On Beauty (6 page)

‘Hello, Dr Belsey,' said Mrs Kipps now, as if all of this were a perfectly normal preamble to a nice social call. She took her napkin off her knees and stood up. ‘We've not met, have we?'

She was not all what he'd expected. Howard had for some reason envisioned a younger woman, a trophy. But she was older than Kiki, more like sixty something, and rather rangy. Her hair was set and curled but stray wisps framed her face, and her clothes were not at all formal: a dark purple skirt that reached the floor, and an Indian blouse of loose white cotton with elaborate needlework down its front. Her neck was long (he saw now where Michael had inherited his look of nobility) and deeply creased, and round it was a substantial piece of art deco jewellery with a multifaceted moonstone at its centre, rather than the expected cross. She took both of Howard's hands in her own. At once Howard felt that things were not as absolutely dire as they had appeared to be twenty seconds earlier.

‘Please, not “Doctor”,' he said. ‘I'm – off-duty – it's Howard – please. Hello – I'm
so
sorry about all of –'

Howard looked about him. The person he now assumed to be
Victoria (though the sex was not at all clear from the scalp) was still frozen at the table. Jerome had slid all the way down the wall like a stain and now sat on the floor, looking at his feet.

‘Young people, Howard,' said Mrs Kipps, as if beginning a Caribbean children's story Howard had no interest in hearing, ‘they got their own way of doing things – it's not always our way, but it's a way.' She smiled a purple gummy smile, and shook her head several times with what appeared to be a slight palsy. ‘These two are sensible enough, thank the Lord. Did you know Victoria just turned eighteen? Can you
remember
eighteen? I know I can't, it's like another universe. Now . . . Howard, you staying in a hotel, yes? I would offer you to stay here but –'

Howard confirmed the existence of his hotel and his enthusiasm for leaving for it immediately.

‘That's a good idea. And I think you should take Jerome –'

At this point Jerome put his head in his hands; at the same moment, in a perfect inversion, the young lady at the table sprang out of that exact position, and Howard registered in his peripheral vision a gamine type with spidery-lashed wet eyes, and arms of sinew and bone like a ballet dancer's.

‘Don't worry, Jerome – you can get your things in the morning when Montague is at work. You can write to Victoria when you get home. Let's not have any more scenes today, please.'

‘Can I
just
–' offered the daughter, but stopped when Mrs Kipps closed her eyes and with unsteady fingers touched her own lips.

‘Victoria, go and see on the stew, please. Go.'

Victoria stood up and slammed her chair into the table. As she left the room, Howard watched her nimble shoulder blades from the back, shifting up and down like pistons driving the engine of her sulk.

Mrs Kipps smiled again. ‘We've loved having him, Howard. He's such a good, honest, upright young man. You should be very proud of him, truly.'

All this time she had been holding Howard's hands; now she gave them a final squeeze and released him.

‘I should probably stay and talk to your husband?' mumbled Howard, hearing approaching voices from the garden and praying that this would not be necessary.

‘I don't think that's a good idea, do you?' said Mrs Kipps, turning, and, with a fugitive breeze lifting her skirt a little, she drifted down the patio steps and vanished into the gloom.

We must now jump nine months forward, and back across the Atlantic Ocean. It is the third sultry weekend of August, during which the town of Wellington, Mass, holds an annual outdoor festival for families. Kiki had intended to bring her family, but, by the time she returned from her Saturday-morning yoga class, they had already dispersed, off in search of shade. Outside, the pool stagnated under a shifting layer of maple leaves. Inside, the AC whirred for no one. Only Murdoch was left, she found him flat out in the bedroom, his head on his paws, tongue as dry as chamois leather. Kiki rolled down her leggings and wriggled out of her vest. She threw them across the room into an overflowing wicker basket. She stood naked for a while before her closet, making some astute decisions regarding her weight as it might be placed on an axis against the heat and the distance she would be covering, making her way through Wellington's celebrations alone. On a shelf here she kept a chaotic pile of multipurpose scarves, like something a magician might pull from his pocket. Now she picked out a brown cotton one with a fringe, and wrapped her hair in this. Then an orange square of silk that could be fashioned into a top, tied beneath the shoulder blades. A deep red scarf, of a coarser silk, she wore around her waist as a sarong. She sat on the bed to fiddle with the buckles of her sandals, a hand idly turning over one of Murdoch's ears, from the glossy brown to the crenulated pink and back again. ‘You're with me, baby,' she said, heaving him up and on to her chest, the hot sack of his belly in her hand. Just as she was about to
leave the house, she heard a noise from the living room. She retraced her steps down the hallway and put her head around the door.

