Purity (31 page)

“And you feel
guilty
about that?”

“I could have said no.”

“But you're doing an amazing thing with the money.”

“I'm enjoying money my wife could never take. Not just enjoying it, doing well with it professionally. Increasing my male professional advantage.”

Although Leila appreciated Tom's company, his guilt seemed a little overwrought to her. She wondered if he might be exaggerating it (and downplaying the sexual hold that Anabel had had on him) for her sake. On her second weekend in New York, she asked him if she could flip through his box of old snapshots. There were pictures of a young man so skinny and boyish and thick-haired she barely recognized him. “You look like a completely different person.”

“I was a completely different person.”

“But, like, not the same DNA, even.”

“That's how it feels.”

As soon as Leila saw Anabel, she understood Tom's guilt better. The woman was
intense
—fiery-eyed, full-chestedly anorexic, Medusa-maned, mostly unsmiling. In the background of the pictures was student housing, slum housing, wintry pre-9/11 New York skyline.

“She does look a little scary,” Leila said.

“Terrifying. I'm having a PTSD thing just looking at these.”

“But you! You were so young and sweet.”

“That's kind of my marriage in a nutshell.”

“And where is she now?”

“No idea. We didn't have any friends in common, and we broke off all contact.”

“So maybe she took her money after all. Maybe she owns an island somewhere.”

“Anything's possible. But I don't think so.”

Leila wanted to ask if she could keep one snapshot of Tom, an especially sweet one taken by Anabel on the Staten Island Ferry, but it was too soon to ask for a picture. She closed the box and kissed his turtle mouth. Sex with him was not the drama it had always been with Charles, the pouncing, the bouncing, the screaming of the prey, but she already thought she might prefer this other way. It was quieter, slower, more like a meeting of minds via bodies.

She had a deep sense of rightness with Tom—it was the thing, among many things, that she felt guiltiest about, because it meant that Charles was not right, had never been right. Tom's reserve, his willingness to leave her be, was soothing to her maritally poked and probed spirit. And he seemed to have the same sense of rightness with her. They were journalists and spoke a common language. But she couldn't help wondering why a catch like him had never remarried. Before she burned any bridges with Charles, she asked Tom why.

He replied that he hadn't stayed with any woman for longer than a year since his divorce. According to his ethics, one year was the limit, at least in New York, for any uncommitted relationship; and his bad marriage had made him commitment-shy.

“So what are you saying?” she said. “I've got ten months before you show me the door?”

“You're already in a committed relationship,” he said.

“Right. Funny. Is this rule of yours something you led with on first dates?”

“It's a tacit rule in New York dating. I'm not the author of it. It's a way to avoid chewing up five years of a woman's life and
then
showing her the door.”

“As opposed to, say, getting over your commitment phobia.”

“I tried. More than once. But apparently I'm textbook PTSD. I had actual panic attacks.”

“Textbook toxic bachelor is what it sounds more like.”

“Leila, they were younger. I knew things they didn't know, I knew what can happen. Even if you weren't married, it wouldn't be the same with you.”

“No, that's right. Because I'm forty-one. I'm already past the sell-by date. You won't have to feel so guilty when you dump me.”

“The difference is that you've been through a marriage.”

A light went on in Leila. “No, here's what it is,” she said. “What's different is that I'm older than your wife when you divorced her. You didn't trade up to some twenty-eight-year-old. With me you're trading
down.
You don't have to feel so guilty.”

Tom said nothing.

“And you know how I know that? Because I make the same kind of calculations myself. Whatever it takes to get away from my guilt, even for five minutes, my mind will do it. There was a review of Charles's book in
The Adirondack Review
, online. Glowing. He sent the link in an email blast to everyone in his address book, and I didn't see it until I was on my way up here to sleep with you. He needed somebody to tell him not to send that email blast. He needed
me, his wife,
to tell him, ‘Better not to do that.' But I was otherwise engaged, on the phone, talking to you. And where's
my
little rule to help me out of that one? I don't have a little rule.”

