On Beauty (14 page)

‘God, he was right here.
God
. He's around here some place . . . God, where
is
he?'

It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly. The three guests stood patiently around her, watching Zora's fireworks of anxiety. Monique passed by and Zora lunged at her, but her tray was empty and she hadn't seen Howard since he'd been looking for Zora, a fact that took a tediously long time to explain.

‘Levi in the pool – Jerome upstairs,' offered Monique in sulky mitigation. ‘He says him not coming down.'

This was an unfortunate reference.

‘This is Victoria,' said Mr Kipps, with the measured dignity of a man taking control of a silly situation. ‘And Michael. Of course, they already know your brother, the
elder
brother.'

His Trinidadian
basso profundo
sailed effortlessly through the sea of shame here, pressing forward into new waters.

‘Yeah, they totally already met,' said Zora, neither lightly nor seriously, and so falling somewhere unsettling in between.

‘They were all
chums
in London and now you will all be
chums
here,' said Monty Kipps, looking out impatiently over her head, like a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him. ‘I really should say hello to your parents. Otherwise it is rather like being smuggled in the wooden horse, and I come as a guest, you see, bearing no dubious gifts. Not tonight, at least.' His politician's laugh left his eyes unaffected by the action.

‘Oh, sure . . .' said Zora, laughing along blandly, joining him in the fruitless stationary staring. ‘I just don't know where . . . So are you all . . . I mean, have you all moved here, or?'

‘Not me,' said Michael. ‘This is purely holiday for me. Back to London Tuesday. Work calls, sadly.'

‘Ah. That's a shame,' said Zora politely, but she wasn't disappointed. He was striking, but wholly void of sex appeal. She thought, strangely, of that boy in the park. Why can't respectable boys like this look more like boys like that?

‘And you're at Wellington, yeah?' asked Michael, without betraying any genuine curiosity. Zora met his eyes, made small and dull behind corrective glass, as her own were.

‘Yeah . . . went to my dad's place . . . not very adventurous, I guess. And it looks like I'm going to be an Art History major, actually.'

‘Which is, of course,' announced Monty, ‘the field in which I started. I curated the first American exhibition of the Caribbean “primitives” in New York in 1965. I have the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island.'

‘Wow. All to yourself – that must be great.'

But Monty Kipps was clearly a man aware of his own comic potential; he was on guard against any irony, attentive to its approach. He had made his statement in good faith and would not allow it to be satirized retrospectively. He gave a long pause before he replied. ‘It's satisfying to be able to protect important black art, yes.'

His daughter rolled her eyes.

‘Great if you like Baron Samedi staring at you from every corner of the house.'

It was the first time Victoria had spoken. Zora was surprised by her voice, which, like her father's, was loud and low and forthright, out of sync with her coquettish appearance.

‘Victoria is currently reading the French philosophers . . .' said her father drily, and began to list contemptuously several of Zora's own lodestars.

‘Right, right, I see . . .' murmured Zora through this. She had drunk one glass of wine too many. One extra glass made her like this, nodding in agreement before a person's point was finished,
and always aiming for exactly this tone, that of the world-weary almost European bourgeois, for whom, at nineteen, all things were familiar.

‘. . . And I'm afraid it's making her hate art in a dull way. But hopefully Cambridge will straighten her out.'

‘
Dad
.'

‘And in the meantime she will audit some classes here – I'm sure you'll run across each other, from time to time.'

The girls looked at one another without much enthusiasm at the prospect.

‘I don't hate “art”, anyway – I hate
your
art,' countered Victoria. Her father patted her shoulder soothingly, a move she shrugged off as a much younger child might.

‘I guess we don't really hang much stuff around the house,' said Zora, looking around at the empty walls, wondering how she got on to the one topic she had wanted to avoid. ‘Dad's more into conceptual art, of course. We have totally extreme taste in art – like most of the pieces we own, we can't really show in the house. He's into the whole evisceration theory, you know – like art should rip your fucking guts out.'

There was not time for the fallout from this. Zora felt a pair of hands on her shoulders. She couldn't remember ever being more pleased to see her own mother.

‘Mom!'

‘You been taking care of our guests?' Kiki stretched out her invitingly podgy hand, glittering with bangles at the wrist. ‘It's Monty, isn't it? In fact, I think your wife was telling me it's now
Sir
Monty . . .'

The smoothness with which she proceeded from here impressed her daughter. It turned out that some of those much maligned (by Zora) traditional Wellington interpersonal skills – avoidance, denial, politic speech and false courtesy – had their uses. Within five minutes everybody had a drink, everyone's coat had been hung, and small talk was proceeding apace.

‘Mrs Kipps . . . Carlene, she's not with you?' said Kiki.

‘Mom, I'm just going to . . . excuse me, nice to meet you,' said
Zora, vaguely pointing across the room and then following her own finger.

