On Beauty (16 page)

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different. Still living at home, still a virgin. And yet heading for her first day as a sophomore. Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in their loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. How successful this had been she couldn't say. Now she stopped to examine herself in the window of
Lorelie's
, a campy fifties hairdressers on the corner of Houghton and Maine. She tried to put herself in her peers' shoes. She asked herself the extremely difficult question:
What would
I
think of me?
She had been gunning for something like ‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful; brave and bold'. She was wearing a long boho skirt in a deep green, a white cotton blouse with an eccentric ruff at the neck, a thick brown suede belt of Kiki's from the days when her mother could still wear belts, a pair of clumpy shoes and a kind of hat. What kind of hat? A
man's hat
, of green felt, that looked like a fedora, a little, but was not one. This was not what she had meant when she left the house. This was not it at all.

Fifteen minutes later Zora peeled it all off again in the women's locker room of Wellington's college pool. This was part of the new Zora Self-Improvement Programme for the fall: wake early, swim,
class, light lunch, class, library, home. She crushed her hat into the locker and pulled her bathing-cap down low over her ears. A naked Chinese woman who looked eighteen from the back now turned and surprised Zora with her crumpled face, in which two little obsidian eyes struggled under the pressure of folded skin from above and below. Her pubic hair was very long and straight and grey, like dead grass.
Imagine being her
, thought Zora vaguely, and the thought puttered along for a few seconds, collapsed, vanished. She pinned her locker key to the black fabric of her own functional costume. She walked the long edge if the pool, her flat feet meeting the ceramics with a wet slap. Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard. From this superior vantage point, a long line of athletes on treadmills was looking down on Zora and all the other people not fit enough for the gym. Up there behind glass the ideal people were exercising; down here the misshapen people were floating around, hoping. Twice a week this dynamic changed when the swim team graced the pool with their magnificence, relegating Zora and everyone else to the practice pool to share lanes with infants and senior citizens. Swim-team people launched themselves from the edge, remade their bodies in the image of darts, and then entered the pool like something the water had been waiting for and gratefully accepted. People like Zora sat carefully down on the gritty tiles, gave the water only their feet and then had a debate with their bodies about committing to the next stage. It was not at all unusual for Zora to get undressed, walk the pool, look at the athletes, sit down, put her toes in, get back up, walk the pool, look at the athletes, get dressed and leave the building. But not today. Today was a new beginning. Zora pushed forward an inch and then launched herself; the water rushed up to her neck like a garment she was wearing. She tread water for a minute and then let herself go under. Blowing water out of her nose, she began to swim slowly, indecorously – never quite able to coordinate her arms and legs but still feeling a partial grace that dry land never offered her. Despite all affectations to the contrary, she was actually racing various
women in this pool (she always made sure to pick women near enough her own age and size; she had a strong sense of fairness), and her will to carry on swimming rose and fell depending on how well she was keeping up with her unwitting competitors. Her goggles began to seep water in from their sides. She yanked them off, left them at one end and tried four lengths without, but it is much harder swimming above the surface than beneath it. You have to carry yourself more. Zora made her way back to the side. She felt around blindly for her goggles and, when this yielded nothing, thrust herself up out of the water to look – they were gone. She lost her temper at once; an unlucky freshman lifeguard was made to kneel down by the lip of the pool and be rudely spoken to as if he himself were the thief. After a while Zora gave up her interrogation and paddled away across the pool, scanning the surface of the water. To her right a boy sped by, kicking water into her eyes. She struggled for the side, swallowing water as she went. She looked at the back of the boy's head – the red band of her own goggles. She clung on to the nearest ladder and waited for him. At the other end he performed a fluid somersault in the water as Zora had often dreamed of doing. He was a black boy in a pair of striking bumblebee shorts, yellow-and-black striped and moulded around him with the same elasticity and definition as his own skin. The curved line of his backside turned like a brand new beach-ball cresting the water. When he straightened out again, he swam the length of the pool without once lifting his head to breathe. He was faster than everybody. He was some kind of a swim-team asshole. Between the dip of his lower back – like a scoop taken out of an ice-cream tub – and the curve of his high, spherical ass, a tattoo was inked. Probably a fraternity thing. But the sun and water rippled and distorted its outline, and, before Zora could figure it out, he was right beside her, his arm resting on the dividing rope, gulping for air.

‘Umm, excuse me?'

‘Huh?'

‘I said
excuse me
– I think you'll find those are my goggles.'

‘I can't hear you, man – hold up a minute.'

He heaved himself up out of the water and rested his elbows on the side. This brought his groin to meet Zora at eye level. For a full ten seconds, as if there were no material there at all, she was presented with the broad line of
it
running along his thigh to the left, making three-dimensional waves of his bumble-bee stripes. Beneath this arresting sight, his balls pulled at the fabric of his shorts, low and heavy and not quite lifted out of the warm water. His tattoo was of the sun – the sun with a face. She felt she had seen it before. Its rays were thick and fanned out like the mane of a lion. The boy took out two earplugs, removed the goggles, left them on the side and returned to Zora's bobbing height.

‘Got plugs in, man – couldn't hear a thing.'

‘I
said
I think you've got my goggles. I put them down for like a second and they went – maybe you picked them up by mistake . . . my goggles?'

The boy was frowning at her. He shook the water from his face. ‘I know you?'

‘What? No – look, can I see those goggles please?'

The boy, still frowning, threw his long arm up and over the side and came back with the goggles.

