Terrorist

by John Updike

  The Irish in her, he thinks. That’s what he loves, that’s what he can’t do without. The moxie, the defiant spark of craziness people get if they’re sat on long enough—the Irish have it, the blacks and Jews have it, but it’s died in him. He wanted to be a comic but he’s become a humorless enforcer of a system that doesn’t believe in itself. All those mornings waking up too early, he was giving himself time to die in. Learn to die in your spare time. What did Emerson say about being dead? At least you’re done with the dentist. That struck him forty years ago, when he could still read something that mattered. This zaftig redhead isn’t dead yet, and she knows it. But he has to protest to her, of Beth, “Let’s leave her out of it. She can’t help the shape she’s in.”

  “Oh, crap. If she can’t, who can? As to leaving her out of it, I’d have loved to, Jack, but you can’t. You bring her with you. There’s a look on your face, a look that says, ‘So help me, dear Lord, this is just for an hour.’ You treat me like a fifty-minute class period at school. I can feel you waiting for the buzzer.” This is the way, she thinks. This is the way to repel him, to make herself repulsive—attack his wife. “You’re married, Jack. You’re too fucking married for me.”

  “No.” It comes out as a whimper.

  “You are,” Terry tells him. “I tried to forget it, but you wouldn’t let me. I give up. For my own sake, Jack, I got to give up. Let me go now.”

  “What about Ahmad?”

  This surprises her. “What about him?”

  “I worry about him. Something’s fishy with this furniture store.”

  Her temper is getting short; it has not been helped by Jack’s lying there in the sweaty warmth of her bed as if he was still her lover and had some rights of tenancy. “So what?” she says. “Something’s fishy everywhere these days. I can’t live Ahmad’s life for him, and I can’t live yours. I wish you well, Jack, I truly do. You’re a sweet, sad man. But if you call me or come around after you go out the door today, it’ll be harassment.”

  “Hey, don’t,” he says brokenly, just wanting things back the way they were an hour ago, she greeting him with a wet kiss that carried down to their groins, the apartment door not even closed behind them. He liked having a woman on the side. He liked her baggage: her being a mother, her being a painter, her being a nurse’s aide, forgiving of other people’s bodies.

  She gets out of the bed that smells of them both. “Let go, Jack,” she tells him, standing just out of his arm’s reach. With a wary quickness she bends down to retrieve some of her clothes where she dropped them. Her tone is getting pedagogic, scolding. “Don’t be a leech. I bet you’re a leech on Beth, too. Sucking, sucking the life out of a woman, dragging her down into your feeling so sorry for yourself. No wonder she eats. I’ve given what I can, Jack, and must move on. Please. Don’t make it hard.”

  He begins to resent and resist this cunt’s scolding tone. “I can’t believe this is happening, for no reason,” he says. He feels soft, too limp and damp to get out of her bed; her image of a leech has penetrated him. Maybe she’s right; he’s a burden on the world. He stalls. “Let’s give ourselves some time to think about it,” he says. “I’ll call you in a week.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  This imperious command gets his goat; he snaps, “What’s your reason again? I missed it.”

  “You teach school, you’ve heard of a clean slate.”

  “I’m a guidance counselor.”

  “Well, give yourself some guidance. Clean up your act.”

  “If I got rid of Beth, what would happen then?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing much, probably. Anyway, how would you get rid of her?”

  Indeed, how? Terry’s bra is back on, and her jeans are being angrily tugged up, his inert nakedness becoming increasingly shameful and abject. He says, “O.K. Enough said. Sorry if I’ve been thick.” Still he keeps lying there. A melody from long ago, when the downtown bristled with movie marquees, enters his head—a cascading, slippery tune. He croons the concluding phrase: “Deedee-dit-da-dat-daaa.”

  “What’s that?” she asks, angry though she has won.

  “Not a Terry tune. Another kind, Warner Brothers. At the end a stuttering pig would pop out of a drum and say, “Thth-that’s all, folks!”

  “You’re not cute, you know.”

