On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  ‘I think the worksheet prompted a dialogue,’ began Christian cautiously, awaiting confirmation. ‘But it’s sincerely the way you then take that dialogue and refashion it – that’s the ignition.’

  Howard both smiled and frowned at this. There was something strange about Christian’s English, despite the fact he was apparently an American. It was as if he were being translated as he spoke.

  ‘Worksheet definitely set us off,’ agreed Howard, and received waves of grateful protest from Christian. It was Christian himself who had made these worksheets. Howard always meant to read them more thoroughly but would, this week as ever, end up skimming the pages the morning before the class. They both knew this well.

  ‘Did you get the memo about the faculty meeting being postponed?’ asked Christian.

  Howard assented.

  ‘It’s January tenth, first meeting after Christmas. Will you need me to be there?’ asked Christian.

  Howard doubted this would be necessary.

  ‘Because, I did all that research, re, the limits of political speech on campus. I mean, not that it matters especially . . . I’m sure you won’t need it . . . but I think it’ll be helpful, although we would need to know the content of Professor Kipps’s proposed lectures to be quite certain,’ said Christian and began to pull papers from his satchel. As Christian continued speaking at him, Howard kept an eye out for Victoria. But Christian went on too long; Howard watched with dismay her long-legged coltish stumble out of the door, pressed in on both sides by male friends. Each leg was perfectly wrapped, separated and fetishized in its tube of denim. Her ankles clicked together in those tan leather boots. The last thing he saw was the perfection of her ass – so high, so round – turning a corner; leaving. In twenty years of teaching he had never set eyes on anything like her. The other possibility, of course, was that in fact he had seen many such girls over the years, but it was only this year that he noticed. Either way, he was resigned to it. Two classes ago he had stopped trying not to look at Victoria Kipps. There’s no point in trying to do impossible things.

  Now young Mike came up to Howard, confidently, like a colleague, to ask about an article Howard had mentioned in passing. Freed from the strange bondage of looking at Victoria, Howard gladly directed him to the journal and the year. More people left the room. Howard bent down under his desk to avoid conversation with any other students and pushed his papers back into his satchel. He got the nasty sensation that someone or another was lingering. Lingering always signalled a cry for pastoral care. I was wondering if we could just maybe meet for a coffee some time . . . there’s some issues I’m having that I’d like to discuss . . . Howard grew more intensely involved with the clasps of his bag. Still he sensed lingering. He looked up. That strange ghost girl who never said a word was making a performance of packing away her one notebook and pen. Finally she made it to the doorway and began lingering there, leaving Howard no choice but to squeeze by her.

  ‘Kathy – everything good?’ asked Howard, very loudly.

  ‘Oh! Yes . . . I mean, but I was just . . . Dr Belsey, is it the – the – same room . . . next week?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Howard, and strode through the hallway, down the wheelchair ramp and out of the building.

  ‘Dr Belsey?’

  Outside, in the small octagonal courtyard, it had begun to snow. Great drifting sheets of it divided the day, and with none of the mystique snow has in England: Will it settle? Will it melt? Is it sleet? Is it hail? This was just snow, period, and by tomorrow morning would be knee-deep.

  ‘Dr Belsey? Could I have a word – just for a sec?’

  ‘Victoria, yes,’ he said, and blinked the flakes from his eyelashes. She was too perfect set against this white backdrop. Looking at her made him feel open to ideas, possibilities, allowances, arguments that two minutes earlier he would have rejected. Just now would be a very good moment, for example, for Levi to ask for twenty dollars or for Jack French to ask him to chair a panel on the future of the University. But then – thank the sweet Lord – she turned her head away.

  ‘I’ll catch up with you,’ said Victoria to two young men who were walking backwards in front of her, grinning and packing snowballs in raw, pink hands. Victoria fell into step with Howard. Howard noticed how her hair kept the snow differently than Howard’s own hair. It sat neatly on top of her head like icing.

