On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  ‘Why don’t I,’ replied Jerome, without inflection.

  ‘It’s a hundred and ten degrees in here, baby. Everybody done gone already.’

  Jerome mimed a minstrel’s expression to match his mother’s intonations. He returned to his task. As he wrote, his womanly mouth drew into a tight, cushioned pout, and this in turn accentuated the family’s cheekbones. His prominent forehead – the detail that made him so unpretty – pulled forward, as if in sympathy with the long, horse’s lashes that curled up to meet it.

  ‘You just going to sit in all day, write your diary?’

  ‘Not a diary. Journal.’

  Kiki made a noise of defeat, stood up. She walked casually around the back of him and then bellyflopped suddenly towards him, hugging him from behind, reading over his shoulder: ‘It is easy to mistake a woman for a philosophy . . .’

  ‘Mom, fuck off – I’m serious –’

  ‘Watch your mouth – The mistake is to be attached to the world at all. It will not thank you for your attachments. Love is the extremely difficult realization –’

  Jerome wrestled the book away from her.

  ‘What is that – proverbs? Sounds heavy. You’re not gonna put on a trench coat and shoot up your school, now, are you, baby?’

  ‘Ha, ha.’

  Kiki kissed the back of his head and stood up. ‘Too much recording – try living,’ she suggested softly.

  ‘False opposition.’

  ‘Oh, Jerome, please – get up out of that nasty thing, come with me. You live in that goddamn beanbag. Don’t make me go alone. Zora went with her girls already.’

  ‘I’m busy. Where’s Levi?’

  ‘Saturday job. Come on. I’m by myself . . . and Howard left me high and dry – he went off with Erskine an hour ago . . .’

  This sneaky mention of his father’s negligence had exactly the effect his mother had intended. He groaned and closed the book between his big, soft hands. Kiki reached out her own hands in a cross towards her son. He grabbed both and heaved himself up.

  From the house to the town square was a pretty walk: swollen gourds on doorsteps, white clapboard houses, luscious gardens carefully planted in preparation for the famous fall. Fewer American flags than in Florida but more than in San Francisco. Everywhere the hint of yellow curl on the leaves of the trees, like the catch paper thrown at something about to go up in flame. Here also were some of the oldest things in America: three churches built in the 1600s, a graveyard overrun with mouldy pilgrims, blue plaques alerting you to all of this. Kiki made a cautious move to link arms with Jerome; he let her. People began to join them on the road, a few more at each corner. At the square, the power of independent movement was taken away from them; they were as one mass with hundreds of others. It had been a mistake to bring Murdoch. The festival was at its most populated point, lunchtime, and inside the crush everybody was too hot and grouchy to be interested in stepping aside for a small dog. With difficulty the three of them made their way to the less populated sidewalk. Kiki stopped at a stall selling sterling silver – earrings, bracelets, necklaces. The stallholder was a black man, exceptionally skinny, in a green string vest and grubby blue jeans. No shoes at all. His bloodshot eyes widened as Kiki picked up some hoop earrings. She had only this brief glimpse of him, but Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those familiar exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men – more comfortably for Kiki – sometimes remarked on it in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting – it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality; people expected new things of her, some of them good, some not. And she had been a tiny thing for years and years! How does it happen? Kiki held the hoops up to each ear. The stall guy proffered a small oval mirror, raising it up to her face, but not quickly enough for her sensitivities.

  ‘Excuse me, brother – a few inches higher with that – Thank you – they don’t wear jewellery – sorry ’bout that. Just the ears.’

  Jerome recoiled from this joke. He dreaded his mother’s habit of starting conversations with strangers.

  ‘Honey?’ she asked Jerome, turning to him. Again with the shrugging. In comic response, Kiki turned back to the stall guy and shrugged, but he only said ‘Fifteen’ loudly and stared at her. He was unsmiling and intent upon a sale. He had a brutal, foreign accent. Kiki felt foolish. Her right hand passed quickly over a number of items on the table.

