The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  Back to the column. “The problem,” she typed, and stopped; “with Islam,” she resumed, and stopped again, this time extracting a Mint Milano. The import of her mission, the magnitude of the challenge—her first first-person story!—were reason enough to break her “no sugar before noon” rule. It was also the only food she had in the house.

  She chewed and swallowed. Her stomach heaved violently. Islam was violent. It believed killing innocent people was acceptable. It didn’t like women. It didn’t like other religions. It was as hateful as her nausea. She was going to puke again.

  “The problem with Islam is Islam.”

  She had one sentence.

  Trying to pretend nothing unusual had transpired, Mo went to work the day after his press conference. Before heading up to the firm, he lingered by the elevator, hoping to see Thomas, dreading seeing him. Thomas must be furious that Mo hadn’t confided in him, warned him, or, perhaps worst of all, invited him to collaborate on the entry. Mo had acquitted himself dishonorably: he knew this. In the Kroll family, he was tantamount to the fourth child, adopted for every holiday, expected at every birthday party. Petey, the eldest, the five-year-old, especially revered Mo, who still remembered the first time Petey had called him by name—that feeling of being known by a child, as a thing apart from every other thing in his world, and thus valued. Truck. Helicopter. Mo. Traitor. His calls and e-mails of apology to Thomas had gone unanswered, and his guilt had been only mildly assuaged by the story in that morning’s Post: “Muslim Winner ‘Decadent,’ Friend Says.”

  Thomas lit up by habit when he saw Mo, then remembered to glower. Mo was still arraying his excuses when Thomas shoved him against the wall, the gesture touchingly schoolboyish, as if Thomas’s heart wasn’t in the violence. It was how Mo himself would have lashed out. Unable to speak, he started laughing, mostly from relief that this moment was over.

  “I deserved that,” Mo said.

  “If Alice were here you’d be bleeding.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “You are the world’s biggest asshole. You drew up that design, what, four, five months ago and never thought to mention it?”

  “I didn’t think I would win, so it didn’t seem worth bringing up.”

  “Bullshit!” Thomas said. “You’re way too cocky to think you wouldn’t win.”

  “I didn’t even tell my parents. Does that make it any better?”

  “I thought we were partners,” Thomas said. “I thought that was the goal here.”

  “It was. It is. I still want to be. I just … this was about me, I admit that. But it was something I had to do on my own. And look how well it’s gone—serves me right.”

  “So I’m supposed to feel sorry for you? Reporters came to our house. Alice is scared. I’m scared. The kids—you asshole,” he said again, with even more feeling.

  “I didn’t know they came to the house, Thomas. Shit, I’m sorry. Somehow it never occurred to me they would drag you into it.”

  “Of course it didn’t occur to you because that would have required thinking about someone other than yourself.”

  Mo’s patience for penance was starting to wane. How many ways could he say he was sorry? “Fine, I am the world’s biggest asshole, but you did call me decadent. Decadent!”

  Thomas started laughing. “I said you were more decadent than I am, which these days isn’t hard. She trimmed the fat from my sentence. I was actually trying to help you, even in my pissed-off state, by making clear you’re not some extremist. Her face lit up as soon as the word left my mouth.”

  “And I was trying to help you by winning this competition. Think how good it will be for our practice.”

  “There’s not going to be a practice, Mo! K/K Architects is dead. You killed it. If nothing else, Alice will never allow it. Grudges are her baby blanket.”

  “I’ll work on her,” Mo said, sensing, in the shift to Alice, a softening. Even this inspired guilt: he knew he had taken a chance on alienating Thomas because unlike his wife, or Mo himself, the man couldn’t hold a grudge.

  Roi could, apparently. He was in the office, but he didn’t speak to Mo—not that day, not the next. Summoned at last, Mo braced for a dressing-down.

  “It may amuse you to know I thought about entering that competition myself,” Roi said, without preamble. “I had an idea—a good idea; one day I will show you some sketches I made. But I thought, once they learn a Frenchman has won? A Frenchman who, in his youth, was a devoted member of the Communist Party in Paris? They will never allow it. And so I didn’t go forward. You were braver.”

