On Beauty (25 page)

‘Honey, you look
bad
. What time you get in?'

Levi looked up weakly for a moment before burrowing back in.

‘Zora – make him some tea. Poor honey can't speak.'

‘Let him make his own tea. The poor honey shouldn't drink so much.'

This enlivened Levi. He freed himself from his mother and strode over to the kettle. ‘Man, shut up.'

‘
You
shut up.'

‘I di'unt drink anything anyhow – I'm just tired. I got back late.'

‘Nobody heard you come in – I worry, you know. Where were you?' asked Kiki.

‘Nowhere – I just met some guys, I was hanging with them – we went on to a club. It was cool. Mom, is there any breakfast?'

‘How was work?'

‘Fine. Same. Is there breakfast?'

‘These eggs are
mine
,' said Zora, and hunched over, drawing her plate into her chest. ‘You know where the cereal is.'

‘Shut
up
.'

‘Baby, I'm glad you had a good time, but that's it now. I don't want you out any night this week, OK?'

Levi's voice leaped several decibels in his defence: ‘I don't even
want
to go out.'

‘Good, because you got SATs and you got to knuckle down right about now.'

‘Oh, wait, man – I got to go out Tuesday.'

‘Levi, what did I just say?'

‘But I'll be back by eleven. Yo, it's impor'ant.'

‘I don't
care
.'

‘Seriously – oh, man – these guys I met – they performing – I'll be back by eleven – it's just the Bus Stop – I can get a cab.'

Zora's head perked up from her breakfast. ‘Wait –
I'm
going to the Bus Stop on Tuesday.'

‘So?'

‘So I don't want to see
you
there. I'm going with my class.'

‘So?'

‘Can't you just go some other day?'

‘Aw, shut
up
, man. Mom, a'hma be back by eleven. I've got two free periods on Wednesday. Honestly, man. It's cool. I'll come back with Zora.'

‘No, you
won't
.'

‘Yes, he will,' said Kiki with finality. ‘That's the deal. Both back by eleven.'

‘
What?
'

Levi performed a little bop of celebration en route to the fridge, adding a special Jacksonesque spin as he passed Zora's chair.

‘Wow, that's unfair,' complained Zora. ‘This is why I should have gone to college in a different town.'

‘You live in this house, you have to help out with family stuff,' said Kiki, getting down to fundamentals in order to defend a decision whose unfairness she had already privately registered. ‘That's the deal. You don't pay any rent here.'

Zora brought her hands together in penitent prayer. ‘That's
so
gracious, thank you.
Thank
you for letting me stay in my childhood home.'

‘Zoor, don't start messing with me this morning – I mean it, don't even –'

Without anyone noting it, Howard had entered the room. He was fully dressed, even shoed. His hair was wet and combed backwards. It was maybe the first time in a week that Howard and Kiki had stood in the same room like this, albeit ten feet apart, and now with full eye-contact, like two formal, unrelated, full-length portraits turned so as to face each other. While Howard asked the
kids to leave the room, Kiki took her time, looking. She saw differently now; that was one of the side-effects. Whether the new way of seeing was the truth, she couldn't say. But it was certainly stark, revelatory. She saw every fold and tremble of his fading prettiness. She found she could muster contempt for even his most neutral physical characteristics. The thin, papery, Caucasian nostril holes. The doughy ears sprouting hairs that he was careful to remove and yet whose ghostly existence she continued to catalogue. The only things that threatened to disturb her resolve were the sheer temporal
layers
of Howard as they presented themselves before her: Howard at twenty-two, at thirty, at forty-five and fifty-one; the difficulty of keeping all these other Howards out of her consciousness; the importance of not being sidetracked, of responding only to this most recent Howard, the 57-year-old Howard. The liar, the heart-breaker, the emotional fraud. She did not flinch.

‘What is it, Howard?'

Howard had just finished ushering his resistant children out of the room. They were alone. He turned round quickly, his face a very nothing. He was at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet, where to stand, what to rest upon.

‘There's no “it”,' he said softly, and pulled his cardigan around himself. ‘Particularly. I don't know what that question means.
It?
I mean . . . obviously, there's everything.'

Kiki, feeling the power of her position, re-established her folded arms. ‘Right. That's very poetic. I guess I'm just not feeling too poetic right now. Is there something you wanted to say to me?'

Howard looked to the floor and shook his head, disappointed, like a scientist getting no data from an elaborately set-up experiment. ‘I see,' he said finally and made as if to return to his study, but then turned back at the door. ‘Umm . . . Is there a time when we could talk, properly? Like human beings. Who know each other.'

For her part, Kiki had been waiting for a hook. That would do. ‘Don't you tell
me
how to behave like a human being. I
know
how to behave like a human being.'

Howard looked up at her, eagerly. ‘Of
course
you do.'

‘Oh,
fuck you
.'

To accompany this, Kiki did something she hadn't done in years. She gave her husband the finger. Howard looked baffled. In a faraway voice he said, ‘No . . . This isn't going to work.'

‘No, really? Aren't we having good dialogue? Are we not interfacing as you'd hoped? Howard, go to the library.'

‘How can I talk to you when you're like this? There's no way for me to talk to you.'

His real distress was obvious and for a moment Kiki considered matching it with her own. Instead, she grew still harder inside.

‘Well, I'm sorry about that.'

Kiki became aware, suddenly, of her own belly and the way it hung over her leggings; she reorganized it under the elastic of her underwear, a move that made her feel more protected somehow, more solid. Howard placed both hands on the sideboard like a lawyer giving his summation to an invisible jury.

‘Clearly we need to talk about what's going to happen next. At least . . . well, the kids need to know.'

Kiki released a flare of laughter. ‘Sugar, you're the one who makes the decisions. We just roll with the punches as they come. Who knows what you'll do to this family next. You know? Nobody can know that.'

