On Beauty (4 page)

‘So: someone's about to make a personal mistake,' said Howard, an attempt to widen the conversation. ‘A terrible one – and you just let it “go by”?'

Levi considered this proposition for a moment. ‘Well . . . even if he
does
get married I don't even get why marrying's so like the bad thing all of a sudden . . . At least he got
some chance
of gettin' some
ass
if he's actually married . . .' Levi released a deep, vigorous laugh that in turn flexed that extraordinary stomach, creasing it like a shirt rather than real flesh. ‘You
know
he ain't got no chance in hell right now.'

‘Levi, that's . . .' began Howard, but up floated a mental picture of Jerome, the uneven afro and soft, vulnerable face, the women's hips and the jeans always slightly too high in the waist, the tiny gold cross that hung at his throat – the innocence, basically.

‘What? I say somethin' that ain't true? You
know
it's true, man – you smiling yourself!'

‘Not marriage
per se
,' said Howard crossly. ‘It's more complicated. The girl's father is . . . not what we need in this family, put it that way.'

‘Yeah, well . . .' said Levi, turning over his father's tie so the front was at the front. ‘I don't see what that's got to do with shit.'

‘We just don't want Jerome to make a pig's ear of –'

‘
We?
' said Levi, with an expertly raised eyebrow – genetically speaking a direct gift from his mother.

‘Look – do you need some money or something?' asked Howard. He dug into his pocket and retrieved two crushed twenty-dollar bills, screwed up like balls of tissue. After all these years he was still unable to take the dirty green feel of American money very seriously. He stuffed them in Levi's own low-slung jeans pocket.

‘ 'Preciate that, Paw,' drawled Levi, in imitation of his mother's Southern roots.

‘I don't know what kind of hourly wage they pay you at that place . . .' grumbled Howard.

Levi sighed woefully. ‘It's flimsy, man . . . Real flimsy.'

‘If you'd only let me go down there, speak to someone and –'

‘No!'

Howard assumed his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be the male inheritance of the Belsey line. How excruciating Howard had found his own father at the same age! He had wished for someone other than a butcher, for someone who used his brain at work rather than knives and scales – someone more like the man Howard was today. But you shift and the children shift also. Would Levi prefer a butcher?

‘I mean,' said Levi, artlessly modifying his first reaction, ‘I can handle it myself, don't worry about it.'

‘I see. Did Mother leave any message or –?'

‘Message? I ain't even
seen
her. I got no idea where she is – she left
early
.'

‘Right. What about you? Message for your brother maybe?'

‘Yeah . . . Tell him,' said Levi smiling, turning from Howard and holding on to the banister either side of himself, lifting his feet up and then parallel with his chest like a gymnast, ‘tell him “
I'm just another black man caught up in the mix, tryna make a dollah outta fifteen cents!
” '

‘Right. Will do.'

The doorbell rang. Howard took a step down, kissed the back of his son's head, ducked under one of his arms and went to the door. A familiar, grinning face was there on the other side, turned ashen in the cold. Howard raised a finger in greeting. This was a Haitian fellow called Pierre, one of the many from that difficult island who now found occupation in New England, discreetly compensating for Howard's unwillingness to drive a car.

‘Oi – where's Zoor?' Howard called back to Levi from the threshold.

Levi shrugged. ‘Eyeano,' he said, that strange squelch of vowels his most frequent response to any question. ‘Swimming?'

‘In this weather?
Christ
.'

‘It's
indoors
. Obviously.'

‘Just tell her goodbye, all right? Back on Wednesday. No, Thursday.'

‘Sure, Dad. Be safe, yo.'

In the car, on the radio, men were screaming at each other in a French that was not, as far as Howard could tell, actually French.

‘The airport, please,' said Howard, over this.

‘OK, yes. We have to go slow, though. Streets pretty bad.'

‘OK, not too slow, though.'

‘Terminal?'

The accent was so pronounced Howard thought he heard the name of Zola's novel.

‘What's that?'

‘You know the terminal?'

‘Oh . . . No, I don't . . . I'll find out – it's here somewhere – don't worry . . . you drive – I'll find it.'

‘Always flying,' said Pierre rather wistfully, and laughed, looking at Howard via the rear view. Howard was struck by the great width of his nose, straddling the two sides of his amiable face.