  Mo was so surprised he couldn’t speak. Better a French Communist than an American Muslim, he thought: Paul Rubin had suggested that Mo submit his design under Roi’s name.

  Roi went on. “No competition is ever pure, you know. Don’t think otherwise: someone knows someone on the jury; one strong will dominates the deliberations. They are all contaminated. I loathe them, actually. We do them only because that’s how most of the work in Europe is given. But this is different, what people are saying about you. I am not fond of all Muslims, the ones who won’t assimilate, I mean; France admitted too many. But that is separate. You won, and we must make sure you are allowed to go forward. I am talking to some of my friends”—he reeled off a list of the world’s biggest names in architecture—“and we are going to do a statement of support for you.”

  “Thank you,” Mo stuttered.

  “But, Mo, you must also keep some perspective.” An assistant scurried in, set Roi’s macchiato precisely six inches and forty-five degrees from his right hand, and withdrew. “Your design—I am sure it will be a fine memorial, but do not let it distract you from your career. Remember that it is just a garden. What is the phrase? Parsley around the roast. You may make history with it, but you will not change the history of architecture.”

  With that Mo was dismissed. His gratitude was no less for wondering if Roi had entered the competition and was lying about it because he hadn’t won.

  “U: NYPost 2mrw.” The text from Lanny came as Claire was getting ready for bed. With reluctance she called him, wondering why this lupine soul had become her chief correspondent. “Paul wanted you to know: there’s a column—it’s online,” he said, his studied neutrality indicating bad news. Chilled, she pulled her robe tight as she seated herself at the computer.

  “The problem with Islam is Islam,” Alyssa Spier’s column began, before describing, in retread language, the religion’s violent propensities, its oppression of women, its incompatibility with democracy and the American way of life. But halfway through, the screed took an abrupt, odd turn, as if a late-breaking bulletin had come in, or the columnist had jettisoned her Fouad Ajami pretensions to channel Cindy Adams: “Another family member tells me that the winsome widow on the jury has a soft spot for Mohammad Khan. If, metaphorically speaking, she’s sleeping with the enemy, whose side is she on?” Claire’s mouth opened in shock. Like a frenetic wing beat, her index finger delicately, compulsively tapped the screen, as if to blot the words away. Enemy.

  She curled up in a chair in her bedroom, not wanting to be alone in her bed. It was a badge of honor to be targeted by the Post, she told herself. If she backed Khan, that meant backing him publicly. Her stand for him, as much as any physical place, would be Cal’s memorial. Yet she would have preferred that her stance stay hidden. What was this cowardice, this fear, that kept her from owning her own beliefs? Knotted in questions, curled around herself, she fell asleep in the chair.

  The phone woke her and the children; she didn’t answer. It rang, rang again, again, again. “Who keeps calling?” William asked. He had, of late, begun to answer the phone himself.

  “Don’t pick up—it’s broken, honey. The phone company’s trying to fix it.”

  With the children packed off to school, she went to work unlisting their phone number. It was midmorning when she heard a car coming up the driveway. A dark-green Pontiac Grand Am pulled up next to the house, and S
ean Gallagher and four other men emerged. Claire, with the maid, hid in her bedroom. The doorbell chimed, chimed again, went silent.

  From behind a curtain, with a hammering heart, Claire watched Sean pace a ragged figure eight, occasionally looking up, watched as he bent and plucked one stone, then another, from the cairn beneath the copper beech. She turned her face away, braced for the sound of glass shattering. It didn’t come. Down below, Sean was stalking around her Mercedes now. For a moment she thought he might actually urinate on it. One of the other men spoke to him; they seemed to argue. Then all five of them door-slammed themselves into the Pontiac and drove off. A safe interval later, Claire went outside to rebuild the cairn. The stones were gone.

