John Updike - Terrorist

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 tugs her close-fitting top out of her little skirt, 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 tJiat 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 anotlier 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 tliat."

"Just this," he tells her, "is as much as I can stand."

"O.K. Ahmad: now, you relax."

"I don't want to do anytliing mat 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^ow 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 die 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 tliey 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 diis 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 die 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 witii 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."