On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

‘That too.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She swivelled round again and now bellyflopped towards him, so her feet were against the bedstead and her head not far from Howard’s knees. She balanced her glass hazardously on top of the duvet and rested her chin on her hands. She examined his face and, after a time, softly smiled, as if something she found there had amused her. Howard followed her eyes with his own as they roved, trying to focus them on the matter at hand.

  ‘My mother died,’ he attempted, quite unable to hit the note he meant to. ‘So I know what you’re going through. I was younger than you when she died. Much younger.’

  ‘That would probably explain it,’ she said. She lost her smile and replaced it with a thoughtful scowl. ‘Why you can’t say I like the tomato.’

  Howard frowned. What game was this? He took out his pocket of tobacco. ‘I – like – the – tomato,’ he said slowly and pulled the Rizlas from the bag. ‘May I?’

  ‘I don’t care. Don’t you want to know what that means?’

  ‘Not terribly. I’ve got other things on my mind.’

  ‘It’s a Wellington thing – it’s a student thing,’ said Victoria rapidly, coming up on her elbows. ‘It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is “The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture”, and Jane Colman’s class is “To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory” – she’s such a silly bitch that woman – and Professor Gilman’s class is “The tomato is structured like an aubergine”, and Professor Kellas’s class is basically “There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself”, and Erskine Jegede’s class is “The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul”. And so on. So you say, ‘What class have you got coming up?’ and the person says ‘Tomatoes 1670–1900.’ Or whatever.’

  Howard sighed. He licked one side of his Rizla.

  ‘Hilarious.’

  ‘But your class – your class is a cult classic. I love your class. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato. That’s why so few people take it – I mean, no offence, it’s a compliment. They can’t handle the rigour of never saying I like the tomato. Because that’s the worst thing you could ever do in your class, right? Because the tomato’s not there to be liked. That’s what I love about your class. It’s properly intellectual. The tomato is just totally revealed as this phoney construction that can’t lead you to some higher truth – nobody’s pretending the tomato will save your life. Or make you happy. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you or be a great example of the human spirit. Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people, for totally selfish reasons of their own, have attached cultural – I should say nutritional – weight to.’ She chuckled sadly. ‘It’s like what you’re always saying: let’s interrogate these terms. What’s so beautiful about this tomato? Who decided on its worth? I find that really challenging – I wanted to tell you before; I’m glad I’ve told you. Everybody’s so scared of you they don’t say anything and I always think Look, he’s just a guy, professors are just people – maybe he’d like to hear that we appreciate this class, you know? Anyway. Definitely your class is the most rigorous, intellectually . . . Everybody knows it, really, and Wellington is such a nerd heaven so that’s basically a serious compliment.’

  Here Howard closed his eyes and pulled his fingers through his hair. ‘Out of interest, what is your father’s class?’

  Victoria considered this a moment. She swigged the rest of her wine down. ‘Tomatoes Save.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Victoria rested her head in her palm and sighed. ‘I can’t believe I told you about the tomatoes. I’m going to be excommunicated when we get back.’

  Howard opened his eyes and lit his cigarette. ‘I won’t tell.’

  They smiled at each other, briefly. Then Victoria seemed to recall where she was and why – her face fell, her lips pulled tight and vibrated with the effort of holding back the water in her eyes. Howard sat back into the sofa. For a few minutes they said nothing. Howard puffed away steadily.

  ‘Kiki,’ she said suddenly. And how awful the corruption when you hear the name of your heart in the mouth of the person you are about to betray her with! ‘Kiki,’ she repeated, ‘your wife. She’s amazing. Looking. She’s like a queen. Imperious-looking.’

  ‘Queen?’

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ said Victoria impatiently, as if Howard were being particularly dense about an obvious truth. ‘Like an African queen.’

  Howard pulled harshly on the tight end of his fag. ‘She wouldn’t thank you for that description, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Beautiful?’

  Howard blew out his smoke. ‘No, African queen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think she finds it patronizing, not to mention factually inaccurate – look, Victoria.’

  ‘Vee. How many times!’