  ‘OK . . . And these?’

  ‘All earring fifteen, necklace thirty, bracelet some ten, some fifteen, different – silver, all silver – all this here silver. You should try necklace, very nice – with black skin, it is good. Do you like earrings?’

  ‘I’m going to get a burrito.’

  ‘Oh, Jerome, please – one minute. We can’t spend five minutes together? What do you think of those?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Small hoop or big?’

  Jerome made a desperate face.

  ‘OK, OK. Where will you be?’

  Jerome pointed directly into the rippling day. ‘It’s called something hokey . . . like Chicken America or something.’

  ‘God, Jay, I don’t know what that is. What is that? Just meet me in front of the bank in fifteen, OK? And get me one – a shrimp one if they have it, extra hot sauce and sour cream. You know I like ’em hot.’

  She watched him amble away, pulling his long-sleeved Nirvana T-shirt down over that sloppy English backside, wide and charmless like the rear view of one of Howard’s aunts. She turned back to the stall and once again tried to engage the man, but he was busy fiddling with the coins in his fanny pack. Listlessly she picked up this and that and put it down, nodding at prices as they were earnestly recounted each time her finger made contact with an item. Aside from her money, the guy seemed barely concerned with her, neither as a person nor as an idea. He did not call Kiki ‘sister’, make any assumptions or take any liberties. Obscurely disappointed, as we sometimes are when the things we profess to dislike don’t happen, she looked up abruptly and smiled at him. ‘You’re from Africa?’ she asked sweetly, and picked up a charm bracelet with tiny replicas of international totems hanging from it: the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty.

  The man folded his arms across his narrow filleted chest, every rib as visible as it is upon a cat’s belly. ‘Where do you think I am from? You are African – no?’

  ‘No, noooo, I’m from here – but of course . . .’ said Kiki. She wiped some sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, waiting for him to finish the sentence as she knew it would be finished.

  ‘We are all from Africa,’ said the man obligingly. He made a double outward fan of his hands over the jewellery. ‘All of this, from Africa. You know where I am from?’

  Kiki was trying to fix something to her wrist, unsuccessfully. Now she looked up as the man took a half step back to give her a fuller view of him. She found she wanted very much to be right, and struggled for a minute between a few places she recalled having French history, unsure if she was right about any of them. She wondered about her own boredom. She must be very bored indeed to want to be right before this man.

  ‘Ivory . . .’ began Kiki cautiously, but his face repelled this, so she switched to Martinique.

  ‘Haiti,’ he said.

  ‘Right. My –’ began Kiki, but realized she did not want to say the word ‘cleaner’ in this context. She began again, ‘There’re so many Haitians here . . .’ She dared a little
further: ‘And of course it’s so difficult, in Haiti, right now.’

  The man put the hub of each hand firmly on the table between them and engaged her eyes. ‘Yes. Terrible. So terrible. Now, every day – terror.’

  The solemnity of this reply forced Kiki to turn her attention back to the bracelet sliding off her wrist. She had only the most vague sense of the difficulty she had made reference to (it had slid off the radar under the stress of other, more pressing difficulties, national and personal) and felt ashamed now to be caught under the pretence of having more knowledge than she possessed.

  ‘This is not for here – for here.’ he said, suddenly coming around the table and pointing at Kiki’s ankle.

  ‘Oh . . . it’s like a . . . what do you call that, an anklet?’

  ‘Put here – put up here – please.’

  Kiki released Murdoch to the floor and allowed this man to lift her foot on to the small bamboo stool. She had to rest her hand on his shoulder for balance. Kiki’s sarong opened a little and some of her thigh was revealed. Moisture sprang from the chubby crease behind her knee. The man did not seem to notice but remained purposeful, catching one sweaty loose end of the chain and bringing it round to meet the other. It was in this unorthodox position that Kiki found herself ambushed from behind. Two masculine hands grabbed her round her middle, squeezed – and then a hot red face materialized next to her own like the Cheshire Cat’s, kissing her damp cheek.

