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?”
“Good point, good point. The hobgoblin of spurious specificity. And the tubularity of a drinking straw, the dull sheen of its plastic—the suspicion creeps in that the author is personally unacquainted with the physical properties of powder cocaine. Or that he’s confused the substance with the tool for nasally delivering the substance.”
“Or he’s just trying too hard,” Pip said.
“Or trying too hard. Yes. I’m going to write those very words in the margin. Would you believe that I have colleagues who won’t make marginal notations? I actually care about this student. I think he could do better, if he could only see what he’s doing wrong. Tell me, do you believe in the soul?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” Pip said.
“Charles.”
He gave Leila a look of comically sorrowful reproach. Must she deny him, the wheelchair dude, his iota of pleasure? “The soul,” he said to Pip, “is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it’s designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That’s what I’ve become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.” He nodded at Leila. “And she worries that I’m not happy.”
Pip’s eyes widened with swallowed comment.
“She’s still looking for her molecule,” Charles continued. “I already know mine. Do you know yours?”
“I’m going to set Pip up in the basement room,” Leila said.
“Safe, but not completely safe,” he said. “I’ve conquered those stairs more than once.”
In the basement, Leila put Pip to bed and then sat near her, under an afghan, drinking from a bottle of wine that she’d opened out of nervous agitation and shared with Pip against her better judgment. The wine and the bed and the girl’s proximity brought out something predatory in her, something ardent and greedy, the same inherited Helou thing that had once landed her Charles and, later, Tom. She told Pip how she’d ended up with two men, the husband whose care she managed and the boyfriend she loved. She didn’t mention having wanted children, because the story of her disappointment felt too personal and too relevant to what she was doing at this moment: sitting at the bedside of a daughter-aged girl. But she kept drinking and told Pip a lot. She told her that if she ever had to choose between men she’d probably choose Charles, because she’d made a vow to him and had arguably ruined his life, and that Charles was OK with this. That he still needed her and was still sometimes capable of sex. That he’d sussed out a lot about Tom and enjoyed baiting her about him, and that, although she did acknowledge that Tom existed, she never referred to him by name. That in more than a decade the two men had never met. That the molecule for which she was evidently the matching enzyme was the care of disabled older men. That, contrary to Charles’s theory, interacting with this molecule didn’t make her happy. That happy would have been a life entirely with Tom.
“The job is mine, though,” she said. “His children never forgave him for leaving their mother, and they’re pretty screwed up anyway. I’m all he’s got.”
Hearing this, Pip began to cry again. Leila took her wineglass away from her, obviously too late, and held her hand. “Won’t you tell me what’s
upsetting you tonight?”
“I’ve just been feeling really alone.”
“It’s hard when the only person you know in a town is your boyfriend.”
Pip didn’t respond to this.
“Are things OK with you two?”
“I’m thinking I might have to go back to California soon.”
“Because things aren’t working out with your boyfriend?”
Pip shook her head and reluctantly divulged. Her student debt, she said, was so large that most of her small intern salary was going to payments on it; she couldn’t afford to be in Denver unless she lived rent-free. Her debt was from both college and the private high school she’d attended in Santa Cruz—her mother had kept telling her not to worry about the money. And her mother, though not technically disabled, was emotionally handicapped and had no support network. There was no one but Pip to look after her, and all Pip could see in her own future was nursing her. “It makes me feel like I’m already an old person myself,” she said.
“You’re the opposite of old.”
“But I feel so guilty being this far away from her. Like, what am I even doing here? It’s some kind of unsustainable fantasy.”
How Leila wished that she could offer to let Pip live with her. But even though she seemed to have two homes, she had none that was actually hers. Not the finest of feminist role-modeling. “It’s only been two months,” she said. “Surely you can be away from California for longer than two months.”
“You don’t understand,” Pip said. “What makes me feel so guilty is that I don’t want to go back there. I love working with you and learning from you. But when I think about not going back, it just breaks my heart to think of her alone in our cabin, missing me.”
“I do understand,” Leila said. “You’re describing my daily life.”
“But at least you’re in the same town. You had bad luck, but you found the right way to deal with it. Sometimes I wish…”
“What do you wish?”
Pip shook her head. “I’ve already kept you up way too late.”
“Not the other way around?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to have a parent more like you.”
The little basement room seemed to spin, and not just from the wine in Leila’s head.
“Well,” she said briskly, patting Pip’s hand and standing up, “I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter like you, either, so.”
“Thank you for the dinner and the wine.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“We’ll both be sorry tomorrow.”
“Just hungover. Not sorry, I hope.”
Leila gave a false little laugh for which she punished herself, as she climbed the basement stairs, by striking her forehead with the heel of her hand. Upstairs, Charles was snoring on the sofa, the student stories on the floor, the whiskey bottle damaged. She woke him with a kiss on his forehead. “Ready to go to bed?”
“Ready to piss.”
He didn’t require her help in getting into his chair, but he appreciated it. There was a narrow but deep way in which she was closer to him than she would ever be to anyone else. The two of them had no secrets. Over the years, being a novelist, Charles had guessed and gleefully trumpeted pretty much every feeling she’d ever had about Tom. If she still declined to speak Tom’s name, it was to protect his privacy, not hers. It was a little game that Charles was fine with playing.