  ‘Vee. I’m going to go now,’ he said, but made no move to stand. ‘I don’t think I can help you tonight. I think you’ve drunk a little too much and you’re under a great emotional –’

  ‘Give us some of that.’ She pointed to his wine and pushed herself forward. Something she had done with her elbows had squeezed her breasts together, and the peaks of both, shiny with some kind of body cream, now began to communicate with Howard independently of their owner.

  ‘Give us some, go on,’ she said.

  In order for her to drink his wine, Howard would have to bring the glass to her lips.

  ‘One sip,’ she said looking over the rim into his eyes. So he tipped it towards her and she drank it tidily. When she drew away from the glass, her mobile, unreasonably large mouth was wet. The ridges in the thick dark lips were like his wife’s – plum-coloured in the creases and almost black elsewhere. What was left of her lipstick had retreated back to the corners, as if this were simply too much lip for it to scale.

  ‘She must be remarkable.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bloody hell, keep up. Your wife. She must be remarkable.’

  ‘Must she?’

  ‘Yeah. Because my mum doesn’t – didn’t – make friends with just anybody,’ said Victoria, her voice catching at this change of tense. ‘She was particular about people. She was hard to get to know. I’ve been thinking that maybe I didn’t get to know her very well . . .’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not –’

  ‘No, shush,’ said Victoria drunkenly and let some tears slip down her face untended, ‘that’s not the point – what I was saying is, she didn’t suffer fools, you know? They had to be special in some way. They had to be real people. Not like you and me. Real, special. So Kiki must be special. Would you say,’ said Victoria, ‘that she was special?’

  Howard dropped his fag in Victoria’s empty glass. Breasts or no breasts, it was time to leave.

  ‘I’d say . . . that she has enabled my existence in the form that it has taken. And that form is special to us, yes.’

  Victoria shook her head ruefully and reached out a hand, which she now placed on his knee.

  ‘There you are, see? You can never just say . . . I like the tomato.’

  ‘I thought we were talking about my wife, not a vegetable.’

  Victoria tapped a correcting finger against his trousers. ‘Fruit, actually.’

  Howard nodded. ‘Fruit.’

  ‘Come on, Dr, give me some more.’

  Howard held his glass up and away. ‘You’ve had enough.’

  ‘Give me some more!’

  She did it. She jumped off the bed and into his lap. His erection was blatant, but first she coolly drank the rest of his wine, pressing down on him as Lolita did on Humbert, as if he were just a chair she happened to sit on. No doubt she had read Lolita. And then her arm went round the back of his neck and Lolita turned into a temptress (maybe she had learned from Mrs Robinson too), lasciviously sucking his ear, an
d then from temptress she moved to affectionate high-school girlfriend, sweetly kissing the corner of his mouth. But what kind of sweetheart was this? He had barely started to return her kiss when she commenced groaning in a disconcertingly enthusiastic manner, and this was followed by a strange fluting business with her tongue, catching Howard off guard. He kept trying to regulate the kiss, to return it back to what he knew of kissing, but she was determined to flicker her tongue in the top of his mouth while keeping a zealous and frankly uncomfortable grip on his balls. Now she began to unbutton his shirt slowly, as if accompanying music were playing, and seemed disappointed not to find a pornographic rug of hair here. She rubbed it conceptually, as if the hair were indeed there, tugging at what little Howard possessed while – could it be? – purring. She pulled him on to the bed. Before he had a chance to consider removing her shirt she had already done the job for him. And then came more of this purring and moaning, although his hands had not yet reached her breasts, and he was presently struggling, at the other end of the bed, to kick one shoe off by means of attacking it with the other. He lifted up slightly, the better to bend his arm back to reach the resistant shoe. On the bed she seemed to be continuing on without him, writhing in a skittish manner and pulling her fingers through her short dreads, as one might muss hair much longer and blonder.

