On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  Levi pressed the knuckles of his thumbs into his sleep-encrusted eyes and met his mother and her relief halfway. Without struggle, he allowed himself be taken into the expansive familiarity of her chest.

  ‘Honey, you look bad. What time you get in?’

  Levi looked up weakly for a moment before burrowing back in.

  ‘Zora – make him some tea. Poor honey can’t speak.’

  ‘Let him make his own tea. The poor honey shouldn’t drink so much.’

  This enlivened Levi. He freed himself from his mother and strode over to the kettle. ‘Man, shut up.’

  ‘You shut up.’

  ‘I di’unt drink anything anyhow – I’m just tired. I got back late.’

  ‘Nobody heard you come in – I worry, you know. Where were you?’ asked Kiki.

  ‘Nowhere – I just met some guys, I was hanging with them – we went on to a club. It was cool. Mom, is there any breakfast?’

  ‘How was work?’

  ‘Fine. Same. Is there breakfast?’

  ‘These eggs are mine,’ said Zora, and hunched over, drawing her plate into her chest. ‘You know where the cereal is.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Baby, I’m glad you had a good time, but that’s it now. I don’t want you out any night this week, OK?’

  Levi’s voice leaped several decibels in his defence: ‘I don’t even want to go out.’

  ‘Good, because you got SATs and you got to knuckle down right about now.’

  ‘Oh, wait, man – I got to go out Tuesday.’

  ‘Levi, what did I just say?’

  ‘But I’ll be back by eleven. Yo, it’s impor’ant.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Seriously – oh, man – these guys I met – they performing – I’ll be back by eleven – it’s just the Bus Stop – I can get a cab.’

  Zora’s head perked up from her breakfast. ‘Wait – I’m going to the Bus Stop on Tuesday.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I don’t want to see you there. I’m going with my class.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Can’t you just go some other day?’

  ‘Aw, shut up, man. Mom, a’hma be back by eleven. I’ve got two free periods on Wednesday. Honestly, man. It’s cool. I’ll come back with Zora.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Yes, he will,’ said Kiki with finality. ‘That’s the deal. Both back by eleven.’

  ‘What?’

  Levi performed a little bop of celebration en route to the fridge, adding a special Jacksonesque spin as he passed Zora’s chair.

  ‘Wow, that’s unfair,’ complained Zora. ‘This is why I should have gone to college in a different town.’

  ‘You live in this house, you have to help out with family stuff,’ said Kiki, getting down to fundamentals in order to defend a decision whose unfairness she had already privately registered. ‘That’s the deal. You don’t pay any rent here.’

  Zora brought her hands together in penitent prayer. ‘That’s so gracious, thank you. Thank you for letting me stay in my childhood home.’

  ‘Zoor, don’t start messing with me this morning – I mean it, don’t even –’

  Without anyone noting it, Howard had entered the room. He was fully dressed, even shoed. His hair was wet and combed backwards. It was maybe the first time in a week that Howard and Kiki had stood in the same room like this, albeit ten feet apart, and now with full eye-contact, like two formal, unrelated, full-length portraits turned so as to face each other. While Howard asked the kids to leave the room, Kiki took her time, looking. She saw differently now; that was one of the side-effects. Whether the new way of seeing was the truth, she couldn’t say. But it was certainly stark, revelatory. She saw every fold and tremble of his fading prettiness. She found she could muster contempt for even his most neutral physical characteristics. The thin, papery, Caucasian nostril holes. The doughy ears sprouting hairs that he was careful to remove and yet whose ghostly existence she continued to catalogue. The only things that threatened to disturb her resolve were the sheer temporal layers of Howard as they presented themselves before her: Howard at twenty-two, at thirty, at forty-five and fifty-one; the difficulty of keeping all these other Howards out of her consciousness; the importance of not being sidetracked, of responding only to this most recent Howard, the 57-year-old Howard. The liar, the heart-breaker, the emotional fraud. She did not flinch.

  ‘What is it, Howard?’

  Howard had just finished ushering his resistant children out of the room. They were alone. He turned round quickly, his face a very nothing. He was at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet, where to stand, what to rest upon.

  ‘There’s no “it”,’ he said softly, and pulled his cardigan around himself. ‘Particularly. I don’t know what that question means. It? I mean . . . obviously, there’s everything.’

  Kiki, feeling the power of her position, re-established her folded arms. ‘Right. That’s very poetic. I guess I’m just not feeling too poetic right now. Is there something you wanted to say to me?’

  Howard looked to the floor and shook his head, disappointed, like a scientist getting no data from an elaborately set-up experiment. ‘I see,’ he said finally and made as if to return to his study, but then turned back at the door. ‘Umm . . . Is there a time when we could talk, properly? Like human beings. Who know each other.’

  For her part, Kiki had been waiting for a hook. That would do. ‘Don’t you tell me how to behave like a human being. I know how to behave like a human being.’

  Howard looked up at her, eagerly. ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you.’

