She undoes the snap on her jeans, sucking in her gut and looking comically pop-eyed for a second, and quickly slithers back beneath the wrinkled sheet in her black and lilac underthings. There is a light-hearted whorishness in the outfit, like the teeny-slut look affected by some of the bolder girls at Central High, which startles a furtive throb from his penis. He tries to ignore it, putting his arm around her shoulders-the downy hairs at the nape of her neck are still damp from her shower-and pulling her closer to him in chaste companionship. "How is Ahmad doing?" he asks.

Terry answers warily, feeling the transition abrupt from whore to mother. "He seems to be doing fine. He likes the people he works for-a Lebanese father and son, who do a kind of good-cop / bad-cop routine on him. The son is apparently something of a character. Ahmad loves the truck."

"The truck?"

"It could be any truck, but this one is his truck. You know how love is. Every morning he checks the tire pressure, the brakes, all these fluids. He tells me about them-engine oil, radiator coolant, windshield-washer fluid, battery, power steering, automatic transmission… I think that's all. He checks the fan belts for tightness and I don't know what all else. He says the mechanics at the service stations, for the scheduled check-ups, are too rushed and hungover to do it right. The truck even has a name-Excellency. Excellency Home Furnishings. They thought it meant something excellent."

"Well," Jack admits, "it almost does. It's witty." His hard-on is growing back as he lies there trying to think of Terry as a mother and a professional person, a nurse's aide and an abstract painter, an intelligent many-sided individual he would be glad to know even if she weren't of the opposite gender. But his thoughts have taken off from her silken underclothes, lilac and black, and the easy, even careless way she deals with him sexually-all that experience, all those boyfriends accumulated in the fifteen years since Ahmad's father failed to crack America 's riddle and fled. Even back then she was a Catholic-raised girl who didn't mind shacking up with a raghead, a Mussulman. She was a wild one, a rule-breaker. Terri-ble. A holy Terr-or. He asks her, "Who told you about Jews and the covenant?"

"I don't know. Some guy I knew once."

"You knew him in what sense?"

"I knew him. Jack, look, don't we have a deal? You don't ask, and I don't tell. I've been abandoned and single in the best years a woman is supposed to have. Now I'm forty. Don't begrudge me a little past."

"In my head I don't, of course. But, like we were saying, when you care, you get possessive."

"Is that what we were saying? I didn't hear that. All I heard was you thinking about Beth. Pathetic Beth."

"She's not so pathetic at the library. She sits behind the reference desk and moves around on the Internet much better than I can do."

"She sounds wonderful."

"No, but she's a person."

"Great. Who isn't? You're saying I'm not?"

An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans. His prick feels the change in Teresa's climate, and is beginning to wilt again. "We all are," he soothes her. "You especially. But as to the covenant, here's one Jew who never felt it. My father hated religion, and the only covenants I heard about were in neighborhoods that wouldn't let Jews in. How religious is Ahmad these days?"

She relaxes a little, slumping down into her pillow. His gaze travels an inch farther down into the black bra. The freckled skin of her upper chest looks a bit crepey, exposed to sun damage year after year, in contrast to the soap-white strip this side of the bra's edge. Jack thinks, So another Jew has been here before me. Who all else? Egyptians, Chinamen, God knows. A lot of these painters she knows are kids half her age. To them she'd be a mother who fucks. Maybe that's why her own kid is queer, if he is.

She is saying, "It's hard to say. He never talked much about it. Poor little guy, he used to look so frail and scared when I'd drop him off at the mosque, going up those stairs all by himself. When I'd ask him afterwards how it had gone, he'd say 'Great' and clam up. He'd even blush. It was something he couldn't share. With the job, he told me, it's hard for him to always get to the mosque on Fridays, and this Charlie who's always with him doesn't seem to be all that observant. But, you know, really, all in all Ahmad seems more relaxed- just the way he talks to me, more of a man's manner, looking me level in the eye. He's pleased with himself, earning money, and, I don't know, maybe I'm imagining this, more open to new ideas, not closed into this very, in my opinion, limited and intolerant belief system. He's getting fresh input."

"Does he have a girlfriend?" Jack Levy asks, grateful to Terry for warming to a subject other than his own failings.

"Not as far as I know," she says. He loves that Irish mouth of hers when she gets pensive, forgetting to close her lifted upper lip, with its little blister of flesh in the middle. "I think I would know. He comes home tired, lets me feed him, reads the Koran or lately the newspaper-this stupid war on terror-so he can talk with this Charlie about it, and goes to bed in his room. His sheets"-she regrets bringing up the subject, but goes ahead with it-"are unspotted." She adds, "They weren't always."

"How would you know if he has a girl?" Jack presses.

"Oh, he'd talk about it, if only to get my goat. He's always hated my having male friends. He'd want to go out nights, and he doesn't."

"It doesn't seem quite right. He's a good-looking kid. Could he be gay?"

The question doesn't faze her; she has thought about it. "I could be wrong, but I think I'd know that, too. His teacher at the mosque, this Shaikh Rashid, is kind of creepy; but Ahmad's aware. He reveres him but distrusts him."

"You say you've met the man?"

"Just once or twice, picking up Ahmad or dropping him off. He was very smooth and proper with me. But I could feel hatred. To him I was a piece of meat-unclean meat."

Unclean meat.Jack's hard-on has revived. He makes himself focus, a minute or so longer, before sharing this possibly inconvenient development. There is a pleasure, which he had forgotten, in just having the thing-the firm, stout, importunate stalk, the pompous little freshly appointed center of your being, bringing with it die sensation of there being more of you. "The job," he resumes. "Does he put in long hours?"

"It varies," Terry says. Her body gives off, perhaps in response to an emanation from his, a mix of tingling scents, soap at the nape of her neck foremost. The subject of her son is losing her interest. "He gets off when he's delivered the furniture. Some days it's early, most days it's late. Sometimes they drive as far as Camden, or Atlantic City."

"That's a long way to go, to deliver a piece of furniture."

"There aren't just deliveries; there are pickups, too. A lot of their furniture is secondhand. They make bids on people's estates and truck the stuff off. They have a kind of network; I don't know how much the Islamic thing matters. Most of their customers around New Prospect are black families. Some of their homes, Ahmad says, are surprisingly nice. He loves seeing the different areas, the different lifestyles."

"See the world," Jack sighs. "See New Jersey first. That's what I did, only I left out the world part. Now, missy"-he clears his throat-"you and I have a problem."

Teresa Mulloy's protuberant, beryl-pale eyes widen in mild alarm. "Problem?"

Jack lifts the sheet and shows her what has happened below his waist. He hopes he has shared enough life in general with her for her to share this with him.

She stares, and lets the tip of her tongue curl up to touch the plump center of her upper lip. "That's not a problem," she decides. "No problema, senor."