On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  ‘Umm, excuse me?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I said excuse me – I think you’ll find those are my goggles.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, man – hold up a minute.’

  He heaved himself up out of the water and rested his elbows on the side. This brought his groin to meet Zora at eye level. For a full ten seconds, as if there were no material there at all, she was presented with the broad line of it running along his thigh to the left, making three-dimensional waves of his bumble-bee stripes. Beneath this arresting sight, his balls pulled at the fabric of his shorts, low and heavy and not quite lifted out of the warm water. His tattoo was of the sun – the sun with a face. She felt she had seen it before. Its rays were thick and fanned out like the mane of a lion. The boy took out two earplugs, removed the goggles, left them on the side and returned to Zora’s bobbing height.

  ‘Got plugs in, man – couldn’t hear a thing.’

  ‘I said I think you’ve got my goggles. I put them down for like a second and they went – maybe you picked them up by mistake . . . my goggles?’

  The boy was frowning at her. He shook the water from his face. ‘I know you?’

  ‘What? No – look, can I see those goggles please?’

  The boy, still frowning, threw his long arm up and over the side and came back with the goggles.

  ‘OK, so those are mine. The red strap is mine – the other one broke and I put that red one on myself, so –’

  The boy grinned. ‘Well . . . If they yours, I guess you better take ’em.’

  He held out his long palm towards her – coloured a rich brown like Kiki’s, with all the lines drawn in a still darker shade. The goggles hung from his index finger. Zora moved to snatch them but instead nudged them from his finger. She thrust her hands into the water; they twirled on down to the bottom, the red band spiralling, inanimate, yet dancing. Zora took a shallow asthmatic breath and tried to dive. Halfway down the buoyancy of her own flesh reeled her back up, ass first.

  ‘You want me to –?’ offered the boy and didn’t wait for the answer. He curved in on himself and shot down with barely a splash. He resurfaced a moment later with the goggles hanging from his wrist. He dropped them into her hands, another fumbling move, for it took all the energy Zora had to tread water while simultaneously opening her palms to receive them. Without a word she kicked away to the side, trying her best to climb the ladder with dignity, and left the pool. Except she didn’t quite leave. For the time it takes to swim one length she stood by the side of the lifeguard’s chair and watched the smiling sun make its way through the water, watched the initial seal-pup flip-flop of the boy’s torso, the ploughing and lifting of two dark arms in turbine motion, the grinding muscles of the shoulders, the streamlined legs doing what all human legs could do if only they tried a little harder. For a whole twenty-three seconds the last thing on Zora’s mind was herself.

  ‘I knew I knew you – Mozart.’

  He was dressed now, the necklines of several T-shirts visible underneath his Red Sox hoodie. His black jeans swamped the white scallop-shell toes of his sneakers. If Zora hadn’t just seen him almost as God intended, she would have had no idea of the contours beneath all of this. The only clue was that elegant neck of his, angling the head away from the body like a young animal looking about the world for the first time. He was sitting on the outdoor steps of the gym, legs wide open, earphones on, nodding to the music – Zora almost stood on him.

  ‘Sorry – if I can just . . .’ she murmured, stepping round.

  He slipped his earphones down to his neck, bounced up and kept pace with her down the stairs.

  ‘Hey, hat girl – yo, I’m talking to you – hey, slow down for a second there.’

  Zora stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pushed the brim of her stupid hat up, looked into his face and recognized him at last.

  ‘Mozart,’ he repeated, cocking a finger at her. ‘Right? You took my player – my man Levi’s sister.’

  ‘Zora, right.’

  ‘Carl. Carl Thomas. I knew it was you. Levi’s sister.’

  He stood there nodding and smiling as if together they had just cracked the cure for cancer.

  ‘So . . . umm, do you see Levi . . . or . . . ?’ tried Zora, awkwardly. His well-madeness as a human being made her feel her own bad design. She folded her arms across her chest and then refolded them the other way. Suddenly she couldn’t stand in a position that was even half normal. Carl looked over her shoulder towards the frizzled corridor of yew trees that led to the river.

  ‘You know, I ain’t even seen him since that concert – I guess we was meant to hang at one point but . . .’ His attention flipped back to her. ‘Which way you walking, you walking down there?’

