The Submission - Amy Waldman [72]
“What’s wrong with the Garden?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Claire said.
“Tell him,” Jane said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Let him be the judge of that.”
“You want to put this in the hands of a six-year-old?”
“He’d probably get it more than your jury did.”
“Ladies,” Nell said. She’d come up with a fresh vodka tonic for Claire. Her own speech was slightly blurred. “You may want to continue this another time.”
Claire saw the Hansen twins standing with William, the three boys now united in wary confusion.
“You’re right, Nell,” she said. “Jane, I’m so sorry about … about everything. We’ll talk another time. William, let’s go check on your sister.”
They walked off, hand in hand. Her knees were buckling. Maybe these events drew a certain kind, the conformists, the mainstream. Outliers knew better than to seek group consolation.
“What’s wrong with the Garden?” William asked again.
“Some people want a different design,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t like the man who designed it.”
“Why?”
“For no good reason, William. That’s why we were arguing.”
Cal’s voice urged her to the margins, but if their positions were reversed, would he take their children there, exile himself for Mohammed Khan? Cal’s own beliefs had cost little but money. A position to defend at a dinner party, a direction in which to channel donations, a box to check on the ballot. Pocket change. Noblesse oblige. These were the phrases Cal’s mother had used to describe the Bridgeport teen-mothers program. His boldest move had been quitting the golf club. For all its merit, this was no great sacrifice. He wasn’t good enough at golf to miss it.
They couldn’t leave the cruise early, as Claire wanted, so she told a crew member she was feeling ill. He led her to a blanketed cot in an airless cabin, where, with the children baffled in their jackets, readied for departure, they sat and waited the long hour for their vessel to make land.
Flipping television channels one night, Asma came upon a news story about a boat trip for the families of the dead. The faces of the women—and it was mostly women—were familiar, and not just because she had seen some of them on the news before, giving interviews, holding press conferences, attending funerals. They had a look about them—blank and guarded, overprotective of their children yet not entirely present to them—that she sometimes caught on her own face.
The Circle Line she knew, too, because it was one of the few splurges she and Inam had made in their two years together. She could still remember the price per ticket—twenty-four dollars—which worked out to sixteen dollars an hour for the two of them, which was seven dollars more than Inam earned in an hour, and she could remember her doubt because she had heard from Mrs. Ahmed that the Staten Island Ferry was free, and you could see the same water, the same city, the same statue, but Inam had insisted and he rarely insisted on anything, and so she had agreed.
Six months after her arrival in America, on a Sunday, Inam’s only day off, they had set out. The other passengers—Americans and Swedes, Japanese and Italians—were drinking, even at that morning hour; some leaned against the rails and kissed. She and Inam had not drunk, had not kissed. They held hands and looked down at the water and studied the city, as if from this distance they could finally understand it. They walked over to look at the orange life vests and boats neatly lined up in case of disaster. Each thought about, and knew the other was thinking about, ferry travel back home: Bangladesh was a country of rivers perilously crossed on rickety, overcrowded boats that flipped or sank or collided, tossing bodies into the water the way these passengers tossed their plastic cups.
From the boat Manhattan had no sound, like a television