  ‘Oh, Howard,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, one minute,’ said Howard. That’s better. He turned back to her with visions of pulling her up to face him and kissing that wonderful mouth in a more restful manner, then feeling along her torso, her shoulders, her arms, hugging her meaty backside and pulling the whole wonderful creation close to him. But she had already turned over on to her stomach, her head pressed against the bed as if an invisible hand were restraining her with a plan to suffocation, her legs splayed, her shorts off, her hands either side of her buttocks pulling them apart. The tiny rosy knot in the centre presented Howard with a dilemma. Surely she didn’t mean – or did she? Was that the fashion these days? Howard took off his trousers, his erection faded somewhat.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Victoria, once, and then again, and then again. Downstairs Howard could hear the tinkle and murmur of the wake for this girl’s dead mother. Clutching his own forehead he brought himself up behind her. At the slightest touch of him to her, she wailed and seemed to quiver with preorgasmic passion, and yet she was, as Howard discovered at his second attempt, completely dry. In the next moment she had licked her hand and brought it round. She rubbed herself with this fiercely and rubbed Howard. Obediently his erection returned.

  ‘Put it in me,’ said Victoria. ‘Fuck me. Put it in me up to the hilt.’

  Very specific. Tentatively Howard reached forward to touch her breasts. She licked his hand and asked him several times if he liked doing what he was doing, to which he could only answer with the obvious affirmative. She then began to tell him just how much he liked it. Tiring a little of the running commentary, Howard moved his hand lower along her belly. She raised it at once like a cat stretching, she held her stomach in – seemed to hold her breath, in fact – and only when he ceased touching her there did she breathe again. He had the sense that every time he touched an area of her body that area was at once moved out of his reach and then returned to his hand a moment later, restyled.

  ‘Oh, I so need you inside me,’ said Victoria and pushed her backside yet higher in the air. Howard tried to stretch over her, to touch the skin of her face; she moaned and took his fingers in her mouth, as if they were somebody else’s cock, and proceeded to suck them.

  ‘Tell me you want me. Tell me how much you want to fuck me,’ said Victoria.

  ‘I do . . . I . . . you’re so very . . . beautiful,’ whispered Howard, rising up on his heels a little and kissing the only bit of her that was really accessible to him, the small of her back. With a strong hand she pushed him back on to his knees.

  ‘Put it in me,’ she said.

  OK, then. Howard took hold of his cock and began the breach. He had imagined it would be hard to top the moaning that had already occurred, but, as he entered Victoria, she managed it, and Howard, who was not used to so much congratulation so early on in the procedure, feared he might have hurt her and now hesitated as to whether to push deeper.

  ‘Fuck me deeper!’ said Victoria.

  And so Howard pressed deeper three times, offering about half of his ample eight and a half inches, that happy accident of nature which, Kiki once suggested, was the true, primal reason why Howard was not still working as a butcher on the Dalston High Street. But with his fourth push the nerves and the tightness and the wine overpowered him, and he came in a small, shivery way that gave him no great pleasure. He fell forward on to Victoria and waited morosely for those familiar sounds of feminine disappointment.

  ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ said Victoria and convulsed dramatically. ‘Oh, I love it when you fuck me!’

  Howard slid himself out and lay next to her on the bed. Victoria, now completely composed again, rolled over and kissed him maternally on the forehead.

  ‘That was delicious.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Howard.

  ‘I’m on the pill, so.’

  Howard grimaced. He had not even asked.

  ‘Do you want me to blow you? I’d love to taste your cock.’

  Howard sat up and made a grab for his trousers. ‘No, that’s all right, I . . . Jesus Christ.’ He looked at his watch, as if lateness were the problem here. ‘We have to get downstairs . . . I don’t know what just happened. This is insane. You’re my student. You slept with Jerome.’

  Victoria sat up in bed and touched his face. ‘Look, I hate to be cheesy, but it’s true: Jerome’s lovely, but he’s a boy, Howard. I need a man right now.’

  ‘Vee – please,’ said Howard, grabbing her hand by the wrist and passing her the shirt she had been wearing. ‘We need to go downstairs.’

  ‘All right, all right – keep your hair on.’

  Together they got dressed, Howard hurriedly and Victoria languidly, with Howard taking a moment to marvel at the fact that the dream of many weeks – to see this girl naked – was now replaying in dramatic reverse. He’d do absolutely anything to see her with all her clothes on. Finally, after they had both fully dressed, Howard found his boxer shorts tucked in a pillowcase. These he stuffed into his pocket. At the door, Victoria stopped him by putting a hand to his chest. She breathed deeply and encouraged him to do the same. She unlocked the door. Slicked his cowlick down with a finger and straightened his tie.