‘OK, so those are mine. The red strap is mine – the other one broke and I put that red one on myself, so –'

The boy grinned. ‘Well . . . If they yours, I guess you better take 'em.'

He held out his long palm towards her – coloured a rich brown like Kiki's, with all the lines drawn in a still darker shade. The goggles hung from his index finger. Zora moved to snatch them but instead nudged them from his finger. She thrust her hands into the water; they twirled on down to the bottom, the red band spiralling, inanimate, yet dancing. Zora took a shallow asthmatic breath and tried to dive. Halfway down the buoyancy of her own flesh reeled her back up, ass first.

‘You want me to –?' offered the boy and didn't wait for the answer. He curved in on himself and shot down with barely a splash. He resurfaced a moment later with the goggles hanging from his wrist. He dropped them into her hands, another fumbling
move, for it took all the energy Zora had to tread water while simultaneously opening her palms to receive them. Without a word she kicked away to the side, trying her best to climb the ladder with dignity, and left the pool. Except she didn't quite leave. For the time it takes to swim one length she stood by the side of the lifeguard's chair and watched the smiling sun make its way through the water, watched the initial seal-pup flip-flop of the boy's torso, the ploughing and lifting of two dark arms in turbine motion, the grinding muscles of the shoulders, the streamlined legs doing what all human legs could do if only they tried a little harder. For a whole twenty-three seconds the last thing on Zora's mind was herself.

‘I
knew
I knew you – Mozart.'

He was dressed now, the necklines of several T-shirts visible underneath his Red Sox hoodie. His black jeans swamped the white scallop-shell toes of his sneakers. If Zora hadn't just seen him almost as God intended, she would have had no idea of the contours beneath all of this. The only clue was that elegant neck of his, angling the head away from the body like a young animal looking about the world for the first time. He was sitting on the outdoor steps of the gym, legs wide open, earphones on, nodding to the music – Zora almost stood on him.

‘Sorry – if I can just . . .' she murmured, stepping round.

He slipped his earphones down to his neck, bounced up and kept pace with her down the stairs.

‘Hey, hat girl – yo, I'm talking to you – hey, slow down for a second there.'

Zora stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pushed the brim of her stupid hat up, looked into his face and recognized him at last.

‘Mozart,' he repeated, cocking a finger at her. ‘Right? You took my player – my man Levi's sister.'

‘Zora, right.'

‘Carl. Carl Thomas. I
knew
it was you. Levi's sister.'

He stood there nodding and smiling as if together they had just cracked the cure for cancer.

‘So . . . umm, do you see Levi . . . or . . . ?' tried Zora, awkwardly. His well-madeness as a human being made her feel her own bad design. She folded her arms across her chest and then refolded them the other way. Suddenly she couldn't stand in a position that was even half normal. Carl looked over her shoulder towards the frizzled corridor of yew trees that led to the river.

‘You know, I ain't even seen him since that concert – I guess we was meant to hang at one point but . . .' His attention flipped back to her. ‘Which way you walking, you walking down there?'

‘Actually, I'm going the other way, just into the square.'

‘Cool, I can go that way.'

‘Er . . . OK.'

They took a few steps, but here the sidewalk ended. They waited at the traffic lights in silence. Carl had replaced one earphone and was nodding to the beat. Zora looked at her watch, and then around herself in a self-conscious way, assuring the passers-by that she also had no idea what this guy could possibly want with her.

‘You're on the swim team?' said Zora when the lights refused to change.

‘Huh?'

Zora shook her head and pressed her lips together.

‘No, say again.' He took off his earphones once more. ‘What was that?'

‘Nothing – I just – just wondering if you were on the swim team – '

‘Do I
look
like I'm on the swim team?'

Zora's memory of Carl refocused, sharpened. ‘Umm . . . it's not an insult – I'm just saying you're fast.'

Carl brought his shoulders down from where they were hitched, up around his ears, but his face held the tension. ‘I'll be in the A-Team before I'm on the swim team, believe that. Gotta be in college before you on the swim team, as I understand it.'

Two cabs came parallel with each other now, heading in opposite directions. The drivers slowed down to a halt and yelled happily at each other from their open windows while beeping horns started up around them.

‘Those Haitians got a lot of mouth, man. Sound like they screaming all the time. Even when they happy they sound pissed as hell,' reflected Carl. Zora jabbed at the traffic button.

‘You go to a lot of classical –' asked Carl at the same time that Zora said, ‘So you just go to the pool to steal other people's –'

‘Oh, shit –' He laughed loudly, falsely, Zora thought. She pushed her wallet deep into her tote bag and discreetly zipped it up.

‘I'm sorry about your goggles, man. You still mad about that? I didn't think nobody was using them. My man Anthony works in the locker room – he gets me in without a pass – so, you know.'

Zora did not know. The sing-song bird call of the traffic lights started up so that the blind might know when to walk.

‘I was just saying – you go to a lot of those things?' asked Carl as they crossed the street together. ‘Like the Mozart?'

‘Umm . . . I guess not . . . probably not as much as I should. Studying takes up a lot of my time, I guess.'

‘You freshman?'

‘Sophomore. First day.'

‘Wellington?'

Zora nodded. They were approaching the main campus building. He seemed to want to slow her down, to put off the moment when she passed through the gate and out of his world.

‘
Scene
. Educated sister. That's cool, man – that's really – that's an amazing thing right there, that's . . . good for you, you're going the right way about your shit and all that – that's the prize, education. We all gotta keep our eyes on the
prize
if we're gonna rise, right? Wellington. Hmph. That's nice.'