Dorian (3 page)

And he would’ve gone on and on and on with this, had it not been for Wotton breaking back in with another impersonation – complete with acoustic air guitar – of Baz doing Bowie doing ‘Andy Warhol’: ‘Baz Hallward looks a scream, standing on his silver screen/ Baz Hallward looks a scream, can’t tell him apart at all, at all, at all…’

In a cubbyhole of a bedroom hidden behind successive dark, membranous curtains, the object of Baz’s affections and his latest muse lay, only just now awoken from the easeful slumber occasioned by weed and wine and mutual wanking. Dorian Gray had been seduced thus far by Baz Hallward but no further. He’d been impressed by his connections and excited by his air of debauchery. He’d been beguiled by Baz’s suggestion that he model for this video installation, but there were limits. So during the videoing it was weed not coke, and afterwards he let Baz take him in hand, not mouth or arse. For now, Dorian was just young enough to want to go to bed with his elders out of a sense of being flattered by their attentions.

Dorian could hear the two older men hooting and railing. He stirred himself and thought he perhaps ought to find out what was going on, but it was difficult to get motivated and so much more pleasant to lie in a tatty pile of sheets and blankets, stretching luxuriously and admiring the way the tendons and arteries writhed in his own wrists, or the way his brown legs – twined in white cotton – assumed this or that angle.

Liquid blobs of light shimmered on the wall above Dorian’s tawny head. On the bedside table stood a half-empty glass of whisky and beside that was a metallic cigarette lighter, and beside that a pair of nail-clippers. Like the rest of the studio the cubbyhole was oak-panelled. Here and there a bronze-effect spotlight had been insensitively inserted. In each of these reflective surfaces Dorian Gray sought himself out, while lip-synching to the narcissistic soundtrack that played in his empty head. ‘She’s a model and she’s looking good, I’d like to take her home it’s understood… She plays hard to get, she smiles from time to time… It only takes a cam-er-a to make her mine…’

The cackling voices of the two older men in the studio kept cutting into Dorian’s reverie. So, in one sinuous movement, he arose from the bed. From the floor Dorian retrieved white boxer shorts; he pulled these on and then sheathed them in white chinos which he fastened with a snake-buckled belt.
Cathode Narcissus
was no contrivance; this young man moved with the performer’s zeal which assumes an observer even when none is present.

Dorian jived a little as he pulled on a T-shirt. He began to pay attention to the voices in the next room. ‘She’s a one’ – Wotton was in raconteur mode – ‘a real card. Have you seen her back room?’

‘Yeah, man.’ Baz was only half-listening.

‘It’s worth scoring off her just to see it – row upon row of new clothes, all still wrapped in polythene. Then electrical goods stacked up – all still in their boxes. She’s even got five fucking Corby trouser presses – showed them to me with great pride.’

‘Yeah, I know, man.’

‘It really proves that drug-dealing should be legal – not, you understand, for any of the usual reasons, but simply because the likes of Honey don’t know how to dispose of such outrageous profits tastefully…’ Baz Hallward may have heard about the trouser presses, but Dorian hadn’t. He wanted to know more, and to see who was describing them. On bare feet he padded towards the drawl, which continued, ‘I don’t suppose you have anything much more than a list to contribute to this shopping expedition, eh Baz? Everything gone on trying to pump yourself up enough to satisfy little
Dorian
, hmm?’

Dorian stood in the doorway, swivel-hipped, blank-faced, floppy-fringed. Wotton fell silent, feeling new eyes upon him. The two older men turned to regard this Adonis, and in their heated appraisal and Dorian’s cool appraisal and their more fervid reappraisal of this and his more frigid reappraisal of that was the most exacting and timeless of triangulations: Baz would always love Dorian, Wotton would never love Dorian but would want him consistently, and Dorian would betray Baz and would never love anyone at all.

‘I’m incredibly sorry’ – Wotton, misinterpreting Dorian’s disgusted pout, began secreting charm – ‘you must have heard that. I didn’t mean anything by it at all – I only said it because I was hoping to upset Baz, I do so like him when he’s aggrieved… I’m sure that if your association persists you’ll soon find out how comical it can be to wind him up until he positively twangs with stress and indignation…’ Wotton advanced, his hand out, his many flopping cuffs adding to the cavalier impression ‘
Ça suffit
. You must be Dorian Gray. I understand
you
know my mother;
I’m
Henry Wotton.’

