The Submission - Amy Waldman [55]
“Thank you,” Mo stuttered.
“But, Mo, you must also keep some perspective.” An assistant scurried in, set Roi’s macchiato precisely six inches and forty-five degrees from his right hand, and withdrew. “Your design—I am sure it will be a fine memorial, but do not let it distract you from your career. Remember that it is just a garden. What is the phrase? Parsley around the roast. You may make history with it, but you will not change the history of architecture.”
With that Mo was dismissed. His gratitude was no less for wondering if Roi had entered the competition and was lying about it because he hadn’t won.
“U: NYPost 2mrw.” The text from Lanny came as Claire was getting ready for bed. With reluctance she called him, wondering why this lupine soul had become her chief correspondent. “Paul wanted you to know: there’s a column—it’s online,” he said, his studied neutrality indicating bad news. Chilled, she pulled her robe tight as she seated herself at the computer.
“The problem with Islam is Islam,” Alyssa Spier’s column began, before describing, in retread language, the religion’s violent propensities, its oppression of women, its incompatibility with democracy and the American way of life. But halfway through, the screed took an abrupt, odd turn, as if a late-breaking bulletin had come in, or the columnist had jettisoned her Fouad Ajami pretensions to channel Cindy Adams: “Another family member tells me that the winsome widow on the jury has a soft spot for Mohammad Khan. If, metaphorically speaking, she’s sleeping with the enemy, whose side is she on?” Claire’s mouth opened in shock. Like a frenetic wing beat, her index finger delicately, compulsively tapped the screen, as if to blot the words away. Enemy.
She curled up in a chair in her bedroom, not wanting to be alone in her bed. It was a badge of honor to be targeted by the Post, she told herself. If she backed Khan, that meant backing him publicly. Her stand for him, as much as any physical place, would be Cal’s memorial. Yet she would have preferred that her stance stay hidden. What was this cowardice, this fear, that kept her from owning her own beliefs? Knotted in questions, curled around herself, she fell asleep in the chair.
The phone woke her and the children; she didn’t answer. It rang, rang again, again, again. “Who keeps calling?” William asked. He had, of late, begun to answer the phone himself.
“Don’t pick up—it’s broken, honey. The phone company’s trying to fix it.”
With the children packed off to school, she went to work unlisting their phone number. It was midmorning when she heard a car coming up the driveway. A dark-green Pontiac Grand Am pulled up next to the house, and Sean Gallagher and four other men emerged. Claire, with the maid, hid in her bedroom. The doorbell chimed, chimed again, went silent.
From behind a curtain, with a hammering heart, Claire watched Sean pace a ragged figure eight, occasionally looking up, watched as he bent and plucked one stone, then another, from the cairn beneath the copper beech. She turned her face away, braced for the sound of glass shattering. It didn’t come. Down below, Sean was stalking around her Mercedes now. For a moment she thought he might actually urinate on it. One of the other men spoke to him; they seemed to argue. Then all five of them door-slammed themselves into the Pontiac and drove off. A safe interval later, Claire went outside to rebuild the cairn. The stones were gone.
11
Claire Burwell took Mo’s hand. There was a brief but unmistakable pause. She flushed, then spoke. “Thank you for the Garden—it’s lovely.”
She was lovely, too, but obviously so, not unlike the neo-Georgian town house they were standing in. Perfect, even classical in proportion, refined in detail, but missing the unpredicted element that would stop his breath in envy or awe.
The pause was a beat of expectation, Mo was sure: