The Submission - Amy Waldman [90]
She was putting on a navy quilted jacket, bandaging her neck with a white silk scarf.
“Maybe if I could shape the ad,” he offered.
“To say what?”
“Could you stop getting ready?” he said instead of answering. “We need to finish this.”
“I have an appointment with a woman whose husband has been detained without trial for seven months, Mo. Should I not show up so we can continue talking about how your principles keep you from doing anything that’s actually principled?”
“Laila, that’s unfair. If this—if what’s between us is actually going to work out, you have to accept me as I am.”
“How can I, when I’m not sure who that is?” She had paused before the window, as if seeing the view for the first time. When she wheeled around her eyes had an angry flash, not the lively spark of their first meeting. “You know, when you stood up for yourself in front of the whole country, I thought you were so brave, I had never seen that kind of confidence in a man. You put yourself on the line. But now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history. You will put yourself on the line for your own interests but no one else’s.”
“Laila, it’s just an ad. Don’t murder this, whatever is between us, because of it.”
“This isn’t about the ad! It’s about whether the same things matter to us. I have to go. I need to think.” She grabbed her attaché case and slammed the door behind her.
Sorrow swelled in him, seemed to press against his lungs. He knew he couldn’t bend himself to fit her shape. But he didn’t know how he would live with the hollow where hers had been.
Another headscarf pulling, the victim hospitalized for anxiety, her toddler son, who’d been holding her hand, bawling on the news. The president of the United States, who had avoided taking a position on the memorial, went on television to ask for civility and respect, to say he was ashamed of what was happening in his country. He called what Sean had started “a plague.”
“A plague of good sense!” Debbie snapped at the screen. She was reading, and marking up, Trisha’s college application essay, which was entitled “My Mother the Firebrand.” Trisha had told Sean that she feared liberal colleges would blackball her when they realized Debbie was her mother. So she had decided to write her essay about how she both respected her mother (“Two years ago she was a just a housewife who spent most of her time watching soap operas. The attack changed everything. She was called to fight for her country. She educated herself …”) and disagreed with her (“Sometimes I think she tries too hard to be provocative. I believe in dialogue”). Debbie was totally on board with this strategy, but she had crossed out “watching soap operas” and replaced it with “taking care of my sisters and me.”
The bawling son again: the cable channels couldn’t get their fill of him. Sean kneaded his right fist into his left palm and eyed Debbie’s liquor cabinet, to which the girls, he knew, had copied the key. He’d been stone-dry since the attack, but for all the virtue in sobriety, it was harder to blame his mistakes on it. Pulling the woman’s headscarf had done nothing to derail the Muslim memorial, instead drawing attention from the huge crowd he had mustered to protest it.
“She called, you know,” he told Debbie, who turned toward him, alert.
“The woman from the protest. Zahira Hussain. Well, she didn’t call: Issam Malik did, from that Muslim council. They said that if I meet with her and apologize, she’ll ask that the charges against me be dropped.” He didn’t say that Malik had talked about wanting to make this a “teachable moment.” He knew how Debbie would take that.
“No apology,” Debbie said. “Not to those people. Your ex—sure, by all means, apologize to her.” Sean reddened. “But this has symbolic value,” she went on. They’re looking for a propaganda coup—a nice Christian boy, an American, submitting to them. Yet another example of Islam triumphant