On Beauty (3 page)

‘Stop arguing,' complained Levi from the other side of the kitchen, and then repeated it loudly.

‘We're not arguing, honey,' said Kiki and bent her body at the hips. She tipped her head forward and released her hair from its flame-coloured headwrap. She wore it in two thick ropes of plait that reached to her backside, like a ram's unwound horns. Without looking up, she evened out each side of the material, threw her head back once more, spun the material twice round and retied it in exactly the same manner but tighter. Everything lifted an inch, and, with this new, authoritative face, she leaned on the table and turned to her children.

‘OK, show's over. Zoor, there might be a few dollars in the pot by the cactus. Give them to Levi. If not, just lend him some and I'll pay you back later. I'm a little short this month. OK. Go forth and learn. Anything. Anything at all.'

A few minutes later, with the door closed behind her children, Kiki turned to her husband with a thesis for a face, of which only Howard could know every line and reference. Just for the hell of it Howard smiled. In return he received nothing at all. Howard stopped smiling. If there was going to be a fight, no fool would bet on him. Kiki – whom Howard had once, twenty-eight years ago, thrown over his shoulder like a light roll of carpet, to be laid down, and laid upon, in their first house for the first time – was nowadays a solid two hundred and fifty pounds, and looked twenty years his junior. Her skin had that famous ethnic advantage of not wrinkling
much, but, in Kiki's case the weight gain had stretched it even more impressively. At fifty-two, her face was still a girl's face. A beautiful tough-girl's face.

Now she crossed the room and pushed by him with such force that he was muscled into an adjacent rocking chair. Back at the kitchen table, she began violently to pack a bag with things she did not need to take to work. She spoke without looking at him. ‘You know what's weird? Is that you can get someone who is a professor of one thing and then is just so
intensely stupid
about everything else? Consult the ABC of parenting, Howie. You'll find that if you go about it this way, then the exact, but the exact opposite, of what you want to happen will happen. The
exact opposite
.'

‘But the exact opposite of what I want,' considered Howard, rocking in his chair, ‘is what always fucking happens.'

Kiki stopped what she was doing. ‘Right. Because you never get what you want. Your life is just an orgy of deprivation.'

This nodded at the recent trouble. It was an offer to kick open a door in the mansion of their marriage leading on to an antechamber of misery. The offer was declined. Kiki instead began that familiar puzzle of getting her small knapsack to sit in the middle of her giant back.

Howard stood up and rearranged himself decently in his bathrobe. ‘Do we have their address at least?' he asked. ‘Home address?'

Kiki pressed her fingers to each temple like a carnival mind-reader. She spoke slowly, and, though the pose was sarcastic, her eyes were wet.

‘I want to understand what it is you think we've done to you. Your family. What is it we've done? Have we deprived you of something?'

Howard sighed and looked away. ‘I'm giving a paper in Cambridge on Tuesday anyway – I might as well fly to London a day earlier, if only to –'

Kiki slapped the table. ‘Oh,
God
, this isn't 1910 – Jerome can marry who the hell he wants to marry – or are we going to start
making up visiting cards and asking him to meet only the daughters of academics that
you
happen to –'

‘Might the address be in the green moleskin?'

Now she blinked away the possibility of tears. ‘I don't
know
where the address
might be
,' she said, impersonating his accent. ‘Find it yourself. Maybe it's hidden underneath the crap in that damn
hovel
of yours.'

‘Thanks
so
much,' said Howard and began his return journey up the stairs to his study.

A tall, garnet-coloured building in the New England style, the Belsey residence roams over four creaky floors. The date of its construction (1856) is patterned in tile above the front door, and the windows retain their mottled green glass, spreading a dreamy pasture on the floorboards whenever strong light passes through them. They are not original, these windows, but replacements, the originals being too precious to be used as windows. Heavily insured, they are kept in a large safe in the basement. A significant portion of the value of the Belsey house resides in windows that nobody may look through or open. The sole original window is the skylight at the very top of the house, a harlequin pane that casts a disc of varicoloured light upon different spots on the upper landing as the sun passes over America, turning a white shirt pink as one passes through it, for example, or a yellow tie blue. Once the spot reaches the floor in mid morning it is a family superstition never to step through it. Ten years earlier you would have found children here, wrestling, trying to force each other into its orbit. Even now, as young adults, they continue to step round it on their way down the stairs.

