On Beauty (45 page)

‘Knock, knock,' said Zora pointlessly, as she stuck her head into his office and tapped his door. ‘Busy? I was just passing by, so.'

Carl pushed his cap off his face and looked up from his keyboard, annoyed by the disruption. Certainly, his intention was always to be nice to Zora Belsey, for she had always been nice to him. But she did not make it easy. She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her. She ‘passed by' his office pretty much twice a day, usually with news of her campaign to keep him in Claire Malcolm's poetry class. He hadn't been able to tell her yet that he no longer gave a damn if he stayed in that class or not.

‘Hard at work – as always,' she said and stepped into the room.

He was taken aback by the large amount of cleavage he was confronted with, pushed up and together in a tight white top that could not quite contain the goods it had been entrusted with. There was also a silly shawl-like thing around her shoulders instead of a
coat, and this Zora was forced to keep rearranging, as the left side slipped down her back.

‘Hello,
Professor
Thomas. Thought I'd pay you a visit.'

‘Hey,' said Carl, and instinctively pushed his chair a little further from the door. He took his earphones out. ‘You look kinda different. You heading somewhere? You look very . . . aren't you
cold
?'

‘No, not really – where's Elisha? Lunch?' Carl nodded and looked at his computer screen. He was in the middle of a sentence. Zora sat in Elisha's chair, and moved it round the desk until it was next to Carl's own.

‘You want to get some lunch?' she asked. ‘We could go out. I've got no class till three.'

‘You know . . . It's like I
would
, 'cept I got all this shit to do . . . I might as well just stay and do it . . . and then it'll be done.'

‘Oh,' said Zora. ‘Oh, OK.'

‘No, I mean, another time'd be cool – but I'm having trouble concentrating – I keep on getting a lot of noise from outside. People hollering for an hour. You happen to know what's going on out there?'

Zora stood, went to the window and opened the blind. ‘Some kind of Haitian protest thing,' she said, pulling open the sash. ‘Oh, you can't see it from this angle. They're in the square handing out leaflets. It's a big deal, lots of people. I guess there's a march later.'

‘I can't
see
them, but I can hear them, man, they
loud
. What's their beef anyway?'

‘Minimum wage, getting shit on by everybody all the time – a lot of stuff, I guess.' Zora closed the window and sat down. She leaned into Carl's body to look at his computer. He covered the screen with his hands.

‘Aw, man – don't be doing that – I ain't even spellchecked it, man.'

Zora peeled his fingers from the monitor. ‘
Crossroads
 . . . The Tracy Chapman album?'

‘No,' said Carl, ‘the motif.'

‘Oh, I see,' said Zora in a teasing voice. ‘Pardon me. The
motif
.'

‘You think I can't know a word 'cos you know it, is that
it?' demanded Carl, and immediately regretted it. You couldn't get angry with middle-class people like that – they got upset too quickly.

‘No – I – I mean, no, Carl, I didn't mean it like that.'

‘Oh, man . . . I know you didn't. Calm down, there.' He patted her hand softly. He couldn't know about the electric whoosh that went through her body when he did that. Now she looked at him funny.

‘Why're you looking at me weird like that?'

‘No, I was just . . . I'm so
proud
of you.'

Carl laughed.

‘Seriously. You're an amazing person. Look at what you've achieved, what you're achieving every day. That's so my whole point. You
deserve
to be at this university. You're about fifteen times as brilliant and hard-working as most of these over-privileged assholes.'

‘Man, shut up.'

‘Well, it's true.'

‘What's
true
is that I wouldn't be doing none of this if I hadn't met you. So there you go, if you're gonna start getting all Oprah about the situation.'

‘Now,
you
shut up,' said Zora beaming.

‘Let's
both
shut the hell up,' suggested Carl, and touched his keyboard. His screen, which had gone to sleep in the last few seconds, came back to life. He tried to retrace the thread of his last half-written sentence.

‘I got fifty more signatures on the petition – they're in my bag. Do you want to see them?'

It took Carl a moment to remember what she was talking about. ‘Oh, right . . . that's cool . . . no, don't bother taking them out or nothing . . . that's cool, though. Thank you, Zora. I really appreciate what you're doing for me there.'

Zora said nothing, but audaciously followed through on a plan she had been hatching since before Christmas: the reciprocal hand pat. She touched the top of his hand twice, quickly. He did not scream. He did not run from the room.

‘Seriously, I'm interested,' she said, nodding at the computer. She inched her chair still closer to him. Carl leaned back in his own chair and casually explained to her a little about the image of the crossroads and how frequently rappers use it. Crossroads to represent personal decisions and choices, to represent ‘going straight', to represent the history of hip-hop itself, the split between ‘conscious' lyrics and ‘gangsta'. The more he spoke, the more animated and absorbed he became by his subject.

‘See, I was using it all the time myself – never even thought about why. And then Elisha says to me: '
member that mural in Roxbury, the one with the chair hanging from that arch
? And I'm like, yeah, of course, man, 'cos I live right by there – you know the one I'm talking about?'

‘Vaguely,' said Zora, but she had only been to Roxbury once on a walking tour, during Black History Month back when she was in high school.