‘D’you mean Phyllis Hawtree?’ Dorian took the hand, held it for second while exerting no pressure and would’ve let it fall, but it held on to him.

‘Quite so,’ Wotton snapped. ‘She will insist on changing her name every time she changes her bed partner.’

‘I’m sorry…’ Dorian floundered ‘… I’ve just woken up… Um, yeah, I’ve… Your mother –’

‘Warned you against me in no uncertain terms, told you of profligacy, drug addiction, sodomy, and even more exotic vices? Am I right? Of course I am.’ Wotton, still retaining Dorian’s hand, led him to the centre of the room and drew him round so that they faced each other, like dancers frozen in a minuet.

Baz smiled at this exchange in a twisted way, while Dorian summoned himself to play his part. ‘No no, she said you were a brilliant –’

‘Mistake? I daresay I am, but we weren’t talking of me, we were discussing you, your hopes, fears and most intimate, most quavering desires. Tell them to me. Now. All of them. But make it snappy!’

‘Wotton –’ Baz began a teeny admonition.

‘ “Wooot-ton,” he cries, like a fucking maiden aunt with a maidenhead the size of Maidenhead! But I mean it! I want to know your intentions now you’ve been exiled from the groves of academe. Your willingness to associate with my philanthropic mother suggests that you’re well on your way to becoming a man of the people,
Mister
Gray.’ He let Dorian’s hand fall as if the very idea were contaminating. ‘Or have I got it wrong, do you intend devoting yourself to Baz’s bizarre art fetishism? He’s been showing me
Cathode Narcissus
.’

‘Isn’t it fantastic –’

‘Fantastic, absolutely. Quite fantastic that any medium – let alone one as shallow and transparent as Baz’s – should be allowed to traduce
your
beauty.’

‘I dunno.’ Dorian moved off, gifting the two older men a view of his feral prowl. ‘I try not to be hung up on the looks thing –’

‘Hung up? “
Looks thing
”? I reel with the impact of these heresies.’ And, as if choreographing such a reel, Wotton pivoted, stooped, yanked up his Scotch bottle from the floor, uncorked it with a ‘plop’, hoisted it to his mouth, drained it, gasped, lit a cigarette, then continued, ‘You should remember,
Mister
Gray, a nude body requires no explanation, unlike a naked intellect.’

Dorian shrugged, unimpressed. ‘People are always coming on to me about acting or modelling or whatever. But I think it’d be chronically dull. You may think your mother’s ridiculous, but there’s nothing funny about the Youth Homeless Project she’s fundraising for.’

‘There’s certainly nothing funny about
youth
’ – Wotton smiled, replete, for he loved a good feed line – ‘a
youth
is the one thing worth hanging on to.’

‘It’s not much, but I feel I’m doing something. I go into this place in Soho three afternoons a week and talk to the guys there about art. It’s as good a use as any for an art history degree, and I get to meet some amazing characters… Even if I’m just turning them on to a different way of seeing things, surely that’s worthwhile?’

But Wotton wasn’t thinking of value judgements – he was still feeding. ‘Art for the underdog, eh? Thrown like a titbit from your high table. Pity they can’t jump up enough to reach it –’

‘Look, Wotton,’ blurted Baz, who’d been agitating to get in, ‘d’you wanna sit on the terrace and have a coffee with Dorian, or what?’

‘Terrace? Coffee? We’re not in fucking
Naples
, y’know –’

‘I know. What I’m trying to say is I want to get on with the editing and sequencing, Dorian’s moving into a new pad and this installation is the centrepiece for it, right? Now I don’t object to you two rapping but it’d be cool if you gave me some space…’ And as if responding to the doggy way Wotton and Dorian were sniffing around each other, Baz Hallward began to shoo them out of the studio. ‘C’mon – scat! I’ll bring you some coffee out. I’ll come to Honey’s with you in a bit, Wotton; for now, keep the client entertained.’

Outside in the garden, Wotton took Dorian’s arm. He could do this – casually take someone’s arm. It was odd that such a caustic character should have such an easy physicality – but no odder than the garden itself, for here, as in the street, the dense and overgrown foliage was oppressively, queerly diverse. The presence of so many different plants and flowers from so many different regions of the world would in and of itself have been disorienting, but since they were all simultaneously in flower and in fruit, the effect was deranging.

