the judgment of paris

“What have you got there, Harry? Something nice for us, I hope?”

But Dorian’s head is raised, alert as a woodland deer, and the slim placidity of his face is broken by the flashing of his eyes. It is only a momentary disturbance, and it cannot spoil his beauty, but the look of recognition darkens him, like a landscape of fleeting clouds. The boyish freshness falls from his mouth. Lord Henry stands in the hall like a scolding schoolmaster or a cherub delivering Valentines. In his hand is a packet of letters, bound up in a ribbon the color of chartreuse.

The incense burner sits between them on its little bronze and lacquer table, spilling clouds of Japanese hinoki-wood and the scent of jasmine – the white flower transmuted into something animal, from flora to fauna, like dirty linen. Dorian sits cross-legged on silk pillows, like an undergraduate lounging about in his digs. There are books of photographs spread out before him on the carpets, albums marked with pressed flowers or visiting cards. His white lily hands hesitate on the pages, and his back has gone very straight, like a schoolboy anticipating a difficult question.

“A mutual friend of ours returned them to me,” Lord Henry says. “He told me he’d found them in the pocket of a coat you’d lent him, I didn’t ask which one. I imagine you wore it better than he did. The young fellow still has spots.”

Basil can only look between them, uncomprehending. “Is this true, Dorian?”

“If he were lying, he’d come up with something more amusing.” Dorian is unmoved – his expression is curious, only, but not very. “Isn’t that Lord Henry’s way? Go on.”

Harry continues. “He wanted twenty pounds for them. I told him that if he had any brains, he’d have made copies, and he said yes, he had. I said I’d give him fifteen for both original and copy, and he said he’d break my nose.”

“Dear God,” Basil mutters. He wants to bury his face in his hands, to rake his hands through his hair and to moan, but he cannot. It’s as if all the blood has fled from his face, and he can feel it; his hands no longer rest loosely in his lap but grip the carved arms of the chair in which he sits.

The boy says nothing; his wide flushed mouth is hard-set, so deeply red that it is nearly purple. The quality of color in his cheeks sets all the tones of him changing in the light; there is a slight translucency to his flesh like a milky jewel, and it makes even his sullen flared indifference shine like a thing from the depths of the ocean.

“Did he, Henry?”

“I told him I rather thought it would improve me. I studied boxing at university – it’s true, Basil will tell you that – but it never served to make this face of mine interesting. He made some vulgar show of his anger, but in the end he took the money, as they all do.”

“You talk as if you have much experience,” Dorian says. His hands lace together across his knee; he draws it up to his chest, as if they are idling the same as before.

“You must understand that I do this for you because it amuses me, not because I have the least fear of what a Yorkshire puppy like that could do to my reputation with a few sentimental lines. I like the thought of my careless scribblings being fought over by guttersnipes. What I do not like, however, is the thought of you condescending to share any thing of yours with a boy of that type. Not a coat, not a ring, not a cigarette-case – nothing of yours should pass into his possession but money. Money, I think, is enough. Do you understand?”

“I haven’t given anyone those things.” Dorian’s expression is coolly opaque, like a stone. “You don’t need to scold me, for I haven’t done anything.”

“You must be more careful, Dorian. The courts find these matters less amusing.”

Dorian rises from the cushions, unfolding and brushing out the creases in his pale suit. “I think I had better go.”

“You mustn’t forget to take your papers. Do with them what you like – burn them, bury them, only don’t give them away.”

Henry’s easy manner of speaking makes it all smoother, easier. His charm is sleek as oil, like a cloak of mist that settles over a country landscape in the morning and makes it all look smoothly picturesque instead of muddy and filth-spotted. Basil knows better. Nothing good will come from this sort of business.

Having passed off his burden, Henry settles in like a man very much at home, and without any particular urgency – he goes about lighting a cigarette. Basil turns away. All the flowers have suffered in the chill – the lilac blossoms all withered up like an old woman’s hand, and the laburnum all dropping their golden spoils in the grass. Every part of the yellow laburnum, he recalls from his schoolboy days, is poisonous: seed and blossom, root and bark.

Once Dorian has taken up his coat and gone out into the street, only Henry remains in his insolence. Basil confronts him with his eyes, and the silence is broken.

Henry curls his fingers under, shedding the first flecks of ash in the act of examining his fingernails.

“It seems I’ve offended you.”

“Oh, Henry, it’s worse than that. You have ruined him.”

“Don’t act so surprised. Of course he knows that something can be got for something. A man is paid to take off his clothes in the sculptor’s studio, or at every academy in Europe – whose concern is it what happens next?”

“He’s only a boy. You’ve said the same yourself. If we were to broach the matter outright it shouldn’t have been like this.”