  To accompany this, Kiki did something she hadn’t done in years. She gave her husband the finger. Howard looked baffled. In a faraway voice he said, ‘No . . . This isn’t going to work.’

  ‘No, really? Aren’t we having good dialogue? Are we not interfacing as you’d hoped? Howard, go to the library.’

  ‘How can I talk to you when you’re like this? There’s no way for me to talk to you.’

  His real distress was obvious and for a moment Kiki considered matching it with her own. Instead, she grew still harder inside.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry about that.’

  Kiki became aware, suddenly, of her own belly and the way it hung over her leggings; she reorganized it under the elastic of her underwear, a move that made her feel more protected somehow, more solid. Howard placed both hands on the sideboard like a lawyer giving his summation to an invisible jury.

  ‘Clearly we need to talk about what’s going to happen next. At least . . . well, the kids need to know.’

  Kiki released a flare of laughter. ‘Sugar, you’re the one who makes the decisions. We just roll with the punches as they come. Who knows what you’ll do to this family next. You know? Nobody can know that.’

  ‘Kiki –’

  ‘What? What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Nothing!’ flashed Howard, and then he reconstituted his self-control, lowering his voice, clasping his hands together. ‘Nothing . . . the onus is on me, I know that. It’s for me to – to – explain my narrative in a way that’s comprehensible . . . and achieves an . . . I don’t know, explanation, I suppose, in terms of motivation . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry – I comprehend your narrative, Howard. Otherwise known as, I got your number. We’re not in your class now. Are you able to talk to me in a way that means anything?’

  To this Howard groaned. He abhorred the reference (an old war-wound in this marriage, continually reopened) to a separation between his ‘academic’ language and his wife’s so-called ‘personal’ language. She could always say – and often did – ‘we’re not in your class now’ and that would always be true, but he would never, neverconcede the point that Kiki’s language was any more emotionally expressive than his own. Even now, even now, this oldest argument of their union was rousing its furious armies in his mind, preparing for one more appearance in the field. It took an en
ormous act of will on his part to divert his forces.

  ‘Look, let’s not . . . All I want to say is that I feel . . . you know, that we seem to be taking rather a giant step backwards. In the spring it seemed that we were going to . . . I don’t know. Survive this, I suppose.’

  What came next burst from Kiki’s chest like an aria she was singing. ‘In the spring I didn’t know you were fucking one of our friends. In the spring it was just someone, a nameless someone, it was a one-night stand – now it’s Claire Malcolm. It went on for weeks!’

  ‘Three weeks,’ said Howard, almost inaudibly.

  ‘I asked you to tell me the truth, and you looked me in the eye and lied to me. Like every other middle-aged asshole in this town lying to his idiot wife. I can’t believe how much contempt you have for me. Claire Malcolm is our friend. Warren is our friend.’

  ‘All right. Well, let’s talk about that.’

  ‘Oh, can we? Can we really?’

  ‘Of course. If you want to.’

  ‘Do I get to ask the questions?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Why did you fuck Claire Malcolm?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Keeks, please –’

  ‘Sorry, is that too obvious? Does that offend your sensibility, Howard?’

  ‘No. Of course not – don’t be so fatuous . . . It’s obviously painful for me to try to . . . explain something so banal, in a way –’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry your dick offends your intellectual sensibilities. It must be terrible. There’s your subtle, wonderful, intricate brain and all the time it turns out your dick is a vulgar, stupid little prick. That must be a real bitch for you!’

  Howard picked up his satchel, which, Kiki only now noticed, was lying on the floor by his feet. ‘I’m going to go now,’ he said, and took the route by the right side of the table so he might physically avoid a confrontation. Kiki was not averse, in very bad times, to kicking and punching, and he was not averse to holding her wrists tightly in his hands until she stopped.

  ‘A little white woman,’ yelled Kiki across the room, unable now to control herself. ‘A tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’

  ‘I’m going. You’re being ludicrous.’

  ‘And I don’t know why I’m surprised. You don’t even notice it – you never notice. You think it’s normal. Everywhere we go, I’m alone in this . . . this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor. I staked my whole life on you. And I have no idea any more why I did that.’

  Howard stopped underneath an abstract painting on the wall. Its main feature was a piece of thick white plaster, made to look like linen, crumpled up like a rag someone had thrown away. This action of throwing had been caught, by the artist, in mid-flight, with the ‘linen’ frozen in space, framed by a white wooden box that thrust out from the wall.

  ‘I can’t understand you,’ he said, looking at her at last. ‘You’re not making any sense to me. You’re hysterical now.’

  ‘I gave up my life for you. I don’t even know who I am any more.’ Kiki fell into a chair and began to weep.

  ‘Oh, God, please . . . please . . . Keeks, don’t cry, please.’

  ‘Could you have found anybody less like me if you’d scoured the earth?’ she said, thumping the table with her fist. ‘My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made me look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?’

