“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 naïve, 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 overestimation. 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, kittenishly, 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 thing 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 the 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.”
“Me, too. And I got to be at work by six.”
“Six?”
“The early shift at Saint Francis’s. I’m a nurse’s aide. I never really wanted to be a nurse, it was too much chemistry and then too much administration; they get to be as pompous as doctors. Nurse’s aides do what nurses used to do. I like hands-on—dealing with people right down there at the level of their real needs. Bedpan level. You didn’t think I made a living out of these?” She gestures, with those short-nailed hands that do things, at her gaudy walls.
“No,” he admits.
She breezes on. “It’s my hobby, my self-indulgence—my bliss, as that man on television used to say a few years ago. Some get bought, sure, but I hardly care. Painting is my passion. Don’t you have a passion, Jack?”
He backs off; she is beginning to look possessed, a priestess on her tripod with snakes in her hair. “Not really.” He gets out of bed in the morning as if pushing aside a blanket of lead, and bulls head-down into his day of waving kids good-bye as they slide off into the world’s morass. “Have you ever thought,” he can’t help adding, “with your nursing, of urging Ahmad to become a doctor? He has a dignity, a presence. I’d trust him with my life, if I were sick.”
Her eyes narrow, turning shrewd and—a word his mother used to use, mostly of other women—common. “It’s a long expensive haul, Jack, a medical education. And the docs I know do nothing but complain about the paperwork and being pushed around by the insurance companies. It used to be a profession where you got a lot of respect and made a fair amount of money. But medicine isn’t the
field it used to be. It’s going to get socialized one way or another eventually, and doctors will be paid like schoolteachers.”
He laughs at this little kick. She has a number of nimble moves. “And that’s not good,” he acknowledges.
“Let him wait for his passion,” she counsels the guidance counselor. “For the moment it’s trucks, getting on the move. He says to me, ‘Mom, I need to see the world.’”
“As I understand the Commercial Driver’s License, all he’ll see until he’s twenty-one is New Jersey.”
“That’s a start,” she says, and nimbly slides off the stool. She has left undone the two top buttons of her paint-smeared man’s work shirt, so he sees the tops of her breasts bounce. This woman has a lot of yes in her.
But the interview is over; it is eight-thirty. Levy lugs the three unwanted college catalogues back through the room where the boy is still studying, and halts at the heavy old dark round table—some kind of inheritance, it reminds him of the heavy sad stuff his parents and grandparents had in the house he grew up in, out on Totowa Road. Approached from behind, Ahmad’s neck looks vulnerably thin, and the tops of his tidy, tight-whorled ears show a few freckles lifted from his mother. Levy gingerly sets the catalogues on the table’s edge and touches the boy’s shoulder, through the white shirt, to get his attention. “Ahmad, look these over sometime when you have a chance, and see if anything here piques your interest enough to discuss it with me. It’s not too late to change your mind about applying.”
The boy feels the touch and responds, “Here’s something interesting, Mr. Levy.”
“What?” He feels closer and easier with the boy, having met his mother.
“Here’s a typical question of the kind they’re going to ask.”
Levy read over his shoulder:
55. You are driving a tank truck and the front wheels begin to skid. Which of these is most likely to occur?
a. You will counter steer as necessary to maintain control.
b. Liquid surge will straighten the trailer out.
c. Liquid surge will straighten the tractor out.
d. You will continue in a straight line and keep moving forward no matter how much you steer.
“Sounds like a pretty bad situation,” Levy admits.
“Which do you think the answer is?”
Ahmad has felt the man approach, and then the presumptuous, poisonous touch on the shoulder. Now he is aware of, too close to his head, the man’s belly, its warmth carrying out with it a smell, several smells—a compounded extract of sweat and alcohol, Jewishness and Godlessness, an unclean scent stirred up by the consultation with Ahmad’s mother, the embarrassing mother he tries to hide, to keep to himself. The two adult voices had intertwined flirtatiously, disgustingly, two aged infidel animals warming to each other in the other room. Mr. Levy, having bathed in her babble, her insatiable desire to press upon the world her sentimental vision of herself, now thinks himself entitled to play with her son a paternal, friendly role. Pity and presumption prompt this unseemly, odorous closeness. Yet the Qur’an urges courtesy upon the faithful; this Jew, though self-invited, is a guest in Ahmad’s tent.
The intruder lazily responds, “I don’t know, my friend. Liquid surge isn’t something I deal with very often. Let me opt for ‘a,’ the counter steering.”
In a quiet voice that conceals the small surge of triumph within him, Ahmad says, “No, ‘d’ is the answer. I looked it up on the answer sheets they give you.”
The belly next to his ear gives off a rumble of disquiet, and the unseen face above it grunts. “Huh. Don’t bother to steer. That’s sort of what your mother was just telling me. Relax. Follow your bliss.”
“After a while,” Ahmad explains, “the truck will lose speed on its own.”
“The will of Allah,” Mr. Levy says, trying to be funny, or friendly: trying to insert himself where Ahmad’s insides are clenched shut, filled with the All-Encompassing.
