The Submission - Amy Waldman [139]
“So great art requires a morally pure artist?” Cal asked. “You look at the creation, not the creator.”
“So you ignore that he tormented poor Dora.”
“No, you judge the paintings as works of art, and Picasso as a man. There’s no inconsistency in loving one and reviling the other. And thankfully the converse is true as well: you love me even though I made some pretty lousy art. Maybe arrogance is necessary for greatness.”
A ground-floor exit expelled her into midtown. An inexplicable series of police barricades diverted her to a Times Square packed with tourist-naïfs. Her breath sped up in time with the intemperate digital collage—videos, commercials, neon, news tickers—that flickered at the edges of her eyelids. She cut through slow-moving knots, indifferent to indignant looks, until she made her way onto a less packed eastbound street. It was one of those miserable humid days when the pressure squeezes in like walls, the whole surly city waiting on edge for it to break. By the time Claire reached Bryant Park, she was damp.
Along the sides of the lawn, trees with twisting trunks lined up in perfect allées. The public library stretched before her. On the park’s other three sides, glassy skyscrapers rose, their surfaces trapping greenery and clouds. It was a walled garden. She sank into its grass.
Even here, in this attenuated form, Khan’s vision beguiled as much as his contempt burned. Perhaps they were inseparable, as Cal had argued—the arrogance firing the creation—but she wanted the Garden pure again, free of associations, free of Khan. The Garden as she first had seen it. But she couldn’t take it from him, because it was his as much as, more than, hers. He had created it.
She bent her head to her hands and cried.
Seeking solitude and air, Paul took to Central Park. Other than being driven through by Vladimir, which didn’t count, Paul hadn’t set foot there in months. In fact, he realized, he had been so busy shuttling from home to jury meetings, offices, and politicians’ lairs, that he had barely been outside. Khan’s garden—the reality, as opposed to the controversy—had vanished from his thoughts. Now, strolling the Sheep Meadow’s studied informality, the barely veiled evidence of Frederick Law Olmsted’s designing hand, he realized that the Garden would be, would have been—he no longer knew what tense to use—the first public garden in Manhattan since Central Park’s creation a century and a half before. He imagined a spot of green flashing on the subway map, then vanishing, flashing, then vanishing. A pulse.
Perhaps it was the breeze and birdsong, or maybe the young people streaking by on Rollerblades and bikes, but Paul felt content as he hadn’t in a long time. His brief foray into inaction, into letting chaos reign—it had been a mistake. Far better that he forced Claire and Khan to confront their differences and work past them. Geraldine Bitman would persist in her demagoguery, but if Claire, as the most prominent family member, insisted that Khan could be trusted—that she trusted him—especially after her very public doubts, there would at least be a showdown between the two women, and Paul thrilled to imagine it. It amused him that this was what his once-racy fantasies of Claire Burwell had come to.
Edith called, atypically breathless. “Paul, there’s a press conference—Claire Burwell. I’m sending Vladimir.”
“I can walk,” he started to say, falsely invigorated by the young people taking flight all around, then, faltering: “Yes, Vladimir.”
Back home he settled into the couch with Edith to watch. Claire was seated at a long table, with members of the Muslim American Coordinating Council on either side of her. Her energy radiated through the screen as she began to read their joint statement.
“We, the undersigned”—she gestured to the right and left of her—“are asking Mohammad Khan to withdraw his memorial design so that the country can unite around a different memorial. We do not want to take anything from Mr. Khan. His effort to help this country heal is appreciated. We