The Submission - Amy Waldman [64]
“The jury’s fuck-up, is what you mean.”
“The jury didn’t know whose design it was picking, as you know, so you can’t pin this on them. And please watch your language, Sean. There are children here.” As if the whole coffee shop was in service of his reprimand, a young man carrying a strapping blond toddler approached. Rubin gave the boy a pro forma chuck on the cheek.
“Sounds like you’ve got a mess on your hands,” the man said.
“Probably less of one than you’ve got, Phil,” Rubin said; the boy had loosed a waterfall of chewed-up cracker from his mouth.
Phil smiled and said, “If anyone knows about cleaning up messes, it’s you.” He turned to Sean: “If you’d seen how Paul dealt with the Asian crisis …” He shook his head in admiration. “People were losing their … losing their cool all over, but Chairman Rubin here was so steady, never broke a sweat.”
As he seamlessly interwove ass-kissing and financial-speak, Sean saw himself too clearly: A no-name worthy of addressing but not worthy of knowing. An audience, not a player, unshaven in his Windbreaker because he hadn’t wanted to be late.
Rubin tapped his fingers with impatience, then dismissed the distraction. “Thanks, Phil, that’s much appreciated, good to see you.” Interloper and child gone, he lowered and toughened his voice at the same time. “There will be a public hearing. You can speak your mind there, Sean. But you might want to make your opposition a little less crude.”
“Honest, you mean? We need to be more crude, not less. What’s the point of a hearing if we can’t speak our minds?”
“You can speak, but in a civilized manner, a manner befitting the fact that Khan is as American as you are. He has rights, including the right not to be denigrated for his religion.”
“What about my rights? The families’ rights? The victims’ rights? Don’t they count for anything?” Sean raised his voice. Customers turned. Let there be witnesses. “My parents’ rights. Do you know what this is doing to them?”
“Emotions are not legal rights.”
“I tell you this is tearing up my parents and you lecture me about legal rights?” Sean exploded. In a code that could mean either “Call the cops” or “Check, please,” Paul raised a single finger to the man at the cash register.
“What about right and wrong?” Sean barely tempered his volume. “Whatever happened to that? If you’re going to police what we say at that hearing, then we’ll find our own way to say what we want.”
“Be my guest,” Rubin said. His even tone made Sean’s yelling ridiculous. His look whittled Sean to boy-size. “Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better. But the hearing will stay within appropriate bounds.”
Sean stood and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table, and the small smile this triggered from Rubin, whose net worth exceeded Sean’s by a factor of roughly four hundred thousand, sent him stumbling in unseeing rage out of the restaurant and down Madison Avenue. He stopped only to scowl at his image in a shop window, to confirm that every unkempt aspect of him called out for disrespect. His hair, smacked into order before he left the house, was now a melee; Sean had his father’s habit of running his hands through it when stressed. If he tried to enter the shop, he suspected that the owlish, suited store clerk staring at him through the glass would refuse to buzz him in.
In the window, long white gloves were laid out like prone bodies, a display that brought to mind Rubin’s mockery—“Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better”—then, unexpectedly, an idea. Sean mustered his most lunatic smile, pressed the buzzer until he saw panic on the smug owl’s face, and moved on.
The first joint meeting of Save America from Islam and the newly renamed Memorial Defense Committee came to order a few days later at a Brooklyn church borrowed for the occasion. The SAFIs, as they called themselves, like some lost Judaic tribe, were mostly from Staten