On Beauty Read online

  ‘I have a record of publication,’ said Zora, scrabbling around in her tote bag, ‘canigetmyballback.com, Salon, eyeshot, unpleasanteventschedule.com, and, as far as print journals go, I’m waiting on a reply from Open City.’ She thrust a crumpled bundle of sheets across the desk that seemed to be prints of things from websites – beyond that Jack did not wish to conjecture without his glasses.

  ‘I see. And you have submitted this . . . work, naturally, as material to be considered by Professor Malcolm. Yes, of course you have.’

  ‘And at this point,’ said Zora, ‘I’m having to consider how the stress and adverse emotions attached to taking a matter like this to the advisory board would be likely to impact on me. I’m really worried about that impaction. I just think it’s inappropriate for a student to feel victimized in this way, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to anybody else.’

  So now all the cards were laid out. Jack took a moment to examine them. Twenty years of playing this game left him in no doubt that Zora Belsey had a full hand. Just for the hell of it, he played his own.

  ‘And have you expressed these feelings to your father?’

  ‘Not yet. But I know he will support me in whatever I choose to do.’

  So it was time, after all, to stand up and walk slowly around the table, and then to perch on the front of it, folding one long leg over the other. Jack did this.

  ‘I want to thank you for coming here this morning, Zora, and for speaking so honestly and eloquently about your feelings in this matter.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Zora, colour rising proud in her face.

  ‘And I want you to understand that I take what you say very seriously indeed – you’re a great asset to this institution, as I think you know.’

  ‘I want to be . . . I try to be.’

  ‘Zora, I want you to leave this with me. I don’t think, at the present time, that we need to think about the advisory board. I think we can straighten this thing out on a human scale that we can all comprehend and appreciate.’

  ‘Are you going to –’

  ‘Let me speak to Professor Malcolm about your concerns,’ said Jack, succeeding at last at winning that little contest. ‘And the moment I feel we’re making a progression, I’ll have you in here and we’ll settle things to everybody’s satisfaction. Is that answering your concerns?’

  Zora stood up and held her bag to her chest. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘I saw that you got into Professor Pilman’s class – now that is wonderful. And what else will you be –?’

  ‘I’m doing a Plato course and Jamie Penfruck’s Adorno half-course and I’m definitely going to Monty Kipps’s lectures. I read his piece Sunday in the Herald about taking the “liberal” out of the Liberal Arts . . . you know, so it’s like now they’re trying to tell us that conservatives are an endangered species – like they need protecting on campuses or something.’ Here Zora took the time to roll her eyes and shake her head and sigh all at the same time. ‘Apparently everybody gets special treatment – blacks, gays, liberals, women – everybody except poor white males. It’s too crazy. But I definitely want to hear what he’s got to say. Know thy enemy. That’s my motto.’

  Jack French smiled weakly at this, opened the door for her and closed it again when she was gone. He hurried back to his chair and drew the N–Z Shorter Oxford English out of his bookshelf. He had an idea that ‘stymie’ might possibly have a more involved Middle English etymology than the usual M19th-century golfing term popularly ascribed to it. Maybe issuing from styme, meaning a glimpse, a glimmer; or possibly from the dangerous bird that Hercules killed, the Stymphalian, or . . . It did not. Jack closed the great book and returned it respectfully to its partner on the shelf. Sometimes these two might not give you what you hoped for, but in a deeper sense they never let you down. He picked up the phone and called Lydia, his Department Administrator.

  ‘Liddy?’

  ‘Here, Jack.’

  ‘And how are you, my dear?’

  ‘I’m dandy, Jack. Busy, you know. First day of the semester’s always nuts.’

  ‘Well, you do a remarkable job of making it look otherwise. Does it appear that every soul knows what he’s doing?’

  ‘Not every soul. We got kids wandering around who couldn’t find their own ass in their pants, if you’ll pardon my French, Jack.’

  Jack did pardon it, and also the unconscious pun. There’s a time for careful speech and then there’s a time for straight talking, and, although Jack French was incapable of the latter, he appreciated Lydia’s salty Boston tongue and the ‘enforcing’ job it did around the department. Unruly students, difficult UPS men, inexpressive computer technicians, Haitian cleaning staff caught smoking dope in the bathrooms – Lydia dealt with them all. The only reason Jack was able to rise above the fray was because Lydia was right there in the fray, toughing it out.

  ‘Now, Liddy, have you any idea where I could get hold of Claire Malcolm this morning?’

  ‘How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand,’ mused Lydia, fond as she was of quoting musicals that Jack had never seen. ‘I know she has a class in five minutes . . . but that doesn’t mean she’s on her way to it. You know Claire.’

  Lydia laughed sardonically. Jack didn’t encourage administrative staff discussing faculty in a sardonic manner, but there was no question of calling her up on it. Lydia was her own authority. Without her, Jack’s whole department would simply fall into chaos and misery.

  ‘I don’t think,’ considered Lydia, ‘that I’ve ever seen Claire Malcolm set foot in this department before noon . . . but maybe that’s just me. I’m so busy in the mornings I don’t see the latte sitting in front of me till it’s as cold as ice, you know?’

