The Submission - Amy Waldman [119]
Needing to neutralize her beauty, he trained his gaze on the faint smudges, like erased pencil marks, beneath her eyes, on the fray of lines around their edges. “I was trying to say we were confused by you, Claire. We still are. You won’t hear us. My father up there, how can he not affect you? You choose Khan over him—Khan who got up there today and shoved all our faces in his Islamic garden, didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was anything else. What did they do to you, Claire, people like my parents, that you’ll do anything not to see their pain?”
“I do see their pain. That’s what makes this so hard.” The edges of her mouth quivered. The question mark in her face, his dubious creative stroke for the rally, hadn’t been wrong. Fury at her transparency seized him, a desire to crush the weakness, the equivocation, he saw in her face. For others, surely, could see the same thing in his.
She stood statue-still while he paced and turned and once even circled her. “You don’t know what you want,” he said, halting in front of her, peeved by the difference in their height. “You know what you’re supposed to want, but not what you really want. Step aside, Claire. Let people who know their own minds fight this out.”
“No, people like me, who can see both sides, are needed. It’s called empathy.” Her tone had turned patronizing, superior.
“Cowardice is what it’s called! You can see all the sides you want, but you can only be on one. One! You have to choose, Claire. Choose!” He was yelling now. That familiar, dreaded tightening, the build of frustration, had begun. Down at his sides, his fists balled and unballed, balled and unballed.
“Sean! Sean Gallagher!” he heard his father call. Behind Claire he saw Frank barreling, to the extent a sixty-three-year-old man could, toward them. If he was trying to save Sean from himself, it worked.
Sean pushed his arms at Claire like he was throwing a basketball at her, so that she jerked back, flailing a bit to keep her balance. But he didn’t touch her, he hadn’t touched her.
It was dark and beginning to rain by the time Claire made her way to the jury’s meeting place, the office suite on the twentieth floor. The glow from the site below, which was lit, as always, for night, seemed to hover outside the windows like an aurora borealis. Claire couldn’t stop staring at it.
Her arm hurt from where Sean had gripped it; her head clattered with his accusatory words. “Maybe it’s different losing a husband,” his mother had said to her. Maybe she was right. Maybe the problem wasn’t the Gallaghers’ passion but Claire’s lack of it, her reasonableness, her rationality revealing something—to others as much as, or more than, to herself—about her marriage. To have loved Cal: she no longer knew what that obligated.
Her head echoed, too, with the heckles and taunts Khan had endured. To question him, she feared, would ally herself with his tormentors, yet questions were all she had. If the Garden was Islamic, did that mean it was a paradise, and did that make it a martyrs’ paradise, and so on. Each question contained another, like those nesting matryoshka dolls that Cal had commissioned as a playful family portrait.
His original idea for the dolls, presented to the one-time art restorer from Moscow he had found to do the work, was for little Penelope to sit within William, who would sit within Claire, who would sit within Cal. But when William asked why Daddy got to be the biggest doll, Cal ordered three more sets in which each of them got to be the biggest once. Claire now could create a matryoshka of just herself—Claire within Claire within Claire within Claire. During the hearing, all these different Claires, who just happened to look alike, seemed to rest inside her, so that every argument, no matter how contradictory, found sympathy. Each time she thought she had reached the last Claire, the true and solid one, she was proved wrong. She couldn’t find her own core.
“We wasted months just to offer guidance?” she heard Elliott, the critic, say. “And ‘not even the most meaningful’ at