On Beauty Read online

  And still Howard’s conversation continued. He began to see no way out of it.

  ‘Well,’ he said loudly, hoping to finish it off with a daunting display of academic pyrotechnics, ‘what I meant was that Rembrandt is part of the seventeenth-century European movement to . . . well, let’s shorthand it – essentially invent the idea of the human,’ Howard heard himself saying, all of it paraphrased from the chapter he had left upstairs, asleep on the computer screen, boring even to itself. ‘And of course the corollary to that is the fallacy that we as human beings are central, and that our aesthetic sense in some way makesus central – think of the position he paints himself in, right between those two inscribed empty globes on the wall . . .’

  Howard kept talking along these almost automatic lines. He felt a breeze from the garden get into his system, deep, through channels a younger body would never permit. He felt very sad, retracing these arguments that had made him slightly notable in the tiny circle in which he moved. The retraction of love in one part of his life had made this other half of his life feel cold indeed.

  ‘Introduce me,’ instructed a woman suddenly, gripping the slack muscle in his upper arm. It was Claire Malcolm.

  ‘Oh, God, excuse me – can I steal him, just a moment?’ she said to the curator and his friend, ignoring their concerned faces. She pulled Howard some steps away towards the corner of the room. Diagonally across from them Monty Kipps’s enormous laugh announced itself first and mightiest over a refrain of hoots.

  ‘Introduce me to Kipps.’

  They stood next to each other, Claire and Howard, looking out across the room like parents on the edge of a school football field, watching their boy. It was an oblique angle but also a close one. The peachy flush of alcohol had pushed through Claire’s deep tan, and the various moles and freckles of her face and décolletage were ringed by this aroused pinkness; it brought youth back to her like no product or procedure could ever hope to. Howard hadn’t seen her in almost a year. They had managed this subtly, without drawing attention to the fact or conferring to achieve it. They had simply avoided each other on campus, giving up the cafeteria entirely and making certain they did not attend the same meetings. As an extra measure, Howard had stopped going to the Moroccan café in which, of an afternoon, one could see almost everybody in the English Department sitting alone, marking piles of essays. Then Claire had gone to Italy for the summer, which he had been thankful for. It was miserable seeing her now. She was in a simple shift dress of very thin cotton. Her tiny yogic body came up against it and then retreated once more – it depended on how she stood. You would have no idea, looking at her like this – make-up free, so simply dressed – no idea at all of the strange, minute cosmetic attentions she gave to other, more private parts of her body. Howard himself had been amazed to discover them. In what position had they been lying when she had offered the peculiar explanation of her mother being Parisian?

  ‘For Godssake, why would you want to meet him?’

  ‘Warren’s interested in him. And actually so am I. I think public intellectuals are incredibly weird and interesting . . . It’s got to be a kind of pathological tension, and then he has the race thing to contend with . . . But I just adore his dapperness. He’s terribly dapper.’

  ‘Terribly dapper fascist.’

  Claire frowned. ‘He’s so compelling, though. Like what they say about Clinton – charisma overdose. It’s probably entirely pheromonal, you know, like nasal, in some way Warren could explain –’

  ‘Nasal, anal – it’s definitely coming out one orifice or another.’ Howard now brought his glass to his mouth so that the next thing he said might be slightly muffled. ‘Congratulations, by the way. I hear they’re in order.’

  ‘We’re very happy,’ she said placidly. ‘God, I am so fascinated by him –’ Howard thought for a moment that she meant Warren. ‘See how he works the room? He’s everywhere, somehow.’

  ‘Yeah, like the plague.’

  Claire turned to Howard with an impish face. He saw that she had thought it would be all right now to look at him, now the ironic pace of their conversation had been set. The affair, after all, was so long in the past, had remained undiscovered for so long. In the interim Claire had got married! And that imaginary night at a Michigan conference was now the accepted reality; the three-week affair between Howard and Claire Malcolm in Wellington had never happened. Why shouldn’t they talk to each other again, look at each other? But in fact to look was lethal, and the moment she turned they both knew it. Claire did her best to continue, everything grotesquely exaggerated now by fear.

  ‘I think,’ she began in a ludicrous teasing voice, ‘I think you’d quite like to be like him.’

  ‘How much have you drunk?’

  He had a cruel wish at that moment that Claire Malcolm might be gone from the planet. Without his doing anything at all – just gone.

  ‘All your silly ideological battles . . .’ she said, and then grinned at him foolishly, her lips pulling away from her rosy gums to reveal her expensive American teeth. ‘You both know they don’t really matter. The country’s got bigger fish to fry now. Bigger ideas,’ she whispered, ‘are afoot. Aren’t they? Sometimes I don’t even know why I stay here.’