  ‘Jay – don’t be crazy –’

  ‘Keeks, wow – you’re all leg. What’re you trying to do, kill me?’

  ‘Oh, my God – Warren – Hi . . . You almost killed me – Jesus – creeping like a fox – I thought it was Jerome, he’s around here someplace . . . God, I didn’t even know you guys were back. How was Italy? Where’s –’

  Kiki spotted the subject of her question, Claire Malcolm, turning away from a stall selling massage oils. Claire looked confused for a moment, panicked almost, but then raised a hand, smiling. In response Kiki gave Claire the long-distance look of surprise and swept her hand up and down to signify the change in Claire, a little green sundress instead of her winter staples of black leather jacket, black polo neck and black jeans. Thinking about it, she hadn’t seen Claire Malcolm since the winter. Now she was speckled a toasty Mediterranean brown, the pale blue of her eyes intensified by the contrast. Kiki signalled to her to come over. The Haitian man, having fastened Kiki’s anklet, dropped his hands and looked anxiously at her.

  ‘Warren, just wait one minute – let me just do this – how much again?’

  ‘Fifteen. For this fifteen.’

  ‘I thought you said ten for a bracelet – Warren, sorry about this, just one minute – didn’t you say ten?’

  ‘This one fifteen, please, fifteen.’

  Kiki hunted in her purse for her wallet. Warren Crane stood beside her, with his hefty head, too large for that neatly muscular blue-collar New Jersey body, his beefy sailor arms crossed and a whimsical look on his face, like that of an audience member waiting for the comedian to get on stage. When you are no longer in the sexual universe – when you are supposedly too old, or too big, or simply no longer thought of in that way – apparently a whole new range of male reactions to you come into play. One of them is humour. They find you funny. But then, thought Kiki, they were brought up that way, these white American boys: I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around. Of course they find me funny. And yet I could cross the river to Boston and barely be left alone for five minutes at a time. Only last week a young brother half her age had trailed Kiki up and down Newbury for an hour and would not relent until she said he could take her out some time; she gave him a fake number.

  ‘You need a loan, Keeks?’ asked Warren. ‘Sister, I could spare you a dime.’

  Kiki laughed. She found her wallet at last. Money dealt with, she said goodbye to the trader.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ said Warren, looking down her and then up her again. ‘As if you needed to get any prettier.’

  And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of it being taken seriously.

  ‘What did she get – something lovely? Oh, that is lovely,’ said Claire as she approached, peering down at Kiki’s ankle. She tucked her tiny body into a cleft of Warren’s. Photographs elongated her, making her appear long and wiry, but in life this American poet was only five foot one and physically prepubescent, even now, at fifty-four. She was neatly made with the minimum of material. When she moved a finger, you could trace the motion through pulleys of veins that went all the way up her slender arms and shoulders to her neck, itself elegantly creased like the lungs of an accordion. Her elfin head with its inch of closely cropped brown hair fitted neatly into her lover’s hand. To Kiki they looked very happy – but what did that mean? Wellington couples had a talent for looking happy.

  ‘Incredible day, isn’t it? We got back a week ago and it’s hotter here than it was there. The sun is a lemon today, it is. It’s like a huge lemon-drop. God, it’s incredible,’ said Claire, as Warren softly palpated the back of her skull. She was babbling a little; it always took her a minute or two to settle. Claire had been at graduate school with Howard, and Kiki had known her thirty years, but never had she felt that they knew each other well. They did not quite gel as friends. There was a part of Kiki that felt every meeting with Claire was like the first time all over again. ‘And you look marvellous!’ cried Claire now. ‘It’s so good to see you. What an outfit! It’s like a sunset – the red, the yellow, the orangey-brown – Keeks, you’re setting.’

