On Beauty Read online

  ‘Idealize?’ repeated Claire uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure I really . . . You know, what I’ve always felt is, well, for instance, in The Georgics – ’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Virgil . . . in The Georgics, nature and the pleasures of the pastoral are essential to any . . .’ began Claire, but Zora had already stopped listening. Claire’s kind of learning was tiresome to her. Claire didn’t know anything about theorists, or ideas, or the latest thinking. Sometimes Zora suspected her of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always ‘in Plato’ or ‘in Baudelaire’ or ‘in Rimbaud’, as if we all had time to sit around reading whatever we fancied. Zora blinked impatiently, visibly tracking Claire’s sentence, waiting for a period or, failing that, a semicolon in which to insert herself again.

  ‘But after Foucault,’ she said, seeing her chance, ‘where is there to go with that stuff?’

  They were having an intellectual argument. The table was excited. Lena bounced on her heels to keep the blood circulating. Claire felt very tired. She was a poet. How had she ever ended up here, in one of these institutions, these universities, where one must make an argument for everything, even an argument for wanting to write about a chestnut tree?

  ‘Boo.’

  Claire and the rest of the table looked up. A tall, handsome brown boy, with five or six guys hanging right behind him, stood by their table. Levi, unfazed by this kind of focused attention, acknowledged it with a nod.

  ‘Eleven thirty, out front, a’right?’

  Zora agreed quickly, willing him away.

  ‘Levi? Is that you?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Mizz Malcolm.’

  ‘My God. Look at you! So that’s what all that swimming is for. You’re huge!’

  ‘Getting that way,’ said Levi, rounding out his shoulders. He didn’t smile. He knew about Claire Malcolm, Jerome had told him, and, with his usual judicious ability to see both sides of a thing, he had felt quite reasonable about it. He felt bad for his mom, obviously, but he also understood his father’s position. Levi too had loved girls dearly in the past and then played away with other girls for less than honourable reasons and saw nothing heinously wrong with the separation of sex and love into two different categories. But, looking at Claire Malcolm now, he found himself confused. It was yet another example of his father’s bizarre tastes. Where was the booty on that? Where was the rack? He felt the unfairness and illogic of this substitution. He made a decision to cut the conversation short as a sign of solidarity with his mother’s more generous proportions.

  ‘Well, you look great,’ chimed Claire. ‘Are you performing tonight?’

  ‘Not definitely. Depends. My boys probably will,’ said Levi, flicking his head back in the direction of his companions. ‘Anyway, I guess I better be getting down there. Eleven thirty,’ he repeated to Zora and walked on.

  Claire, who had not missed Levi’s silent chastisement, poured herself another large glass of wine and put her knife and fork together over her half-eaten salad. ‘We should probably go down too,’ she said quietly.

  8

  The ethnography of the basement was not as it had been on previous visits. From where Claire sat she could see only a few other white people, and no one at all of her own age. This state of affairs need not change things particularly, but it was not quite as she’d expected and it would take a little while to feel comfortable. She was thankful for yoga; yoga allowed her to sit cross-legged on a floor cushion like a much younger woman, camouflaged among her students. On stage, a black girl in a tall headwrap rhymed brashly over the bluesy swing of the small live band behind her. My womb, she said, is the TOMB, she said, of your precious misconceptions /I KNOW the identity of your serenity /When YOU claim my hero was blond /Cleopatra? Brother, that’s plain wrong /I HEAR the Nubian spirit behind the whitewash /Oh, gosh /My redemption has its OWN intention. And so on. This was not good. Claire listened to her students’ lively discussion about why this was not good. In the spirit of pedagogy she tried to encourage them to be less abusive, more specific. She was only partly successful in this.

  ‘At least she’s conscious,’ said Chantelle, a little guardedly. She was shy of the weight of opinion on the other side. ‘I mean, at least it’s not “bitch” this and “nigger” that. You know?’

