On Beauty (20 page)

‘Jack –'

‘. . . to offer your impressive abilities . . .'

‘Jack, what are you saying?'

‘. . . to young people who would not otherwise have these opportunities . . . but the bottom line here is that people are asking questions about the fairness of classes being open to non-Wellington – '

‘Who's asking? English Department people?'

Jack sighed. ‘Quite a few people, Claire. And I redirect those questions. Have done for a while. But if Zora Belsey is successful in bringing a lot of unwelcome attention to your, shall we say, selective admissions process – then I don't know if I will still be able to continue redirecting those questions.'

‘Is it Monty Kipps? I heard he “objected”,' said Claire bitterly, and made her fingers quote, unnecessarily, Jack felt, ‘to Belsey's Affirmative Action Committee working on campus. God, he hasn't
even been here a month! Is he the new authority around here now or something?'

Jack blushed. He could blackmail with the best of them, but he could not involve himself very deeply in personal conflict. He also had a profound respect for public power, that compelling quality that Monty Kipps had in spades. If only, as a young man, Jack's way of expressing himself had been a tad sprightlier, a shade more people-friendly (if one could have imagined, even abstractly, the possibility of having a beer with him), he too might have been a public person in the manner of Monty Kipps, or like Jack's own late father, a senator for Massachusetts, or like his brother, a judge. But Jack was a university man from the cradle. And when he met people like Kipps, a man who straddled both worlds, Jack always deferred to them.

‘I cannot have you talking about a colleague of ours in that way, Claire, I just can't. And you know that I can't name names. I am trying to save you a lot of pointless pain here.'

‘I see.'

Claire looked down at her small brown hands. They were quivering. The dome of her speckled grey-and-white head faced Jack, downy, he thought, like the feathers in a bird's nest.

‘In a university . . .' began Jack, preparing his best impression of a parson, but Claire stood up.

‘I know what happens in universities, Jack,' she said sourly. ‘You can tell Zora congratulations. She made the class.'

‘I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based,
wintery
kind of a pie,' explained Kiki, leaning over the counter. ‘You know – tasty-looking.'

Kiki's little laminated name tag tapped on the plastic sneeze-guard protecting the merchandise. This was her lunch hour.

‘It's for my friend,' she said bashfully, incorrectly. She hadn't
seen Carlene Kipps since that strange afternoon three weeks ago. ‘She's not too well. I need a
down home
pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing French or . . . frilly.'

Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their speciality goods and smiled abstractly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren't certain of the cause.

‘See that?' said Kiki emphatically, pressing her index finger on the plastic, directly above an open-faced pie. The surrounding pastry was golden and in the centre sat a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. ‘
That's
what I'm talking about.'

A few minutes later Kiki was striding up the hill with her pie in its recycled cardboard box, tied with a green velvet ribbon. She was taking business into her own hands. For there had been a misunderstanding between Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps. Two days after their meeting, somebody had hand-delivered an extremely old-fashioned, unironic and frankly unAmerican visiting card to 83 Langham:

Dear Kiki,

Thank you so much for your kind visit. I should like to repay the call. Please let me know of a time that would be convenient to you,

Yours truly
Mrs C. Kipps

In normal circumstances, of course, this card would have served as an ideal object of ridicule over a Belsey breakfast table. But, as it happened, the card arrived two days after the Belsey world fell apart. Pleasure was no longer on the menu. Ditto communal breakfasts. Kiki had taken to eating on the bus to work – a bagel and a coffee from the Irish store on the corner – and putting up with those disapproving looks that other women give big women when they're eating in public. Two weeks later, upon rediscovering the card tucked in the kitchen magazine rack, Kiki felt somewhat guilty; silly as it was, she had meant to reply. But there was never a good time to broach the subject with Jerome. The important
thing at the time had been to keep her son's spirits up, to keep the waters as calm as possible so that he might get in the boat his mother had spent so long carefully constructing and sail off to college. Two days before registration Kiki passed Jerome's bedroom and witnessed him gathering his clothes into a ritualistic-looking mound in the middle of the floor – the traditional prelude to packing his bags. So now everyone was back in school. Everyone was enjoying the sense of new beginnings and fresh pastures that school cycles offer their participants. They were starting again. She envied them that.

Four days ago, Kiki found the visiting card once again, in the bottom of her Alice Walker Barnes and Noble tote bag. Sitting in the bus with the card on her lap, she parsed it into its constitutive parts, examining first the handwriting, then the Anglicized phrasing, then the idea of the maid or cleaner or whoever she was being sent round with it; the thick English notepaper with something about Bond Street stamped in the corner, the royal blue ink of the italics. It was too ridiculous, really. And yet when she looked out of the back window of the bus, seeking any happy memories of the long, distressing summer, moments when the weight of what had happened to her marriage was not crushing her ability to breathe and walk down the street and have breakfast with her family, for some reason, that afternoon on the porch with Carlene Kipps kept rising up.

