The Submission - Amy Waldman [70]
This obstinacy would be Khan’s undoing, Paul hoped. Yet perversely, Mo’s stubbornness was also increasing Paul’s respect, even affection for him, and perhaps salving his conscience, too. Khan had drive, Paul’s drive. If this contest didn’t make Mohammed Khan, something else would. He carried his own path within him.
13
There was a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan for the victims’ families. At all of these gatherings a small part of Claire rebelled: how false to pretend the relatives had anything other than loss in common, how morbid to have only that to share. Grief was not a country she had chosen to enter, but she could choose when to leave, even if joining the diaspora bore the taint of treason. Out there the dead were still remembered, but with less feeling. This had long been happening in Claire, in all of them. They believed they couldn’t go on. They went on.
The word had gone out to the press beforehand—no questions on the memorial—and to the widows: no ribbons, no stickers, keep it civil for the children. Still, Claire braced for hostility and wondered if she would be strong enough to withstand it. The boat swanned out into the river. Soon swag-laden children were racing around mothers trying to hide their tipsiness from reporters cruising for angles beyond teary remembrance and admirable resilience.
Their interest in Claire was even more avid than usual, but she deflected them. “This is no place for politics,” she scolded one puppy who approached.
Bolstered by a vodka tonic, she struck up a conversation with Nell Monroe, one of her favorite fellow widows, whose humor got drier the more she drank. “I’m glad it’s you dealing with that whole business and not me,” Nell said. “They can let a Martian design the memorial for all I care. It’s not going to change my life. Unless, of course, the Martian’s looking to get laid. Speaking of which, have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Gotten laid.” Claire’s sex life, or lack thereof, was a subject of continuing fascination for the other widows. She knew this because of the few, like Nell, who weren’t afraid to tell her. She could date anyone, marry anyone, the rap went—half the men they knew had crushes on her. So why the nun act? No one’s husband was irreplaceable, not even Saint Calder.
It wasn’t entirely true that there had been no one; only that Claire had told no one. The previous summer, at a neighbor’s for a fund-raiser, a young man had come in from a run apologizing for being late. Claire had assayed the tall, hard physique beneath the black running shirt and shorts, the handsome bearded face, and thought simply: Him. Jesse, a cousin of the hosts, was staying in their pool house for a few months, helping out with the dogs and the children, until he started graduate school in photography in New York. He was twelve years younger than Claire. She had, by the end of the evening, found a way to invite him over to look at Cal’s photography collection, and they had begun an affair—“playdating,” they called it—that took place whenever her children were off on playdates of their own or on weekend visits to Cal’s parents.
Jesse was as good-natured and open and hale as he had looked at first glance; the sex managed to be both depleting and energizing—people told Claire she hadn’t looked so well, so alive (an unfortunate word choice, she thought) since the attack. A few times she allowed him to come over when the children were home. Watching him toss William around the pool or offer his suntanning body as a runway for Penelope’s dolls, she had allowed herself to entertain the possibility of more than a summer fling. But she was so straitjacketed by dignity—the widow’s dignity, the almost-forty-year-old’s dignity, the wealthy woman’s dignity—that by the time he left in the fall she could barely wave goodbye.
That same straitjacket kept her from