The Nature of Beauty Theme Analysis

And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of it being taken seriously.

The young man stepped forward cautiously, with one hand up as if to show he meant no harm. He turned the Discman over in her hand and showed her the sticky patch. He lifted his hoodie and the T-shirt beneath it to reveal a well-defined pelvic bone and drew a second Discman from his waistband. ‘This one’s yours.’

‘They’re exactly the same.’

Too quickly, Claire removed her hand from Howard’s body. But Kiki wasn’t looking at Claire; she was looking at Howard. You’re married to someone for thirty years: you know their face like you know your own name.

‘She’s fabulous,’ replied Kiki, only now taking the time to look at her properly. In the centre of the frame there was a tall, naked black woman wearing only a red bandanna and standing in a fantastical white space, surrounded all about by tropical branches and kaleidoscopic fruit and flowers. Four pink birds, one green parrot. Three humming birds. Many brown butterflies. It was painted in a primitive, childlike style, everything flat on the canvas. No perspective, no depth.

‘It’s true that men – they respond to beauty . . . it doesn’t end for them, this . . . this concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world – and that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes . . . but it’s true and . . . I don’t know how else to explain what –’

‘Are you interested in refining what you have?’

‘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.’

For the first time it occurred to Howard that this gorgeous, single nineteen-year-old giving her attention to a 57-year-old married man (albeit with a full head of hair) might have other motives besides pure animal passion. Was he – as Levi would put it – being played?

Zora Belsey’s real talent was not for poetry but persistence.

Kiki looked up. ‘Howard, I love you. But I’m just not interested in watching this second adolescence. I had my adolescence. I can’t go through yours again.’

Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.