On Beauty Read online

  ‘Choo – you ain’t selling, man,’ said Levi keenly in reply. Now that he understood the problem he was happy – it was so easily solved! It was just a matter of attitude. He said, ‘This ain’t like working the counter at CVS! You hustling, man. And that’s a different thing. That’s street. To hustle is to be alive – you dead if you don’t know how to hustle. And you ain’t a brother if you can’t hustle. That’s what joins us all together – whether we be on Wall Street or on MTV or sitting on a corner with a dime-bag. It’s a beautiful thing, man. We hustling!’

  This, the most complete version of Levi’s personal philosophy that he himself had ever articulated, hung in the air awaiting its appropriate Amen!

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said Choo, sighing. ‘Let’s get going.’

  This disappointed Levi. Even if the other guys didn’t fully understand Levi’s enthusiasm for what they did, they always smiled and played along, and they had learned a few of the artificial words that Levi liked to apply to their real-life situation. Hustler, Playa, Gangsta, Pimp. The reflection of themselves in Levi’s eyes was, after all, a more than welcome replacement for their own realities. Who wouldn’t rather be a gangsta than a street-hawker? Who wouldn’t rather hustle than sell? Who would choose their own lonely, dank rooms over this Technicolor video, this outdoor community that Levi insisted they were all a part of? The Street, the global Street, lined with hustling brothers working corners from Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town.

  Levi tried again: ‘I’m talking about hustlin’, man! It’s like –’

  ‘Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Gucci, Fendi, Fendi, Prada, Prada,’ called Choo, as he had been instructed. Two middle-aged white women paused by his display, and started to boldly haggle him down. Levi noticed that his colleague’s English transformed at once into something simpler, monosyllabic. He noted also how much more comfortable the women were dealing with Choo than they were with Levi. When Levi tried to interject a little speech about the quality of the merchandise, they looked at him strangely, almost affronted. Of course, they never want conversation – Felix had explained that. They’re ashamed to be buying from you. It was a hard thing to remember, after the mega-store, where people had taken such pride in their capacity as purchasers. Levi zipped his mouth and watched Choo swiftly collect eighty-five dollars for three bags. That was the other good thing about this business: if people were going to buy, they did it quickly and walked on quickly. Levi congratulated his new friend on his sale.

  Choo took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘It’s Felix’s money,’ he said, cutting Levi off. ‘Not mine. I worked the cabs – it was the same bullshit.’

  ‘We get our cut, man, we get our cut. It’s economics, right?’

  Choo laughed bitterly. ‘Originals – eight hundred dollars,’ he said pointing at a store across the street. ‘Fakes – thirty dollars. Cost to produce – five dollars, maybe three. That’s economics. American economics.’

  Levi shook his head at the miracle of it. ‘Can you believe these stupid bitches be paying thirty dollars for a three-dollar handbag? That shit’s unbelievable. That’s a hustle.’

  And here Choo looked down at Levi’s sneakers. ‘How much did you pay for them?’

  ‘A hundred and twenty dollars,’ said Levi proudly and demonstrated the shock reducers built into their soles by bouncing up and down on his heels.

  ‘Fifteen dollars to make,’ said Choo, blowing horns of smoke from both of his nostrils. ‘No more. Fifteen dollars. You’re the one being hustled, my friend.’

  ‘Now, how would you know that? That ain’t true, man. That ain’t true at all.’

  ‘I come from the factory where they make your shoes. Where they used to make your shoes. We don’t make anything now,’ said Choo, and then cried ‘PRADA!’, hooking another group of women, an expanding group, which kept growing, as if he’d thrown a trawler’s net over the sidewalk. Come from a factory? How can you come from a factory? But there was no time for further inquiry; now, on Levi’s side, a group of Goth girls. They were black-haired and white and skinny, linked to each other by strange metal chains – the kind of girls who haunt the Harvard T-stop on a Friday night with a bottle of vodka tucked in their huge pants. They wanted horror movies, and Levi had them. He did some brisk business, and for the next hour or so the two salesmen did not talk to each other much, unless one needed change from the other’s fanny pack. Levi, who never could bear bad vibes, still felt the need to make this guy like him, like most guys liked him. At last there came a lull in trade. Levi took his opportunity.

