The Submission - Amy Waldman [85]
“You think that will solve this problem?” Paul wanted to bark. He was angry. “You think it’s fair to Americans to buy your way around a democratic process?” But all he said was, “Let’s wait until the selection is finalized, then I’ll hold you to that pledge.”
As if the endless blare of news—a car alarm that wouldn’t turn off—weren’t enough, Paul couldn’t turn on the television without confronting dark advertisements against the Garden. One showed frothing Iranians chanting “Death to America,” stone-throwing Palestinians, burka-wearing women, RPG-toting Taliban, terrorist leaders in highthread-count beards, nuclear bombs exploding, Muslims praying en masse, and of course Mohammad Khan, glowering beneath the words “Save the Memorial.” No one knew who was paying for the ads—reporters could trace the group putatively behind them only as far as a post office box in Delaware.
“Have We Forgotten?” another began, the words white on black. Then came a montage of the attack’s most harrowing sights and sounds: the jumpers swimming through air; the desperate messages on answering machines; the panicked voices of emergency dispatchers; the first fulminating collapse, and the second; the tsunami of smoke chasing terrified New Yorkers down narrow, rumbling streets; the aghast faces of witnesses, the distraught ones of orphans. Then, “The Jury Forgot”—and a faint, but unmistakable, image, almost a holograph, of Mohammad Khan—“But the Rest of Us Haven’t.”
But the worst for Paul, although he hated to admit it, was being singled out for personal attack. The Weekly Standard had castigated “the heretofore respected chairman of the memorial selection jury” for failing to speak out against Khan’s “martyrs’ paradise.”
“Does Rubin’s acquiescence suggest a lack of commitment to fighting the Islamofascist threat; does it imply sympathy for that movement’s goals? Is he, in short, with us or with them?” the magazine asked. “We would remind him what 1938 taught, that neutrality in the face of an existential threat is nothing more than appeasement. We would like to see from Mr. Rubin some indication of where he stands. The moment for Churchillian clarity is now.” Reading this, Paul had slumped in his chair, his drooping head giving him only a Churchillian chin. Ever since, he had found it hard to eat.
“I’m sure that Weekly Standard column was unpleasant to read,” Claire said now.
Surprised she had seen it—she was hardly the conservative magazine’s standard reader—he gave her a curious glance.
“What else do I have to do at night but read up on this?” she asked with a self-mocking smile.
If she was seeking pity, she had won it. Paul often thought of her alone—the children didn’t count, not in the way he meant—in her house. It made him shudder. Like many long-married men, he couldn’t abide even the thought of being alone, let alone the actual aloneness. His imagination occasionally tangoed him to a younger, more beautiful wife, almost identical to the woman sitting across from him, before he scurried back to the safe ground of Edith. But if Edith, God forbid, were to die before him, his bereavement, by necessity, would be brief. He would have to remarry. Yet here was Claire, two whole years on her own. He didn’t know whether to admire or suspect her toughness.
“Not fun, is it, this whole thing,” she said. “Sometimes I just wish it were over.”
Again he was surprised. “But, Claire, if you get what you want—if the Garden is the memorial, it will never be over. Partly because someone or other may keep agitating against Khan, and the Garden, forever. But also: that will be the memorial. This isn’t some hypothetical exercise where you pronounce a victory for tolerance and go home. The Garden, Khan’s design—that’s what we will build. That’s what you have to want.”
“I know that,” she said irritably. “I want the Garden as much as I ever did.”
He didn’t believe