She was putting on clothes, repacking her overnight bag.

“I'm done with the rule,” Tom said. “I only mentioned it because I trusted you to understand it. But you're right, it does help that you're forty-one. I'm not going to deny it.”

His honesty seemed directed at the ghost of his ex-wife, not at Leila.

“I think I'm just going to leave before you make me cry,” she said.

What drove her away from his apartment that night was an instinct about Tom. If his reserve had simply been his fundamental nature, she could have relaxed and appreciated it. But he hadn't always been reserved. He'd been open to intensity in his marriage, so open that he now felt traumatized by it, and Anabel clearly still had a grip on his conscience. He'd had something with Anabel that he didn't intend to have with anyone else, and an instinct told Leila that she would always feel secondary—that here was a competition she could never win.

But Tom kept calling her that winter, updating her on the progress of his nonprofit, and she couldn't pretend that she would rather have been talking to anyone else. In early May, three and a half months after they'd first met, he came down to Washington again. When she went to Union Station and saw him ambling up the platform, in wrinkled khakis and an old fifties sport shirt specifically chosen for its ugliness, as a private joke at the expense of good taste, a little chime sounded in her head, a single pure note, and she knew she was in love with him.

He'd booked a room at the George, so as not to presume that he could stay with her, but he never checked in. He spent a week in her apartment, using her Internet connection and reading on her sofa, his glasses perched upon his bald dome, his fingers curled over the spine of his book, holding it close to his bad eyes. She felt as if he'd always been there on the sofa; as if, when she came home and saw him sprawled on it, she was finally truly coming home, for the first time in her life. She agreed to leave the
Post
and go to work for his nonprofit. If there had been other things to agree to, she would have agreed to them. She wanted (but didn't yet say she wanted) to try to have a baby with him. She loved him and wanted him to never leave. Now there was only the matter, much discussed but still not acted on, of having the conversation with Charles. And maybe, if she'd managed to have that conversation in time, she could have married Tom. But she was cowardly—as cowardly as Tom said he'd been in not ending his own marriage. She delayed having the conversation, delayed giving notice at the
Post
, and on a warm Colorado night in late June, on a foothill road behind Golden, Charles went over the front of the XLCR 1000 he'd bought with the last third of his U.K. advance and was paralyzed below the hips. He'd been drinking.

The fault was his but also undeniably hers. While falling in love with someone else, she'd allowed her husband's life to spin out of control. She immediately had herself reassigned to Denver, and as long as Charles was in the hospital, and then in rehab, she couldn't tell him about Tom; she needed to keep his spirits up. But suppressing the fact of Tom made the prospect of divulging it ever scarier. She performed the role of loving wife perfectly—she saw Charles briefly every morning and for hours every evening, she sold their three-story house and bought a more suitable one, she infused morale and sneaked him whiskey, she befriended his doctors and caregivers, she ran herself ragged—and meanwhile, at the pretty house that Tom had bought in Hilltop, in part with money from his former father-in-law, she had sex with someone else.

Charles's accident ended up costing her a year of fertility. It was unthinkable, as long as he was recovering, to bring him the news that she was carrying someone else's child. Unthinkable to add a baby to an already overstressed life. And then unthinkable not to live with Charles after she brought him home to his new house. But she still wanted a baby, and when, by and by, Tom asked her how long she intended to keep living with Charles, she found herself replying with a question of her own.

“No,” Tom said.

“That's it?” she said. “No?”

He gave her many sensible reasons—their dedication to their work, their already overfull lives, the danger of birth defects for older couples, the global cataclysms that climate change and overpopulation would likely unleash in a child's lifetime—but the reason that actually made him angry was that she was still living with Charles and hadn't told him about their affair. How could he think of having a kid with a woman who couldn't even leave her husband?

“The minute I got pregnant, I'd tell him everything,” she said.

“Why not tell him now?”

“He's suffering. Would you have abandoned Anabel if she'd landed in a wheelchair? Charles needs me.”