  ‘What are we talking about exactly – state of the nation or the state of you?’

  ‘Don’t be a wise-ass,’ she said sourly. ‘I mean all of us, not just me. There’s just no point.’

  ‘You sound like you’re fifteen. You sound like my kids.’

  ‘Bigger ideas than these. It’s got down to fundamentals, out there, in the world. Fundamentals. We’ve let down your kids, we’ve let down everybody’s kids. Looking at this country the way it is now, I’m thankful I never had any kids myself.’ Howard, who doubted the veracity of this, hid his disbelief by making a study of the yellowing oak floorboards beneath them. ‘God, when I think of this next semester I just feel sick. Nobody gives a fuck about Rembrandt, Howard–’ She stopped herself and began to laugh sadly. ‘Or Wallace Stevens. Bigger ideas,’ she repeated, finished her wine and nodded.

  ‘It’s all interconnected,’ said Howard dully, tracing the toe of his shoe around a wood-wormed gap in the flooring. ‘We produce new ways of thinking, then other people think it.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘Define believe,’ said Howard and, as he said it, felt shattered. There was almost not enough breath even to complete the sentence. Why wouldn’t she go away?

  ‘Oh, dear God –’ huffed Claire, stamping her little foot and laying a hand flat against his chest, priming up for one of their age-old battles. Essence versus theory. Belief versus power. Art versus cultural systems. Claire versus Howard. Howard felt one of her fingers thoughtlessly, drunkenly, slip under a gap in his shirt to his skin. Just then, they were interrupted.

  ‘What are you two gossiping about?’

  Too quickly, Claire removed her hand from Howard’s body. But Kiki wasn’t looking at Claire; she was looking at Howard. You’re married to someone for thirty years: you know their face like you know your own name. It was so quick and yet so absolute – the deception was over. Howard realized it at once, but how could Claire pick up on that tiny piece of tight skin on the left side of his wife’s mouth, or know what it meant? In her innocence, thinking she was rescuing the situation, Claire enclosed both of Kiki’s hands in her own.

  ‘I want to meet Sir Montague Kipps. Howard’s being tricky about it.’

  ‘Howard’s always tricky,’ said Kiki, flashing him a second steely, confirmatory glance that put the matter beyond doubt. ‘He thinks it makes him look clever.’

  ‘God, you look great, Keeks. You should be in a fountain in Rome.’

  Howard expected that this flattery of his wife’s appearance by Claire was compulsive. All he wanted to do was to stop her saying another word. Wild, violent fantasies took hold of him.

  ‘Oh, you too, honey,’ said Kiki calmly, dampening down this false enthusiasm. So there wasn�
��t going to be a scene. Howard had always loved this about his wife, her ability to play things cool – but at this moment he would have been happier to hear her scream. She stood like a zombie, her eyes quite dead to any appeal from him, her smile nailed on. And still they were stuck in this ludicrous conversation.

  ‘Look, I need an opening salvo,’ continued Claire. ‘I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing I actually want to talk to him. What can I get him on?’

  ‘He’s got a finger in every pie,’ said Howard, converting his personal desperation into anger. ‘Take your pick. State of Britain, state of the Caribbean, states of blackness, state of art, state of women, state of the States – you hum it, he’ll play it. Oh, and he thinks affirmative action is the work of the devil – he’s a charmer, he’s a . . .’

  Howard stopped. All the drink in his body had turned against him; his sentences were beginning to rush away from him like rabbits down their holes; soon neither the white tip of a thought nor the black hole into which it was vanishing would be visible to him.

  ‘Howie – you’re making yourself ridiculous,’ said Kiki precisely and bit her lip. Howard could see the battle going on inside her. He saw how determined she was. She would not scream, she would not cry.

  ‘He’s anti-affirmative action? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ asked Claire, watching Monty’s nodding head.

  ‘Not really,’ replied Kiki. ‘He’s just a black conservative – thinks it’s demeaning for African-American kids to be told they need special treatment to succeed, etcetera. It’s terrible timing for Wellington, having him here – there’s an Anti-Affirmative Action bill working its way through the Senate and it’s gonna cause trouble. We need to stand firm on the issue right now. Well, as you know. You and Howard did all that work together.’ Kiki’s eyes widened at the end of this, taking in her own realization.

  ‘Ah . . .’ said Claire, twirling the stem of her empty wine glass. Small-scale politics bored her. She had served six months, a year and a half ago, as Howard’s titular deputy in Wellington’s Affirmative Action Committee – this was indeed how the whole thing between them had begun – but her interest had been minimal and her attendance patchy. She’d taken the job because Howard (desperate to avoid the appointment of another despised colleague) had begged her. Claire was only truly excited by the apocalyptic on the world stage: WMD, autocratic presidents, mass death. She detested committees and meetings. She liked to go on marches and to sign petitions.