‘She didn't make it?' repeated Kiki. Why did she feel so disappointed?

‘Oh, my wife very rarely attends these things,' said Monty. ‘She doesn't enjoy social conflagration. It's fair to say she is more warmed by the home hearth.'

Kiki was familiar with this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative occasionally have – but the accent was incredible to her. It flew around the scale – somewhat like Erskine's but the vowels were given a body and depth she had never heard before.
Fair
came as Fee-yer.

‘Oh . . . that's a pity . . . she seemed so sure she was going to come.'

‘And then later, she was just as sure she would not.' He smiled, and in the smile was a powerful man's assurance that Kiki would not be silly enough to push the topic any further. ‘Carlene is a woman of changeable moods.'

Poor Carlene! Kiki dreaded the idea of spending even one night with this man with whom Carlene must spend a lifetime. Fortunately there were many people Monty Kipps wanted to be introduced to. He quickly demanded a list of significant Wellingtonians, and Kiki obligingly pointed out Jack French, Erskine, the various faculty heads; she explained that the college president was invited while failing to explain that there wasn't a chance in hell that he would come. The Kipps children had already disappeared into the garden. Jerome – much to Kiki's annoyance – remained skulking upstairs. Kiki accompanied Monty through the rooms. His meeting with Howard was brief and arch, a stylized circling of each other's more extreme positions – Howard the radical art theorist, Monty the cultural conservative – with Howard coming off the worse because he was drunk and took it too seriously. Kiki separated them, manoeuvring Howard towards the curator of a small Boston gallery who had been trying to catch him all night. Howard only half attended to this small worried man as he pressed him on a proposed Rembrandt lecture season that Howard had promised to
organize and done nothing about. Its highlight was to be a lecture from Howard himself, with a wine and cheese event afterwards, part sponsored by Wellington. Howard had neither written this lecture nor looked deeply into the matter of the wine and the cheese. Over the man's shoulder, he watched Monty dominate what was left of his party. A loud, playful debate with Christian and Meredith was being conducted near the fireplace, with Jack French at its borders, never quite quick enough to insert the witticisms he kept on attempting. Howard worried whether he was being defended by his supposed defenders. Maybe he was being ridiculed.

‘I suppose I'm asking what the
tenor
of your talk will be . . .'

Howard tuned back into his own conversation, which he was apparently having not with one man but two. The curator, with his moist nose, had been joined by a young bald man. This second fellow had such lucent white skin and so prominent a plate of bone in his forehead that Howard felt oppressed by the sheer mortality of the man. Never had another living being shown him this much skull.

‘The tenor?'

“ ‘
Ag 'inst
Rembrandt”,' the second man said. He had a high-pitched Southern voice that struck Howard as a comic assault for which he had been completely unprepared. ‘That was the title your assistant mailed us – I'm just tryna figger what you meant by “ag'inst” – obviously my organization are part-sponsors of this whole event, so –'

‘Your organization –'

‘The RAS – Rembrandt Appreciation – and I'm sure I'm not an innellekchewl, at least, as a fella like you might think of one . . .'

‘Yes, I'm sure you're not,' murmured Howard. He found that his accent caused a delayed reaction in certain Americans. It was sometimes the next day before they realized how rude he had been to them.

‘I mean, maybe the “fallacy of the human” is a phrase for innnelekchew-alls, but I can tell you our members . . .'

Across the room, Howard saw that Monty's circle had widened to allow in a clutch of avid Black Studies scholars, led by Erskine
and his brittle Atlanta wife, Caroline. She was an extremely wiry black woman, really one muscle from head to toe, and always immaculate – that East Coast moneyed finesse translated into blackness, her hair straight and stiff, her Chanel suit slightly brighter and more shapely than those of her white counterparts. She was one of the few women in his circle whom Howard had not imagined in a sexual context – this fact was unrelated to her attractiveness (Howard often considered the most awful-looking women in this dimension). It was rather a question of impenetrability: there was no way for the imagination to get through the powerful casing of Caroline herself. You had to imagine yourself into a different universe to imagine fucking her; and that would not be how it went anyway –
she
would fuck
you
. She was infamously proud (most women disliked her) and, like any wife of a superficially attentive man, she was admirably self-contained, apparently without external social needs. But Erskine was also helplessly unfaithful, which gave the pride a characterful, impressive edge of which Howard had always been slightly in awe. She expressed herself eccentrically – she referred to Erskine's girls imperiously as
those mulattos
– and gave no clue as to her real feelings. A celebrated lawyer, she was, it was said, extremely close to becoming a Supreme Court judge; she knew Powell personally, and Rice; she liked to explain patiently to Howard that such people ‘lifted the race'. Monty was exactly to her taste. Her delicate manicured hand was presently making precise cutting movements in the air in front of him, maybe describing where the buck stopped, or how far there was left to go.

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
makes
us 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?