‘Hey, Jerome, baby.'

‘Hey.'

Her son sat morosely in the beanbag, in his lap a notebook bound in fraying blue silk. Kiki put Murdoch on the floor and watched his maladroit waddle towards Jerome, where he sat upon the boy's toes.

‘Writing?' she asked.

‘No, dancing,' came the reply.

Kiki let her mouth close and then opened it once more with a mordant puck. Since London he was like this. Sarcastic, secretive, sixteen all over again. And always working away at this diary. He was threatening not to go back to college. Kiki felt that the two of them, mother and son, were now moving steadily in obverse directions: Kiki to forgiveness, Jerome to bitterness. For, though it had taken almost a year, Kiki had begun to release the memory of Howard's mistake. She had had all the usual conversations with friends and with herself; she had measured a nameless, faceless woman in a hotel room next to what she knew of herself; she had weighed one stupid night against a lifetime of love and felt the difference in her heart. If you'd told Kiki a year ago,
Your husband will screw somebody else, you will forgive him, you will stay
, she wouldn't have believed it. You can't say how these things will feel, or how you will respond, until they happen to you. Kiki had drawn upon reserves of forgiveness that she didn't even know she had. But for Jerome, friendless and brooding, it was clear that one week with Victoria Kipps, nine months ago, had expanded in his mind until it now took up all the space in his life. Where Kiki had felt her way instinctively through her problem, Jerome had written his out, words and words and words. Not for the first time, Kiki felt grateful she was not an intellectual. From here she could see the strangely melancholic format of Jerome's text, italics and ellipses everywhere. Slanted sails blowing about on perforated seas.

‘Remember that thing . . .' Kiki said absently, rubbing his exposed
ankle with her own shin. ‘
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
. Who said that again?'

Jerome crossed his eyes like Howard and looked away.

Kiki hunkered down to Jerome's eye level. She put two fingers to his chin and drew his face to hers. ‘You OK, baby?'

‘Mom, please.'

Kiki cupped Jerome's face in her hands. She stared at him, seeking a refracted image of the girl who had caused all this misery, but Jerome had not given his mother any details when it happened and he wasn't going to give her any now. It was a matter of an impossible translation – his mother wanted to know about a girl, but it wasn't
about
a girl or, rather, it wasn't about
just
the girl. Jerome had fallen in love with a family. He felt he couldn't tell his own family this fact; it was easier for them to believe that last year was Jerome's ‘romantic fuck-up' or – more pleasing to the Belsey mentality – his ‘flirtation with Christianity'. How could he explain how pleasurable it had truly been to give himself up to the Kippses? It was a kind of blissful un-selfing; a summer of un-Belsey; he had allowed the Kippses' world and their ways to take him over entirely. He had
liked
to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. He had put up a weak show of fighting these ideas, but only so that he might enjoy all the more the sensation of the family's ridicule – to hear once again how typically liberal, academic and wishy-washy were his own thoughts. When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demand equal rights they haven't earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk further back into the receiving sofa. When Michael argued that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment, Jerome had not given a traditionally hysterical Belsey answer – ‘Try telling that to the Klansman coming at you with a burning cross' – but rather vowed to think less of his identity in the future. One by one the gods of the Belseys toppled.
I'm so full of liberal crap
, Jerome had thought happily, bowed his head low and pressed his knees into one of the little red cushions provided for kneeling in the Kippses' pew of the local church. Long before Victoria arrived in the house, he was already in love. It was only that his general ardour for the family found its correct, specific vessel in Victoria – right age, right gender, and as beautiful as the idea of God. Victoria herself, flush with the social and sexual successes of her first summer abroad without her family, returned home to find a tolerable young man, weighed down by his virginity and satisfyingly unmanned by his desire for her. It seemed petty not to make a gift of her new-found loveliness (she had been what Caribbeans call a
margar
child) to a boy so obviously starved of the same quality. And he'd be gone by August anyway. They spent a week stealing kisses in shaded corners of the house and made love once, extremely badly, under the tree in the Kippses' back garden. Victoria never for a moment considered . . . But of course Jerome did. Considering things too much, all the time, was the definition of who he was.

‘It's not healthy, baby,' said his mother now, smoothing his hair to his scalp, watching it spring back. ‘You're brooding the hell out of this summer. Summer's almost up.'

‘What's your point?' said Jerome, with uncharacteristic rudeness.

‘It's a shame, that's all . . .' said Kiki quietly. ‘Look, shug, I'm going to the festival – why don't you come?'

‘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.