Not that Dorian Gray noticed; he allowed Wotton to lead him by the arm into this upsetting thicket. They paused in front of a carnation and Wotton pointed out the peculiar green shade of the flowers. ‘My mother cultivated plants before she moved on to humanity,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not altogether sure which is the higher life form.’ With a flourish he lit yet another cigarette and blew brown scrolls of smoke among the green leaves and brilliant blossoms. In the mid-distance traffic rumbled, while at their feet insects pulsed and chafed and buzzed. ‘You see that man?’ Wotton snapped after a while.

‘Sorry?’

‘There…’ His naked arm – cuffs still flapping – hailed the sky overhead, and the tip of his fag pinpointed a window five storeys up in a block of flats next to the garden. ‘You see the jiggling man?’

‘He’s more swaying back and forth like a metronome,’ Dorian corrected him. And it was a better description of the odd sight, this ordinary man in a V-neck sweater and an open-neck shirt, hands stuck in his pockets, rocking sideways, from foot to foot.

‘He does it all day,’ Wotton continued, ‘and all night… and in the early morning. I once came out here at five-thirty a.m. just to make sure he hadn’t knocked off. I’m convinced that it’s he who’s really meting out the minutes. He’ll probably cease when the apocalypse begins. I call him the jiggling man, and I suggest that if you want to dub someone “metronome man” you find your own fucking loony!’

‘Actually,’ Dorian said, ‘that’s not something I want –’

‘Ah, exactly, but what is it that you
do
want?’ Wotton rounded on him. ‘D’you know? Do any of us? I’ve a terribly fey friend who swears that he isn’t really a faggot at all, it’s just that he has these vivid dreams of being buggered – which, as we all know, is perfectly normal, even for the most red-blooded of heterosexuals – and when he awakes he finds it terribly hard to shake them off. Now what,
Mister
Gray, d’you say to that?’

It was unclear whether Dorian understood Wotton at all, or comprehended him only too well. ‘I’m happy enough…’ he replied. ‘I’ve only –’

‘Only what?’ This was another of Wotton’s myriad techniques of seduction, the continual interruption as a means of making up another’s mind. ‘Only spent the one white night with poor, washed-up Baz, who’s not so much hip as a hip-fucking-replacement? I congratulate you. Did he seduce you with potions and rub unguents on you?’

‘We smoked a bit of grass… I’m not sure about hard –’

‘Hard what? Hard talk? Hard cocks? Hard labour? Hard drugs? Hardly anything? You should remember, my young friend, if you don’t know what you want to do, at least do something. There’s no other cure for indecisiveness.’

‘Henry,’ Dorian demurred, ‘look, we’ve only just met, I don’t know why it is you’re being so intense… Actually, that’s what your mother said about you, that you’re a brilliant talker. But I don’t want to be cured of anything, any more than I’m obsessed by looks – least of all my own – they’re such a superficial thing.’

‘You say that Dorian, you say that, but we are in an age when appearances matter more and more. Only the shallowest of people won’t judge by them.’

There was a terrace, of sorts, by the door to the studio – if you call twelve bird-shat-upon Portland paving slabs a terrace, which in London most do. This Wotton and Dorian now regained, still arm in arm, and both of them felt as if the interlude in the bijou jungle had been significant, although in Wotton’s case this was partly because it was the longest walk he had taken in several weeks.

It could have been a Neapolitan terrace, because there was a small, round, metal table and two folding metal chairs. Baz had managed to assemble a tray of coffee, complete with matching white china cups and saucers, sugar bowl, cream jug. The whole ensemble was ridiculously elegant and bright in the dull, oppressive afternoon. They scraped their seats to sit, and Wotton was mother, while Dorian became his vain daughter, twirling a teaspoon between his fingers, so that he might admire the way his face ballooned then hollowed, ballooned then hollowed. ‘I’ve no idea what I’m going to do,’ he said after a few slurps. ‘I’ve come down from Oxford with an indifferent degree and too much money – hardly a recipe for success.’

‘
Au contraire
,’ said Wotton, ‘if you’ve got it – and you have it all – you must use it, and you must use it all. Before this jaded century is utterly exhausted, at least one individual should’ve pleasured it thoroughly. I’m prepared to be your pandar, I’ll take you under my ample wing…’ at last he noticed the bloodied, flapping cuffs and began to button them ‘… today!’

‘Today?’ Dorian saw the blood and prevaricated, but the people who had warned him about people like Wotton should, in turn, have themselves been warned about. ‘Look, I’m – I’m not sure, I said I’d drop in at this reception your mother is giving – for her donors.’