  11

  Claire Burwell took Mo’s hand. There was a brief but unmistakable pause. She flushed, then spoke. “Thank you for the Garden—it’s lovely.”

  She was lovely, too, but obviously so, not unlike the neo-Georgian town house they were standing in. Perfect, even classical in proportion, refined in detail, but missing the unpredicted element that would stop his breath in envy or awe.

  The pause was a beat of expectation, Mo was sure: she was waiting for his thanks for supporting him. He had read the New York Post column talking about her, seen the histrionic relatives berating her on the news. But to thank her would suggest, somehow, that she was doing something extraordinary. He wouldn’t congratulate her for being decent. Her expectation made him want to refuse.

  They were in Paul Rubin’s living room, its aspirational-aristocrat decor giving Mo hives, for the official announcement of his selection. The moment was anticlimactic, the location and setup peculiar, even hermetic. No press and, other than Claire, no relatives of the dead being memorialized. No sense of the historic weight, the monumentality of the commission. Just Mo meeting the jury for a group photograph, which would be handed out with a glossy press packet describing his design. Anyone else’s submission, he was sure, would have been introduced with more fanfare. The jurors had each greeted and, mostly, congratulated him, then peeled off into small clusters, leaving him to Claire.

  In one nearby group around Paul, an argument was unfolding. Mo tried to eavesdrop while also appearing responsive to Claire.

  “The governor’s talk is confusing, Paul,” Leo, the retired university president, was saying.

  “How did you know that a memorial that wasn’t just bleak was exactly right for us, for who my husband was?” Claire asked Mo.

  “Stressing the importance of the public hearing—” he heard.

  “I felt like you got inside my head,” Claire said. She seemed almost as uncomfortable with this talk as he was, but she kept on.

  “Dress parade or battleground—”

  “I’ve told my son it’s a place where his father will live,” Claire said.

  “Relax,” Paul Rubin said, “it will be fine.”

  Mo nodded, blankly, before Claire’s words latched on to him. The names on the Garden’s walls had become, for him, just another design element, but they were the dead; they were the faces that had been plastered on every surface right after the attack, that first draft of a memorial. His architect’s detachment wobbled at the image of a boy seeking his father in the Garden. Mo and Claire were almost the same height. He looked into her eyes and cleared his throat. “How old is he? I hope it will help him.”

  “If 90 percent of them come to the hearing and say they don’t want a garden, she’s not going to shove it down their throats,” he heard the governor’s man say.

  “Six,” Claire said, “and it will if we can make it come to—” She broke off, then moved away, at Ariana Montagu’s approach.

  Mo had met Ariana once, three years ago, at the elaborate bash Roi had thrown to celebrate his Pritzker, but she gave no sign of recollection. Most of the jurors had been neutrally pleasant. Ariana clearly saw neutral pleasantry as selling out.

  “It wasn’t my first choice,” she began, as if to be sure she wouldn’t be blamed. “You made some interesting choices, but a garden? So”—the word languorously extended—“precious. It doesn’t seem to fit with your other work.”

  He wondered what her first choice had been, and who else hadn’t wanted the Garden. It hadn’t been designed with her in mind, but of all the jurors, he thought she would appreciate its Modernist influences and details like the steel trees, whose perpetual spareness would preserve the sightlines from the pavilion to the wall. He was about to impress these points on her when Rubin called them to assemble for the group picture.

  “Smile,” the photographer called out. From reflex Mo did.

  He called Laila Fathi as soon as he left Paul Rubin’s house. “Do you have time for a drink?” The question was posed as casually as it could be by a man holding his breath. Why, he couldn’t say: she wasn’t remotely his type. He tended to date architects or designers, thin of frame, delicate of feature, precise in dress, cool in style and affect. Laila was in no respect cool. She was small but curvy, and her features were bold, as were the lipsticks she favored. Her suits were vividly colored and her passions, he had already learned in a few working meetings, many: food of all kinds; Persian poetry and Iranian films; her large extended family. She was blasé about nothing, least of all her cases, which meant she found his determination to fight for his memorial noble. This, he insisted, was the cause of the weightlessness—the balloon just released by a child—he felt when he thought of her, and he had thought of her, since their first encounter at MACC, far more than was warranted.

