by Amy Waldman
Something on background, Alyssa insisted, that would allow her to convey what Claire was thinking, even if it came from “knowledgeable sources” or “a friend of Claire Burwell.”
“How do I know that what you’re telling me is important?” Claire said.
“Trust me,” Alyssa said, and they both looked embarrassed.
Claire unfolded and refolded her paper napkin. “This is a dirty business, isn’t it,” she said. A statement, not a question. Alyssa wasn’t sure which business she was referring to. Journalism? The memorial selection? The Albanian coffee shop, which stank of being a cover for organized crime? For a minute she pitied Claire for having to soil her pristine values in the muck where everyone else lived.
“I like to think of it as practical,” Alyssa said, in a way she hoped was soothing. She waited until Claire almost whispered “Oh, all right,” and then pulled out her notebook.
“He was in Afghanistan,” she told Claire now. “Kabul.”
“So is that where—” Claire started to say.
“He made a threat against the embassy there.”
“What?” Claire said, incredulous. “That can’t be true.” But she was white. Alyssa pushed a water glass closer to her. Claire sipped. “There must be some explanation,” she said, tremulous. “Why wouldn’t everyone know about this? Why wouldn’t they have arrested him?”
“I don’t think it was an actionable threat,” Alyssa said. “More threatening language. Supportive of threats, rather than making a threat himself. These cases are difficult—if they locked up every Muslim who said something anti-American, the prisons would be full. More full. Way more full. I’m just trying to give you a sense of how he thinks.”
In the long silence that followed, Alyssa gobbled the meat pie she had ordered, hoping to absorb some of the acid in her stomach, even as she motioned to the surly waiter for another espresso. She was still chewing when Claire spoke.
“You really are despicable, trying to smear him,” she said, curling her mouth in disapproval.
Alyssa shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to smear him. I’m probably not even going to publish it,” she said, not mentioning that, per Oscar’s condition, she couldn’t, or that the report had been dismissed because it came from an architect competing against ROI to design the new embassy and clearly trying to gain advantage. The “threat” was an offhand comment Mo had made. Alyssa didn’t know what it was. Usually it was the Afghans narcing on each other to settle scores or win some personal gain, Oscar’s friend had told him. This one lodged in memory because it was one American trying to shank another, using Mo’s being Muslim to do it. Alyssa felt no guilt about sharing only part of this story with Claire. Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.
“I thought you would want to know, as you weigh things,” she said. “And I wanted to talk to you, and it was a way to get through. So now how about it”—she paused to extract her tape recorder from her purse—“you going to keep your promise, or what?”
Claire glared at her. “If you’re not going to quote me, why are you taping it?”
“For my own protection,” Alyssa said with all the sincerity she could muster. “And yours.”
The interview was a mess, as those conducted at gunpoint often are. Claire looked like she would have preferred to confide in the Albanian thugs. Her posture was so obdurate, her utterances so miserly, that Alyssa worried whether she could fill a story. She opted for provocation.
“Do you trust Mohammad Khan?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Claire snapped.
“Well, put another way, how much do you know about what he thinks? Putting aside whether this garden is or isn’t a martyrs’ paradise—and we all know he won’t say, although I’m not clear on why he won’t say—what’s his position on jihad? On whether it’s right for America to be in Afghanistan? On what brought the buildings down—does he subscribe to all the conspiracy theories saying it was an inside job? Does he think America got what it deserved?”
“None of that is relevant,” Claire said.
“Really?” Alyssa said. “You really believe that? It’s not relevant if he would be happy if the American embassy was blown up? Or if he believes Mossad or the CIA carried out the attack? You’d still want him to build your memorial?”
“Why don’t you ask him these questions?” Claire snarled.
“He’s not building a memorial to my husband,” Alyssa said, wondering if this made it sound like she had a husband.
Tears filled Claire’s eyes but, as if they knew their place, didn’t leave. “We can’t ask him,” she said, in a subdued voice. “We’re not allowed—it wouldn’t be fair to him.”