  ‘What’s your deal, man? Don’t take this strange, but . . . you don’t seem like the type of guy who would be doing this kind of thing. You know?’

  ‘How about this?’ said Choo quietly, again alarming Levi with his easy use of American idioms, albeit dipped in that exotic accent. ‘You leave me alone and I do my very best to leave you alone. You sell your movies. I sell these handbags. How would that be?’

  ‘That’s cool,’ said Levi quietly.

  ‘Best movies, top movies, three for ten dollars! ’ called Levi into the street. He dug into his pocket and found two individually wrapped Junior Mints. He offered one to Choo, who declined it sniffily. Levi unwrapped his own mint and popped it into his mouth. He loved Junior Mints. Minty and chocolatey. Just everything you want from a candy, basically. The last of the peppermint slipped down his throat. He tried really hard not to say anything at all. And then he said: ‘So you got a lot of friends here?’

  Choo sighed. ‘No.’

  ‘No one in the city?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t know anyone?’

  ‘I know two, three people. They work across the river. At Wellington. In the college.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Levi. ‘Which department?’

  Choo stopped organizing the money in his fanny pack and looked at Levi curiously. ‘They’re cleaners,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which department they clean.’

  OK, OK, you win, bro, thought Levi, and crouched down to the DVDs to pointlessly rearrange a row of them. He was done with this guy. But now it was Choo who seemed freshly interested.

  ‘And you –’ said Choo, pursuing him. ‘You live in Roxbury, Felix tells me.’

  Levi looked up at Choo. He was smiling, at last.

  ‘Yeah, man, that’s right.’

  Choo looked down at him like the tallest man who had ever lived.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I heard, that you live in Roxbury. And you rap with them too.’

  ‘Not really. I just went along. It’s good, though – it’s got that political vibe. Real angry. I’m learning more about the . . . like, the political context, that’s what I’m into right now,’ said Levi, referring to a book on Haiti he had borrowed (though it was as yet unread) from Arundel School’s 127-year-old library. It was the first time Levi had ever entered that cloistered, dark little space without the propulsion of a school project or imminent exam.

  ‘But they say they never see you there, in Roxbury. The others. They say they never see you.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I pretty much keep myself to myself.’

  ‘I see. Well, maybe we shall see each other there, Levi,’ said Choo, and his smile grew wider, ‘down in the hood.’

  10

  Katherine (Katie) Armstrong is sixteen. She is one of the youngest students attending Wellington College. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where she was by far the brightest student in her high school. Although the great majority of kids from Katie’s school either drop out or go on to attend Indiana’s fine in-state institution, no one was too surprised to discover that Katie would be attending a fancy East Coast school on a full academic scholarship. Katie is proficient both in the arts and sciences, but her heart – if this makes sense – has always resided in the left side of her brain. Katie loves the arts. Given her parents’ relative poverty and limited education, she knows that it would probably have made more sense for her family if she
’d tried for medical school or even Harvard Law. But her parents are generous, loving people, and they support her in all her choices.