  ‘You should talk to him about art – I mean, he’s a collector, apparently. Caribbean art,’ continued Kiki bravely.

  ‘I’m fascinated by the children too. They’re glorious.’

  Howard snorted repulsively. He was desperately drunk now.

  ‘Jerome fell in love with the daughter briefly,’ explained Kiki tersely. ‘Last year. Her family freaked out a little – Howard made it all a hell of a lot worse than it needed to be. The whole thing was so stupid.’

  ‘What drama you all live in,’ said Claire happily. ‘I don’t blame him – I mean, I don’t blame Jerome – I saw her, she’s so amazing, looks like Nefertiti. Didn’t you think so, Howard? Like one of those statuaries in the bottom of the Fitzwilliam, in Cambridge. You’ve seen those, right? Such an anciently wonderful face. Didn’t you think?’

  Howard closed his eyes and drank deep from his glass.

  ‘Howard, the music –’ said Kiki, turning to Howard at last. It was amazing to see her words and her eyes entirely unconnected to each other, like a bad actress. ‘I can’t take any more of this hip-hop. I don’t know how it even got on there. People can’t stand it – Albert Konig just left because of it, I think. Put on some Al Green or something – something everybody can enjoy.’

  Claire had already taken a few steps towards Monty. Kiki joined her, but then paused and came back towards Howard and spoke in his ear. Her voice was shaky, but her grip on his wrist was not. She said one name and put a disbelieving question mark at the end of it. Howard felt his stomach fall away.

  ‘You can stay in the house,’ continued Kiki, her voice cracking, ‘but that’s it. Don’t you come near me. Don’t you come near me. I’ll kill you if you do.’

  Then she calmly drew away and got in step with Claire Malcolm once more. Howard watched his wife walk away with his great mistake.

  Initially, he was quite certain he was about to be sick. He walked purposefully into the hallway towards the bathroom. Then he remembered Kiki’s errand and perversely determined to complete it. He paused in the doorway of the empty second living room. There was only one person in there, kneeling by the stereo, surrounded by CDs. That narrow, expressive back he had seen once before was exposed to the night: a clever top, tied up at the neck. One expected her to unfurl and dance the dying swan.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, turning her head. Howard had the queer sense that this was a reply to his silent thought. ‘Having a good one?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  ‘It’s Victoria, isn’t it.’

  ‘Vee.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was right back on her heels, with only her top half turned to him. They smiled at each other. Howard’s heart spontaneously went out in sympathy to his eldest son. Mysteries of the past year resolved themselves.

  ‘So you’re the DJ,’ said Howard. Was there a new word for that now?

  ‘Looks like it – you don’t mind?’

  ‘No, no . . . although a few of our senior guests were finding the selection . . . maybe a little bit hectic.’

  ‘Right. You’ve been sent to sort me out.’

  It was strange to hear this English phrase said in such an English way.

  ‘To confer, I think. Whose music is this, anyway?’

  “ ‘Levi’s Mix”,’ she read from a sticker on the CD case. She shook her head at him sadly. ‘Looks like the enemy’s within,’ she said.

  Of course she was bright. Jerome wouldn’t be able to stand a stupid girl, not even one this gorgeous. This was a problem Howard had never had in his own youth. It was only later that brains began to mean something to him.

  ‘What was wrong with what was on before?’

  She stared at him. ‘Were you listening?’

  ‘Kraftwerk . . . nothing wrong with Kraftwerk.’

  ‘Two hours of Kraftwerk?’

  ‘There’s other stuff, surely.’

  ‘Have you seen this collection?’

  ‘Well, yes – it’s mine.’

  She laughed and shook her hair out. It was new hair, pulled back into a pony-tail and then falling down her back in a cascade of synthetic curls. She shifted her position to face him and then sat down on her heels again. The shiny purple material pulled tight across her chest. She seemed to have large nipples, like the old tenpence coins. Howard looked to the floor, feigning shame.

  ‘Like, how did you come by this one, exactly?’ She held up a CD of lyric-less electronica.

  ‘I bought it.’

  ‘You bought it under duress. Gunman leading you to the counter.’ She mimed this. She had a dirty, cackling laugh, pitched low like her voice. Howard shrugged. He was annoyed by the lack of deference.

  ‘So we’re sticking with hectic?’

  ‘ ’Fraid so, Professor.’

  She winked. The eyelid came down in slow motion. The lashes were extravagant. Howard wondered whether she was drunk.

  ‘I’ll report back,’ he said, and turned to go. He almost tripped over a lifted ridge in the rug, but his second step righted him.