  He suggested a dark, intimate bar in the West Village. She countered with a restaurant, more convenient for her, near Madison Square Park. Waiting for her, he admired the art deco interior—ostentatiously high ceiling, clean lines. They sat in a banquette at a tiny round table, a candle flickering on top, their knees brushing beneath.

  He repeated the scraps of overheard conversation that suggested the public hearing would be used to kill the design and shared his impression that Ariana would like nothing better. “It hadn’t occurred to me”—he paused and licked his lips, embarrassed by his wounded pride—“that the vote for the Garden wasn’t unanimous, and that maybe she or others would seize on me being Muslim as a way to push through another design.”

  “We’ll deal with one step at a time,” Laila said. “At least they’ve acknowledged you.”

  “But in such an odd way. It was like being at a cocktail party where nobody acknowledges a nuclear bomb just detonated. There’s no way any other winner would have been handled that way.”

  “You’re right, but you can’t prove it, so legally it’s irrelevant.”

  “I know that,” he said. “It’s not the legal—” He stopped. He didn’t know how to explain.

  “It’s how it made you feel,” she said. “I understand.” Some connection formed with those words. There was no one he could talk to about his strain. His parents, in their twice, sometimes thrice, daily calls, were too worried. He couldn’t complain to Thomas. He projected complete confidence, having long ago learned, as the sole brown boy in a white school, the power in appearing uninterested in the opinions of others. But he wasn’t a robot.

  “I’ve been having a lot of unfamiliar feelings,” he told her. Most uncomfortably, bitterness toward those families who excoriated and caricatured him. “I did this for them and they don’t appreciate it,” he said.

  “For them or for you?” Laila asked. She smiled at his look. “I’m sure you care about helping them heal. But my father’s a political cartoonist. He wants to provoke and shape opinions, but he also loves to draw. Your design is really beautiful, by the way—moving, I should say. The pavilion is brilliant, as a way to encourage contemplation. It’s a very Eastern, or at least Persian, concept, you know—that a garden isn’t for walking, for action, but for sitting. Stopping. Which is exactly right in a memorial. I just keep imagining looking out over the water at all of those names.”

  Not ready to voice his most unfamiliar feelings, which were toward her,
he offered to walk her home. They wandered up Third Avenue, the Empire State Building a lantern held aloft to light their way. Flushed with wine and night air, she seemed free in a way he wasn’t, in a way that made his efforts to assert his individuality—to compose an identity—seem strenuous, even ridiculous by comparison. He had grown a beard on his return from Kabul merely to assert his right to wear a beard, to play with the assumptions about his religiosity it might create. She would never adopt a headscarf for the same reason. He imagined himself as indifferent to the opinions of others. She really was.

  His attraction to her was both sharply physical and strangely innocent, as if he wanted to take shelter in her. He took her hand. She took it back.

  “No, Mo,” she whispered. “Nothing in public. I would be kicked off the council. I tried to explain to you. Modesty matters to them.”

  “Then let them police their wives.”

  “It’s not that simple. I have to respect their beliefs if I’m going to work with them.”

  It was late when they neared her building, but she invited him up for tea. “Should we enter separately?” he joked.

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “Ring 8D in five minutes.”

  Studying the group photograph of Khan with the jury in the following day’s papers, Claire saw thirteen dour, even somber faces, and one smile. Khan’s grin nettled her, suggesting deafness to the rancor and grief around him. It made her wonder if he saw the memorial as anything but a career milestone.

  Until he failed to express gratitude toward her, she hadn’t realized she was expecting it. He must have seen the Post column, must have some inkling of the courage it took to stand up for him. So why not acknowledge it? She looked at the photograph again. A piece of history, but its meaning as yet unassigned. Before it hardened and came to seem as if it had never been otherwise, history was liquid, unfixed.