Terrorist by John Updike Page A

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 / Ching sticks. He says, "I thought we had agreed on instant decaf, even though it always tastes scalded."
    Her color stays high under 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 tbat does things—Jack has turned off the hot plate so tbe 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