On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  Howard took a deep, artificial breath. ‘I think they’re both much, much too young to get married, Michael, I really do. That’s it, in a nutshell. I’m not old-fashioned, but I do think, by any measure – ’

  ‘Marriage?’ said Michael, stopping where he was, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose an inch. ‘Who’s getting married? What’re you chatting about?’

  ‘Jerome. And Victoria – sorry . . . I thought that surely –’

  Michael arranged his jaw in a new way. ‘Are we talking about my sister?’

  ‘Yes – sorry – Jerome and Victoria – who are you talking about? Wait – what?’

  Michael let out a loud single-burst laugh, and then came closer to Howard’s face with his own, seeking some sign of jest. When none came, he took off his glasses and slowly rubbed them against his scarf.

  ‘I don’t know where you got that idea, yeah, but just seriously, like, remove it, because it just isn’t even . . . Phew!’ he said, breathing out heavily, shaking his head and replacing his glasses. ‘I mean, I like Jerome, he’s fine, yeah? But I think my family wouldn’t really . . . feel safe thinking of Victoria getting involved with somebody who was so far outside of . . .’ Howard watched Michael openly search for a euphemism. ‘Well, things we think are important, right? That’s just not the plan right now, sorry. You’ve got the wrong end of something there, mate, but whatever it is, I suggest you get the right end of it before you walk into my father’s house, you understand? Jerome is just not the thing at all, at all.’

  Michael began to walk off at speed, still shaking his head, with Howard angled to his right, trying to keep up. This was interspersed with frequent side glances at Howard and more of this head-shaking, until Howard was considerably wound up.

  ‘Look, excuse me – I’m not exactly overjoyed here, right? Jerome’s whack bam in the middle of his studies – and anyway, if and when the time comes I imagine he’s expecting a woman of similar – how do you want me to say this – intellectual – and not the first woman he happens to have got his end away with. Look, I don’t want to fall out with you as well – we agree, that’s fine – you and I both know that Jerome’s a baby –’

  Howard, who had matched Michael’s pace at last, halted him once more by laying a firm hand on his shoulder. Michael turned his head quite slowly to look at the hand, until Howard felt compelled to retract it.

  ‘What was that?’ said Michael, and Howard noticed a slip in his accent, to something a little rougher, a little more familiar with the street than with the office. ‘Excuse me? Get your hands off me, all right? My sister is a virgin, yeah? You get me? That’s how she was brought up, yeah? Mate, I don’t even know what your son has been telling you –’

  This medieval turn to the conversation was too much for Howard. ‘Michael – I don’t want to . . . we’re on the same side here – no one’s saying a marriage isn’t completely ridiculous – look at my lips, I’m saying completely ridiculous, completely – no one’s disputing your sister’s honour, really . . . no need for swords at dawn . . . duel to the . . . or any of that – look, of course I know you and your family have “beliefs”,’ began Howard uneasily, as if ‘beliefs’ were a kind of condition, like oral herpes. ‘You know . . . and I completely and utterly respect and tolerate that – I didn’t realize this was a surprise to you –’

  ‘Well, it is, yeah? It’s a fucking surprise!’ cried Michael, turning about him and whispering the swear word, as if in fear of being overheard.

  ‘So, OK . . . it’s a surprise, I appreciate that . . . Michael, please . . . I didn’t come here to have a row – let’s take it down a notch –’

  ‘If he’s touched –’ began Michael, and Howard, over and above the madness of the conversation itself, began to feel genuinely afraid of him. The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century, none of it had surprised Howard as it had surprised others, but each new example he came across – on the television, in the street and now in this young man – weakened him somehow. His desire to be involved in the argument, in the culture, fell off. The energy to fight the philistines, this is what fades. Now Howard’s eyes turned to the ground, in some expectation of being thumped or otherwise verbally abused. He listened to a sudden curve of wind swoop around the corner they were standing on and rustle the trees.

