"To die, you mean? You're scaring me again, Ahmad. How's that prick been poking me doing? We talk it all away?" She touches him, quickly, expertly. "No, man, we didn't. He's still there, wanting what he wants. I can't stand it-can't stand the suspense. Don't you do a thing. Allah can blame me. I can take it, I'm just a woman, dirty anyway." Joryleen puts her hands one on each of his buttocks through the black jeans and by pulling him rhythmically into her pushing softness draws him up and up into a convulsive transformation, a vaulting inversion of his knotted self like that, perhaps, which occurs when the soul passes at death into Paradise.
The two young bodies cling together, panting climbers who have attained a ledge. Joryleen says, "There, now. You got a mess in your pants but we didn't have to use any scumbag and you're still a virgin for that bride of yours with the head scarf."
"The hijab. There may never be such a bride."
"Why you say that? You've got the working parts, and a good nature besides."
"A feeling," he answers her. "You may be the closest to a bride I get." He lightly accuses her, "I didn't ask you to do that, making me come."
"I like to earn my money," she tells him. He is sorry to feel her relax into conversation, receding from the tight, moist seam that made them one body. "I don't know where you get that bad feeling from, but that Charlie friend of yours has some sort of game going. Why'd he arrange this hook-up, when you didn't ax for it?"
"He thought it was something I needed. And maybe I did. Thank you, Joryleen. Though, as you said, it was unclean."
"It's almost like they're fattening you up."
"Who is, for what?"
"Sugar, I don't know. You heard my advice. Get away from that truck."
"Suppose I told you to get away from Tylenol?"
"That's not so easy. He's my man."
Ahmad tries to understand. "We seek attachments, however unfortunate."
"You got it."
The mess in his underpants is drying, growing sticky; still, he resists when she tries to roll out from under his arm. "Got to go," Joryleen says.
He hugs her tighter, a little cruelly. "Have you earned your money?"
"Haven't I? I felt you shoot off, real big."
He wants to join her in uncleanness. "We didn't fuck, though. Maybe we should. Charlie would want me to."
"Getting the idea, huh? Too late this time, Ahmad. Let's keep you pure for now."
Night has descended outside the furniture store. They are two beds away from the single lit lamp, and by its dim light her face, on the pillow of white chenille, is a black oval, a perfect oval holding its sparkles and the silvery small movements of her lips and eyelids. She is lost to God but is giving her life for another, so that Tylenol, that pathetic bully, can live. "Do one more thing for me," Ahmad begs. "Joryleen, I can't bear to let you go."
"What kind of thing?"
"Sing to me."
"Boy. You're a man, all right. Always wanting one more thing."
"Just a little song. I loved it, in the church, being able to pick your voice out from all the others."
"And now somebody's taught you how to sweet-talk. I got to sit up. You can't sing lying down. Lying down's for other things." This was needlessly coarse of her to say. Her breasts there in the light from the lone lamp in that ocean of mattresses have crescents of shadow beneath their rounded weight; she is eighteen, but already gravity tugs them down. He has an urge to reach out and touch the jut of her meat-colored nipples, to pinch them even, since she is a whore and used to worse, and wonders at this itch of cruelty within him, fighting that tenderness which would seduce him away from his innermost loyalty. He that fights for Allah's cause, the twenty-ninth sura says, fights for himself. Ahmad closes his eyes as he sees from the tensing little muscles of her lips, with that delicate welt of flesh that runs around their edges, that she is about to sing.
" 'What a friend we have in Jesus,' " she croons, quaver-ingly and without the jumping syncopation of the version he heard in church, " 'all our sins and griefs to bear… ' " As she sings she reaches out a pale-palmed hand and touches his brow, an upright square brow bent on carrying more faith than most men can bear, and, her fingers with their two-toned nails straying, pinches the lobe of his ear in conclusion. " '… take it to the Lord in prayer.' "
He watches her briskly put her clothes back on: bra first, then, with a comical wriggle, her skimpy underpants; next, her snug jersey, short enough to let a strip of belly show, and the scarlet miniskirt. She sits on the edge of the bed to put on her long-toed boots, over some thin white socks he hadn't noticed her taking off. To protect the leather from her sweat, and her feet from the smell.
What time is it? The dark comes earlier every day. Not much past seven; he has been with her less than an hour. His mother might be home, waiting to feed him. She has more time for him, lately. Reality calls: he must get up and smooth any shadow of their shapes out of the plastic-wrapped mattress and restore the carpet and cushions to their places downstairs and lead Joryleen among the tables and armchairs, past the desks and the water cooler and the time clock, and let them both out the back door into the night, busy with headlights less now of workers coming home than of people out hunting for something, for dinner or for love. Her singing and his coming have left him so sleepy that the thought, as he walks the dozen blocks home, of going to bed and never waking up has no terror for him.
Shaikh Rashid greets him in the language of the Qur'an: "fa-inna ma a 'l-'usri yusrd." Ahmad, his classical Arabic rusty after three months of skipping his lessons at the mosque, deciphers the quote in the head and ponders it for hidden meanings. Every hardship is followed by ease. He recognizes it as from "Comfort," one of the early Meccan suras placed late in the Book because of their shorter length but dear to his master because of their compressed, enigmatic nature. Sometimes called "The Opening," it addresses, in God's voice, the Prophet himself: Have We not lifted up your heart and relieved you of the burden which weighed down your back?
His encounter with Joryleen had been arranged for the
Friday before Labor Day, so it was not until the next Tuesday that Charlie Chehab asked him at work, "How'd it go?"
"Fine" was Ahmad's queasy reply. "It turns out I knew her, slightly, at Central High. She has been led sorely astray since."
"She do the job?"
"Oh, yes. The job is done."
"Good. Her thug promised she could do it nicely. What a relief. To me, I mean. It didn't feel natural, you still having your cherry. Don't know why I took it so personally, but I did. Feel like a new man?"
"Oh, yes. I see life through a new veil. A new lens, I should say."
"Great. Great. Until your first piece of ass, you really haven't lived. I got mine when I was sixteen. Two, actually- a pro with a Trojan, and a girl from the neighborhood bareback. But that was when things were wilder, before AIDS. Your generation is smart to be cautious."
"We were cautious." Ahmad blushed at the secret he was hiding from Charlie, that he was still pure. But he had no wish to disappoint his mentor by sharing this truth. There had perhaps been too much sharing between them, in the closeness of the cab as Excellency processed New Jersey beneath its whirring wheels. Joryleen's advice to get away from that truck rankles.
An air of apprehension, of nervous multi-tasking, clung to Charlie this morning. The quick creasing of his face, the flitting expressions of his mobile mouth, seemed excessive in his office behind the showroom, where morning coffee was consumed and the day's plan was sketched. Unwashed olive coveralls waited here, and yellow slickers for days of delivering in the rain; they hung on their hooks like flayed skins.