Purity (36 page)

“You're making us very proud of ourselves.”

“Don't tease her for giving us a compliment,” Leila said crossly.

“Anyway,” Pip said.

They were in Tom's kitchen, and Leila, sensitive to Pip's vegetarian inclinations, was making a zucchini frittata for dinner. Both she and Tom had noticed that whenever food was about to be sautéed, Pip went upstairs and shut the door of her bedroom. “You seem to be very sensitive to smells,” Tom said now. “Pancake smells, sock smells…”

“Smell is hell,” Pip said. She raised her Manhattan glass as if toasting the sentiment.

“I used to be married to someone who felt that way,” Tom said.

“But smell is also heaven,” Pip said. “I found that—” She stopped herself.

“What?” Leila said.

Pip shook her head. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

“Is she a super-smeller, too?” Tom said.

“She's super anything to do with sensitivity. And she tends to be depressed, so smell is always hell for her.”

“You're missing her,” Leila said.

Pip nodded.

“Maybe she'd like to come out here and visit you.”

“She doesn't travel. She doesn't drive, and she's never set foot on an airplane.”

“She's afraid of flying?”

“It's more like she's one of those mountain people who never leaves the mountains. She said she'd come to my college graduation, but I could tell how nervous the idea made her, riding the bus or asking somebody to take her, and I finally told her she didn't have to. She was incredibly apologetic, but I could tell she was also incredibly relieved. And Berkeley's not even two hours away.”

“Ha,” Tom said. “I would have loved not having my mother at my college graduation. She herself described it as the worst day of her life.”

“What happened?” Pip said.

“She had to meet the person I ended up marrying. It was a very bad scene.”

He said more about the scene, and Leila could hardly listen to it, not because she'd heard the story before but because she
hadn't
. He'd had a decade-plus to tell her the story of his college graduation, and she was hearing it only as he recounted it to Pip. She wondered what other interesting things he'd told the girl while she was not around.

“You know, the wine's not working for me,” she said from the stove. “Will you make me a Manhattan?”

“I'll do it,” Pip said eagerly.

Leila had been drinking more since she'd met Pip. At the dinner table that night, she found herself ranting about the false promise of the Internet and social media as substitutes for journalism—the idea that you didn't need Washington journalists when you could read the tweets of congressmen, didn't need news photographers when everyone carried a phone with a camera, didn't need to pay professionals when you could crowdsource, didn't need investigative reporting when giants like Assange and Wolf and Snowden walked the earth …

She could feel herself targeting Pip with her rant, losing her cool by way of attacking Pip's noncommittal coolness, but there was an undercurrent of grievance with Tom as well. He'd told her, a long time ago, that he'd met Andreas Wolf in Berlin, back when he was still married. All he would say was that Wolf was a magnetic but troubled person, with secrets of his own. But the way he said it gave Leila the impression that Wolf had meant a great deal to Tom. Like Anabel, Wolf belonged to the dark core of Tom's inner life, the pre-Leila history against which she contended. Because she appreciated that he didn't poke and probe her, she didn't poke or probe him. But she couldn't help noticing how closely Tom guarded his memories of Wolf, and she felt some of the same competitive jealousy she did toward Anabel.

This had already come to the surface a year ago, when she'd been honored with an interview by the
Columbia Journalism Review
. In response to a question about leakers, she'd laid into the Sunlight Project rather viciously. Tom was unhappy with her when he read the interview. Why antagonize the true believers who had nothing better to do with their days than to mischaracterize the “Luddites” who disagreed with them? Wasn't Denver Independent just as wedded to the Internet as the Sunlight Project was? Why expose herself to cheap criticism? Leila had thought but hadn't said:
Because you don't tell me anything
.

As she continued her Manhattan-fueled rant at the dinner table, extending it to male-dominated Silicon Valley and the way it exploited not only female freelancers but women more generally, seducing them with new technologies for chitchat, giving them the illusion of power and advancement while maintaining control of the means of production—phony liberation, phony feminism, phony Andreas Wolf—Pip stopped eating and stared unhappily at her plate. Finally Tom, himself quite drunk, interrupted.

“Leila,” he said. “You seem to think we don't agree with you.”

“
Do
you agree with me? Does Pip agree with me?” She turned to Pip. “Do you have an actual opinion to offer on this?”

Pip's eyes widened and stayed fixed on her plate. “I understand where you're coming from,” she said. “But I guess I don't see why there can't be room for both journalists and leakers.”

“Exactly,” Tom said.

“You don't think Wolf is competing with you?” Leila said to him. “Competing and
winning
?” She turned to Pip again. “Tom and Wolf have a history.”

“You do?” Pip asked.

“We met in Berlin,” Tom said. “After the Wall came down. But that has nothing to do with this.”

“Really?” Leila said. “You hate Assange, but somehow Wolf gets a free pass. Everyone gives him a free pass. He gets carried around on people's shoulders and hailed as a hero and a savior and a mighty feminist. And I don't buy it for one second. I especially don't buy his feminism.”

“No other leaker in the last decade has broken a bigger and better variety of stories. You're just annoyed because he has as good a record as we do.”

“Uploading some dentist's selfies of his thingy in the face of a female patient on Propofol? I guess you could call that a feminist act. But maybe
feminist
isn't the
best
word to describe an upload like that?”

“He does better things than that. The Blackwater and Halliburton leaks were game changers.”

