Purity (32 page)

Walker, too, had said no to her, but merely “no,” and merely “no” meant “maybe.” She sat in her car, drinking green tea and replying to emails about other stories, until Walker himself came out of his house and strode straight toward her, across his sodden lawn. He was Jack Sprat lean and wearing a sweat suit with the purple and white of Texas Christian University. The Horned Frogs. She powered down her window.

“Who are you?” Walker said. He had a whiskey drinker's complexion not unlike her husband's.

“Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

“That's what I thought, and I already told you I got nothing to say to you.”

With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

“I have just a couple of very quick and straightforward questions,” Leila said. “Nothing that's going to cause you any trouble.”

“You're already trouble. I don't want you on my street.”

“But if we could meet for a cup of coffee somewhere? Any time today is good for me.”

“You think I'm going to sit in public with you? I'm asking you politely to please go away. I couldn't talk to you even if I wanted to.”

Not on my street. Not in public. Not allowed to talk.

“You've got a beautiful house,” she said. “I've been admiring it.”

She gave him a pleasant smile and touched the hair at her temple for no other reason than to let him see her fingers in her hair.

“Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice lady, so I'm going to spare you a deal of trouble here. There's no story. You think there's something but there's not. You're barking up the wrong tree.”

“Easy, then,” she said. “Let's clear it up. I'll tell you why I think there's something, you can explain to me why there's not, and I can be home tonight in Denver, sleeping in my own bed.”

“I'd prefer you just start up your car and move it off this street.”

“Or not explain, if you don't want to. You can just nod or shake your head. There's no law against shaking your head, is there?”

She smiled again and demonstrated how to shake a head. Walker sighed as if unsure what to do.

“Here, I'm starting my car,” she said, starting it. “See? I'm going to leave your street.”

“Thank you.”

“But maybe there's someplace you need to be? I can give you a lift.”

“I don't need a lift.”

She turned off the engine, and Walker sighed more heavily.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “But I wouldn't be a responsible journalist if I didn't hear your side of the story.”

“There is no story.”

“Well, see, but that's a side itself. Because other sides are saying there
is
a story. And some of those sides are telling me that you were paid off not to talk about it. And I'm wondering why the money, if there's no story. You see what I'm saying?”

Walker bent down closer to her. His face was like a stained map of somewhere densely populated. “Who you been talking to?”

“I don't betray sources. That's the first thing you need to know about me. When you talk to me, you're safe.”

“You think you're smart.”

“No, in fact, I'm fairly female-brained about this stuff. I could really use your help to understand it.”

“Smart lady from the big city.”

“Just tell me a time and a landmark. Somewhere I can meet you. Somewhere anonymous.”

Anonymous
was a preferred word of hers with male sources. It had all the right connotations. Anonymous was the opposite of the wife in Walker's house. Who, at that very moment, opened the front door and called out, “Earl, who is that?”

Leila bit her lip.

“Reporter lady,” Walker shouted back. “She needs directions out of town.”

“You tell her you got nothing to say to her?”

“What I just
said
to you.”

After the door had closed again, Walker spoke without looking at Leila. “Behind the Centergas depot on Cliffside. Be there at three. You don't see me by four, you may as well head on home to that bed of yours in Denver.”

As Leila drove away from his house, on the rush of his yes, the kind of rush she lived for as a journalist, she had to tell herself not to speed. Who could have guessed that, of the ten tricks she'd tried, dropping the word
bed
would be the one that got to him?

Back in her hotel room, she speed-dialed with the letter P.

“This is Pip Tyler,” Pip said in Denver.

“Hello, hello. I just landed a date with Earl Walker.”

“Hey!”

“I also got Phyllisha Babcock's story.”

“
Nice
.”

“The most hilarious thing you ever heard. Flayner borrowed the weapon as a sex aid.”

“She told you that?”

“It would have been TMI if there were such a thing in this business. But she did also confirm the weapon was a dummy.”

“Oh.”

“It's still a good story, Pip. If a worker can take a dummy out, he could take a real one, too. It's still a story.”

“I guess it's good to know the world is safer than I thought.”

As Leila filled her in on the details, she was glad, as a person, if not as a boss, that Pip seemed in no hurry to get back to the research she was doing for another reporter on the credentialing of coroners.

“I should let you read your autopsy reports,” Leila said finally. “How's that going?”

“Borink.”

“Well. You have to pay your dues.”

“I'm describing, not complaining.”

Leila resisted a surge of emotion. Then she surrendered to it. “I miss you.”

“Oh—thank you.”

She waited, hoping for more.

“I miss you, too,” Pip said.

“I wish I'd brought you with me.”

“It's OK. I'm not going anywhere.”

Leila felt keenly, after the call, that she liked the girl too much. “I miss you” was already more than she had a right to elicit from a subordinate and still not as much as she wanted to hear. She felt dissatisfied and exposed and somewhat nuts. The tenderness she felt with children had always had a physical component, situated close in her body to the part that wanted intimacy and sex. But the reason she felt such tenderness was that, no matter how she warmed to a child in her arms, she knew she would never betray and exploit its innocence. This was why nothing could replace having kids—this structural insatiability, both painful and delicious, of parental love.

