Terrorist

take.

'Maybe,' he tells her. 'But something's throwing him off.' Jack gets down to the business he came for. 'Listen. He doesn't want to be a truck driver.'

'He doesn't? He thinks he does, Mr.-'

'Levy, Teresa. Like in 'Down by the levee' but spelled differently. Somebody's putting pressure on Ahmad, for whatever reason. He can do better than be a trucker. He's a smart, clean-cut kid, with a lot of inner-directedness. What I want him to have are some catalogues for colleges around here where it's not too late for admission. Princeton and Penn, it's way too late, but New Prospect Community College – you have to know where that is, up past the falls-and Fair-leigh Dickinson and Bloomfield, he might get in, and could commute to any of them if you can't swing room and board. The thing would be to get him started somewhere and, depending how he does, hope to transfer up. Any college these days, the way the politics of it are, wants diversity, and your boy, what with his self-elected religious affiliation, and, pardon me for saying it, his ethnic mix, is a kind of minority's minority-they'll snap him up.'

'What would he study at college?'

'What anybody studies-science, art, history. The story of mankind, of civilization. How we got here, what now. Sociology, economics, anthropology even-whatever turns him on. Let him feel his way. Few college students nowadays know what they want to do at first, and the ones that do get their minds changed. That's the purpose of college, to let you change your mind, so you can handle the twenty-first century. Me, I can't. When I was in college, who ever heard of computer science? Who knew about genomes and how they can track evolution? You, you're a lot younger than I, maybe you can. These new-style paintings of yours-you're making a start.'

'They're very conservative, really,' she says. 'Abstraction's old hat.' The open set of her lips has closed; his remark about painting was dumb.

He hurries to finish his pitch. 'Now, Ahmad-'

'Mr. Levy. Jack.' She has become a different person, sitting widi her too-hot decaf on a kitchen stool bought unpainted and never varnished. She lights a cigarette and props one foot, in a crepe-soled blue canvas shoe, on a rung and crosses her legs. Her pants, tight white jeans, bare her ankles. Blue veins wander through die white skin, Irish-white skin; the ankles are bony and lean, considering die soft heft of the rest of her. Beth's weight has had twenty more years than this woman's to settle low, drooping over her shoes and taking all the anatomy out of her ass. Jack, though he used to be a two-packs-a-day Old Golds man, has grown unused to people smoking, even in the school's faculty room, and the smell of burning tobacco is deeply familiar to him but verges on being scandalous. The stylized acts of lighting up, inhaling, and hurling smoke violently out of her pursed lips give Terry-how her paintings are signed, big and legibly, with no last name-an edge. 'Jack, I appreciate your interest in Ahmad and would have been more so if die school had shown any interest in my son before a month before graduation.'

'We're swamped over there,' he interrupts. 'Two thousand students, and half of them it would be kind to call dysfunctional. The squeakiest wheels get the attention. Your son never made trouble, was his mistake.'

'Regardless, at diis phase of his development he sees what college offers, those subjects you name, as part of godless Western culture, and he doesn't want more of it than he absolutely can't avoid. You say he never made trouble, but it was more tiian that: he sees his teachers as die troublemakers, worldly and cynical and just in it for the paycheck-the short hours and summer vacations. He thinks they set poor examples. You've heard die expression, 'above it all'?'

Levy merely nods, letting this now-cocky woman run on. What she might tell him about Ahmad could be a help.

'My son is above it all,' she states. 'He believes in the Islamic God, and in what the Koran tells him. I can't, of course, but I've never tried to undermine his faith. To someone without much of one, who dropped out of die Catholic package when she was sixteen, his faith seems rather beautiful.'

Beauty, then, is what makes her tick-attempts at it on the wall, all that sweet-smelling paint drying, and letting her boy hang out to dry in grotesque, violent superstition. Levy asks, 'How did he get to be so-so good? Did you set out to raise him as a Muslim?'

'No, Christ,' she says, dragging deep, playing die tough girl, so that her roused eyes seem to burn along with die tip of the cigarette. She laughs, having heard herself. 'How do you like that for a Freudian slip? 'No, in nomine Domini.' Islam meant nothing to me-less than nothing, to be accurate: it had a negative rating. And it meant not much more to his father. Omar never went to a mosque that I could see, and whenever I'd try to raise the subject he'd clam up, and look sore, as if I was pushing in where I had no business. 'A woman should serve a man, not try to own him,' he'd say, as if he were quoting some kind of Holy Writ. He'd made it up. What a pompous, chauvinistic horse's ass he was, really. But I was young and in love-in love mostly with him being, you know, exotic, third-world, put-upon, and my marrying him showing how liberal and liberated I was.'

'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