“Is it fair to you?” Some secular lust was burning in Alyssa, the desire to hack at this glacier of a woman, to push her harder and harder until she confronted her own hypocrisies, the impossibility—the ridiculousness—of her position. Alyssa wanted to see Claire Burwell’s principles collapse beneath her, and she was dimly aware that this desire told as much about her, Alyssa, as it did about Claire. Being a Columnist, trying to influence invisible masses, didn’t suit her. But using information, insinuation, and the right line of questioning to rewire a woman in front of her eyes—that was a scary rush of a high.
“Can you live with never knowing the answers to those questions?” she asked.
“I have to,” Claire whispered. Her hands were limp in her lap, her head slightly bowed. She was almost docile now, before Alyssa’s onslaught, as if she was being justifiably berated.
“Or are you scared to know the answer? What if he does hate your husband, or everyone like your husband? What if he hates you, the infidel widow? Are there no conditions under which you would say he’s not suitable?”
Claire’s spine straightened. Clarity returned to her eyes. “Legally—no, morally, I can’t, won’t take this from him just because of what he might think.”
“Then that’s all the more reason to ask him what he does think!” Alyssa squawked. “Why don’t you? He won’t answer me, or other reporters, but you’re a juror, a family member, I think he would have to answer you.”
“Weren’t you listening?” Claire spit the words. She clenched her jaw, balled her hands into fists on the table. Animus was turning her, if not ugly, something far from beautiful. “It’s not fair to him to ask.”
“That’s his line, Mrs. Burwell, and I’m sure he’s thrilled you’ve adopted it. But again, is that really what you think?”
Claire nodded, shook her head, nodded again, pressed her lips together like a child resisting food, and stared, as if just noticing them, at the AK-wielding women on the walls.
“Headscarf puller may have a history of violence against women: report at eleven.”
The teaser, on a local news channel caught up in sweeps week, ran so often that the interview, aired as promised at eleven, was almost an anticlimax. Sean’s ex-wife was claiming he had beaten her once: “He shoved me against the wall and I had to wear a sling for three days … No, I don’t know why: he just lost his temper. He has a temper, everyone knows that now.”
Her hair was different: short, punkish, dyed blond. She looked hot, if not entirely credible. The Body, Patrick had called her. She must have sold her story. Irina never did anything for free.
“She always was a liar,” Eileen said. She and Sean were on the couch, Frank in his easy chair, where he had been dozing all night. Now he was fully alert.
Sean took a deep breath. “She’s not lying.” The signs of his mother’s displeasure were so physically subtle that it was easy to miss them if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but Sean did: the mouth thinning out, the ears shifting back and taking the hairline with them. “I mean, not entirely. She’s exaggerating—she didn’t have to wear a sling, she wore it just to make me feel bad and to get off work. But she’s not lying.”
Irina was a shadow that wouldn’t vanish even at night, a mistake with an afterlife. They’d married a few months after the
y met—quick, drunk, Borough Hall. “No church?” was all that his mother had said when he told her. A judgment, but also an investigation, as if she was assessing, with her typical, irritating foresight, how hard it would be to end. They’d boozed their way through the next five months, until the attack. As he hunted for bodies, she gathered resentments, and when he came home she banished him to the couch because his new, persistent cough was keeping her up. She prattled on about the stupidity of her bar-owner boss, whether the fear was making people tip less or more, how much she hated her mother. Through the fog of his exhaustion he saw her clearly for the first time: a survivor of a rough childhood whose instincts toward self-preservation had become mere selfishness, and a drunk. No doubt his ability to grasp this came from his being, for the first time since they met, sober. The bottomless desire he had felt for the moons of her ass and the cream of her skin became a kind of revulsion. When she complained, one too many times, that there was a dead man in bed with them, his chest tightened and he shoved her into the wall. Cradling her afterward, he couldn’t still the angry drumming of his heart, or hers. They divorced as soon as the state would let them. She stayed in their apartment, which used to be his.
