How has he gotten this far, to the door? The apartment building is one of three erected twenty-five years ago to displace row houses so run-down and drugs-plagued that the administrators of New Prospect thought that ten-story stacks of mixed-income housing had to be an improvement. In addition, they calculated, the land taken under the right of eminent domain could be used for a park with recreational areas and, in the bargain, a curving parkway speeding commerce with towns where a “better element” prevailed. Yet, as with draining malarial land, problems returned: the sons of former drug dealers took up the trade, and addicts used the park benches and bushes and the apartment-house stairways, and raced back and forth in the hallways at night. The original plan called for a security guard at each entrance, but the city had to effect budget cuts, and the little offices with television monitors showing halls and doorways were erratically manned. Back in 15 minits, a hand-lettered sign would say for hours at a time. This time of evening, residents and visitors usually walked right in. Mr. Levy must have walked in and studied the mailboxes and taken the elevator and knocked on their door. Here he was, standing in the space this side of the door, off the kitchen, describing himself in a louder, more formal voice than he had used with Ahmad in the guidance conference. Then, he had seemed insinuating, lazy, and bone-weary. Ahmad’s mother’s face is flushed and her voice high and quick; she is excited by this visit from a representative of the distant bureaucracy that hovers above their lonely lives.
Mr. Levy senses her excitement and tries to put a calm face on things. “I apologize for invading your privacy,” he says to a point midway between the standing mother and the sitting son, who does not get up from the brown table. “But when I tried the phone number on Ahmad’s school records, I got a recording saying it had been disconnected.”
“We had to, after Nine-Eleven,” she explains, still a little breathless. “We were getting hate calls. Anti-Muslim. I had the number changed and unlisted, even if it does cost a couple dollars a month more. It’s worth it, I tell you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs.—Ms.—Mulloy,” the guidance counselor says, and he does seem sorry, above and beyond his usual sad look.
“There were just one or two calls,” Ahmad interposes. “No big deal. Most people were cool. I mean, I was only fifteen when it happened. Who could blame me?”
His mother, with that infuriating way she has of making something of nothing, says, “It was more than one or two, I can tell you, Mr. Levine.”
“Levy.” He still wants to explain why he has shown up. “I could have called Ahmad to my office at the school, but it was you I wanted to speak to, Ms. Mulloy.”
“Teresa, please.”
“Teresa.” He comes to the table and looks over Ahmad’s shoulder. “At it already, I see. Studying for the CDL. As you realize, I’m sure, until you’re twenty-one you can’t get better than a ‘C’ rating. No tractor trailers, no hazardous materials.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ahmad says, pointedly looking down at the page he was trying to study. “But it’s interesting, it turns out. I wanted to learn it all, while I’m at it.”
“Good for you, my friend. For a young man as bright as you are, it should all be pretty simple.”
Ahmad isn’t afraid of arguing with Mr. Levy. He tells him, “There’s more to it than you’d think. There’s a lot of strict rules, and then there’s all the parts of the truck and what you should do for maintenance. You don’t want your truck to break down, it can be dangerous.”
“O.K., you keep at it, son. Don’t let it get in the way of your schoolwork, though; there’s still a month to go, with a lot of exams. You want to graduate, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.” He doesn’t want to argue over everything, though in truth he resents the hint of a threat. They’re dying to graduate him, get rid of him. And graduate into what? An imperialist economic system rigged in favor of rich Christians.
Mr. Levy, hearing his surly tone, asks, “Do you mind if I talk a minute with your mother?”
“No. Why would I? And what if I did?”
“You want to see me?” the woman affirms, to cover up her son’s rudeness.
“Very briefly. Again, Mrs.—Ms.—whatever: Teresa!—I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m the kind of guy, when something is bothering me, my mind won’t let me rest until I take action.”
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr.—?”
“Jack. My mother called me Jacob, but people call me Jack.” He looks at her face, with its flush and freckles and protuberant, overeager eyes. She seems anxious to please. School personnel don’t get the respect from parents they used to, and with some of the parents you’re an enemy like the police, only laughable because you don’t have a gun. But this woman, though of a generation younger than his, is old enough, he guesses, to have had a parochial education and learned respect from the nuns. “No thanks,” he tells her. “I’m a lousy sleeper anyway.”
“I can do decaf,” she promises, too eagerly. “Can you stand instant?” Her eyes are a pale green, like the glass bottles Coke used to come in.
“I’m tempted,” he allows. “If it can be quick. Where can we go, to stop bothering Ahmad here? The kitchen?”