  ‘Honey,’ said Kiki, moving her head from side to side in a manner she understood white people enjoyed, ‘I done set already.’

  Claire made the jangle sound of laughter. Not for the first time, Kiki noted the implacable intelligence of her eyes, the way they did not indulge in the natural release of the act.

  ‘Come on, walk with us,’ said Claire plaintively, putting Warren between herself and Kiki, as if he were their child. It was a strange way to walk – it meant they had to talk to each other over Warren’s body.

  ‘OK – we got to keep an eye out for Jerome, though – he’s about. So how was Italy?’ asked Kiki.

  ‘Amazing. Wasn’t it incredible?’ said Claire, looking to Warren with an intensity that fulfilled Kiki’s hazy idea of how an artist should be: passionate, attentive, bringing her native enthusiasm to the smallest matters.

  ‘Was it just a vacation?’ asked Kiki. ‘Weren’t you collecting a prize or –?’

  ‘Oh, a silly . . . nothing, the Dante thing – but that’s not interesting – Warren spent the whole time in this rape field going crazy over this new theory about airborne pollutants from fields, GM fields – Kiki, my God . . . unbelievable ideas he was having out there – he’s basically going to be able to prove definitively that there’s cross – cross – oh, God, cross-dissemination – insemination – you know what I mean – which is what this damn government has been lying through its teeth about – but it’s really the science that’s just –’ Here Claire made a noise and a gesture to signify the top of one’s head coming off, revealing the inner cranium to the universe. ‘Warren, tell Kiki about it – I get it all mixed up, but it’s absolutely phenomenal science – Warren?’

  ‘It’s not really so fascinating,’ said Warren flatly. ‘We’re trying to find a way to pin down the government regarding these crops – a lot of the lab work has already been done, but it hasn’t been put together – just needs someone to harness the solid evidence – Oh, Claire, it’s too damn hot – boring subject . . .’

  ‘Oh, no . . .’ protested Kiki faintly.

  ‘It is not boring –’ cried Claire. ‘I had no idea about the extent of this technology and what it’s actually doing to the biosphere. I don’t mean in ten years or fifty years, I mean right now . . . It’s so vile, so vile. “Infernal” is the word I keep getting caught on, do you know wh
at I mean? We’ve reached a new ring somehow. A very low infernal ring. The planet is finished with us, at this point –’

  ‘Right, right,’ Kiki kept saying through all of this, as Claire kept talking. Kiki was impressed by her but also slightly wearied – there was no subject she could not enthusiastically dissect or embroider. Kiki was reminded of that famous poem of Claire’s about an orgasm that seemed to take apart all the different elements of an orgasm and lay them out along the page, the way a mechanic dismantles an engine. It was one of the few poems by Claire that Kiki had felt she understood without having to be talked through it by her husband or her daughter.

  ‘Honey,’ said Warren. He touched Claire’s hand lightly but with intent. ‘So where’s Howard?’

  ‘Missing in action,’ said Kiki, and smiled at Warren warmly. ‘Probably in a bar with Erskine.’

  ‘God – I haven’t seen Howard in for ever,’ said Claire.

  ‘Working on the Rembrandt still, though?’ persisted Warren. He was the son of a fireman, and Kiki liked this best about him, although she knew all the other ideas she connected with this one were romantic notions on her part, not relevant to the real lived existence of a busy biochemist. He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Kiki, and nodded and smiled but found she could go no further than this without betraying more than she wanted to.

  ‘We saw The Shipbuilder and His Wife in London – the Queen lent it out to the National Gallery – nice of her, huh, right? It was fabulous . . . the working up of the paint,’ said Claire urgently, and yet practically to herself, ‘the physicality of it, like he’s digging in to the canvas to get what’s really in those faces, in that marriage – that’s the thing, I think. It’s almost anti-portraiture: he doesn’t want you to look at the faces; he wants you to look at the souls. The faces are just a way in. It’s the purest kind of genius.’