The Submission - Amy Waldman [140]
“Asma Anwar’s death was devastating,” she added, looking up from her pages. “Even without knowing who is responsible, it shocked us into realizing that this is a time for unity, for flexibility, not for rigidity.”
She had seduced the jury into backing the Garden, insisted it support Khan, then turned on both design and designer. Without her, the jury’s support of Khan would look like a bunch of artists defending one of their own—the governor’s dream scenario. Paul took umbrage not just at Claire’s betrayal of her fellow jurors, their months of work, their willingness to argue through their differences, but at her lack of humility—her sense that she alone could decide when was the time to fight, when to stand down. She didn’t understand her own country, he thought: it would take more than a new memorial to unite it.
Yet he, perhaps, had sown this idea. When he had called Claire to insist on the Khan meeting, he had said, almost as an aside, that the best thing would still be Khan’s withdrawing. She had done him one better: she grasped that her request would carry both more force and less risk if she joined with Muslims to make it.
“I wish this had gone differently,” Claire was saying. “If Mr. Khan had shown more willingness to explain his design, so it wouldn’t be subject to misinterpretation, or even to modify it, I would have continued to push for the Garden and many of the families would have done the same.”
So Paul had misread not just Claire but Khan. Why had he thought that the architect, after such consistent resistance, would yield to her demands? Khan would fight on, but the fight would get even muddier now, more drawn out. Geraldine Bitman would ride the irresolution and its attendant anxieties as far as she could, no matter the wreckage in her wake. Paul couldn’t imagine the Garden ever coming to be any more than he could imagine Khan giving in. Suddenly he craved a retirement filled not with chairmanships and prestige and continued relevance, but with him and Edith watching the musicals of the 1930s from the couch.
“She doesn’t know her own mind,” he said of Claire.
“Really?” said Edith. “It looks to me like she knows it quite well.”
25
Mo almost laughed as he watched the press conference, the orchid-white WASP framed by Arab, South Asian, African American Muslims. He had wanted to unite East and West, and he had—against himself. She sat at the center of a long table, members of MACC on either side: Issam Malik to her left, Jamilah to her right, Laila thankfully nowhere in sight. “Safeguard us and we’ll safeguard you”: he should have listened.
He watched Claire and the MACC members fall over one another to display their mutual respect. See? she seemed to be saying, I don’t have a problem with all Muslims, with Muslims at all, only with Mohammad Khan! This edifice of unexceptional beauty, as he had categorized her, now flaunted newly intriguing angles, as if false ceilings and partitions and scaffoldings, all the conventional interventions, had been cleared to reveal her true and startling bones. To unite with Muslims as opposed to other victims’ families—it was a creative stroke. Even as her principles collapsed, even as she conformed, she had found a way to set herself apart. Mo had dismissed her as a type: the well-off woman who married for money, was married for beauty, and lived on a barren plateau of motherhood, philanthropy, and irrelevance. Now he saw, for the first time, her singularity.
It was more than odd to be casing Claire at this moment, he knew. But it was the least painful place he could dwell. He had wanted to undo their encounter the moment she walked out the door. He couldn’t say what she wanted him to say; she couldn’t see why he wouldn’t say it. If they couldn’t find common ground, what hope was there?
“Our jihad—and I use the word mindfully,