On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  ‘Stop it!’ whispered Victoria and pinched his knee. ‘Everybody’s looking.’

  It surprised Howard that a girl so used to being looked at should hate so much this other kind of stare. Howard apologetically removed the handkerchief, but this had the effect of releasing the noise. A squealing laugh announced itself in the room. It drew the attention of Howard’s own table and the four tables beside it. It even reached Monty’s table, where all of the diners turned their heads, seeking – but not yet able to locate – the insolent disturbance.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you serious? Stop it!’

  Howard mimed incapacity. His squeal turned to a honk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a dour female professor on the table behind him whom he did not know, ‘but you’re being very rude.’

  But Howard could not find a place to put his face. He could either turn to look at the glee club or turn to face his own dining companions, all of whom were now trying to disassociate themselves from him, leaning far back in their chairs, doggedly focusing on the stage.

  ‘Please,’ said Victoria urgently, ‘this isn’t funny. You’re actually embarrassing me.’

  Howard turned to look at the glee club. He tried to think of unfunny things: death, divorce, taxes, his father. But something about the fat guy’s handclaps pushed Howard over the brink. He lurched from his chair, knocked it over, picked it up and escaped down the middle aisle.

  When Howard got home, he was in that middling state of drunkenness. Too drunk for work, not drunk enough to sleep. The house was empty. He went into the living room. Here was Murdoch, curled in on himself. Howard bent down and stroked his little hound face, tugging the brown-pink skin of his jaw away from harmless, blunted teeth. Murdoch stirred crossly. When Jerome was a baby, Howard liked to go into the nursery and touch his son’s crêpey head, knowing he would wake, wanting him to. He had liked that warm, talc-scented company resting in his lap, little baby fingers stretching for the keyboard. Was it a computer, back then? No: a typewriter. Howard lifted Murdoch from his stinking basket, hooked him under one arm and brought him to the bookcase. He passed a restless eye over the rainbow of spines and titles. But every one met with resistance in Howard’s soul – he did not want fiction or biography, he didn’t want poetry or anything academic written by anyone he knew. Sleepy Murdoch barked softly and got two of Howard’s fingers in his mouth. With his free hand Howard took a turn-of-the-century edition of Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and brought it with Murdoch to the couch. As soon as he was released, Murdoch retreated to his basket. He seemed to look at Howard resentfully as he did so and, once he was in his former position, hid his head between his paws. Howard placed a cushion at one end of the couch and stretched out along it. He opened the book and was drawn to a handful of capitalized phrases.

  VERY

  TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT-POCKET

  ORANGE MARMALADE

  DRINK ME

  He read a few lines. Gave up. Looked at the pictures. Gave up. Closed his eyes. The next thing was a soft, heavy mass, weighing down the couch by his thigh, and then a hand on his face. The porch light was on, bathing the room in amber. Kiki took the book from his hands.

  ‘Complex stuff. You staying down here?’

  Howard shunted up a little. He brought his hand to his eye and dug from it a hard piece of yellow sleep. He asked the time.

  ‘Late. Kids are back – didn’t you hear them?’

  Howard had not.

  ‘Did you get back early? I wish you’d told me – I would have asked you to walk the Doc.’

  Howard shunted up further and grasped her wrist. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, and had to repeat it because the first time it was just a croaking sound.

  Kiki shook her head.

  ‘Keeks, please. Just one.’

  Kiki pressed her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Howard, I’m real tired. I’ve had an emotional evening. And for me, it’s a little late to drink.’

  ‘Please, darling. One.’

  Howard stood and went over to the drinks cabinet by the stereo. He opened the little door and turned to see Kiki standing. He looked at her pleadingly. She sighed and sat down. Howard brought over a bottle of amaretto and two brandy glasses. It was a drink Kiki loved, and she inclined her head in grudging admission of a good choice. Howard sat close to his wife.

  ‘How was Tina?’

  ‘Theresa.’

  ‘Theresa.’

