Purity (30 page)

As if in self-defense, she reached the point of wanting him to make her pregnant. She had friends at the
Post
with babies, toddlers, six-year-olds. She'd held them in her arms and inwardly melted at the trust and innocence with which they put their hands on her face, their faces on her breast, their feet between her legs. Nothing, she came to think, was sweeter than a child, nothing more precious and worth having. But when—on a night carefully selected for having followed a day of thousand-word progress on his book—she took a deep breath and raised the subject of children with Charles, he became especially dramatic. He turned his head with comical slowness and gave her his glowering Look. The Look was supposed to be funny but it also scared her. The Look meant
Think about what you just said
. Or
You must be joking
. Or, more sinisterly,
Do you realize you're speaking to a major American novelist?
The frequency with which she'd received the Look of late was making her wonder what she was to him. She'd thought he was attracted to her talent and toughness and maturity, but she worried that it was principally her slightness.

“What?” she said.

He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that his whole face wrinkled. Then he blinked them open. “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”

“Whether we might talk about having a kid.”

“Not now.”

“OK. But do you mean ‘now' as in ‘tonight,' or ‘now' as in ‘this decade'?”

He sighed dramatically. “What exactly is it about my profoundly non relationship with my existing children that makes you think I'm dad material? Did I not notice something?”

“But this is me. This isn't her.”

“I'm aware of the distinction. Are you aware of the pressure I'm under?”

“It's kind of hard to miss.”

“No, but can you
conceive
 … can you
imagine
me, for one second, finishing the book with a baby in the house?”

“Obviously, it wouldn't happen for at least nine months. Maybe a medium-term deadline would help you.”

“I'm already three years past one of those.”

“A real deadline. One you believed in. I'm saying this is something I want with you. I want you to finish the book and us to maybe have a kid. The two things don't have to be opposed. Maybe they could be connected, in a good way.”

“
Leila
.” He barked the name sternly but also ironically: to be funny.

“What.”

“I love you more than anything in this world. Please tell me you know that.”

“I know that,” she said in a slight voice.

“So hear me, please. Please hear this: every further minute this particular conversation lasts is going to be a day of lost work in the coming week. One minute, one day; I can feel it. When you suffer, I suffer—you know that. So can we please just put an end to it right here?”

She nodded, and then cried, and then had sex with him, and then cried some more. A few months later, when the
Post
offered her a five-year stint as its Washington correspondent, she accepted. She hadn't entirely stopped loving Charles, but there was only so long that she could stand to be around him with an ache in her chest. She felt loyal to a baby in her that hadn't even been conceived yet. To a possibility.

It came along to Washington with her, the possibility, and it flew home with her to Denver once a month, for staff meetings and conjugal obligations. She didn't want to think about being divorced in her early forties, working sixty and seventy hours a week and wanting a kid, and yet her trajectory was like a thing she had no control over, a hurtling into deeper space, a feeling of nearly achieved escape velocity. She knew but didn't want to know where it was taking her. When she spoke on the phone with Charles, late at night, she could tell that he was lonely, because he'd never been so attentive to her reporting work, so eager to be of help. But when he came east in the summer, and again the next summer, her little apartment on Capitol Hill became the sour-smelling cage of a big cat too depressed to groom itself. Charles spent his days in his boxer shorts and bitched about the weather. For the first time, she felt physically averse to him. She invented reasons to stay out late, but he was always waiting for her, anxious, obsessive, when she came home. He'd finally delivered the
big book
, but his editor wanted revisions and he couldn't make up his mind about the smallest change. He asked her the same editorial questions over and over, and it did no good for her to answer them, because he had the very same questions again the next night. Both of them were relieved when he returned to Denver, where a fresh crop of students was waiting to hang on his words.

She met Tom Aberant in February 2004. Tom was a well-regarded journalist and editor who'd come to Washington to poach talent for a nonprofit investigative news service he was starting, and Leila, who by now had won a shared Pulitzer (anthrax, 2002), was on his wish list. He took her to lunch and told her he had $20 million in seed money. He currently lived in New York, but he was divorced and childless and thinking of situating his nonprofit in Denver, his hometown, where the overhead would be lower. Having done his homework, he knew that Leila had a husband in Denver. Might she be interested in going home and working at a nonprofit, insulated from the impending collapse of print-ad revenues, freed from space constraints and daily deadlines, and paid a competitive salary?

The offer ought to have appealed to her. But Charles's
big book
had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers (“bloated and immensely disagreeable,” Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
), and Leila was in a state of medium-grade dread. She'd been calling Charles three and four times a day for pep talks, telling him how sorry she was that she couldn't be with him. But it was clear, from the repugnance she felt toward Tom's offer, that she wasn't really sorry at all. She didn't want to be the woman who abandoned her husband after his magnum opus tanked. But there was no hiding, from herself or from Tom, how unready she was to give up Washington.

“You're pretty sure it has to be Denver,” she said.

Tom's face was fleshy, his mouth somehow turtlish, his eyes narrow in a way that conveyed kindly amusement. The hair he still had farther back on his head was closely buzzed and mostly dark. The thing about men in their prime was that, within rather wide limits, it didn't matter if they weren't conventionally handsome. They could also get away with bellies and even with high-pitched voices, if they were scratchy high-pitched, as Tom's was.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” he said. “I've got a sister and a niece there. I miss the West.”

“It sounds like an amazing project,” Leila said.

“Do you want to think it over? Or are you just going to say no right now.”