  He kicks off the sheet. He likes the feel of being a naked hairy animal, spent genitals flopping, yellow-soled feet smelling cheesy; he likes the flare of alarm in the other animal’s glassy bulging eyes. Standing naked, his creased and sagging sexagenarian self, Jack Levy tells her, “I’ll miss the hell out of you.” As the cool air licks his skin, he remembers reading years ago how that paleontologist Leakey, who found the world’s oldest human in the Olduvai Gorge, claimed that a naked human being could run down and kill bare-handed any prey, even a toothed predator, smaller than he. He feels that potential within him. He could wrestle this smaller member of his own species to the floor and strangle her. “You were my last—” he begins.

  “Your last what? Piece of ass? That’s your problem, not mine. You can hire it, you know.” Her freckled face is pink with defiance. She doesn’t get it, that she doesn’t have to fight him, being crude and spelling everything out. He knows when he’s flunked the course. He feels his exposed flesh as dead weight.

  “Hey, Terry, easy. My last reason to live, I was going to say. My last reason for joie de vivre.”

  “Don’t do a sentimental kike number on me, Jack. I’ll miss you, too.” Then she has to add hurtfully, “For a while.”

  Charlie greets Ahmad one morning early in September saying, “This is your lucky day, Madman!”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll see.” Charlie has been sober yet brusque lately, as if something is eating at him, but whatever this surprise is pleases him so simply that, seen from the side, the corner of his restless mouth tucks into his cheek with a smile. “First, we got a ton of deliveries, one of them way down to Camden.”

  “Do they need both of us? I don’t mind doing it alone.” He has come to prefer it. In the solitude of the cab he is not alone, God is with him. But God is Himself alone, He is the ultimate of solitude. Ahmad loves his lonely God.

  “Yep, they do. One’s a Hide-A-Bed, they weigh a fucking ton with all that internal metal, and the Camden delivery is an eighty-eight-inch all-actual-leather nail-head sofa, with flared arms. But you mustn’t lift by the arms; they crack right off, as one of your predecessors and I discovered. Marked down from over a thousand, for the waiting room of a fancy clinic for disturbed children.”

  “Disturbed?”

  “Who isn’t, right? Anyway, with the two matching armchairs it’s a two-grand deal, and we don’t get those every day of the week. Watch that oil truck on your left; I think the bastard’s stoned.”

  But Ahmad already has his eye on the speeding, grimy Getty tanker, wondering if the driver is taking sufficient account of liquid surge and other factors requiring caution. September brings with it an extra danger on the streets and highways, as returning vacationers jostle and joust for their old place in the pack. “Excellency is heading upscale,” Charlie is saying, “with all these new houses selling for a million up. Have you noticed, on the quiz shows, the audience no longer laughs when you say you’re from New Jersey? We’re getting to be Connecticut South, only a tunnel away from Wall Street. My dad and uncle, they thought modest—stained poplar and stapled vinyl for the masses—but now we get these white-collar commuters from Montclair and Short Hills who think nothing of forking over two grand for a bone leather sectional or three for an Old World–style dining suite, say, with a matching Gothic-style curio cabinet and everything carved oak. Stuff like that moves these days; it never used to. We’d take the odd quality piece at an estate clearance and have it on the floor for years. There’s new money even in poor old New Prospect.”

  “It is good,” Ahmad says cautiously, “that business thrives.” He dares to add, seeking harmony with Charlie’s upb
eat mood, “Perhaps the new customers expect to find a cash bonus tucked into the cushions.”

  Charlie’s profile doesn’t acknowledge any joke. He keeps his tone offhand. “We’ve done our payouts for now. Uncle Maurice has headed back to Miami. Now we’re the ones waiting for delivery.” His tone becomes less offhand; he says, “Madman, you don’t talk about your job here with anybody, do you? The details. Anybody ever quiz you? Your mother, say? Any guys that she dates?”

