On Beauty Read online

  ‘This is the kind of job,’ said Elisha, ‘that you have to make something of for yourself. It’s all very well walking through those gates and sitting in the lunchroom and pretending that you’re a Wellingtonian or whatever –’ Here, if Carl’s skin could blush, it would have. Elisha had his number. He did thrill to walk under those gates. He did love walking across the snowy quad with a knapsack on his back or sitting in that bustling cafeteria, for all the world as if he were the college student his mother had always dreamed he would be. ‘But people like you and me,’ continued Elisha severely, ‘we’re not really a part of this community, are we? I mean, no one’s gonna help us feel that way. So if you want this job to be something special, you got to make it something special. No one’s gonna do it for you, that’s the truth.’

  So, in his third week of work, Carl started to get into the research end of things. Economically and time-wise it didn’t make any sense to do this – no one was going to pay him more for the extra work. But for the first time in his life he found he was interested in the work he was doing – he wanted to do it. And what was the point, after all, of Elisha (whose area of expertise was the Blues) always asking him this and that about rap artists and rap history, when he had a brain in his head and a keyboard at his disposal? The first thing he sat down to write was a context card on Tupac Shakur. All he meant to do was write a thousand-word bio, as Elisha had asked him to, and then pass it on to her so that she could notate it with one of her mini-discographies and bibliographies, pointing students to further listening and related reading. He sat down at the computer at ten in the morning. By lunchtime he’d written five thousand words. And all this without even getting to the bit where teenage Tupac leaves the East Coast for the West. Elisha suggested that instead of taking whole people as subjects he could take one aspect of rap music in general, and make a note of all incidences of that aspect, so people could cross-reference. That didn’t help. Five days ago, Carl had elected the subject of crossroads. All mention of crossroads, imagery on album covers of crossroads, and raps based on the idea of a crossroads in someone’s life journey. Fifteen thousand words and counting. It was like suddenly he had a typing disease. Where was this disease when he was in school?

  ‘Knock, knock,’ said Zora pointlessly, as she stuck her head into his office and tapped his door. ‘Busy? I was just passing by, so.’

  Carl pushed his cap off his face and looked up from his keyboard, annoyed by the disruption. Certainly, his intention was always to be nice to Zora Belsey, for she had always been nice to him. But she did not make it easy. She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her. She ‘passed by’ his office pretty much twice a day, usually with news of her campaign to keep him in Claire Malcolm’s poetry class. He hadn’t been able to tell her yet that he no longer gave a damn if he stayed in that class or not.

  ‘Hard at work – as always,’ she said and stepped into the room.

  He was taken aback by the large amount of cleavage he was confronted with, pushed up and together in a tight white top that could not quite contain the goods it had been entrusted with. There was also a silly shawl-like thing around her shoulders instead of a coat, and this Zora was forced to keep rearranging, as the left side slipped down her back.

  ‘Hello, Professor Thomas. Thought I’d pay you a visit.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Carl, and instinctively pushed his chair a little further from the door. He took his earphones out. ‘You look kinda different. You heading somewhere? You look very . . . aren’t you cold?’

  ‘No, not really – where’s Elisha? Lunch?’ Carl nodded and looked at his computer screen. He was in the middle of a sentence. Zora sat in Elisha’s chair, and moved it round the desk until it was next to Carl’s own.

  ‘You want to get some lunch?’ she asked. ‘We could go out. I’ve got no class till three.’

  ‘You know . . . It’s like I would, ’cept I got all this shit to do . . . I might as well just stay and do it . . . and then it’ll be done.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Zora. ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘No, I mean, another time’d be cool – but I’m having trouble concentrating – I keep on getting a lot of noise from outside. People hollering for an hour. You happen to know what’s going on out there?’

  Zora stood, went to the window and opened the blind. ‘Some kind of Haitian protest thing,’ she said, pulling open the sash. ‘Oh, you can’t see it from this angle. They’re in the square handing out leaflets. It’s a big deal, lots of people. I guess there’s a march later.’

  ‘I can’t see them, but I can hear them, man, they loud. What’s their beef anyway?’

