The Submission - Amy Waldman [56]
They were in Paul Rubin’s living room, its aspirational-aristocrat decor giving Mo hives, for the official announcement of his selection. The moment was anticlimactic, the location and setup peculiar, even hermetic. No press and, other than Claire, no relatives of the dead being memorialized. No sense of the historic weight, the monumentality of the commission. Just Mo meeting the jury for a group photograph, which would be handed out with a glossy press packet describing his design. Anyone else’s submission, he was sure, would have been introduced with more fanfare. The jurors had each greeted and, mostly, congratulated him, then peeled off into small clusters, leaving him to Claire.
In one nearby group around Paul, an argument was unfolding. Mo tried to eavesdrop while also appearing responsive to Claire.
“The governor’s talk is confusing, Paul,” Leo, the retired university president, was saying.
“How did you know that a memorial that wasn’t just bleak was exactly right for us, for who my husband was?” Claire asked Mo.
“Stressing the importance of the public hearing—” he heard.
“I felt like you got inside my head,” Claire said. She seemed almost as uncomfortable with this talk as he was, but she kept on.
“Dress parade or battleground—”
“I’ve told my son it’s a place where his father will live,” Claire said.
“Relax,” Paul Rubin said, “it will be fine.”
Mo nodded, blankly, before Claire’s words latched on to him. The names on the Garden’s walls had become, for him, just another design element, but they were the dead; they were the faces that had been plastered on every surface right after the attack, that first draft of a memorial. His architect’s detachment wobbled at the image of a boy seeking his father in the Garden. Mo and Claire were almost the same height. He looked into her eyes and cleared his throat. “How old is he? I hope it will help him.”
“If 90 percent of them come to the hearing and say they don’t want a garden, she’s not going to shove it down their throats,” he heard the governor’s man say.
“Six,” Claire said, “and it will if we can make it come to—” She broke off, then moved away, at Ariana Montagu’s approach.
Mo had met Ariana once, three years ago, at the elaborate bash Roi had thrown to celebrate his Pritzker, but she gave no sign of recollection. Most of the jurors had been neutrally pleasant. Ariana clearly saw neutral pleasantry as selling out.
“It wasn’t my first choice,” she began, as if to be sure she wouldn’t be blamed. “You made some interesting choices, but a garden? So”—the word languorously extended—“precious. It doesn’t seem to fit with your other work.”
He wondered what her first choice had been, and who else hadn’t wanted the Garden. It hadn’t been designed with her in mind, but of all the jurors, he thought she would appreciate its Modernist influences and details like the steel trees, whose perpetual spareness would preserve the sightlines from the pavilion to the wall. He was about to impress these points on her when Rubin called them to assemble for the group picture.
“Smile,” the photographer called out. From reflex Mo did.
He called Laila Fathi as soon as he left Paul Rubin’s house. “Do you have time for a drink?” The question was posed as casually as it could be by a man holding his breath. Why, he couldn’t say: she wasn’t remotely his type. He tended to date architects or designers, thin of frame, delicate of feature, precise in dress, cool in style and affect. Laila was in no respect cool. She was small but curvy, and her features were bold, as were the lipsticks she favored. Her suits were vividly colored and her passions, he had already learned in a few working meetings, many: food of all kinds; Persian poetry and Iranian films;