by John Updike
Charlie opens another door and there the truck waits, backed up to a thick-planked loading porch beneath a projecting roof. A tall orange box with each edge reinforced by riveted metal strips, the truck shocks Ahmad, coming upon it for the first time; his impression from the loading platform is of a great blunt-headed animal that is coming too close, nosing up against the platform as if to be fed. Its orange side, dulled a bit by road dirt, bears in a slanting indigo script outlined in gold the word Excellency and then, beneath, in block capitals, HOME FURNISHINGS, and, smaller, the store’s address and phone number. The truck has double tires behind. Its bulky chrome side-mirrors protrude. Its cab is attached to its box of a body with no space between. It is grand, but friendly. “It’s a trusty old beast,” Charlie says. “A hundred ten thousand miles and no major problems. Come on down and get acquainted. Don’t jump, use these steps over here. The last thing we need is you breaking an ankle your first day on the job.”
Ahmad feels this area is somehow already familiar. In the future he will come to know it well—the loading platform, the parking lot with its cracked concrete baking in the shimmering summer heat, the surrounding low brick buildings and cluttered backs of row houses, a rusting Dumpster in one corner from some long-defunct enterprise, the half-heard oceanic sound of traffic waves swishing by on the four-lane boulevard. This space will always have something magic about it, something peaceful not of this world, a strange quality of being under magnification from some high vantage. It is a place God has breathed upon.
Ahmad descends the flight of four thick-planked steps and stands on the same level with the truck. A badge on the driver’s door says Ford Triton E-350 Super Duty. Charlie opens that door and says, “Here you go, Madman. Climb in.”
The cab holds a leathery warm reek of male bodies and stale cigarette smoke and cold coffee and the meat of Italian sandwiches eaten on the move. Ahmad is surprised, after the hours studying the booklets for the CDL with all their talk of double-clutching and downshifting on perilous slopes, by the lack of a stick shift on the floor. “How do we shift gears?”
“We don’t,” Charlie tells him, his face creasing sourly, but his voice neutral enough. “It’s automatic. Just like in your friendly family car.”
His mother’s embarrassing Subaru. His new friend senses an embarrassment, and says reassuringly, “Gears give you one more thing to worry about. One kid we took on, a couple of drivers ago, stripped the gears shifting into reverse going downhill.”
“But on steep hills, shouldn’t you shift down? Instead of riding the brake and wearing out the pads.”
“Go ahead; you can shift down on the steering stalk. But this part of Jersey isn’t that big into hills. It’s not like we’re West Virginia.”
Charlie knows the states; he is a man of the world. He walks around the cab and in one easy swoop, his arms stretching like a monkey’s, ascends into the passenger’s seat. To Ahmad it feels that someone has jumped into bed with him. Charlie pulls a half-red pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt—a coarse tough cloth like denim, but a military green instead of blue—and adroitly snaps it so that several tan-tipped cigarettes pop out an inch. He asks Ahmad, “A smoke steady your nerves?”
“Thanks, sir, no. I don’t smoke.”
“Really? That’s smart. You’ll live forever, Madman. You can cut the ‘sir.’ ‘Charlie’ will do. O.K.: let’s see you drive this heap.”
“Right now?”
Charlie snorts, making an explosion of smoke in the corner of Ahmad’s vision. “You’d rather next week? What’d you come here for? Don’t look so anxious. It’s a piece of cake. Morons do it, all the time; believe me. This isn’t rocket science.”
It is eight-thirty in the morning—too early, Ahmad feels, for an initiation. But if the Prophet entrusted his body to the fearsome horse Buraq, Ahmad can ascend to the high black seat, cracked and stained and split by previous occupants, and steer this towering orange box on wheels. The engine, when the key turns it over into combustion, has a deep pitch, as if the fuel is a thicker, lumpier substance than gasoline. “It takes diesel?” Ahmad asks.
Charlie exhales more sputtery smoke: it keeps coming from deep in his lungs. “You kidding, kid? You ever driven diesel? Stinks up the place, and takes forever for the engine to warm up. You can’t just get in and put the pedal to the metal. One thing to keep in mind, though: there’s no rear-view mirror over the dash. Don’t panic when out of habit you look and there’s nothing there. Use your side mirrors. Another thing, remember everything takes longer—takes longer to stop, and longer to get going. At stoplights, you’re not winning any dig-out races; don’t try. She’s like an old lady: don’t push her, but don’t underestimate her either. Take your eye off the road for a second, and she can kill. But don’t let me scare you. O.K., let’s give it a try. Let’s go. Wait: make sure you put it in reverse. We’ve had more than one collision with the platform. That same driver I mentioned before. You know what I’ve learned over the years? There’s nothing so stupid people won’t go ahead and do it. Back up, do a three-point, head straight out of the lot, that’s Thirteenth Street, and go right on Reagan. You can’t go left; there’s a cement divider, but, like I say, there’s nothing so stupid people won’t do it, so I mention it.”
Charlie is still talking as Ahmad eases the truck back, backs it a tidy half-circle, and in forward gear heads out of the lot. He discovers that, this high off the ground, he floats, looking down upon the tops of cars. As he heads out onto the boulevard, he takes the corner too short and drags the back tires up over the curb, but hardly feels it. He has been transposed to another scale, to another plane. Charlie is busy stubbing out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and doesn’t mention the bump.
