Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray Page 16

  “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.

  Rosemary gave him her hand—a dry, old pigeon of a thing—and he led her up the spiral staircase and down the hall. Her hand squeezed his as they approached the landing below the attic. She wanted some comfort, or some intimacy. Dorian felt nauseous. He shook her loose and felt better at once.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Dorian went up first, a lamp in hand. Rosemary followed closely behind him. She could hear her heart like it was a clock in her brain, wildly ticking with each ascending step. Though Dorian was every bit as beautiful and boyish-looking as she had remembered, more beautiful even than in the dreams of him that had haunted her for decades, he was unrecognizable in character. There was a fearsome scorn in his every word and movement. Rosemary felt that some of the change in him was her fault. If I weren’t his sister, we would have spent all these years in happiness. We would have a flock of pure blond and chestnut children. And maybe even a few hounds.

  Dorian set the lamp down on the floor. The light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange, casting fantastic shadows on the walls. The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish tapestry, a looming curtained picture, an old Italian cassone, and an almost empty bookcase—that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. The whole place was covered in dust, and there was a damp odor of mildew. The only sign of life was contained in a gray mouse that sprinted weakly across the room and then was gone through a hole in the wall. A rising wind rattled a hidden window like a cage.

  “You insist on knowing, Rosemary?” Dorian asked in a low voice.

  “Yes,” she said. My, he really was drawing this all out. Was there some sexual surprise in store for her?

  “I am delighted,” Dorian answered, smiling deviously. “You are the one person in the world who is entitled to know everyt
hing about me. You have had more to do with my life than you think.”

  Rosemary felt herself blushing. She bit her lower lip.

  “Argh!” yelled Dorian, and turned away.

  Was the temptation too much for him, still, after all this time? She couldn’t help but think, when she’d been sitting across from him in the library moments ago, as he was eyeing her with such intensity and throwing back brandy, that he was struggling with blasphemous lust for her. She wondered if he had not taken her up to this room to make forbidden love to her—if the attic setting was a kind of negotiation, following a kind of Helen Wotton logic that if they performed their sin in a secret place, it would be as if it never happened.

  Dorian paced in front of the covered picture and ran his hands through his hair. He seemed tense, as if he could restrain his desire no longer. Rosemary felt she was the only person in the world who could understand him. She knew the desire so well—had lived pinned beneath it every night since she left his house nearly twenty years ago. That last day had stuck in her memory like a shard of glass. Every experience hitherto walked over it and tore open its feet, unable to walk on. It was impossible to recover from it and she remembered everything not as if it were yesterday, but as if it were that very day. She could still feel Helen’s horrific letter trembling in her hands, could still feel Dorian’s seed clung to a coil of hair in her nether region. That clump of him had stayed on her for days until she finally worked up the nerve to cleanse herself. That bath had been the last time she had wakefully touched herself, and there had been no pleasure in it. It was just to remove the seed from her. All nights were torment, loaded with dreams of Dorian. She felt his tongue sliding down her navel, down to her most special part, circling there in deft concentration. Days were almost worse, for the daydreams never took her away from her mind, as the night ones did. But at least the days she had been able to paint her way through. Some days she’d painted herself out of altogether. And when she couldn’t paint, she prayed.

  “So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Rosemary?” challenged Dorian. He set a hand on the cloaked frame.

  Rosemary did not know how to respond. She kept her upper teeth firmly on her lower lip, watching Dorian.

  “Ah, stop biting your lower lip, it is driving me insane!” he cried.

  Rosemary released her lip. Yes, she still had some hold on him—that was evident by his wild reaction.

  “I am sorry,” she said. Thinking about his God question, she replied, “Yes, only God can see the soul. Dorian, everyone knows that.”

  Dorian laughed. His laugh, too, was nothing like the laugh she recalled. It was as if he were badly playing a part, bereft of any human suffering or joy.

  “Draw that curtain back, and you will see my soul,” he said.

  Rosemary looked back between him and the curtain. Was this all part of an elegant seduction?

  “Dorian, what is this about?” she asked.

  “You won’t lift the curtain?” he cried, eyeing her spitefully. “Then I must do it myself,” he said. He tore the purple curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground.

  Rosemary went numb. There was her heart again, winding up in her ears, about to run out. She heard herself cry out in horror as she saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at her.

  “Good heavens!” she cried.

  She seized the lamp, and held it to the picture. In the left hand corner were her own initials in her signature vermilion. But no: It was some foul parody, some ignoble satire. She had never done that—would never do something like that. It was why she refused to paint ugly people! But there was no denying that it was her own picture. She knew it, and she felt as if her blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice.

