On Beauty Read online

  ‘The Zormeister – rocking with the salt of the earth.’

  At her right were her friends, greeting her; at her left, the homeless guy, just at her shoulder, from whom she now moved away, laughing stupidly at the idea of any connection between them. She was hugged and shaken. Here were people, friends. A boy called Ron, of delicate build whose movements were tidy and ironic, who liked to be clean, who liked things Japanese. A girl called Daisy, tall and solid like a swimmer, with an all-American ingénue face, sandy hair and more of a salty manner than she required, given her looks. Daisy liked eighties romantic comedies and Kevin Bacon and thrift-store handbags. Hannah was red-headed and freckled, rational, hard-working, mature. She liked Ezra Pound and making her own clothes. Here were people. Here were tastes and buying habits and physical attributes.

  ‘Where’s Claire?’ asked Zora, looking around them.

  ‘ ’Cross the street,’ said Ron, holding his hand against his hip. ‘With Eddie and Lena and Chantelle and everybody – most of the class came. Claire’s loving it, naturally.’

  ‘She sent you over?’

  ‘I guess. Ooooh, Dr Belsey. Do you smell trauma?’

  Happily, Zora rose to the bait. By virtue of who she was she had information other students could not hope to have. She was their vital link to the inner life of professors. She had no qualms about sharing all she knew.

  ‘Are you serious? She totally can’t look me in the eye – even in class, when I’m reading she’s nodding at the window.’

  ‘I think she’s just ADD,’ drawled Daisy.

  ‘Attention Dick Deficiency,’ said Zora, because she was extremely quick. ‘If it doesn’t have a dick, it’s basically deficient.’

  Her little audience guffawed, pretending to a worldliness none of them had earned.

  Ron gripped her chummily round the shoulders. ‘The wages of sin, etcetera,’ he said as they began to walk, and then, ‘Whither morality?’

  ‘Whither poetry?’ said Hannah.

  ‘Whither my ass?’ said Daisy, and nudged Zora for one of her cigarettes. They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Zora, and flicked open the carton.

  And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

  The Bus Stop was a Wellington institution. For twenty years it had been a cheap and popular Moroccan restaurant, attracting students, the aged hippies of Kennedy Square, professors, locals and tourists. A first-generation Moroccan family ran it and the food was very good, unpretentious and flavoursome. Although there was no Moroccan diaspora in Wellington to appreciate the authenticity of the lamb tagine or the saffron couscous, this had never tempted the Essakalli family into Americanization. They served what they themselves enjoyed eating and waited for the Wellingtonians to acclimatize, which they did. Only the decor nodded to the town’s hunger for kitschy ethnic charm: oak tables inlaid with mother of pearl, low banquette seating buried in multicoloured cushions of harsh goat’s wool. Long-necked hookah pipes rested on the high shelves like exotic birds come to roost.

  Six years ago, when the Essakallis went into retirement, their son Yousef took over with his German-American wife, Katrin. Unlike his parents, who had merely tolerated the students – their pitchers of beer, fake IDs and requests for ketchup – the younger, more American Yousef enjoyed their presence and understood their needs. It was his idea to convert the restaurant’s 150-foot basement into a club space where many different classes and events and parties could take place. Here the visuals of Star Wars were shown alongside the soundtrack to Dr Zhivago. Here a fleshy, dimpled red-headed lady explained to a gang of willowy freshman girls how to move one’s abdomen in tiny increments of clockwise motion, the art of the belly dance. Local rappers performed impromptu sets. It was a favourite stop-off for British guitar bands hoping to rid themselves of nerves before their American tours. Morocco, as it was reimagined in the Bus Stop, was an inclusive place. The black kids from Boston were down with Morocco, down with its essential Arab nature and African soul, the massive hash pipes, the chilli in the food, the infectious rhythms of the music. The white kids from the college were down with Morocco too: they liked its shabby glamour, its cinematic history of non-politicized Orientalism, the cool pointy slippers. The hippies and activists of Kennedy Square – without even really being conscious of it – came more regularly to the Bus Stop now than they had before the war started. It was their way of showing solidarity with foreign suffering. Of all the Bus Stop’s regular events, the bi-monthly Spoken Word nights were the greatest sensation. As an art form it practised the same inclusiveness as the venue itself: it made everybody feel at home. Neither rap nor poetry, not formal but also not too wild, it wasn’t black, it wasn’t white. It was whatever anybody had to say and whoever had the guts to get up on the small boxy stage at the back of the basement and say it. For Claire Malcolm, it was an opportunity each year to show her new students that poetry was a broad church, one that she was not afraid to explore.

  Because of these visits, and as a regular of the restaurant, Claire was well known and loved by the Essakalis. Spotting her now, Yousef pushed through the line of people waiting to be seated and helped Claire hold open the double doors so that her kids might come in from the cold. With his arm high on the doorframe, Yousef smiled at each student in turn, and each got the opportunity to admire his emerald eyes, set improbably in a dark, unmistakably Arab face, and large silky curls, untended, like an infant’s. Once they had all passed through he carefully bent down to Claire’s height and allowed himself to be kissed on both cheeks. During this courtly display, he held on to a little embroidered skullcap that sat on the back of his head. Claire’s class loved all this. Many of them were freshmen for whom a visit to the Bus Stop, indeed to Kennedy Square, was as exotic as a trip to Morocco itself.