  The summer before Katie turned up at Wellington, she drove herself half crazy wondering whether she would end up an English major or an Art History major. She’s still unsure. Some days she wants to be an editor of something. Other days she can imagine running a gallery or even writing a book on Picasso, who is the most amazing human being Katie has ever come across. At the moment, as a freshman, she is keeping her options open. She is in Professor Cork’s Twentieth-Century Painting seminar (for sophomores only, but she begged) and two literature classes, English Romantic Poetry and American Post-Modernism. She’s learning Russian, she helps man the phones for the eating disorder help-line, and she’s doing the set design for a production of Cabaret. A naturally shy girl, Katie has to overcome a great deal of nerves, every week, simply to enter the rooms where these various activities take place. One class above all terrifies her: Dr Belsey’s class on Seventeenth-Century Art. They are spending most of this semester on Rembrandt, who is the second most amazing human being Katie has ever come across. She used to dream about one day attending a college class about Rembrandt with other intelligent people who loved Rembrandt and weren’t ashamed to express this love. She has been to only three classes so far. She did not understand much. A lot of the time she felt the professor to be speaking a different language from the one she has spent sixteen years refining. After the third class she went back to her dorm and cried. She cursed her stupidity and her youth. She wished her high school had given her different kinds of books to read than the ones she has evidently wasted her time on. Presently, Katie calmed down. She looked up some of the mysterious vocab from her class in Webster’s. The words were not there. She did find ‘liminality’, but she still didn’t understand the way Dr Belsey was using it. However, Katie is not the type of girl to give up easily. Today is the fourth class. She is prepared. Last week, they were given a worksheet with photocopies of the two pictures that would be under discussion today. Katie has spent a week staring at them, thinking deeply about them, and has made notes in her notebook.

  The first painting is Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1658. Katie has thought about the vigorous impasto that works counter-intuitively to create that somnolent, dreamy atmosphere. She makes notes on the angel’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s pretty son, Titus; on the perspective lines that create the illusions of frozen movement; on the personal dynamic between the angel and Jacob. When she looks at this painting she sees a violent struggle that is, at the same time, a loving embrace. It reminds her, in its homoeroticism, of Caravaggio (since beginning at Wellington she finds a lot of things homoerotic). She adores the earthy colours – Jacob’s simple damask, and the angel’s off-white farm-boy smock. Caravaggio always gave his angels the darkly resplendent wings of eagles; by contrast, Rembrandt’s angel is no eagle but he’s no dove either. No bird Katie has ever seen really has these imprecise, shabby, dun-coloured wings. The wings seem almost an afterthought, as if to remind us that this painting is meant to be of matters biblical, other-worldly. But in Rembrandt’s Protestant heart, so Katie believes, the battle depicted here is really for a man’s earthly soul, for his human faith in the world. Katie, who lost her faith slowly and painfully two years earlier, finds the relevant passage in the Bible and adds the following to her notes:

  And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the break of day . . . And he said, Let me go for the day breaketh. And the angel said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

  This painting Katie finds impressive, beautiful, awe-inspiring – but not truly moving. She can’t find the right words, can’t put her finger on why that is. All she can say, again, is that this is not a faith battle she is looking at. At least, not of the kind she herself has experienced. Jacob looks like he wants sympathy, and the angel looks like he wants to give sympathy. That’s not how a battle goes. The struggle isn’t really there. Does that make sense?

  The second picture, on the other hand, makes Katie cry. It is Seated Nude, an etching from 1631. In it a misshapen woman, naked, with tubby little breasts and a hugely distended belly, sits on a rock, eyeing Katie directly. Katie has read some famous commentaries on this etching. Everybody finds it technically good but visually disgusting. Many famous men are repulsed. A simple naked woman is apparently much more nauseating than Samson having his eye put out or Ganymede pissing everywhere. Is she really so grotesque? She was a shock, to Katie, at first – like a starkly lit, unforgiving photograph of oneself. But then Katie began to notice all the exterior, human information, not explicitly in the frame but implied by what we see there. Katie is moved by the crenulated marks of absent stockings on her legs, the muscles in her arms suggestive of manual labour. That loose belly that has known many babies, that still fresh face that has lured men in the past and may yet lure more. Katie – a stringbean, physically – can even see her own body contained in this body, as if Rembrandt were saying to her, and to all women: ‘For you are of the earth, as my nude is, and you will come to this point too, and be blessed if you feel as little shame, as much joy, as she!’ This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience – these are the marks ofliving. So Katie feels. And all this from cross-hatching (Katie makes her own comics and knows something of cross-hatching); all these intimations of mortality from an inkpot!