  ‘Minimum wage, getting shit on by everybody all the time – a lot of stuff, I guess.’ Zora closed the window and sat down. She leaned into Carl’s body to look at his computer. He covered the screen with his hands.

  ‘Aw, man – don’t be doing that – I ain’t even spellchecked it, man.’

  Zora peeled his fingers from the monitor. ‘Crossroads . . . The Tracy Chapman album?’

  ‘No,’ said Carl, ‘the motif.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Zora in a teasing voice. ‘Pardon me. The motif.’

  ‘You think I can’t know a word ’cos you know it, is that it?’ demanded Carl, and immediately regretted it. You couldn’t get angry with middle-class people like that – they got upset too quickly.

  ‘No – I – I mean, no, Carl, I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘Oh, man . . . I know you didn’t. Calm down, there.’ He patted her hand softly. He couldn’t know about the electric whoosh that went through her body when he did that. Now she looked at him funny.

  ‘Why’re you looking at me weird like that?’

  ‘No, I was just . . . I’m so proud of you.’

  Carl laughed.

  ‘Seriously. You’re an amazing person. Look at what you’ve achieved, what you’re achieving every day. That’s so my whole point. You deserve to be at this university. You’re about fifteen times as brilliant and hard-working as most of these over-privileged assholes.’

  ‘Man, shut up.’

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  ‘What’s true is that I wouldn’t be doing none of this if I hadn’t met you. So there you go, if you’re gonna start getting all Oprah about the situation.’

  ‘Now, you shut up,’ said Zora beaming.

  ‘Let’s both shut the hell up,’ suggested Carl, and touched his keyboard. His screen, which had gone to sleep in the last few seconds, came back to life. He tried to retrace the thread of his last half-written sentence.

  ‘I got fifty more signatures on the petition – they’re in my bag. Do you want to see them?’

  It took Carl a moment to remember what she was talking about. ‘Oh, right . . . that’s cool . . . no, don’t bother taking them out or nothing . . . that’s cool, though. Thank you, Zora. I really appreciate what you’re doing for me there.’

  Zora said nothing, but audaciously followed through on a plan she had been hatching since before Christmas: the reciprocal hand pat. She touched the top of his hand twice, quickly. He did not scream. He did not run from the room.

  ‘Seriously, I’m interested,’ she said, nodding at the computer. She inched her chair still closer to him. Carl leaned back in his own chair and casually explained to her a little about the image of the crossroads and how frequently rappers use it. Crossroads to represent personal decisions and choices, to represent ‘going straight’, to represent the history of hip-hop itself, the split between ‘conscious’ lyrics and ‘gangsta’. The more he spoke, the more animated and absorbed he became by his subject.

  ‘See, I was using it all the time myself – never even thought about why. And then Elisha says to me: ’member that mural in Roxbury, the one with the chair hanging from that arch? And I’m like, yeah, of course, man, ’cos I live right by there – you know the one I’m talking about?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ said Zora, but she had only been to Roxbury once on a walking tou
r, during Black History Month back when she was in high school.

  ‘So you got the crossroads painted there, right? And the snakes and this guy – who obviously I now know is Robert Johnson – I lived my whole life next door to this mural, never knew who the brother was . . . anyway: that’s Johnson in the picture, sitting at the crossroads waiting to sell his soul to the devil. And that’s why (man, there’s a lot of noise out there). That’s why there’s a real chair hanging from the archway in that alley. My whole life I been wondering why someone hung a chair in that alley. It’s meant to be Johnson’s chair, right? Sitting at the crossroads. And that’s totally filtered through hip-hop – and that, like, reveals to me the essence of rap. YOU GOTTA PAY YOUR DUES. That’s what’s written on the top of that mural, right? Near the chair? And that’s the first principle of rap music. You gotta pay your dues, man. So, it’s like . . . I’m tracing that idea through – man, those brothers make a lot of noise! I can’t hear myself thinking in here!’

  ‘The top bit of the window is open.’

  ‘I know, I don’t how to close that – these windows don’t close right.’

  ‘Yeah, they do, you just can’t do it – there’s a knack to it.’

