On Beauty Read online

  ‘You don’t understand anything,’ said Levi very quietly.

  ‘What was that? Excuse me? WHAT WAS THAT?’

  ‘People in Haiti, they got NOTHING, RIGHT? We living off these people, man! We – we – living off them! We sucking their blood – we’re like vampires! You OK, married to your white man in the land of plenty – you OK. You doing fine. You’re living off these people, man!’

  Kiki stuck a shaky finger in his face. ‘You crossing a line right now, Levi. I don’t know what you’re talking about – I don’t think you do either. And I really don’t know what any of this has to do with you becoming a thief.’

  ‘Then why don’t you listen to what I’m talking about. That painting don’t belong to him! Or his wife! These people I’m talking about, they remember how things went down, man – and now look how much it’s worth. But that money belongs to the Haitian people, not some . . . some Caucasian art dealer,’ said Levi, confidently remembering Choo’s phrase. ‘That money needs to be redis – to be shared.’

  Kiki was briefly too astounded to speak.

  ‘Umm, that’s not the way the world works,’ said Jerome. ‘I study economics and I can tell you that isn’t the way the world works.’

  ‘That’s exactly the way the world works! I know you all think I’m some kind of a fool – I’m not a fool. And I been reading, I been watching the news – this shit is real. With that money from that painting you could go build a hospital in Haiti!’

  ‘Oh, is that what you were intending to do with the money?’ asked Jerome. ‘Build a hospital?’

  Levi made a face both sheepish and defiant. ‘No, not zackly. We was going to redistribute,’ said Levi successfully. ‘The funds.’

  ‘I see. So how exactly were you gonna sell it? Ebay?’

  ‘Choo had people on that.’

  Kiki found her voice again. ‘Choo? Choo? WHO IS CHOO?’

  Levi covered his face with both hands. ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Levi . . . I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me,’ said Kiki slowly, making an effort to calm herself. ‘And I . . . I understand that you had concerns about these people, but, baby, Jerome’s right, this is not the way you go about solving social problems, this is not how you –’

  ‘So how do you do it?’ demanded Levi. ‘By paying people four dollars an hour to clean? That’s how much you pay Monique, man! Four dollars! If she was American you wouldn’t be paying her no four dollars an hour. Would you? Would you?’

  Kiki was stunned.

  ‘You know what, Levi?’ she said, her voice breaking. She bent down to put her hands to one side of the painting, ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more.’

  ‘ ’Cause you ain’t got no answer to that!’

  ‘Because the only thing that comes out of your mouth is bullshit. And you can save it for the poh-leese when they come and drag your ass off to jail.’

  Levi sucked his teeth. ‘You ain’t got no answer,’ he repeated.

  ‘Jerome,’ said Kiki, ‘take the other side of this. Let’s try to get it upstairs. I’ll call Monty and see if we can sort this out without a lawsuit.’

  Jerome went to the other side and hitched the painting up on to his knee. ‘I think longwise. Levi – get out of the damn way,’ he said, and together they turned themselves a hundred and eighty degrees. As they were completing this manoeuvre, Jerome began to yank at something on the back of the canvas.

  Kiki let out a little scream. ‘No! No! Don’t pull at it! What are you doing? Have you damaged it? Oh, Jesus Christ – I don’t believe this is happening.’

  ‘No, Mom, no . . .’ said Jerome uncertainly. ‘It’s just there’s something stuck here . . . it’s fine . . . we can just. . .’ Jerome brought the painting upright and rested it against his mother. He pulled again at a piece of white notecard tucked into the frame.

  ‘Jerome! What are you doing? Stop doing that!’

  ‘I just want to see what . . .’

  ‘Don’t tear it,’ yelled Kiki, unable to see what was going on. ‘Are you tearing it? Leave it!’

  ‘Oh, my God . . .’ whispered Jerome, forgetting his own blaspheming rule. ‘Mom? Oh, my God! ’

  ‘What are you doing? Jerome! Why are you tearing it more?’

  ‘Mom! Oh, shit, Mom! Your name’s written here!’

  ‘ What?’

  ‘Oh, man, this is too fucking weird . . .’

  ‘Jerome! What are you doing?’