‘Always off somewhere, yes,' said Howard genially, but it did not seem to him that he travelled so very much, though when he did it was more and further than he wished. He thought of his own father again – compared to him, Howard was Phileas Fogg. Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in snow supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn't imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

Upon returning to the house and before entering her own study, Kiki took her opportunity to look into Howard's. It was half dark, with curtains drawn. He'd left the computer on. Just as she was turning to leave, she heard it waking up, making that heaving,
electronic wave-machine sound they produce every ten minutes or so when untouched, as if they're needy, and now sending something unhealthy into the air to admonish us for leaving them. She went over and touched a key – the screen returned. His in-box, with one e-mail waiting. Correctly presuming it was from Jerome (Howard e-mailed his teaching assistant, Smith J. Miller, Jerome, Erskine Jegede and a selection of newspapers and journals; nobody else), Kiki refreshed the window.

To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Date: 21 November
Subject:
PLEASE READ THIS

Dad – mistake. Shouldn't have said anything. Completely over – if it ever began. Please please
please
don't tell anybody, just forget about it. I've made a total fool of myself! I just want to curl up and die.

Jerome

Kiki let out a moan of anxiety, then swore, and turned around twice, clenching her fingers round her scarf, until her body caught up with her mind and ceased its trouble, for there was nothing whatsoever to be done. Howard would already be negotiating with his knees the impossible closeness of the seat in front, torturing himself about which books to retain before placing his bag in the upper storage – it was too late to stop him and there was no way to contact him. Howard had a profound fear of carcinogens: checked food labels for Diethylstilbestrol; abhorred microwaves; had never owned a cellphone.

When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional. In his ten years on the East Coast Howard had lost count of the times some loon from Massachusetts had heard his accent, looked at him pitiably and said something like:
Cold over there, huh?
Howard's feeling was: look, let's get a few things straight here. England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it
is
warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May – that is, in every month when warmth matters. In England letter-boxes do not jam with snow. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins. This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give. Howard knew this, and so was suitably dressed for England in November – his one ‘good' suit, topped by a lightweight trench coat. Smugly he watched the Boston woman opposite him overheating in her rubber coat, the liberated pearls of sweat emerging from her hairline and slinking down her cheek. He was on the train from Heathrow into town.

At Paddington the doors opened and he stepped into the warm smog of the station. He wound his scarf into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He was no tourist and did not look about him, not at the sheer majesty of interior space, nor at that intricate greenhouse ceiling of patterned glass and steel. He walked straight out to the open air, where he might roll a cigarette and smoke it. The absence of snow was sensational. To hold a cigarette without wearing gloves, to reveal one's whole face to the air! Howard rarely felt moved by an English skyline, but today just to see an oak and an
office block, outlined by a bluish sky with no interpolation of white on either, seemed to him a landscape of rare splendour and refinement. Relaxing in a narrow corridor of sun, Howard leaned against a pillar. A stretch of black cabs lined up. People explained where they were going and were given generous help lugging bags into back seats. Howard was taken aback to hear twice in five minutes the destination ‘Dalston'. Dalston was a filthy East End slum when Howard was born into it, full of filthy people who had tried to destroy him – not least of all his own family. Now, apparently, it was the sort of place where perfectly normal people lived. A blonde in a long powder-blue overcoat holding a portable computer and a pot plant, an Asian boy dressed in a cheap, shiny suit that reflected light like beaten metal – it was impossible to imagine these people populating the East London of his earliest memory. Howard dropped his fag and nudged it into the gutter. He turned back and walked through the station, keeping pace with a flow of commuters, allowing himself to be bustled by them down the steps to the underground. In a standing-room-only tube carriage, pressed up against a determined reader, Howard tried to keep his chin clear of a hardback and considered his mission, such as it was. He had got nowhere with the vital points: what he would say, how he would say it and to whom. The matter was too deeply clouded and perverted for him by the excruciating memory of the following two sentences:

Even given the extreme poverty of the arguments offered, the whole would of course be a great deal more compelling if Belsey knew to which painting I was referring. In his letter he directs his attack at the
Self-Portrait
of 1629 that hangs in Munich. Unfortunately for him, I make it more than clear in my article that the painting under discussion is the
Self-Portrait with Lace Collar
of the same year, which hangs in The Hague.