“It’s too messy. I haven’t cleared the dishes yet. I’d hoped to get to my painting while I still had some energy left. Let’s go into my studio. I have a hot plate.”
“Studio?”
“I call it that. It’s also the room I sleep in. Ignore the bed. I have to multi-task, so Ahmad has his privacy in his room. We shared a room for years, maybe too long. These cheap apartments, the walls are like paper.”
She opens the door she came out of, ten minutes ago. “Wow!” Jack Levy says, entering. “I guess Ahmad told me you painted, but—”
“I’m trying to work bigger, and brighter. Life’s so short, I suddenly figured, why keep fussing at the details? Perspective, shadows, fingernails—people don’t notice, and your peers, the other painters, accuse you of being just an illustrator. Some of my regulars, like a gift shop in Ridgewood that’s sold me for ages, are a little bewildered by this new direction of mine, but I tell them, ‘I can’t help it, it’s the way I’ve got to go.’ If you don’t grow, you die, right?”
Stepping around the carelessly made bed, its blanket tugged up roughly, he surveys the walls with a respectful squint. “You really sell this stuff?”
He regrets his phrasing; she goes defensive. “Some, not all. Not even Rembrandt and Picasso sold all their work, right away.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean…” he blusters. “They’re very striking; you just don’t expect it, walking in.”
“I’m experimenting,” she says, mollified and willing to go on, “with straight out of the tube. The viewer, that way, mixes the colors with his eye.”
“Terrific,” Jack Levy says, hoping to conclude this part of the conversation. He is out of his element.
She has got a kettle of water heating on the little electric coil set on a bureau whose top is crusty with spilled or wiped-off oil colors. He finds her paintings pretty wild but he likes the atmosphere in here, the messiness and the icy-clear fluorescent lights overhead. The smell of paints speaks to him, like the fragrance of wood shavings, of a bygone time when people made things by hand, hunched over in their own cottages. “Maybe you’d prefer herbal tea,” she says. “Chamomile makes me sleep like a baby.” Her eyes glance his way, testing. “Except when I wake up four hours later.” Needing to go pee, she doesn’t say.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s the problem.”
Cut short and knowing it, she blushes and tends to the water, which already is sending a plume of steam out through the hole in its hinged spout cap. “I forget what you said about what kind of tea. Chamomile or what?”
He resists this woman’s New Age side. Next thing she’ll be pulling out her crystals and I Ching sticks. He says, “I thought we had agreed on instant decaf, even though it always tastes scalded.”
Her color stays high un
der her sifting of freckles. “If you feel that way about it, maybe you don’t want anything.”
“No, no, Miss—Mrs.—” He gives up trying to name her. “Anything wet and hot would be fine. Anything you want. You’re being very gracious. I didn’t expect—”
“I’ll get the decaf and check on Ahmad. He hates studying when I’m not in and out of the living room; he feels he’s not getting credit, you know?”
Teresa disappears, and when she comes back with a stubby jar of brown powder in her hand—a short-nailed, firm-fleshed hand that does things—Jack has turned off the hot plate so the water wouldn’t boil away. Her mothering has taken some minutes; he could hear her in the other room bantering in a light, probing, female voice, and her son’s scarcely deeper voice whining and groaning back at her with those inarticulate high-school denials he knows too well—as if the very existence of adults is a cruel and needless trial they’re being put to. Jack tries to pick up on this: “So you see your son as a pretty typical, average eighteen-year-old?”
“Isn’t he?” Her maternal side is a sensitive side; her beryl-green eyes bulge out at him between colorless lashes that must get mascara from time to time, but not today or yesterday. The hair at her hairline is a lighter, softer tint than the metallic red up top. The set of her lips, the plump upper one lifted a bit as with someone listening hard, tells him that he has used up her initial gush of friendliness. She comes on strong, then gets impatient, is his 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 Fairleigh 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 with her too-hot decaf on a kitchen stool bought unpainted and never varnished. She lights a cigarette and props one foot, in a crêpe-soled blue canvas shoe, on a rung and crosses her legs. Her pants, tight white jeans, bare her ankles. Blue veins wander through the white skin, Irish-white skin; the ankles are bony and lean, considering the 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 the 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 this 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 than that: he sees his teachers as the 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 the 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 the 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 the tough girl, so that her roused eyes seem to burn along with the 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 the 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 Zhivago?”
“Only in Funny Girl. And I went to see Streisand.”
“Of course.” She smiles, that short upper lip of hers exposing imperfect Irish teeth, the 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, the 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 I 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 terri-ble teacher at the mosque put him up to it.”