The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  To share a secret, Asma understood then, was to shift a burden. She wished that day, as she often would after, that Mrs. Mahmoud had never told her, so unbearable was the thought of Inam calling and calling but never connecting, perhaps the last sound he heard the ringing of an unanswered phone. For a long time afterward Asma couldn’t hear that sound herself without a sharp chill, as if she were watching his last moments through glass. Asma had pretended, that day, to forgive Mrs. Mahmoud. On days like today, she knew she never really had.

  On the pretense of retrieving the remote control from Abdul, but really so she could breathe freer air, she went to him. In her own hands she took his, which were sticky with sugar syrup and softly scented with rose water. Looking into his wondering mischievous eyes, she tried to lose herself in the black dots of his pupils. He shrieked a laugh, threw his head back, nearly knocked her with his chin.

  She tuned back in to Mrs. Mahmoud only when she heard Nasruddin’s name. “And he promised to line up a job for my husband’s nephew and he hasn’t done a thing. I think he has forgotten about all the people who helped him become such a big shot”—this term in English—“in Brooklyn.”

  “Helped him?” Asma snapped, incredulous, returning to the couch. “He is the one who has helped everyone else. He has no time for himself. You shouldn’t say such things.” Shut up, you fat water buffalo, rolling in the mud of other people’s lives, is what she wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and reminded herself of how Mrs. Mahmoud had held her hand through Abdul’s birth, which made her think that if she had found strength enough to push him out, she could hold her meanest comments in. At this moment it seemed harder.

  Even restraining herself, she could tell her vehemence had surprised Mrs. Mahmoud. This, too, would probably get chewed and swallowed and regurgitated in other households. So be it. They sat unspeaking for a moment.

  Then Mrs. Mahmoud said, “Well, none of us may be here to help anyone anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Asma, still curt.

  “Now they—the English newspapers, the radio—they’re saying Muslims don’t belong here!” Mrs. Mahmoud was back on form, rolling slightly, like she was on casters, as she did when she got excited. “And then who, might I ask, would fix their buildings and drive their taxis? And who would give them halal meat?”

  “No one will need halal meat if there are no Muslims,” Asma said severely. Suddenly warm, she took off her cardigan sweater.

  “What they say,” Mrs. Mahmoud continued conspiratorially, “is that if we want to show we are loyal, we should tell this Mohammad Khan to stop trying to build his memorial. I think they are right,” she said, as her tongue worked to extract a food particle from between her teeth. “I would tell him, if I knew him.”

  “No!” Asma said. Again the vehemence. This time it surprised her. Maybe she would have opposed Mrs. Mahmoud on any issue today. “He shouldn’t stop doing anything! They can’t just take this achievement away from him. It’s like Pakistan taking away our election.”

  “You’ve been listening to the men talk again,” Mrs. Mahmoud said, clucking in disapproval.

  Her condescension infuriated Asma, who shifted a foot away from her on the couch. “Even if we say we don’t support him they won’t believe us, because they think we lie,” Asma said.

  “And if I do support him, what do I gain? What has he done for us, this Mohammad Khan? Let them have their memorial.”

  Asma gritted her teeth. “It’s my memorial, too, auntie.”

  “I know, I know.” Mrs. Mahmoud patted her knee. “But it’s not worth so much trouble.”

  “It is!” Asma said, but before she could find the words to say why, Mrs. Mahmoud rose, even she not immune to the demands of nature imposed by four cups of tea, and trundled off down the hall like an overloaded truck. “If we do have to leave,” she said over her shoulder, “Salima Ahmed had better not try to get in front of me in the line.”

  Paul wanted Khan to drop out. This notion came to him, again, after yet another incensed call from a juror over the governor’s attacks on their elitism. At every turn, Geraldine played up the importance of the public hearing and her right to veto the jury’s choice. Paul, who saw himself as the patriarch of this oversized, cantankerous brood, didn’t want his jurors quashed. But nor did he want to cross Geraldine, to whom he owed his position. The best outcome for the jury, for the country, for himself, for all, if not necessarily for Khan, was for him to withdraw.

  He hit upon his strategy at a cocktail fund-raiser for his son Samuel’s gay rights organization. Having already written the check, Paul didn’t see why he needed to attend the party, but Edith had insisted, and two Scotches and three mini—lobster rolls in, he was starting to find it palatable. They were in one of those enormous downtown lofts whose style and art collection made Paul feel a century or two behind. The hosts, a pair of prominent gay philanthropists who sat on Samuel’s board, were great champions of his and therefore took an interest in Paul. They escorted him into the bedroom to show off a Richard Prince painting for which they had paid a record price at a Sotheby’s auction. Paul studied the painting—a cowboy riding a horse against the backdrop of a cloud-filled sky—for a long time, unsure whether the price made it seem more ordinary or extraordinary.