  Howard picked up his keys from the clay boot on the sideboard and walked purposively to the front door.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Kiki leaped up and followed him. ‘What? I can’t hear you – what?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m not allowed to say it.’

  ‘Say. It.’

  ‘All I said was . . .’ Howard shrugged fretfully. ‘Well, I married a slim black woman, actually. Not that it’s relevant.’

  Kiki’s eyes widened, allowing what was left of the tears to film themselves over her eyeballs. ‘Holy shit. You want to sue me for breach of contract, Howard? Product expanded without warning?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing as trite as that. I don’t want to get into that. There’s a million factors, clearly. This is not the reason people have affairs, and I don’t want to have this conversation on this level, I really don’t. It’s puerile. It’s beneath you – it’s beneath me.’

  ‘There you go again. Howard, you should talk to your cock so the two of you are singing from the same hymn book. Your cock is beneath you. Literally.’ Kiki laughed a little and then cried – childish, formless yelps that came up from her belly, relinquishing everything she had left.

  ‘Look,’ said Howard resolutely, and the more she could sense his sympathy draining away from her, the more she wailed. ‘I’m trying to be as honest as I can. If you’re asking me, obviously physicality is a factor. You have . . . Keeks, you’ve changed a lot. I don’t care, but –’

  ‘I staked my life on you. I staked my life.’

  ‘And I love you. I’ve always loved you. But I’m not having this discussion.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me the truth?’

  Howard passed his satchel from his right hand to his left and opened the front door. He was that lawyer again, simplifying a complex case for a desperate, simple-minded client who would not take his advice.

  ‘It’s true that men – they respond to beauty . . . it doesn’t end for them, this . . . this concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world – and that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes . . . but it’s true and . . . I don’t know how else to explain what –’

  ‘Get away from me.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’m not interested in your aesthetic theories. Save them for Claire. She loves them.’

  Howard sighed. ‘I wasn’t giving you a theory.’

  ‘You think there’s some great philosophical I-don’t-fucking-know-what because you can’t keep your dick in your pants? You’re not Rembrandt, Howard. And don’t kid yourself: honey, I look at boys all the time – all the time. I see pretty boys every day of the week, and I think about their cocks, and what they would look like butt naked –’

  ‘You’re being really vulgar now.’

  ‘But I’m an adult, Howard. And I’ve chosen my life. I thought you had too. But you’re still running after pussy, apparently.’

  ‘But she’s not . . .’ said Howard, lowering his voice to an exasperated whisper, ‘you know . . . she’s our age, older, I think – you talk as if it were a student like one of Erskine’s . . . or . . . But in fact I didn’t – ’

  ‘You want a fucking prize?’

  Howard was intent on slamming the door behind him, and Kiki was equally determined to kick it shut. The force of it knocked the plaster picture to the floor.

  7

  On Tuesday night a water main burst at the corner of Kennedy and Rosebrook. A dark river filled the street, breaking only towards the high ground at its centre. It sloshed either side of Kennedy Square, massing in dirty puddles tinted orange by the streetlights. Zora had parked the family car a block away, intending to wait for her poetry class on the central traffic island, but this too was lapped on all sides by a slurry lake, more an island than ever. The cars sent up sheets of black spray as they went past. Instead she set herself back on the sidewalk, choosing to lean against a cement post in front of a drug store. Here, in this spot, Zora felt confident she would be aware of her class, when they came, at least a moment or two before they were aware of her (this had also been the point of the traffic island). She held a cigarette and struggled to enjoy the sear of it on desiccated, winter lips. She watched a little behavioural pattern develop just across the street. People paused at the doorway of the McDonald’s, waited for the passing car to displace its gallon of grimy water
and then continued on their way, proudly, swiftly adaptable to anything the city could throw at them.

  ‘Anybody call the water board? Or is this the second flood?’ inquired a throaty Boston voice, just by Zora’s elbow. It was the purple-skinned homeless guy with his coiled beard of solid, grey clumps, with white panda rings around his eyes, as if half his year was spent in Aspen. He was always here, holding a polystyrene cup to hustle for dimes outside the bank, and now he shook this at Zora, laughing gruffly. When she didn’t respond, he made his joke again. To escape, she moved forward to the road’s edge and looked into the gutters to imply her concern and further investigation of the situation. A patina of frost had collected on top of the puddles here in the potholes and natural gulleys created by uneven asphalt. Some puddles had already resolved themselves into slush, but others maintained their pristine, wafer-thin ice rinks. Zora threw her cigarette on to one of these and at once lit another. She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face – as her favourite poet had it – to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn’t seem to her that she had a face at all . . . And yet in college, she knew was famed for being opinionated, a ‘personality’ – the truth was she didn’t take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn’t feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Even on this short trip to the bohemian end of Wellington – a journey that, having been traversed by car, offered no opportunity whatsoever for reading – she had brought along, in her knapsack, three novels and a short tract by De Beauvoir on ambiguity – so much ballast to stop her floating away, up and over the flood, into the night sky.