The Submission - Amy Waldman [121]
“The families aren’t the only ones who want to know what this design is,” she said, carefully. “Americans, many of them, are afraid.”
Ariana fixed her obsidian eyes on Paul, but it was Claire she spoke of. “Before we had to weigh her stance more because she stood for all the families. Now she stands for all of America. Now she wants us to accommodate her ambivalence, her pivots. Enough!”
“But Claire has a point.” Paul bestirred himself to speak. “It wouldn’t be wise to shove this down everyone’s throats. We need to effect consensus among the public, among all the constituencies. That’s the right thing to do.”
“No, that’s the cautious thing,” Ariana said. “The right thing is not to give in to the pressure to abandon Khan.” Her small frame seemed newly dense, so that she looked, in her trademark gray, like an iron ingot. “The Garden,” she said defiantly. “As is.”
“The Garden, as is.” Juror by juror, the phrase was taken up, until Paul said, in the unconvincing manner of a father having to discipline his children after a long day at the office, “We’re not voting.”
“And if we are I’m voting no,” said the governor’s man, to which Maria, then Leo, then Violet, dithering, fretful Violet, said, “The Garden, as is.”
Only Claire, waiting fruitlessly for Paul to stop the vote, hadn’t spoken. The whole table was watching her. Her thinking bullet-trained around turns and through tunnels and underground at breathtaking speed, so that in the fraction of time between opening her mouth and the words coming out she moved from voting for Khan, if only to avoid the embarrassment of admitting her internal disarray, to saying, “I abstain. I abstain.”
Her body had fought doubt like a virus and lost. Up and up ticked her fever at the thought of Alyssa Spier’s questions and Sean Gallagher’s condemnations and Jack Worth’s principled manipulations and Khan himself, elusive. Her mind returned to the Russian dolls, not as a stand-in for Khan’s mysteries or her own, but the actual dolls of the Burwell family, and how they taught her the un-mystery of Cal. Dreaming them up had been one of his last acts; this, not a twenty-year-old resignation from a country club, revealed him. The giving of pleasure was, for him, a creative act, which meant he would have rebuked her less for her uncertainty than for the seriousness she brought to it. In inflating his relatively low-stakes political principles, she had forgotten his highest value, which was to relish life. This understanding—Cal wouldn’t have cared about Khan anywhere near as much as she had pretended—was levitating, freeing. She could decide for herself, could abandon a position she wasn’t sure was hers, could accept that her innermost doll was an uncertain one.
“I abstain because I don’t know,” she said. The silence that followed felt like a pinhole in history. The other jurors, she realized, hadn’t been on the train in her head, hadn’t even seen it go by. Before she could begin to re-create the steps that had taken her to so confidently abandoning her once-firm position, Ariana said, “We have ten votes even without you.”
Claire flinched at the statement, at the lack of respect in its delivery. Then Wilner, the governor’s man, nodded at her supportively. The gesture enfolded her, to her dismay, in his camp. They were gathered like a family around the huge round table, and the intimacy was awful. The adenoidal breathing of the historian next to her could be too clearly discerned. Desperate for air, for space, Claire stood and turned to the window, only to be blasted by the light from the empty, expectant site below. She returned, shattered, to her seat.
“You don’t have any votes yet,” Paul, severe at last, told Ariana. They needed to wait a decent interval—three weeks, he insisted—so they would at least appear to be considering