  ‘Yousef, ça fait bien trop longtemps! ’ cried Claire, stepping back but with both her little hands still gripping his own. She tipped her head girlishly to the side. ‘Moi, je deviens toute vieille, et toi, tu rajeunis.’

  Yousef laughed, shook his head and looked appreciatively at the tiny figure before him, swathed in many layers of black shawl. ‘Non, c’est pas vrai, c’est pas vrai . . . Vous êtes magnifique, comme toujours.’

  ‘Tu me flattes comme un diable. Et comment va la famille? ’ asked Claire, and looked over the restaurant to the bar at the far end, where Katrin, waiting to be acknowledged, raised her skinny arm and waved. A naturally angular woman, she was dressed today in a sensual brown wrap dress to accentuate the fact that she was heavily pregnant, with the high-sitting, pointed bump that suggests a boy. She was tearing off raffle tickets and giving them to a line of teenagers who each paid their three dollars and descended into the basement.

  ‘Bien,’ said Yousef simply, and then, encouraged by Claire’s delight at this pure and honest description, extended it in a manner less to her taste, prattling happily about this longed-for pregnancy, his parents’ second, deeper retirement to the wilds of Vermont, the growth and success of his restaurant. Claire’s poetry class, not understanding French, huddled together behind their teacher, smiling shyly. But Claire always grew tired of other people’s prose narratives and now patted Yousef several times on the arm.

  ‘We need a table, darling,’ she said, in English, looking over his head into the double line-up of booths on each side of a wide aisle, like pews in a church. Yousef, in turn, was instantly businesslike.

  ‘Yes, of course. For how many are you?’

  ‘I haven’t even introduced you,’ said Claire, and began to point her finger around her bashful class, finding something wonderful – although based only loosely in fact
– to say about everybody. If you played the piano a little, you were described as a maestro. Once acted in a college cabaret? The next Minnelli. Everyone warmed themselves in the generous communal glow. Even Zora – described as ‘the brains of the outfit’ – began to feel a little of the real, unassailable magic of Claire: she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you. Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you are thirsty. Or – if one wishes to be grand about it – to write the poem that is exactly the fitting receptacle of the feeling or thought that you hoped to convey. In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. This was why students at Wellington applied in their hundreds for her class. Poor Yousef ran out of facial expressions of wonder with which to greet this race of giants who had come to eat at his establishment.

  ‘And how many is this?’ he asked again, when Claire had finished.

  ‘Ten, eleven? Actually, darling, we’re going to need three booths, I think.’

  Settling into the tables was a political matter. The booth to sit in was clearly whichever one contained Claire and, failing that, Zora, but when these two unintentionally chose the same booth, an indecorous struggle began for the vacant seats. The two who found themselves in these prime positions – Ron and Daisy – did little to conceal their joy. By contrast the second booth behind this one was despondently quiet. The stragglers’ booth across the room – with only three people in it – openly sulked. Claire too, was disappointed. Her own affections rested with other students, not at this table. Ron and Daisy’s callow, spiky humour did not amuse her. American humour in general left her cold. She never felt less at home in the States than when confronted with one of those bewildering sitcoms: people walking in, people walking out, gags, laugh tracks, idiocy, irony. Tonight, she would really have preferred to be sitting at the stragglers’ table with Chantelle, listening to that saturnine young lady’s startling accounts of ghetto life in a bad Boston neighbourhood. Claire was spellbound by this news of lives so different from her own as to seem interplanetary. Her own background had been international, privileged and emotionally austere; she had grown up among American intellectuals and European aristocrats, a cultivated but cold mix. Five languages, went the line in a very early poem, the kind of doggerel she wrote in the early seventies, And no way to say I love you. Or, more importantly, I hate you. In Chantelle’s family both expressions were slung around the house with operatic regularity. But Claire would learn nothing of all that this evening. Instead she was to be the net over which Ron and Daisy and Zora lobbed wisecracks. She settled into her cushions and tried to make the best of it.

  The present conversation concerned a television show so famous even Claire had heard of it (although she’d never seen it); it was being satirized by her three students, taken apart to reveal unpleasant subtexts; dark political motives were assigned to it, and complex theoretical tools used to dismantle its simple, sincere façade. Every now and then the discussion swerved and slowed down until it ran alongside actual politics – the President, the administration – at which point the door was opened and Claire invited in for the ride. She was grateful when the waiter came to take their orders. A little hesitation hovered over the ordering of drinks – all but one of her students, a grad, were under the legal limit. Claire made it clear they were free to do as they wished. Stupid, faux sophisticated drinks – all incompatible with a Moroccan meal – were then ordered: a whiskey and ginger, a Tom Collins, a Cosmopolitan. Claire ordered a bottle of white wine for herself. The drinks were brought swiftly. Even after one gulp, she could see her students freeing themselves of the formality of the classroom. It wasn’t the drink itself but merely the licence it gave. ‘Oh, I so needed that,’ came from the adjacent booth, as a mousy little thing called Lena lowered a simple bottle of beer from her lips. Claire smiled to herself and looked at the table top. Every year more students, same but different. She listened with interest to the young men from her class ordering whatever it was they wished to eat. Then came the girls. Daisy ordered a starter, claiming to have eaten earlier (an old trick of Claire’s youth); Zora – after much hesitation – ordered a fish tagine without rice, and this order Claire could hear femininely echoed three times in the booth behind. Then it was Claire’s turn. She did as she had done for thirty years.

