by John Updike
“To be laid, I bet he said.”
“Yes, he did, come to think of it. You don’t hear that word all the time; you hear lots of others. He said he was your boss and here was where you worked. Tylenol was who he originally talked to, but he wanted then to see me and tell me how sweet I should be to this certain boy. He was a tall kind of Arab, with a shifty twitchy mouth. I said to myself, ‘Joryleen, don’t you trust that man,’ but his cash was good. Nice clean bills.”
Ahmad is struck; he would not have described Charlie as an Arab or as shifty. “They’re Lebanese. Charlie’s been raised pure American. He’s not exactly my boss, he’s the son of the owner, and we deliver furniture in a truck together.”
“You know, Ahmad, pardon my saying it, but I would have figured you back in school for something a little above that. Something where you could use your head more.”
“Well, Joryleen, I could say the same about you. The last time I had a good look, you were dressed up in choir robes. What you doing in that hooker outfit, talking about devirginating people?”
Defensively she tips back her head, pushing out her mouth, with its greasy shine of a coral-colored lipstick. “It’s not something permanent,” she explains. “Just a few favors Tylenol asks me to do for people till we get set up and can have a house of our own and all.” Joryleen looks around her and changes the subject. “You mean a bunch of Arabs have all this on their own? Where their money come from?”
“You don’t understand business. You borrow from the bank to create an inventory, and then the interest gets figured into your expenses. That’s called capitalism. The Chehabs came over here in the ’sixties, when everything was easier.”
“I guess it was,” she says, and sits down bouncily on a bare mattress, its pattern of cushioned diamond shapes covered in a silvery brocade. Her little red miniskirt, smaller than a cheerleader’s, allows him to see her thighs, spread fat from the pressure of the mattress edge. He thinks of only her underpants coming between her bare bottom and the fancy ticking; the thought constricts his throat. Everything about her seems to gleam—her hot-pink lipstick, her short hair moussed up into little points like porcupine quills, the gold sparkles sprinkled in the grease around her eyes. She says, to fill his silence, “Those were easy times, compared to nowadays and its job market.”
“Why doesn’t Tylenol get a job for this money he wants?”
“He thinks too big for any old job. He has plans to be a big man some day and meanwhile asks me to put a little bread on the table. He doesn’t ax me to work the street, just oblige somebody now and then, usually some white man. When we’re fixed up and settled down he’s gone to treat me like a queen, he says.” Since high school she has pierced one eyebrow for a little ring to add to the nostril-bead and the silver row of rings that looks like a caterpillar feeding on the upper curve of her ear. “So, Ahmad. No more just standing there staring your face off. What would you like? I could give you a blow job right the way we are and cut down on the mess, but I think your Mr. Charlie had his heart set on your getting a real piece of ass, which involves a scumbag and a wash-up afterwards. He paid me for the full deal, depending on how it suited you. He anticipated you might be shy.”
Ahmad whimpers. “Joryleen, I can’t stand to hear you talk like this.”
“Talk like what way, Ahmad? You still have your head up there in Arab Neverland? I’m just trying to be clear. Let’s get some clothes off and pick one of these beds. Boy, do we have the beds!”
“Joryleen, you keep those clothes on. I respect you the way you used to be, and anyway don’t want to be devirginated, until a lawful marriage to a good Muslim woman, like the Qur’an says.”
“She’s out there in Neverland, baby, and I’m right here and ready to take you around the world.”
“What does that mean, ‘take you around the world’?”
“I can show you. You don’t even have to take off that faggy white shirt, just your black pants. Those are evil tight pants of yours; they used to get me to creaming.”
And, her face at the level of his fly, Joryleen opens her lips, not as wide as when she used to sing, but wide enough so he can see in. The moist inner membranes and gums gleam at the base of her teeth, the perfect pearly arc of them, with the fat pale tongue behind. The whites of her eyes enlarge as she looks a question up into his face.
“Don’t you be disgusting,” he says, though the flesh behind his fly has responded.
Joryleen turns pettish, teasing. “You want me to have to return the money your Mr. Charlie gave? You want Tylenol to beat the shit out of me?”
