On Beauty (26 page)

‘It's true that men – they respond to beauty . . . it doesn't end for them, this . . . this
concern
with beauty as a physical actuality in the world – and that's clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes . . . but it's
true
and . . . I don't know how else to explain what –'

‘Get
away
from me.'

‘Fine.'

‘I'm not interested in your aesthetic theories. Save them for Claire. She loves them.'

Howard sighed. ‘I wasn't giving you a theory.'

‘You think there's some great philosophical I-don't-fucking-know-what because you can't keep your dick in your pants? You're not Rembrandt, Howard. And don't kid yourself: honey, I look at boys
all the time
– all the time. I see pretty boys every day of the week, and I think about their cocks, and what they would look like butt naked –'

‘You're being really vulgar now.'

‘But I'm an
adult
, Howard. And I've chosen my life. I thought you had too. But you're still running after pussy, apparently.'

‘But she's not . . .' said Howard, lowering his voice to an exasperated whisper, ‘you know . . . she's
our
age, older, I think – you talk as if it were a student like one of Erskine's . . . or . . . But in fact I didn't – '

‘You want a fucking
prize
?'

Howard was intent on slamming the door behind him, and Kiki was equally determined to kick it shut. The force of it knocked the plaster picture to the floor.

On Tuesday night a water main burst at the corner of Kennedy and Rosebrook. A dark river filled the street, breaking only towards the high ground at its centre. It sloshed either side of Kennedy Square, massing in dirty puddles tinted orange by the streetlights. Zora had parked the family car a block away, intending to wait for her poetry class on the central traffic island, but this too was lapped on all sides by a slurry lake, more an island than ever. The cars sent up sheets of black spray as they went past. Instead she set herself back on the sidewalk, choosing to lean against a cement post in front of a drug store. Here, in this spot, Zora felt confident she would be aware of her class, when they came, at least a moment or two before
they were aware of her (this had also been the point of the traffic island). She held a cigarette and struggled to enjoy the sear of it on desiccated, winter lips. She watched a little behavioural pattern develop just across the street. People paused at the doorway of the McDonald's, waited for the passing car to displace its gallon of grimy water and then continued on their way, proudly, swiftly adaptable to anything the city could throw at them.

‘Anybody call the water board? Or is this the second flood?' inquired a throaty Boston voice, just by Zora's elbow. It was the purple-skinned homeless guy with his coiled beard of solid, grey clumps, with white panda rings around his eyes, as if half his year was spent in Aspen. He was always here, holding a polystyrene cup to hustle for dimes outside the bank, and now he shook this at Zora, laughing gruffly. When she didn't respond, he made his joke again. To escape, she moved forward to the road's edge and looked into the gutters to imply her concern and further investigation of the situation. A patina of frost had collected on top of the puddles here in the potholes and natural gulleys created by uneven asphalt. Some puddles had already resolved themselves into slush, but others maintained their pristine, wafer-thin ice rinks. Zora threw her cigarette on to one of these and at once lit another. She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face – as her favourite poet had it – to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn't seem to her that she had a face at all . . . And yet in college, she knew was famed for being opinionated, a ‘personality' – the truth was she didn't take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn't feel that she
had
any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were
all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Even on this short trip to the bohemian end of Wellington – a journey that, having been traversed by car, offered no opportunity whatsoever for reading – she had brought along, in her knapsack, three novels and a short tract by De Beauvoir on ambiguity – so much ballast to stop her floating away, up and over the flood, into the night sky.

‘The
Zor
meister – rocking with the salt of the
earth
.'

At her right were her friends, greeting her; at her left, the homeless guy, just at her shoulder, from whom she now moved away, laughing stupidly at the idea of any connection between them. She was hugged and shaken. Here were people, friends. A boy called Ron, of delicate build whose movements were tidy and ironic, who liked to be clean, who liked things Japanese. A girl called Daisy, tall and solid like a swimmer, with an all-American ingénue face, sandy hair and more of a salty manner than she required, given her looks. Daisy liked eighties romantic comedies and Kevin Bacon and thrift-store handbags. Hannah was red-headed and freckled, rational, hard-working, mature. She liked Ezra Pound and making her own clothes. Here were people. Here were tastes and buying habits and physical attributes.

‘Where's Claire?' asked Zora, looking around them.

‘ 'Cross the street,' said Ron, holding his hand against his hip. ‘With Eddie and Lena and Chantelle and everybody – most of the class came. Claire's
loving
it, naturally.'

‘She sent you over?'

‘I guess. Ooooh, Dr Belsey. Do you smell trauma?'

Happily, Zora rose to the bait. By virtue of who she was she had information other students could not hope to have. She was their vital link to the inner life of professors. She had no qualms about sharing all she knew.

‘Are you
serious
? She totally can't look me in the eye – even in class, when I'm reading she's nodding at the window.'

‘I think she's just ADD,' drawled Daisy.

‘Attention Dick Deficiency,' said Zora, because she was extremely quick. ‘If it doesn't have a dick, it's basically deficient.'

Her little audience guffawed, pretending to a worldliness none of them had earned.

Ron gripped her chummily round the shoulders. ‘The wages of sin, etcetera,' he said as they began to walk, and then, ‘Whither morality?'

‘Whither poetry?' said Hannah.

‘Whither my ass?' said Daisy, and nudged Zora for one of her cigarettes. They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.