These were Monty Kipps's sentences. Three months on they clanged, they stung, and sometimes they even seemed to have an actual weight – the thought of them made Howard's shoulders roll forward and down as if someone had snuck up behind and laden
him with a backpack filled with stones. Howard got off the train at Baker Street and crossed the platform to the northbound Jubilee line, where the compensation of a waiting train greeted him. And of course, the thing was that in
both
of these self-portraits Rembrandt wears a white collar, for Christ's sake;
both
faces emerge from murky, paranoid shadows with a timorous adolescent look about them – but no matter. Howard had failed to note the differing head position described in Monty's article. He had been going through an extremely difficult time personally and had let his guard down. Monty saw his chance and took it. Howard would have done the same. To enact with one sudden tug (like a boy removing his friend's shorts in front of the opposing team) a complete exposure, a cataclysmic embarrassment – this is one of the purest academic pleasures. One doesn't have to deserve it; one has only to leave oneself open to it. But what a way to go! For fifteen years these two men had been moving in similar circles; passing through the same universities, contributing to the same journals, sometimes sharing a stage – but never an opinion – during panel discussions. Howard had always disliked Monty, as any sensible liberal would dislike a man who had dedicated his life to the perverse politics of right-wing iconoclasm, but he had never
really
hated him until he had heard the news, three years ago, that Kipps too was writing a book about Rembrandt. A book that, even before it was published, Howard sensed would be a hugely popular (and populist) brick designed to sit heavily atop the
New York Times
bestseller list for half a year, crushing every book beneath it. It was the thought of that book, and of its likely fate (compared to Howard's own unfinished work, which, in the best of all possible worlds, could only ever end up in the bookshelves of a thousand art history students), that had pushed to him to write that terrible letter. In front of the entire academic community Howard had picked up some rope and hanged himself.

Outside Kilburn Station Howard found a phone-box and called directory inquiries. He gave the Kippses' full address and received in return a phone number. For a few minutes he hung about,
examining the prostitutes' cards. Strange that there should be so very many of these ladies-of-the-afternoon, tucked away behind the Victorian bay windows, reclining in post-war semis. He noticed how many were black – many more than in a Soho phone-box, surely – and how many, if the photos were to be believed (are they to be believed?), were exceptionally pretty. He picked up the handset again. He paused. In the past year he had grown shyer of Jerome. He feared the new adolescent religiosity, the moral seriousness and silences, always somehow implicitly critical. Howard took courage and dialled.

‘Hello?'

‘Yes, hello.'

The voice – young-sounding and very London – threw Howard for a moment.

‘
Hi
.'

‘Sorry, who's this?'

‘I'm . . . who's that?'

‘This is the Kipps residence. Who's
that
?'

‘Ah – the son, right.'

‘Pardon? Who
is
this?'

‘Er . . . look, I need to – this is awkward – I'm
Jerome's father
and – '

‘Oh, right, let me just call him –'

‘No – no – no, wait – one minute –'

‘ 'Sno trouble – he's having dinner, but I can call him –'

‘No, don't – I – look, I don't want to . . . Thing is, I've just come from Boston . . . we only just heard, you see –'

‘OK,' said the voice in an exploratory way that Howard couldn't get a handle on.

‘Well,' said Howard, swallowing hard, ‘I'd quite like to sound out someone in the family a little . . . before I speak properly to Jerome – he didn't explain much – and obviously . . . I'm sure your father – '

‘My father's eating too. Do you want to –'

‘No . . . no, no, no, no,
no
, I mean, he won't want to . . .
no
 . . . no, no – I just . . . whole thing's a bloody mess, of course, it's just
a matter of –' began Howard, but then could not think what indeed it was a matter of.

A cough came down the line. ‘Look, I don't understand – do you want me to get Jerome?'

‘I'm right near you, actually –' Howard blurted.

‘Excuse me?'

‘Yes . . . I'm calling from a phone-box . . . I don't really know this bit of town and . . . no map, you see. You couldn't . . . pick me up maybe? I'm rather – I'll only get lost if I try to get to you – no sense of direction at all . . . I'm just at the station.'

‘Right. It's really an easy walk, I could give you directions.'

