On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  ‘But I didn’t imagine you like this at all. You are not a little woman, are you?’

  Going over it later, Kiki could not completely account for her own response to this question. Her gut had its own way of going about things, and she was used to its executive decisions; the feeling of immediate safety some people gave her, and, conversely, the nausea others induced. Maybe something in the shock of the question, as well as the natural warmth of it, and the apparently guileless nature of the intention behind it, impelled her to respond in kind – with the first thought she had.

  ‘Uh-uh. Ain’t nothing small on me. Not a thing. Got bosoms, got back.’

  ‘I see. And you don’t mind it at all?’

  ‘It’s just me – I’m used to it.’

  ‘It looks very well on you. You carry it well.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  It was as if a sudden gust of wind had lifted and propelled this odd little conversation and now, just as suddenly, let it go. Mrs Kipps looked straight ahead, into her garden. Her breathing was shallow and audible in her throat.

  ‘I . . .’ began Kiki, and waited again for some kind of recognition and received none. ‘I guess I wanted to say how sorry I was about all that unnecessary fuss last year – it all got so out of proportion . . . I hope we can all just put it . . .’ said Kiki, and trailed off as she felt Mrs Kipps’s thumb pressing down in the centre of Kiki’s own palm.

  ‘I hope you won’t offend me,’ said Mrs Kipps, her head shaking, ‘by apologizing for things that were no fault of yours.’

  ‘No,’ said Kiki. She meant to continue, but, once again, everything fell away. She just knew she could no longer crouch. She took her feet out from under her and sat down on the wood.

  ‘Yes, you sit down and we can talk properly. Whatever problems our husbands may have, it’s no quarrel of ours.’

  Nothing followed. Kiki felt and saw herself in this unlikely position, sitting on the floor beneath a woman she did not know. She looked out over the garden and sighed stupidly, as if the charm of the scene had only this moment struck her.

  ‘Now, what do you think,’ Mrs Kipps said slowly, ‘of my house?’

  This question, implicit in Kiki’s social dealings with the women of Wellington, was another she had never been asked outright before.

  ‘Well, I think it’s absolutely lovely.’

  This answer seemed to surprise the occupant. She moved forward, lifting her chin from where it rested on her chest.

  ‘Really. I cannot say that I like it so much. It’s so new. There’s nothing in this house except money, jangling. My house in London, Mrs Belsey –’

  ‘Kiki, please.’

  ‘Carlene,’ she replied, pressing a long hand to her own, exposed throat. ‘It’s so full of humanity – I could hear petticoats in the hallway. I miss it so much, already. American houses . . .’ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has ever lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?’

  Kiki instinctively bristled – after a lifetime of bad-mouthing her own country, these past few years she had grown into a new sensitivity. She had to leave the room when Howard’s English friends settled into their armchairs after dinner and began the assault.

  ‘American houses? How do you mean? You mean, you’d rather a house with, like, a history?’

  ‘Oh . . . well, it can be put this way, yes.’

  Kiki was further wounded by the sense she had said something to disappoint, or, worse, something so dull it was not worth replying to.

  ‘But you know, actually this house does have a kind of history, Mrs – Carlene – it’s not a very pretty one, though.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Now this was simply impolite. Mrs Kipps had closed her eyes. The woman was rude. Wasn’t she? Maybe it was a cultural diff erence. Kiki pressed on.

  ‘Yes – there was an older gentleman here, Mr Weingarten – he was a dialysis patient at the hospital where I work, so he got picked up by an ambulance, you know, three or four times a week, and one day they arrived and they found him in the garden – it’s terrible, actually – he was burned to death – apparently he had a lighter in his pocket, in his bathrobe – he was probably trying to light a cigarette – which he should not have been doing – anyway, he went and set fire to himself, and I guess he just couldn’t put it out. It’s pretty awful – I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry.’

  This last was untrue – she was not sorry she had told the story. She had wanted to kick-start this woman somehow.

  ‘Oh, no, my dear,’ said Mrs Kipps, rather impatiently, dismissive of so obvious a ploy to unbalance her. Kiki noticed for the first time the shake in her head also extended to her left hand. ‘I already knew that – the lady next door told my husband.’