  Nothing followed. Howard accepted the thrum of silent anger, waves of it, coming off Kiki. She tapped her fingers on the couch’s leather. ‘Well, she’s pissed off –’course she’s pissed off. Carlos is a fucking asshole. He’s got the lawyers in already. Theresa doesn’t even know who the woman is. Blah, blah, blah. Little Louis and Angela are devastated. Now they’re heading to court. I have no idea why. They haven’t even got any money to fight about.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Howard, disqualified from saying another word. He poured out two glasses of amaretto, passed one to Kiki and brought his glass to hers. He held his own glass up in the air. She thinned her eyes at him but clinked the glass.

  ‘So. There goes another one,’ she said, looking through the French doors to the silhouette of their willow tree. ‘This year . . . just everybody falling apart around us. It’s not just us. It’s everyone. That’s the fourth since the summer. Dominoes. Plop, plop, plop. It’s like everybody’s marriage was on a timer. It’s pathetic.’

  Howard leaned forward with her but said nothing.

  ‘It’s worse than that – it’s predictable.’ Kiki sighed. She kicked off her slip-on shoe and reached her bare foot out towards Murdoch. She traced the line of his spine with her big toe.

  ‘We do need to talk, Howard,’ she said. ‘It can’t go on like this. We need to talk.’

  Howard drew his lips into his mouth and looked at Murdoch. ‘Not now, though,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we need to talk.’

  ‘I’m agreeing with you. I’m just saying not now. Not now.’

  Kiki shrugged and continued to stroke Murdoch. She worked her toe under his ear and flipped it over. The porch light now switched itself off and left them in suburban darkness. The only light remaining was the little bulb under the extractor fan in the kitchen.

  ‘How was your dinner?’

  ‘Embarrassing.’

  ‘Why? Claire there?’

  ‘No. That’s not even . . .’

  They were silent again. Kiki breathed out heavily. ‘Sorry. Why was it embarrassing?’

  ‘There was a glee club.’

  In the shadow, Howard could see Kiki smile. She did not look at him but she smiled. ‘Oh, Jesus. There was not.’

  ‘Full glee club. Gold waistcoats.’

  Kiki, still smiling, nodded rapidly several times. ‘Did they sing “Like a Virgin?” ’

  ‘They sang a U2 song.’

  Kiki passed her plait around to the front of her body and wound its end around her wrist.

  ‘Which one?’

  Howard told her. Frowning, Kiki finished her amaretto and poured herself another. ‘No . . . I don’t know that one – how’s it go?’

  ‘Do you mean how does it actually go or how did they sing it?’

  ‘Wasn’t worse than that time, though. Couldn’t be. Oh, God, I almost died that time.’

  ‘Yale,’ said Howard. He had always been the repository of their dates, their names, their places. He supposed he was feminine that way. ‘The dinner for Lloyd.’

  ‘Yale. The revenge of white boy soul. Oh, my Lord. I had to leave the room. I was weeping tears. He still barely speaks to me, ’cause of that one night.’

  ‘Lloyd’s a pompous arse.’

  ‘That’s true . . .’ mulled Kiki, twirling the stem of her glass in her hand. ‘But you and I still did not behave ourselves well that evening.’

  Outside a dog howled. Howard was aware of Kiki’s knee in its rough green silk resting against his own. He could not tell yet whether she was similarly aware.

/>   ‘This was worse,’ he said.

  Kiki whistled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, you are not sitting here and telling me it was as bad as Yale. That’s just not even possible.’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, I’m sorry.’

  Here Howard, who had a tuneful voice, began an effective impersonation.

  Kiki held her jaw. Her bosom shook. She was giggling into her bosom, but now her head jerked back and out came her big bellow of a laugh. ‘You are making this shit up.’

  Howard shook his head in denial. He kept singing.

  Kiki wagged her finger at him. ‘No, no, no – I need to see the hand signals. It ain’t the same without all that business.’