  ‘Michael –’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’

  The nobility Howard had first thought he detected in Michael’s face was rapidly being replaced by a hardening, the nonchalant manner supplanted by its exact opposite, as if some fluid poisonous to his system had been swapped for the blood in his veins. His head whipped back round; now Howard seemed no longer to exist for him. He began to walk with speed, almost to jog, down the street. Howard called out to him. Michael increased his pace, took a sudden, jerky right and kicked open an iron gate. He shouted ‘Jerome!’ and disappeared under and through a leafless bower that thrust twigs in all directions, like a nest. Howard followed him through the gate and under the bower. He stopped before an imposing double-fronted black door with a silver knocker. It was ajar. He paused again in the Victorian hallway, underfoot those black-and-white diamonds that no one had welcomed him on to. A minute later, upon hearing raised voices, he followed them to the furthest room, a high-ceilinged dining room with dramatic French doors, before which was a long table laid with five dinner settings. He had the sense of being in one of those horrid claustrophobic Edwardian plays, in which the whole world is reduced to one room. To the right of this scene was his son, presently pressed up against a wall by Michael Kipps. Of other matters, Howard had time to note someone who must be Mrs Kipps with her right hand raised in the direction of Jerome, and someone beside her with their face in their hands and only their intricately plaited scalp on view. Then the tableau came to life.

  ‘Michael,’ Mrs Kipps was saying firmly. She pronounced the name so that it rhymed with ‘Y-Cal’, a brand of sugar substitute that Howard used in his coffee. ‘Let Jerome go, please – the engagement is already off. No need for this.’

  Howard noticed the surprise on his own son’s face as Mrs Kipps said the word ‘engagement’. Jerome tried to stretch his head away from Michael’s body to catch the eye of the silent, curled-up figure at the table, but this figure did not move.

  ‘Engagement! Since when was there an engagement!’ Michael yelled and drew back his fist, but Howard was already there and surprised himself by instinctively reaching out to grab the boy’s wrist. Mrs Kipps was trying to stand but seemed to be having difficulty, and, when she called her son’s name again, Howard was thankful to feel all the will in Michael’s arm dissolve. Jerome, shaking, stepped aside.

  ‘Anyone could see it happening,’ said Mrs Kipps quietly. ‘But it’s over now. All done.’

  Michael looked confused for a minute, and then a second thought seemed to come to him and he started to rattle the handle of the French doors. ‘Dad!’ he shouted, but the doors wouldn’t give. Howard stepped forward to help him with the top lock. Michael violently shrugged him off, spotted the fastened lock at last and released it. The French doors flew open. Michael stepped out into the garden, still calling for his father, as the wind chased the curtains up and down. Howard could make out a long stretch of grass and somewhere at the end of it the orange glow of a small bonfire. Beyond that, the ivy-covered base of a monumental tree, the invisible top of which belonged to the night.

  ‘Hello, Dr Belsey,’ said Mrs Kipps now, as if all of this were a perfectly normal preamble to a nice social call. She took her napkin off her knees and stood up. ‘We’ve not met, have we?’

  She was not all what he’d expected. Howard had for some reason envisioned a younger woman, a trophy. But she was older than Kiki, more like sixty something, and rather rangy. Her hair was set and curled but stray wisps framed her face, and her clothes were not at all formal: a dark purple skirt that reached the floor, and an Indian blouse of loose white cotton with elaborate needlewo
rk down its front. Her neck was long (he saw now where Michael had inherited his look of nobility) and deeply creased, and round it was a substantial piece of art deco jewellery with a multifaceted moonstone at its centre, rather than the expected cross. She took both of Howard’s hands in her own. At once Howard felt that things were not as absolutely dire as they had appeared to be twenty seconds earlier.

  ‘Please, not “Doctor”,’ he said. ‘I’m – off-duty – it’s Howard – please. Hello – I’m so sorry about all of –’

  Howard looked about him. The person he now assumed to be Victoria (though the sex was not at all clear from the scalp) was still frozen at the table. Jerome had slid all the way down the wall like a stain and now sat on the floor, looking at his feet.

