The Submission - Amy Waldman [15]
It was Cal’s hand she had reached for when she read Mohammad Khan’s name at Gracie Mansion last night, Cal’s indignation she channeled, but also Cal’s specificity she sought. It had been two years. He appeared in her dreams but vanished on waking, and she spoke of him in qualities—positive, ebullient, smart, principled—that had no texture.
So on this morning, instead of swimming she went to his study. Small, oak-paneled, a nook in a house of grand spaces, it had been a sanctuary for Cal and, in the months after his death, for Claire. On bad days, when the loneliness howled or the children shrieked, she would come to the study and leave fortified by this fiction of his enduring. Better a dollhouse than no house. The study was largely as he had left it, intact, a museum of sorts. When the children were old enough, she would let them touch and read his books, dip into his papers and files. She often had done the same in those first months. Now she couldn’t recall the last time she had sat at his desk.
Settling herself there, she stared down the painting opposite. It was a liverish red that clotted to blackness at the center. “It makes me think of childbirth,” she had told Cal, distaste in her voice, the night they spotted it in a Chelsea gallery. “You’re wrong,” he replied, his tone, as always when he overruled her, as respectful as it was certain. The next day he bought it, Claire pretending indifference to the price. Wrong how? That it was like childbirth? Of this he had no better idea than she: they were, then, still childless. Or wrong in her dislike? Lose someone prematurely, and you had endless time to pore over finite conversations. Over fossils.
In the cabinets next to his desk Cal had kept neat files: Art, Politics, Philanthropy, Travel. A Claire file, the sight of which always made her smile. She rifled through them, not sure what she was looking for. In the Art files—mostly detailed dossiers on the art Cal had collected, or wanted to, or on artists he admired—she found, to her semi-amusement, an article on Ariana Montagu’s Tectonics, a huge piece, gargantuan slabs of granite tilting into one another, as if they had fallen that way, installed some years back in Central Park.
Other files held information about causes he had backed, generously, sometimes astonishingly so: environmental groups; human rights organizations; Democrats trying to reform the party; a program in Bridgeport to help teen mothers continue their schooling, which Claire now financed, although she didn’t visit as often as Cal had. All of this suggested a decent man, an earnest liberal, a citizen trying to leave his country better than he found it. The clearest view into his principles was a letter he had written, at the age of twenty, resigning from his parents’ and grandparents’ golf club. It had the endearing, aggravating righteousness of a college student who has just noticed the world around him and believes it will heel to his newfound idealism.
“It has come to my attention,” the letter began—Claire had ribbed him about this: had the club’s homogeneity really just then come to his attention?—“that the club does not have a single black or Jewish member. Whether or not this indicates a deliberate policy of exclusion, I am unable to associate myself with an institution that does not place a greater value on diversity.”
The country club, from what Claire knew, was as lily-WASP as it had always been, which was just one reason she considered these files a chronicle of defeat. Cal had wanted to be a sculptor, had even set himself up in a studio after college. By the time Claire met him, he was in business school. Conceding that he would never be a great, or even good, artist, he had turned to collecting, to owning what he couldn’t create. Creating wealth was the