‘Kiki –'

‘
What?
What do you want me to
say
?'

‘Nothing!' flashed Howard, and then he reconstituted his self-control, lowering his voice, clasping his hands together. ‘Nothing . . . the onus is on me, I know that. It's for me to – to – explain my narrative in a way that's comprehensible . . . and achieves an . . . I don't know, explanation, I suppose, in terms of motivation . . .'

‘Don't worry – I comprehend your narrative, Howard. Otherwise known as, I got your number.
We're not in your class now
. Are you able to talk to me in a way that means
anything
?'

To this Howard groaned. He abhorred the reference (an old war-wound in this marriage, continually reopened) to a separation between his ‘academic' language and his wife's so-called ‘personal' language. She could always say – and often did – ‘we're not in your class now' and that would always be true, but he would never,
never
concede the point that Kiki's language was any more emotionally expressive than his own. Even now,
even now
, this oldest argument of their union was rousing its furious armies in his mind, preparing for one more appearance in the field. It took an enormous act of will on his part to divert his forces.

‘Look, let's not . . . All I want to say is that I feel . . . you know, that we seem to be taking rather a giant step backwards. In the spring it seemed that we were going to . . . I don't know. Survive this, I suppose.'

What came next burst from Kiki's chest like an aria she was singing. ‘In the
spring
I didn't know
you were fucking one of our friends
. In the spring it was just someone, a nameless someone, it was a one-night stand – now it's
Claire Malcolm
. It went on for weeks!'

‘
Three
weeks,' said Howard, almost inaudibly.

‘I
asked
you to tell me the truth, and you
looked me in the eye and lied to me
. Like every other middle-aged
asshole
in this town lying to his
idiot
wife. I can't believe how much contempt you have for me.
Claire Malcolm is our friend
. Warren is our
friend
.'

‘All right. Well, let's talk about that.'

‘Oh, can we? Can we really?'

‘Of course. If you want to.'

‘Do I get to ask the questions?'

‘If you like.'

‘Why did you fuck Claire Malcolm?'

‘Bloody hell, Keeks, please –'

‘Sorry, is that too obvious? Does that offend your sensibility, Howard?'

‘
No
. Of course not – don't be so fatuous . . . It's obviously painful for me to try to . . . explain something so banal, in a way –'

‘Oh, I'm
so
sorry your dick offends your intellectual sensibilities. It must be terrible. There's your subtle, wonderful, intricate brain and all the time it turns out your dick is a vulgar, stupid little prick. That must be a real bitch for you!'

Howard picked up his satchel, which, Kiki only now noticed, was lying on the floor by his feet. ‘I'm going to go now,' he said, and took the route by the right side of the table so he might
physically avoid a confrontation. Kiki was not averse, in very bad times, to kicking and punching, and he was not averse to holding her wrists tightly in his hands until she stopped.

‘A little
white
woman,' yelled Kiki across the room, unable now to control herself. ‘A tiny little white woman I could fit in my
pocket
.'

‘I'm going. You're being ludicrous.'

‘And I don't know why I'm surprised. You don't even notice it – you
never
notice. You think it's normal. Everywhere we go, I'm alone in this . . . this
sea
of white. I barely
know
any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don't see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your
fucking
college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor. I
staked my whole life
on you. And I have no idea any more why I did that.'

Howard stopped underneath an abstract painting on the wall. Its main feature was a piece of thick white plaster, made to look like linen, crumpled up like a rag someone had thrown away. This action of throwing had been caught, by the artist, in mid-flight, with the ‘linen' frozen in space, framed by a white wooden box that thrust out from the wall.

‘I can't understand you,' he said, looking at her at last. ‘You're not making any sense to me. You're hysterical now.'

‘I gave up
my life
for you. I don't even know who I am any more.' Kiki fell into a chair and began to weep.

‘Oh, God, please . . . please . . . Keeks, don't cry, please.'

‘Could you have found anybody less like me if you'd
scoured
the
earth
?' she said, thumping the table with her fist. ‘My
leg
weighs more than that woman. What have you made me
look like
in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?'

Howard picked up his keys from the clay boot on the sideboard and walked purposively to the front door.

‘I didn't.'

Kiki leaped up and followed him. ‘What? I can't hear you – what?'

‘
Nothing
. I'm not allowed to say it.'

‘Say. It.'

‘All I said was . . .' Howard shrugged fretfully. ‘Well, I married a slim black woman, actually. Not that it's relevant.'

Kiki's eyes widened, allowing what was left of the tears to film themselves over her eyeballs. ‘Holy
shit
. You want to sue me for breach of contract, Howard? Product expanded without warning?'

‘Don't be ridiculous. It's nothing as trite as that. I don't want to get into that. There's a million factors, clearly. This is not the reason people have affairs, and I don't want to have this conversation on this level, I really don't. It's puerile. It's beneath you – it's beneath me.'

‘There you go again. Howard, you should talk to your cock so the two of you are singing from the same hymn book. Your cock is beneath you. Literally.' Kiki laughed a little and then cried – childish, formless yelps that came up from her belly, relinquishing everything she had left.

‘Look,' said Howard resolutely, and the more she could sense his sympathy draining away from her, the more she wailed. ‘I'm trying to be as honest as I can. If you're asking me, obviously physicality is a factor. You have . . . Keeks, you've changed a lot. I don't
care
, but –'

‘I staked my
life
on you. I staked my
life
.'

‘And I love you. I've always loved you. But I'm not having this discussion.'

‘Why can't you tell me the
truth
?'

Howard passed his satchel from his right hand to his left and opened the front door. He was that lawyer again, simplifying a complex case for a desperate, simple-minded client who would not take his advice.