  To women like Lydia, women like Claire made no sense at all. Everything Lydia had achieved in her life had come as a result of her prodigious organizational abilities and professionalism. There wasn’t any institution in the country that Lydia couldn’t reorganize and make more efficient, and in a few years, when she was done with Wellington, she knew in her heart of hearts that she would go on to Harvard and from there to anywhere she liked, maybe even the Pentagon. She had the skills, and skills took you places in Lydia’s America. You started out with something as lowly as creating a filing system for a Back Bay drycleaning firm, and you ended with organizing and managing one of the most complex databases in the country for the President himself. Lydia knew how she’d got where she was today, and also where she was going. What she didn’t get was how Claire Malcolm had got where she was today. How was it possible that a woman who lost her own office keys sometimes three times in a week and did not know where the supplies cupboard was after five years at the college could yet hold a title as grandiose as Downing Professor of Comparative Literature and be paid what Lydia knew she was paid because it was Lydia who sent out the pay stubs? And then, on top of it all, have an inappropriate workplace affair. Lydia knew it had something to do with art, but, personally, she didn’t buy it. Academic degrees she understood – Jack’s two Ph.D.s, in Lydia’s mind, made up for the all times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet. But poetry?

  ‘Now, would you have any idea which classroom she’s assigned to, Liddy?’

  ‘Jack – give me a minute on that. I got it on the computer somewhere . . . Remember that time she took a class on a bench by the river? She gets some crazy ideas sometimes. Is it an emergency?’

  ‘No . . .’ murmured Jack, ‘Not an emergency . . . as such.’

  ‘It’s the Chapman block, Jack, Room 34C. You want that I get a message to her? I can send one of the kids.’

  ‘No, no . . . I’ll go and . . .’ said Jack, lost for a minute in pressing the tip of a ballpoint into the soft, giving blackness at the centre of his desk.

  ‘Jack, I got a kid just come in my office looking like someone killed his dog – you OK, honey? Jack, call me later if you need anything.’

  ‘Will do, Liddy.’

  Jack eased his blazer off the back
of his chair and put it on. His hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang.

  ‘Jack? Liddy. Claire Malcolm just ran by my office faster than Carl Lewis. She’ll be in front of yours in about three seconds. I’ll send someone over to her class and tell them she’s going to be late.’

  Jack opened his door and not for the first time marvelled at Lydia’s precision.

  ‘Ah, Claire.’

  ‘Hey, Jack. I’m just rushing to class.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Well!’ said Claire, pushing the sunglasses she had taken to wearing up on to her head. She was never too late to talk a little of how she was. ‘The war continues, the President’s an ass, our poets are failing to legislate, the world’s going to hell and I want to move to New Zealand – you know? And I’ve got a class in five. The usual!’

  ‘These are dark times,’ said Jack solemnly, threading his fingers through each other like a parson. ‘And yet what can the university do, Claire, but continue its work? Doesn’t one have to believe that at times like these the university joins arms with the fourth estate, exercising our capacity for advocacy . . . helping frame political issues . . . that we too sit in that “reporters’ gallery yonder” . . .’

  Even by Jack’s standards this was a circuitous route to get to what he intended to say. He seemed a little surprised himself by the development, and stood opposite Claire, with a face suggestive of a continuation of this thought which never materialized.

  ‘Jack, I wish I had your confidence. We had an anti-war rally last Tuesday in Frost Hall? A hundred kids. Ellie Reinhold told me the Wellington anti-Vietnam rally in ’67 brought three thousand people to the yard, and Allen Ginsberg. I’m kind of in despair at the moment. People round here act more like the first estate than the fourth if you ask me. God, Jack – I’m late, I gotta run. But maybe lunch?’

  She turned to go but Jack couldn’t let her. ‘What’s on the menu, creatively speaking, this morning?’ he said, nodding at the book she held to her chest.

  ‘Oh! You mean what are we reading? As it happens – me!’

  She flipped the thin book over to its cover, a large photo of Claire, circa 1972. Jack, who had some taste in women, admired once again the Claire Malcolm he had first met, all those years ago. Awful pretty with those provocative schoolgirl’s bangs running into light brown waves of sumptuous hair, which curved over her left eye like Veronica Lake’s and continued all the way down to her miniature hips. For the life of him Jack could never figure out why women of a certain age cut off all their hair like that.

  ‘God, I look so ridiculous! But I just wanted to copy a poem for class, just an example of something. A pantoum.’

  Jack brought his hand to his chin. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to freshen my memory as to the precise nature of a pantoum . . . I’m rather rusty on my Old French verse forms . . .’

  ‘It’s Malay originally.’

  ‘Malay!’

  ‘It travelled. Victor Hugo did use it, but it’s Malay originally. It’s basically interlinked quatrains, usually rhyming a-b-a-b, and the second and fourth line of each stanza go on to be the first and third . . . is that right? So long since I . . . no, that’s right – the first and third lines of the next stanza – mine’s a broken pantoum, anyway. It’s kind of hard to explain . . . it’s better just to look at one,’ she said and opened the book to the relevant page, handing it to Jack.

  On Beauty

  No, we could not itemize the list

  of sins they can’t forgive us.

