On Beauty (29 page)

‘And Victoria?' he said.

‘Hmm? How d'you mean?' inquired Zora innocently, although it was too late for this. A faint growl came into Jerome's mild voice. ‘Well, you told me about the rest of them with such
glee
– aren't you going to tell me about her?'

Zora denied the glee adamantly; Jerome insisted on the glee; a typical sibling argument began, concerning subtleties of tone and phrasing that could neither be objectively proved nor rationally questioned.

‘Believe me,' said Zora stridently, to finish the thing, ‘I don't feel any
glee
in relation to Victoria Kipps. None whatsoever. She's auditing my
class
.
Dad's
class. There're a million freshman classes she could sit in on – she chooses a sophomore seminar. What's her
problem
?'

Jerome smiled.

‘It's
not
funny. I don't even know why she turns up. She's purely decorative.'

Jerome gave his sister a look heavy with the implication that he expected more from her. He'd been laying this look on her since they were children, and now Zora defended herself as she always did, by attacking.

‘I'm sorry, but I don't like her. I can't pretend I like her when I don't. I do not like her. She's just a typical pretty-girl, power-game playing, deeply shallow human being. She tries to hide it by reading one book by
Barthes
or whatever –
all
she does is quote Barthes; it's so tedious – but then the bottom line is, whenever things get sticky for her she just works her
charms
to her advantage. It's disgusting. Oh, my God, and she has this coterie of boys just following her everywhere, which is
fine
– obviously it's pathetic, but whatever you need to make it through the day . . . but don't fuck up the dynamic of the class with stupid questions that go nowhere. You know? And she's vain. Wow, is she vain. You're lucky to be out of that situation.'

Jerome looked pained. He hated hearing anybody bad-mouthed; anyone except Howard, maybe, and even then he preferred to do his own dirty work. Now he folded his muffin wrapper in half and passed it idly between his fingers like a playing card.

‘You don't know her at all. She's not really that vain. She just hasn't settled into her looks. She's still young. She hasn't decided what to do with it yet. It's a powerful thing, you know, to look like that.'

Zora guffawed. ‘Oh, she's decided. She's using it as a force of evil.'

Jerome threw his eyes back in his head but laughed along.

‘You think I'm joking. She's poisonous. She needs to be stopped. Before she destroys somebody else. I'm serious.'

This went too far. Zora sank into her stool a little, realizing.

‘You don't have to say any of that – not for me, anyway,' said Jerome crossly, confusing Zora, who had been expressing nothing but her own feelings. ‘Because . . . I don't . . . I don't love her any more.' With this simplest of sentences all the air seemed to rush from him. ‘That's what I found out this semester. It was hard – I willed myself. I actually thought I'd never get her face out of my system.' Jerome looked down at the table top and then up and directly into his sister's eyes. ‘But I did. I don't love her any more.' This was said with such solemnity and earnestness that Zora wanted to laugh, as they had always laughed in the past at moments like these. But nobody laughed.

‘I'm out,' said Levi and bounced off his stool.

Levi's family turned to him in surprise.

‘I gotta go,' he reiterated.

‘Back to school?' asked Jerome, looking at his own watch.