The staircase itself is a steep spiral. To pass the time while descending it, a photographic Belsey family gallery has been hung on the walls, following each turn that you make. The children come first in black and white: podgy and dimpled, haloed with
curls. They seem always to be tumbling towards the viewer and over each other, folding on their sausage legs. Frowning Jerome, holding baby Zora, wondering what she is. Zora cradling tiny wrinkled Levi with the crazed, proprietorial look of a woman who steals children from hospital wards. School portraits, graduations, swimming pools, restaurants, gardens and vacation shots follow, monitoring physical development, confirming character. After the children come four generations of the Simmondses' maternal line. These are placed in triumphant, deliberate sequence: Kiki's great-great-grandmother, a house-slave; great-grandmother, a maid; and then her grandmother, a nurse. It was nurse Lily who inherited this whole house from a benevolent white doctor with whom she had worked closely for twenty years, back in Florida. An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in America: it makes them middle class. And 83 Langham is a fine middle-class house, larger even than it looks on the outside, with a small pool out back, unheated and missing many of its white tiles, like a British smile. Indeed much of the house is now a little shabby – but this is part of its grandeur. There is nothing
nouveau riche
about it. The house is ennobled by the work it has done for this family. The rental of the house paid for Kiki's mother's education (a legal clerk, she died this spring past) and for Kiki's own. For years it was the Simmondses' nest egg and vacation home; they would come up each September from Florida to see the Color. Once her children had grown and after her minister husband had died, Howard's mother-in-law, Claudia Simmonds, moved into the house permanently and lived happily as landlady to cycles of students who rented the spare rooms. Throughout these years Howard coveted the house. Claudia, acutely aware of this covetousness, determined to pervert its course. She knew well that the place was perfect for Howard: large, lovely and within spitting distance of a half-decent American university that might consider hiring him. It gave Mrs Simmonds joy, or so Howard believed, to make him wait all those years. She tripped happily into her seventies without any serious health problems. Meanwhile, Howard shunted his young family around various second-rate seats of learning: six years in upstate New York,
eleven in London, one in the suburbs of Paris. It was only ten years ago that Claudia had finally relented, leaving the property in favour of a retirement community in Florida. It was around this time that the gallery photograph of Kiki herself, a hospital administrator and final inheritor of 83 Langham Drive, was taken. In the photo she is all teeth and hair, receiving a state award for out-reach services to the local community. A rogue white arm clinches what was, back then, an extremely neat waist in tight denim; this arm, cut off at the elbow, is Howard's.

When people get married, there is often a battle to see which family – the husband's or the wife's – will prevail. Howard has lost that battle, happily. The Belseys – petty, cheap and cruel – are not a family anyone would fight to retain. And because Howard had conceded willingly, it was easy for Kiki to be gracious. And so here, on the first landing, we have a large representation of one of the English Belseys, a charcoal portrait of Howard's own father, Harold, hanging as high up the wall as is decent, wearing his flat-cap. His eyes are cast downward, as if in despair at the exotic manner in which Howard has chosen to continue the Belsey line. Howard himself was surprised to discover the picture – surely the only artwork the Belsey family had ever owned – among the small bundle of worthless bric-a-brac that came his way upon his mother's death. In the years that followed the picture has lifted itself out of its low origins, like Howard himself. Many educated upscale Americans of the Belseys' acquaintance claim to admire it. It is considered ‘classy', ‘mysterious' and redolent in some mystifying way of the ‘English character'. In Kiki's opinion it is an item the children will appreciate when they get older, an argument that ingeniously bypasses the fact that the children are already older and do not appreciate it. Howard himself hates it, as he hates all representational painting – and his father.