  ‘Actually, I’m going the other way, just into the square.’

  ‘Cool, I can go that way.’

  ‘Er . . . OK.’

  They took a few steps, but here the sidewalk ended. They waited at the traffic lights in silence. Carl had replaced one earphone and was nodding to the beat. Zora looked at her watch, and then around herself in a self-conscious way, assuring the passers-by that she also had no idea what this guy could possibly want with her.

  ‘You’re on the swim team?’ said Zora when the lights refused to change.

  ‘Huh?’

  Zora shook her head and pressed her lips together.

  ‘No, say again.’ He took off his earphones once more. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing – I just – just wondering if you were on the swim team – ’

  ‘Do I look like I’m on the swim team?’

  Zora’s memory of Carl refocused, sharpened. ‘Umm . . . it’s not an insult – I’m just saying you’re fast.’

  Carl brought his shoulders down from where they were hitched, up around his ears, but his face held the tension. ‘I’ll be in the A-Team before I’m on the swim team, believe that. Gotta be in college before you on the swim team, as I understand it.’

  Two cabs came parallel with each other now, heading in opposite directions. The drivers slowed down to a halt and yelled happily at each other from their open windows while beeping horns started up around them.

  ‘Those Haitians got a lot of mouth, man. Sound like they screaming all the time. Even when they happy they sound pissed as hell,’ reflected Carl. Zora jabbed at the traffic button.

  ‘You go to a lot of classical –’ asked Carl at the same time that Zora said, ‘So you just go to the pool to steal other people’s –’

  ‘Oh, shit –’ He laughed loudly, falsely, Zora thought. She pushed her wallet deep into her tote bag and discreetly zipped it up.

  ‘I’m sorry about your goggles, man. You still mad about that? I didn’t think nobody was using them. My man Anthony works in the locker room – he gets me in without a pass – so, you know.’

  Zora did not know. The sing-song bird call of the traffic lights started up so that the blind might know when to walk.

  ‘I was just saying – you go to a lot of those things?’ asked Carl as they crossed the street together. ‘Like the Mozart?’

  ‘Umm . . . I guess not . . . probably not as much as I should. Studying takes up a lot of my time, I guess.’

  ‘You freshman?’

  ‘Sophomore. First day.’

  ‘Wellington?’

  Zora nodded. They were approaching the main campus building. He seemed to want to slow her down, to put off the moment when she passed through the gate and out of his world.

  ‘Scene. Educated sister. That’s cool, man – that’s really – that’s an amazing thing right there, that’s . . . good for you, you’re going the right way about your shit and all that – that’s the prize, education. We all gotta keep our eyes on the prize if we’re gonna rise, right? Wellington. Hmph. That’s nice.’

  Zora smiled feebly.

  ‘No, man, you worked for it, you deserved it,’ said Carl, and looked around himself distractedly. He reminded her of the young boys she used to ment
or in Boston – taking them to the park, to the movies – back when she had time to do that kind of stuff. His attention span was like theirs. And always the toe-tapping and head-nodding as if stillness was the danger.

  ‘ ’Cos the thing about Mozart, right,’ he said suddenly. ‘This is the thing right here – I mean about the Requiem – I don’t know too much about his other shit, but that Requiem, that we were listening to – OK, so you know the Lacrimosa part?’

  His fingers worked the air like a maestro, hoping to conduct the reaction he wanted out of his new companion.

  ‘The Lacrimosa – you know it, man.’

  ‘Er . . . no,’ said Zora, nothing with alarm her fellow students pouring in to register. She was late already.

  ‘It’s like the eighth bit,’ said Carl impatiently. ‘I sampled it for this tune I made, after I heard it at that show, right – and it’s crazy – with all the angels singing higher and higher and those violins, man – swish dah DAH, swish da DAH, swish da DAH – it’s amazing listening to that – and it sounds mad cool when you put words over the top and a beat below – you know the part, it’s like –’ said Carl and began to hum the tune again.

  ‘I really don’t know it. I’m not really a classical music type of –’

  ‘No, man, you remember –’cos I remember I overheard your people, your moms and everybody – they were discussing whether he was a genius, remember, and –’

  ‘That was like a month ago,’ said Zora, confused.