  “My mother is too self-absorbed to spare me much curiosity. She is relieved I have steady employment, and contribute now to our expenses. But we come and go in our apartment as strangers.” This is not quite true, it occurs to him. The other night, during an unusual, well-cooked dinner together at the old round table where he used to study, she asked him if he had ever felt anything “fishy” at the furniture store. Not at all, he told her. He is learning to lie. To be honest with Charlie, he tells him, “I think recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the other night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still there. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated well. My father’s absence stood between us, and then my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and no doubt cares for her hospital patients, but I think has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother’s enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference.”

  “How does she feel about your not having a girlfriend?”

  “I think she is relieved, if anything. An attachment to my life would complicate hers. Another woman, however young, might begin to judge her and hold her to a certain standard of conventional behavior.”

  Charlie interrupts: “There’s a left turn coming—I think not this light but the next—where we get Route 512 to Summit, where we drop off the dinette set with the cinnamon finish. So you haven’t gotten laid yet?” He takes Ahmad’s silence to confirm his assertion, and says, “Good.” The dimpling smile has returned to his profile. Ahmad is so used to seeing Charlie in profile that it shocks him when the man turns in the shadows of the cab and shows him both sides of his face. Having done this, Charlie returns his gaze to the shifting lights seen through the windshield. “You’re right about Western advertisers,” he says, picking up an old thread between them. “They push sex because it means consumption. First the liquor and flowers that go with dating, and then the breeding and the buying that goes with that, baby food and SUVs and—”

  “Dinette sets,” Ahmad supplies.

  When Charlie is not kidding he is so serious he invites teasing. The lone eye in his profile blinks and his mouth makes a swigging motion, as if he has tasted a sour truth. “A bigger house, I was going to say. These young couples spend and go deeper and deeper into debt, which is just what the Jewish usurers want. It’s the ‘buy now, pay later’ trap—very seductive.” But he did hear the teasing; he goes on, “Sure, we’re merchants. But Dad’s idea was, reasonable prices. Don’t encourage the customer to buy more than he can afford. Bad for him, and eventually bad for us. We didn’t even accept credit cards until a couple years ago. Now we do. One must join the system,” he says, “until the moment.”

  “The moment?”

  “The moment to give it a blow from within.” He sounds impatient. He seems to think Ahmad knows more than he does.

  Ahmad asks him, “When does such a moment arrive?”

  Charlie ponders. “It arrives when it has been created. It can be never, or can be sooner than we think.”

  Ahmad feels he is balanced on a scaffolding of straws, in the dizzying space of their shared faith, revealed when the other man spoke of the Jewish usurers. Having been admitted, the boy feels, to a rare level of Charlie’s confidence, he in turn confides, “I have a God to whom I turn five times a day. My heart needs no other companion. The obsession with sex confesses the infidels’ emptiness, and their terror.”

  Charlie says, perking up, “Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Here we are. Number eight eleven Monroe. One cinnamon dinette set, coming up. One table, four chairs.”

  The house is a hybrid colonial, red brick and white wood, on a well-watered small lawn. The young lady of the house, Chinese-American, comes out on her flagstone walk to greet them. As the two men carry in chairs and an oval table, her two children, a kindergarten-age girl in hot-pink overalls with duckling appliqués and a male toddler in a food-stained T-shirt and a sagging diaper, stare and cavort as if another set of siblings is being delivered. The young mother in her happiness of fresh acquisition offers to tip Charlie a ten, but he waves it away, giving her a lesson in American equality. “It’s been our pleasure,” he tells her. “Enjoy.”

  There are fourteen more deliveries that day, and by the time they get back from Camden long shadows have crept across Reagan Boulevard, and the other stores are closed. They approach from the west. Next to Excellency Home Furnishings, on the other side of Thirteenth Street, there is a tire store that used to be a service station, with the gas island still in place though the pumps are gone, and next to it a funeral home, converted from a private mansion before this section of town went commercial, with a deep porch and white awnings and a discreet sign, UNGER & SON, out on the lawn. They park the truck in the lot and wearily clump up onto the resounding loading platform, into the back door and the hall, where Ahmad punches his card on the time clock. “Don’t forget, you have a surprise,” Charlie tells him.

  The reminder surprises Ahmad; in the course of the long day he has forgotten. He has outgrown games.

