On Beauty Read online

  Iconoclastic Howard rejects all these fatuous assumptions. How can we know what goes on beyond the frame of the painting itself? What audience? Which questioner? What moment of judgement? Nonsense and sentimental tradition! To imagine that this painting depicts any one temporal moment is, Howard argues, an anachronistic, photographic fallacy. It is all so much pseudohistorical storytelling, disturbingly religious in tone. We want to believe these Staalmeesters are sages, wisely judging this imaginary audience, implicitly judging us. But none of this is truly in the picture. All we really see there are six rich men sitting for their portrait, expecting – demanding – to be collectively portrayed as wealthy, successful and morally sound. Rembrandt – paid well for his services – has merely obliged them. The Staalmeesters are not looking at anyone; there is no one to look at. The painting is an exercise in the depiction of economic power – in Howard’s opinion a particularly malign and oppressive depiction. So goes Howard’s spiel. He’s repeated it and written about it so many times over the years that he has now forgotten from which research he drew his original evidence. He will have to unearth some of this for the lecture. The thought makes him very tired. He slumps in his chair.

  The portable heater in Howard’s office is turned up so high he feels himself to be held in place by hot, thick air. Howard clicks his mouse, enlarging the image of the painting until it is as big as his computer screen. He looks at the men. Behind Howard, the icicles that have decorated his office window for two months melt and drip. In the quad the snow is retreating, and small oases of grass can be seen, although it is important not to derive hope from this: more snow is surely on its way. Howard regards the men. Outside there are bells ringing to mark the hour. There is the clunking sound of the tram linking with its overhead cables, there is the inane chatter of students. Howard looks at the men. History has retained a few of their names. Howard looks at Volckert Jansz, a Mennonite and collector of curiosities. He looks at Jacob van Loon, a Catholic cloth-maker, who lived on the corner of the Dam and the Kalverstraat. He looks at the face of Jochem van Neve: it is a sympathetic, spaniel face with kind eyes for which Howard feels some affection. How many times has Howard looked at these men? The first time he was fourteen, being shown a print of the painting in an art class. He had been alarmed and amazed by the way the Staalmeesters seemed to look directly at him, their eyes (as his schoolmaster put it) ‘following you around the room’, and yet, when Howard tried to stare back at the men, he was unable to meet any of their eyes directly. Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard. On that day, forty-three years ago, he was an uncultured, fiercely bright, dirty-kneed, enraged, beautiful, inspired, bloody-minded schoolboy who came from nowhere and nothing and yet was determined not to stay that way – that was the Howard Belsey whom the Staalmeesters saw and judged that day. But what was their judgement now? Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard. Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard.

  Howard pressed the ‘zoom’ option on his screen. Zoom, zoom, zoom until he was involved only with the burgundy pixels of the Turkey rug.

  ‘Hey, Dad – what’s up? Daydreaming?’

  ‘Christ! Don’t you knock?’

  Levi pulled the door to behind himself. ‘Not for family, no . . . can’t say I do.’ He perched on the end of Howard’s desk and reached out a hand for his father’s face. ‘You OK? You sweating, man. Your forehead’s all wet. You feel OK?’

  Howard batted Levi’s hand away. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  Levi shook his head disapprovingly but laughed. ‘Oh, man . . . that’s real cold. Just because I come to see you, you think I want something!’

  ‘Social call, is it?’

  ‘Well, yeah. I like to see you at work, see what’s going on with you, you know how it is, being all intellectual in college land. You’re like my role model and all that.’

  ‘Right. How much is it, then?’

  Levi shrieked with laughter. ‘Oh, man . . . you’re cold! I can’t believe you!’

  Howard looked at the little clock in the corner of his screen. ‘School? Shouldn’t you be in school?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Levi, stroking his chin. ‘Technically, yeah. But see they got this rule – the city has a rule that you can’t be in class if the temperature in the room is below a certain, like, temperature – I don’t know what it is, but that kid Eric Klear knows what it is – he brings this thermometer in? And if it drops below that specific temperature, then – well, basically, we all just go home. Not a thing they can do about it.’

