Sibyl Vane

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

Wide interior of a dim Victorian playhouse. A slight young woman in a pale gown stands center stage under hissing gas jets, almost translucent against a moth-eaten blood-red curtain. In the pit below, clerks, shopgirls, and a sailor drowse. High in a private box, a small male silhouette slouches in shadow, watching. — She stepped into the light, and the room changed — a creature of paper and breath, wearing borrowed names like veils. In the shadows of a private box, a young man watched, and felt the very specific thrill of a collector who has stumbled upon an authentic canvas in a junk shop. He had to possess the moment before the moment rotted.

Close shot in a papered greenroom, a slight young actress reaching both hands toward a young man in a flannel shirt whose gaze drifts past her shoulder — She ran to him with both hands outstretched and called him Prince Charming, as if he had ridden in on a white horse rather than a hansom cab. For a few gilded weeks, beauty and feeling sat together like well-mannered guests at the same table, and the world, briefly, seemed to be the kind of place where such a thing was possible.

He found her in a crooked little playhouse on the wrong side of the river, the kind of theatre where the gas jets hiss and the pit smells of oranges and damp wool. The curtain was a moth-eaten velvet the color of dried blood, and the audience — clerks, shopgirls, a sailor with his cap on his knees — seemed half-asleep until she stepped into the light. Then the room changed. She was so slight she looked almost transparent, a creature of paper and breath, yet she carried the whole stage on her collarbones. Romeo's lover, Desdemona, Cordelia — she wore them all like borrowed veils, and through every one you could hear a real heart pretending. To Dorian, slouched in the shadows of a private box, she was not an actress but a proof: beauty had not yet been extinguished by the world. He felt, in that dim auditorium, the very specific thrill of a collector who has stumbled upon an authentic canvas in a junk shop. He had to possess the moment before the moment rotted.

By the following evening he was sitting beside her in a greenroom papered with old playbills, and by the end of the week he was telling two very different men that he intended to marry her. Lord Henry, sprawled in a chair like a bored cat, lifted one eyebrow and murmured that love in a young man was a charming little infirmity the gods had mercifully provided as a counterweight to grey hairs. Basil Hallward looked, instead, genuinely frightened — the frightened of a painter who sees a figure he has been working on suddenly step out of the frame and walk toward a fire. Neither warning took. Dorian was drunk on the discovery of his own capacity to feel, and he mistook the intoxication for the feeling itself. Sibyl, for her part, no longer needed the stage. When he appeared at the wings she ran to him with both hands outstretched and called him by a name that belonged in a children's book — her Prince Charming, the boy in the shining armor, as if he had ridden in on a white horse rather than a hansom cab. For a few gilded weeks, beauty and feeling sat together like well-mannered guests at the same table, and the world, briefly, seemed to be the kind of place where such a thing was possible.

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It could not last, of course. It never does, in the particular religion Dorian had been tutored in by Lord Henry, where every sensation must be tasted at its peak and discarded at the first hint of repetition. The new creed had a beautiful surface — live exquisitely, feel deeply, refuse the gray — but underneath it ran a small, dry river of contempt, and that contempt was already lapping at the foot of the stage. Sibyl, for her part, had done the unforgivable thing: she had begun to live her life off the boards. Real love, it turned out, made real art impossible; a girl with a warm hand in yours cannot convincingly die of a feigned grief on a Tuesday matinee. Dorian felt the first sting of this in the pit of his stomach and called it betrayal. He had loved her, he realized, not as a woman but as a metaphor — a moving footnote to his own aesthetic — and a metaphor that refused to stay metaphorical is, in the end, only a person, and persons are so dreadfully particular. Somewhere in the house, a portrait waited with its secret grin, the varnish still glossy, the rot still safely hidden beneath. But the varnish was beginning, almost imperceptibly, to craze.