The Submission - Amy Waldman [51]
Yet she yielded to Mr. Chowdhury in the matter of the rice. As a woman, she had to.
“Paul,” the governor said breathlessly.
Bitman was on her elliptical machine in a black velour sweat suit. It was seven-fifteen, an hour when Paul would have preferred to be contemplating the soft hillocks of a sleeping Edith’s rear country. Summoned for breakfast at the governor’s New York City pied-à-terre, Paul had put on his suit and bow tie. An aide offered a glass of orange juice and pointed him to a chair.
The governor was watching herself on television. “Even if Mr. Khan is not a security threat—and there is no reason to think he is—his finding his way to victory in this anonymous competition reminds us that radical Islamists could use our democratic institutions and our openness to advance their own agenda,” the governor on the screen was saying in a CNN interview from the previous day. The governor next to Paul nodded in time to her own words. The rise and fall of her legs suggested a riverboat churning. “As a woman, I can’t stay quiet about that danger, given that if Islamists were to take power here, it is women who would bear the brunt of our lost freedoms. As you may know, Wolf, I joined a delegation of female politicians on a visit to Afghanistan last year …”
“Geraldine, I’m surprised at you,” Paul said, unable to help himself. He had known the governor for more than twenty years, known her late husband for even longer. When Joseph Bitman died, bequeathing his wife his fortune and his unrealized political ambitions, Paul had been one of her early and ardent supporters. He had backed her from her first run for the legislature all the way to the helm of the state, and not only out of friendship. Her brio and clarity of mind impressed him, as did her cobbling from left and right her own unpredictable center. She was New York’s first female governor, a first that led her to think of others. She wanted to be president.
“Read my senior thesis from Smith, Paul”—there was heavier breathing, more strenuous pumping: the machine had shifted to a sterner cycle—“it might alleviate your surprise. ‘Hegemonic Hierarchies in the Women’s Movement.’ I was worried about women being oppressed by women. My concern about Islam is entirely consistent with that.” Consistent, too, Paul thought for the first time, with her patronage of Bob Wilner: she hadn’t appointed the lawyer, her former aide, to the jury knowing a Muslim would win, but his stridency on the issue couldn’t have been a secret to her.
A pinkish glow; a seed pearl of sweat on her brow. Paul studied Geraldine from the side—her coiffed hair, a rich, lustrous artificial auburn from which her nickname, the Fox, was partly derived; a handsome aquiline profile that would suit a coin.
“To be honest, I’m surprised at you,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“You don’t have a grip on the process.”
Her meaning was clear. Khan’s assertion that he had been asked to withdraw from the competition had taken Paul aback because he had striven so hard not to ask Khan to withdraw but only to insinuate that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if he did. So Paul had immediately issued a statement saying he had made no such request. This was Error Number One. Error Number Two was issuing a clarifying statement in which he said that he had not called Khan a liar, which was what reporters inferred from the first statement. The upshot of both statements was to confirm that Khan’s design had, indeed, been selected by the jury, which meant Paul had to find a way to introduce Khan after Khan had already introduced himself. He was having to rebut accusations that the jury had attempted to thwart Khan’s selection, even as the families shouted that the jury should have thwarted his selection.
“It’s a tricky situation, Geraldine, which is why I don’t think heightening the fear is helpful—”
“The fear is there, Paul. The fear is real. And the sense out there in Middle America, whose sentiments, I don’t mind saying, happen to be of interest to me these days,