  ‘Very enterprising,’ said Howard. Then he laughed and looked at his son with fond wonder. What a period this was to live through! His children were old enough to make him laugh. They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. They weren’t even the same colour as him. They were a kind of miracle.

  ‘This isn’t traditional filial behaviour, you know,’ said Howard jovially, already reaching for his back pocket. ‘This is being mugged in your own office.’

  Levi slipped off the desk and went to look out of the window. ‘Snow’s melting. Won’t last, though. Man,’ he said, turning around. ‘As soon as I have my own greens and my own life, I’m moving somewhere so hot. I’m moving to, like, Africa. I don’t even care if it’s poor. Long as I’m warm, that’s cool with me.’

  ‘Twenty . . . six, seven, eight – that’s all I have,’ said Howard holding up the contents of his wallet.

  ‘I really appreciate that, man. I’m dry and dusty right now.’

  ‘What about that job, for God’s sake?’

  Levi squirmed a little before confessing. Howard listened with his head on the table.

  ‘Levi, that was a good job.’

  ‘I got another one! But it’s more . . . irregular. And I’m not doing it right now, ’cos I got other things cooking, but imma go back to it soon, ’cos it’s like –’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ insisted Howard, closing his eyes. ‘Just don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’

  Levi put the dollars in his back pocket. ‘Anyway, so in the meantime I got a bit of a cash flow situation. I pay you back, though.’

  ‘With other money I’ll have given you.’

  ‘I got a job, I told you! Chill. OK? Will you chill? You gonna give yo’self a heart attack, man. Chill.’

  Sighing, he kissed his father on his sweaty forehead and closed the door softly on his way out.

  Levi did his funky limp through the department and out into the main lobby of the Humanities Faculty building. He stopped here to select a tune that would fit the experience of stepping out of this building and facing the freeze outside. Somebody called his name. He couldn’t see at first who it was.

  ‘Yo – Levi. Over here! Hey, man! I ain’t seen your ass in the longest time, man. Put it there.’

  ‘Carl?’

  ‘Yeah, Carl. Don’t you even know me now?’

  They touched fists, but with Levi frowning all the time.

  ‘What you doing here, man?’

  ‘Damn – didn’t you know?’ said Carl, smiling cheesily and popping his collar. ‘I be a college man now!’

  Levi laughed. ‘No, seriously, bro – what you doing here?’

  Carl stopped smiling. He tapped the knapsack on his back. ‘Didn’t your sister tell you? I’m a college man now. I’m working here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Black Studies Department. I just started – I’m an archivist.’

  ‘A what?’ Levi transferred his weight to the opposite foot. ‘Man, you screwing with me?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You work here. I don’t get it – you cleaning?’

  Levi didn’t mean this the way it came out. It was just that he had met a lot of Wellington cleaners on the march yesterday, and it was the first thing that came to his mind. Carl was offended.

  ‘No, man, I manage the archives – I
don’t clean shit. It’s a music library – I’m in control of the hip-hop and some R & B and modern urban black music. It’s an amazing resource – you should come check it out.’

  Levi shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Carl, bro, I’m tripping . . . you gotta run this past me again. You’re working here?’

  Carl looked up over Levi’s head at the clock on the wall. He had an appointment to get to – he was meeting someone in the Modern Languages Department who was going to translate some French rap lyrics for him.

  ‘Yeah, man – it’s not that complicated a concept. I’m working here.’

  ‘But . . . You like it here?’

  ‘Sure. Well . . . it’s a little tight-assed sometimes, but the Black Studies Department is cool. You can get a lot done in a place like this – hey, I see your dad all the time. He works just down there.’

  Levi, concentrating on the many strange facts being put before him, ignored this last. ‘So, wait: you ain’t making music no more?’

