Terrorist

by John Updike

  “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 Terror. 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 crêpey, 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 the 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, señor.”

  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 there 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 that 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.

  Ahmad sees his mother as an aging woman still in her heart a girl, playing at art and love—for she is alive lately with a preoccupation in which her son detects a new lover, though this one, unlike the run of them, does not come around to the apartment and vie with Ahmad for dominance of the premises. She may be your mother but I fuck her, their manner said, and this too was American, this valuing of sexual performance over all family ties. The American way is to hate one’s family and flee from it. Even the parents conspire in this, welcoming signs of independence from the child and laughing at disobedience. There is not that bonding love which the Prophet expressed for his daughter Fatimah: Fatimah is a part of my body; whoever hurts her, has hurt me, and whoever hurts me has hurt God. Ahmad does not hate his mother; she is too scattered to hate, too distracted by her pursuit of happiness. Though they still live together in that apartment perfumed with the sweet and acrid odors of oil paints, she has as little to do with the self he presents to the daytime world as do the pajamas, greasy with sweat, that he sleeps in at night and sheds before the shower through which he hurries into the morning purity of the working day, and his mile walk to work. For some years it has been awkward, their bodies sharing the limited space of the apartment. Her ideas of healthy behavior include appearing before her son in her underwear or a summer nightie that allows the shadows of her private parts to show through. On the summer street she wears halters and miniskirts, blouses unbuttoned at the top and low-slung jeans tightest where she is fullest. When he rebukes her attire as improper and provocative, she mocks and teases him as if he is flirting with her. Only at the hospital, with pale-green scrubs, decently baggy, worn over her indiscreet street clothes, does she meet the Prophet’s injunction to women, in the twenty-fourth sura, to throw veils over their bosoms and to display their ornaments only to their husbands and fathers and sons and brothers and slaves and eunuchs and, the Book emphasizes, children who note not women’s nakedness. As a child of ten or less, he more than once, to patch over the lack of a babysitter, waited for her at Saint Francis’s and would rejoice to see her flushed with the hurry of her job, muffled below the waist in scrub pants and thick-soled running shoes, with no bangles to break the silence. A tense moment was reached when, at fifteen, he became taller than she, and sprouted a dark down on his upper lip: still under forty, she still foolishly hoped to catch a man, to pluck a rich doctor from the midst of his harem of comely young attendants, and her teen-age son was betraying her as middle-aged.

  From Ahmad’s standpoint she looked and acted younger than a mother should. In the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, women withdrew into wrinkles and a proud shapelessness; an indecent confusion between a mother and a mate was not possible. Praise Allah, Ahmad never dreamed of sleeping with his mother, never undressed her in those spaces of his brain where Satan thrusts vileness upon the dreaming and the daydreaming. In truth, insofar as the boy allows himself to link such thoughts with the image of his mother, she is not his type. Her flesh, mottled with pink and dotted with freckles, seems unnaturally white, like a leper’s; his taste, developed in his years at Central High, is for darker skins, cocoa and caramel and chocolate, and for the alluring mystery of eyes whose blackness, opaque at first glance, deepens to the purple of plums or the glinting brown of syrup—what in the Qur’an figure as large dark eyeballs, kept close in their pavilions. The Book promises: And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds. Ahmad regards his mother as a mistake that his father made but that he never would.

  Charlie is married, to a Lebanese woman Ahmad sees rarely, coming into the store toward closing hour, at the end of her own day’s work, which was performed in a legal office where tax forms are filled out for those who cannot do it for themselves, and where paper intercessions are made with the governments of the city, the state, and the nation as each exacts its tribute from all citizens. There is a mannish air to her Western dress and pants suits, and only her olive complexion and thick, untrimmed eyebrows distinguish her from a kafir. Her hair bushes out to several inches all around her head, but in the photograph Charlie keeps on his desk she is wearing an extensive head scarf that conceals every hair, and smiles above the faces of two small children. He never speaks of her, yet speaks of women often, especially the women who appear on television commercials.

  “Did you see the one on the Levitra ad for guys who can’t get it up?”

  “I rarely watch television,” Ahmad tells him. “Now that I am no longer a child, it does not interest me.”

  “Well, it should—how can you know what the corporations that run this country are doing to us if you don’t? The one in the Levitra ad is my idea of absolute pussy, purring away about her ‘guy’ and how he likes ‘quality’ in his erections—she doesn’t say ‘erections’ but that’s what the whole ad is about, pricks getting hard enough, erectile dysfunction is the biggest thing the drug-makers have hit upon since Valium—and the way she gazes off into the middle distance and gets misty-eyed, you can just see, see through a woman’s eyes, this big stiff prick of his, hard as a rock, and her mouth does this funny little thing—she has a great mouth—it kind of ripples, the tiny little muscles in the lips, so you know she’s picturing it, thinking of blowing it—the perfect mouth for cocksucking—and then, looking, you know, all kind of misty and smug and sexually satisfied, she turns to the guy—some male model, probably gay in his real life—and, quick as a wink, says, ‘Look at that!’ and touches his cheek where he was making a dimple, listening sheepishly to her talking about how great he is. You wonder how the hell they did it—how many takes on videotape before she thought of it, or if the scriptwriter for the commercial thought of it and wrote it out ahead of time—but it seems so spontaneous, you wonder how they got her to look so sexed-up. She really has that happily fucked look women get, you know? And it’s not just the soft focus.”

