Terrorist (19 page)

"Oh," she says, "stretchy. This is interesting. And it likes—tell me what it likes."

"It likes being kissed, and licked, and played with, and entered—don't make me go on any more, Terry. It kills it for me. I'm crazy about you, you know that. You're the nicest—"

"Don't tell me," she says angrily, and throws back the sheet and jackknifes out of bed, her buttocks jiggling and beginning, as she said of elsewhere, to droop. Her buttocks are developing puckers. As if sensing his eyes on her backside, she turns in the bathroom doorway, flashing her little

patch of cedar color; the whole doughy softness of her— white bread without the crust—is exposed, he feels, defiantly, an invitation to kindness that he has failed to accept heartily enough. The sight of her, so naked and female, so sensitive and lumpy, dries his mouth, sucking the air of his usual clothed, conscientious life quite out of him. She completes his sentence for him: "—the nicest thing since Beth before she got pig-fat. You're happy enough to fuck me, but you don't want to say 'fuck' for fear she'll somehow hear it. It used to be you'd fuck and run because you were afraid Ahmad might come back any minute, but now he's gone at his job all day you always have some other excuse not to hang around even a minute. Just enjoy me, that's all I ever asked, but, no, Jews have to have guilt, it's their way of showing how special they are, how superior to everybody else, God gets sore at just
them,
with their putrid precious covenant. You make me sick, Jack Levy!" She slams the bathroom door, but it catches on a woolly bathroom rug and shuts reluctantly, not before in the slice of the light being angrily flicked on he sees her Irish ass, never kissed by the desert sun, jiggle.

Jack lies there feeling mournful, wanting to get his clothes back on but knowing this would prove her point. When she finally comes out of the bathroom, having washed him away with a shower, she picks up her underwear from the floor and in measured fashion puts it on. Her breasts swing as she bends down, and these are the first pieces of her she covers, catching them up in the gossamer cups of her bra and reaching with a grimace behind to do the fasteners. Then she steps into her underpants, steadying herself with an extended arm and a shapely firm hand on the bureau top that is covered with lined-up tubes of painter's oils. She tugs with one

hand and then with both the bit of nylon smartly up; the cedar-colored patch of frizzy hair puffs out, in its moment of capture, above the elastic waistband like the head on an impatiently poured beer. Her bra is black but her thong panties are lilac. Their elastic waist is low, exposing the pearly swell of her belly to the depth of the most daring hip-huggers, though what she next puts on are a pair of ordinary old high-waisted jeans, with a dab or two of paint on the front. A ribbed jersey and a pair of canvas sandals, and she will be completely armored, ready to face the street and its opportunities. Another man might steal her. Jack fears that each time he sees her naked might be the last. A desolation sweeps through him sharp enough to make him cry out, "Don't put all that crap back on! Come back to bed, Terry. Please."

"You don't have time."

"I have time. I just remembered, the tutorial isn't until three. The kid's a loser anyway, from over in Fair Lawn, his parents think I can tutor him into Princeton. I can't. Pretty please?"

"Well . . . maybe a second. For just a snuggle. I hate it when we quarrel. We shouldn't have anything to quarrel about."

"We quarrel," he explains to her, "because we care about each other. If we didn't care we wouldn't quarrel."

She undoes the snap on her jeans, sucking in her gut and looking comically pop-eyed for a second, and quickly slithers back beneath the wrinkled sheet in her black and lilac underthings. There is a light-hearted whorishness in the outfit, like the teeny-slut look affected by some of the bolder girls at Central High, which startles a furtive throb from his penis. He tries to ignore it, putting his arm around her

shoulders—the downy hairs at the nape of her neck are still damp from her shower—and pulling her closer to him in chaste companionship. "How is Ahmad doing?" he asks.

Terry answers warily, feeling the transition abrupt from whore to mother. "He seems to be doing fine. He likes the people he works for—a Lebanese father and son, who do a kind of good-cop / bad-cop routine on him. The son is apparently something of a character. Ahmad loves the truck."