  Carl shifted the knapsack on his back. ‘Aw . . . I’m doing a little but . . . I don’t know, man, the rap game . . . it’s all gangstas and playas now . . . that’s not my scene. Rap should be all about proportion, for me, as I see it. And it’s like, you go to the Bus Stop these days, it’s all these really angry brothers kinda . . . ranting . . . and I’m not really feeling that, so, well . . . you know how it is . . .’

  Levi unwrapped a gum and put it in his mouth without offering Carl one. ‘Maybe they got shit they angry about,’ said Levi frostily.

  ‘Yeah . . . well – look, man – I actually got to run, I got this . . . thing – hey, you should come by the library sometime – we’re gonna start this open-listening afternoon, where you can pick any record and play it through – we got some really rare shit, so, you should come by. Come by tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you do that?’

  ‘It’s the second march tomorrow. We marching all week.’

  ‘March?’

  Just then the front doors opened and they were joined, for a moment, by one of the most incredible-looking women either boy had ever seen. She was walking at high speed, past them and on towards the Humanities departments. She was dressed in tight jeans and pink polo neck and high tan boots. A long silky weave fell down her back. Levi did not connect her with the weeping, short-haired girl dressed in black that he had seen a month ago, walking, in more sedate and pious mode, behind a coffin.

  ‘Sister – damn!’ murmured Carl, loud enough to be heard, but Victoria, practised in ignoring such comments, simply continued along her way. Levi stared after the incendiary rear view.

  ‘Oh, my God . . .’ said Carl, and held his hand to his breast. ‘Did you see that booty? Oh, man, I’m in pain.’

  Levi had indeed seen that booty, but suddenly Carl was not the person with whom he wanted to discuss it. He had never known Carl well, but, in the way of a teenage crush, he had thought a great deal of him. Just shows what happens when you mature. Levi had obviously matured a hell of a lot since last summer – he’d sensed that about himself and now saw it was true. Feckless brothers like Carl just didn’t impress him any more. Levi Belsey had moved on to the next level. It was strange to think of his previous self. And it was so strange to stand next to this ex-Carl, this played-out fool, this shell of a brother in whom all that was beautiful and thrilling and true had utterly evaporated.

  Howard was preparing to nip out for a bagel from the cafeteria. He rose from his desk – but he had a visitor. She smashed the door open and smashed it closed. She didn’t come far into the room. She stood with her back pressed against the door.

  ‘Could you sit down, please?’ she said, looking not at him but to the ceiling, as if addressing a prayer upwards. ‘Can you sit down and listen and not say anything? I want to say something and then I want to go and that’s it.’

  Howard folded his coat in half and sat down with it on his lap.

  ‘You don’t treat people like that, right?’ she said, still talking to the ceiling. ‘You don’t do that to me twice. First you make me look like a fool at that dinner and then – you don’t leave someone in a hotel by themselves – you don’t act like a fucking child – and make someone feel that they’re not worth anything. You don’t do that.’

  She brought her gaze down at last. Her head was wobbling wildly on her neck. Howard looked to his feet.

  ‘I know you think,’ she said, each word tear-inflected, making her hard to understand, ‘that you . . . know me. You don’t know me. This,’ she said and touched her face, her breasts, her hips, ‘that’s what you know. But you don’t know me. And you were the one who wanted this – that’s all anybody ever . . .’ She touched the same three places. ‘And so that’s what I . . .’

  She wiped her eyes with the hem of her polo neck. Howard looked up.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I want the e-mails I sent you destroyed. And I’m dropping out of your class, so you don’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘You don’t need –’

  ‘You don’t have any idea what I need. You don’t even know what you need. Anyway. Pointless.’

  She put her hand to the door handle. It was selfish, he knew, but before she left Howard was desperate to secure from her the promise that this disaster should stay between them only. He stood up and put his hands on the desk but said nothing.

