The Submission - Amy Waldman [101]
Their picnic lunch had included a bottle of Greek wine and when they resumed riding Cal nearly collided with a stone wall. They had doubled over in laughter, possessed of the reckless freedom, the false sense of immortality that came from being young and childless.
When Jack’s hand touched her elbow, Claire felt a jolt even before she looked at him. When she did she saw silver at his temples, interesting lines on his face, the rich dark brown of his eyes, that well-cut mouth. He kissed her with it now, lightly, electrically, on the lips, and took a seat.
Regret seized her as soon as they began to talk. Making conversation with him, given their intimacy and subsequent estrangement, was almost harder than talking to a stranger. They stuck to facts: her summary of life since Cal, her children. He had, as she assumed, divorced; he had one-third custody of his eleven-year-old son. Most of his time now went to the social activism: financing progressive documentaries; attending Netroots camps; brainstorming with the young Turks of the Democratic Party. A political sugar daddy, Claire thought—one with enough money not to have to work.
After a glass of wine they moved to a table and groped their way to old familiarities.
“Do you remember all the nights in the shanties?” he asked. Pieced together from discarded wood, meant to point up the inhumanity of supporting South Africa’s racist regime, Dartmouth’s antiapartheid shanties were defiantly ugly on that green, pristine campus. Both her relationship with Jack and her political education had taken shape within their flimsy walls. They often spent nights in one of the shanties, often made love there on a carpet of cardboard boxes over hard cement. The shanty had no locks, and to take such a risk, so unlike her, was arousing. The air sneaking through the cracks onto her bare skin, the cricket-quiet of the night in the campus’s brief dormant hours. She remembered all of it and saw, in his invoking this memory, an erotic portent of the evening ahead.
They were barely through the first course when Jack said, “So what’s going on with the memorial?”
She told him how guilty she felt about defying the families opposed to Khan, even if she believed that opposition wrong. How unsure she was what to make of Khan himself. As she unburdened herself, the weight of the choice lightened for the first time in weeks.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve got one leg in New York and one in America,” she said.
“New York is America.”
“You know what I mean—we think so differently, so atypically, here. We’re such a minority in our own country. Liberals, I mean.”
“Which doesn’t mean we’re wrong.”
“Doesn’t mean they are, either.”
“So everyone’s right? How’s that supposed to work?”
“I just meant there are two sides to everything, including this. Probably more than two sides. I mean, the protest was ugly, but I’m supposed to represent the families. I’m one of them, we’ve shared this searing experience. Their presence at that rally was their way of telling me, ‘You let us down, betrayed us.’ I have an obligation to understand their point of view.”
“Some things don’t deserve to be understood. Apartheid didn’t deserve to be understood, even if the whites who benefited from it didn’t see it that way.”
This second reference to their shared history grated, and it cast his earlier evocation of the shanties in a new light, one neither erotic nor accidental. By the time he said “The memorial is the reason I got back in touch,” she didn’t need him to tell her, but the words wrecked her nonetheless. He was here to remind