Charlie is still talking as Ahmad eases the truck back, backs it a tidy half-circle, and in forward gear heads out of the lot. He discovers that, this high off the ground, he floats, looking down upon the tops of cars. As he heads out onto the boulevard, he takes the corner too short and drags the back tires up over the curb, but hardly feels it. He has been transposed to another scale, to another plane. Charlie is busy stubbing out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and doesn't mention the bump.
After a few blocks, Ahmad's eyes acquire the habit of darting left to the long-side mirror, and then through the passenger window to the right-hand mirror. The orange, chrome-edged reflections of Excellency's own sides tJiat he glimpses no longer alarm him but become parts of him, like the shoulders and arms that figure in his peripheral awareness as he walks down the street. In his dreams since childhood he would sometimes be flying down hallways or skimming sidewalks a few feet off the ground, and sometimes would awake with an erection or, more shamefully still, a large wet spot on the inside of his pajama fly. He had consulted the Qur'an for sexual advice in vain. It talked of uncleanness but only in regard to women, their menstruation, their suckling of infants. In the second sura, he found the mysterious words, Your wives are your field: go in, therefore, to your field as ye will; but do first some act for your souls' good: and fear ye God, and know that ye must meet Him. In the verse before that, he read that women are a pollution. Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are cleansed, go in unto them as God hath ordained for you. Verily God loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean. Ahmad feels clean in the truck, cut off from the base world, its streets full of dog filth and blowing shreds of plastic and paper; he feels clean and free, flying his orange box kite behind him in the side mirrors.
"Don't pass on the right," Charlie suddenly admonishes him, in a voice sharp with alarm. Ahmad slows, not having realized he was overtaking cars to his left, in the lane next to the traffic divider, a solid, sullied string of Jersey barriers.
"Why are they called Jersey barriers?" he asks. "In Maryland, what are they called?"
"Don't change the subject, Madman. Driving a truck, you can't sit there and daydream. You got life and death in your hands, not to mention repairs that'll jack up the insurance premiums if you goof. No hot-dogging and farting around with cell phones like people do in cars. You're bigger; you got to be better."
"Really?" Ahmad makes an attempt to tease the older man, his Lebanese-American brother, out of his grimly serious mood. "Shouldn't cars get out of my way?"
Charlie doesn't see that Ahmad is teasing. He keeps his eyes on the road, through the windshield, and says, "Don't be stupid, kid: they can't. It's like animals. You don't hold rats and rabbits to the same standard as lions and elephants. You don't hold Iraq to the same standard as the U.S. Bigger, you better be better."
This political note strikes Ahmad as strange, slighdy out of tune. But he is in bed with Charlie, and submissively settles himself for the ride.
"Jesus," says Jack Levy. "This is what life is all about. I'd forgotten, and never expected anybody to remind me." Thus guardedly, in tbese circumstances, without naming her, he pays tribute of a sort to his wife, who long ago had had her turn at showing him what life was all about.
Teresa Mulloy, naked beside him, agrees, "It is," but then adds, in self-protection, "but it doesn't last." Her face, with its round shape and slightly protuberant eyes, is flushed so that her freckles blend in, pale brown on pink.
"What does?" Jack asks. She doesn't really want him to agree with such a careless shrug. Her rosy flush becomes the high color that follows the sting of a rebuke, a facing of her defenselessness in this dead-end adventure, another married boyfriend. He will never leave his fat Beth, and would she want him to in any case? He is twenty-three years older than she, and she needs a man to last her the rest of her life.
Summer in New Jersey has attained July's steady swelter, but even so, feeling the air as cool on their love-flushed skins, the lovers have drawn up the top sheet, rumpled and damp from having been beneath their bodies. Jack sits up against the pillow, exposing the slack muscles and gray froth of his chest, and Terry, with lovable bohemian immodesty, has pulled her side of the sheet no higher, so her breasts, white as soap where the sun never touches them, jut free for him to admire and to feel the heft of again if he desires. He loves plump, tbough it can get to be too much. The fragrances of paint thinner and linseed oil lull Jack here in his mistress's bed. As Terry said, she is working bigger and brighter. When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides. With Beth, he can't imagine her weight on his pelvis, or her legs spread far enough apart; tbey have run out of positions, except for the spoon, and even there her huge ass pushes him away like a jealous child in their bed.
"The thing is," Jack goes on, hearing in Terry's silence a withdrawal from some tacdessness on his part, "while it's going on it doesn't matter that it doesn't last-Motber Nature says, 'Who cares?' It feels like it's forever. I adore your tits, have I said tbat lately?"
"They're starting to droop. You should have seen tbem when I was eighteen. Bigger, even, and stuck straight out."
"Terry, please. Don't get me excited again. I got to go." Beth's, too, he could remember, had been like inverted bowls, tbe size for breakfast cereal, witb nipples hard as a single blueberry in his mouth.
"Where to now, Jack?" Terry's voice is weary. A mistress knows the man to be a liar, where the wife only guesses.
"A tutorial. A real one, across town. I have the car; she needs it in an hour and a half to get to the library." He is uncertain, in the gap his post-orgasmic daze leaves in his head, of how much of what he says is true. Beth needs tlie car eventually, he knows.
Terry, hearing his uncertainty, complains, "Jack, you're always rushing off. Do I have body odor or something?"
This is cruel, because Beth indeed does; it fills up the bed at night, a caustic exhalation from her deep creases, and adds to his nocturnal unease and dread.
"No way," he says, having picked up this much slang from his students. "Not even-" He halts, on the edge of overstepping.
"My cunt. Say it."
"Not even tbere," he concedes. "Especially there. You're sweet. You're my sugar plum." But if truth be known he is wary of having his face too long between her legs, for fear of Beth's smelling the other woman through their good-night kiss-a mere peck, but their enduring custom for thirty-six years of marriage.
"Tell me about my cunt, Jack. I want to hear it. Loosen up."
"Please, Terry. This is grotesque."
"Why, you prim prick? You Jewish priss. What's grotesque about my cunt?"