  ‘Oh, OK. It’s just so sad. Living alone and all.’

  To this, Mrs Kipps’s face responded at once – it crumpled and distorted like a child’s when given caviar or wine. Her front teeth came forward as the skin on her jaw pulled back. She looked ghastly. Kiki thought for a moment it was a kind of seizure, but then her face healed over. ‘It is so awful to me, that idea,’ Mrs Kipps said passionately.

  Once again she gripped Kiki’s hand, this time with both of her own. The deeply lined black palms reminded Kiki of her own mother’s. The fragility of the grasp – the feeling that one need only release one’s own five fingers from it and this other person’s hand would smash into pieces. Kiki was shamed out of her pique.

  ‘Oh, God, I’d hate to live alone,’ she said, before considering whether this was still true. ‘But you’ll like it here in Wellington – generally, we all take care of each other pretty well. It’s a community-minded kind of a place. Reminds me a lot of parts of Florida that way.’

  ‘But when we drove through town I saw so many poor souls living on the street!’

  Kiki had lived in Wellington long enough not to be able to quite trust people who spoke of injustice in this faux naive manner, as if no one had ever noticed the injustice before.

  ‘Well,’ she said evenly, ‘we’ve certainly got a situation down there – there’s a lot of very recent immigrants too, lot of Haitians, lot of Mexicans, a lot of folk just out there with no place to go. It’s not so bad in the winter when the shelters open up. But, no . . . absolutely, and you know, we really need to thank you for helping Jerome with a place to stay in London – it was so generous of you. His hour of need and everything. I was so sad that everything got polluted by –’

  ‘I love a line from a poem: There is such a shelter in each other. I think it is so fine. Don’t you think it’s a wonderful thing?’

  Kiki was left with her mouth open at being interrupted thus.

  ‘Is it – which poet is it?’

  ‘Oh, I would not actually know that for myself . . . Monty is the intellectual in our family. I have no talent for ideas or memory for names. I read it in a newspaper, that’s all. You’re an intellectual too?’

  And this was possibly the most important question Wellington had never honestly asked Kiki.

  ‘No, actually . . . No, I’m not. I’m really not.’

  ‘Neither am I. But I do love poetry. Everything I cannot say and I never hear said. The bit I cannot touch?’

  Kiki could not tell at first what kind of question this was or whether she was meant to answer it, but a moment’s pause proved it rhetorical.

  ‘I find that bit in poems,’ said Mrs Kipps. ‘I did not read a poem for years and years – I preferred biographies. And then I read one last year. Now I can’t stop!’

  ‘God, that’s great. I just never get a chance to read any more. I used to read a lot of Angelou – do you read her? That’s autobiography, isn’t it? I always found her very . . .’

  Kiki stopped. The same thing that had distracted Mrs Kipps distracted her. Just passing by the gate five white teenage girls, barely dressed, were going by. They had rolled-up tow
els under their arms and wet hair, stuck together in long sopping ropes, like the Medusa. They were all speaking at once.

  ‘There is such a shelter in each other,’ repeated Mrs Kipps, as the noise grew fainter, ‘Montague says poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. He is always saying wonderful things like that.’

  Kiki, who did not think this especially wonderful, stayed quiet.

  ‘And when I told him this line, from the poem –’

  ‘Yes, the poem line.’

  ‘Yes. When I spoke it to him, he said that that was all very well but I should place it on a scale – a scale of judgement – and on the other side of the scale I should place L’enfer, c’est les autres. And then see which had more weight in the world!’ She laughed for some time at this, a sprightly laugh, more youthful than her speaking voice. Kiki smiled helplessly. She did not speak French.

  ‘I’m so glad we’ve met properly,’ said Mrs Kipps, with real fondness.

  Kiki was touched. ‘Oh, that’s very sweet.’

  ‘Really glad. We’ve just met – and look how cosy we are.’