She tried ringing. Three times. She sent Levi over with a note. The note received no reply. And on the phone it was always him, the husband, with his excuses. Carlene wasn't feeling well, then she was asleep, and then yesterday: ‘My wife is not quite up to visitors just now.'

‘Could I maybe talk to her?'

‘I think it would be preferable if you left a message.'

Kiki's imagination went to work. It was, after all, a good deal easier on her own conscience to envisage a Mrs Kipps kept from the world by dark, marital forces than to acknowledge a Mrs Kipps offended by Kiki's own rudeness. So she had booked a two-hour lunch break today with the purpose of going over to Redwood and
seeing about liberating Carlene Kipps from Montague Kipps. She would bring a pie. Everybody loves pie. Now she took out her cell and with a dextrous thumb scrolled down to JAY
_–
DORM and pressed ‘Call'.

‘Hey . . . Hi, Mom . . . wait a minute . . . getting my glasses.'

Kiki heard a thump and then the sound of water spilling.

‘Oh,
man
 . . . Mom, wait up.'

Kiki tensed her jaw. She could
hear
the tobacco in his voice. But it was no good attacking on that front, seeing as how she'd started up smoking again herself. Instead she attacked obliquely. ‘Every time I call you, Jerome, every time you
always
just getting out of bed. It's amazing, really. Don't matter what time I call, you
still
in bed.'

‘Mom . . . please . . . less of the Mamma Simmonds . . . I'm in pain here.'

‘Baby, we
all
in pain . . . now, look, Jay,' said Kiki seriously, abandoning her own mother's Southern stylings as too unwieldy for the delicate task at hand, ‘quickly – when you were in London . . . Mrs Kipps, her relationship with her husband, with Monty – they were, you know, cool with each other?'

‘How do you mean?' asked Jerome. Kiki could feel a little of the jittery anxiety of last year coming through the phone. ‘Mom, what's going on?'

‘Nothing, nothing . . . Nothing about that . . . It's just every time I try to call her, Mrs Kipps – you know, I just want to see how she is – she
is
my neighbour –'

‘Give me some gossip, I
am
your neighbour!'

‘Excuse me?'

‘Nothing. It's a song,' said Jerome and chuckled gently to himself. ‘Sorry – go on, Mom. Neighbourly concern, etcetera . . .'

‘Right. And I
just
want to say hello, and every time I call it's like he won't let me speak to her . . . like he's got her locked away or . . . I don't know, it's strange. First I thought she was offended – you know how easy folk like that get offended, they're worse than
white folk
that way – but now . . . I don't know. I think it's more than that. And I was just wondering if you knew anything.'

Kiki heard her son sigh into the phone. ‘Mom, I don't think it's time for an intervention. Just because she can't come to the phone doesn't mean the evil Republican is beating her. Mom . . . I
really
don't want to come home at Christmas and find Victoria drinking eggnog in my kitchen . . . Could we just . . . like, could we cool it on the “being neighbourly” vibe? They're pretty private people.'

‘Who's bothering them!' cried Kiki.

‘OK, then!' echoed Jerome, imitating her.

‘Nobody's bothering anybody,' muttered Kiki irritably. She stepped aside to allow a woman with a double stroller to get by. ‘I just
like
her. The woman lives near by, and she's obviously not well, and I'd like to see how she's doing. Is that allowed?'

It was the first time she had articulated these motives, even to herself. Hearing them now, she recognized how approximate and shoddy they were when placed alongside the strong, irrational desire she had to be in that woman's presence again.

‘OK . . . I just – I guess I don't see why we have to be friends with them.'

‘You
have
friends, Jerome. And Zora has friends, and Levi practically
lives
with his friends – and' – Kiki followed the thought to the edge of the cliff and beyond – ‘well, we sure as hell know now how close your
father
is to his friends – and what? I can't make friends? Y'all have your life and I have
no
life?'

‘No,
Mom
 . . . come on, that's not fair . . . I just . . . I mean, I wouldn't have thought she was your type of person . . . Makes it a little awkward for me, that's all. Anyway, whatever. You know . . . you do what you want.'

A mutual bad temper stretched its black wings over the conversation.

‘Mom . . .' mumbled Jerome contritely, ‘look, I'm glad you rang. How are you? Are you OK?'