“Is that what he does?”
“He tries not to mark me up. The older pimps tell him you’re just spiting your own self when you do that.” She stops looking up at him and gently butts him below his belt, twisting her head there like a dog drying off. She looks up again. “Come on, you pretty thing. You like me, I can see you do.” With both sets of long-nailed fingertips she touches the bulge behind his fly.
He jumps back, alarmed less by Joryleen’s caress than by the devil of assent and submission rising within him, stiffening one part of his body and causing a dazed relaxation elsewhere, as if his blood has been injected with a thickening substance; she has roused a sugary reality within him, that of a man coming into his own in the service of the seed he carries. Women are his fields, on couches with linings of brocade shall they recline, and the fruit of the two gardens shall be within easy reach. He tells Joryleen, “I like you too well to treat you like some whore.”
But she is in a crooning mood, amused and challenged by her balky customer. “Just let me take him into my mouth,” she says. “That’s no sin in the old Koran. That’s just natural affection. We’re made for it, Ahmad. And we won’t stay made forever. We get old, we get sick. Be your plain self with me for an hour, and you’ll be doing us both a favor. Wouldn’t you like to play with my nice big tits? I see you looking down my blouse every time we got close at school.”
He holds himself back from her, his calves pressing against the mattress of the next bare bed, but is too dazed by the storm in his blood to protest when in a zigzag set of gestures she cross-handed tugs up her close-fitting little jersey top, pulls it up over her blotchily bleached head of short hair, and, arching her back, uncouples her webby black bra. The brown of her breasts is dark as eggplants in the circles around the meat-colored nipples. Having them there out in the air, purple and rose, looking less enormous than they seemed half concealed, makes her feel, somehow, more like the old friendly Joryleen he used to, slightly, know, her smile both cocky and tentative out by the lockers.
He says, with a thick tongue and dry throat, “I don’t want you telling Tylenol what we did and didn’t do.”
“O.K., I won’t, I promise. He doesn’t like to hear what I do with the tricks anyway.”
“I want you to take off the rest of your clothes and we’ll just lie together a while and talk.”
That he has taken even this much initiative seems to subdue her. She crosses her legs and takes off one pointy white boot and then the other and stands, the top of her spiky blond-spotted head no higher, now that she is barefoot, than the base of Ahmad’s throat. Joryleen bumps against his chest, balancing on one leg and now the other, to pull down her red vinyl skirt and filmy black underpants. This done, she keeps her chin and eyelids lowered, waiting, crossing her arms in front of her breasts as if nudity makes her more modest.
He stands back and says, “Little Miss Popular,” marvelling at the real, bare, vulnerable Joryleen. “We’ll leave my clothes on,” he tells her. “Let me see what I can find for a blanket and some pillows.”
“It’s pretty hot and stuffy up here,” she says. “I’m not sure we need a blanket.”
“A blanket under us,” he explains. “To protect the mattress. You know what a good mattress costs?” Most are protected in thick plastic, but that would make an unpleasant, skin-adhesive surface to lie down on.
“Hey, let’s move this
show along,” she complains. “I’m all undressed—suppose somebody comes up?”
“I’m surprised you care,” he says, “if you turn all those tricks.” He has taken on a responsibility, to create a bower for him and a mate; the sensation excites him but makes him anxious. Turning at the head of the stairs, he sees her, sitting calmly in the lamplight, light another cigarette, and the smoke make that rippling structure in the conical glow. He runs downstairs, rapidly so she won’t evaporate. Amid the furniture in the main showroom he finds no blankets, but he takes two patterned pillows from a chenille-covered sofa and carries up along with them a small Oriental rug, four by six. These hurried tasks cool him off a little, but his legs still tremble.
“’Bout time,” she greets him. He arranges the pillows and rug on the mattress, and she stretches herself out on the rug’s intertwining pattern, bordered in blue—the traditional image, Habib Chehab has explained to him, of an oasis garden, encircled by a river. Joryleen, one arm cocked behind her head on the chenille pillow, exposes a shaved armpit. “Man, this is kinky,” she says as he lies down, shoeless but otherwise clothed, beside her.