“Well, that’s done,” his mother had said.
Now Sean tried to explain why he had manhandled her. “She was disrespecting Patrick,” he said, hoping that defending his brother’s honor would outweigh the lousy deed, knowing, as soon as he saw the ears pull back, that it wouldn’t.
“Patrick wouldn’t have hit a woman,” she said.
“Not even that one,” said Frank.
The second headscarf pulling occurred less than a week after the rally. A man in a Queens shopping mall walked up to a Muslim woman pushing a baby stroller, tugged her headscarf back, and ran. The next took place in Boston. This perpetrator didn’t flee—instead he waited for the police to arrest him so he could testify to the media: “I saw that guy do it on the news, and I thought, we all need to be that brave, take a stand.” More men copied him, and copycats copied the copycats, so within a week there had been more than a dozen incidents around the country. Some non-Muslim women put on headscarves in solidarity, but no one preyed on them.
In an editorial, The New York Times called Sean representative of “a new, ominous strain of intolerance in the land.” Reporters called him to ask how it felt to represent a new strain of intolerance. The atmosphere in his parents’ house chilled. “It’s Muslims that are supposed to mistreat women,” Eileen said to him when he came into the kitchen before dinner one night. Her hands were full with a tray of roast chicken, but before he could get the swinging door to the dining room for her, she turned around and backed it open with her rear end.
When the FBI called to say they had tracked hostile references to Sean in jihadist chat rooms online, he brushed off the threat but welcomed the excuse to vacate his parents’ house for a while. “I don’t want to put my parents in danger,” he told Debbie Dawson, knowing, somehow, that she would find him a place to stay. He didn’t expect it to be in her apartment.
It was a sprawling aerie on the Upper East Side, two units her husband had conjoined before he split. She lived with her three daughters: Trisha, eighteen, flouncy, fond of flashing Sean the straps of her bra, when she wore one; Alison, sixteen and flitty; and Orly, at thirteen the baby, a pout. All three had signs saying NO ISLAM ZONE on their doors: Debbie wasn’t allowed to talk about “the cause,” as they disdainfully referred to it, in their rooms. When they didn’t get their way, they threatened to marry Muslims.
Sean felt like he had come upon the Wizard of Oz in his bathrobe, since Debbie spent most of the day in hers. Once the girls went off to school, she entered her virtual world, obsessively updating her blog, rallying supporters and volunteers (two of whom acted, on occasion, as her bodyguards), flaming opponents across the Web. She made sure to shower and dress before the girls came home in the afternoon.
They were on the eighteenth floor, and at first the height elevated Sean’s sense of his own worth. It was his first time living in Manhattan, and his days were his, since he had temporarily delegated Joe Mullaney, his lieutenant, to run the committee. He walked the blocks around Debbie’s apartment trying to look like he belonged. But he didn’t; he was the only man not in a hurry. Not even the children idled here. One afternoon he trailed a man who, with his slick affect and Middle Eastern complexion, reminded him of Mohammad Khan. The man went into a museum whose brutal gray concrete exterior put Sean off not just because he found it ugly but because he suspected it was meant to be beautiful in a way he didn’t get—and he winced to realize that it was the architect Khan who would better fit here.
When he came back to the apartment, Debbie was out, and he glanced at her blog. Debbie’s burka-bikinied body—the focus, he knew now, had been soft—had shrunk to make way for a new item. THE AMERICAN WAY IS CURRENTLY GIVING ASYLUM TO A REFUGEE FROM ISLAMIST POLITICAL VIOLENCE, it said in huge letters. DONATE NOW! This man has been threatened for being brave enough to speak up against the Islamist threat and against Mohammad Khan. Now he has had to flee his home. We are feeding and housing him. DONATE NOW!
“Is this me?” he asked when Debbie returned with the girls.
“I am housing you,” she said. “And someone’s got to put these girls through college.”
“Daddy’s going to put us through college,” Trisha said.
Debbie cut her eyes at her eldest. “Women need to be financially independent.”