After Harold Belsey follows a jolly parade of Howard himself in his seventies, eighties and nineties incarnations. Despite costume changes, the significant features remain largely unchanged by the years. His teeth – uniquely in his family – are straight and of a similar size to each other; his bottom lip's fullness goes some way
towards compensating for the absence of the upper; and his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears. He has no chin, but his eyes are very large and very green. He has a thin, appealing, aristocratic nose. When placed next to men of his own age and class, he has two great advantages: hair and weight. Both have changed little. The hair in particular is extremely full and healthy. A grey patch streams from his right temple. Just this fall he decided to throw the lot of it violently forward on to his face, as he had not done since 1967 – a great success. A large photo of Howard, towering over other members of the Humanities Faculty as they arrange themselves tidily around Nelson Mandela, shows this off to some effect: he has easily the most hair of any fellow there. The pictures of Howard multiply as we near the ground: Howard in Bermuda shorts with shocking white, waxy knees; Howard in academic tweed under a tree dappled by the Massachusetts light; Howard in a great hall, newly appointed Empson Lecturer in Aesthetics; in a baseball cap pointing at Emily Dickinson's house; in a beret for no good reason; in a Day-Glo jumpsuit in Eatonville, Florida, with Kiki beside him, shielding her eyes from either Howard or the sun or the camera.

Now Howard paused on the middle landing to use the phone. He wanted to speak with Dr Erskine Jegede, Soyinka Professor of African Literature and Assistant Director of the Black Studies Department. He put his suitcase on the floor and tucked his air ticket into his armpit. He dialled and waited out the long ring, wincing at the thought of his good friend hunting through his satchel, apologizing to his fellow readers and making his way out of the library into the cold.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello, who is this? I am in the library.'

‘Ersk – it's Howard. Sorry, sorry – should have called earlier.'

‘Howard? You're not upstairs?'

Usually, yes. Reading in his beloved Carrel 187, on the uppermost floor of the Greenman, Wellington College's library. Every Saturday for years, barring illness or snowstorm. He would read all
morning, and then convene with Erskine in the lobby at lunchtime, in front of the elevators. Erskine liked to grip Howard fraternally by the shoulders as they walked together to the library café. They looked funny together. Erskine was almost a foot smaller, completely bald, with his scalp polished to an ebony sheen and a short man's stocky chest, thrust forward like plumage. Erskine was never seen out of a suit (Howard had been wearing different versions of the same black jeans for ten years), and the mandarin impression he gave was perfectly completed by his neat salt-and-pepper beard, pointed like a White Russian's, with a matching moustache and 3-D freckles around his cheeks and nose. During their lunches he was always wonderfully scurrilous and bad tempered about his peers, not that his peers would ever know it – Erskine's freckles did incredible diplomatic work for him. Howard had often wished for a similarly benign face to show the world. After lunch, Erskine and Howard would part, always somewhat reluctantly. Each man returned to his own carrel until dinner. For Howard there was great joy in this Saturday routine.

‘Ah, now that is unfortunate,' said Erskine upon hearing Howard's news, and the sentiment covered not only Jerome's situation but also the fact that these two men should be deprived of each other's company. And then: ‘Poor Jerome. He's a good boy. It is surely a point he is trying to prove.' Erskine paused. ‘What the point is, I'm not sure.'

‘But Monty
Kipps
,' repeated Howard despairingly. From Erskine he knew he would get what he needed. This was why they were friends.

Erskine whistled his sympathy. ‘My God, Howard, you don't have to tell me. I remember during the Brixton riots – this was '81 – I was on the BBC World Service trying to talk about context, deprivation, etcetera' – Howard enjoyed the tuneful Nigerian musicality of ‘etcetera' – ‘and that madman Monty – he was sitting there opposite me in his Trinidad cricket-club tie saying, “The coloured man must look to his own home, the coloured man must take responsibility.” The coloured man! And he
still
says coloured! Every time it was one step forward, and Monty was taking us all two
steps back again. The man is sad. I pity him, actually. He's stayed in England too long. It's done strange things to him.'