‘So you got the crossroads painted there, right? And the snakes and this guy – who obviously I now know is Robert Johnson – I lived my whole life next door to this mural, never knew who the brother was . . .
anyway
: that's Johnson in the picture, sitting at the crossroads waiting to sell his soul to the devil. And that's why (
man
, there's a lot of noise out there).
That's
why there's a
real
chair hanging from the archway in that alley. My whole life I been wondering why someone hung a chair in that alley. It's meant to be Johnson's chair, right?
Sitting at the crossroads
. And that's totally filtered through hip-hop – and that, like, reveals to me the essence of rap. YOU GOTTA PAY YOUR DUES. That's what's written on the top of that mural, right? Near the chair? And that's the first
principle of rap music
. You gotta pay your dues, man. So, it's like . . . I'm tracing that idea through –
man
, those brothers make a lot of noise! I can't hear myself thinking in here!'

‘The top bit of the window is open.'

‘I know, I don't how to close that – these windows don't close right.'

‘Yeah, they do, you just can't do it – there's a knack to it.'

‘Now, what would I do without my Boo, huh?' asked Carl, as
Zora stood up. He smacked her playfully on her big butt. ‘You always got my back. Knows everything 'bout
everything
.'

Zora took her chair to the window and demonstrated the technique.

‘
That's
better,' said Carl. ‘Little peace for a brother when he's working.'

You never know what the hotels are like in your hometown because you never have to stay in them. Howard had been recommending the riverside Barrington to visiting professors for ten years, but, aside from a slight familiarity with the lobby, he really knew nothing about the place. He was about to find out. He was sitting on one of their reproduction Georgian sofas, waiting for her. From a window he could see the river and the ice on the river and the white sky reflected in the ice. He was feeling absolutely nothing. Not even guilt, not even lust. He had been compelled to come here by a series of e-mails she'd sent in the past week, liberally illustrated with the kind of home-made digital camera pornography that every teenage girl now seems so expert at. Her motivations were obscure to him. The day after the dinner she had sent him a livid e-mail, in reply to which he had sent a feeble apology, with no expectation of hearing from her again. But this was not like being married, as it turned out: Victoria forgave him at once. His disappearing act at the dinner seemed only to have intensified her determination to repeat what had happened in London. Howard felt himself too weak to fight anyone who had resolved to have him. He opened all her attachments and passed a lusty week of intense hard-ons at his desk – lurid visions of letting her do what she had asked to do. Crawl under your desk. Open my mouth. Suck it. Suck it. Suck it. How sexy the words are! Howard, who had almost no personal experience of pornography (he had contributed to a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem), was riveted by this modern sex, hard and shiny and fluid-free and violent. It suited his mood. Twenty years ago, maybe, he would have been repelled. Not now. Victoria sent
him images of orifices and apertures that were simply
awaiting
him – with no conversation and no debate and no conflicting personalities and no sense of future trouble. Howard was fifty-seven years old. He had been married for thirty years to a difficult woman. Entering waiting orifices was about as much as he felt he could handle now, in the arena of personal relations. There was nothing left to fight for or rescue. Soon, surely, he would be sent off to find an apartment of his own, to live as so many of the men he knew lived, alone and defiant and always slightly drunk. And so it was all much of a muchness. It was inevitable, what was coming. And here it –
she
– was. The revolving doors spat her out looking predictably lovely, in a high-collared, very yellow coat with big, square buttons made of horn. They barely spoke. Howard went to the desk to get the key.

‘It's a street-facing room, sir,' said the hotel guy, because Howard had pretended he was staying overnight. ‘And it may be a bit noisy today. A march is going through town – if you find it unbearable, please call down to us and we'll see if we can fix you up with something on the other side of the building. Have a nice day.'

They took the elevator up alone and she pressed her hand against his crotch. Room 614. At the door, she pushed him up against the wall and started to kiss him.

‘You're not going to run away again, are you?' she whispered.

‘No . . . wait, let's get inside first,' he said, and slid the credit-card key into its sheath. The green light came on, the door clicked. They found themselves in a musty, afternoon room with the curtains closed. There was a cutting little breeze, and Howard could hear muffled chanting. He went over to find the open window.

‘Leave the curtains closed – I don't want everybody to see the floor show.'

She dropped her yellow coat to the floor. She stood there in all her youthful glory in the dust-flecked light. Corset, stockings, G-string,
garters
– not one dreary detail had been neglected.

‘Oh! Pardon! Excuse me, please!'

A woman in her fifties, a black woman, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, had emerged from the bathroom with a bucket in her
hand. Victoria screamed and sank to the floor to retrieve her coat.

‘Sorry, please,' said the woman. ‘I clean – later, I come –'

‘Didn't you
hear
us come in?' asked Victoria heatedly, rising swiftly.

The woman looked to Howard for mercy.

‘I'm
asking
you a question,' said Victoria, coat draped like a cape over her now. She stepped in front of her quarry.

‘My English – sorry, can you – repeat, please?'

Outside a flurry of whistle-blowing started up.

‘For fuckssake – we were clearly in here – you should have made yourself known.'

‘Sorry, sorry, pardon,' said the woman, and began to back herself out of the room.

‘
No
,' said Victoria. ‘Don't leave – I'm
asking
you a question. Hello? Speak English?'

‘Victoria, please,' said Howard.

‘Excuse me, sorry,' continued the maid; she opened the door and, bowing and nodding, made good her escape. The door eased itself slowly to its click. They were left together in the room.

‘
God
, that makes me angry,' said Victoria. ‘Anyway. Bollocks. Sorry.' She laughed softly and took a step towards Howard. Howard took a step back.

‘I think that's rather spoilt the . . .' he said, as Victoria approached, saying
shhhh
and removing one shoulder of her coat. She pressed her body against his and pushed her thigh gently into his balls. Howard now produced a well-worn phrase that went perfectly with the coat and the corset and the garters and the fluffy-toed mules Victoria had brought along in her schoolbag.