  ‘Now, what would I do without my Boo, huh?’ asked Carl, as Zora stood up. He smacked her playfully on her big butt. ‘You always got my back. Knows everything ’bout everything.’

  Zora took her chair to the window and demonstrated the technique.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Carl. ‘Little peace for a brother when he’s working.’

  You never know what the hotels are like in your hometown because you never have to stay in them. Howard had been recommending the riverside Barrington to visiting professors for ten years, but, aside from a slight familiarity with the lobby, he really knew nothing about the place. He was about to find out. He was sitting on one of their reproduction Georgian sofas, waiting for her. From a window he could see the river and the ice on the river and the white sky reflected in the ice. He was feeling absolutely nothing. Not even guilt, not even lust. He had been compelled to come here by a series of e-mails she’d sent in the past week, liberally illustrated with the kind of home-made digital camera pornography that every teenage girl now seems so expert at. Her motivations were obscure to him. The day after the dinner she had sent him a livid e-mail, in reply to which he had sent a feeble apology, with no expectation of hearing from her again. But this was not like being married, as it turned out: Victoria forgave him at once. His disappearing act at the dinner seemed only to have intensified her determination to repeat what had happened in London. Howard felt himself too weak to fight anyone who had resolved to have him. He opened all her attachments and passed a lusty week of intense hard-ons at his desk – lurid visions of letting her do what she had asked to do. Crawl under your desk. Open my mouth. Suck it. Suck it. Suck it. How sexy the words are! Howard, who had almost no personal experience of pornography (he had contributed to a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem), was riveted by this modern sex, hard and shiny and fluid-free and violent. It suited his mood. Twenty years ago, maybe, he would have been repelled. Not now. Victoria sent him images of orifices and apertures that were simply awaiting him – with no conversation and no debate and no conflicting personalities and no sense of future trouble. Howard was fifty-seven years old. He had been married for thirty years to a difficult woman. Entering waiting orifices was about as much as he felt he could handle now, in the arena of personal relations. There was nothing left to fight for or rescue. Soon, surely, he would be sent off to find an apartment of his own, to live as so many of the men he knew lived, alone and defiant and always slightly drunk. And so it was all much of a muchness. It was inevitable, what was coming. And here it – she – was. The revolving doors spat her out looking predictably lovely, in a high-collared, very yellow coat with big, square buttons made of horn. They barely spoke. Howard went to the desk to get the key.

  ‘It’s a street-facing room, sir,’ said the hotel guy, because Howard had pretended he was staying overnight. ‘And it may be a bit noisy today. A march is going through town – if you find it unbearable, please call down to us and we’ll see if we can fix you up with something on the other side of the building. Have a nice day.’

  They took the elevator up alone and she pressed her hand against his crotch. Room 614. At the door, she pushed him up against the wall and started to kiss him.

  ‘You’re not going to run away again, are you?’ she whispered.

  ‘No . . . wait, let’s get inside first,’ he said, and slid the credit-card key into its sheath. The green light came on, the door clicked. They found themselves in a musty, afternoon room with the curtains closed. There was a cutting little breeze, and Howard could hear muffled chanting. He went over to find the open window.

  ‘Leave the curtains closed – I don’t want everybody to see the floor show.’

  She dropped her yellow coat to the floor. She stood there in all her youthful glory in the dust-flecked light. Corset, stockings, G-string, garters – not one dreary detail had been neglected.

  ‘Oh! Pardon! Excuse me, please!’

  A woman in her fifties, a black woman, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, had emerged from the bathroom with a bucket in her hand. Victoria screamed and sank to the floor to retrieve her coat.

  ‘Sorry, please,’ said the woman. ‘I clean – later, I come –’

  ‘Didn’t you hear us come in?’ asked Victoria heatedly, rising swiftly.

  The woman looked to Howard for mercy.

  ‘I’m asking you a question,’ said Victoria, coat draped like a cape over her now. She stepped in front of her quarry.

  ‘My English – sorry, can you – repeat, please?’

  Outside a flurry of whistle-blowing started up.

  ‘For fuckssake – we were clearly in here – you should have made yourself known.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, pardon,’ said the woman, and began to back herself out of the room.