  ‘Just try not to look like you love tomatoes,’ she said.

  5

  In the early years of the last century, Helen Keller embarked on a lecture tour of New England, enthralling audiences with her life story (and occasionally surprising them with her socialist views). En route she made a stop at Wellington College, and there named a library, planted a tree and found herself the recipient of an honorary degree. Hence the Keller Library: a long, draughty room on the ground floor of the English Department with a green carpet, red walls and too many windows – it is impossible to heat. On one wall hangs a life-sized portrait of Helen dressed in academic cap and gown, sitting in an armchair, her blind eyes demurely directed into her lap. Her companion Annie Sullivan stands behind her, a hand resting tenderly on her friend’s shoulder. It is in this chilly room that all faculty meetings for the Humanities are conducted. Today is January tenth. The first faculty meeting of the year is due to begin in five minutes. As when an especially important vote comes up in the House of Lords, even the most reluctant college members are present this morning, including the octogenarian tenured hermits. It’s a full house, although nobody hurries; they arrive in staggered fashion, scarves stiff and wet with the snow, with salty tide marks on their leather shoes, with handkerchiefs and ostentatious coughs and wheezes. Umbrellas, like dead birds after a shooting party, pile up in the far corner. Professors and research fellows and visiting lecturers gravitate towards the long tables at the back of the room. These are la
id out with pastries wrapped in cellophane and steaming pots of coffee and decaf in their steel industrial tankards. Faculty meetings – especially those chaired by Jack French, as this one will be – have been known to go on for three hours. The other priority is to try to get a chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through. The dream (so rarely achieved!) is that one might then be able to leave both early and unnoticed.

  By the time Howard arrived at the doors of Keller Library all escape-route seating had already been taken. He was forced right up to the front of the room, directly underneath the portrait of Helen and six feet from where Jack French and his assistant Liddy Cantalino were fussing over an ominously large pile of paper, spread out across two empty chairs. Not for the first time at a faculty meeting, Howard wished himself as sensorially deprived as Keller herself. He would give a lot not to have to look at Jane Colman’s pointy little witch face, her mane of parched frizzy blonde hair and the way it thrust out from beneath the kind of beret you find in the ‘Be a European!’ ads in the New Yorker. Ditto the student favourite: 36-year-old, already tenured Jamie Anderson, specialist in Native American history, with his expensive tiny laptop, which he now balanced on the arm of his chair. Most of all Howard wished he could not hear the poisonous mutterings of Professors Burchfield and Fontaine, two portly grandes dames of the History Department, squeezed up together on the only sofa, wrapped in their swathes of curtain fabric, and presently giving Howard the evil eye. Like Matrushka dolls they were almost identical, with Fontaine, the slightly smaller of the two, seeming to have sprung fully formed from the body of Burchfield. They sported utilitarian bowl cuts and bulky plastic eyewear dating back to the early seventies, and yet they remained radiant with the almost sexual allure that comes with having written – albeit fifteen years ago – a handful of books that became set texts in every college in the country. No faddish punctuation for these gals: no colons, no dashes, no subtitles. People still spoke of Burchfield’s Stalin and Fontaine’s Robespierre. And so in the eyes of Burchfield and Fontaine, the Howard Belseys of this world were mere gadflies, flitting from institution to institution with their fashionable nonsense, meaning nothing, amounting to nothing. After ten years of service they had still opposed Howard’s tenure when it was put forward last fall. They would oppose it once more this year. That was their right. And it was also their right, in their capacity as ‘lifers’, to ensure that the spirit and soul of Wellington – of which they considered themselves guardians – was protected from abuse and distortion by men like Howard, whose presence at the institution could only ever, in the greater scheme of things, be temporary. It was to keep Howard in check that they had raised themselves from their desks to attend this meeting. He could not be allowed to make any unsupervised decision regarding this college that they both loved. Now, as the clock struck ten and Jack stood before them all delivering his preliminary coughs, Burchfield and Fontaine seemed to ruffle and settle, like two big hens bedding down upon their eggs. They gave Howard a last, contemptuous glance. Howard, in preparation for the usual verbal roller coaster of Jack’s opening speech, closed his eyes.