Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  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 loo
se 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.

  CHAPTER XV

  It 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.”