  ‘I’ve never seen it like this!’ she said gaily as they passed out of the gate and prepared to cross the small road that led to Wellington’s main yard. She had placed her hands in a funny position, in the back pockets of her jeans, her elbows jutting backwards like the stumps of wings. ‘It must have got going while we were in class. Bloody hell. It’s like movie snow!’

  ‘I wonder whether movie snow costs a million dollars a week to clear.’

  ‘Blimey – that much.’

  ‘That much.’

  ‘That’s a shitload.’

  ‘Quite.’

  This, only the second private conversation they’d ever had, was the same as the first: dumb and oddly charged with humour, Vee smiling toothily and Howard unsure if he was being ridiculed or flirted with. She had slept with his son – was that the joke? If so, he couldn’t say he found it too amusing. But he had taken her lead from the start: this unspoken pretence that they had never met before this semester and had no connection other than that of teacher and student. He felt wrong-footed by her. She was unafraid of him. Any other student in his class would be trawling their brains right now for a brilliant sentence, no, they would never have approached him in the first place without some sparkling opener prepared earlier, some tedious little piece of rhetorical flash. How many hours of his life had he spent smiling thinly at these carefully constructed comments, sometimes bred and developed days or even weeks before in the nervous hothoused brains of these ambitious kids? But Vee wasn’t like that. Outside of class she seemed to take pride in being somewhat moronic.

  ‘Umm, look – you know this thing that all the college societies have, this stupid dinner?’ she said, tilting her face upwards to the white-out skies. ‘Each table has to invite three professors – mine’s Emerson Hall, and we’re not too formal, it’s not as poncy as some of the others . . . it’s all right, actually – mixed, women and men – it’s quite chilled. It’s basically just dinner, and there’s usually a speech – a long dull speech. So. Obviously say no if that’s not the sort of thing you do . . . I mean, I don’t know – it’s my first one. Thought I’d ask, though. No harm in asking.’ She stuck her tongue out and ate some snowflakes.

  ‘Oh . . . well – I mean, if you’d like me to go, I will, of course,’ began Howard, turning to her tentatively, but Vee was still eating snow. ‘But . . . are you sure you wouldn’t feel . . . well, obligated to take your father, maybe? I wouldn’t want to step on any toes,’ said Howard rapidly. It was a tribute to the power of the girl’s charm that it didn’t for a moment occur to Howard that he had obligations of his own.

  ‘Oh, God, no. He’s already been asked by about a million different students. Plus I’m a bit stressed that he’ll say Grace at the table. Actually, I know he will, which would be . . . interesting.’

  She was already developing the woozy transatlantic accent of Howard’s own children. It was a shame. He liked that North London voice, touched by the Caribbean and, if he was not mistaken, equally touched by an expensive girls’ school. Now they stopped walking. This was Howard’s turn-off, up the stairs to the library. They stood facing each other, almost the same height thanks to her towering boots. Vee hugged herself and plaintively pulled her lower lip under her large front teeth, the way beautiful girls sometimes pull goofy faces, without any fear that the effects will be permanent. In response Howard put on an extremely serious face.

  ‘My decision would depend very much . . .’

  ‘On what?’ She clapped her snowy mittens together.

  ‘. . . on whether there will be a glee club in attendance.’

  ‘A wh
at? I don’t know . . . I don’t even know what that is.’

  ‘They sing. Young men,’ said Howard, wincing slightly. ‘They sing. Very close harmony singing.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Nobody mentioned it.’

  ‘I can’t go to anything with a glee club. It’s very important. I had an unfortunate episode.’

  Now it was Vee’s turn to wonder if fun was being made of her. As it happened, Howard was serious. She squinted at him and chattered her teeth.

  ‘But you’ll come?’

  ‘If you’re sure you’d like me to.’

  ‘I’m completely sure. It’s just after Christmas, ages away, basically – January tenth.’

  ‘No glee club,’ said Howard as she began to walk away.

  ‘No glee club!’