  ‘This stuff makes me want to die,’ said Zora loudly and put both hands on the top of her head. ‘It’s so cheesy.’

  ‘My vagina /In Carolina /Is much finer /Than yours,’ said Ron, walking close (Claire felt) to the racial line, with his exaggerated impression of the girl’s feisty head movements and sing-song intonation. But the class fell into hysterics, Zora leading the laughter and so, in a vital way, sanctioning it. Of course, thought Claire, they’re less sensitive about all that than we were. If it were 1972 this room would be as silent as a church.

  Through the laughter and conversation, the ordering of drinks, the opening and closing of toilet doors, the girl kept going. After ten minutes the fact that the girl was not good stopped being amusing and began, as Claire heard her students put it, ‘getting old’. Even the most supportive members in the audience stopped nodding. Conversation grew louder. The MC, who sat on a stool by the side of the stage, switched his mike on to intervene; he begged them for quiet and attention and respect, this last word having some currency in the Bus Stop. But the girl was not good, and soon enough the chatter started up again. Finally, with the ominous promise ‘And I WILL rise’, the girl stopped. A spattering of applause came.

  ‘Thank you, Queen Lara,’ said the MC, holding his mike very close to his lips like an ice-cream. ‘Now, I’m Doc Brown, your MC this eve’nin’, and I want to hear you make some noise for Queen Lara . . . Sister was brave to get up on this stage, takes some guts to do that, man . . . to stand up in front of everybody, talk about yo’womb and shit . . .’ Doc Brown allowed himself a chuckle here but then played the straight man once more: ‘Nah, on the real, tho, that takes some guts, sho’ nuf . . . right? Am I right? Oh, come on, man, put yo hands together, now. Don’t be like that. Let’s hear it for Queen Lara and her conscious lyrics – now that’s better.’

  Claire’s class joined in the reluctant clapping. ‘Bring on the poetry!’ said Ron, meaning it as a joke, just for his friends, but he had pitched it too loud.

  ‘Bring on the poetry?’ repeated Doc Brown, wide-eyed, looking into the darkness for the mystery voice. ‘Shit, now how often you get to hear that? See, that’s why I love the Bus Stop. Bring on the poetry. I know that be a Wellington kid . . .’ Laughter detonated through the basement, loudest among Claire’s class itself. ‘Bring on the poetry. We got some educated brothers in here tonight. Bring on the poetry. Bring on the trigonometry. Bring ON the algebra – bring that shit ON,’ he said, in the ‘nerd’ voice with which black comedians sometimes imitate white people. ‘Well . . . you’re in luck, young man, ’cos we about to bring on the poetry, the Spoken Word, the rap, the rhyming – we gon’ do alla that for you. Bring on the poetry. I love that . . . Now: tonight it’s up to y’all who wins – we got a jeroboam of champagne – yeah, thank you, Mr Wellington, there’s your vocabulary word-for-the-day – a jeroboam of champagne, which basically means a whole lot of alcohol. And you guys got to choose who wins it – all you got to do is make some noise for your favourite. We got a show for you tonight. We got some Caribbean brothers in the house, we got some African brothers in the house, we got people gonna hit it in French, in Portuguese – I am reliably informed we got the United Nations of Spoken Word up in here tonight, so, you people be privileged in the extreme. Yeah, that’s right,’ said Doc Brown, responding to the whoops and whistles. ‘We getting international on yo’ ass. You know how we do.’