  ‘Mom . . . look.’ Jerome pulled the note free. ‘Here, it says To Kiki – please enjoy this painting. It needs to be loved by someone like you. Your friend, Carlene.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m reading it! It’s right here! And then, under that, There is such a shelter in each other. This is too weird!’

  Kiki lost her legs, and it was only Levi’s intervention, hands at her waist, which prevented both Kiki and painting from hitting the floor.

  Ten minutes earlier, Zora and Howard had arrived back home together. After driving around Wellington for most of the afternoon, thinking things over, Zora had spotted Howard walking back from the Greenman. She gave him a lift. He was in chipper spirits after a good afternoon’s work on his lecture and spoke so much and so continually that he didn’t notice that his daughter was not responding. Only when they came through the front door did it dawn on Howard that a cold front was coming off Zora in his direction. They walked silently into the kitchen, where Zora threw the car keys on to the table with such vigour that they slid the length of it and fell off the other side.

  ‘Sounds like Levi’s in trouble,’ said Howard cheerfully, nodding towards the sound of shouting coming from the basement. ‘He had it coming. I can’t say I’m surprised. There’re sandwiches developing into life forms in that room.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Zora. ‘And ha.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Just admiring your ironic gift for comedy, Daddy.’

  Sighing, Howard sat down in the rocking chair. ‘Zoor – have I pissed you off? Look, if it was that last grade, let’s discuss it. I think it was fair, darling, that’s why I gave it. The essay was just badly structured. Ideas-wise it was fine, but – there was a lack of . . . concentration, somehow.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Zora. ‘My mind’s been elsewhere. I’m real focused now, though.’

  ‘Good!’

  Zora rested her backside on the lip of the kitchen table. ‘And I’ve got a bombshell for the next faculty meeting.’

  Howard put on his interested face – but it was spring, and he wanted to go into the garden and sniff the flowers, and maybe take his first swim of the year and towel off upstairs, and lie naked on the marital bed he had so recently been allowed to return to, and pull his wife on to that bed with him and make love to her.

  ‘The discretionaries?’ said Zora. She lowered her eyes to avoid the bright, reflected sun streaming through the house. It dappled the walls and made the whole place look like it was underwater. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem any more.’

  ‘Oh, no? How so?’

  ‘Well . . . it turns out that Monty’s fucking Chantelle – a student,’ said Zora, speaking the expletive with particular vulgarity. ‘One of the discretionaries he was trying to get rid of.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. Can you believe it? A student. He was probably fucking her before his wife even died.’

  Howard slapped the sides of his chair jubilantly. ‘Well, my God. What a tricky bastard. Moral majority my arse. Well, you’ve got him. My God! You should go in there and spit-roast him. Destroy him!’

  Zora forced her fake nails, left over from the party, into the underside of the table top. ‘That’s your advice?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. How could you resist? His head’s on a platter! Deliver him up.’

  Zora looked up to the ceiling, and when she looked down a tear was working its way down her face.

  ‘It’s not true, is it, Dad?’

  Howard’s face stayed the same
. It took a minute. The Victoria incident was so happily concluded in his mind that it was a mental stretch to remember that this did not mean the incident was not a real thing in the world, capable of discovery.

  ‘I saw Victoria Kipps last night. Dad?’

  Howard held his expression in place.

  ‘And Jerome thinks . . .’ said Zora, with difficulty, ‘somebody said something and Jerome thinks . . .’ Zora hid her wet face behind her elbow. ‘It’s not true, is it?’

  Howard put a hand over his mouth. He had just seen the step after this and the step after that, all the way to the awful end.

  ‘I . . . oh, God, Zora . . . oh, God . . . I don’t know what to say to you.’

  Here Zora used an ancient English expletive, very loudly.

  Howard stood up and took a step towards her. Zora put her arm out to stop him.

  ‘Defended,’ said Zora, opening her eyes very wide in amazement, letting the tears course down. ‘Defended and defended and defended you.’

  ‘Please, Zoor –’

  ‘Against Mom! I took your side!’

  Howard took another step forward. ‘I’m standing here, asking for you to forgive me. It’s real mercy I’m asking for. I know you don’t want to hear my excuses,’ said Howard, whispering. ‘I know you don’t want that.’

  ‘When have you ever,’ said Zora clearly, taking another step back from him, ‘given a fuck about what anyone wants?’