‘
Tell
me about it,' said Zora, and flicked open the carton.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

The Bus Stop was a Wellington institution. For twenty years it had been a cheap and popular Moroccan restaurant, attracting students, the aged hippies of Kennedy Square, professors, locals and tourists. A first-generation Moroccan family ran it and the food was very good, unpretentious and flavoursome. Although there was no Moroccan diaspora in Wellington to appreciate the authenticity of the lamb tagine or the saffron couscous, this had never tempted the Essakalli family into Americanization. They served what they themselves enjoyed eating and waited for the Wellingtonians to acclimatize, which they did. Only the decor nodded to the town's hunger for kitschy ethnic charm: oak tables inlaid with mother of pearl, low banquette seating buried in multicoloured cushions of
harsh goat's wool. Long-necked hookah pipes rested on the high shelves like exotic birds come to roost.

Six years ago, when the Essakallis went into retirement, their son Yousef took over with his German-American wife, Katrin. Unlike his parents, who had merely tolerated the students – their pitchers of beer, fake IDs and requests for ketchup – the younger, more American Yousef enjoyed their presence and understood their needs. It was his idea to convert the restaurant's 150-foot basement into a club space where many different classes and events and parties could take place. Here the visuals of
Star Wars
were shown alongside the soundtrack to
Dr Zhivago
. Here a fleshy, dimpled red-headed lady explained to a gang of willowy freshman girls how to move one's abdomen in tiny increments of clockwise motion, the art of the belly dance. Local rappers performed impromptu sets. It was a favourite stop-off for British guitar bands hoping to rid themselves of nerves before their American tours. Morocco, as it was reimagined in the Bus Stop, was an inclusive place. The black kids from Boston were down with Morocco, down with its essential Arab nature and African soul, the massive hash pipes, the chilli in the food, the infectious rhythms of the music. The white kids from the college were down with Morocco too: they liked its shabby glamour, its cinematic history of non-politicized Orientalism, the cool pointy slippers. The hippies and activists of Kennedy Square – without even really being conscious of it – came more regularly to the Bus Stop now than they had before the war started. It was their way of showing solidarity with foreign suffering. Of all the Bus Stop's regular events, the bi-monthly Spoken Word nights were the greatest sensation. As an art form it practised the same inclusiveness as the venue itself: it made everybody feel at home. Neither rap nor poetry, not formal but also not too wild, it wasn't black, it wasn't white. It was whatever anybody had to say and whoever had the guts to get up on the small boxy stage at the back of the basement and say it. For Claire Malcolm, it was an opportunity each year to show her new students that poetry was a broad church, one that she was not afraid to explore.

Because of these visits, and as a regular of the restaurant, Claire
was well known and loved by the Essakalis. Spotting her now, Yousef pushed through the line of people waiting to be seated and helped Claire hold open the double doors so that her kids might come in from the cold. With his arm high on the doorframe, Yousef smiled at each student in turn, and each got the opportunity to admire his emerald eyes, set improbably in a dark, unmistakably Arab face, and large silky curls, untended, like an infant's. Once they had all passed through he carefully bent down to Claire's height and allowed himself to be kissed on both cheeks. During this courtly display, he held on to a little embroidered skullcap that sat on the back of his head. Claire's class loved all this. Many of them were freshmen for whom a visit to the Bus Stop, indeed to Kennedy Square, was as exotic as a trip to Morocco itself.

‘
Yousef, ça fait bien trop longtemps!
' cried Claire, stepping back but with both her little hands still gripping his own. She tipped her head girlishly to the side. ‘
Moi, je deviens toute vieille, et toi, tu rajeunis
.'

Yousef laughed, shook his head and looked appreciatively at the tiny figure before him, swathed in many layers of black shawl. ‘
Non, c'est pas vrai, c'est pas vrai . . . Vous êtes magnifique, comme toujours
.'

‘
Tu me flattes comme un diable. Et comment va la famille?
' asked Claire, and looked over the restaurant to the bar at the far end, where Katrin, waiting to be acknowledged, raised her skinny arm and waved. A naturally angular woman, she was dressed today in a sensual brown wrap dress to accentuate the fact that she was heavily pregnant, with the high-sitting, pointed bump that suggests a boy. She was tearing off raffle tickets and giving them to a line of teenagers who each paid their three dollars and descended into the basement.

‘
Bien
,' said Yousef simply, and then, encouraged by Claire's delight at this pure and honest description, extended it in a manner less to her taste, prattling happily about this longed-for pregnancy, his parents' second, deeper retirement to the wilds of Vermont, the growth and success of his restaurant. Claire's poetry class, not understanding French, huddled together behind their teacher, smiling shyly. But Claire always grew tired of other people's
prose narratives and now patted Yousef several times on the arm.

‘We need a table, darling,' she said, in English, looking over his head into the double line-up of booths on each side of a wide aisle, like pews in a church. Yousef, in turn, was instantly businesslike.

‘Yes, of course. For how many are you?'

‘I haven't even introduced you,' said Claire, and began to point her finger around her bashful class, finding something wonderful – although based only loosely in fact – to say about everybody. If you played the piano a little, you were described as a maestro. Once acted in a college cabaret? The next Minnelli. Everyone warmed themselves in the generous communal glow. Even Zora – described as ‘the brains of the outfit' – began to feel a little of the real, unassailable magic of Claire: she made you feel that just being in
this
moment, doing
this
thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you. Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness': that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting.
This
, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you are thirsty. Or – if one wishes to be grand about it – to write the poem that is exactly the fitting receptacle of the feeling or thought that you hoped to convey. In Claire's presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. This was why students at Wellington applied in their hundreds for her class. Poor Yousef ran out of facial expressions of wonder with which to greet this race of giants who had come to eat at his establishment.