  ‘Whoa, there.’

  ‘Whoa . . . there,’ repeated Howard.

  ‘Tell them to calm themselves. It’s only hip-hop. It won’t kill them.’

  ‘Right,’ said Howard.

  ‘Yet,’ he heard her say as he left the room.

  the anatomy lesson

  To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among t
he precious things that can be destroyed.

  Elaine Scarry

  1

  Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different. Still living at home, still a virgin. And yet heading for her first day as a sophomore. Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in their loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn’t, she did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead. How successful this had been she couldn’t say. Now she stopped to examine herself in the window of Lorelie’s, a campy fifties hairdressers on the corner of Houghton and Maine. She tried to put herself in her peers’ shoes. She asked herself the extremely difficult question: What wouldIthink of me? She had been gunning for something like ‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful; brave and bold’. She was wearing a long boho skirt in a deep green, a white cotton blouse with an eccentric ruff at the neck, a thick brown suede belt of Kiki’s from the days when her mother could still wear belts, a pair of clumpy shoes and a kind of hat. What kind of hat? A man’s hat, of green felt, that looked like a fedora, a little, but was not one. This was not what she had meant when she left the house. This was not it at all.

  Fifteen minutes later Zora peeled it all off again in the women’s locker room of Wellington’s college pool. This was part of the new Zora Self-Improvement Programme for the fall: wake early, swim, class, light lunch, class, library, home. She crushed her hat into the locker and pulled her bathing-cap down low over her ears. A naked Chinese woman who looked eighteen from the back now turned and surprised Zora with her crumpled face, in which two little obsidian eyes struggled under the pressure of folded skin from above and below. Her pubic hair was very long and straight and grey, like dead grass. Imagine being her, thought Zora vaguely, and the thought puttered along for a few seconds, collapsed, vanished. She pinned her locker key to the black fabric of her own functional costume. She walked the long edge if the pool, her flat feet meeting the ceramics with a wet slap. Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard. From this superior vantage point, a long line of athletes on treadmills was looking down on Zora and all the other people not fit enough for the gym. Up there behind glass the ideal people were exercising; down here the misshapen people were floating around, hoping. Twice a week this dynamic changed when the swim team graced the pool with their magnificence, relegating Zora and everyone else to the practice pool to share lanes with infants and senior citizens. Swim-team people launched themselves from the edge, remade their bodies in the image of darts, and then entered the pool like something the water had been waiting for and gratefully accepted. People like Zora sat carefully down on the gritty tiles, gave the water only their feet and then had a debate with their bodies about committing to the next stage. It was not at all unusual for Zora to get undressed, walk the pool, look at the athletes, sit down, put her toes in, get back up, walk the pool, look at the athletes, get dressed and leave the building. But not today. Today was a new beginning. Zora pushed forward an inch and then launched herself; the water rushed up to her neck like a garment she was wearing. She tread water for a minute and then let herself go under. Blowing water out of her nose, she began to swim slowly, indecorously – never quite able to coordinate her arms and legs but still feeling a partial grace that dry land never offered her. Despite all affectations to the contrary, she was actually racing various women in this pool (she always made sure to pick women near enough her own age and size; she had a strong sense of fairness), and her will to carry on swimming rose and fell depending on how well she was keeping up with her unwitting competitors. Her goggles began to seep water in from their sides. She yanked them off, left them at one end and tried four lengths without, but it is much harder swimming above the surface than beneath it. You have to carry yourself more. Zora made her way back to the side. She felt around blindly for her goggles and, when this yielded nothing, thrust herself up out of the water to look – they were gone. She lost her temper at once; an unlucky freshman lifeguard was made to kneel down by the lip of the pool and be rudely spoken to as if he himself were the thief. After a while Zora gave up her interrogation and paddled away across the pool, scanning the surface of the water. To her right a boy sped by, kicking water into her eyes. She struggled for the side, swallowing water as she went. She looked at the back of the boy’s head – the red band of her own goggles. She clung on to the nearest ladder and waited for him. At the other end he performed a fluid somersault in the water as Zora had often dreamed of doing. He was a black boy in a pair of striking bumblebee shorts, yellow-and-black striped and moulded around him with the same elasticity and definition as his own skin. The curved line of his backside turned like a brand new beach-ball cresting the water. When he straightened out again, he swam the length of the pool without once lifting his head to breathe. He was faster than everybody. He was some kind of a swim-team asshole. Between the dip of his lower back – like a scoop taken out of an ice-cream tub – and the curve of his high, spherical ass, a tattoo was inked. Probably a fraternity thing. But the sun and water rippled and distorted its outline, and, before Zora could figure it out, he was right beside her, his arm resting on the dividing rope, gulping for air.