  The beautiful don’t lack the wound.

  It is always beginning to snow.

  Of sins they can’t forgive us

  speech is beautifully useless.

  It is always beginning to snow.

  The beautiful know this.

  Speech is beautifully useless.

  They are the damned.

  The beautiful know this.

  They stand around unnatural as statuary.

  They are the damned

  and so their sadness is perfect,

  delicate as an egg placed in your palm.

  Hard, it is decorated with their face

  and so their sadness is perfect.

  The beautiful don’t lack the wound.

  Hard, it is decorated with their face.

  No, we could not itemize the list.

  Cape Cod, May 1974

  Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded: saying something after reading a poem. Saying something to the poet. It was a strange fact of his tenure as Dean of the Humanities Faculty that Jack himself was not overly enamoured of either poetry or fictional prose; his great love was the essay, and, if he were really honest with himself, beyond essays themselves, the tools of the essayist: dictionaries. It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love, bowed his head in awe and thrilled at an unlikely tale, for example, the bizarre etymology of the intransitive verb ‘ramble’.

  ‘Beautiful,’ said Jack at last.

  ‘Oh, it’s just old crap – but a useful illustration. Anyway – Jack, I really have to run –’

  ‘I’ve sent someone over to your classroom, Claire, they know you’re going to be late.’

  ‘You have? Is something wrong, Jack?’

  ‘I do actually need a quick word with you,’ said Jack, oxymoronically. ‘Just in my office if that’s possible.’

  3

  Here they all were, Howard’s imaginary class. Howard indulged in a quick visual catalogue of their interesting bits, knowing that this would very likely be the last time he saw them. The punk boy with black-painted fingernails, the Indian girl with the disproportionate eyes of a Disney character, another girl who looked no older than fourteen with a railroad on her teeth. And then, spread across this room: big nose, small ears, obese, on crutches, hair red as rust, wheelchair, six foot five, short skirt, pointy breasts, iPod still on, anorexic with that light downy hair on her cheeks, bow-tie, another bow-tie, football hero, white boy with dreads, long fingernails like a New Jersey housewife, already losing his hair, striped tights – there were so many of them that Smith couldn’t close the door without squashing somebody. So they had come, and they had heard. Howard had pitched his tent and made his case. He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. ‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.

  ‘Any questions?’ asked Howard.

  The answer to this never changed. Silence. But it was an interesting breed of silence particular to upscale liberal arts colleges. It was not silent because nobody had anything to say – quite the opposite. You could feel it, Howard could feel it, millions of things to say brewing in this room, so strong sometimes that they seemed to shoot from the students telepathically and bounce off the furniture. Kids looked down at the table top, or out of the window, or at Howard with great longing; some of the weaker ones blushed and pretended to take notes. But not one of them would speak. They had an intense fear of their peers. And, more than that, of Howard himself. When he first began teaching he had tried, stupidly, to coax them out of this fear – now he positively relished it. The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn’t have the fear you had nothing.

  ‘Nothing? Have I really been so very thorough? Not a single question?’

  A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor. Howard let the silence stretch a little. He turned to the board a
nd slowly unpeeled the photocopy, letting tongueless questions pelt his back. His own questions kept him mentally occupied as he rolled Rembrandt into a tight white stick. How much longer on the divan? Why does the sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything?

  ‘I have a question.’

  The voice, an English voice like his own, came from his left. He turned – she had been hidden by a taller boy sitting right in front of her. The first thing to note were two spots of radiant highlights on her face – maybe the result of the same cocoa butter Kiki used in the winter. A pool of moonlight on her smooth forehead, and another on the tip of her nose; the kind of highlights, it occurred to Howard, that would be impossible to paint without distorting, without misrepresenting, the solid darkness of her true complexion. And her hair had changed again: now it was wormy dreadlocks going every which way, although none was longer than two inches. The tips of each were coloured a sensational orange, as if she had dipped her head into a bucket of sunshine. Because he was not drunk this time he knew now for certain that her breasts were indeed a phenomenon of nature and not of his imagination, for here were the spirited nipples again, working their way through a thick green ribbed woollen jumper. It had a stiff polo neck, several inches from her own skin, through which her neck and head emerged like a plant from its pot.

  ‘Victoria, yes. I mean – is it Vee? Victoria? Go on.’

  ‘It’s Vee.’

  Howard could feel the class thrill to this new piece of information – a freshman who was already known to the professor! Of course, the more committed Googlers in this class probably already knew the deal between Howard and the celebrity Kipps, and maybe had gone further and knew that this girl was Kipps’s daughter, and that girl over there, Howard’s. Maybe they even knew something of the culture war shaping up on the campus. Two days ago Kipps had argued strongly against Howard’s Affirmative Action committee in the Wellington Herald. He had criticized not only its aims but challenged its very right to existence. He accused Howard and ‘his supporters’ of privileging liberal perspectives over conservative ones; of suppressing right-wing discussion and debate on campus. The article had been a sensation, as such things are in college towns. Howard’s e-mail in-box this morning was full of missives from outraged colleagues and students pledging their support. An army rushing to fight behind a general who could barely get on his horse.