  It was always the same, Claire’s poetry class, and it was always a pleasure. Each student’s poem was only a slight variation on the poem they had brought in the week before, and all poems were consistently met with Claire’s useful mix of violent affection and genuine insight. So Ron’s poems were always about modern sexual alienation, and Daisy’s poems were always about New York, Chantelle’s were always about the black struggle, and Zora’s were the kind that appear to have been generated by a random word-generating machine. It was Claire’s great gift as a teacher to find something of worth in all these efforts and to speak to their authors as if they were already household names in poetry-loving homes across America. And what a thing it is, at nineteen years old, to be told that a new Daisy poem is a perfect example of the Daisy oeuvre, that it is indeed evidence of a Daisy at the height of her powers, exercising all the traditional, much loved, Daisy strengths! Claire was an excellent teacher. She reminded you how noble it was to write poetry; how miraculous it should feel to communicate what is most intimate to you, and to do so in this stylized way, through rhyme and metre, images and ideas. After each student had read their work and it had been discussed seriously and pertinently, Claire would finish by reading a poem by a great, usually dead poet, and encourage her class to discuss this poem no differently than they had discussed the others. And in this way one learned to imagine continuity between one’s own poetry and the poetry of the world. What a feeling! You walked out of that class if not shoulder to shoulder with Keats and Dickinson and Eliot and the rest, then at least in the same echo chamber, in the same roll-call of history. The transformation was most noticeable on Carl. Three weeks ago he had attended his first class wearing a comic, sceptical slouch. He read his lyrics in a grumpy mumble and seemed angered by the interested appreciation with which they were met. ‘It’s not even a poem,’ he countered. ‘It’s rap.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Claire asked. ‘They two different things,’ Carl had argued, ‘two different art forms. Except rap ain’t no art form. It’s just rap.’ ‘So it can’t be discussed?’ ‘You can discuss it – I ain’t stopping you.’ The first thing Claire did with Carl’s rap that day was show him of what it was made. Iambs, spondees, trochees, anapaests. Passionately Carl denied any knowledge of these arcane arts. He was used to being fêted at the Bus Stop but not in a classroom. Large sections of Carl’s personality had been constructed on the founding principle that classrooms were not for Carl.

  ‘But the grammar of it,’ Claire had explained, ‘is hard-wired in your brain. You’re almost thinking in sonnets already. You don’t need to know it to do it – but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.’ This is the kind of announcement which cannot help but make you feel a little taller the next day when you’re in the Nike store asking your customer if they want to try the same sneaker in a size 11. ‘You’ll write me a sonnet, won’t you?’ Claire had asked Carl sweetly. In the second class she asked him, ‘How about that sonnet, Carl?’ He said, ‘It’s cooking. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.’ Of course he flirted with her; he always did that with teachers, he’d done it all through high school. And Mrs Malcolm flirted right back. In high school Carl had slept with his geography teacher – that was a bad scene. When he looked back on it, he considered that incident the beginning of when things began going very wrong between him and classrooms. But with Claire you got just the right amount of flirting. It wasn’t . . . inappropriate – that was the word. Claire had that special teacher thing he hadn’t felt since he was a really small boy, back in the days before his teachers started worrying that he was going to mug them or rape them: she wanted him to do well. Even though there was nowhere this could go, academically speaking. He wasn’t really a student and she wasn’t really his teacher, and anyway Carl and classrooms did not mix. And yet. She wanted him to do well. And he wanted to do well for her.

  So in this, the fourth session, he went and brought her a sonnet. Just as she said. Fourteen lines with ten syllables (or beats, as Carl could not help but think of them) a line. It wasn’t such a fabulous sonnet. But everybody in the class made a big fuss like he’d just split the atom. Zora said, ‘I think that’s the only truly funny sonnet I’ve ever read.’ Carl was wary. He was still not sure that this whole Wellington thing wasn’t a kind of sick joke being played on him.

  ‘You mean it’s stupid funny?’

  Everybody in the class cried Noooo! Then she, Zora, said, ‘No, no, no – it’s alive. I mean, the form hasn’t restricted you – it always restricts me. I don’t know how you managed that.’ The class enthusiastically agreed with this judgement, and a whole crazy conversation began, which took up most of the hour, about his poem, as if his poem were something real like a statue or a country. During this Carl looked down at his poem every now then and felt a sensation he’d never experienced in a classroom before: pride. He had written his sonnet out sloppily, as he wrote his raps, with a pencil, on scrap paper crumpled and stained. Now he felt this medium was not quite good enough for this new way of writing his message. He resolved to type the damn thing out sometime if he could get access to a keyboard.