  “It’s waiting upstairs,” says Charlie in a voice too soft to be heard by his father, who is working late in his office. “Let yourself out the back when you’re done. Put the alarm on when you go.”

  Habib Chehab, bald as a mole in his musty underworld of furniture new and used, emerges from behind his office door. He looks pale even after a summer of Pompton Lakes, with a sickly puffiness to his face, but he says cheerfully to Ahmad, “How’s the boy?”

  “I can’t complain, Mr. Chehab.”

  The old man contemplates his young driver, feeling a need to say something additional, to cap a summer’s worth of faithful service. “You the best boy,” he says. “Hundreds of miles, two, three hundred miles many days, not a dent, not a scrape. No speeding ticket, either. Excellent.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s been my pleasure”—a phrase, he realizes, he heard from Charlie earlier in the day.

  Mr. Chehab looks at him curiously. “You going to stay with us, now Labor Day here?”

  “Sure. What else? I love driving.”

  “I just thought, boys like you—bright, obedient—go for more education.”

  “People have suggested it, sir, but I don’t feel the need yet.” More education, he feared, might weaken his faith. Doubts he had held off in high school might become irresistible in college. The Straight Path was taking him in another, purer direction. He couldn’t explain this very well. Ahmad wonders how much the old man knows of the smuggled cash, of the four men in the Shore cottage, of his own son’s anti-Americanism, of his brother’s connections in Florida. It would be strange if he were totally ignorant of these currents; but, then, families, as Ahmad knows from his own family of two, are nests of secrets, of eggs that lightly touch but hold each its own life.

  As the two men move toward the back door to the parking lot and their own separate cars—Habib’s Buick, Charlie’s Saab—Charlie repeats his instructions to Ahmad about activating the alarm and closing the door with its oiled double lock. Mr. Chehab asks, “The boy stays?”

  Charlie puts a hand on his father’s back to urge him forward. “Papa, I’ve given Ahmad an assignment to do upstairs. You trust him to close up, don’t you?”

  “Why ask? He is good boy. Like family.”

  “Actually,” Ahmad hears Charlie explaining to his father on the loading porch, “the
kid has a date and wants to freshen up and put on clean clothes.”

  Date? Ahmad thinks. He has already figured out the surprise Charlie has for him: it will be a hassock, like the one he delivered, stuffed with money, an end-of-summer bonus. But as if to make Charlie’s lie to his father good, Ahmad does, in the little lavatory next to the water cooler, scrub the day’s grime from his hands and splash water on his face and neck before making his way toward the stairs, in the middle of the store, up to the second floor. With silent steps he climbs them. The second floor displays beds and dressers, side tables and armoires, mirrors and lamps. These things bulk in the dim light of a distant bedside lamp, while the headlights of the evening rush flicker at the high windows. Unlit lampshades knife into the shadows with their acute angles; overhead fixtures dangle spiderlike. There are padded headboards, and headboards of florid wooden shapes, and others of parallel rods of brass. Bare mattresses, side by side on both sides, present a pair of receding planes raised up by the thickness of box springs mounted on metal frames. As he moves between the two receding planes, his heart beats and his nose is touched by forbidden cigarette smoke and his ears by a familiar voice. “Ahmad! They didn’t tell me it would be you.”

  “Joryleen? Is that you? They didn’t tell me anything.”

  The black girl steps out from behind the low-lit lamp-shade, under which the smoke from her cigarette, suddenly doused in an ashtray improvised from a candy bar’s tinfoil wrap, stands up like a piece of sculpture, slowly twisting. As his eyes adjust he sees that she is wearing a red vinyl miniskirt and tight black top with a low oval neckline like that of a ballet leotard. Her roundnesses have been poured somehow into a new mold, narrower at the waist; her jaw is leaner. Her hair is cut shorter and splashed with blond bleach, the way it never was at Central High. Looking lower, he sees she is wearing white boots with zigzag stitching and long pointed toes, the new kind with lots of spare room in the front. “All I was told was to wait for this boy that needs to be devirginated.”