After a few blocks, Ahmad’s eyes acquire the habit of darting left to the long-side mirror, and then through the passenger window to the right-hand mirror. The orange, chrome-edged reflections of Excellency’s own sides that he glimpses no longer alarm him but become parts of him, like the shoulders and arms that figure in his peripheral awareness as he walks down the street. In his dreams since childhood he would sometimes be flying down hallways or skimming sidewalks a few feet off the ground, and sometimes would awake with an erection or, more shamefully still, a large wet spot on the inside of his pajama fly. He had consulted the Qur’an for sexual advice in vain. It talked of uncleanness but only in regard to women, their menstruation, their suckling of infants. In the second sura, he found the mysterious words, Your wives are your field: go in, therefore, to your field as ye will; but do first some act for your souls’ good: and fear ye God, and know that ye must meet Him. In the verse before that, he read that women are a pollution. Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are cleansed, go in unto them as God hath ordained for you. Verily God loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean. Ahmad feels clean in the truck, cut off from the base world, its streets full of dog filth and blowing shreds of plastic and paper; he feels clean and free, flying his orange box kite behind him in the side mirrors.
“Don’t pass on the right,” Charlie suddenly admonishes him, in a voice sharp with alarm. Ahmad slows, not having realized he was overtaking cars to his left, in the lane next to the traffic divider, a solid, sullied string of Jersey barriers.
“Why are they called Jersey barriers?” he asks. “In Maryland, what are they called?”
“Don’t change the subject, Madman. Driving a truck, you can’t sit there and daydream. You got life and death in your hands, not to mention repairs that’ll jack up the insurance premiums if you goof. No hot-dogging and farting around with cell phones like people do in cars. You’re bigger; you got to be better.”
“Really?” Ahmad makes an attempt to tease the older man, his Lebanese-American brother, out of his grimly serious mood. “Shouldn’t cars get out of my way?”
Charlie doesn’t see that Ahmad is teasing. He keeps his eyes on the road,
through the windshield, and says, “Don’t be stupid, kid: they can’t. It’s like animals. You don’t hold rats and rabbits to the same standard as lions and elephants. You don’t hold Iraq to the same standard as the U.S. Bigger, you better be better.”
This political note strikes Ahmad as strange, slightly out of tune. But he is in bed with Charlie, and submissively settles himself for the ride.
“Jesus,” says Jack Levy. “This is what life is all about. I’d forgotten, and never expected anybody to remind me.” Thus guardedly, in these circumstances, without naming her, he pays tribute of a sort to his wife, who long ago had had her turn at showing him what life was all about.
Teresa Mulloy, naked beside him, agrees, “It is,” but then adds, in self-protection, “but it doesn’t last.” Her face, with its round shape and slightly protuberant eyes, is flushed so that her freckles blend in, pale brown on pink.
“What does?” Jack asks. She doesn’t really want him to agree with such a careless shrug. Her rosy flush becomes the high color that follows the sting of a rebuke, a facing of her defenselessness in this dead-end adventure, another married boyfriend. He will never leave his fat Beth, and would she want him to in any case? He is twenty-three years older than she, and she needs a man to last her the rest of her life.
Summer in New Jersey has attained July’s steady swelter, but even so, feeling the air as cool on their love-flushed skins, the lovers have drawn up the top sheet, rumpled and damp from having been beneath their bodies. Jack sits up against the pillow, exposing the slack muscles and gray froth of his chest, and Terry, with lovable bohemian immodesty, has pulled her side of the sheet no higher, so her breasts, white as soap where the sun never touches them, jut free for him to admire and to feel the heft of again if he desires. He loves plump, though it can get to be too much. The fragrances of paint thinner and linseed oil lull Jack here in his mistress’s bed. As Terry said, she is working bigger and brighter. When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides. With Beth, he can’t imagine her weight on his pelvis, or her legs spread far enough apart; they have run out of positions, except for the spoon, and even there her huge ass pushes him away like a jealous child in their bed.
“The thing is,” Jack goes on, hearing in Terry’s silence a withdrawal from some tactlessness on his part, “while it’s going on it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t last—Mother Nature says, ‘Who cares?’ It feels like it’s forever. I adore your tits, have I said that lately?”
“They’re starting to droop. You should have seen them when I was eighteen. Bigger, even, and stuck straight out.”
“Terry, please. Don’t get me excited again. I got to go.” Beth’s, too, he could remember, had been like inverted bowls, the size for breakfast cereal, with nipples hard as a single blueberry in his mouth.
“Where to now, Jack?” Terry’s voice is weary. A mistress knows the man to be a liar, where the wife only guesses.
“A tutorial. A real one, across town. I have the car; she needs it in an hour and a half to get to the library.” He is uncertain, in the gap his post-orgasmic daze leaves in his head, of how much of what he says is true. Beth needs the car eventually, he knows.
Terry, hearing his uncertainty, complains, “Jack, you’re always rushing off. Do I have body odor or something?”
This is cruel, because Beth indeed does; it fills up the bed at night, a caustic exhalation from her deep creases, and adds to his nocturnal unease and dread.
“No way,” he says, having picked up this much slang from his students. “Not even—” He halts, on the edge of over-stepping.
“My cunt. Say it.”
“Not even there,” he concedes. “Especially there. You’re sweet. You’re my sugar plum.” But if truth be known he is wary of having his face too long between her legs, for fear of Beth’s smelling the other woman through their good-night kiss—a mere peck, but their enduring custom for thirty-six years of marriage.
“Tell me about my cunt, Jack. I want to hear it. Loosen up.”
“Please, Terry. This is grotesque.”
“Why, you prim prick? You Jewish priss. What’s grotesque about my cunt?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he concedes, beaten down. “It’s perfect, it’s gorgeous, it—”
“It? What? What is all these nice things? Perfect and gorgeous.”
“Your cunt.”
“Good. Go on.” Perhaps her point is that he uses it, as he uses her, without paying enough attention, without taking in the whole picture—the aroma, the incidentals, her ache of loneliness when he pulls out, her awareness of being used, and used squeamishly at that.
“—is wet,” he goes on, “and fuzzy, and soft as a flower inside, and stretchy—”
“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 hiphuggers, 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.”