The Submission - Amy Waldman [61]
He found refuge at Laila’s. With Laila. Their relationship had deepened—tentatively, at first: she was his lawyer, she had protested, it was inappropriate; they would be discovered by the council—then in a rush of surrender, as if the pressure of controversy welded them together. Her Murray Hill studio had been inherited, along with its cheap rent, from a friend. Its lines suggested a hotel room or corporate apartment, but it had built-in bookcases and a long wall of windows. Laila had dressed the room in velvety Persian rugs and a rich red sofa, a small walnut table and two matching straight-backed chairs to eat on, her grandmother’s elegant armoire to hold her serving pieces, and the family’s old phonograph with its amplifier like a giant conch ear. All of it delivered the odd but enchanting effect of a live orchestra playing a Viennese waltz in a dentist’s office. She had walled off her bed with a screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but in the morning, she would reach up to fold it aside, turning the cello of her back toward Mo. The first thing he saw out her window was the Chrysler Building, which he had loved as a child, and a circle he hadn’t known to be incomplete closed.
On the single occasion that Laila stayed a night at Mo’s loft, she had spent the entire next day trapped inside for fear that the photographers would expose their relationship. From now on, she told Mo once she had snuck out under cover of dark, he had to come to her place to see her. “And I’m not so sure your apartment is safe for you now, either,” she said.
He took a suitcase full of clothes to her studio, where she gave him a corner of the closet and told him to keep to it. His stays without returning home stretched longer—three days, then five, until he stopped running the shrill gauntlet into his building at all. To his surprise, he was at Laila’s studio more than she was. She had meetings, working dinners, cases, causes. Mo, out of sync with ROI’s rhythms, was adrift between projects. Sometimes she let him know when she would be home, sometimes she forgot. By the time she returned, the apartment would be immaculate. It amused Mo that she didn’t notice. She entered and warmed the room like a small sun, and in her absence both he and the furniture seemed to be waiting to be brought to life.
“Mohammad Khan has absolutely, unequivocally every right to proceed with his memorial,” read The New Yorker’s weekly Comment, penned by its editor. “The question is whether he should proceed.” Mo’s stomach contracted. He had been taking comfort, to a degree, in the predictability of the opposition to him: hostile family members; conservative publications; opportunistic politicians like Governor Bitman, who had been speaking about “stealth jihad” in the early primary and caucus states. The New Yorker fit none of these categories.
Khan’s opponents judge him by his fellow Muslims—not just those who brought down the towers but the significant numbers who believe that America brought the attack on itself, or that it was an inside job by the American government. This is unfair, even reprehensible. We should judge him only by his design. But this is where matters get tricky. In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs. This memorial is not an exercise in self-expression, nor should it be a display of religious symbolism, however benign. The memorials lining the Mall in Washington reflect only our admiration of classical architecture and the reason and harmony that it, like our democracy, was meant to embody