  Howard rose from his seat, still singing, and turned to face the couch. He did nothing physical yet; he had first to envisage the moves and then fit them to his own badly coordinated body. He panicked for a moment, not able to grasp the idea and the muscles in the same thought. Suddenly it came together. His body knew what to do. He began with a spin and a click.

  ‘Oh, shut your mouth. I do not believe you! No! No they did not!’

  Kiki fell back into the cushions, everything on her wobbling. Howard upped the tempo and the volume, growing more confident and fancy in his footwork.

  ‘Oh, my gosh. What did you do?’

  ‘Had to leave,’ said Howard quickly, and carried on singing.

  The door of Levi’s basement room opened. ‘Yo! Keep it down, man. Some of us trying to sleep!’

  ‘Sorry!’ whispered Howard. He sat down, picked up his glass and brought it to his mouth, still laughing, hoping to hold her, but at the same moment Kiki stood up, agitated, like a woman reminded of a task she hadn’t completed. She was also still laughing, but not happily, and, as the laughter slowed, it became a kind of groan, and then a wispy sigh, and then nothing. She wiped her eyes.

  ‘Well,’ she said. Howard put his glass down on the table, ready to say something, but she was already at the doorway. She told him there was a clean sheet for the divan to be found in the upstairs closet.

  8

  Levi needed his sleep. He had to get up early in order to pay a call in Boston and be back in school by midday. By eight thirty he was in the kitchen, keys in his pocket. Before leaving, he stopped by the larder, not quite sure what he was looking for. As a child he had accompanied his mother as she paid calls in Boston neighbourhoods, visiting sick or lonely people she knew from the hospital. She would always arrive with food. But Levi had never paid this kind of call before, not as an adult. He looked blankly into the larder. He heard a door open upstairs. He grabbed three packets of Asian noodle soup and a box of rice pilaf, stuffed them in his knapsack and left the house.

  The uniform of the streets comes into its own during the January freeze. While others shivered, Levi was cosy in his sweatshirts and hoods, wrapped up in there with his music. He stood by the bus stop, unconsciously reciting, listening to a tune that really called for a girl to be right in front of him, moving when he moved, fitting her curves into his sculpted crevices, bouncing. But the only female in sight was the stone Virgin Mary behind him in the courtyard of St Peter’s. She was, as ever, missing both her thumbs. Her hands were full of snow. Levi studied her pretty, sorrowful face, familiar to him from so many waits at this bus stop. He always liked to have a look at what she was holding. In late spring she held flower petals, which had rained down from the trees above her. When the weather grew less volatile, people put all kinds of weird stuff in her mutilated hands – little chocolates, photos, crucifixes, a teddy bear, once – or sometimes they tied a silk ribbon round her wrist. Levi had never put anything in her hands. He didn’t feel it was his place to do so, not being a Catholic. Not being an anything.

  The bus approached. Levi did not notice it. At the last minute he stretched out his hand. The bus screeched and stopped a few feet ahead of him. He did his funky limp towards it.

  ‘Hey, man, how about a little more wah-ning next time?’ said the bus guy. He had one of those broad-as-hell Boston accents. Hah-vahd, for Harvard. Made cost sound like cast. He was one of those fat old Boston guys with stains on their shirts that work for the city and liked to call brothers man.

  Levi slotted his four quarters into the box.

  ‘I said how about a little more time there, young man, so I can stop safely?’

  Levi slowly removed one ear of his cans. ‘You talking to me?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Hey, buddy, can we close that door and get this bus moving?’ called somebody from the back.

  ‘Ahlright, ahl – right!’ shouted the bus guy.

  Levi put his cans back on, scowled and walked to the back of the bus.

  ‘Jumped-up little . . .’ began the bus guy, but Levi didn’t hear the rest. He sat down and leaned the side of his head against the cold glass. He silently rooted for a girl who was tearing down the snowy hill to meet the bus at the next stop, her scarf fluttering behind her.