  ‘Just the salad please, thank you.’

  Claire passed her menu to the waiter and brought both hands, one on top of the other, down hard on the table.

  ‘So,’ she said.

  ‘So,’ said Ron and boldly mimicked his teacher’s movement.

  ‘How’s the class working out for everybody?’ asked Claire.

  ‘Good,’ said Daisy solidly, but then glanced at Zora and Ron for confirmation. ‘I think it’s good – and the discussion format will come into its own, I’m sure. Right now it’s a little . . .’ said Daisy, and Ron finished for her:

  ‘. . . stop and start. You know, because it’s a little intimidating.’ Ron leaned confidentially over the table. ‘For freshmen I think, particularly. But those of us who’ve had some experience are more – ’

  ‘But even then, you can be very intimidating,’ insisted Zora.

  For the first time tonight, Claire looked at Zora Belsey directly. ‘Intimidating? How so?’

  ‘Well,’ said Zora, faltering a little. Her contempt for Claire was like the black backing on a mirror; the other side reflected immense personal envy and admiration. ‘This is quite intimate and, and, vulnerable, what we’re bringing to you, these poems. And of course we want proper constructive criticism, but you also can be –’

  ‘It’s like: you make it clear,’ said Daisy, already slightly drunk, ‘who you, like, really prefer. And that’s a little demoralizing. Maybe.’

  ‘I don’t prefer anybody,’ protested Claire. ‘I’m evaluating poems, not people. You have to guide a poem to its greatness, and we’re all doing that, together, communally.’

  ‘Right, right, right,’ said Daisy.

  ‘There isn’t anybody,’ said Claire, ‘who I don’t believe deserved to get into this class.’

  ‘Oh, completely,’ said Ron fervently, and then in the little silence, concocted a new, more pleasing route for the conversation.

  ‘You know what it is?’ he suggested. ‘It’s just we’re all looking at you, and you did this thing so young, and so successfully – and that’s awe-inspiring.’ Here he touched her hand, as his old-fashioned camp somehow freed him to, and she threw her shawl once more over her shoulder, allowing herself to be cast in the diva role. ‘And so it’s a big deal – it would be weird if it wasn’t this total bull-in-a-china-shop situation in the room.’

  ‘Elephant in the room,’ corrected Claire gently.

  ‘Right. God! I’m such an idiot. Bull? Aaaargh.’

  ‘But what was it like?’ asked Daisy, as Ron flushed maroon. ‘I mean – you were so young. I’m nineteen and it feels like it’s too late for me or something. Right? Doesn’t it feel like that? We were just saying about how awe-inspiring Claire is and what it must have been like for her to be so successful so young and stuff,’ said Daisy, for the sake of Lena, who now knelt awkwardly by the low table, having made a weak pretence of coming over to pick up the condiment tray. Daisy looked over at Claire, waiting for her to continue the thread. They all looked at her.

  ‘You’re asking me what it was like when I started.’

  ‘Yeah – was it amazing?’

  Claire sighed. She could tell these stories all night long – she often did when people asked. But they h
ad nothing to do with her any more.

  ‘God . . . it was ’73, and it was a very strange time to be a woman poet . . . I was meeting all these amazing people – Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti, and then finding myself in these insane situations . . . meeting, I don’t know, Mick Jagger or whoever, and I felt just very examined, very picked over, not just mentally but also personally and physically . . . and I suppose I felt somewhat . . . disembodied from myself. You could put it that way. But the next summer I was already gone, I went up to Montana for three years, so . . . things normalize quicker than you’d think. And I was in this beautiful country, in this exceptional landscape, and the truth is land like that is what fills you up, it’s what nourishes you as an artist . . . I’d get involved with a cornflower, for days . . . I mean with its actual, essential blueness . . .’

  Claire talked on in her loopy way about the earth and its poetry, and her students nodded thoughtfully, but an unmistakable torpor had descended. They would have preferred to hear more about Mick Jagger, or Sam Shepard, the man she’d gone to Montana for, as they already knew from their Googling. Land did not interest them too much. Theirs was the poetry of character, of romantic personalities, of broken hearts and emotional warfare. Claire, who had experienced more than enough of this in her life, populated her poems these days with New England foliage, wildlife, creeks, valleys and mountain ranges. These poems had proved less popular than the sexualized verse of her youth.

  The food arrived. Claire was still speaking about the land. Zora, who had been clearly brooding on something, now spoke up. ‘But how do you avoid falling into pastoral fallacy – I mean, isn’t it a depoliticized reification, all this beauty stuff about landscape? Virgil, Pope, the Romantics. Why idealize?’