The Submission - Amy Waldman [3]
“Paul, you know there’s a whole critique out there. If we pick the wrong memorial, if we yield to sentimentalism, it only confirms—”
“I know the concerns,” he said gruffly: that it was too soon for a memorial, the ground barely cleared; that the country hadn’t yet won or lost the war, couldn’t even agree, exactly, on who or what it was fighting. But everything happened faster these days—the building up and tearing down of idols; the spread of disease and rumor and trends; the cycling of news; the development of new monetary instruments, which in turn had speeded Paul’s own retirement from the chairmanship of the investment bank. So why not the memorial, too? Commercial exigencies were at work, it was true: the developer who controlled the site wanted to remonetize it and needed a memorial to do so, since Americans seemed unlikely to accept the maximization of office space as the most eloquent rejoinder to terrorism. But there were patriotic exigencies, too. The longer that space stayed clear, the more it became a symbol of defeat, of surrender, something for “them,” whoever they were, to mock. A memorial only to America’s diminished greatness, its new vulnerability to attack by a fanatic band, mediocrities in all but murder. Paul would never put it so crudely, but the blank space was embarrassing. Filling in that blank, as much as Edith’s ambitions, was why he had wanted to chair the jury. Its work would mark not only his beloved city but history, too.
Ariana was waiting for more from Paul. “You’re wasting your time on me,” he said brusquely. The winner needed ten of thirteen votes; Paul had made clear he would abandon neutrality only if a finalist was one short. “If I were you, I’d go rescue Maria from Claire.”
Claire had seen Maria heading outside, cigarette in hand, and hurried after her. She had been pleading—no other word for it—with the critic, telling him, “Just because we’re memorializing the dead doesn’t mean we need to create a dead place,” watching him roll his head as if his neck hurt from looking up at her. But she also had been scavenging her memory for tidbits from law school: the science of juries. The Asch experiments, what did Asch show? How easily people were influenced by other people’s perceptions. Conformity. Group polarization. Normative pressures. Reputational cascades: how the desire for social approval influences the way people think and act. Which meant Claire’s best chance was to get jurors alone. Maria was a public art curator who had made her mark placing large-scale artworks, including one of Ariana’s, around Manhattan. This made her an unlikely defector, but Claire had to try.
“Got an extra?” she asked.
Maria handed her a cigarette. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a smoker.”
“Only occasionally,” Claire lied. As in never.
They were standing on the veranda, the lawn spread before them, its majestic trees mere smudges in the dark, the lights of the bridges and boroughs like proximate constellations. Maria ashed complacently over the railing onto the lawn, and although it struck Claire as somehow disrespectful, she did the same.
“A ruined garden within the walls—that I could get behind,” Maria said.
“Excuse me?”
“It would be so powerful as a work of art, would answer any worries about erasing the hard memories. We have to think of history here, the long view, a symbolism that will speak to people a hundred years from now. Great art transcends its time.”
“A ruined garden has no hope and that’s unacceptable,” Claire said, unable to help her sharpness. “You all keep talking about the long view, but the long view includes us. My children, my grandchildren, people with a direct connection to this attack are going to be around for the next hundred years, and maybe that’s a blip when you look back at the Venus of Willendorf, but it certainly seems a long time now. So I don’t see why our interests should count any less. You know, the other night I dreamed about that black pool around the Void, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it.