The Submission - Amy Waldman [57]
He suggested a dark, intimate bar in the West Village. She countered with a restaurant, more convenient for her, near Madison Square Park. Waiting for her, he admired the art deco interior—ostentatiously high ceiling, clean lines. They sat in a banquette at a tiny round table, a candle flickering on top, their knees brushing beneath.
He repeated the scraps of overheard conversation that suggested the public hearing would be used to kill the design and shared his impression that Ariana would like nothing better. “It hadn’t occurred to me”—he paused and licked his lips, embarrassed by his wounded pride—“that the vote for the Garden wasn’t unanimous, and that maybe she or others would seize on me being Muslim as a way to push through another design.”
“We’ll deal with one step at a time,” Laila said. “At least they’ve acknowledged you.”
“But in such an odd way. It was like being at a cocktail party where nobody acknowledges a nuclear bomb just detonated. There’s no way any other winner would have been handled that way.”
“You’re right, but you can’t prove it, so legally it’s irrelevant.”
“I know that,” he said. “It’s not the legal—” He stopped. He didn’t know how to explain.
“It’s how it made you feel,” she said. “I understand.” Some connection formed with those words. There was no one he could talk to about his strain. His parents, in their twice, sometimes thrice, daily calls, were too worried. He couldn’t complain to Thomas. He projected complete confidence, having long ago learned, as the sole brown boy in a white school, the power in appearing uninterested in the opinions of others. But he wasn’t a robot.
“I’ve been having a lot of unfamiliar feelings,” he told her. Most uncomfortably, bitterness toward those families who excoriated and caricatured him. “I did this for them and they don’t appreciate it,” he said.
“For them or for you?” Laila asked. She smiled at his look. “I’m sure you care about helping them heal. But my father’s a political cartoonist. He wants to provoke and shape opinions, but he also loves to draw. Your design is really beautiful, by the way—moving, I should say. The pavilion is brilliant, as a way to encourage contemplation. It’s a very Eastern, or at least Persian, concept, you know—that a garden isn’t for walking, for action, but for sitting. Stopping. Which is exactly right in a memorial. I just keep imagining looking out over the water at all of those names.”
Not ready to voice his most unfamiliar feelings, which were toward her, he offered to walk her home. They wandered up Third Avenue, the Empire State Building a lantern held aloft to light their way. Flushed with wine and night air, she seemed free in a way he wasn’t, in a way that made his efforts to assert his individuality—to compose an identity—seem strenuous, even ridiculous by comparison. He had grown a beard on his return from Kabul merely to assert his right to wear a beard, to play with the assumptions about his religiosity it might create. She would never adopt a headscarf for the same reason. He imagined himself as indifferent to the opinions of others. She really was.
His attraction to her was both sharply physical and strangely innocent, as if he wanted to take shelter in her. He took her hand. She took it back.
“No, Mo,” she whispered. “Nothing in public. I would be kicked off the council. I tried to explain to you. Modesty matters to them.”
“Then let them police their wives.”
“It’s not that simple. I have to respect their beliefs if I’m going to work with them.”
It was late when they neared her building, but she invited him up for tea. “Should we enter separately?” he joked.
“Actually, yes,” she said. “Ring 8D in five minutes.”
Studying the group