Larkinesque

Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I’ve lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man’s interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?— Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron— those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby’s at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we’re dealt are best. It’s only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers,