On Beauty Read online

  Howard spotted her by the pool now, crouching next to Erskine, both of them talking to Levi, who held himself up in the water with his strong folded arms upon the concrete. They were all laughing. Sadness sidled up to Howard. It was so strange to him, this decision of Kiki’s not to pursue him for every detail of his betrayal. He admired the strength of her continued emotional willpower, but he didn’t understand it. Had it been Howard, no force on earth could have stopped him knowing the name, the face, the whole history of touches. Sexually, he had always been an intensely jealous man. When he met Kiki she had been a woman of only male friends, hundreds of them (or so it had seemed to Howard), mostly ex-lovers. Just hearing their names, even now, thirty years later, plunged Howard into a blue funk. They saw none of these men socially with any regularity, and that had been Howard’s doing. He had bullied, threatened and frozen them all out. And this was despite the fact that Kiki had always claimed (and he had always believed her) that love started with him.

  Now he put his hand over his empty glass to decline some wine Monique was trying to give him. ‘Monique. Good party? Have you seen Zora?’

  ‘Zora?’

  ‘Yes, Zora.’

  ‘I don’t see ’er. Before I see, not now.’

  ‘Everything going OK? Enough wine and so on?’

  ‘Enough of everything. Too much.’

  A few minutes later, by the doors into the kitchen, Howard spotted his unsubtle daughter hovering by a trio of philosophy graduates. He hurried over to effect her entry into this circle. He could do this kind of thing, at least. They stood leaning against each other, father and daughter: Howard feeling the alcohol and wanting to say something sentimental to her; Zora oblivious. She was focused on the conversation between the grads.

  ‘And of course he was the great white hope.’

  ‘Right. Great things were expected.’

  ‘He was the darling of that department. At twenty-two or whatever.’

  ‘Maybe that was the problem.’

  ‘Right. Right.’

  ‘He was offered a Rhodes – didn’t take it up.’

  ‘But he’s doing nothing now, right?’

  ‘Nope. I don’t even think he’s attached to anywhere at the moment. I heard he had a baby – so who knows. I think he’s in Detroit.’

  ‘Which is where he came from . . . Just one of these brilliant but totally unprepared kids.’

  ‘No guidance.’

  ‘None.’

  It was a very average piece of Schadenfreude, but Howard saw how Zora was compelled by it. She had the strangest ideas about academics – she found it extraordinary that they should be capable of gossip or venal thoughts. She was hopelessly naive about them. She had not noticed, for example, the fact that philosophy graduate number two was involved in a study of her chest, out on messy display this evening in an unreliable gypsy top. So it was Zora whom Howard sent to the door when the bell went; Zora who opened the door to the family Kipps. The penny did not drop immediately. Here was a tall, imperious black man, in his late fifties, with a pug dog’s distended eyes. To his right, his taller, equally dignified son; on the other side, his gallingly pretty daughter. Before conversation, Zora waded around in the visual information: the strangely Victorian get-up of the older man – the waistcoat, the pocket-handkerchief – and again that searing glimpse of the girl, the instantaneous recognition (on both sides) of her physical superiority. Now they moved in a triangle behind Zora through the hallway as she babbled about coats and drinks and her own parents, neither of whom, for the moment, could be found. Howard had vanished.

  ‘God, he was right here. God. He’s around here some place . . . God, where is he?’

  It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly. The three guests stood patiently around her, watching Zora’s fireworks of anxiety. Monique passed by and Zora lunged at her, but her tray was empty and she hadn’t seen Howard since he’d been looking for Zora, a fact that took a tediously long time to explain.

  ‘Levi in the pool – Jerome upstairs,’ offered Monique in sulky mitigation. ‘He says him not coming down.’

  This was an unfortunate reference.

  ‘This is Victoria,’ said Mr Kipps, with the measured dignity of a man taking control of a silly situation. ‘And Michael. Of course, they already know your brother, the elder brother.’

  His Trinidadian basso profundo sailed effortlessly through the sea of shame here, pressing forward into new waters.

  ‘Yeah, they totally already met,’ said Zora, neither lightly nor seriously, and so falling somewhere unsettling in between.

  ‘They were all chums in London and now you will all be chums here,’ said Monty Kipps, looking out impatiently over her head, like a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him. ‘I really should say hello to your parents. Otherwise it is rather like being smuggled in the wooden horse, and I come as a guest, you see, bearing no dubious gifts. Not tonight, at least.’ His politician’s laugh left his eyes unaffected by the action.

