The Submission - Amy Waldman [82]
“Then that’s all the more reason to ask him what he does think!” Alyssa squawked. “Why don’t you? He won’t answer me, or other reporters, but you’re a juror, a family member, I think he would have to answer you.”
“Weren’t you listening?” Claire spit the words. She clenched her jaw, balled her hands into fists on the table. Animus was turning her, if not ugly, something far from beautiful. “It’s not fair to him to ask.”
“That’s his line, Mrs. Burwell, and I’m sure he’s thrilled you’ve adopted it. But again, is that really what you think?”
Claire nodded, shook her head, nodded again, pressed her lips together like a child resisting food, and stared, as if just noticing them, at the AK-wielding women on the walls.
“Headscarf puller may have a history of violence against women: report at eleven.”
The teaser, on a local news channel caught up in sweeps week, ran so often that the interview, aired as promised at eleven, was almost an anticlimax. Sean’s ex-wife was claiming he had beaten her once: “He shoved me against the wall and I had to wear a sling for three days … No, I don’t know why: he just lost his temper. He has a temper, everyone knows that now.”
Her hair was different: short, punkish, dyed blond. She looked hot, if not entirely credible. The Body, Patrick had called her. She must have sold her story. Irina never did anything for free.
“She always was a liar,” Eileen said. She and Sean were on the couch, Frank in his easy chair, where he had been dozing all night. Now he was fully alert.
Sean took a deep breath. “She’s not lying.” The signs of his mother’s displeasure were so physically subtle that it was easy to miss them if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but Sean did: the mouth thinning out, the ears shifting back and taking the hairline with them. “I mean, not entirely. She’s exaggerating—she didn’t have to wear a sling, she wore it just to make me feel bad and to get off work. But she’s not lying.”
Irina was a shadow that wouldn’t vanish even at night, a mistake with an afterlife. They’d married a few months after they met—quick, drunk, Borough Hall. “No church?” was all that his mother had said when he told her. A judgment, but also an investigation, as if she was assessing, with her typical, irritating foresight, how hard it would be to end. They’d boozed their way through the next five months, until the attack. As he hunted for bodies, she gathered resentments, and when he came home she banished him to the couch because his new, persistent cough was keeping her up. She prattled on about the stupidity of her bar-owner boss, whether the fear was making people tip less or more, how much she hated her mother. Through the fog of his exhaustion he saw her clearly for the first time: a survivor of a rough childhood whose instincts toward self-preservation had become mere selfishness, and a drunk. No doubt his ability to grasp this came from his being, for the first time since they met, sober. The bottomless desire he had felt for the moons of her ass and the cream of her skin became a kind of revulsion. When she complained, one too many times, that there was a dead man in bed with them, his chest tightened and he shoved her into the wall. Cradling her afterward, he couldn’t still the angry drumming of his heart, or hers. They divorced as soon as the state would let them. She stayed in their apartment, which used to be his.
“Well, that’s done,” his mother had said.
Now Sean tried to explain why he had manhandled her. “She was disrespecting Patrick,” he said, hoping that defending his brother’s honor would outweigh the lousy deed, knowing, as soon as he saw the ears pull back, that it wouldn’t.
“Patrick wouldn’t have hit a woman,” she said.
“Not even that one,” said Frank.
The second headscarf pulling occurred less than a week after the rally. A man in a Queens shopping mall walked up to a Muslim woman pushing a baby stroller, tugged her headscarf