  ‘We’re so happy to have you in Wellington, really,’ said Kiki, abashed. ‘Actually, I came to invite you to a party we’re having tonight. I think my son mentioned it.’

  ‘A party! How lovely. And how kind of you to invite an old lady who you don’t even know from Adam.’

  ‘Honey, if you’re old, I’m old. Jerome’s only two years older than your daughter, isn’t he? Is it Victoria?’

  ‘But you’re not old,’ she admonished. ‘It hasn’t even touched you yet. It will, but it hasn’t yet.’

  ‘I’m fifty-three. I sure feel old.’

  ‘I was forty-five when I had my last child. Praise the Lord for his miracles. No, anybody can see it – you’re a child in your face.’

  Kiki had inclined her head to avoid having to come up with any face with which to meet the praising of the Lord. Now she raised it again.

  ‘Well, come to a children’s party, then.’

  ‘I will, thank you. I will come with my family.’

  ‘That would be wonderful, Mrs Kipps.’

  ‘Oh, please . . . Carlene, please call me Carlene. I feel the pull of an office and paperclips whenever anybody calls me Mrs Kipps. Years ago I used to help Montague in his office – there I was Mrs Kipps. In England, if you will believe me,’ she said, smiling mischievously, ‘they even call me Lady Kipps because of Montague’s achievements . . . proud as I am of Montague, I have to tell you – being called Lady Kipps feels like being dead already. I don’t recommend it.’

  ‘Carlene, I got to be honest with you, honey,’ said Kiki, laughing, ‘I don’t think Howard’s in any danger of a knighthood any time soon. Thanks for the warning, though.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make fun of your husband, dear,’ came the urgent reply; ‘you only make fun of yourself that way.’

  ‘Oh, we make fun of each other,’ said Kiki, still laughing but with the same sorrow she had felt when a hitherto perfectly nice cabbie began to tell her that all the Jews in the first tower had been warned beforehand or that you can’t trust Mexicans not to steal the rug from under your feet or that more roads were built under Stalin . . .

  Kiki moved to stand up.

  ‘Hold on to the arm of the chair, dear . . . Men move with their minds, and women must move with our bodies, whether we like it or not. That’s how God intended it – I have always felt that so strongly. When you’re a larger lady, though, I expect that becomes a little more hard.’

  ‘No, I’m cool, I’m fine – there,’ said Kiki good-humouredly, upright now, and shimmying her hips a little. ‘Actually, I’m pretty flexible. Yoga. And, to be honest, I guess I feel men and women use their minds about equally.’ She brushed the wood dust off her palms.

  ‘Oh, I don’t. No, I don’t. Everything I do I do with my body. Even my soul is made up of raw meat, flesh. Truth is in a face, as much as it is anywhere. We women know that faces are full of meaning, I think. Men have the gift of pretending that’s not true. And this is where their power comes from. Monty hardly knows he has a body at all!’ She laughed and put a hand to Kiki’s face. ‘You have a marvellous face, for example. And the moment I saw you I knew I would like you.’

  The silliness of this made Kiki laugh too. She shook her head at the compliment.

  ‘Well, it looks like we like each other,’ she said. ‘What will the neighbours say?’

  Carlene Kipps raised herself up from her chair. Kiki’s protesting noises couldn’t stop her neighbour walking her to the gate. If Kiki had been in any doubt earlier, she knew now that this woman was unwell. She asked to take Kiki’s arm after only a couple of steps. Kiki felt almost the whole of Carlene’s weight shift on to her, and this weight was nothing at all to bear. Something in Kiki’s heart shifted too, towards this woman. She didn’t seem to say anything that she didn’t mean.

  ‘Those are my bougainvillea – I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don’t know if they will survive. But right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing. And they do it with such style. I grow them in Jamaica – we have a little house there. Yes, I think the garden will be my solution to this house. Don’t you think that’s true?’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer that. They’re both wonderful.’

  Carlene nodded quickly, dismissing the charming nonsense.

  She patted Kiki’s hand soothingly. ‘You must go and organize your party.’

  ‘And you must come.’

  With the same incredulous and yet mollifying look, as if Kiki had asked her to the moon, she nodded again, and turned back towards her house.