  ‘Oh, sure . . .’ said Zora, laughing along blandly, joining him in the fruitless stationary staring. ‘I just don’t know where . . . So are you all . . . I mean, have you all moved here, or?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Michael. ‘This is purely holiday for me. Back to London Tuesday. Work calls, sadly.’

  ‘Ah. That’s a shame,’ said Zora politely, but she wasn’t disappointed. He was striking, but wholly void of sex appeal. She thought, strangely, of that boy in the park. Why can’t respectable boys like this look more like boys like that?

  ‘And you’re at Wellington, yeah?’ asked Michael, without betraying any genuine curiosity. Zora met his eyes, made small and dull behind corrective glass, as her own were.

  ‘Yeah . . . went to my dad’s place . . . not very adventurous, I guess. And it looks like I’m going to be an Art History major, actually.’

  ‘Which is, of course,’ announced Monty, ‘the field in which I started. I curated the first American exhibition of the Caribbean “primitives” in New York in 1965. I have the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island.’

  ‘Wow. All to yourself – that must be great.’

  But Monty Kipps was clearly a man aware of his own comic potential; he was on guard against any irony, attentive to its approach. He had made his statement in good faith and would not allow it to be satirized retrospectively. He gave a long pause before he replied. ‘It’s satisfying to be able to protect important black art, yes.’

  His daughter rolled her eyes.

  ‘Great if you like Baron Samedi staring at you from every corner of the house.’

  It was the first time Victoria had spoken. Zora was surprised by her voice, which, like her father’s, was loud and low and forthright, out of sync with her coquettish appearance.

  ‘Victoria is currently reading the French philosophers . . .’ said her father drily, and began to list contemptuously several of Zora’s own lodestars.

  ‘Right, right, I see . . .’ murmured Zora through this. She had drunk one glass of wine too many. One extra glass made her like this, nodding in agreement before a person’s point was finished, and always aiming for exactly this tone, that of the world-weary almost European bourgeois, for whom, at nineteen, all things were familiar.

  ‘. . . And I’m afraid it’s making her hate art in a dull way. But hopefully Cambridge will straighten her out.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘And in the meantime she will audit some classes here – I’m sure you’ll run across each other, from time to time.’

  The girls looked at one another without much enthusiasm at the prospect.

  ‘I don’t hate “art”, anyway – I hate your art,’ countered Victoria. Her father patted her shoulder soothingly, a move she shrugged off as a much younger child might.

  ‘I guess we don’t really hang much stuff around the house,’
said Zora, looking around at the empty walls, wondering how she got on to the one topic she had wanted to avoid. ‘Dad’s more into conceptual art, of course. We have totally extreme taste in art – like most of the pieces we own, we can’t really show in the house. He’s into the whole evisceration theory, you know – like art should rip your fucking guts out.’

  There was not time for the fallout from this. Zora felt a pair of hands on her shoulders. She couldn’t remember ever being more pleased to see her own mother.

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘You been taking care of our guests?’ Kiki stretched out her invitingly podgy hand, glittering with bangles at the wrist. ‘It’s Monty, isn’t it? In fact, I think your wife was telling me it’s now Sir Monty . . .’

  The smoothness with which she proceeded from here impressed her daughter. It turned out that some of those much maligned (by Zora) traditional Wellington interpersonal skills – avoidance, denial, politic speech and false courtesy – had their uses. Within five minutes everybody had a drink, everyone’s coat had been hung, and small talk was proceeding apace.

  ‘Mrs Kipps . . . Carlene, she’s not with you?’ said Kiki.

  ‘Mom, I’m just going to . . . excuse me, nice to meet you,’ said Zora, vaguely pointing across the room and then following her own finger.

  ‘She didn’t make it?’ repeated Kiki. Why did she feel so disappointed?

  ‘Oh, my wife very rarely attends these things,’ said Monty. ‘She doesn’t enjoy social conflagration. It’s fair to say she is more warmed by the home hearth.’

  Kiki was familiar with this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative occasionally have – but the accent was incredible to her. It flew around the scale – somewhat like Erskine’s but the vowels were given a body and depth she had never heard before. Fair came as Fee-yer.