  Thus did the show begin. There was support for the first artist, a young man who rhymed stiffly but spoke eloquently of America’s latest war. After this came a gawky, lanky girl with ears that thrust through the poker-straight curtains of her long hair. Claire suppressed her own hatred of elaborate metaphor and manage
d to enjoy the girl’s cruel, witty verse about all the useless men she’d known. But then three boys, one after the after, recounted macho tales of street life, the final boy speaking in Portuguese. Here Claire’s attention petered out. It happened that Zora was sat right in front of her at an evocative angle, her face presenting itself to Claire in profile. Without wanting to, Claire found herself examining it. How much of the girl’s father was here! The slight over-bite, the long face, the noble nose! She was getting fat, though; inevitably she would go the way of her mother. Claire rebuked herself for this thought. It was wrong to hate the girl, as it was wrong to hate Howard, or to hate herself. Hate would not help this. It was personal insight that was required. Twice a week at six thirty Claire drove into Boston, to Dr Byford’s house in Chapel Hill, and paid him eighty dollars an hour to help her seek out personal insight. Together they tried to comprehend the chaos of pain Claire had unleashed. If one good thing had come out of the past twelve months, it was these sessions: of all her psychiatrists over the years, it was Byford who had brought her closest to breakthrough. So far this much was clear: Claire Malcolm was addicted to self-sabotage. In a pattern so deeply embedded in her life that Byford suspected it of being rooted in her earliest babyhood, Claire compulsively sabotaged all possibilities of personal happiness. It seemed she was convinced that it was not happiness that she deserved. The Howard episode was only the last and most spectacular in a long line of acts of emotional cruelty she had felt impelled to inflict upon herself. You only had to look at the timing. Finally, finally, she had found this wonderful blessing, this angel, this gift, Warren Crane, a man who (she could not help but list his attributes as Byford encouraged her to do):

  Did not consider her a threat.

  Did not fear or dread her sexuality or gender.

  Did not wish to cripple her mentally.

  Did not, at a preconscious level, want her dead.

  Did not resent her money, her reputation, her talent or her strength.

  Did not wish to interfere with the deep connection she had with the earth – indeed, loved the earth as she did and encouraged her love of it.

  She had come to a place of personal joy. Finally, at fifty-three. And so naturally it was the perfect time to sabotage her own life. To this end she had initiated an affair with Howard Belsey, one of her oldest friends. A man for whom she had no sexual desire whatsoever. Looking back on it, it was really too perfect. Howard Belsey – of all people! When Claire leaned into Howard’s body that day in the conference room of the Black Studies Department, when she clearly offered herself to him, she had not really known why. By contrast, she had felt all the classic masculine impulses and fantasies surge through her old friend back towards her – the late possibility of other people, of living other lives, of new flesh, of being young again. Howard was releasing a secret, volatile, shameful part of himself. And it was an aspect of himself with which he was unfamiliar, that he had always presumed beneath him; she could sense all of this in the urgent pressure of Howard’s hands on her tiny waist, the fumbling speed with which he undressed her. He was surprised by desire. In response Claire had felt nothing comparable. Only sorrow.

  Their three-week affair never even met with a bedroom. To go to a bedroom would have been a conscious decision. Instead, in the regular course of their college business, their thrice-weekly after-hours meeting in Howard’s office, they would lock the door and gravitate to his huge squishy sofa, upholstered in its ostentatiously English, William Morris ferns. Silently and fiercely they fucked among the foliage, almost always sitting up, with Claire sat perfunctorily atop her colleague, her little freckled legs wrapped about his waist. When they had finished he had a habit of pushing her backwards until she was lying beneath him. Curiously, he laid his big flat hands on her body, on her shoulders, on her flat chest, on her stomach, on the backs of her ankles, on the thin, waxed line of her pubic hair. It seemed a kind of wonder; he was checking that she was all there and this was all real. Then they would get up and dress. How did that happen again? They often said this or something like it. A stupid, cowardly, pointless thing to say. Meanwhile sex with Warren was newly ecstatic and always completed with guilty tears, which Warren misinterpreted, in his innocence, as joy. The whole situation was vile, the more so because she couldn’t defend it, even to herself; the more so because she was terrified and humbled by the long reach of her miserable, unloved childhood. Still clasping its fingers round her throat all these years later!