  This, Ahmad thinks to himself a little mournfully, is male talk, which he, in his severe white shirt and black jeans, skirted the edges of in high school, and which his father might have provided in measured and less obscene fashion, had Omar Ashmawy waited to play a father’s role. Ahmad is grateful to Charlie for including him in the club of male friendship. Fifteen or more years older than he, and married though he doesn’t sound it, Charlie seems to assume that Ahmad knows everything he knows, or that if not he wants to know it. The boy finds it easier to talk to Charlie sideways, staring ahead through the truck windshield and with his hands on the wheel, than he does face to face. He tells him, blushing in exposing his piety, “I do not find that television encourages clean thoughts.”

  “Hell, no. Wake up: it’s not meant to. Most of it is just crap they put out to fill in between the commercials. That’s what I’d love to be doing, if I didn’t have Dad’s business to keep from going under. His brother got it going with him and now sits down there in Florida bleeding us dry with his cut. I’d love to make commercials. Planning it out, putting together the elements—the director, the cast, the sets, the script; those things have to have a script—and then socking John Q. Public with it, right in the kisser, so he can’t ever think straight again. Your gut to his gut, telling him what he can’t live without. What else do they give us, these media moguls? The news is sob-sister stuff—Diane Sawyer, the poor Afghani babies, boo-hoo-hoo—or else straight propaganda; Bush complains about Putin turning into Stalin, but we’re worse than the poor old clunky Kremlin ever was. The Commies just wanted to brainwash you. The new powers that be, the international corporations, want to wash your brains away, period. They want to turn you into machines for consuming—the chicken-coop society. All this entertainment—Madman, it’s
crap, the same crap that kept the masses zombified in the Depression, only then you stood in line and paid a quarter for the movie, where today they hand it to you free, with the advertisers paying a million a minute for the chance to mess with your heads.”

  Ahmad, steering, tries to agree: “It is not on the Straight Path.”

  “You kidding? It’s the Yellow Brick Road, paved with insidious intentions.” In-sid-i-ous, Ahmad thinks, recalling the last time he was preached at. In the side of his field of vision he sees sparks of saliva spray from Charlie’s mouth in his hurry to speak. “Sports,” the man spits out. “They pay zillions for the rights to televise sports. It’s reality without being real. The money has ruined the professional leagues; nobody sticks with their team any more, they jump ship for another fifteen mill when already they can’t count the money they have. There used to be team loyalty and some regional identification, but the morons in the stands don’t know what they’re missing. They think this has always been it, greedy players and records broken every year. Barry Bonds—he’s better than Ruth, better than DiMaggio, but who can love that juiced-up surly bastard? Fans now don’t know about love. They don’t care about it. Sports are like video games; the players are holograms. You listen to these radio talk shows and want to say to these Cheeseheads or Jetheads or whatever who spout off endlessly, ‘Oh, please, get a fucking life.’ My God, the poor saps have all these statistics memorized, as if they’re getting paid A-Rod’s salary. And the so-called comedies the networks dish up—Jesus—who’s laughing? It’s slop. And Leno and Letterman, more slop. But the commercials, they are fantastic. They’re like Fabergé eggs. When somebody in this country wants to sell you something, they really buckle down. They get intense. You watch the same commercial twenty times, you see how every second has been weighed out in gold. They’re full of what physicists call information. Would you know, for example, that Americans were as sick as they are, full of indigestion and impotence and baldness, always wetting their pants and having sore assholes, if you didn’t watch commercials? I know you say you never watch it, but you really shouldn’t miss this Ex-Lax commercial with this cute dish with long straight hair and Waspy long teeth who looks out through the camera and tells you, just you, sitting there with your bag of Fritos, that she has a weakness for junk food—skinny as a rail, with a weakness for junk food supposedly—and has to battle constipation sometimes? How old is she? Twenty-five if that, and as buff as Lance Armstrong, and you can bet she hasn’t missed taking a dump for a day in her life, but the Ex-Lax CEO wants the old ladies out there not to be ashamed of their plugged-up colons. ‘Look,’ he’s saying to them, the Ex-Lax CEO is saying, ‘even a snappy Waspy chick like this can’t always take a shit, or keep her underpants dry on the golf course, or her hemorrhoids from ruining her day in the bleachers; so, Grandma, you’re not some old piece of crud on the trash heap, you’re in the same boat with these young glamour pusses!’”