Howard was quiet on the other end of the phone. He was checking his computer bag for his passport. He felt exhausted at the prospect of the journey and of the battle that awaited him at the other end.

‘And his work gets worse every year. In my opinion, the Rembrandt book was very vulgar indeed,' added Erskine kindly.

Howard felt the baseness of pushing Erskine into unfair positions such as this. Monty was a shit, sure, but he wasn't a fool. Monty's Rembrandt book was, in Howard's opinion, retrogressive, perverse, infuriatingly essentialist, but it was neither vulgar nor stupid. It was good. Detailed and thorough. It also had the great advantage of being bound between hard covers and distributed throughout the English-speaking world, whereas Howard's book on the same topic remained unfinished and strewn across the floor before his printer on pages that seemed to him sometimes to have been spewed from the machine in disgust.

‘Howard?'

‘Yes – here. Got to go, actually. Got a cab booked.'

‘You take care, my friend. Jerome is just . . . well, by the time you get there I'm sure it will have proved to be a storm in a teacup.'

Six steps from the ground floor Howard was surprised by Levi. Once again, this head-stocking business. Looking up at him from beneath it, that striking, leonine face with its manly chin, upon which hair had been growing for two years and yet had not confidently established itself. He was topless to the waist and barefoot. His slender chest smelt of cocoa butter and had been recently shaved. Howard stretched his arms out, blocking the way.

‘What's the deal?' asked his son.

‘Nothing. Leaving.'

‘Who you on the phone to?'

‘Erskine.'

‘You
leaving
leaving?'

‘Yes.'

‘Right
now
?'

‘What's the deal with
this
?' asked Howard, flipping the interrogation round and touching Levi's head. ‘Is it a political thing?'

Levi rubbed his eyes. He put both arms behind his back, held hands with himself and stretched downwards, expanding his chest hugely. ‘Nothin', Dad. It's just what it
is
,' he said gnomically. He bit his thumb.

‘So then . . .' said Howard, trying to translate, ‘it's an aesthetic thing. For looks only.'

‘I guess,' Levi said and shrugged. ‘Yeah. Just what it is, just a thing that I wear. You know. Keeps my head warm, man. Practical and shit.'

‘It does make your skull look rather . . . neat. Smooth. Like a bean.'

He gave his son a friendly squeeze on the shoulders and pulled him close. ‘Are you going to work today? They let you wear it at the wotsit, the record shop?'

‘Sure, sure . . . It's not a record shop – I keep telling you – it's a mega-store. There's like seven floors . . . You make me laugh, man,' said Levi quietly, his lips buzzing Howard's skin through his shirt. Levi pulled back now from his father, patting him down like a bouncer. ‘So you going now or what? What you gonna say to J? Who you flyin' wid?'

‘I don't know – not sure. Air miles – someone from work booked it. Look . . . I'm just going to
talk
to him – have a reasonable conversation like reasonable people.'

‘Boy . . .' said Levi and clucked his tongue, ‘Kiki wants to
kick
your ass . . . An' I'm with
her
. I think you should just let the whole thing go by, just go
by
. Jerome ain't gonna marry anybody. He can't find his dick with two hands.'

Howard, though duty bound to disapprove of this, did not completely disagree with the diagnosis. Jerome's lengthy virginity (which Howard now presumed had come to an end) represented, in Howard's opinion, an ambivalent relationship to the earth and its inhabitants, which Howard had trouble either celebrating or understanding. Jerome was not quite
of the body
somehow, and this had always unnerved his father. If nothing else, the mess in London
surely ended the faint whiff of moral superiority that had so far clung to Jerome through his teens.