  Three Tuesdays after the affair began Howard came into her office to tell her it was over. It was the first time either properly acknowledged it had begun. He explained he’d been caught with a condom. It was the same, unopened condom at which Claire had laughed, that afternoon of their second assignation, when Howard had produced it, like an anxious, well-intentioned teenage boy (‘Howard, darling – that’s sweet of you, but my reproductive days are over’). Upon hearing his retelling of it, Claire had wanted to laugh again – it was so typically Howard, such an unnecessary disaster. But what followed was not so funny. He told her that he had confessed, telling Kiki the minimum that needed to be told – that he had been unfaithful. He had not mentioned Claire’s name. This was kind, and Claire thanked him for it. He looked at her oddly. He had told this lie to save his wife’s feelings, not Claire’s face. He finished his short, factual speech. He wobbled a little on his feet. This was a different Howard from the one Claire had known these thirty years. No longer the steely academic who’d always (she suspected) found her slightly ridiculous, who never seemed quite certain what the point of poetry was. That day in her office Howard had looked as if a good, comforting piece of verse was just what he needed. Throughout their friendship, Claire had satirized his scrupulous intellectualism, just as he had teased her about her artistic ideals. It was her old joke that Howard was only human in a theoretical sense. This was the general feeling in Wellington too: his students found it near impossible to imagine that Howard should have a wife, a family, that he went to the bathroom, that he felt love. Claire was not as naive as the students; she knew he did love, and intensely, but she also saw that it was not articulated in him in the normal way. Something about his academic life had changed love for him, changed its nature. Of course, without Kiki, he couldn’t function – anyone who knew him knew that much. But it was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. Claire had always been curious how a marriage like that worked. Dr Byford went so far as to suggest that this was exactly the reason Claire had chosen to get involved with Howard after all these years. At the moment of her own greatest emotional commitment she intervened in the most successful marriage she knew. And it was true: sitting behind her desk, examining this abandoned, rudderless man, she had felt perversely vindicated. Seeing him like that had meant she was right, after all, about academics. (And shouldn’t she know? She’d married three of them.) They had no idea what the hell they were doing. Howard had no way of dealing with his new reality. He was unequal to the task of squaring his sense of himself with what he had done. It was not rational, and therefore, he could not comprehend it. For Claire, their affair was only confirmation of what she knew of the darkest parts of herself. For Howard, it was clearly revelation.

  It was horrendous thinking about him, having him refracted through Zora’s features. Now that Claire’s part in Howard’s indiscretion was no longer a secret, the guilt had moved from private indulgence to public punishment. Not that she minded the shame; she had been the mistress on other occasions and had not been especially cowed by it then. But this time it was infuriating and humiliating to be punished for something she’d done with so little desire or will. She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she
was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psychological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself.

  And were they still like that, she wondered – these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of – as Howard might put it – desiring subjects? Thinking of the girls sat cross-legged with her in this basement, of Zora in front of her, of the angry girls who shouted their poetry from the stage – no, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything. Strangely, Kiki Belsey had always struck Claire as a wonderful anomaly in exactly this sense. Claire remembered when Howard first met his wife, back when Kiki was a nursing student in New York. At that time her beauty was awesome, almost unspeakable, but more than this she radiated an essential female nature Claire had already imagined in her poetry – natural, honest, powerful, unmediated, full of something like genuine desire. A goddess of the everyday. She was not one of Howard’s intellectual set, but she was actively political, and her beliefs were genuine and well expressed. Womanish, as they said back then, not feminine. For Claire, Kiki was not only evidence of Howard’s humanity but proof that a new kind of woman had come into the world as promised, as advertised. Without ever becoming intimates, she felt she could honestly say that she and Kiki had always been fond of each other. Never had she resented Kiki or wished her ill. And here Claire emerged out of herself; refocused on Zora’s features so that hers was again a sovereign face and not a blur of colour and personal thoughts. It was not possible to make the last leap – to consider what it was Kiki now thought of Claire. To do that was to become subhuman before yourself, the person cast out beyond pity, a Caliban. Nobody can cast themselves out.