  When he returned from his private tour, he joined a group that was standing around a windbag who was telling a long story about an incompetent employee. Not wanting to fire the laggard—“his old man was a major donor,” words that made Paul, as Samuel’s father, wince—the windbag had handed him ever more petty, mindless tasks: report collating, phone-list updating, and so on. “Place enough unreasonable demands on someone and eventually they’ll throw their hands up and walk away,” he said, to knowing laughter. Who hadn’t tried the same type of thing with an incompetent underling or even just an irritating maid? Firing was messy, often costly. Offending pride came cheap.

  Edith interpreted Paul’s silence on the way home as a judgmental one. “Sometimes I wish you would be more open-minded,” she said. “It would mean a lot to the boys. It was a lovely affair and they said such nice things about Samuel—”

  “Edith, it was a very nice party,” he said, putting his palms to her powdery-soft cheeks, not caring that Vladimir was watching in the rearview. “I mean it. I’m so glad we went.”

  The next day Paul informed Mo that he would have to partner with a landscape architect because he was too inexperienced to handle such a large project on his own. The partner would have to come from a short list that would be presented to him. Mo was suspicious—“Is this a tactic to get someone else’s name on the project?”—then, once the list arrived, disdainful. “You—or whoever—picked the most conventional firms out there. We have no visual language in common.”

  “Find one,” Paul said.

  Next Paul requisitioned reports on the design from the jury’s security consultants and summoned Khan to a meeting to go over them. They sat at the oval table where the jury had met for all those months. The consultants were advising against enclosing the garden entirely in walls because it would create too contained a target. Better to use very low perimeter walls, more like parapets. The canals were also a safety liability: “One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.” They recommended scrapping them.

  “You can’t be serious,” Mo said when the consultants had left. He and Paul were spaced several seats apart at the round table. Khan leaned elegantly back in his chair and crossed a thin leg. A certain comfort had been achieved between them, Paul thought, for all their arguing.

  “If you read the bylaws, we are allowed to impose—request—changes.”

  “And I am allowed to refuse—decline—them.”

  “Yes, but if you agree to make them, it might increase your chances of securing the governor’s approval.”

  A skeptical smile flitted over Mo’s lips. “Do you really believe that?”

  “My job is to try to achieve a meeting of the minds,” Pa
ul said, choosing not to speak his own. “If there isn’t one—”

  “Then what? If you’re making a threat, spell it out.”

  “No threats, just realities. We’re meant to have a dialogue, which should lead to refinements. If the jury and the governor are not satisfied, then it becomes impossible to proceed. No winning entry is final. Any vision has to evolve. We’re the client, after all. No one is immune to compromise. You think Maya Lin wanted that statue of the soldiers near her memorial?”

  “But if you’re worried about security, the walls actually provide an ideal way to screen who’s coming in and out. They can be built with strong materials—fortified, blast-resistant, you name it. Your arguments seem … specious, for lack of a better word. For every one I could offer a counterargument that’s as strong. Stronger.”

  “We have sound technical or financial reasoning for all our desired changes.”

  “Your changes would alter the essence of my design.”

  “An essence, as it so happens, now widely equated with a paradise for martyrs. Even if you didn’t intend it that way, it’s now read that way—by your opponents, by America’s opponents. You saw the Iranian president’s statement, I’m sure. He’s delighted—delighted!—to have an Islamic paradise in Manhattan.”

  “He’s a buffoon.”

  “Anyway, there’s nothing sacrosanct about your design. Ever read Edmund Burke?”

  “Nope.”

  “His treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful—I was just rereading it. He argues for randomness over geometry: the number and disorder of the stars, the way their confusion constitutes a kind of infinity—”

  “A grid subdividing endlessly can be a form of infinity, too.”

  “The point he makes is that man tried to teach nature its business with straight lines and mathematical shapes, but nature wouldn’t be taught. He was writing around the time that English gardens came into being, Capability Brown and so on”—Paul’s casual mention of this belying the hour he had spent researching the genesis and proliferation of English gardens, or, rather, perusing the research that he had asked Lanny to do—“and those gardens showed that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty.”

  “I didn’t know beauty was what we were aiming for,” Mo said.

  “The importance of variation”—Paul decided to ignore him until he finished his piece—“to have parts not be angular but melted into one another, as he puts it. ‘No work of art can be great, but as it deceives—’”

  “That’s affirming, since it’s deception I’m being accused of.”

  “Yes, well, that’s not the kind he means—he means tricking the eye.”

  “This is a memorial, not an English lord’s estate. The Garden has order, which its geometry manifests, for a reason, which is that it’s an answer to the disorder that was inflicted on us. It’s not meant to look like nature. Or like confusion, which is what the attack left behind. If anything, it’s meant to evoke the layout of the city it will sit in.”

  This obstinacy would be Khan’s undoing, Paul hoped. Yet perversely, Mo’s stubbornness was also increasing Paul’s respect, even affection for him, and perhaps salving his conscience, too. Khan had drive, Paul’s drive. If this contest didn’t make Mohammed Khan, something else would. He carried his own path within him.

