by Amy Waldman
But his bitterness was overwhelmed by the magnitude of mourning around him. The city reeled—the air ashy, the people ashen, the attack site a suppurating wound you felt even when you didn’t see it. One night, soon after his return, Mo walked toward the zone of destruction. The moonlight picked out a strange fine dust clinging to leaves and branches; his toe rested on a paper scrap with charred edges. The eternal lights were off in the nearby office towers, as if the city’s animal appetites had been quelled. A quilt of the missing—bright portraits of tuxedoed men and lipsticked women—had been pasted on fences and construction plywood, but the streets were empty, and for the first time in memory, he heard his own footsteps in New York City.
He imagined, couldn’t avoid it, the shaking hands that must have placed each of these photos on a photocopy machine, that roll of blue light, cold, mechanical hope. False hope. The centers of hundreds upon hundreds of webs of family, friends, work had been torn out. It staggered Mo, shamed him. These men who had given vent to their homicidal sanctimony had nothing to do with him, yet weren’t entirely apart. They represented Islam no more than his own extended family did, but did they represent it less? He didn’t know enough about his own religion to say. He was the middle-class Muslim son of an engineer, a profile not all that different from some of the terrorists. Raised in another society, raised religious, could he have become one of them? The question shuddered through him and left an uneasy residue.
Behind a police sawhorse an Indian man in a bedraggled white jacket and black bow tie held a sign: WE ARE OPEN. The man motioned to a tiny restaurant down the block, and although Mo wasn’t hungry, he followed and ordered a sympathy chola. The waiter left him to the cook, who also served, and alone, Mo picked at his chickpeas and naan. Here he could hear himself chew.
What was it he was trying to see? He had been indifferent to the buildings when they stood, preferring more fluid forms to their stark brutality, their self-conscious monumentalism. But he had never felt violent toward them, as he sometimes had toward that awful Verizon building on Pearl Street. Now he wanted to fix their image, their worth, their place. They were living rebukes to nostalgia, these Goliaths that had crushed small businesses, vibrant streetscapes, generational continuities, and other romantic notions beneath their giant feet. Yet it was nostalgia he felt for them. A skyline was a collaboration, if an inadvertent one, between generations, seeming no less natural than a mountain range that had shuddered up from the earth. This new gap in space reversed time.
4
Claire jackknifed into the water, pinned her arms to her sides, and kicked until she rose to the surface and began wheeling her arms. Her eyes opened behind her goggles, and her senses opened to cobalt tiles, the light lurking on the pool floor, the chlorine smell, her own gasps for air. Her solitude. Cal at work, William at preschool, Penelope down for a nap. After every two laps she pulled up to listen to the monitor she had set at the edge of the pool and, hearing only even breaths, plunged back in.
An aquarium sea lion that no one bothered to watch: that’s what she was. She had assumed she would keep working once she had children; Cal had assumed she wouldn’t. It astonished her, in retrospect, that they had never discussed it before they married, but maybe they couldn’t have discussed it. In theory, no one ever liked to give in, but in practice—in marriage, if it were to last—someone had to.
“I just can’t imagine finding a nanny as smart as you,” Cal had said with a smile, when, five months into her pregnancy with William, she raised the issue.
“I didn’t go to Dartmouth and Harvard Law to be a nanny.”
“And I didn’t marry you so our kids would have a good lawyer, although it could come in handy if they punch anyone at school.” He turned serious: “I’m not saying I’m right on the merits, I’m saying maybe I’m more traditional than I realized.”
Telling him that she needed the independence her lawyer’s income guaranteed would have implied some lack of faith in the marriage, which wasn’t the case. There was only the fear of having to depend on anyone at all. At sixteen she had seen her father die and her mother inherit his previously hidden mountain of debt. In response Claire had driven herself harder than ever, becoming class valedictorian, tennis team captain, debating champion. She put away every dollar, schemed for every scholarship and loan, and made it to Dartmouth. Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don’t you stay home?
They agreed to interview nannies. Cal was right: they weren’t as smart as she was, or so she rationalized her decision to stay home. She was only a week shy of her due date on the first day he went into the city without her. She dropped him at the Chappaqua train station, turtling through the line with the other wives, and when she turned the car to face home couldn’t shake the sense she was facing backward.
Four years had passed since then, passed at toddlers’ soccer practice and at ladies’ lunches; passed in music groups and on playdates, shopping trips, and philanthropic committees. Claire pretended this was the life she wanted. But when Cal, dressing for work, had asked for the second time whether she had found a tennis coach for William, she snapped at him, “Why don’t you try being social secretary for a four-year-old?”
With calm, infuriating sympathy he said, “Would you like me to call? I’m happy to,” which only made her feel worse. Calling would take two minutes, far less than it would take to convey her feelings about her life narrowing to phoning pro shops. It was easier to apologize for her mood, to cite Penelope’s poor sleeping habits, and when she dropped him at the train station they made a kissing peace, but perhaps a false peace, for she had come to the pool to splash out the lingering anger that, as much as the exercise, warmed her against the air’s faint chill.