  Katie comes to class very excited. She sits down excited. She keeps her notebook open before her, determined this time, determined to be one of the three or four people who dare to speak in Dr Belsey’s class. The class, all fourteen of them, are arranged in a square, the desks fitted together so that everyone can see everyone. They have their names written on pieces of paper that are folded in half and stood atop their desks. They look like so many bank managers. Dr Belsey is speaking.

  ‘What we’re trying to . . . interrogate here,’ he says, ‘is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human. What is it about these texts – these images as narration – that is implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius?’

  An awful long silence follows this. Katie bites at the skin around her cuticles.

  ‘To reframe: is what we see here really a rebellion, a turning away? We’re told that this constitutes a rejection of the classical nude. OK. But. Is this nude not a confirmation of the ideality of the vulgar? As it is already inscribed in the idea of a specifically gendered, class debasement?’

  Another silence. Dr Belsey stands up and writes the word LIGHT very large on the blackboard behind him.

  ‘Both these pictures speak of illumination. Why? That is to say, can we speak of light as a neutral concept? What is the logos of this light, this spiritual light, this supposed illumination? What are we signing up to when we speak of the “beauty” of this “light”?’ says Dr Belsey, employing quoting fingers. ‘What are these images really concerned with?’

  Here Katie sees her opportunity and begins the slow process of thinking about possibly opening her mouth and allowing sound to come from it. Her tongue is at her teeth. But it is the incredible-looking black girl, Victoria, who speaks, and as ever she has a way of monopolizing Dr Belsey’s attention, even when Katie is almost certain that what she is saying is not terribly interesting.

  ‘It’s a painting of its own interior,’ she says very slowly, looking down at her desk and then up again in that stupid, flirty way she has. ‘Its subject is painting itself. It’s a painting about painting. I mean, that’s the desiring force here.’

  Dr Belsey raps on his desk in an interested way, as if to say, now we’re getting to it.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Expand.’

  But before Victoria can speak again there is an interruption.

  ‘Umm . . . I don’t understand how you’re using “painting” there? I don’t think you can simply just inscribe the history of painting, or even its logos, in that one word “pa
inting”.’

  The professor seems interested in this point too. It is made by the young man with the T-shirt that says BEING on one side and TIME on the other, a young man Katie fears more than anybody else in this whole university, much more than she could ever fear any woman, even the beautiful black girl, because he is clearly the third most amazing person she has ever come across. His name is Mike.

  ‘But you’ve already privileged the term,’ says the professor’s daughter, whom Katie, who is not given easily to hatred, hates. ‘You’re already assuming the etching is merely “debased painting”. So there’s your problematic, right there.’

  And now the class escapes Katie; it streams through her toes as the sea and sand when she stands at the edge of the ocean and dozily, stupidly, allows the tide to draw out and the world to pull away from her so rapidly as to make her dizzy . . .

  At three fifteen, Trudy Steiner hesitantly put her hand up to point out that the class had gone fifteen minutes over. Howard collected his papers into a neat pile and apologized for the overrun but for nothing else. He felt this had been the most successful session to date. The class dynamic was finally beginning to come together, to gel. Mike, in particular, impressed him very much. You need people like that in a class. In fact, he reminded Howard a little of Howard at the same age. Those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life.

  Everybody began packing away their things. Zora gave her father the thumbs-up and rushed off; because of a scheduling glitch she always missed the first ten minutes of Claire’s poetry class anyway. Christian and Veronica, who were sitting in as entirely unnecessary teaching assistants (given the small class number), passed out worksheets for the following week. When Christian reached Howard’s end of the table he crouched down in his creepily limber way to Howard’s level, and with one hand reslicked his side parting.

  ‘That was amazing.’

  ‘Went well, yes, I thought,’ said Howard, and took a worksheet from Christian’s hands.