John Updike - Terrorist

"I know the feeling. I'm a Jew, and my wife was a Lutheran."

"Was? Did she convert, like Elizabeth Taylor?"

Jack Levy snarls out a chuckle and, still clutching his unwanted college catalogues, admits, "I shouldn't have said 'was.' She never changed, she just doesn't go to church. Her sister on the other hand works for the government in Washington and is very involved in church, like all those born-againers down there. It may be just that around here die only Lutheran church is the Lithuanian, and Elizabeth can't see herself as a Lithuanian."

" ' Elizabeth ' is a pretty name. You can do so much with it. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Betsy. All you can do with Teresa is Terry, which sounds like a boy."

"Or like a male painter."

"You noticed. Yeah, I sign that way because female artists have always seemed smaller than the male ones, no matter how big they painted. This way, I make them guess."

"You can do a lot with 'Terry.' Terry cloth. Terri-ble. Terri-fy. And there's Terrytoons."

"What's that?" she asks in a startled voice. As laid-back as she wants to appear, this is a shaky woman, who married what her harp brothers and father would have called a nigger. Not a mother who'd give a lot of firm guidance; she'd let the kid take charge.

"Oh, something from long ago-animated cartoons at the movie show. You're too young to remember. One of the things when you're ancient, you remember things nobody else does."

"You're not ancient," she says automatically. Her mind switches tracks. "Maybe on television I saw some, when I used to watch with little Ahmad." Her mind switches tracks again. "Omar Ashmawy was handsome. I thought he was like Omar Sharif. Did you ever see him in Doctor ZhivagoV "Only in Funny Girl. And I went to see Streisand." "Of course." She smiles, that short upper lip of hers exposing imperfect Irish teeth, die eyeteeth crowded. She and Jack have reached a stage when anything they say to each other is pleasing, their senses ratcheted up. Sitting with her legs crossed on the high unpainted stool, she preens, stretching her neck and doing a slow shimmy with her back, as if easing out a kink caused by standing at her easel. How seriously can she work at this stuff? He guesses she could slap out three a day if she tried. "Handsome, huh? Does your son-" "And he's a fantastic international bridge player," she says, not jumping her own track.

"Who? Mr. Ashmawy?" he asks, though of course he knows who she means. "No, die other one, silly. Sharif."

"Does your son, I tried to ask him, have a picture of his father in his room?" "What a strange question, Mr. -"

"Come on. Levy. Like a levy of taxes. School taxes, let's say. Or those things that keep the Mississippi from overflowing. Get an association, that's what I do with names. You can do it, Terrytoons."

"What / started to say, Mr. Down-by-the-Levee, was you must be a mind reader. Just this year, Ahmad took the photographs in his room of his father and put them face-down in drawers. He announced it was blasphemy to duplicate the image of a person God had made-a kind of counterfeiting, he explained to me. A rip-off, like those Prada bags the Nigerians sell on the street. My intuition tells me this terrible teacher at the mosque put him up to it."

"Speaking of terri-ble," Jack Levy says quickly. Forty years ago he thought of himself as a wit, quick on the verbal trigger. He even daydreamed about joining a team of joke writers for one of the Jewish comedians on television. Among his peers at college he had been a wise guy, a fast talker. "How terrible?" he asks. "Why terrible?"

Signalling with her hands and eyes toward the other room, where Ahmad might be sitting listening while pretending to study, she drops her voice, so Jack has to move a step closer. "Ahmad often returns disturbed from one of their sessions," she says. "I don't think the man-I've met him, but just barely-shows enough conviction to satisfy Ahmad. I know my son is eighteen and shouldn't be so naive, but he still expects adults to be absolutely sincere and sure of things. Even supernatural things."

Levy likes the way she says "my son." There's a homier feeling here than his interview with Ahmad had led him to expect. She may be one of these single women trying to get by on sheer brass, but she's also some kind of nurturer. "The reason," he tells her, in a conspiratorially lowered voice, "I asked about a picture of his father is that I wondered if his… if this faith of his had to do with a classic overestima-tion. You know-not there, you can do no wrong. You see a lot of that in, in"-why did he keep putting his foot in it?- "black families, the kids idealizing the absent dad and directing all their anger at poor old Mom, who's knocking herself out trying to keep a roof over their heads."