  ‘That’s not fair. I love my family, Zoor.’

  ‘Do you. Do you love Jerome? How could you do this to him?’

  Howard’s head shook mutely.

  ‘She’s my age. No – she’s younger than me. You’re fifty-seven years old, Dad,’ said Zora and laughed miserably.

  Howard covered his face with his hands.

  ‘IT’S SO BORING, DAD. IT’S SO FUCKING OBVIOUS.’

  Zora now reached the top of the stairs leading down to the basement. Howard begged her for a little more time. There was no more time. Mother and daughter were already calling for each other, one running upstairs and one running down, each with her rich, strange news.

  13

  ‘What? What am I looking at exactly?’

  Jerome directed his father to the relevant section of the letter from the bank that had been placed in front of him. Howard put his elbows either side of it and tried to concentrate. The air-conditioning was still not up to the job of summer in the Belsey house, so the sliding doors were pulled across and every window open, but only warm air circulated. Even reading seemed to bring on a sweat.

  ‘You need to sign there and there,’ said Jerome. ‘You have to do this stuff yourself. I’m late.’ A heavy smell lingered over the table: a putrid bowl of pears that had expired in the night. Two weeks earlier Howard had let go of Monique, the cleaner, describing her as an expense they could no longer afford. Then the heat came and everything began to rot and swelter and stink. Zora took a seat far from these pears rather than move the bowl herself. She finished what was left of the cereal and pushed the empty box towards her father.

  ‘I still don’t see what the point of separating the bank account is,’ grumbled Howard, his pen hovering above the document. ‘It just makes things twice as difficult.’

  ‘You’re separated,’ said Zora factually. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘Temporarily,’ said Howard, but wrote his name on the dotted line. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked Jerome. ‘Need a lift?’

  ‘Church, and no,’ replied Jerome.

  Howard restrained himself from comment. He stood and walked across the kitchen to the doors, stepping out on to the patio, which was too hot for his bare feet. He stepped back on to the kitchen tiles. Outside smelled of tree sap and swollen brown apples, of which maybe a hundred were scattered over the lawn. It had been like this every August for ten years, but only this year did Howard realize something might be done to improve the situation. Apple cobbler, apple crumble, candied apples, chocolate apples, fruit salads . . . Howard had surprised himself. There was nothing now that he didn’t know about making food from apples. He had an apple dish for every day of the week. But it just didn’t make as much difference as he’d hoped. Still they kept falling. Worms spent their days passing through them. When they turned black and lost their shape, the ants came crawling.

  It was now about time for the squirrel to make its first appearance of the day. Howard leaned against the doorframe and waited. And here he came, scuttling along the fence, intent on destruction. He stopped halfway along and made the acrobatic leap over to the bird feeder, which Howard had spent yesterday afternoon reinforcing with chicken wire to protect it from this very predator. He watched with interest as the squirrel now set about methodically tearing his defences apart. He would be more prepared tomorrow. Howard’s forced sabbatical had brought with it a new knowledge of the life cycles of his house. He now noticed which flowers closed themselves when the sun set; he knew the corner of the garden that attracted ladybugs and how many times a day Murdoch needed to relieve himself; he had identified precisely the tree in which the bastard squirrel lived and had considered cutting it down. He knew what sound the pool made when the filter needed changing, or when the air-conditioning unit needed a thump to its side to quieten it down. He knew, without looking, which of his children was passing through a room – from their intimate noises, their treads. Now he reached out for Levi, who he correctly sensed was right behind him.

  ‘You. You need your allowance. Don’t you?’

  Levi, in his shades, was giving nothing away. He was taking a girl out to brunch and a movie, but Howard didn’t need to know that. ‘If you’re giving it,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Well, did your mother already give you some?’

  ‘Just give him the money, Dad,’ called Jerome.

  Howard came back into the kitchen.

  ‘Jerome, I am merely interested in how your mother manages to pay for the secret “bachelor pad” and go out with her girlfriends every night and fund a court case and provide Levi with twenty dollars every other day. Is that all out of the money she’s siphoning off me? I’m simply interested in how that works.’

  ‘Just give him the money,’ repeated Jerome.

