Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray (19 page)

The style in which it was written was vivid and obscure at once. Its metaphors were as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in color. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy as well as radiant pornography. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the sensual confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as they were of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in Dorian's mind, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie charged with lascivious energy. It was a kind of incurable sickness, the sexual intensity that fired in his loins. As he read, his cock hardened, became all bone, and more than once he had to set the book down, take to his drawer of dirty daguerreotypes, and empty his cock into a glossy cloth.

He had to keep reminding himself that its contents were only words. Words! He said the word,
words
, over and over again in his mind, feeling sanity about to topple out of his grasp. So clear and vivid and cruel words were, and what magic they withheld! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things and to have a sexual rhythm of their own.

Ah! He felt words crawling up and down his spine, tickling in his undershorts. He had to get out of his room, out of his whole house! He must smoke, and imbibe, and laugh, and dance, and, above all, he must fuck. It was decided. He would meet Helen. What good was there in hiding from his inherently bad nature? Either road he chose would be clad in sin. To stalk off into an eternal night, infinite with sexual squanders, was, in a way, less sacrilegious than marrying his sister and bearing a brood of hell-bound offspring. Yes, he would go with Helen tonight. They would eat the finest, bloodiest of chops at the St. James, and then head over to the Brandy Bell, where they would drown themselves in quartern upon quartern of the brown liquor, getting their bellies fat with false courage.

As he dressed for dinner, he watched himself in the mirror—seduced yet again by his beautiful physique. Rosemary, with her astute painter's eye, had been right. He was the living ideal of a young man. He probably need not even exercise to maintain his broad shoulders and flat, rigid stomach. And his face, the face that was so entrancing to everyone whose eyes fell upon it—why, that would never leave him. He wondered if there was a need to make it any better and examined himself from different angles. No, it was rather perfect as it was. He wetted his eyebrows with his spit to smooth them into place and rubbed his strong, smooth chin where a gruff harvest was beginning. He shaved himself in a hurry, nicking his neck in the process. It left not a trace on his skin. The portrait would bleed for him.

He was just about ready to leave, when, staring at himself, he saw someone familiar in his face—and it was not himself. By God, it was Rosemary. Yes, how had he not seen it all along? The resemblance was there in the shape of the eyes, the full lips, the flawless smile.

Oh, well
, he thought.

And this was the last he thought of his love, Rosemary, for some time. She visited his dreams on occasion, but as soon as she drew her dear, succulent mouth from his, her face twisted and scowled, became disgusting. Really she resembled less him and more his other doomed sibling, the portrait.

F
or years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of the yellow book Helen Wotton had vested in him. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.

The hero, the debauched young Alphonse Gris in whom the erotic and stoically philosophical temperaments were so strangely blended, became to Dorian a kind of prefiguring type of himself. The whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. There were some differences, however: For instance, the Frenchman had not fallen in love with and nearly married his half-sister. In that regard, Dorian felt he had lived a less fortunate life than Alphonse, and that the anonymous author had flawed the work by not including such an experience in the Parisian's repertoire of indecency. Another point in which Dorian and Alphonse lacked common ground was, of course, where Dorian lacked it with every other mortal: Alphonse, like all men who do not die young, died a slow death over many agonizing years. He developed a dread of mirrors. The polished metal surfaces, the pure, still water—all that were once his echo of solace and source of contentment became grotesque objects of horror. He became shriveled. His cock malfunctioned. By the end of his story, the only women who would endure him were worn-out whores and thieving gypsies out for a swindle, their crotches fetid with disease.

It was with an almost cruel joy that Dorian read this latter part of the book, and wonder, with a rosy tinge in his ever-young cheeks. What a different ending the book would have had, should Alphonse have lived Dorian's immortal youth! Perhaps the book would never have had to end, with no moral of the story ever dispensed. Dorian would live the life that nature had mangled for Alphonse Gris. His beauty would never leave him, and so neither would women.

His hunts for sexual release became nightly excursions. Helen remained a vital accessory to his crimes, but she partook less and less in the actual events throughout the years. The last relics of fresh-faced beauty fell away from her like wilted petals. She passed 40, then 45. Her thick, lustrous lips were puckered by wrinkles, as were her wise eyes so many shades of an autumn forest. Her wicked smile was all the more wicked with the leftover lines of laughter, but it was no longer seductive. Dorian was often repulsed to think of engaging with her in any fleshy activities. There were moments in the back of hansoms and along the poorly lit corridors of theaters where she silently asked him for romance. Embarrassed for her, he pretended not to read her subtlety.

Lord Henry Wotton got even older and soon sick and sooner, it seemed, dead. Helen inherited the obscene wealth she'd long been dipping into, and she and Dorian traveled Europe. Together they baited, hooked, and reeled in women of all flavors. Unless thoroughly drugged, most of them had interest only in being fucked by Dorian. In these instances, Helen would, as she had years ago in the dim dressing room of Sybil Vane, slump against a wall in quiet voyeurism, to rub herself into a lonely release.