The master-bedroom end of the house had a faint but inexpungible scent of skin lotions and fart. In the bathroom, she stood by the railinged toilet and watched Charles’s urine issue from his penis in a healthy stream. It did both of them good for her to witness his bodily functions. It was a way of doing something for each other. Even when she handled the penis to ejaculation, it wasn’t just for him. He was the baby she’d got.
“When I heard your car,” he said, “I thought, ‘Thursday! What a nice surprise.’”
“I appreciate your letting her stay here.”
“Then I thought, ‘Trouble on the Other Home Front?’”
“You weren’t kidding about needing to pee.”
“My continence speaks to the existence of a Deity for which evidence is otherwise scant.”
“I’m a little nuts about that girl.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You thinking of jumping the fence?”
“God, no. She’s more like a lost puppy that found its way to me.”
“You can keep her in the basement, but you’d have to do the house-training.”
“Where did Rosie put the clean pajamas?”
“They’re right in front of you.”
“Ah, yes. They’re right in front of me.”
The next morning, somewhat hungover, she went to Tom and told him he had to hire Pip as a full-fledged researcher, with a salary she could live on. Tom pointed out that Pip hadn’t finished her internship. Leila said, “She’s good, she’s worth it, and she needs the money right now.” And Tom, with a shrug, assented. Before he could change his mind, she went and found Pip and told her the good news.
“That’s great,” Pip said in a small voice.
For a moment, Leila wondered whether she was doing something selfish, something disturbed even, by trying to keep Pip in Denver. But the girl herself had said she didn’t want to leave.
“Now let’s find you a place to live,” Leila said cheerfully. “We can start by asking around the office.”
Pip nodded, seeming underjoyed.
* * *
The meeting with Earl Walker, behind the propane depot on Amarillo’s outskirts, lasted less than fifteen minutes. Walker stayed in his truck, speaking through the open window, and left the engine running. He admitted to having accepted a $250,000 severance payment after he’d remarked to plant management that everyone would be happier if he was happy. He further admitted to having been fired for cause, the cause being that he’d done some drinking, once, while on the job. One time, Cody Flayner had had to cover for him, and Flayner, having a taste for blackmail and being a generally nasty little shit, had made him pay for it by doing the egress paperwork on the mock B61, so that Flayner could play a prank on his girlfriend. Walker wasn’t proud of himself, but he insisted that he’d done nothing dangerous. The mock B61 had been shipped in error from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and a carload of Air Force investigators had come by to examine it, but Kirtland hadn’t yet dispatched a truck to repossess it. If Flayner hadn’t been so stupid as to show the thing off to his buddies, and post pictures of it, there would have been no harm, no foul.
“You did not hear any of this from me,” Walker said, shifting his truck into drive.
“Absolutely not,” Leila said. “Your wife can attest to the fact that you refused to talk to me.”
Her mind was already moving on to a story she was developing on mining-industry ties to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. She still needed to interview plant management about the mock B61, but the smallness of the Flayner story was becoming apparent. It would disappoint Pip, the smallness, and Leila decided to let the girl write it and share the byline.
Back in her hotel room, she tried calling Pip and Tom and then texted them. That both texts went unanswered for some hours, while she plowed through the tax filings and COI disclosure statements that Pip had dug up for her, became noteworthy only when Tom returned her call, around ten thirty Denver time.
“Where you been?” she asked.
“Out to dinner,” he said. “I took your girl to dinner.”
Leila immediately had a bad feeling, as if she’d felt a tooth crack.
“I always take new hires to dinner,” Tom said.
“Right. Of course. And where’d you go?”
“Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro.”
The Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro was her and Tom’s place. They liked to reward it for its name.
“I have no imagination for restaurants,” he said. “My mind becomes a perfect blank.”
&nbs
p; “It’s kind of funny to think of you there without me.” There was a tremor in Leila’s voice.
“I had the same thought. I don’t think I’ve ever been there without you.”
But he’d taken other new hires to dinner, and in each case he’d had enough imagination to think of restaurants other than the one where he and Leila went. Although the two of them never fought—hadn’t fought in so many years that she’d thought they never would again—she was remembering the foretaste now, the constriction of her chest.
“Maybe I was wrong,” she said, “but I had the sense you weren’t even comfortable around Pip.”
“Not wrong. You’re never wrong.”
“She reminds you of Anabel.”
“Of Anabel? No.”
“She’s the same type. If I can see it, you can definitely see it.”
“Completely different personality. And you were right—I’m glad we hired her.”
“Always Listen to Leila.”
“The words I live by. But I ran something by her. Tell me what you think of this. I said I’d run it by you, too.”
“Move her out of research and into reporting?”
“Ah, no. That’s worth discussing, but no. I asked her if she might want to live with you and me for a while. I gather she’s beyond broke.”
Fighting was like vomiting. The prospect grew more dreadful with each year that passed without her doing it. Even when she finally fell ill and needed to throw up, and even though she rationally knew that it would bring relief, she struggled to hold the vomit in as long as possible. And fighting was even worse, because fighting didn’t bring relief. Fighting was more like death in that regard: just keep postponing.
“Your house,” she said, trying to steady her voice. “Pip living in your house.”
“Our house. Didn’t you tell me you wished you could take her in?”
“Actually, what I said was that I wished I had a place that I could offer her. I don’t think of your house as a place I can offer.”