“But can you not see how this looks to me? I'm ready to go, right now. I'm ready to marry you tomorrow. And you don't even have a
timeline
for getting out of your marriage.”

“Well, and I'm telling you how you could help me with that.”

“And I'm telling you there's something wrong if that's what you need to help you.”

She was in a weak position, wanting a baby and running out of time. If it didn't happen with Tom, it wouldn't happen at all. She felt grief at the death of the possibility, pain at Tom's refusal, and anger at him for not wanting what she wanted. He didn't seem to understand the bind she was in. She was convinced that his avowed reasons for not wanting a kid were bogus—that his actual reason was to avoid the guilt of having the child he'd denied his ex-wife—but he refused to credit her own guilt about Charles.

And so they started fighting. Hotly on her side, coldly on his. Again and again the same impasse: she wouldn't leave Charles, he wouldn't try to have a baby. Tom never lost control, never even raised his voice, and his explanation for this—that he'd already done five lifetimes' worth of fighting with Anabel and refused to do it anymore—made Leila lose control for both of them. Charles had never driven her to shriek with rage; nobody had; but competing with Anabel did. She detested the sound of her shrieking so much that she broke up with Tom. A week later, they reconciled. A week after that, they broke up again. She was right for him, he was right for her, but they couldn't find a way to be together.

For nearly two months, they didn't communicate in any way. Then one night, after she'd put Charles to bed and cleaned his errant shit off the toilet and found herself weeping, she yielded to an impulse to call Tom. She picked up the phone, but there was something wrong with it—no dial tone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello?”

“
Tom?
”

“Leila?”

Two months of no contact, and they'd picked up the phone at the same moment. She didn't believe in signs, but this had to be a sign. She blurted out that she couldn't divorce Charles but couldn't live without Tom. He in turn said he didn't care if she ever divorced Charles, he couldn't live without her, either. It felt like coming home again.

The next morning, she told Charles that she was getting a place of her own and leaving the
Post
to work for a new nonprofit service. She didn't say why, but Charles poked and probed and made her confession for her. She continued to spend every second weekend with him, but from then on she lived mainly at Tom's, not as the co-keeper of his house, not as a person who made decorating decisions, but as a kind of permanent special guest. The two of them buried the fundamental conflict that their fighting had exposed; buried it deep. She never quite forgave him for not wanting a child with her, but in time it stopped mattering. They were both busy building DI into a nationally respected news service, and she was additionally busy taking care of Charles; sometimes she even found herself feeling grateful to be unburdened with children.

Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true love, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she'd learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgment. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

*   *   *

Early in the morning after her visit with Phyllisha, she drove to the house that Earl Walker had bought, for a price publicly recorded at $372,000, after losing his job at the weapons plant. The house had a triple garage and a sprinkler system whose early-morning overshoot had left the street wet where she parked. Apparently, in Amarillo, when lawns dried out in a drought, the obvious thing to do was water them. On Walker's driveway was a newspaper with a rubber band around it. After Leila had sat for a few minutes, a very heavy woman in her fifties came out and picked it up, gave Leila a hard look, and went back inside.

Walker had been Cody Flayner's boss in Inventory Control. This information Leila had from Pip, who had also learned that Walker had sold his previous home for $230,000. People who'd lost their job didn't typically turn around and buy a larger house, nor were they good candidates for a larger mortgage, and no probated will from the previous three years could account for the additional $142,000 Walker had paid. This amounted to a fact nearly as interesting as the Facebook pictures. Another fact, unearthed by Pip in an inspector general's report from January, was that “a minor irregularity in Inventory Control” had occurred at the plant the previous summer; according to the report, the irregularity had been “satisfactorily addressed” and was “no longer an issue.” At Leila's suggestion, Pip had shown the Facebook pictures to an auto mechanic and learned that, unless Flayner's pickup had a custom suspension, the load on its bed had probably been less than the nine hundred pounds of a real B61. “It aint a real one, sugar” was still the only statement that Leila or Pip had gotten from Flayner directly. Leila's one phone call to him had quickly ended with threats and curses.