The Submission - Amy Waldman [33]
“Vacation,” Paul repeated. “Must be nice.”
Jacob made no reply, so Paul asked after his wife, an unsettlingly gorgeous Taiwanese American.
“Bea’s great. So what are you going to do, Dad?”
“About—?” Paul said curtly, although he knew. He was touched, since Jacob rarely inquired about Paul’s own stresses, then sour: it took something this sensational to make him inquire.
“The memorial, of course.”
“What would you do in my shoes, Jacob? If it’s true?”
“Give it to him. Or her: I told Bea I think it’s Zaha Hadid.” No response. “Whoever it is, if they won, they won.”
Like the simple son at the Passover seder, Paul thought. “So what are we here for today?” he asked. Jacob began to talk about his new film—something about a woman who takes her nine-year-old son on a journey to Laos. Laos sounded expensive.
“You know, Dad, the woman who was a minor character in Exiled? And she got pregnant? This is her child!” The content of his speech could not bear the weight of his excited tone, and this, Paul concluded, was what made Jacob a poor salesman: he had no sense of when to modulate, no care for how his audience received him. This judgment, Paul knew, was also a dodge for his own guilt: he had missed the screening of Exiled for a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of the governor, when he was trying to secure his jury chairmanship. Later he had dozed, bored and confused, through the film at home, waking only for the credits, where he saw his name as executive producer, an acknowledgment of the money lost to this folly. He had sent Jacob a note dictated by Edith commending the “originality and passion” of Exiled, but today he was distracted, his caution frayed. “I think I slept through that part,” he said, unthinking, gruff—even, he realized in retrospect, snide.
Two spots of deep red glowed in Jacob’s cheeks, and Paul saw him as a stricken boy seeking comfort after being wounded by some insult at school. But his own father had done the wounding. Perhaps, Paul thought, parenting meant protecting children until they were strong enough to sustain the hurt their parents inflicted.
“I’m—” No, he wouldn’t apologize. “I’m tired,” he said. “I have a lot going on.” Jacob opened and closed his mouth but said nothing. This silence, this failure to speak, only diminished Paul’s respect.
“How much do you need?” he asked, wanting the business done.
“Four hundred,” Jacob mumbled, the thousands not needing spelling out. The amount was high, and Paul half hoped that Jacob had been quick enough in hurt to raise it. He couldn’t help comparing his son, and not favorably, to Mohammad Khan.
8
How could you be dead if you did not exist? Of the forty Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only twenty-six were legal, and Asma Anwar’s husband was not among them. The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted. The consulate could not abet illegals, even posthumously. They were very sorry about Inam, “if indeed he had existed” rolling off their tongues as often as Insh’Allah, but they could do nothing about repatriating the body, if it were found, or helping with funds for the widow.
The subcontractor who had employed Inam as a janitor argued similarly : there was no Inam Haque, since he had taken the job using a fake name and Social Security number. The subcontractor had insisted on this pretense of legality, but now used it as an excuse to deny Asma help. “He paid real taxes,” she kept telling Nasruddin, the “mayor” of Little Dhaka, as their Brooklyn neighborhood was called, even though its people mostly came from Sandwip. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
Nasruddin just shook his head. He had lived in Brooklyn for longer than Asma, who was only twenty-one, had been alive. In that time, people said, his face had barely aged—though his stomach had swelled, like a very slow-gestating pregnancy. He made his living overseeing a crew of Bangladeshis who remodeled and maintained the dozen Brooklyn brownstones owned by an Irish American butcher. But his real energy went