After forty-five minutes she emerged calm and stretched out to sun herself and let her pounding heart slow. There was no sound beyond her daughter’s waking babblings through the monitor, the dog’s tags clinking as he scratched himself, the water’s faint lapping, a relentless woodpecker somewhere within the shirred line of spruces and maples at the edge of the lawn. Walking back to the house, she broke into a barefoot jog as she heard the phone ringing, an ordinary ring.
“Mommy, you smell like the pool,” William sniffled a day—or was it two?—later. She had not thought to shower since the news. She would think often about having been submerged in water while her husband was consumed by fire. What did this say? It was like a myth, a dark poem whose meaning just eluded her.
It was Cal’s hand she had reached for when she read Mohammad Khan’s name at Gracie Mansion last night, Cal’s indignation she channeled, but also Cal’s specificity she sought. It had been two years. He appeared in her dreams but vanished on waking, and she spoke of him in qualities—positive, ebullient, smart, principled—that had no texture.
So on this morning, instead of swimming she went to his study. Small, oak-paneled, a nook in a house of grand spaces, it had been a sanctuary for Cal and, in the months after his death, for Claire. On bad days, when the loneliness howled or the children shrieked, she would come to the study and leave fortified by this fiction of his enduring. Better a dollhouse than no house. The study was largely as he had left it, intact, a museum of sorts. When the children were old enough, she would let them touch and read his books, dip into his papers and files. She often had done the same in those first months. Now she couldn’t recall the last time she had sat at his desk.
Settling herself there, she stared down the painting opposite. It was a liverish red that clotted to blackness at the center. “It makes me think of childbirth,” she had told Cal, distaste in her voice, the night they spotted it in a Chelsea gallery. “You’re wrong,” he replied, his tone, as always when he overruled her, as respectf
ul as it was certain. The next day he bought it, Claire pretending indifference to the price. Wrong how? That it was like childbirth? Of this he had no better idea than she: they were, then, still childless. Or wrong in her dislike? Lose someone prematurely, and you had endless time to pore over finite conversations. Over fossils.
In the cabinets next to his desk Cal had kept neat files: Art, Politics, Philanthropy, Travel. A Claire file, the sight of which always made her smile. She rifled through them, not sure what she was looking for. In the Art files—mostly detailed dossiers on the art Cal had collected, or wanted to, or on artists he admired—she found, to her semi-amusement, an article on Ariana Montagu’s Tectonics, a huge piece, gargantuan slabs of granite tilting into one another, as if they had fallen that way, installed some years back in Central Park.
Other files held information about causes he had backed, generously, sometimes astonishingly so: environmental groups; human rights organizations; Democrats trying to reform the party; a program in Bridgeport to help teen mothers continue their schooling, which Claire now financed, although she didn’t visit as often as Cal had. All of this suggested a decent man, an earnest liberal, a citizen trying to leave his country better than he found it. The clearest view into his principles was a letter he had written, at the age of twenty, resigning from his parents’ and grandparents’ golf club. It had the endearing, aggravating righteousness of a college student who has just noticed the world around him and believes it will heel to his newfound idealism.
“It has come to my attention,” the letter began—Claire had ribbed him about this: had the club’s homogeneity really just then come to his attention?—”that the club does not have a single black or Jewish member. Whether or not this indicates a deliberate policy of exclusion, I am unable to associate myself with an institution that does not place a greater value on diversity.”
The country club, from what Claire knew, was as lily-WASP as it had always been, which was just one reason she considered these files a chronicle of defeat. Cal had wanted to be a sculptor, had even set himself up in a studio after college. By the time Claire met him, he was in business school. Conceding that he would never be a great, or even good, artist, he had turned to collecting, to owning what he couldn’t create. Creating wealth was the Burwell family talent, but Cal feared being known for that alone. The political engagement, the philanthropy: that was him casting about for a mark to make. He hadn’t yet found his medium. Discovering this unformed spot in a man who seemed so complete at first disturbed Claire, still busy papier-mâchéing her own unfinished self. But if she had fallen for Cal’s strengths, his charms, she came to love him most generously, she believed, where he was weakest. Just as he loved her where she was hardest—her seriousness provided both ballast and challenge, one he met with a constant effort to make her laugh. Let go.
Marrying Claire had been, for him, a small rebellion. She was presentable, highly so. But his family didn’t know hers, and she plainly had no money of her own. She was in the Claire file now—photos (some nude, dating to their honeymoon; she scrutinized them for changes), scraps of middling poetry about her, ideas for her birthday presents. The documents recording Cal’s unexpected payoff of her college and law school loans, some $100,000 of debt. He’d wiped it out in a single day without asking her if he could. It had seemed monumental at the time, less so once she learned the staggering scale of his fortune. She wished that knowledge hadn’t diminished the gesture.
These documents narrated their history as much as their marriage certificate did. When they made love the night he told her about the loans, she sensed him expecting some new trick or abandon, some evidence of gratitude. This had made her tense because she wasn’t entirely grateful: in giving her freedom from worry he had stolen a hard-won self-sufficiency. But the next morning she had decided she was overreacting. He wanted only the surrender of her anxiety.
