The Submission - Amy Waldman [52]
“My jury isn’t at fault here. It was an anonymous competition—you know that.”
“I do, but polling is showing that 70 percent of Americans don’t. People need someone to blame at a time like this. They’re not consoled by abstract notions of process.”
Geraldine had not called him here for breakfast, Paul realized, since there was none on offer. She had called him, out of friendship, to warn him that she was going to target his jury—a bunch of Manhattan artists, elite as they come—as much as the Islamist threat. There were all kinds of protests he could make against this beyond the anonymity of the entries. Most of those artists hadn’t even wanted the Garden. But the governor, with her man on the jury reporting back to her, likely knew that.
“And don’t forget that I have the final say, Paul.” He made no reply. When she’d asked him to chair the jury, she had urged him to make sure most of the jurors were artists, professionals. “We don’t want a bunch of firefighters deciding to put a giant helmet in Manhattan” had been her words. In private, of course. She had vetoed the campaign, led by Sean Gallagher, to have a jury of family members. They would bicker, she was sure; she would gain nothing by choosing among them. Claire Burwell, the only family member on the jury, was picked because her Ivy League credentials and art collection comported with the other jurors’ sensibilities. The notion of public input—the hearing, the comment period, the governor signing off—had been written into the process to give the public the illusion they would be heard, when in fact they were being led. Token modifications to the winning design could be made, but the jury’s selection would stand, blessed by the governor.
But now the bickering was here, on a scale unforeseen, and Bitman was clearly determined to profit from it. She wasn’t rewriting the rules, Paul thought, so much as interpreting them with a new and cynical literalism.
Her cool-down period was over. She stepped off the elliptical, motioned for the towel draped on Paul’s chair, and kissed him lightly on the cheek in farewell.
Staring down at her first column, Alyssa Spier had imagined herself as Carrie Bradshaw: golden hair tousled, cigarette in hand, petite, tank-top-clad frame perched on the bed, pithy comments filling the laptop screen. But Alyssa’s one-bedroom smelled, as it always did, of the farted exhaust of the Indian restaurants around her building. Curry Hill, they called her neighborhood; she called it Curry Hell. More than the odor, a sideways glance at the mirror demolished the fantasy. She was in nubby sweatpants and an extra-large T-shirt from a 1992 Bruce Springsteen concert (could it really be that old? could she?). She had a few pounds—okay, more than a few—on Carrie, perhaps because she had substituted a bag of Mint Milanos for the cigarettes. Her hair was unstreaked, not to mention unwashed. And she was severely hungover. Drinks with Chaz, her new editor, had felt more like a hazing than a celebration. He drank four martinis, lining up the empty glasses, Rockette-like, before him. She surrendered after two, despite his ribbing, but that was two too many on an almost empty stomach, since Chaz apparently subsisted on gin alone. The handfuls of pretzels she wolfed down when he looked away proved a meager levee. She had puked three times during the night. Then there were their subjects, hers and Carrie’s. Sexiness must come easily when your topic is sex and the single woman. Pondering terrorism—or “the Muslim problem,” as Chaz called it—didn’t exactly make for a seductive scribe. Nothing to do but press on. She was who she was, although these days, she wasn’t exactly sure who that was.
Less than a week ago, she had been a mere reporter, scraping for scoops. She was dogged, which was how she got the Muslim tip-off, but she was one of a crowd—no illusions there.