‘If you
could
just pop up here, it would be very helpful – it's getting dark already and I know I'll take a wrong turn, and . . .'

Howard cringed into the silence.

‘I'd just like to ask you a few things, you see – before I see Jerome.'

‘All right,' said the voice at last, tetchy now. ‘Well – let me get my coat, yeah? Outside the station, right? Queen's Park.'

‘Queens . . . ? No, I, er . . . Oh,
Christ
, I'm at Kilburn – is that wrong? I thought
you
were in Kilburn.'

‘Not really. We're between the two, closer to Queen's Park. Look, just . . . I'll come and get you, don't worry. Kilburn Jubilee line, right?'

‘Yes, that's right – that's very kind of you, thank you. Is it Michael?'

‘Yes. Mike. You're . . . ?'

‘Belsey, Howard Belsey. Jerome's –'

‘Yeah. Well, stay there, then, Professor. I'll be seven minutes, maybe.'

A rough white boy lurked outside the phone-box, with a doughy face and three well-spaced spots, one on his nose, one on his cheek and one on his chin. As Howard opened the door, doing the apologetic smile thing, the boy did the uninterested in outmoded social convention thing, saying ‘About fucking
time
', and then made it as difficult as possible for Howard to get out and for the boy to get in. Howard's face glowed. Why this flush of shame, when it is
someone else who has been rude, pushing you roughly with their shoulder – why the shame? It was more than shame, though, it was also the physical capitulation – at twenty Howard might have sworn back at him or offered him out; at thirty, even at forty; but not at fifty-six, not now. Fearing an escalation (
What you looking at?
) Howard dug into his pocket and found the requisite three pounds for the nearby photo-booth. He bent his knees and parted the miniature orange curtain as if entering a tiny harem. He sat on the stool, a fist on each knee and his head low. When he looked up, he found himself reflected in the sheet of dirty perspex, his face enclosed by a big red circle. The first flash went off without any planning on Howard's part: he had dropped his gloves and, upon looking down to find them, was then forced to spring back up as he heard the machine begin, his head just that moment raised, his hair obscuring his right eye. He looked cowed, beaten down. For the second flash he lifted his chin and tried to challenge the camera as that boy might – the result was something yet more insecure. There followed a completely unreal smile that Howard would never smile in the course of a normal day. Then the consequences of the unreal smile – sad, frank, abashed, almost confessional, as men often appear in their final years. Howard gave up. He stayed where he was, waiting to hear the boy leave the phone-box and walk away. Then he retrieved his gloves from the floor and left his own small box.

Outside the bare trees lined up along the high road, lopped branches thrust into the air. Howard stepped forward to lean against one of these, careful to avoid the dirty patch around the trunk. From here he could keep an eye on both ends of the street and the mouth of the station. A few minutes later he looked up and saw the man he assumed he was waiting for, rounding the corner of the next street. To Howard's eye, which fancied itself attuned to these things, he looked African. He had that ochre highlight in his skin, most visible where the skin was in tension with bone – at the cheekbones and across the forehead. He wore leather gloves, a long grey topcoat and a dark blue cashmere scarf tied smartly. His glasses were thin-rimmed and gold. His shoes were an item of interest:
very grubby trainers of the flat, cheap kind Howard felt sure Levi would never wear. As he came closer to the station, he slowed down and began to cast his eyes around the small gathering of people waiting for other people. Howard had thought himself as instantly recognizable as this Michael Kipps, but it was he who had to come forward and hold his hand out.

‘Michael – Howard. Hi.
Thanks
for coming to get me, I wasn't –'

‘Find it OK?' Michael cut in with extreme shortness, nodding at the station. Howard, who didn't understand the point of this question, grinned stupidly back at him. Michael was quite a bit taller than Howard, which Howard was unused to and disliked. He was broad too; not that freshman muscle that Howard saw in his classes, the kind that begins at the top of the neck and makes young men trapezoid, no, this was more elegant than that. A birthright. He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble'. Howard didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.

‘This way, then,' said Michael, and took a step forward, but Howard caught him by the shoulder.

‘Just going to get these – new passport,' he said, as the photos were delivered to the chute, where an artificial breeze began to blow on them.

Howard reached for his pictures, but now Michael's hand stopped him.

‘Wait – let them dry – they smudge otherwise.'