Uncannily enough, Pip's actual name was Purity. (She called herself Pip Tyler on her résumé, but Leila had looked at her college transcript.) The name seemed apt to Leila without her being able to say exactly why. Certainly Pip was no innocent sexually. She was shacked up in Denver with a boyfriend about whom she'd been resolutely tight-lipped, saying only that he was a musician named Stephen. She'd also been living in serious squalor in Oakland, surrounded by dirty anarchists, and her pictures of Cody Flayner's barbecue had been obtained by lawless hacking. Leila wondered if the innocence she sensed in Pip was actually her own innocence at the age of twenty-four. Back then, she'd had no concept of how little she knew, but she could see it clearly now in Pip.

She wanted to be a good feminist role model and give Pip the direction she herself had lacked at that age. “The irony of the Internet,” she'd said to her at lunch one day, “is that it's made the journalist's job so much easier. You can research in five minutes what used to take five days. But the Internet is also killing journalism. There's no substitute for the reporter who's worked a beat for twenty years, who's cultivated sources, who can see the difference between a story and a non-story. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field. Your source makes some offhand remark, and suddenly you see the
real
story. That's when I feel most alive. When I'm sitting at the computer, I'm only half alive.”

Pip listened to Leila attentively but noncommittally. She had the modern college grad's reluctance to express a strong opinion, for fear of being uncool or disrespectful. It did occur to Leila that Pip wasn't actually innocent at all—that, to the contrary, she was wiser than Leila, that she and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting, and that Leila herself was the innocent one. But she persisted in thinking that Pip's coolness was merely a generational style, and looking for ways to break through it.

Pip seemed to drink either not at all or way too much. Leila had been treating her to dinners out, to make sure she got some good meals, and had drunk alone at them. But the previous week, on Thursday night, Pip had ordered a glass of wine and dispatched it in two minutes. After she'd done the same to a second glass, she asked if she could order a bottle; she offered, ridiculously, to pay for it. An hour later, the bottle empty, her dinner barely touched, she was crying. Leila reached across the table and put her hand on her flushed face. She said, “Oh, honey.”

Pip pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom. When she returned, she asked if she might, this once, come home with Leila and sleep on her sofa or something.

“Oh, honey,” Leila said again. “Won't you tell me what's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong,” Pip said. “I just feel so alone here. I miss my mom.”

Leila preferred not to think about the girl's mother. “It's fine if you want to come home with me,” she said. “There are just some things you need to know about my situation.”

Pip quickly nodded.

“Or maybe you've already heard about it.”

“Some of it.”

“Well, ordinarily I'd be at Tom's tonight—I'm presuming that's part of what you know. But I don't think that's such a good idea.”

“It's OK. I shouldn't have asked.”

“No! It's lovely that you asked. But I'm sort of a guest at the other house. If you could live with a little bit of sneaking…”

“I wasn't thinking.”

“I wouldn't offer if it weren't all right with me.”

Charles's house was three blocks from the creative-writing offices. He could have wheeled himself to and from work—could also have retired—but he preferred to conduct his workshops and office hours from home. The house was a lair that he did his best never to leave; he said he'd rather be the absolute ruler of a 2,000-square-foot kingdom than be that wheelchair dude in the outside world. He had fair control of his bowels, remarkable abdominal and shoulder strength, and great dexterity with his chair. He still drank too much, but he'd cut back because he intended to live a long time. His paraplegia had objectified his grievance with the literary world, which, he believed, wanted more than ever for him to simply go away, and he wasn't going to give it that satisfaction.

Leila still spent half her weekends at Charles's, but she didn't sleep with him. She had her own—slight—room at the front of the hallway leading to the big cat's bedroom. She would have liked to slip Pip into the house unobserved, but it was only ten o'clock and the living-room lights were on when they pulled into the driveway.

“Well,” she said. “It looks like you'll meet my husband. Are you sure you're up for that?”

“I'm curious, actually.”

“That's the journalistic spirit.”

Leila knocked on the front door, unlocked it, and stuck her head in to warn Charles that he had two visitors. They found him lying on the sofa with a pile of student writing on his chest and a red pencil in his hand. He still had his looks and his long hair, which he wore in a nearly white ponytail. Near at hand was a whiskey bottle, stoppered. Books were shelved floor to ceiling and standing in stacks on the floor.

“This is one of our research interns, Pip Tyler,” Leila said.

“Pip,” Charles boomed, looking the girl up and down in open sexual appraisal. “I like your name. I have
great expectations
of you. Aieee—you must get that a lot.”

“Seldom so neatly put,” Pip said.

“Pip needs a place to sleep tonight,” Leila said. “I hope you don't mind.”

“Are you not my wife? Is this not our house?” Charles laughed less than nicely.

“Anyway, so,” Leila said, edging toward the front hall.

“Are you a
reader
, Pip? Do you read
books
? Is the sight of so many books in one room at all
frightening
to you?”

“I like books,” Pip said.

“Good. Good. And are you a big fan of
Jonathan Savoir Faire
? So many of my students are.”

“You mean the book about animal welfare?”

“The very one. He's a novelist, too, I'm told.”

“I read the animal book.”

“So many
Jonathans
. A plague of literary
Jonathans
. If you read only the
New York Times Book Review
, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.” He arched an eyebrow at Pip. “And what about
Zadie Smith
? Great stuff, right?”

“Charles,” Leila said.

“Sit with me. Have a drink.”

“A drink is more or less exactly what we don't need. And you've got stories to read.”

“Before my
long and restful
night's sleep.” He picked up a student story. “‘We were doing lines as long and fat as milk-shake straws.' The flaw in this simile: can we spot it? Pip? Can you tell me what's less than airtight about this simile?”

Pip seemed to be enjoying the show that Charles was putting on for her. “Is there a difference between milk-shake straws and other straws?”