"The truck?"

"It could be any truck, but this one is
his
truck. You know how love is. Every morning he checks the tire pressure, the brakes, all these fluids. He tells me about them—engine oil, radiator coolant, windshield-washer fluid, battery, power steering, automatic transmission ... I think that's all. He checks the fan belts for tightness and I don't know what all else. He says the mechanics at the service stations, for the scheduled check-ups, are too rushed and hungover to do it right. The truck even has a name—Excellency. Excellency Home Furnishings. They thought it meant something excellent."

"Well," Jack admits, "it almost does. It's witty." His hard-on is growing back as he lies there trying to think of Terry as a mother and a professional person, a nurse's aide and an abstract painter, an intelligent many-sided individual he would be glad to know even if she weren't of the opposite gender. But his thoughts have taken off from her silken underclothes, lilac and black, and the easy, even careless way she deals with him sexually—all that experience, all those boyfriends accumulated in the fifteen years since Ahmad's father failed to crack America's riddle and fled. Even back then she was a Catholic-raised girl who didn't mind shacking up with a raghead, a Mussulman. She was a wild one, a

rule-breaker. Terri-ble. A holy Terr-or. He asks her, "Who told you about Jews and the covenant?"

"I don't know. Some guy I knew once."

"You knew him in what sense?"

"I knew him. Jack, look, don't we have a deal? You don't ask, and I don't tell. I've been abandoned and single in the best years a woman is supposed to have. Now I'm forty. Don't begrudge me a little past."

"In my head I don't, of course. But, like we were saying, when you care, you get possessive."

"Is that what we were saying? I didn't hear that. All I heard was you thinking about Beth. Pathetic Beth."

"She's not so pathetic at the library. She sits behind the reference desk and moves around on the Internet much better than I can do."

"She sounds wonderful."

"No, but she's a person."

"Great. Who isn't? You're saying I'm not?"

An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans. His prick feels the change in Teresa's climate, and is beginning to wilt again. "We all are," he soothes her. "You especially. But as to the covenant, here's one Jew who never felt it. My father hated religion, and the only covenants I heard about were in neighborhoods that wouldn't let Jews in. How religious is Ahmad these days?"

She relaxes a little, slumping down into her pillow. His gaze travels an inch farther down into the black bra. The freckled skin of her upper chest looks a bit crepey, exposed to sun damage year after year, in contrast to the soap-white strip this side of the bra's edge. Jack thinks,
So another Jew has been here before me.
Who all else? Egyptians, Chinamen, God knows. A lot of these painters she knows are kids half

her age. To them she'd be a mother who fucks. Maybe that's why her own kid is queer, if he is.

She is saying, "It's hard to say. He never talked much about it. Poor little guy, he used to look so frail and scared when I'd drop him off at the mosque, going up those stairs all by himself. When I'd ask him afterwards how it had gone, he'd say 'Great' and clam up. He'd even blush. It was something he couldn't share. With the job, he told me, it's hard for him to always get to the mosque on Fridays, and this Charlie who's always with him doesn't seem to be all that observant. But, you know, really, all in all Ahmad seems more relaxed— just the way he talks to me, more of a man's manner, looking me level in the eye. He's pleased with himself, earning money, and, I don't know, maybe I'm imagining this, more open to new ideas, not closed into this very, in my opinion, limited and intolerant belief system. He's getting fresh input."

"Does he have a girlfriend?" Jack Levy asks, grateful to Terry for warming to a subject other than his own failings.

"Not as far as I know," she says. He loves that Irish mouth of hers when she gets pensive, forgetting to close her lifted upper lip, with its little blister of flesh in the middle. "I think I would know. He comes home tired, lets me feed him, reads the Koran or lately the newspaper—this stupid war on terror—so he can talk with this Charlie about it, and goes to bed in his room. His sheets"—she regrets bringing up the subject, but goes ahead with it—"are unspotted." She adds, "They weren't always."