“I want to draw the Garden,” William said, clutching his coloring pad. He was at her elbow; she hurriedly shoved the nude portraits into the file and made space for him on the desk. He handed her crayons in wordless command.
They had been enacting this ritual for weeks, ever since she told him about the Garden, figuring that breaking her juror confidentiality pledge with a six-year-old didn’t count. As she devoted increasing time to the memorial selection, William had become ever more difficult. Each tantrum sent sadness and guilt, anger at his manipulations, irritation at his whining squalling through her. Suffocation. The children needed her more, needed more of her, than ever: one less parent and more parenting required. Do more with less; an emotional recession. Every so often, she would grasp that her pain at William’s pain was so unbearable that somehow she held it against him. His sadness, too big for his tiny frame, was like a shadow stunting a plant’s growth.
The Garden, she told him, was a special place where his father could be found, even though William wouldn’t be able to see him there. This was all too true: shards, less than shards, of Cal likely lay in the ground where the memorial would go, although William didn’t know that. The idea of the Garden seemed to console him, and ever since, together they had drawn the trees and flowers, the pathways and canals. William always drew in two little figures: himself and his father. In his drawings, the sun always shone.
“Sometimes it will rain in the Garden,” Claire said today, coloring a gray cloud. A small, inexplicable resistance quavered in her. William drew an umbrella over the figures.
The time for lunch was nearing. They left the study together, their sheaf of drawings in her hand. Glancing at them, she saw that she had mixed in the documents recording Cal’s payoff of her loans. Her first instinct was to return them to the file. Instead she continued down the hall with her son.
Paul slept poorly and awoke achy. The sunlight bounded in and punched him in the eyes when he opened the curtains. He pulled them shut, showered too long, dressed too slow. “Paul!” Edith began calling once she heard him astir. “Your eggs are ready.”
To the cook’s chagrin, the eggs were cold by the time he made his way to the dining table. Like a child he pushed them in a circle, trying to ignore the rat-a-tat of Edith’s questions: “Who won? What’s the design like?”
His silence goaded her. “Paul, you’re not answering me,” she said, standing just to the right of his ear. “Do I need to make another appointment with the hearing doctor?”
“My hearing’s fine, Edith,” he said, staring down at the eggs, which brought to mind a leaking sun.
He went to his study, where his eye fell first on a photograph of himself with the governor, displayed in a black leather frame propped against the decorously aged set of Gibbon. Paul and Governor Bitman were beaming and clasping hands, a shake that had sealed Paul’s chairmanship of the memorial jury.
His cell phone rang as soon as he’d seated himself at his desk.
“Mr. Rubin, hello, it’s Alyssa Spier. You remember—from the Daily News.”
He did remember, made it his business to know the beat reporters covering the memorial process. She was no worse than the rest of them, maybe a bit better—she truncated his quotes but didn’t butcher them. He brought her features into focus: the short one, glasses, on the heavy side, tired hair, lips always twitching like she had something to ask. The kind who dreamed in questions.
“How can I help you?”
“I have a source who says a Muslim has won the competition. Could you confirm that?”
Paul gripped the desk as if it were a cliff’s edge. Who was the Judas? Someone had leaked. “I can’t confirm anything,” he said. “We don’t have a winner yet.” Was this technically true? The last thing Paul needed was to be caught in a lie.
“That’s not what I hear. It’s, you know, Mr. uh, Mr. uh … hold on, I’m just checking my notes.”
Her bluff could be sensed through the phone: she didn’t have the name. He said nothing.
“Oh, I’ll have to find it later. Look, I won’t be quoting you on the confirmation�
��that’s off the record, although I may then want to get an on-the-record reaction from you. I just need to make sure my source is right.”
“And your source is …?” He had to know: Was it one of his jurors? He tried to think who would want to make this public. Not the minute-taker, with that posture of fear when he reminded her of the confidentiality pledge. Claire: Would she imagine she could box them in?
“You know I can’t give away my sources, just like I won’t give you away,” Alyssa cooed.
Paul deployed his “stern-father tone,” which required sadly little effort. “Alyssa, on the record, off the record, I have nothing to say. I would help you if I could, and of course we’ll have a winner shortly, but today I have nothing for you.”
He ended the call. Think, Paul, think. Strange, but this crisis within the crisis provided a certain relief, for he knew how to handle this. You figured out whom to pressure, which levers to pull. You called in favors, dangled others. Feeling his old mastery returning, he found the number he needed and dialed.
“Fred, Paul Rubin. A drink later?”
Paul had told the Daily News editor to meet him at the Four Seasons. He wanted a setting that conveyed gravitas, and twenty-dollar martinis always helped.
“I think I know why I’m here,” Fred said with a smile as they took seats in a discreet corner. The bar had the amber light of poured whiskey.
“What can I get you?” Paul asked. “Jameson,” Fred said.
“You sure?” Paul asked. “Why not try this GlenDronach Grandeur? Make it two,” he told the waiter. “Neat.”
Once they were alone, he turned toward Fred. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how delicate this situation is.”