‘Me? I'm fine. I'm
fine
.'

‘OK . . .'

‘Really,' said Kiki.

‘You don't sound great.'

‘I'm
fine
.'

‘So . . . what's going to happen? With you . . . you know . . . and Dad.' He sounded almost tearful, anxious not to be told the truth. It was wrong, Kiki knew, to be antagonized by this, but she was. These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you – even when it isn't in your power to bestow it – and then when the
real shit hits the fan
, when you need them to
be
adults, suddenly they're children again.

‘God, I don't know, Jay. That's the truth. I'm getting through the days here. That's about it.'

‘I love you, Mom,' said Jerome ardently. ‘You're gonna get through this. You're a strong black woman.'

People had been telling Kiki this her whole life. She supposed she was lucky that way – there are worse things to be told. But the fact remained: as a sentence it was really beginning to bore the hell out of her.

‘Oh, I
know
that. You know me, baby, I can
not
be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.'

‘Right,' said Jerome sadly.

‘And I love you too, baby. I'm just
fine
.'

‘You can feel bad,' said Jerome, and coughed the frog from his throat. ‘I mean, that's not illegal.'

A fire engine went by, wailing. It was one of the old, shiny, brass-and-red-paint engines of Jerome's childhood. He could see it and its fellows in his mind's eye: six of them parked in the courtyard at the end of the Belseys' road, ready for an emergency. As a child he used to go over the hypothetical moment when his family would be saved from fire by white men climbing through the windows.

‘I just wish I was there.'

‘Oh, you're busy. Levi's here.
Not
,' said Kiki cheerily, wiping fresh tears from her eyes, ‘that I see hide nor hair of Levi. We just do bed, breakfast and the laundry for that boy.'

‘Meanwhile I'm drowning in dirty laundry here.'

Kiki was silent trying to picture Jerome right now: where he was sitting, the size of his room, where the window was and what it looked out upon. She missed him. For all his innocence, he was her
ally. You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

‘And Zora's here. I'm
fine
.'

‘Zora . . .
please
. She wouldn't piss on somebody if they were on fire.'

‘Oh, Jerome, that's not true. She's just angry with me – it's normal.'

‘
You're
not the one she should be angry with.'

‘Jerome, you just get to class and don't be sweating about
me
. Takes a
giant
.'

‘Amen,' said Jerome, in the comic way of the Belseys when they were putting on their ancestral Deep South voices, and Kiki echoed him, laughing.
Amen!

And then to ruin everything that had gone before Jerome said, in all seriousness, ‘God bless you, Mom.'

‘Oh, baby, please . . .'

‘Mom, just
take
the blessing, OK? It's not viral. Look, I'm late for class – I've got to go.'

Kiki snapped her cell closed and wedged it back into the very small gap between her flesh and her jean pocket. She was on Redwood already. During the conversation she had hung the paper bag with the cake box in it from her wrist; now she could feel the pie shifting around dangerously. She threw the bag away and put both hands under the bottom of the box to steady it. At the door she pressed down the bell with the back of her wrist. A young black girl answered with a dishrag in her hand, with poor English, giving her the information that Mrs Kipps was in the ‘leebry'. Kiki didn't have a chance to ask if this was a good time, or to offer up the pie and then withdraw – she was led at once down the hallway and to an open door. The girl ushered her through into a white room lined with walnut bookshelves from floor to ceiling. A shiny black piano rested against the only bare wall. On the floor, on top of a sparse cowhide rug, hundreds of books were arranged in rows like dominos, their pages to the floor, their spines facing up. Sitting among them was Mrs Kipps, perched on the edge of a white calico Victorian armchair. She was bent forward, looking at the floor with her head in her hands.

‘Hello, Carlene?'

Carlene Kipps looked up at Kiki, and smiled, slightly.

‘I'm sorry – is this a bad time?'

‘Not at all, my dear. It's a slow time. I think I've bitten off rather more than I can chew. Please sit down, Mrs Belsey.'

There being no other chair, Kiki took a seat on the piano stool. She wondered what had happened to first names.

‘Alphabetizing,' murmured Mrs Kipps. ‘I thought it would take a few hours. It's a surprise for Monty. He likes his books in order. But I'm been in here since eight this morning and I'm not past C!'

‘Oh, wow.' Kiki picked up a book and pointlessly turned it over in her hands. ‘I have to say, we've never alphabetized. Sounds like a lot of hard work.'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘Carlene, I wanted to give this to you as a way —'

‘Now, can you see any B's or C's over there?'

Kiki put her pie down beside her on the stool and bent over. ‘Oh-oh. Anderson – there's an Anderson here.'