  ‘Young people, Howard,’ said Mrs Kipps, as if beginning a Caribbean children’s story Howard had no interest in hearing, ‘they got their own way of doing things – it’s not always our way, but it’s a way.’ She smiled a purple gummy smile, and shook her head several times with what appeared to be a slight palsy. ‘These two are sensible enough, thank the Lord. Did you know Victoria just turned eighteen? Can you remember eighteen? I know I can’t, it’s like another universe. Now . . . Howard, you staying in a hotel, yes? I would offer you to stay here but –’

  Howard confirmed the existence of his hotel and his enthusiasm for leaving for it immediately.

  ‘That’s a good idea. And I think you should take Jerome –’

  At this point Jerome put his head in his hands; at the same moment, in a perfect inversion, the young lady at the table sprang out of that exact position, and Howard registered in his peripheral vision a gamine type with spidery-lashed wet eyes, and arms of sinew and bone like a ballet dancer’s.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jerome – you can get your things in the morning when Montague is at work. You can write to Victoria when you get home. Let’s not have any more scenes today, please.’

  ‘Can I just –’ offered the daughter, but stopped when Mrs Kipps closed her eyes and with unsteady fingers touched her own lips.

  ‘Victoria, go and see on the stew, please. Go.’

  Victoria stood up and slammed her chair into the table. As she left the room, Howard watched her nimble shoulder blades from the back, shifting up and down like pistons driving the engine of her sulk.

  Mrs Kipps smiled again. ‘We’ve loved having him, Howard. He’s such a good, honest, upright young man. You should be very proud of him, truly.’

  All this time she had been holding Howard’s hands; now she gave them a final squeeze and released him.

  ‘I should probably stay and talk to your husband?’ mumbled Howard, hearing approaching voices from the garden and praying that this would not be necessary.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?’ said Mrs Kipps, turning, and, with a fugitive breeze lifting her skirt a little, she drifted down the patio steps and vanished into the gloom.

  5

  We must now jump nine months forward, and back across the Atlantic Ocean. It is the third sultry weekend of August, during which the town of Wellington, Mass, holds an annual outdoor festival for families. Kiki had intended to bring her family, but, by the time she returned from her Saturday-morning yoga class, they had already dispersed, off in search of shade. Outside, the pool stagnated under a shifting layer of maple leaves. Inside, the AC whirred for no one. Only Murdoch was left, she found him flat out in the bedroom, his head on his paws, tongue as dry as chamois leather. Kiki rolled down her leggings and wriggled out of her vest. She threw them across the room into an overflowing wicker basket. She stood naked for a while before her closet, making some astute decisions regarding her weight as it might be placed on an axis against the heat and the distance she would be covering, making her way through Wellington’s celebrations alone. On a shelf here she kept a chaotic pile of multipurpose scarves, like something a magician might pull from his pocket. Now she picked out a brown cotton one with a fringe, and wrapped her hair in this. Then an orange square of silk that could be fashioned into a top, tied beneath the shoulder blades. A deep red scarf, of a coarser silk, she wore around her waist as a sarong. She sat on the bed to fiddle with the buckles of her sandals, a hand idly turning over one of Murdoch’s ears, from the glossy brown to the crenulated pink and back again. ‘You’re with me, baby,’ she said, heaving him up and on to her chest, the hot sack of his belly in her hand. Just as she was about to leave the house, she heard a noise from the living room. She retraced her steps down the hallway and put her head around the door.

  ‘Hey, Jerome, baby.’

  ‘Hey.’

  Her son sat morosely in the beanbag, in his lap a notebook bound in fraying blue silk. Kiki put Murdoch on the floor and watched his maladroit waddle towards Jerome, where he sat upon the boy’s toes.

  ‘Writing?’ she asked.

  ‘No, dancing,’ came the reply.

