The Submission - Amy Waldman [5]
“It’s eleven o’clock,” Paul said. “I think someone may need to reconsider his or her vote. How can we ask this country to come together in healing if this jury can’t?”
Guilty looks. A long silence. And finally, from the historian, an almost speculative “Well …” All bleary eyes turned to him, but he said nothing more, as if he had realized he held the fate of a six-acre chunk of Manhattan in his hands.
“Ian?” Paul prodded.
Even if inebriated, Ian wasn’t going without a lecture. He noted the beginnings of public gardens in suburban cemeteries in eighteenth-century Europe, segued into the garden-based reforms of Daniel Schreber in Germany (“We’re interested in his social reforms, not the ‘reforms’ he carried out on his poor sons”), jumped to the horror conveyed by Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, in which seventy-three thousand names—“Seventy-three thousand!” Ian exclaimed—were inscribed on its interior walls, pondered the difference between “national memory” and “veteran’s memory” at Verdun, and concluded, some fifteen minutes later, with: “And so, the Garden.”
Paul, then, would be the tenth and final vote, and this didn’t displease him. He had insisted, for himself, on not just public neutrality but internal neutrality as well, so that no design had been allowed to catch his fancy. But over the course of the evening he had begun rooting for the Garden. “Stumble on joy”—the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy? He must have felt it when his sons were born—that kind of event would surely occasion it—but he couldn’t remember. Joy: it was like a handle with no cupboard, a secret he didn’t know. He wondered if Claire did.
“The Garden,” he said, and the room broke loose, less with pleasure than relief.
“Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everyone,” Claire whispered.
Paul slumped in his chair and allowed himself some sentimental chauvinism. The dark horse had won—he hadn’t thought Claire could trump Ariana—and this seemed appropriately American. Champagne appeared, corks popped, a euphonious clamor filled the room. Paul clinked his flute to command their attention for a moment of silence in the victims’ honor. As heads bowed, he glimpsed the part in Claire’s hair, the line as sharp and white as a jet’s contrail, the intimacy as unexpected as a flash of thigh. Then he remembered to think of the dead.
He thought, too, of the day, as he hadn’t for a long time. He had been stuck in uptown traffic when his secretary called to say there had been an accident or attack and it might affect the markets. He was still going into the office in those days, not having learned yet that in an investment bank, “emeritus” translated to “no longer one of us.” When the traffic stopped completely, Paul got out of the car. Others were standing outside looking south, some shielding their eyes with their hands, all exchanging useless information. Edith called, sobbing “It’s falling down, it’s falling down,” the nursery-rhyme words, then the mobile network went dead. “Hello? Hello? Honey?” all around, then a silence of Pompeian density so disturbing that Paul was grateful when Sami, his driver, broke it to say, “Oh sir, I hope it’s not the Arabs,” which of course it would turn out to be.
Oh sir, I hope it’s not the Arabs. Sami wasn’t Arab, but he was Muslim. (Eighty percent of Muslims were not Arab: this was one of those facts many learned and earnestly repeated in the wake of the attack, without knowing