  ‘No,’ said Victoria. ‘Don’t leave – I’m asking you a question. Hello? Speak English?’

  ‘Victoria, please,’ said Howard.

  ‘Excuse me, sorry,’ continued the maid; she opened the door and, bowing and nodding, made good her escape. The door eased itself slowly to its click. They were left together in the room.

  ‘God, that makes me angry,’ said Victoria. ‘Anyway. Bollocks. Sorry.’ She laughed softly and took a step towards Howard. Howard took a step back.

  ‘I think that’s rather spoilt the . . .’ he said, as Victoria approached, saying shhhh and removing one shoulder of her coat. She pressed her body against his and pushed her thigh gently into his balls. Howard now produced a well-worn phrase that went perfectly with the coat and the corset and the garters and the fluffy-toed mules Victoria had brought along in her schoolbag.

  ‘I’m sorry – I can’t do this!’

  10

  ‘It’s very simple. Ah’ve saved all the images to your hard drive – and awl you gotta do is put them in the order that you’re gonna need for the lecture, and you put any quotes or diagrams down, in order – just like a normal word-processing file. And then we’ve put it all in the right format. See this?’ Smith J. Miller leaned over Howard’s shoulder and touched his fingers to Howard’s keyboard. He had baby breath: warm and odourless and fresh like steam. ‘Click and drag. Click and drag. And you can take stuff off the web too. Saved a good Rembrandt site for you, see? Now, that has high-definition images of all the paintings you’ll need. ’Kay?’

  Howard nodded mutely.

  ‘Now, ah’m going to lunch, but ah’ll be back in the afternoon to pick this up off you and turn it into pah-point. ’Kay? This is the future.’

  Howard looked dejectedly at the hardware before him.

  ‘Howard,’ said Smith, putting a hand to his shoulder, ‘this is gonna be a real good lecture. It’s a nice atmosphere, it’s a nice little gallery, and everybody’s on your side. A little wine, a little cheese, a little lect
ure, everybody goes home. It’s gonna be slick, it’s gonna be professional. Nothing to worry about. You’ve done this a million times. ’Cept this time you got a little help from Mr Bill Gates. Now, ah’ll be back at about three to pick this up.’

  Smith delivered one last squeeze to Howard’s left shoulder and picked up his slim briefcase.

  ‘Wait –’ said Howard. ‘Have we sent all the invitations?’

  ‘Did that in November.’

  ‘Burchfield, Fontaine, French –’

  ‘Howard, everybody who can make a difference for you here has been invited. It’s all done. Nothing to worry about. Just need that pah-point finished and we’re ready to roll.’

  ‘Did you invite my wife?’

  Smith swapped his case to his other hand and looked perturbedly at his employer.

  ‘Kiki? Sorry, Howard . . . I mean, I just sent out professional invitations as usual – but if there’s a list of friends and family y’all want me to –’

  Howard waved the idea away.

  ‘OK, then.’ Smith saluted Howard. ‘My work here is done. Three o’clock.’

  Smith left. Howard clicked around the website left open for him. He found the list of paintings Smith had mentioned and opened The Sampling Officials of the Drapers’ Guild; more popularly known as The Staalmeesters. In this painting, six Dutchmen, all about Howard’s age, sit around a table, dressed in black. It was the Staalmeesters’ job to monitor cloth production in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. They were appointed annually and chosen for their ability to judge whether cloth put before them was consistent in colour and quality. A Turkey rug covers the table at which they sit. Where the light falls upon this rug, Rembrandt reveals to us its rich, burgundy colour, the intricacy of its gold stitching. The men look out from the painting, each adopting a different pose. Four hundred years of speculation have spun an elaborate story around the image. It is supposedly a meeting of shareholders; the men are seated on a raised dais, as they might be in a modern panel discussion; an unseen audience sits below them, one member of which has just asked the Staalmeesters a difficult question. Rembrandt sits near, but not next to, this questioner; he catches the scene. In his rendering of each face the painter offers us a slightly different consideration of the problem at hand. This is the moment of cogitation as shown on six different human faces. This is what judgement looks like: considered, rational, benign judgement. Thus the traditional art history.