His shirt will get wrinkled, but he figures this is part of what this will cost him. “Can I put my arm around you?” he asks.
“Oh, Christ, sure. You’re entitled to a lot more than that.”
“Just this,” he tells her, “is as much as I can stand.”
“O.K. Ahmad: now, you relax.”
“I don’t want to do anything that strikes you as repulsive.”
This makes her smile, and then laugh, so he feels her expressed breath warm on the side of his neck. “That would be harder than you’d like to know.”
“Why do you do it? Let Tylenol send you out like this.”
She sighs, again a gust of life on his neck. “You don’t know much yet about love. He’s my man. Without me, he doesn’t have much. He’d be pathetic, and maybe I love him too much for him to know that. For a black man grown up poor in New Prospect, having a woman to peddle around is no disgrace—it’s a way to prove your manhood.”
“Yeah, but what are you getting to prove?”
“That I can deal with shit, I guess. It’s just for a while. I don’t do drugs, that’s how the girls get hooked, they do the drugs so they can stand the shit, and then the habit becomes the main shit. All I’ll do is grass, and a puff of crack now and then; nobody’s breakin’ into my veins. I can walk away, when circumstances change.”
“Joryleen: how would they change?”
She offers, “He gets set up with some other connection. Or I say I won’t do it any more.”
“I don’t think he will let you go easily now. You yourself say you’re all he has.”
She confesses the truth of this with her silence, a silence that adds a density to her body under his arm. Lightly she presses her belly against his, and her breasts are like sponges of warm water held at the level of his shirt pocket, deepening the wrinkles. At a far reach of him, her toenails—painted plain red, he noticed when she took off her pointy white boots, whereas her fingernails are painted silver and green divided the long way—scratch at his ankles in playful interrogation. These touches from her are wonderfully welcome, washing across his senses with the odors of her hair and scalp and sweat and the velvet abrasion of her voice, close to his ear. He hears in her breath a huskiness with its own tremble. “I don’t want to talk about me,” she tells him. “That kind of talk scares me.” She must be aware, if less intensely than he, of the congested knot of arousal below his waist, but in obedience to the pact he has imposed upon her she does not touch it. He has never had power over anybody before, not since his mother, without a husband, had to worry about keeping him alive.
He persists, “What about all that church singing you were doing? How does that fit in?”
“It doesn’t. I don’t do it any more. My mother doesn’t understand why I’ve dropped out. She says Tylenol is a bad influence. She doesn’t know how right she is. Listen: the deal is you can fuck me, but not grill me.”
“I just want to be with you, as close as I can.”
“Oh, boy. I’ve heard that before. Men, they are all heart. Let’s hear about you, then. How’s old Allah doing? How do you like being holy, now that school’s out and we’re in the real world?”
His lips move an inch from her forehead. He has decided to be open with her, about this thing in his life that his instinct is to protect from everyone, even from Charlie, even from Shaikh Rashid. “I still hold to the Straight Path,” he tells Joryleen. “Islam is still my comfort and guide. But—”
“But what, baby?”
“When I turn to Allah and try to think of Him, it is borne in upon me how alone He is, in all the starry space He has willed into existence. In the Qur’an, He is called the Loving, the Self-Subsistent. I used to think of the love; now I’m struck by the self-subsistence, in all that emptiness. People are always thinking of themselves,” he tells Joryleen. “Nobody thinks of God—if He suffers or not, if He likes being what He is. What does He see in the world, to take any pleasure in it? And to even think of such things, to try to make such pictures of God as a kind of human being, my master the imam would tell me was blasphemy, deserving an eternity of Hellfire.”
“My goodness, what a lot to take on in your own brain. Maybe He gave us each other, so we wouldn’t be as alone as He is. That’s in the Bible, pretty much.”
“Yeah, but what are we? Smelly animals, really, with a little bunch of animal needs, and shorter lives than turtles.”