  Just as they were packing up to leave, Mrs Malcolm said, ‘Are you serious about this class, Carl?’

  Carl looked around himself cautiously. This was a strange question to ask in front of everybody.

  ‘I mean, do you want to stay in this class? Even if it gets difficult?’

  So that was the deal: they thought he was stupid. These early stages were fine, but he wouldn’t be able to manage the next stage, whatever it was. Why’d they even ask him, then?

  ‘Difficult how?’ he asked edgily.

  ‘I mean, if other people wanted you not to be in this class. Would you fight to be in it? Or would you let me fight for you to be in it? Or your fellow poets here?’

  Carl glowered. ‘I don’t like to be where I’m not welcome.’

  Claire shook her head and waved her hands to disperse that thought.

  ‘I’m not making myself clear. Carl, you want to be in this class, right?’

  Carl was very close to saying that he truly did not give a fuck, but at the last moment he understood that Claire’s eager face wanted something quite different from him.

  ‘Sure. It’s interesting, you know. I feel like I’m . . . you know . . . learning.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad,’ she said and practically smiled her face off. Then she stopped smiling and looked businesslike. ‘Good,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s decided. Good. Then you’re going to stay in this class. Anybody who needs this class,’ she said fervently, and looked from Chantelle to a young woman called Bronwyn who worked at the Wellington Savings Bank, and then to a mathematician boy called Wong from BU, ‘is staying in this class. OK, we’re done here. Zora, can you stay behind?’

  The class filed out, everybody a little curious and jealous of Zora’s special dispensation. Carl, as he left, punched her gently on the shoulder with his fist. Sunshine broke out over Zora. Claire remembered, recognized and pitied the feeling (for it seemed, to her, a long shot on Zora’s part). She smiled to think of herself at the same age.

  ‘Zora – you know about the faculty meeting?’ Claire sat down on the desk and looked up into Zora�
�s eyes. Her mascara had been ineptly applied, lashes welded together.

  ‘Of course,’ said Zora. ‘It’s the big one – it’s been postponed. Howard’s going to come out all guns blazing about Monty Kipps’s lectures. Since no one else seems to have the balls.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Claire, made awkward by the mention of Howard. ‘Oh, that, yes.’ Claire looked away from Zora and out of the window.

  ‘Everybody’s going, for once,’ said Zora. ‘It’s basically got down to a battle for the soul of this university. Howard says it’s the most important meeting Wellington’s had in a long time.’

  This was the case. It would also be the first interdisciplinary faculty meeting since all the mess of last year had come into the open. It was more than a month away, but this morning’s memo had set the scene all too clearly for Claire: that chilly library, the whispers, the eyes – averted and staring – Howard in an armchair avoiding her, Claire’s colleagues enjoying him avoiding her. And this was not to mention the usual tabling of motions, blocked votes, rabid speech-making, complaints, demands, counter-demands. And Jack French directing it all, slowly, very slowly. It didn’t seem to Claire that, in this vital stage of her psychic recovery, she should have to contend with such intense spiritual and mental degradation.

  ‘Yes . . . Now, Zora, you know there are people in the college who don’t approve of our class – I mean they don’t approve of people like Chantelle . . . people like Carl, being a part of our community here at Wellington. It’s going to be on the agenda at that meeting. There’s a general conservative trend sweeping this university right now, and it really, really frightens me. And they don’t want to hear from me. They’ve already decided I’m the communist loony-tune anti-war poetess or whatever they think I am. I think we need a strong advocate for this class from the other side. So we’re not just arguing the same stupid dialectic over and over. And I think a student would be much more appropriate – to make the case. Somebody who has benefited from the experience of learning alongside these people. Someone who could . . . well, attend in my place. Make a barnstorming speech. About something they believed in.’