"How would you know if he has a girl?" Jack presses.

"Oh, he'd talk about it, if only to get my goat. He's always hated my having male friends. He'd want to go out nights, and he doesn't."

"It doesn't seem quite right. He's a good-looking kid. Could he be gay?"

The question doesn't faze her; she has thought about it. "I could be wrong, but I think I'd know that, too. His teacher at the mosque, this Shaikh Rashid, is kind of creepy; but Ahmad's aware. He reveres him but distrusts him."

"You say you've met the man?"

"Just once or twice, picking up Ahmad or dropping him off. He was very smooth and proper with me. But I could feel hatred. To him I was a piece of meat—
unclean
meat."

Unclean meat.
Jack's hard-on has revived. He makes himself focus, a minute or so longer, before sharing this possibly inconvenient development. There is a pleasure, which he had forgotten, in just
having
the thing—the firm, stout, importunate stalk, the pompous little freshly appointed center of your being, bringing with it die sensation of there being
more
of you. "The job," he resumes. "Does he put in long hours?"

"It varies," Terry says. Her body gives off, perhaps in response to an emanation from his, a mix of tingling scents, soap at the nape of her neck foremost. The subject of her son is losing her interest. "He gets off when he's delivered the furniture. Some days it's early, most days it's late. Sometimes they drive as far as Camden, or Atlantic City."

"That's a long way to go, to deliver a piece of furniture."

"There aren't just deliveries; there are pickups, too. A lot of their furniture is secondhand. They make bids on people's estates and truck the stuff off. They have a kind of network; I don't know how much the Islamic thing matters. Most of their customers around New Prospect are black families. Some of their homes, Ahmad says, are surprisingly nice. He loves seeing the different areas, the different lifestyles."

"See the world," Jack sighs. "See New Jersey first. That's what I did, only I left out the world part. Now, missy"—he clears his throat—"you and I have a problem."

Teresa Mulloy's protuberant, beryl-pale eyes widen in mild alarm. "Problem?"

Jack lifts the sheet and shows her what has happened below his waist. He hopes he has shared enough life in general with her for her to share this with him.

She stares, and lets the tip of her tongue curl up to touch the plump center of her upper lip. "That's not a problem," she decides.
"No problema, senor.
"

Charlie Chehab often rides with Ahmad, even when Ahmad could handle by himself the furniture to be loaded or unloaded. The boy is growing stronger with the lifting and hauling. He has asked that his paychecks—nearly five hundred a week, at twice what Shop-a-Sec paid per hour—be made out to Ahmad Ashmawy, though he still lives with his mother. Because his Social Security and driver's license both list his last name as Mulloy, she has gone with him downtown to the bank, in one of the new glass buildings, to explain, and to make out new forms for a separate account. That is how she is these days: she makes no resistance to him, though she never made much. His mother is, he sees now, looking back, a typical American, lacking strong convictions and the courage and comfort they bring. She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air.
Bombs bursting in air
— empty air is the perfect symbol of American freedom. There is no
ummah
here, both Charlie and Shaikh Rashid point

out—no encompassing structure of divine law that brings men rich and poor to bow down shoulder to shoulder, no code of self-sacrifice, no exalted submission such as lies at the heart of Islam, its very name. Instead tiiere is a clashing diversity of private self-seeking, whose catchwords are
Seize the day
and
Devil take the hindmost
and
God helps those who help themselves,
which translate to
There is no God, no Day of Judgment; help yourself.
The double sense of "help yourself"—self-reliance and "grab what you can"—amuses the shaikh, who, after twenty years among these infidels, takes pride in his fluency in their language. Ahmad sometimes has to suppress a suspicion tJiat his teacher inhabits a semi-real world of pure words and most loves the Holy Qur'an for its language, a shell of violent shorthand whose content is its syllables, the ecstatic flow of "l"s and "a"s and guttural catches in the throat, savoring of the cries and the gallantry of mounted robed warriors under the cloudless sky of Arabia Deserta.