This—his mentioning turtles—makes Joryleen laugh; when she laughs, her whole naked body jiggles against his, so he thinks of all those intestines, and stomach and things, packed in: she has all that inside her, and yet also a loving spirit, breathing against the side of his neck, where God is as close as a vein. She says to him, “You better get on top of all those weird ideas you have, or they gone to drive you crazy.”
His lips move within an inch of her brow. “At times I have this yearning to join God, to alleviate His loneliness.” No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he recognizes them as blasphemy: in the twenty-ninth sura it is written, Allah does not need His creatures’ help.
“To die, you mean? You’re scaring me again, Ahmad. How’s that prick been poking me doing? We talk it all away?” She touches him, quickly, expertly. “No, man, we didn’t. He’s still there, wanting what he wants. I can’t stand it—can’t stand the suspense. Don’t you do a thing. Allah can blame me. I can take it, I’m just a woman, dirty anyway.” Joryleen puts her hands one on each of his buttocks through the black jeans and by pulling him rhythmically into her pushing softness draws him up and up into a convulsive transformation, a vaulting inversion of his knotted self like that, perhaps, which occurs when the soul passes at death into Paradise.
The two young bodies cling together, panting climbers who have attained a ledge. Joryleen says, “There, now. You got a mess in your pants but we didn’t have to use any scumbag and you’re still a virgin for that bride of yours with the head scarf.”
“The hijab. There may never be such a bride.”
“Why you say that? You’ve got the working parts, and a good nature besides.”
“A feeling,” he answers her. “You may be the closest to a bride I get.” He lightly accuses her, “I didn’t ask you to do that, making me come.”
“I like to earn my money,” she tells him. He is sorry to feel her relax into conversation, receding from the tight, moist seam that made them one body. “I don’t know where you get that bad feeling from, but that Charlie friend of yours has some sort of game going. Why’d he arrange this hook-up, when you didn’t ax for it?”
“He thought it was something I needed. And maybe I did. Thank you, Joryleen. Though, as you said, it was unclean.”
“It’s almost like they’re fattening you up.”
“Who is, for what?”
“Sugar, I don’t know. You heard my advice. Get away from that tru
ck.”
“Suppose I told you to get away from Tylenol?”
“That’s not so easy. He’s my man.”
Ahmad tries to understand. “We seek attachments, however unfortunate.”
“You got it.”
The mess in his underpants is drying, growing sticky; still, he resists when she tries to roll out from under his arm. “Got to go,” Joryleen says.
He hugs her tighter, a little cruelly. “Have you earned your money?”
“Haven’t I? I felt you shoot off, real big.”
He wants to join her in uncleanness. “We didn’t fuck, though. Maybe we should. Charlie would want me to.”
“Getting the idea, huh? Too late this time, Ahmad. Let’s keep you pure for now.”
Night has descended outside the furniture store. They are two beds away from the single lit lamp, and by its dim light her face, on the pillow of white chenille, is a black oval, a perfect oval holding its sparkles and the silvery small movements of her lips and eyelids. She is lost to God but is giving her life for another, so that Tylenol, that pathetic bully, can live. “Do one more thing for me,” Ahmad begs. “Joryleen, I can’t bear to let you go.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Sing to me.”
“Boy. You’re a man, all right. Always wanting one more thing.”
“Just a little song. I loved it, in the church, being able to pick your voice out from all the others.”
“And now somebody’s taught you how to sweet-talk. I got to sit up. You can’t sing lying down. Lying down’s for other things.” This was needlessly coarse of her to say. Her breasts there in the light from the lone lamp in that ocean of mattresses have crescents of shadow beneath their rounded weight; she is eighteen, but already gravity tugs them down. He has an urge to reach out and touch the jut of her meat-colored nipples, to pinch them even, since she is a whore and used to worse, and wonders at this itch of cruelty within him, fighting that tenderness which would seduce him away from his innermost loyalty. He that fights for Allah’s cause, the twenty-ninth sura says, fights for himself. Ahmad closes his eyes as he sees from the tensing little muscles of her lips, with that delicate welt of flesh that runs around their edges, that she is about to sing.