Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray (20 page)

I
t was on the ninth of November, about eleven o'clock, on the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday. He was walking home from Helen's, where he had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy. At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street, a woman passed him in the mist, walking very fast: a little huddle of a human in a gray woolen coat scurrying home. She had a large burlap bag, presumably stocked with groceries, in either hand, balancing herself between their weight. Dorian recognized in himself something he'd long lived without and deemed obsolete: an impulse to help another being.

Dorian walked toward the woman just as a gust of wind sent the hood of her coat flying back. Chestnut hair flecked with silvery strands spilled down her back. Something around Dorian's heart seized up. A strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him. He did and didn't want it to be her. He could save himself some turmoil if it was her. But then there would be the turmoil of never knowing. And a part of him really did want to know. Deeper in that same part of him, he wanted it to be her. He wanted to see what forty years of time on earth had done to her. How had those tremendous blue eyes, always so startled by happiness when they beheld him, become small and dim? How had those lustrous lips, so identical to his own, puckered and chapped? Well, his own portrait could show him that, but nonetheless he wanted the gratification of seeing how she, the girl he'd once dreamed would be his wife, had been twisted by nature, how she had been proven to be his older, oh, his infinitely
older
sister.

The woman felt him coming close behind her and whipped around in fear. She dropped both bags. A sheaf of bright radishes tumbled out onto the pale cobblestone.

“Dorian!” Rosemary gasped.

Suspending the anticipation, Dorian stooped to gather the radishes before looking at her face. Some of the radishes had rolled into the street, which he left well enough alone. He grabbed the intact bushel and held it up to Rosemary, asking silently if she still wanted them. She nodded and opened the bag for him to return them. He snuck a glance at her face—one that was uncensored, while she was still looking down to see if any more items had spilled—and quickly assessed the damage of time. He knew with what shock she would look at him when she saw his face still as smooth and lovely as it had been two decades ago. He wished to conceal the shock in his face when he observed how devastated her looks had become.

“Thank you,” she said, securing both bags at her feet. She lifted the burly head of her coat back onto her head, and covered her mouth with her hand, as if she would be less seen if she went unheard.

It wasn't as terrible as it could have been—her face, that was. Her eyes were still as large and radiantly blue as he remembered them and her complexion was still clear and rosy. But there were some problems. Her nose, once small as a button, was not so buttony anymore. It had not grown, Dorian figured, but it did appear bigger. This was likely owed to the fact that her once full, dollish face had deflated. She was but forty years old, and not completely sagging, but her cheeks were hollow and the high, elegant bones beneath protruded like rods.

Dorian kept an impassive gaze upon her while she fidgeted and tittered lightly as he remembered her often doing in his nerve-racking presence. The effect was hardly charming anymore, if not altogether depressing.

“You live around here now?” he asked.

“Ah,” she said, thinking hard as she bit her lower lip. Oh, what a saddening performance! No, she wasn't even performing. This was just how she was. Inside, she had not changed much. That was what was so tragic about personalities. They carried on their song no matter the deaths in the band.

“No, I'm just visiting a friend,” she answered, finally.

“A dinner party?” he asked, stooping to take the bags. “Let me carry those for you.”

“Oh, no!” she said, but he clutched the bags despite her protests.

“Well, all right,” she said, biting her lip in fury. “Thank you.”

“Lead the way,” he said.

Rosemary hesitated. “Actually, I—I was hoping we may go to your place. You still live in this area, yes? Oh, it's as lovely as ever. I should like to live here myself someday.”

Dorian laughed.

“Rosemary Hall, do you not want me to know where you live?”

Rosemary blushed. Dorian hissed and had to look away. Women really should not allow themselves embarrassment after a certain age. The physical effects were dismal.

“No, that's not it at all!” she cried. “I just, I've been hearing such wonderful things about the way you've decorated your home and would really just like to take a moment to sit and talk with you.”

She looked at the bags in his hands.

“Before the dinner,” she said.

“Quite a deal of preparations for another's dinner,” said Dorian, lifting the bags with a groan to exaggerate their heaviness. Rosemary laughed, tipping her head back to show her long neck that now showed creases. Dorian cringed.

They walked side by side to his house. Upon certain turns, Rosemary feigned to not know the way, but Dorian could feel that she knew the way as well as he did and guessed that she still made solitary visits to his front garden when she was sure he'd be asleep. She had done that at least once when she was a girl, he knew. He had started suddenly from a dream and as if called by the retreating moon, dashed to the window and saw her standing at the gate before the poppies, a lonely dream shadowing her face.

That was before he'd made love to her. Before he'd fallen in love with her. When he remembered this, he felt inside himself for sadness or nostalgia. There was no such feeling, only a grave satisfaction in knowing he had never been meant to marry a girl who would not always be a girl.

“You seemed to recognize me right away,” she said, as they turned onto the path leading to his door.

“In this fog? Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor Square,” he said. “But I had an intuition,” he said, then smiled, a piece of him turning cruel in a flash. “Such is the way with family, they say.”

Rosemary did not react directly to this remark. She appeared to be cold, and hugged herself, her eyes eagerly on the door.

Dorian paused with the latchkey in hand.

“I'd be charmed to have you in, but won't you miss your dinner party?” he said.

Rosemary shook her head. Her teeth chattered. He remembered how, long ago, they'd clumsily grazed his cock. They must be yellowed and jagged by now.

“No, please, let us go in,” she said. “I shan't take much of your time.”

Dorian chuckled.

