Terrorist by John Updike Page B

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