On Beauty by Zadie Smith Page A

cover the side ofhis vision in which Howard was persisting. It was surely only seconds before Howard recited the only piece of rap he could ever remember, a single line he’d mysteriously retained from the mass of lyrics he heard Levi mutter day after day. ‘ I got the slickest, quickest dick –’ began Howard. Screams of consternation rose up from the rest of his family. ‘ A penis with the IQ of a genius! ’
    â€˜Dat’s it – I’m gone .’
    Levi coolly jogged ahead of them all and tucked himself into the swarm going through the gates into the park. They all laughed, even Jerome, and it did Kiki good to see him laugh. Howard had always been funny. Even when they first met, she had thought of him, covetously, as the kind of father who would be able to make his children laugh. Now she tweaked his elbow affectionately.
    â€˜Something I said?’ asked Howard, satisfied, and released his arms from their folded pose.
    â€˜Well done, baby. Has he got his cell on him?’ asked Kiki.
    â€˜He’s got mine,’ said Jerome. ‘He stole it from my room this morning.’
    As they filed in behind the slow-moving crowd, the park gave off its scent for the Belseys, sap-filled and sweet, heavy with the last of the dying summer. On a humid September night like this the Common was no longer that neat, historic space renowned for its speeches and hangings. It shrugged off its human gardeners and tended once more towards the wild, the natural. The Boston primness Howard associated with these kinds of events could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments – and all this was to the good. Yellow lanterns, the colour of rape seed, hung in the branches of the trees.
    â€˜Gee, that’s nice,’ said Jerome. ‘It’s like the orchestra’s hovering above the water, isn’t it? I mean, the reflection from the lights makes it look like that.’
    â€˜Gee,’ said Howard, looking towards the flood-lit mound beyond the water. ‘Gee gosh. Golly gee. Bo diddley.’
    The orchestra sat on a small stage on the other side of the pond. It was clear to Howard – the only non-myopic member of his family– that every male musician was wearing a tie with a ‘musical notes’ design upon it. The women had this same motif printed on a cummerbund-like sash they wore around their waists. From an enormous banner behind the orchestra, a profile of Mozart’s miserable, pouchy hamster face loomed out at him.
    â€˜Where’s the choir?’ asked Kiki, looking about her.
    â€˜They’re underwater. They come up in like a . . .’ said Howard, miming a man emerging with a flourish from the sea. ‘It’s Mozart in pond. Like Mozart on ice. Fewer fatalities.’
    Kiki laughed lightly, but then her face changed and she held him tightly by his wrist. ‘Hey . . . ah, Howard, baby?’ she said warily, looking across the park. ‘You want good news or bad news?’
    â€˜Hmm?’ said Howard, turning round and finding both kinds of news were approaching from across the green and waving at him: Erskine Jegede and Jack French, the Dean of the Humanities Faculty. Jack French on his long playboy legs in their New England slacks. How old was this man? The question had always troubled Howard. Jack French could be fifty-two. He could just as easily be seventy-nine. You couldn’t ask him and if you didn’t ask him you’d never know. It was a movie-idol face Jack had, cut-glass architecture, angled like a Wyndham Lewis portrait. His sentimental eyebrows made the shape of two separated sides of a steeple, always gently perplexed. He had skin like the kind of dark, aged leather you find on those fellows they dig out, after 900 years, from a peat bog. A thin yet complete covering of grey silk hair hid his