  ‘Oh, and I know,’ she said, scrunching her eyes closed, ‘that you’re not interested in anything I have to say, because I’m just a fucking idiot girl or whatever . . . but as someone who’s relatively objective . . . basically, you just need to deal with the fact that you’re not the only person in this world. In my opinion. I have my own shit to deal with. But you need to deal with that.’

  She opened her eyes, turned and left, another noisy exit. Howard stayed where he was, gripping his coat by its collar. At no point during the past month’s debacle had he harboured any genuinely romantic feelings for Victoria, nor did he feel any now, but he did realize, at this late stage, that he actually liked her. There was something courageous there, flinty and proud. It seemed to Howard to be the first time she had spoken to him truthfully, or at least in a manner that he experienced as true. Now Howard put his coat on, shaking as he did so. He came to the door, but then waited a minute, not wanting to risk bumping into her outside. He felt peculiar: panicked, ashamed, relieved. Relieved! Was it so awful to feel that he had escaped? Must she not feel it too? Alongside the physical tremors and psychological shock of having been party to such a scene (and how strange it is to be spoken to that way by someone who, in truth, you barely know), was there not, on the other side of the explosion, the satisfaction of survival? Like a street confrontation, where you are physically threatened and dare to stand up to the threat and are then left alone. You walk away quivering with fear and joy at the reprieve, relief that things did not become worse. In such a mood of equivocal elation, Howard walked out of the department. He strolled past Liddy at the front desk, through the hall, past the drinks machines and the internet station, past the double doors of Keller Libr –

  Howard took a step back and pressed his cheek against the glass of one of the doors. Two significant details – no, actually three. One: Monty Kipps at a podium, speaking. Two: the Keller Library packed with people, more people than any Wellington audience Howard had ever managed to amass. Three – and this was the detail that had initially arrested Howard’s attention: a few feet from the door, sitting up tall in her chair, holding a notepad, apparently alert and interested, one Kiki Belsey.

  Howard forgot about his appointment with Smith. He went straight home and awaited his wife. In his rage, he sat on the couch holding Murdoch tightly on his lap, scheming upon the many ways he might open the coming conversation. He lined up a pleasing selection of cool, emotionally detached possibilities – but when he heard the front door open, sarcasm vanished. It was all he could do not to leap from his seat and confront her in the most vulgar way. He listened to her footsteps. She passed the doorway of the livi
ng room (‘Hey. You OK?’) and kept walking. Howard internally combusted.

  ‘Been at work?’

  Kiki retraced her steps and stopped in the doorway. She was – like all long-married people – immediately alerted to trouble by a tone of voice.

  ‘No . . . Afternoon off.’

  ‘Have a nice time?’

  Kiki stepped into the room. ‘Howard, what’s the problem here?’

  ‘I think,’ said Howard, releasing Murdoch, who had grown tired of being partially strangled, ‘I would have been marginally – marginally – less surprised to see you at a meeting of . . .’

  They began to speak at the same time.

  ‘Howard, what is this? Oh, God –’

  ‘. . . of the Klu Klux fucking Klan – no, actually, that would have made a bit more –’

  ‘Kipps’s lecture . . . Oh, Jesus Christ, that place is like Chinese whispers . . . Look, I don’t need –’

  ‘I don’t know what other neo-con events you’ve got planned – no, darling, not Chinese whispers, actually; I saw you, taking notes – I had no idea you were so taken with the great man’s work, I wish I’d realized, I could have got you his collected speeches, or –’

  ‘Oh, fuck you – leave me alone.’

  Kiki turned to leave. Howard flung himself to the other end of the couch, knelt up and caught her by the arm. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Away from here.’

  ‘We’re talking – you wanted to talk – we’re talking.’

  ‘This isn’t talking – this is you ranting. Stop it – let go of me. Jesus! ’

  Howard had successfully twisted her arm, and therefore her body, moving her round the couch. Reluctantly she sat down.