Teresa Mulloy does take offense; she sits so erect on the stool he feels the hard wood circle of the seat biting into her tightened buttocks. "Is that how you see us single moms, Mr. Levy? So thoroughly undervalued and downtrodden?"

Single moms, he thinks. What a cutesy, sentimentalizing, semi-militant phrase. How tedious it makes conversation these days, every possible group except white males on the defensive, their dukes up. "No, not at all," he backtracks. "I see single moms as terrific, Terry-they're all that's holding our society together."

"Ahmad," she says, loosening up a little immediately, the way a responsive woman does, "has no illusions about his father. I've made it very clear to him what a loser his father was. An opportunistic, clueless loser, who hasn't sent us a postcard, let alone a fucking check, for fifteen years."

Jack likes the "fucking"-loosening up fast. She was wearing instead of a painter's smock a man's blue work shirt, the tail hanging down and her breasts shaping the pockets from behind. "We were a disaster," she confides, her voice still kept low, out of Ahmad's hearing. As if stretching within the extra room of this confession, she arches her back, kitten-ishly, perched on the high bare stool, pushing her breasts out an inch farther. "He and I were crazy, thinking we ought to marry. We each thought the other had the answers, when we didn't even speak the same language, literally. Though his English wasn't bad, to be fair. He'd studied it in Alexandria. That was another tiling I fell for, his little bit of an accent, almost a lisp, kind of British. He sounded so refined. And always tidy, shining his shoes, combing his hair. Thick jet-black hair like you never see on an American, a little curl behind die ears and at the neck, and of course his skin, so smooth and even, darker than Ahmad's but perfectly matte, like a cloth that's been dipped, olive-beige with a pinch of lampblack in it, but it didn't come off on your hand-"

My God, Levy thinks, she's getting carried away, she's going to describe his purple third-world prick to me.

She feels his distaste and halts herself, saying, "Don't worry about any overestimation on Ahmad's part. He despises his father, as he should."

"Tell me, Terry. If his father was around, do you think Ahmad'd be settling for driving a truck for a job after graduation, with his SAT scores?"

"I don't know. Omar couldn't have done even that. He would have gotten to daydreaming and drifted off the road. He was a hopeless driver; even then, supposed to be a submissive young wife, I'd take the wheel of the car whenever I was in it. I said to him, 'It's my life, too.' I'd ask him, 'How are you going to be an American if you can't drive a car?' '

How had Omar gotten to be the subject? Is Jack Levy the only person in the world who cares about the boy's future? "You've got to help me," he tells his mother earnestly, "to get Ahmad's future more in line with his potential."

"Oh, Jack," she says, gesturing airily with her cigarette and swaying slightly on her stool, a sibyl on her tripod, pronouncing. "Don't you think people find their potential, like water does its level? I've never believed in people being pots of clay, to be shaped. The shape is inside, from the start. I've treated Ahmad as an equal since he was eleven, when he began to be so religious. I encouraged him at it. I'd pick him up at the mosque after school in the winter months. I must say, this imam of his almost never came out to say hello. He hated shaking my hand, I could tell. He never showed the slightest interest in converting me. If Ahmad had gone the other way, if he had turned against the God racket all the way, the way I did, I would have let that happen, too. Religion to me is all a matter of attitude. It's saying yes to life. You have to have trust that there's a purpose, or you'll sink. When I paint, I just have to believe that beauty will emerge. Painting abstract, you don't have a pretty landscape or bowl of oranges to lean on; it has to come purely out of you. You have to shut your eyes, so to speak, and take a leap. You have to say yes." Having pronounced to her satisfaction, she leans far over to a worktable and crushes out her cigarette in an ashy jar-lid. The effort stretches her shirt tight across her breasts and makes her eyes protrude. She turns those eyes, their glassy pale green, on her guest and adds as an afterthought, "If Ahmad believes in God so much, let God take care of him." She softens what sounds callous and flip in this with a pleading tone: "Your life isn't something to be controlled. We don't control our breathing, our digestion, our heartbeat. Life is something to be lived. Let it happen." It has become weird. She has sensed his trouble, his desolation at four a.m., and is ministering to him, her voice massaging him. He likes it, up to a point, when women start undressing their minds in front of him. But he has stayed too long already. Beth will be wondering; he told her he had to swing by Central High for some college materials. This was not a lie; now he has distributed these materials. "Thanks for the decaf," he says. "I feel sleepy already."