  ‘Oh . . . that’s a pity . . . she seemed so sure she was going to come.’

  ‘And then later, she was just as sure she would not.’ He smiled, and in the smile was a powerful man’s assurance that Kiki would not be silly enough to push the topic any further. ‘Carlene is a woman of changeable moods.’

  Poor Carlene! Kiki dreaded the idea of spending even one night with this man with whom Carlene must spend a lifetime. Fortunately there were many people Monty Kipps wanted to be introduced to. He quickly demanded a list of significant Wellingtonians, and Kiki obligingly pointed out Jack French, Erskine, the various faculty heads; she explained that the college president was invited while failing to explain that there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would come. The Kipps children had already disappeared into the garden. Jerome – much to Kiki’s annoyance – remained skulking upstairs. Kiki accompanied Monty through the rooms. His meeting with Howard was brief and arch, a stylized circling of each other’s more extreme positions – Howard the radical art theorist, Monty the cultural conservative – with Howard coming off the worse because he was drunk and took it too seriously. Kiki separated them, manoeuvring Howard towards the curator of a small Boston gallery who had been trying to catch him all night. Howard only half attended to this small worried man as he pressed him on a proposed Rembrandt lecture season that Howard had promised to organize and done nothing about. Its highlight was to be a lecture from Howard himself, with a wine and cheese event afterwards, part sponsored by Wellington. Howard had neither written this lecture nor looked deeply into the matter of the wine and the cheese. Over the man’s shoulder, he watched Monty dominate what was left of his party. A loud, playful debate with Christian and Meredith was being conducted near the fireplace, with Jack French at its borders, never quite quick enough to insert the witticisms he kept on attempting. Howard worried whether he was being defended by his supposed defenders. Maybe he was being ridiculed.

  ‘I suppose I’m asking what the tenor of your talk will be . . .’

  Howard tuned back into his own conversation, which he was apparently having not with one man but two. The curator, with his moist nose, had been joined by a young bald man. This second fellow had such lucent white skin and so prominent a plate of bone in his forehead that Howard felt oppressed by the sheer mortality of the man. Never had another living being shown him this much skull.

  ‘The tenor?’

  “ ‘Ag ’inst Rembrandt”,’ the second man said. He had a high-pitched Southern voice that struck Howard as a comic assault for which he had been completely unprepared. ‘That was the title your assistant mailed us – I’m just tryna figger what you meant by “ag’inst” – obviously my organization are part-sponsors of this whole event, so –’

  ‘Your organization –’

  ‘The RAS – Rembrandt Appreciation – and I’m sure I’m not an innellekchewl, at least, as a fella like you might think of one . . .’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re not,’ murmured Howard. He found that his accent caused a delayed reaction in certain Americans. It was sometimes the next day before they realized how rude he had been to them.

  ‘I mean, maybe the “fallacy of the human” is a phrase for innnelekchew-alls, but I can tell you our members . . .’

  Across the room, Howard saw that Monty’s circle had widened to allow in a clutch of avid Black Studies scholars, led by Erskine and his brittle Atlanta wife, Caroline. She was an extremely wiry black woman, really one muscle from head to toe, and always immaculate – that East Coast moneyed finesse translated into blackness, her hair straight and stiff, her Chanel suit slightly brighter and more shapely than those of her white counterparts. She was one of the few women in his circle whom Howard had not imagined in a sexual context – this fact was unrelated to her attractiveness (Howard often considered the most awful-looking women in this dimension). It was rather a question of impenetrability: there was no way for the imagination to get through the powerful casing of Caroline herself. You had to imagine yourself into a different universe to imagine fucking her; and that would not be how it went anyway – she would fuck you. She was infamously proud (most women disliked her) and, like any wife of a superficially attentive man, she was admirably self-contained, apparently without external social needs. But Erskine was also helplessly unfaithful, which gave the pride a characterful, impressive edge of which Howard had always been slightly in awe. She expressed herself eccentrically – she referred to Erskine’s girls imperiously as those mulattos – and gave no clue as to her real feelings. A celebrated lawyer, she was, it was said, extremely close to becoming a Supreme Court judge; she knew Powell personally, and Rice; she liked to explain patiently to Howard that such people ‘lifted the race’. Monty was exactly to her taste. Her delicate manicured hand was presently making precise cutting movements in the air in front of him, maybe describing where the buck stopped, or how far there was left to go.