“I'm not saying no. I'm…”

She felt utterly exposed.

“Oh, this is
terrible
,” she said. “I know what you must be thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Why wouldn't I want to go home to Denver.”

“I'm not going to lie to you, Leila. You'd be a keystone hire for me. I thought Denver would be a selling point.”

“No, it's great, and I think you're absolutely right about the industry. We had a monopoly on classifieds for a hundred years. Roll the presses, print the money. And now we don't. But…”

“But.”

“Well, this is coming at a bad moment for me.”

“Trouble at home.”

“Yeah.”

Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back, straining the buttons of his dress shirt. “So tell me if this sounds familiar,” he said. “You love the person but you can't live with him, the person is struggling, you think a separation will make it better, let the two of you recover. And then it finally comes time to get back together, because the separation was only supposed to be temporary, and you discover that, no, in fact, you were lying to yourself the whole time.”

“Actually,” Leila said, “I've suspected for quite a while that I've been lying to myself.”

“So women are smarter than men. Or you're just smarter than I was. But to spin out the hypothetical scenario a little further—”

“I think we both know who we're talking about.”

“I'm a fan of his,” Tom said. “
Mad Sad Dad
—great book. Hilarious. Gorgeous.”

“Super funny, definitely.”

“And yet now here you are in Washington. And his new book's getting kicked in the head.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck the reviewers. I'm still going to buy it. But, speaking hypothetically, is there someone else in town here I should know about? If he's good and does investigative, I'd be happy to look at his CV. I have nothing in principle against couple hires.”

She shook her head.

“No, there isn't anybody?” Tom said. “Or no, he's not a journalist?”

“Are you trying to ask if I'm available in some other way?”

He crumpled forward and covered his face with his hands. “I deserved that,” he said. “I was actually
not
asking that, but the question wasn't straight, either. It's just a thing with me—I'm kind of a connoisseur of guilt. I shouldn't have asked you that.”

“If you could see my guilt levels, I think you'd find them quite appealingly high.”

The flirtation with which she made this statement made it true. It was appalling, an almost autonomic thing, the way she was warming to the first sweet, funny, successful, unmarried man she'd met since the wave of caustic adjectives (“stale,” “obese,” “exhausting”) had crashed over the
big book
. But no matter how guilty it made her, she couldn't help it: she resented Charles for having failed. She resented that she now had to feel like a shallow, success-chasing woman just because she was liking Tom Aberant. If Charles's book had been glowingly reviewed and short-listed for prizes, she could have continued on her outbound trajectory without feeling guilty. No one would have blamed her. To the contrary, it would have been blameworthy to go
back
to him—to have fled to Washington while he was suffering and then to swoop back in to enjoy his success. And so she couldn't help wishing that Charles didn't exist. In a world where he didn't exist, she could have said yes to Tom's extremely attractive job offer.

What she did instead was suggest that she and Tom get together again over drinks. She wore a short black dress to the bar. Later, from her apartment, she sent Tom a long and disclosive email. She delayed calling Charles that night. In her growing sense of guilt about delaying,
in the guilt itself
, she found the will and motive not to call him at all. (Even though the sufferer of guilt could stop the suffering whenever she chose, simply by doing the right thing, the suffering was still real while it lasted, and self-pity wasn't picky about the kind of suffering it fed on.) The next day, she didn't open Tom's return email but went to work, called Charles three times, and ate a late dinner with a source. At home, she called Charles a fourth time and finally opened Tom's email. It wasn't disclosive, but it was invitational. She took a Friday-night train to Manhattan (somehow the guilt that should have
followed
infidelity not only existed
before
the infidelity but was hounding her
into
it) and spent the night at Tom's apartment. She spent the whole weekend with him, leaving his side only to go to the bathroom to pee or call Charles. Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn't felt while wrecking Charles's marriage. This guilt turned out not to have been nonexistent but pre-forwarded, by way of time-and-space warp, to Manhattan in 2004.

She couldn't have borne it without Tom. She felt safe with Tom. He was both the cause of her guilt and the balm for it, because he understood it and was living it himself. He was only six years older than Leila, younger than his hair loss made him look, but he'd started so early on his marriage that its ending, after twelve years, was in the fairly distant past. His wife, Anabel, had been an artist, a promising young painter and filmmaker, who came from one of the families that owned McCaskill, the biggest food-products company in the world. On paper, she was absurdly rich, but she was estranged from her family and refused on principle to take money from them. By the time Tom escaped from the marriage, her art career was going nowhere, she was in her late thirties, and she still wanted children.

“I was a coward,” he said to Leila. “I should have left her five years earlier.”

“Is it cowardly to stay with a person you love and who needs you?”

“You tell me.”

“Hmm. I'll get back to you on that.”

“If she'd been thirty-one, she could have put her life together and met somebody else and had her baby. I waited just long enough to make that very difficult.”

“It wouldn't have helped that she was rich?”

“She was insane about the money. She'd sooner have died than take it from her father.”

“But then that's her choice. Why should you feel guilty for a choice
she's
making?”

“Because I knew she'd make that choice.”

“And did you cheat on her?”

“Not until we'd separated.”

“Then, I'm sorry, but I think I've got you beat in the guilt race.”

But there was something else, Tom said. Anabel's father had always liked him and tried to help him out financially. Tom couldn't accept any help as long as he stayed with Anabel, but when the father had died, more than a decade after the divorce, he'd left Tom a bequest to the tune of $20 million, and Tom had taken it. It was the seed money for his nonprofit venture.