  ‘Oh, I’m very memorizing – like I remember everything. You tell me something: I remember it. I never forget a face – you see how I don’t forget a face. And it was just – you know – inneresting to me, about Mozart, ’cos I’m a musician also –’

  Zora allowed herself a tiny smile at the unlikely comparison.

  ‘And then I found out about it a little more –’cos, I’ve been reading about classical music, ’cos you can’t do what I do without knowing about other shit outside of your direct, like, your influences and shit –’

  Zora nodded politely.

  ‘Right, you understand me,’ said Carl vigorously, as if with this nod Zora had signed her name to a declaration of undisclosed principles of Carl’s choosing. ‘And so anyway, man, it turns out that that section – it wasn’t even by him – I mean, it was partly him, right? Obviously he passed away halfway through, and then other people had to be brought in to finish it off. And it turns out that the main business of the Lacrimosa was by this guy Süssmayr – which is the shit, man, ’cos it’s like the best thing in the Requiem, and it made me think damn, you can be so close to genius that it like lifts you up – it’s like Süssmayr, this guy, stepped up to the bat, right, like a rookie, and then he went and hit it out of the park – and all these people be trying to prove that it’s Mozart ’cos that fits in with their idea of who can and who can’t make music like this, but the deal is that this amazing sound was just by this guy Sü ssmayr, this average Joe Shmo guy. I was tripping when I read that shit.’

  And all the time, while he spoke, and she tried, bewilderedly, to listen, his face was doing its silent voodoo on her, just as it seemed to work on everybody passing by him in this archway. Zora could clearly see people stealing a look, and lingering, not wanting to release the imprint of Carl from their retinas, especially if it was only to be replaced by something as mundane as a tree or the library or two kids playing cards in the yard. What a thing he was to look at!

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, enthusiasm shading off into disappointment at her silence, ‘I been wanting to tell you that and now I told ya, so . . .’

  Zora snapped out of it. ‘You wanted to tell me that?’

  ‘No, no, no – it ain’t like that.’ He laughed raucously. ‘Damn, girl, I’m not a stalker – sister, seriously –’ He patted her softly on her left arm. Nothing less than electricity shot right through her body, into her groin and ended up somewhere round her ears. ‘I’m just saying that it stuck in my mind, right –’cos I go to stuff in the city and usually I’m the only Negro, right – don’t see many black folk at things like that and I thought: Now, if I ever see that bad-tempered black girl again, I’m gonna lay some of my Mozart thoughts on her head, see how she takes them – that’s all. That’s college, right? That’s what you paying all that money for – just so you get to talk to other people about that shit. That’s all you’re paying for.’ He nodded his head authoritatively. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘It’s nothing more than that,’ Carl insisted.

  The college bell started up, pompous and monotonous, then the jollier four-note tune of the Episcopalian church across the road. Zora took a risk: ‘You know, you should meet my other brother, Jerome. He’s a total music-head and poetry-head – he can be a little bit of an uptight asshole, but you should totally come by some time, I mean, if you want to talk and stuff – He’s at Brown right now, but he comes back every few weeks . . . it’s a pretty amazing household for talking even though they all kind of drive me a little crazy sometimes . . . my dad’s like a professor so –’ Carl’s head jerked back in surprise. ‘No, but he’s cool . . . and he’s pretty incredible to talk to . . . but seriously, you should really feel free, just to come by and talk and just . . .’

  Carl looked frostily at Zora. When a boy brushed past him, Zora saw Carl square his own shoulder, bumping the freshman forward a little; the freshman, seeing as how the bumper was a tall black guy, said nothing and continued on his way.

  ‘Well,’ said Carl, staring after the boy he’d pushed, ‘actually I did come by, but seemed like I wasn’t welcome, so –’

  ‘You came by . . . ?’ began Zora uncomprehendingly.

  In her face Carl recognized authentic innocence. He waved the discussion away. ‘Bottom line? I’m not a big talker. I don’t express shit well when I talk. I write better than I speak. When I be rhyming I’m like BAM. I hit it on the nail, through the wood and out the other side. Believe. Talkin’? I hit my own finger. Every time.’