  13

  There was a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan for the victims’ families. At all of these gatherings a small part of Claire rebelled: how false to pretend the relatives had anything other than loss in common, how morbid to have only that to share. Grief was not a country she had chosen to enter, but she could choose when to leave, even if joining the diaspora bore the taint of treason. Out there the dead were still remembered, but with less feeling. This had long been happening in Claire, in all of them. They believed they couldn’t go on. They went on.

  The word had gone out to the press beforehand—no questions on the memorial—and to the widows: no ribbons, no stickers, keep it civil for the children. Still, Claire braced for hostility and wondered if she would be strong enough to withstand it. The boat swanned out into the river. Soon swag-laden children were racing around mothers trying to hide their tipsiness from reporters cruising for angles beyond teary remembrance and admirable resilience.

  Their interest in Claire was even more avid than usual, but she deflected them. “This is no place for politics,” she scolded one puppy who approached.

  Bolstered by a vodka tonic, she struck up a conversation with Nell Monroe, one of her favorite fellow widows, whose humor got drier the more she drank. “I’m glad it’s you dealing with that whole business and not me,” Nell said. “They can let a Martian design the memorial for all I care. It’s not going to change my life. Unless, of course, the Martian’s looking to get laid. Speaking of which, have you?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Gotten laid.” Claire’s sex life, or lack thereof, was a subject of continuing fascination for the other widows. She knew this because of the few, like Nell, who weren’t afraid to tell her. She could date anyone, marry anyone, the rap went—half the men they knew had crushes on her. So why the nun act? No one’s husband was irreplaceable, not even Saint Calder.

  It wasn’t entirely true that there had been no one; only that Claire had told no one. The previous summer, at a neighbor’s for a fund-raiser, a young man had come in from a run apologizing for being late. Claire had assayed the tall, hard physique beneath the black running shirt and shorts, the handsome bearded face, and thought simply: Him. Jesse, a cousin of the hosts, was staying in their pool house for a few months, helping out with the dogs and the children, until he started graduate school in photography in New York. He was twelve years younger than Claire. She had, by the end of the evening, found a way to invite him over to look at Cal’s photography collection, and they had begun an affair—“playdating,” they called it—that took place whenever her children were off on playdates of their own or on weekend visits to Cal’s parents.

  Jesse was as good-natured and open and hale as he had looked at first glance; the sex managed to be both depleting and energizing—people told Claire she hadn’t looked so well, so alive (an unfortunate word choice, she thought) since the attack. A few times she allowed him to come over when the children were home. Watching him toss William around the pool or offer his suntanning body as a runway for Penelope’s dolls, she had allowed herself to entertain the possibility of more than a summer fling. But she was so straitjacketed by dignity—the widow’s dignity, the almost-forty-year-old’s dignity, the wealthy woman’s dignity—that by the time he left in the fall she could barely wave goodbye.

  That same straitjacket kept her from sharing the liaison—how would it look, a younger man, a nobody?—with Nell.

  “Not lately,” she said with a vague smile. “You?”

  “I told you about the surgeon, right?”

  “Only three times,” Claire teased gently.

  They were laughing when William showed up on the verge of tears. “Mommy, they won’t let me play the fireman.” Claire tousled his head. “William is obsessed with firemen,” she told Nell. “His sheets. His pajamas. His Halloween costumes. I keep trying to propose new obsessions: no luck so far.” Nell smiled at William with a sympathy Claire feared she herself had failed to demonstrate. Then Nell excused herself to go check on her own kids, saying, “They’re probably the reason we need a fireman in the first place.”

  Claire knelt before William. “What happened? Don’t you want to play something else? Why did they say you couldn’t be the fireman?” He wouldn’t meet her eyes, which was unlike him, and when she took him on her lap he began to cry. Around them the party for the “Heroes’ Kids” was in full swing, and the microphones and cameras were roving—she saw one hesitate near her, then move on, sense enough at least to leave a crying child alone. “What’s wrong, William?” she asked again. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “They said I couldn’t be the fireman because of you.”


  “Who said?”

  “Timmy and Jimmy.”

  The Hansen twins. Bulky, ruddy-faced redheads. Bullies, she considered them. At a birthday party she had seen them asking Bozo the Clown how much he earned as their mother pretended not to hear and the clown’s runny mouth turned down farther in response. But they were also only eight years old. She knew children lived between the poles of invention and imitation. They had to have gotten this idea from their parents. At least they hadn’t made William play a terrorist.

  “And they said what, exactly?”

  “That you like the bad guys. So I can’t play the good guy. Do you? Do you like the bad guys?”

  “Of course not,” she said, kissing his head. “They’re mixed up.” She asked William to check on Penelope, who with a half dozen girls was keeping vigil by the uncut cake, and went to track down Jane Hansen. She lived in New Jersey and still looked like the sorority president she had once been. All of her features, even her up-do, looked chiseled.

  “Your boys seem to be giving William a hard time because of some idea they have of me,” Claire said, not bothering with hello. “Where would they possibly come up with something like that?”

  “How should I know?” Jane said. “They have minds of their own, unfortunately.”