“All right, then. Not to worry, dear, I have all the time in the world.” He opened the door for her. She went in with some unease, checking to be sure he was following her, but also keeping a distance ahead of him.

“Go along, or the fog will get into the house,” he said. “And mind you don't talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be.”

Dorian set her bags in the foyer and proceeded to the library where there was a bright fire blazing in the large open hearth. The lamps were lit, and an open spirit case stood, with some siphons of soda water and large cut-glass tumblers, on a little marqueterie table. Rosemary sat in a velvet armchair that Dorian had recently acquired in a lightless seaside boutique in Odessa. It came with two matching fuchsia horns that one could place in the centers of the chair for a most indecent insertion. Presently, the horns were under the chair.

“My servants make me quite at home, Rosemary,” said Dorian, pouring them each a glass of brandy and soda water. “I have more than just the Frenchman now, though I keep him around out of pity, and because it can be entertaining to watch an old man try to keep up with those so much younger.”

“Victor is still here?” asked Rosemary. She appeared to be uncomfortable in the chair, seemingly unable to decide whether she would recline fully or stay stiffly on the edge. Dorian sat in the opposing chair, watching her. Her discomfort intensified under his gaze. He drank greedily, and was beginning to get ideas. He thought to bring out the horns, imagining the horror on Rosemary's failing face, the cry from her creased throat.

“Indeed. I never liked him much, but I have nothing to complain about. He is really very devoted to me. I imagine he will be quite sorry to leave me when he dies.”

Rosemary's eyes widened, then blinked to process what he'd said. Dorian smiled and finished his drink in a gulp.

“Have another brandy and soda?” he offered. “Or would you like gin and seltzer? I always take gin and seltzer myself. There is sure to be some in the next room.”

Rosemary raised her glass to show that it was still full.

“Ah, such a lady,” he said. “I never had the pleasure of getting you drunk.”

He went to refill his own glass and took a long sip at the table before turning back to Rosemary. Her brow was furrowed and she was biting her lower lip.

“Oh, the horrors of time” Dorian could not help but utter. He never would have been able to be married to a forty-year-old. Never!

“Dorian,” began Rosemary, sitting forward, her face serious, a welcome respite from all that schoolgirl blushing. “It is entirely for your own sake that I am speaking,” she said. “I should want to know if it were me. Anyhow, I think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said about you in London.”

Dorian polished off his second glass, refilled it, and returned to his seat. He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanor and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

“I don't wish to know anything about what is being said about me,” he said, burping. “I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”

“They must interest you, Dorian,” said Rosemary. “Every gentleman is interested in his good name. You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded—as a man who steals and defiles young women. Of course, you have your position, and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. But position and wealth are not everything. Mind you, I don't believe these rumors at all. At least, I can't believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. As a painter, I know that all too well. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the molding of his hands even. Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvelous untroubled youth, I can't believe anything against you.”

She looked down at her own pruned and spotted hands. “I have seen pictures of you in the paper—at benefits and the like. I've never understood how you've maintained your beauty.” She looked at him desperately, her eyes welling. “But you have, Dorian. You are still so beautiful.” She broke into a sob. “I never married because . . .” She held her hands over her sniffling nose—how had that ever been adorable?

“Because you are some kind of angel,” she went on, pausing to swallow her tears. “My mother's angel,” she finished in a hush.

She dabbed her eyes with her wrist and sat back in the chair. She seemed at last able to relax. It was as Helen had once said: Women were all laced up and corseted, crushed up and imprisoned in themselves—until they started crying. Then they unraveled everywhere, utterly adrift from themselves, only to be spooled back together by the poor fools who loved them. A bitter laugh of mockery broke from Dorian's lips.

“Your mother's angel?” he cried. “
My
mother's angel?”

Rosemary looked at him with disbelief.

“Dorian, why do you mock me? I see your soul plain as day on your face. The tainted voice that comes from that lovely mouth so violently contradicts it.”

Dorian, now well into the first phase of drunkenness, experienced a sense of clarion rage. It rang in his ears, dilated in his eyes. As he continued to drink, the rage grew louder, and clearer. Rosemary Hall would bear the brunt of it.

Slamming his glass on the floor, he leaped up and crossed over to her. She cried out and lurched back in the chair, holding her glass before her face as if it would shield her. He knocked it out of her hands. It rolled down the chair, its brown liquid sponged up by the velvet, then crashed to the floor in a twinkling shatter.

“You think you see my soul!” he cried. “I can show you my soul. Do you really want to see it? The thing you call my soul?”

A twisted flash of pain shot across Rosemary's face. She started up from the chair, turning almost white from fear. She sucked back a sob, looking around her as if considering exit points, then returned her eyes to him. They emitted a spinsterly destitution, and Dorian wanted to strangle her if only to destroy that pathetic look.

“Yes,” she answered meekly, and then in a larger voice. “Yes!”

“Then come with me,” he said, extending a hand for her.

She looked at it with hesitation, then said, “But only God can do that.”

Dorian laughed. There felt to be an orgy of demons in his stomach, tickling him with pronged feathers.

“Only God, Dorian Gray, and Rosemary Hall,” replied Dorian. “Come: It is your own handiwork. Why shouldn't you look at it? You can tell the world all about it afterward, if you choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look at it face-to-face.”

There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. He stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish, insolent manner. He felt a terrible joy at the thought that someone else was to share his secret, and that the woman who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of her life with the hideous memory of what she had done. “
That awful thing, a woman's memory!
” as Helen had once said.