The interface of Central High and its formerly extensive grounds with the city’s private property has grown more complicated in the years since its playing fields stretched behind it, unfenced, toward a street of Victorian houses so varied and widely spaced as to be suburban. This area, to the northwest of the spectacular City Hall, was a domain of the middle class that pulled its money from the mills along the river, a short walk from the working-class tenements on the lower side of the then-bustling downtown. But the near-suburban houses became, as Jack Levy thinks of it, housing. Cost-cutting contractors broke them into apartments and subdivided their wide lawns or else tore them down to make room for solid blocks of low-rent row houses. The pressure of population and the encroachments of vandalism bore upon the grassy vacancies of school property and eventually caused the football field, which in the spring became a track-meet site, and the baseball grounds, whose outfield became in football season a junior-varsity gridiron, to be moved, in what seemed to various city boards a shrewd and profitable rearrangement, a fifteen-minute bus ride away, to the purchased land of an old dairy farm, Whelan & Sons Dairy, whose milk had contributed calcium to the bones of generations of New Prospect youngsters. The inner-city fields became congested slums.
The great high school and its several outbuildings were then walled off by Italian bricklayers whose work was later topped by glinting coils of razor wire. The immurement was piecemeal, a running response to various complaints and incidents of damage and explosions of spray-painted graffiti. The defaced, rusting fortifications created areas of unintended privacy, such as some square yards of cracked concrete alongside the half-buried yellow-brick edifice housing the giant boilers, originally coal-burning, that send steam, furiously knocking, into every classroom. One yellow-brick wall holds a basketball backboard whose hoop has been bent at a nearly vertical angle by boys imitating the dunk-and-hang style of NBA professionals. Twenty paces away, in the main building, double doors equipped with crash bars inside are in warm weather left propped open; they give onto steel stairs leading down to the basement floor with its locker rooms, boys’ and girls’ on either end, and, in between, the cafeteria and the wood and machine shops for the voke students. Underfoot, the cracks in the concrete hold crabgrass and mullein and dandelions and ridges of the minute particles, shining like coffee grounds, of the underlying earth which ants have brought to the surface. Where the concrete has been thoroughly undermined and pulverized, taller weeds, purslane and snakeroot and bedstraw and a species of daisy, have taken root and extend spindly stems up into the lengthening daylight.
In this gritty and unpoliced area, good for nothing with its deformed basketball hoop but to sneak a smoke or a sniff or a swig or to arrange showdowns between warring boys, Tylenol confronts Ahmad, who is still in his track shorts. A school-operated bus has brought him to the parking lot from practice on the former farm fifteen minutes away. Today he has ten minutes to shower and change and run the seven blocks to the mosque for his biweekly Qur’an lesson; he hoped to save some steps by cutting through to the double doors that should be open. This late after school, the area is usually empty, except for a few ninth-graders who accept the hoop at its ruined angle and use it for shooting baskets anyway. But today a cluster of blacks and Latinos, the gang allegiances declared by the blue and red of the belts on their droopy, voluminous drawers and their headbands and skull-fitting do-rags, are promiscuously mingled, as if the benign weather has declared a truce.
“Hey. You Arab.” Tylenol stands square before him, flanked by several others wearing tight blue muscle shirts. Ahmad feels vulnerable, near-naked in his running shorts, his striped socks and feather-light cleats and sleeveless shirt sweat-soaked back and front in dark butterfly shapes; he has a sense of himself, his long limbs bare, as beautiful, beauty being an affront to the brutes of the world.
“Ahmad,” he corrects, and stands there still with the heat of exertion, the heart-bursting sprints and jumps, rising from his pores. He feels luminous, and Tylenol’s deepset little eyes wince, looking at him.
“Hear you went to church to hear Joryleen sing. How come?”
“She asked me to.”
“Shit she did. You’re an Arab. You don’t go there.”
“I did, though. People were friendly. One family shook my hand and gave me big smiles.”
“They didn’t know about you. You was there under false pretenses.”
Ahmad stands lightly braced, his feet in their weightless shoes spread for balance, against Tylenol’s coming assault.
But the pained squint becomes a smirk. “People seen you two walkin’ after.”
“After church, yes. So?”
Now, surely, the assault will come. Ahmad plans to feint left with his head and then sink his right hand into Tylenol’s soft stomach, and then sharply lift his knee. But his enemy lets his smirk tear open into a grin. “So nothin’, ’cordin’ to her. She had somethin’ she wanted me to tell you.”
“Oh, yes?” The other boys, the blue-shirted minions, are listening. Ahmad’s plan is that, having left Tylenol gasping and doubled up on the crumbling concrete, he will dodge between these astonished others for the relative safety of the school.
“She says she hates you. Joryleen says she don’t give a flying fuck about you. You know what a flying fuck is, Arab?”
“I’ve heard the phrase.” He feels his face go stiff, as if something warm is slowly coating it.
“So I don’t care about you and Joryleen no more,” Tylenol concludes, leaning in closer, almost as if amorous. “We laugh about you, the two of us. Especially when I fuck her. We fuck a lot, lately. A flying fuck is when you do it to yourself, like all you Arabs do. You all faggots, man.”
The little audience around them laughs, and Ahmad knows from the heat on his face that he is blushing. This infuriates him to the point that when he blindly pushes through the muscular bodies toward the doors to the locker room, late now for his shower, late for his lesson, no one moves to stop him. Instead, there are whistles and hoots behind him, as if he is a white girl with pretty legs.