‘Uh-huh,' said Levi because there was no point in worrying people unnecessarily. He made his farewells, pulling on his Michelin Man coat, thumping first sister and then brother hard between their shoulder blades. He pressed play on his iPod (the earphones of these had never left his ears). He got lucky. It was a beautiful song by the fattest man in rap: a 400-pound, Bronx-born, Hispanic genius. Only twenty-five years old when he died of a coronary, but still very much alive to Levi and millions of kids like Levi. Out of the coffee shop and down the street Levi bounced to the fat man's ingenious boasts, similar in their formality (as Erskine had once tried to explain) to those epic boasts one finds in Milton, say, or in
the
Iliad
. These comparisons meant nothing at all to Levi. His body simply loved this song; he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was dancing down the street, the wind at his back making him as fleet of foot as Gene Kelly. Soon he could see the church steeple and then, as he got a block closer, a flash of the wash-white bed-sheets, knotted to black railings. He wasn't so late. A few of the guys were still unpacking. Felix – who was the ‘leader', or at least the guy who held the purse strings – waved. Levi jogged up to meet him. They knocked fists, clasped hands. Some people's hands are sweaty, most are moist, and then there are a few rare souls like Felix whose hands are as dry and cool as stone. Levi wondered whether it was something to do with his blackness. Felix was blacker than any black man Levi ever met in his life. His skin was like slate. Levi had this idea that he would never say out loud and that he knew didn't make sense, but anyway he had this idea that Felix was like the
essence
of blackness in some way. You looked at Felix and thought:
This
is what it's all about, being
this
different; this is what white people fear and adore and want and dread. He was as purely black as – on the other side of things – those weird Swedish guys with translucent eyelashes are purely white. It was like, if you looked up black in a dictionary . . . It was awesome. And, as if to emphasize his singularity, Felix didn't goof off like the other guys, he didn't joke. He was all business. The only time Levi had seen him laugh was when Levi asked Felix that first Saturday whether he had a job going. It was an African laugh, with the deep, resonant timbre of a gong. Felix was from Angola. The rest were Haitian and Dominican. And there was a Cuban too. And now there was a mixed-race American citizen, much to Felix's surprise and much to Levi's. It had taken a week of persistence to convince Felix he was serious about working with them. But now, looking at the way Felix held Levi's hand and kneaded his back, Levi could tell Felix liked him. People tended to like Levi, and he was thankful for this fact without really knowing whom to be thankful to. With Felix and the guys, the clincher had definitely been that night at the Bus Stop. They just didn't think he'd turn up. No
way
did they think he was going to show. They thought he was fly-by.
But he
did
turn up, and they'd respected him for it. He'd done more than turn up – he had demonstrated how helpful he could be. It was his own articulate English – comparatively speaking – that had got their tape played and convinced the MC to let ten guys on stage at the same time and made sure they were given the crate of beer each act is promised. He was
in
. Being
in
was a weird feeling. These past few days, coming to meet the guys after school, hanging with them, had been an eye-opener for Levi. Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable. He felt a little like Jesus taking a stroll with the lepers.

‘You come back again,' said Felix, nodding. ‘OK'.

‘OK,' said Levi.

‘Saturdays and Sundays you will come. Regular. And Thursdays?'

‘No, man – Saturday and Sunday, yes. But not Thursdays. Just
this
Thursday. I got a free day today – if it's cool.'

Felix nodded again, took a little notepad and a pen out of his pocket and wrote something down.

‘It's cool if you work. It's fucking cool if you work,' he considered, putting his syllabic emphasis in various unnatural places.

‘I'm all about work, Fe.'

‘All about work,' repeated Felix appreciatively. ‘Very good. You'll work other side,' he said, pointing to the opposite corner of the street. ‘We have a new guy. You work with him. Fifteen per cent. Keep your eye to the city. Fucking cops all over. Keep your eye. The stuff is here.'

Levi obediently picked up two bed-sheet sacks and stepped off the sidewalk, but Felix called him back.

‘Take him. Chouchou.'

Felix pushed a young man forward. He was skinny, with shoulders no broader than a girl's; you could rest an egg between each knob of his spine. He had a big natural afro, a small, feathery moustache, and an Adam's apple bigger than his nose. Levi imagined him to be in his mid twenties, maybe as old as twenty-eight. He wore a cheap orange acrylic sweater rolled up to his elbows, despite the chill, and down his right arm there was this knockout
scar, rose-pink against his black skin, beginning in a point and then spreading out down his forearm like the wake of a ship.

‘That's your name?' asked Levi, as they crossed the street. ‘Like a
train
?'

‘What does this mean?'

‘You know, like a
train
, like, choo choo! Train coming through! Like a
train
.'

‘It's Haitian. C-H-O-U-C –'

‘Yeah, yeah – I see . . .' Levi considered the problem. ‘Well, I can't call you that, man. How about just Choo – that works, actually. It works. Levi and Choo.'