  When the bus reached Wellington Square it connected with its overhead cables and went underground, winding up outside the T-stop that takes you into Boston. Here, in the subway, Levi bought a doughnut and a hot chocolate. He got on his train and switched off his iPod. He opened a book on his lap and held its pages flat with his elbows, leaving both hands free to hold the drink for warmth. This was Levi’s reading time, this half-hour trip into town. He’d read more on the subway then he’d ever read in class. Today’s book was the same one he’d been reading since way before Christmas. Levi was not a fast reader. He read maybe three volumes a year, and only in exceptional circumstances. This was the book about Haiti. He had fifty-one pages left to go. If asked to write a book report, he’d have to say that the main impression he’d gleaned from it so far was that there’s this little country, a country real close to America that you never hear about, where thousands of black people have been enslaved, have struggled and died in the streets for their freedom, have had their eyes gouged out and their testicles burned off, have been macheted and lynched, raped and tortured, oppressed and suppressed and every other kind of pressed . . . and all so some guy can live in the only decent-looking house in the whole country, a big white house on a hill. He couldn’t say if that was the real message of the book – but that’s how it seemed to Levi. These brothers had an obsession with that white house. Papa Doc, Baby Doc. It was like they’d seen white people in the white house for so long that now it seemed reasonable to them that everybody should die so that they got a chance to live in it too. It was pretty much the most depressing book Levi had ever read. It was even more depressing than the last book he got all the way through, which was about who killed Tupac. The experience of reading both books had wounded him. Levi had been raised soft and open, with a liberal susceptibility to the pain of others. While all the Belseys shared something of this trait, in Levi – who knew nothing of history or economics, of philosophy or anthropology, who had no hard ideological shell to protect him – it was particularly pronounced. He was overwhelmed by the evil that men do to each other. That white men do to black. How does this shit happen! Each time he returned to the Haiti book he felt impassioned; he wanted to stop Haitians on the streets of Wellington and make it better for them somehow. And, conversely, he wanted to stop the American traffic, stand in front of the American cars, and demand that somebody do something about this wretched, blood-stained little island a mere hour’s boat trip from Florida. But Levi was also a fair-weather friend when it came to books of this kind. He need only leave the book on Haiti in a forgotten knapsack in his closet for a week, and the whole island and its history grew obscure to him once more. He seemed to know no more about it than he ever had. Haitian Aids patients in Guantánamo, drug barons, institutionalized torture, state-sponsored murder, enslavement, CIA interference, American occupation and corruption. It all became a haze of history to him. He retained only the searing, unwelcome awareness that somewhere, not far from him, a people were suff ering g
reatly.

  Twenty minutes and five pages of impenetrable statistics later, Levi got off at his stop and switched his music back on. At the exit to the T he looked around him. The district was busy. How strange it was to see streets where everybody was black! It was like a homecoming, except he’d never known this home. And yet they all hurried past him as if he were a local – nobody looked at him twice. He asked an old guy by the exit for directions. The man wore an old-fashioned hat and a bow-tie. As soon as he started speaking Levi realized he was going to be of no use whatsoever. Very slowly, the old guy told him to take a right here, walk three blocks, past the blessed Mr Johnson – Beware of them snakes! – and then take a left into the square because the street he was looking for was someplace around there if he was not mistaken. Levi had no idea what the guy was talking about, but he thanked him and took the right. It began to rain. The one thing Levi was not was waterproof. If all this gear got wet, it would be like dragging another boy his own weight around on his back. Three blocks down, under the awning of a pawnshop, Levi stopped a young brother and was directed precisely in language he recognized. He ran diagonally across the square and soon found the street and the house. It was a big square property with twelve windows out front. It looked like it had been sliced in half. The sliced side was raw brick red. Shrubs and garbage grew up against this wall, alongside a burned-out car, turned upside down. Levi walked to the front of the property. Three defunct commercial properties faced him. A locksmith, a butcher and a lawyer had all failed to make a go of it here. Each doorway had multiple bells for the apartments above. Levi checked his piece of paper. 1295, Apartment 6B.