Terrorist (25 page)

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, drag-

ging 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;

it never used to. We'd take die 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 upbeat 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 tJiink recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the odier night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still diere. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated well. My father's absence stood between us, and tJien 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 tiiink 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 die 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 die shadows of the cab and shows him botJi sides of his face. Having done this, Charlie returns his gaze to die shifting lights seen through die 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 diat go with dating, and then the breeding and the buying diat 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 die '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 die customer to buy more dian 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 tlieir shared faith, revealed when the other man spoke of the Jewish usurers. Having been admitted, die 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 appliques 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 die otJier stores are closed. They approach from die west. Next to Excellency Home Furnishings, on the other side of Thirteenth Street, there is a tire store tJiat 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 die lot and wearily clump up onto the resounding loading platform, into die back door and die 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 die 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 fadier, who is working late in his office. "Let yourself out the back when you're done. Put die 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?"