“But always with the same flimflam. Shining his pure light on a world of corruption. Lecturing other men on their sexism. It's like he wants there to be a world full of women and only one man who understands them. I know that kind of guy. They give me the creeps.”

“What happened in Berlin?” Pip said.

“Tom doesn't talk about it.”

“That's true,” Tom said. “I don't talk about it. Do you want me to talk about it now?”

Leila could see that the only reason he was offering was that the girl was there.

“With you here,” she said to Pip with a wretched little laugh, “I'm learning all sorts of things I didn't know about Tom.”

Pip, no dummy, sensed the danger. “I don't need to hear about Berlin,” she said. She reached for her wineglass and managed to knock it over. “Shit! I'm so sorry!”

Tom was the one to jump up and get paper towels. Charles, even before his accident, would have let Leila mop up the wine—Charles who almost never taught books by women, while Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. “I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,” he'd said to her once. “What I don't get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.” And he'd laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but
one of those women
whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them. She'd felt attacked by Tom's laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.

Another thing not spoken of, in a life of things unspoken, a life that Leila had enjoyed until the girl became a part of it. Pip seemed very happy to be with them and had stopped making noises about returning to California; it wouldn't be so easy to get rid of her. But Leila, to her sorrow, had started wishing that they could.

When the plane touched down in Denver, she checked her work email and then her texts. There was one from Charles:
Does Cesar exist?

As soon as she was off the plane, she called him. “Is César there yet?”

“Still not,” Charles said. “It's a matter of indifference to me, but I know how you like to bite them people's heads off. And nibble on they tiny feet.”

“Fuck these people. What is so hard about getting someone to show up?”

“Rowrr!”

César, the new aide, was supposed to have been at Charles's at six to give him a bath, PT, and a hot dinner. It was now eight thirty. The trouble with Charles was that he didn't like having aides but didn't dislike it so much that he forbade Leila to employ them and oversee them. As a result, she did a lot of work for little thanks.

Striding down the concourse, she called Tom's home number and was shunted straight to voice mail. Next she called the agency.

“People Who Need People, this is Emma,” said a girl who sounded about twelve.

“This is Leila Helou and I want to know why César isn't at Charles Blenheim's.”

“Oh hi, Mrs. Blenheim,” Emma said cheerfully. “César should have been there at six.”

“I'm aware of that. But he was not there at six. He's still not there.”

“OK, no problem. I'll see if we can find out where he is.”

“‘No problem'? It is a problem! And this is not the first time.”

“I'll find out where he is. It's really no problem.”

“Please stop saying ‘no problem' when we have a problem.”

“We're a little shorthanded tonight. One sec … Oh, I see what happened. César had to fill in for another aide who got sick. He should be getting to Mr. Blenheim's pretty soon.”

The agency couldn't foresee a staff shortage? Thought it was OK to send someone three hours late and not notify them? Made a practice of pulling aides off scheduled visits and sending them to other clients? Didn't even train its desk personnel to apologize?

Leila knew better than to ask these questions. She was halfway into the city when Emma called back. “OK, so, unfortunately it looks like César won't be able to get away. But we do have someone else we can send out. She can't do lifting, but she can help Mr. Blenheim with other things and keep him company.”

“Mr. Blenheim doesn't need company. Mr. Blenheim only needs lifting.”

“OK, no problem. Let me reach out to César again.”

“Just forget the whole thing. Send a male aide out at nine tomorrow morning, and never mention the name César to me again. Can you do that for me? Is it no problem?”

Charles was perfectly capable of feeding himself and getting himself into bed, and Leila could feel that she was spiting herself by letting Tom and Pip enjoy an extra hour or two at home without her. But she did it anyway. She found Charles sitting in his chair in the hallway off his kitchen, where he'd randomly stopped. A smell of canned beef stew was in the air.

“God, you look depressing,” she said. “Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

“I've become kind of obsessed with this nonexistent César. There's that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you've only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is. I have yet to experience the disappointing reality of César.”

“You must have been on your way somewhere when you stopped here. Maybe you want to go there?”

“It's been nice getting better acquainted with the hallway.”

“What do you need?”

“A real bath, but that's not going to happen. I suppose I could have a drink. Haven't played the drink card yet.”

He wheeled himself into the living room, and she brought him his bottle and a glass.

“You should run along to your guy and your gamine,” he said.

“First tell me what else I can do for you.”

“You didn't have to come here at all. In fact, it's interesting that you did. Is everything OK on the other home front?”

“Things are fine.”

“You've got that parenthetical frown between your eyebrows.”

“I'm just really tired.”

“I don't know your guy—haven't had the pleasure. But the gamine has a daddy thing. Even the wheelchair dude was getting somewhere, in the few short minutes you gave me with her. I've always had a knack for bringing out daddy issues.”

“Huh. Thanks for that.”

“I didn't mean you.” He frowned. “Was that what I was for you? Daddy?”

“No. But I probably did have issues.”

“None that I could smell the way I could with this girl. I'd advise keeping close watch.”

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?”

“I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

“It just seems like it must get very tiring.”

When she finally arrived at Tom's, the only light she could see was from the kitchen. She loved his house and had made herself at home in it, but its very niceness was eternally a reminder that Anabel's father's money had paid for part of it. This may have been why she felt reluctant to so much as hang a picture of her own choosing in it, and why, for years, she'd tried to get Tom to accept rent checks from her. Since he refused them, she instead paid for Charles's caregivers and sent large sums to EMILY's List, to NARAL and NOW and Barbara Boxer, to ease her feminist conscience.