The Wish

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

Wide view of a Victorian garden: an older well-dressed man lectures a younger seated listener beneath a leafy canopy, dappled afternoon light, teacup between them. — Lord Henry spoke the way other men eat pastry — slowly, with obvious pleasure, and with full awareness that the sweetness would be billed to the listener.

In the garden, beneath a canopy of leaves that filtered the afternoon into something almost edible, Lord Henry Wotton settled into a chair the way a man does when he intends to spend an unhurried afternoon disassembling someone he finds charming. Dorian Gray listened, half-flattered and half-unnerved, while Henry unwound his philosophy like a long ribbon: that beauty was a kind of genius, perhaps the truest kind, because it required no translation; that youth was the only possession one could never repurchase; that a man who refused his own impulses was slowly poisoning the well he drank from. Henry spoke the way other men eat pastry — slowly, with obvious pleasure, and with full awareness that the sweetness would be billed to the listener. Every sentence was a small key turning in a lock Dorian had not known he carried.

The second afternoon Henry returned. He claimed to have been thinking; in truth he had been arranging, composing little bouquets of heresy to lay at Dorian's feet. He spoke now of the colours denied appetites leave behind, of how a life lived too cautiously becomes a kind of quiet betrayal of the self. Beauty, he suggested, was less a gift than an obligation; to be handsome and to do nothing about it was a cruelty to oneself and to every eye that had bothered to look. He deployed paradox the way a fencer uses a foil: lightly, smiling, drawing a bead of red without seeming to move. Dorian, raised on gentler hymns, felt something inside him lean forward — the way a sunflower leans, the way a candle leans into a draft.

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Alone that evening in the locked studio, Dorian stood before the painted version of himself. The portrait leaned against the wall in its gilt frame, finished — every eyelash, every curl, every shadow laid down once and for all by the artist's hand, never again to be touched by weather or years. The boy inside the canvas was Dorian as he was at that hour: fresh, astonished, untouched. The boy inside the mirror was Dorian as he would soon not be. Between the two, a chasm opened, and at the bottom of it lay every grey hair, every softening of jaw, every faint inscription time would press into his skin. The thought did not arrive as terror; it arrived as a small, exquisite, almost beautiful ache. He envied the portrait. He envied it with the whole weight of his nineteen years.

How strange, he murmured, half to himself and half to the painted boy who could not answer, that I shall grow old, and the picture will not. It will stay exactly this. If only it were the other way round. If only the picture could bear the years, and I remain as I am. Why did I ever let it be made? I would give anything — my soul, if such a thing were mine to give — that it were so. He did not notice that the smile on the painted lips had shifted by a fraction, settling into something a shade too knowing. He did not notice the eyes, which had begun, very faintly, to glitter. He went home in the early dusk humming a tune he half-remembered, already a stranger to himself, and the canvas watched him go with the patience of something that had learned, in a single breath, how to wait.