  Howard tightened the cord of his bathrobe indignantly. ‘But then of course Linda – she’s the lesbian one, isn’t she?’ asked Howard, knowing the answer. ‘Yes, the lesbian one – she’s still squeezing half of Mark’s money out of him, five years later, which seems a bit rich, really, what with their children being grown, Linda a lesbian . . . marriage having been just a small blip in her lesbian career.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how many times you say the word lesbian in a day?’ asked Zora, switching on the television.

  Jerome laughed quietly at this. Howard, happy to amuse his family even incidentally, smiled too.

  ‘So,’ said Howard, clapping his hands, ‘money. If she wants me bled dry, so be it.’

  ‘Look, man, I don’t want your money,’ said Levi resignedly. ‘Keep it. If it means I don’t have to listen to you talk about it.’

  Levi lifted his sneaker up, a request for his father to do that special triple knot thing with the laces. Howard braced Levi’s foot against his thigh and began tying.

  ‘Soon, Howard,’ said Zora breezily, ‘she won’t need your money. Once the case is won she can sell the painting and buy a goddamn island.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Jerome confidently, ‘she won’t sell that painting. You don’t understand anything if you think that. You have to understand the way Mom’s brain works. She could have kicked him out’ – Howard expressed alarm at this nameless characterization of himself – ‘but she’s like, “No, you bring up the kids, you deal with this family.” Mom’s perverse like that. She doesn’t go the way you think she’s going to go. She’s got a will of iron.’

  They had this discussion, in different variants, several times a week.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ contributed Howard, and with exactly the morose int
onation of his father. ‘She’ll probably sell this house from under us an’ all.’

  ‘I really hope so, Howard,’ said Zora. ‘She totally deserves it.’

  ‘Zora, haven’t you got to get to work?’ asked Howard.

  ‘None of you knows anything,’ said Levi, hopping to swap feet. ‘She’s gonna sell that picture, but she won’t keep the money. I was round there yesterday, talked to her about it. The money’s going to the Haitian Support Group. She just doesn’t want Kipps to have it.’

  ‘You were round there . . . Kennedy Square?’ queried Howard.

  ‘Nice try,’ said Levi, because they had all been instructed not to give Howard any details as to Kiki’s exact location. Levi put both feet on the floor and evened up the legs of his jeans. ‘How do I look?’ he asked.

  Murdoch, fresh from a short-legged scramble through the long grass, came scuffling into the kitchen. He was overwhelmed by attention from all sides: Zora ran over to pick him up; Levi played with his ears; Howard offered him a bowl of food. Kiki had wanted desperately to take him, but her apartment was not dog-friendly. And now the remaining Belseys being nice to Murdoch was, in some way, for Kiki; there was the unspoken, irrational hope that, although not with them in this room, she could somehow sense the care they were lavishing upon her beloved little dog, and that these good vibes would . . . it was ridiculous. It was a way of missing her.

  ‘Levi, I can give you a lift into town if you like, if you can wait a minute,’ said Howard. ‘Zoor – aren’t you late?’

  Zora didn’t move.

  ‘I’m dressed, Howard,’ she said, pointing to her summer waitress’s uniform of black skirt and white shirt. ‘It’s your big day. And you’re the one with no pants on.’

  This much was true. Howard picked Murdoch up – although the dog had barely tasted the meat put in front of him – and took him upstairs to the bedroom. Here Howard stood before his closet and considered how smart he could possibly look given the humidity. In the closet, from which all the real clothes – all the colourful silk and cashmere and satin – had been removed, a solitary suit hung, swinging above a jumble of jeans and shirts and shorts. He reached out for the suit. He put it back. If they were going to take him, they could take him as he truly was. He pulled out black jeans, dark blue short-sleeved shirt, sandals. Today, supposedly, there would be people from Pomona in the audience, and from Columbia University and from the Courtauld. Smith was excited about all these possibilities, and now Howard did his best to be too. This is the big one, read Smith’s e-mail of this morning, Howard, it’s time for tenure. If Wellington can’t give you that, you move on. This is how it’s supposed to be. See you at ten thirty! Smith was right. Ten years in one place, without tenure, was a long time. His children were grown. They would soon leave. And then the house, if it were to stay as it was, without Kiki, would be intolerable. It was in a university that he must now put all his remaining hope. Universities had been a home for him for over thirty years. He only needed one more: the final, generous institution to take him in his dotage and protect him.