  11

  By the time Kiki returned to 83 Langham, her first guest had arrived. It is an unnatural law of such parties that the person whose position on the guest list was originally the least secure is always the first to arrive. Christian von Klepper’s invitation had been added by Howard, removed by Kiki, reinstated by Howard, removed by Kiki and then, at some later point, apparently extended once more in secret by Howard, for here was Christian, leaning into an alcove in the living room, nodding devotedly at his host. From where she stood in the kitchen, Kiki could see only a sliver of both men, but you didn’t need to see much to get the picture. She watched them, unnoticed, as she took off her cardigan and hung it over a chair. Howard was full of beans. Hands in his hair, leaning forward. He was listening – but really listening. It’s amazing, thought Kiki, how attentive he can be when he puts his mind to it. In his efforts to make peace with her, Howard had spent months showering some of this attention on Kiki herself, and she knew all about the warmth it afforded, the flattering bliss of it. Christian, under its influence, looked properly young for once. You could see him permitting himself some partial release from the brittle persona that a visiting lecturer of only twenty-eight must assume if he has ambitions of becoming an assistant professor. Well, good for him. Kiki took a lighter from a kitchen drawer and began to kindle her tealights wherever she found them. This should all have been done already. The quiches had not been heated. And where were the children? An appreciative rumble of Howard’s laughter reached her. And now he and the boy swapped roles – now it was Howard doing the talking and Christian following every syllable like a pilgrim. The younger man looked modestly to the floor, in response, Kiki assumed, to some piece of flattery of her husband’s. Howard was more than generous that way; if flattered he repaid the favour tenfold. When Christian’s face resurfaced Kiki saw it was flushed with pleasure, and a second later this shaded into something more calculated: the recognition, maybe, that the compliment was nothing less than his due. Kiki went to the fridge and took out a very good bottle of champagne. She picked up a plate of bang-bang chicken canapés. She hoped these would serve as replacement for any opening bon mots she might be expected to come up with. Her encounter with Mrs Kipps had left her strangely empty of casual conversation. She couldn’t remember when she’d felt less like having a party t
han at this moment.

  Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people. This one was unpleasant: a black woman in a headwrap, approaching with a bottle in one hand and a plate of food in the other, like a maid in an old movie. The real staff – Monique, and an unnamed friend of hers who was meant to be handing out drinks – were nowhere to be seen. The living room revealed only one other person, Meredith, a fat and pretty Japanese-American girl, constant – you assumed platonic – companion of Christian. She had an extraordinary outfit on and her back to the room, engrossed in reading the spines of Howard’s art books on the opposite wall. Kiki was reminded that, although Howard’s fan club within the university was extremely small, it had an intensity in inverse proportion to its size. Because of the stringency of his theories and his dislike of his colleagues, Howard was nowhere near as successful or as popular or as well paid as his peers in Wellington. He had, instead, a miniature campus cult: Christian was the preacher; Meredith was the congregation. If there were others, Kiki had never met them. There was Smith J. Miller, Howard’s teaching assistant, a sweet-tempered white boy from the Deep South – but Smith was paid for his services by Wellington. Kiki opened the living-room door wide with her heel, wondering again where Monique, who might have thought to wedge the thing open, was hiding. Christian did not yet turn to acknowledge her, but he was already pretending to like Murdoch playing around his ankles. He leaned forward with the clumsy loom of the natural pet-hater and child-fearer, all the time clearly hoping for an intervention before he reached the dog. His elongated, lean body struck Kiki as a comic, human version of Murdoch’s own.

  ‘He bothering you?’

  ‘Oh, no. Mrs Belsey, hello. No, not at all, not really. If anything, I was concerned that he might choke on my laces.’

  ‘Really?’ said Kiki, looking down dubiously.

  ‘No, I mean it’s fine . . . it’s fine.’ Christian’s features abruptly morphed into his pinched attempt at a ‘party-face’. ‘And anyway: happy anniversary! It’s so amazing.’

  ‘Well, thank you so much for coming –’