  The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled Dorian Gray’s marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of their gray loveliness; the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiseled nostrils and white throat.

  “What does this mean?” she cried.

  “Ah,” said Dorian, circling her and the portrait. “Years ago, when I was a boy, you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day, you introduced me to a friend of yours, Helen Wotton. She explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment that even now I don’t know whether I regret or not, I made a wish—perhaps you would call it a prayer. . . .”

  “I remember it!” cried Rosemary. “Oh, how well I remember it! But this is impossible.” She looked around the room, desperate for an answer, however ludicrous. “The room is damp. Mildew has got into the canvas,” she said. “Or the paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them! No, this is impossible!”

  “Ah, what is impossible?” murmured Dorian, coming close to her and taking the lamp from her.

  “There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful!” she cried. “You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of evil.”

  “It is the face of my soul,” said Dorian.

  “Christ! What a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil.”

  “Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Rosemary!” cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.

  “My God! If it is true,” she exclaimed. “And this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!” She whisked the lamp from him and held it once more to the canvas, taking in all its foulness and horror. The leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The man depicted looked much older than thirty-eight.

  Her hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and lay there sputtering. Dorian placed his foot on it and put it out. Rosemary flung herself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried her face in her hands.

  “Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!”

  She sobbed, holding her hands over her face. Then, realizing they were hands that had been puppet-mastered by some satanic force, she began wringing them wildly. Wait, no, she needed them to pray. She steepled them and looked up at Dorian.

  “Pray, Dorian,” she murmured. “Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities,” she began. “Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.”

  Dorian stood by the portrait, his eyes dimmed with tears. That was a good sign, thought Rosemary. Tears! There was a human in there yet—a relic God would recognize as his own and save.

  But Dorian did not want to cooperate.

  “It is too late,” he faltered.

  “It is never too late, Dorian!” cried Rosemary. She got off the chair and onto her knees, facing away from the painting.

  “Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere: Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow?”

  “Those words mean nothing to me now,” said Dorian.

  “Hush! Don’t say that!” Rosemary begged, her hands still clasped heavenward. “You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?”

  Dorian looked at the picture for a while, then giggled, as if it were whispering to him. His eyes veered to the little table and settled upon an object there. He walked past Rosemary to the table and fetched the object. My, he had gotten strange in his lack of old age. Rosemary closed her eyes to focus on praying. She estimated she would pray for another ten or fifteen minutes, and then flee, for her beloved was clearly mad. Go now! she thought—but, no, she had to at least try and save his soul. Its destruction was partly her doing. Perhaps it was all her doing.

  Dorian moved slowly toward h
er and crouched down at her side.

  “Yes,” she cried. “Pray with me!”

  “Rosemary,” he said softly. “Why don’t you get up off the floor? It’s been too many years since I’ve seen you.”

  Rosemary stopped praying. Dorian’s tone had changed. He sounded tranquil and tender. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with that bottomless lust she’d been fantasizing about in such agony all these years. He held her hand and squeezed it. Her thoughts quieted and then muted altogether. She was his again. Black magic, shared blood, decades of sexless seclusion—none of it mattered. As long as he was touching her, everything was exactly as it was meant to be and infinitely good.

  He stood her up and kissed her on the mouth, releasing his tongue into her mouth as soon as his lips touched hers. Oh, yes! Her tongue awakened and seized his. She pulled him closer by his neck, inhaling him. With one hand, he grabbed both of hers and yanked them away. Oh, Dorian Gray still needed to have control over her. She would let him do anything he wanted this time. Just one touch to her and she would explode. She pressed her burning crotch against his thigh and moaned. It was as if she was bursting out of herself, uncorked.

  “Oh, Dorian!” she cried, feeling for his sure-to-be bulging cock with her pelvis. She rubbed around but could not find it. He kissed her again.

  When she first felt the blade on her back, she thought it was his hand moving to unlace her. But the pressure kept going until it was a weeping pain, bolder than anything she’d ever felt.

  “Argh!” she cried, as the knife was yanked out and plunged again into her back. Dorian’s lips were still locking hers, and his tongue mirrored the jabbing of the knife. Thick, hot liquid filled her bodice. She fought to break from his kiss, but he was sucking her with tremendous strength, and she was quickly losing hers. Her hands tingled. A coppery rush of blood lunged up her throat and she gagged. Dorian kept kissing her.

  He removed the knife once more and dug it into the great vein behind her ear.