The Submission - Amy Waldman [103]
“No one’s interested in my point of view,” he said. “Like a lot of Americans, I’ve felt really helpless the past few years, powerless to stop the change in this country’s direction, and bolstering you is a way to do something. Look, I’m not saying it’s easy, I know there are all kinds of pressures, but this really matters. You need to be strong. There’s no evidence our Muslim population is a threat; why should we make them one?”
“Still fighting for the underdog, I see,” she said, and although she didn’t mean it as a compliment, he took it as one.
“Whom else would I fight for?”
“The victims? The families?”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any shortage of recruits for their army,” he said.
“There are a billion Muslims in the world!” Her laugh faked lightness. “You think they’re short of recruits?”
“In this country, I do. Khan’s the underdog. He won, fair and square, and you want to take it away from him.”
His inability to grasp the complications was making her, for the first time, judge him to be stupid. “I don’t want to take anything away, I just want to know what he’s given us—”
He interrupted: “Promise me you won’t renege on Khan.”
“Renege? It’s not a contract, Jack. You’re as bad as the people who want me to promise to stop him. It’s my decision, and I’ll make it, thank you. Let me ask you a question. You, with your liberal causes, how do you reconcile your support for Islam with your support for gay rights, for feminism, when you look at how women, or gays, or minorities get treated in so many Muslim countries?”
“That’s not the kind of Muslim Khan is.”
“But then it’s your own litmus test—the ‘acceptable’ Muslims are the ones who agree with you.”
He downed his drink, seemed peeved. To her surprise, she was enjoying flustering him as much as she once had enjoyed pleasing him.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
“I’m sure I have,” she said, refilling his glass and her own, even though the cognac’s warmth was already leadening her muscles and her tongue. “I can’t imagine that anyone who lost someone that day didn’t.” What she wanted to say was that maybe it wasn’t a change but a becoming—a coming into herself. But she could sense his judgment. “Try to understand, Jack. It’s been—there aren’t words for how painful it has been to lose Cal this way.”
She looked at the tableau she had constructed on the ottoman, an artful display of family pictures and branched coral and stacked art books, its maintenance in the face of childish sabotage a constant struggle. Her glance caught on the picture of Cal, grinning, then his arm was around her, or so she imagined until she looked up to see that it was Jack moving closer, encircling her, pulling her to him, saying, “Hey, hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He cradled her head against his chest, as if she were his daughter, and stroked her hair with his hand, undoing its coil, stroked, stroked, until she relaxed, tingled. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.” He turned her face up and leaned down to put his mouth on hers and they were twenty again, panting, nervous, the charge between them now almost stronger for their friction. His other hand began deftly pulling open her blouse and rubbing her breast in little circles that made every dormant part of her surge to life. Then he gave her nipple a hard twist as if to say “I know you, I know what you are.”
The idea of luring him to her house only to spurn him had come to her on the drive home from the restaurant. Yet here she was leaning up so he could pull off her shirt and unhook her bra, here she was letting him pull up her skirt and slide his hand into her underwear, inside her, so that she gasped, almost shouted, at the shot of pleasure and pain.
“Easy,” he said, laughing. “You’ll wake