‘It's not my name.'

‘No, I get that, man – but it just runs better to my ear – Choo. Levi and Choo. You hear that?'

No answer came.

‘Yeah, it's street. Choo . . .
The
Choo. That's cool. Put it there – no, not there – like this.
That's
the way.'

‘Let's get on with it, shall we?' said Choo, freeing his hand from Levi's and looking both ways down the street. ‘We need to weigh everything down in this wind. I have some stones from the churchyard.'

Such an extended piece of grammatically correct English was not what Levi had been expecting. In silent surprise he helped Choo untie his bundle, releasing a pile of colourful handbags on to the sidewalk. He stood on the sheet to fight the wind, while Choo placed stones on the handles of the bags. Then Levi began to clip his own DVDs to a similarly weighted bed-sheet with clothes-pegs. He tried to make conversation.

‘Bottom line is, Choo, the only thing you got to worry about really is keeping an eye out for the cops and just giving me the holler when you see them. A holler and a hoot. And you got to
see
them before they even there – you got to get that
street
sense so you can
smell
a cop eight blocks away. That takes time, that's an art. But you got to acquire it. That's
street
.'

‘I see.'

‘I lived on these streets all my life, so it's like second nature to me.'

‘Second nature.'

‘But don't worry – you'll pick all this shit up in time.'

‘I'm sure I will. How old are you, Levi?'

‘Nineteen,' said Levi, sensing the older the better. But it didn't seem better. Choo closed his eyes and shook his head, slightly but perceptibly.

Levi laughed nervously. ‘Now, Choo . . . don't look too excited, you know, all at once, now.'

Choo looked Levi straight in his eyes, hoping for fellow feeling. ‘I really fucking
hate
to sell things, you know?' he said, pretty sorrowfully, Levi thought.

‘Choo – you ain't
selling
, man,' said Levi keenly in reply. Now that he understood the problem he was happy – it was so easily solved! It was just a matter of attitude. He said, ‘This ain't like working the counter at CVS! You
hustling
, man. And that's a different thing. That's
street
. To hustle is to be alive – you dead if you don't know how to hustle. And you ain't a brother if you can't hustle. That's what joins us all together – whether we be on Wall Street or on MTV or sitting on a corner with a dime-bag. It's a beautiful thing, man. We hustling!'

This, the most complete version of Levi's personal philosophy that he himself had ever articulated, hung in the air awaiting its appropriate
Amen!

‘I don't know what you are talking about,' said Choo, sighing. ‘Let's get going.'

This disappointed Levi. Even if the other guys didn't fully understand Levi's enthusiasm for what they did, they always smiled and played along, and they had learned a few of the artificial words that Levi liked to apply to their real-life situation.
Hustler
,
Playa
,
Gangsta
,
Pimp
. The reflection of themselves in Levi's eyes was, after all, a more than welcome replacement for their own realities. Who wouldn't rather be a gangsta than a street-hawker? Who wouldn't rather hustle than sell? Who would choose their own lonely, dank rooms over this Technicolor video, this outdoor community that Levi insisted they were all a part of? The Street, the global Street, lined with hustling brothers working
corners from Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town.

Levi tried again: ‘I'm talking about
hustlin'
, man! It's like –'

‘Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Gucci, Fendi, Fendi, Prada, Prada,' called Choo, as he had been instructed. Two middle-aged white women paused by his display, and started to boldly haggle him down. Levi noticed that his colleague's English transformed at once into something simpler, monosyllabic. He noted also how much more comfortable the women were dealing with Choo than they were with Levi. When Levi tried to interject a little speech about the quality of the merchandise, they looked at him strangely, almost affronted. Of course, they never want conversation – Felix had explained that. They're ashamed to be buying from you. It was a hard thing to remember, after the mega-store, where people had taken such pride in their capacity as purchasers. Levi zipped his mouth and watched Choo swiftly collect eighty-five dollars for three bags. That was the other good thing about this business: if people were going to buy, they did it quickly and walked on quickly. Levi congratulated his new friend on his sale.