Dorian and Helen spent a good deal of time in London, too, indeed, most of their time. But it was a difficult place. As Dorian maintained the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Rosemary Hall, and many others besides her, evil rumors about his mode of life crept through town and became the chatter of the clubs. But when a woman actually saw him, actually was taken in by his world-engulfing gray eyes, they could not believe anything about his dishonor. He always had the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world, let alone soiled by its underbelly. Men who talked grossly of him became silent when Dorian entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he could have escaped the stain of an age.

Often, on returning home from one of his long hunts for all the women he could get (and he could get any of them), he would creep upstairs to the attic, and stand with a mirror in front of the portrait that Rosemary had painted of him, looking back and forth between the evil, aging face on the canvas and the pure, young face that was his own. The very sharpness of the contrast quickened his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamored of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering which were uglier: the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse, bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs as a man mocks an ape in a zoo.

There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber or in the sordid room of the little, ill-famed tavern near the docks that, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul. In those moments, he would think vaguely of Rosemary. What had become of her? She'd had some moderate success as a painter—that much he knew from social gatherings. But she was a hermit and was seldom seen by anyone. A few weeks after she'd read Helen's letter on her and Dorian's blood bond, she wrote Dorian a note saying only that she was moving away and would no longer be reachable to either him or Helen. She said she would always love him, and hoped to one day learn to love him as a brother, though she did not foresee such a day, and she prayed he would understand and that God would forgive them. She asked that he pray, too.

When he thought of her, of how he had once made up his mind to grow old with her, he thought of all that could have been had fate not been so twisted as his smile in the painting. The pity that came upon him then was so strong that for brief spells he lost all interest in his hedonistic pursuits. He lay in bed for days, reeking of gin and cigarettes, unable to hide from himself if only for a moment of sleep.

But moments such as these were rare. That curiosity about pleasure that Helen had first stirred in him, as they first sat together in Rosemary's garden, seemed to increase with sexual gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad sexual hungers that starved the more he fed them.

Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate, in his relations to society. Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in the settling of which Helen always assisted, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table with its subtle, symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers and embroidered cloths and antique plates of gold and silver.

There were many, especially among the very young attendants, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of scholar who possessed all the grace and distinction and manner of a citizen of the world. Young men frittered away their youth trying to be like him. Many lost their brides-to-be to him. He scarfed down their virginity and then tossed them back to their bitter beaus. He was careful to steadily upgrade his guests with London's finest, and youngest, among whom he would casually blend. If ever the question came up as to how he preserved such a youthful glow, Dorian made mention of his gorgeous, tragic mother and let his eyes well up with tears. Helen never asked a thing about it, and seemed to feel she too, was protected by a mystical youth. Certainly, she was not.

Following in the steps of his hero, Alphonse Gris, Dorian invested in obscure devices that, likely designed for torture purposes, were splendid for sexual entertainment. Helen had started the collection on one of her solitary travels to the East—shipping back an oblong metal contraption as grandly tall as he, in which one could be hung upside down or bent into an array of gravity-defying postures. There were cuffs for one's wrists and ankles (though they were challenging to loosen and even more so to unlock), as well as a ball the size of an apple swinging from one of its poles that was best inserted in one's mouth as a gagging tool. In a condemned shop at the base of the Seine, Dorian acquired a pair of silver clamps that he learned to apply to a woman's nipples, as well a rusted trap for catching vermin, which he had professionally polished and had all the time in the world to figure out how to use. There were several objects he was unsure as to how to use sexually but was intrigued by nonetheless. The mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, for instance, was fascinating and held great sexual promise. The legend read that that women were not allowed to look at it. There were the earthen jars of the Peruvians that contain the shrill cries of birds, the flutes of human bones from Chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found in Peru and give forth a note of singular sweetness.

He added to the collection as frequently as he could, and arranged them in a long latticed room with a gold ceiling and walls of crimson lacquer. Some women started back in fear as soon as he removed their blindfold to reveal the room. Others let him lead them in do as he wished, too drugged or jaded to care. There were a handful of women that enjoyed themselves, at least part of the time, especially when he brought out the silver clamps. These types he kept around for a while, until they wanted more, then, struck by the terrifying thought of his mother's ring sitting in his old Uncle Kelso's house somewhere, he cut them loose for good. It was usually upon such incident that one of his malaises came on where he laid about in discontent for days.

But mostly his was a life brimming with the magnificent realization of sexual indulgences. He fancied himself a kind of hero for embracing what mankind had decried throughout time. Era upon era, men and women had banished their sexual natures, hid them in the lightless basements of their psyches, insistent that they must never be recognized, not even by them. True nature of the erotic senses had never been understood, as Dorian, Helen, and Alphonse well knew, and so such senses had remained savage in the majority of minds. The world had sought to starve sexual thoughts into submission or to kill them. But it had failed.

As Dorian reflected upon man's moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. Civilization had surrendered so much. However old people were when they perished, they died so young in terms of their sexual understanding! There had been mad, willful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in societal ignorance, humans sought to escape. Young people retired to their bed chambers alone, convinced the fear of their bodies was not only well-deserved, but noble. Their passions turned clammy in kempt bed sheets. Vast numbers of women died virgins—and some men, too. Men virgins! That, thought Dorian, easing his own well-milked cock back into his pants, was what was truly upsetting.