  Kiki let her mouth close and then opened it once more with a mordant puck. Since London he was like this. Sarcastic, secretive, sixteen all over again. And always working away at this diary. He was threatening not to go back to college. Kiki felt that the two of them, mother and son, were now moving steadily in obverse directions: Kiki to forgiveness, Jerome to bitterness. For, though it had taken almost a year, Kiki had begun to release the memory of Howard’s mistake. She had had all the usual conversations with friends and with herself; she had measured a nameless, faceless woman in a hotel room next to what she knew of herself; she had weighed one stupid night against a lifetime of love and felt the difference in her heart. If you’d told Kiki a year ago, Your husband will screw somebody else, you will forgive him, you will stay, she wouldn’t have believed it. You can’t say how these things will feel, or how you will respond, until they happen to you. Kiki had drawn upon reserves of forgiveness that she didn’t even know she had. But for Jerome, friendless and brooding, it was clear that one week with Victoria Kipps, nine months ago, had expanded in his mind until it now took up all the space in his life. Where Kiki had felt her way instinctively through her problem, Jerome had written his out, words and words and words. Not for the first time, Kiki felt grateful she was not an intellectual. From here she could see the strangely melancholic format of Jerome’s text, italics and ellipses everywhere. Slanted sails blowing about on perforated seas.

  ‘Remember that thing . . .’ Kiki said absently, rubbing his exposed ankle with her own shin. ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Who said that again?’

  Jerome crossed his eyes like Howard and looked away.

  Kiki hunkered down to Jerome’s eye level. She put two fingers to his chin and drew his face to hers. ‘You OK, baby?’

  ‘Mom, please.’

  Kiki cupped Jerome’s face in her hands. She stared at him, seeking a refracted image of the girl who had caused all this misery, but Jerome had not given his mother any details when it happened and he wasn’t going to give her any now. It was a matter of an impossible translation – his mother wanted to know about a girl, but it wasn’t about a girl or, rather, it wasn’t about just the girl. Jerome had fallen in love with a family. He felt he couldn’t tell his own family this fact; it was easier for them to believe that last year was Jerome’s ‘romantic fuck-up’ or – more pleasing to the Belsey mentality – his ‘flirtation with Christianity’. How could he explain how pleasurable it had truly been to give himself up to the Kippses? It was a kind of blissful un-selfing; a summer of un-Belsey; he had allowed the Kippses’ world and their ways to take him over entirely. He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. He had put up a weak show of fighting these ideas, but only so that he might enjoy all the more the sensation of the family’s ridicule – to hear once again ho
w typically liberal, academic and wishy-washy were his own thoughts. When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demand equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk further back into the receiving sofa. When Michael argued that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment, Jerome had not given a traditionally hysterical Belsey answer – ‘Try telling that to the Klansman coming at you with a burning cross’ – but rather vowed to think less of his identity in the future. One by one the gods of the Belseys toppled. I’m so full of liberal crap, Jerome had thought happily, bowed his head low and pressed his knees into one of the little red cushions provided for kneeling in the Kippses’ pew of the local church. Long before Victoria arrived in the house, he was already in love. It was only that his general ardour for the family found its correct, specific vessel in Victoria – right age, right gender, and as beautiful as the idea of God. Victoria herself, flush with the social and sexual successes of her first summer abroad without her family, returned home to find a tolerable young man, weighed down by his virginity and satisfyingly unmanned by his desire for her. It seemed petty not to make a gift of her new-found loveliness (she had been what Caribbeans call a margar child) to a boy so obviously starved of the same quality. And he’d be gone by August anyway. They spent a week stealing kisses in shaded corners of the house and made love once, extremely badly, under the tree in the Kippses’ back garden. Victoria never for a moment considered . . . But of course Jerome did. Considering things too much, all the time, was the definition of who he was.

  ‘It’s not healthy, baby,’ said his mother now, smoothing his hair to his scalp, watching it spring back. ‘You’re brooding the hell out of this summer. Summer’s almost up.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ said Jerome, with uncharacteristic rudeness.

  ‘It’s a shame, that’s all . . .’ said Kiki quietly. ‘Look, shug, I’m going to the festival – why don’t you come?’