John Updike - Terrorist

"I need you, Terry."

"You do and you don't. You tliink my painting's a crock-"

"Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if BetJi-"

"If Beth had an extra dimension, she'd break through the floor." She laughs at diis image, sitting up in bed so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half witii tiie nipple untouched by die sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there.

The Irish in her, he thinks. That's what he loves, that's what he can't do witJiout. 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 tb.ink 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 witJi movie marquees, enters his head-a cascading, slippery tune. He croons the concluding phrase: "Deedee-dit-dtf- dat-daaa. "

"What's that?" she asks, angry tiiough she has won.

"Not a Terry tune. Another kind, Warner Brotliers. At the end a stuttering pig would pop out of a drum and say, "Th-th-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;