“That blog,” Trisha said, wrinkling her pert nose, “is not going to make you independent.”
On a temperate fall day, Paul summoned Claire to Manhattan for lunch and a reprimand. The Post cover—WIDOW WAVERING—had caught him off guard. Alyssa Spier’s story didn’t quote her directly, of course, but the flimsy diversions (“Friends say Claire Burwell is concerned by Mohammad Khan’s evasiveness”) had the funk of falsehood. He was peeved Claire appeared to have, against jury rules, talked to the press. He was shocked she had talked to the Post. And if she wasn’t the source, she should have known better than to think out loud to her friends.
“I screwed up,” she said, as the waiter pulled her chair out, then tucked her into the table. “I apologize, Paul.”
“And I thought I was going to have to waterboard you to get the truth,” he said drily. “Would that all of our country’s information-gathering efforts went so smoothly.”
“I’m not wavering, though. She mischaracterized me. She kept trying to provoke me into saying I thought Khan should come clean.”
“So you, not just your friends, talked to her? Why the Post, of all places, Claire?”
“She told me she had information on Khan.”
Paul raised his eyebrows in surprise. “And?”
“He was in Afghanistan, Paul, and—”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“You know? Why didn’t you say something to us?”
“Because it has no bearing. He went for his architecture firm. It’s perfectly legitimate, raised no flags.”
“That’s not what she—Alyssa Spier—said.”
“Then perhaps we should hire her in place of our security consultants. What did she say, exactly?”
“It’s—that he—there weren’t really details,” Claire said, and blushed, then seemed to blush at her blushing. She was now beautifully pink.
Paul, in vain, waited for more, then said, “Be careful, Claire. You’re an important player in this—among the most important—and people are going to try to manipulate you. Even more so now with this story suggesting you’re persuadable. It puts you in play.”
“Well, I’m not in play; I haven’t changed my position. I just needed to know if there was anything to know.”
“You can’t have it both ways.”
A plate of melon and prosciutto landed between them. Claire paused while the waiter bowed off.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“You can’t say people shouldn’t be suspici
ous of him just because he happens to be a Muslim, then have suspicions of your own.”
“I don’t have suspicions! I just want to know what I’m defending. It hasn’t been easy to have my position public. William has been picked on—it’s very upsetting.” Her agitation was evident; her pupils seemed to dilate.
“I’d still like to know how your support for Khan became public in the first place,” Paul said. “It was also Alyssa Spier who reported that, wasn’t it?”
“Paul, you don’t think I would have—”
“It’s hard to know what to think anymore.”
“That didn’t come from me. I’m fine with it being public but between us would have preferred that it wasn’t. It limited my room to maneuver. I think you let Lanny off too easily on the leaks,” she added provocatively.
He ignored this, took a bite of melon, and pushed the plate away.
“No appetite?” she asked, with a little too much surprise.
He tried to make light—“I’m too fat a target”—but he didn’t feel light. The House minority leader, also a presidential aspirant, had labeled the jury Islamist sympathizers and vowed to sponsor legislation to block the construction of Khan’s design. Geraldine Bitman’s response to this was hardly reassuring: “The danger to America isn’t just from jihadists,” she said. “It’s from the naïve impulse to privilege tolerance over all other values, including national security. Mohammad Khan has brought us face-to-face with our own vulnerability.” Paul was finding it ever harder to get his old friend on the phone.
The cacophony drowned out his repeated, and reasonable, attempts to point out that the jury had selected from anonymous entries. He prided himself on buffering his jurors from the onslaught, took the pressures on himself as evidence of his capacity to lead. But it was wearing. A flamboyant real estate mogul with a toupee and an inestimable fortune was vowing to sponsor his own memorial design competition, then underwrite construction of the winner, although no one was sure he had the liquidity to do it. Hearing this, a liberal hedge-fund billionaire of Paul’s acquaintance had called to say he would underwrite a hefty chunk of the cost of the Garden.