The Submission - Amy Waldman [118]
20
As the Bangladeshi woman made her way toward the exit, people seated alongside the aisle leaned out to whisper words of encouragement or condolence, to grab her hand or, failing that, her interpreter’s. The two of them reminded Sean of a couple leaving the church at the end of their wedding ceremony. They approached the exit, where he had been hovering since leaving his father onstage. His own unexpected impulse to reach toward them he stanched by opening the door.
“Thank you,” the translator said, looking right through him.
Watching the woman onstage in her headscarf, Sean had thought of Zahira Hussain. Up close they didn’t look much alike at all. This woman was smaller, darker. Excitement, nervousness, gleamed from her face, but beneath lived qualities less transient. A determination, a stubbornness, that brought his mother to mind. With some primal kind of certainty, both women claimed this memorial for their sons.
But their claims weren’t equal; he had to remember that. Patrick, trying valiantly to make too-small, too-distractible Sean into a high-school football player, had taught him to marry public sportsmanship with the essential psychological tool of the private gloat. Pitying the other team, Patrick instructed, would erode Sean’s will to crush them, would worm deep within him, even into his hands, so that he would start giving away plays without meaning to. Sean had to stamp out these glimmerings of sympathy. To lend his heart to the other side would weaken his own.
After watching the Bangladeshis hurry off, Sean made his way outside. It was almost evening—they’d been inside practically the whole day—and the sky, brewing a storm, had gone asphalt-gray. His departure from the stage would need explaining to his family, and he canvassed possibilities. The truth was that he hadn’t thought before he acted. As always, he learned what he felt by what he did. Some strange scramble of images had beset him up there: Debbie serving him eggs at home, then hurling insults outside MACC; Zahira warming behind that desk, then aghast; Eileen, cold fierceness one minute, childlike grief the next. All these doubles. He couldn’t get a fix on anyone, least of all himself, the brother left behind and the striving son, the shabby handyman and the suited man on the make, the guy pulling the headscarf and the one apologizing and somehow meaning both. His empathy kept settling in new, unstable places. It—he—couldn’t be trusted.
Any more than Claire Burwell could be. There she was now, fighting her way out of city hall, surrounded by agitated family members. Already taller than most of them, she was straining, with the regal annoyance of a woman who believes herself better than her circumstances, to hold her head even higher. The cluster moved down the steps with her, so that she appeared to be shepherding the relatives even as she tried to shake them off. They pressed close to hear the questions she wasn’t answering.
“Claire!” he shouted. “Claire Burwell!” He climbed the stairs, shoved into the knot, and pulled her roughly by the arm to extract her. Down they went, into City Hall Park, where she wrested free.
“You hurt me,” she said angrily, rubbing the spot where his fingers had been.
“I was trying to help you.”
“Sure you were. You’re a really helpful guy, Sean. I’m sure you were trying to help me when you brought your gang to my house, too.”
He was embarrassed that she had been watching, even though he had wanted her to be. Stewing that day over how to make her repudiate Khan, he had also been imagining her naked upstairs, eager for him, Sean. The fantasy of drilling himself into her was so arousing, given her proximity, that he could have hurled that rock just for release. It wasn’t news to him that anger and sex lived inside each other, but he’d never felt them pair with such force.
“And at your rally,” she continued, “when your people were waving those posters of me with a question mark, that was you helping me, too, right?” In her voice, unvarnished