“You are too jealous of him, Basil. Diamonds are of most value that have passed through most jewelers’ hands, and all that. Or did you think your subject was wholly virgin, pristine, and untouched?”

In fact, Basil had. It had been impossible to picture the coarse flush of release darkening those cheeks, or those shining white hands making the motions of desire.

“I didn’t fool myself that the boy was uninitiated. I only wanted to believe – that there was something pure about him transcending physical morality, that’s all. Oh, Henry, why did you bring him to such a place?”

Henry frowns. “I never meant to bring him at all. It was only his natural curiosity that led him to follow me, and once the curtain was parted, I couldn’t send him away. I thought at least to supervise him. How was I to know some driveling boy would capture his fancy?”

Basil paces before the window; behind him, Henry’s voice rises to a complaining pitch.

“You can’t keep him locked up in your studio, like a sleeping princess. If your beloved boy wants company, he’ll surely find it. Better at some pleasantly vicious place than in some other way.”

“I’ve no doubt who made the introduction. You took me once to the same spot.”

“That smoky little house in H— Street like a Chinese den, full of drapers’ boys and wonderful little clerks, all that carnation-colored satin making the place look like a house on fire – or don’t you remember? If it was good enough for you, it should be good enough for him, I dare say.”

Basil can see it in his mind’s eye, even now – how absurd he’d felt, how out of place among beardless boys with torsos like Greek statuary. His visits there had no higher purpose; he was not there to draw pictures, or to contemplate the forms, but to achieve animal relief. Any man or boy would have done for him then. And the boys…

“Association with such filthy types will spoil him.”

“Oh, Basil, are they filthy? I don’t remember hearing such a moralizing refrain when I helped you with your trouble in Paris. What impulse is it that keeps you from extending the same kindness to this friend of yours?”

“The boy isn’t like you are, or like I am, not even at that age. I know you think I’m being sentimental, but there’s something different about him and I’m not ashamed to say it frightens me. Dorian cannot afford to become experienced in vice. He doesn’t undertake things lightly.”

“Perhaps he should learn how.”

Basil halts, with the thin light streaming past him. “Nothing good can come from this business.”

“On that we wholeheartedly agree. I wish I’d never brought him, and I pray he’ll leave the business off. Now, leave off acting like a pious fool and let’s be friends again. Being confronted by you is like being savaged by a sheepdog.”

Basil could strike him. His body has gone cold and rigid with the realization of having been gotten at – having been goaded in the jauntiest of ways, having been pricked with a little drama performed for his amusement.

“You purposefully made a scene of this to hurt me. It’s too late for that, Harry. Go and follow him, tell him what a fool you’ve made of that old-fashioned painter.”

Lord Henry takes him by the shoulder. “You’re jealous of his company, I know. I should have trod more carefully. I don’t remember sometimes how it is you feel things. It’s as if you really feel them, and I’m only pretending.”

“Don’t. Don’t talk any more, Harry, please. I am very angry with you.”

Henry presses the curls back from his forehead with a smooth, scented hand – and Basil turns his face into the palm of that hand, just as he always has, to be caressed. His anger throbs beneath the surface.

“Do you remember that term when it was so hot, all the grass on the ground had wilted? Like a great tawny mat, and Matron telling us not to drink our water so quickly or we would strain ourselves. I’ve never known a summer like that since then.”

“Summer’s over. Don’t tell me school-stories, I don’t have the stomach for them.”

“You were well-handled by the time I met you, and the masters flogged the living daylights out of you for it. You were an amorous soul, and wherever you went poetry wafted with you.”

Basil laughs a little, breathlessly scornful. “You were captain of the eleven then, and I daresay I owed much of my practical knowledge to you.”

“I suppose we should be thanking each other.”

“I was frightened of you then, too frightened to refuse, and yet you were always trying to take me on. I think I must have been an experiment of yours.”

Perhaps he was Henry’s first experiment. He would be flogged again for this man, in the name of friendship, but for Dorian he will suffer much worse.

Henry draws him down against the divan, murmuring empty phrases; Basil allows it. He ought to be weeping bitterly for the loss of his argument. They haven’t been together like this since Oxford – kissing and embracing, face to face and limb against limb. Henry’s mustaches burn against Basil’s mouth like the pass of a paintbrush. Basil tugs apart the studs of his friend’s shirt and separates layers of cloth one from another; Harry fumbles his trousers down from his braces obligingly, pressing him with kisses all the while as though to prove a point of reconciliation.

The smell of ink is on Lord Henry’s hands, and the ever-present perfume of opium twining through his clothes.

“Touch me quickly,” he says, bringing Basil’s hand to the site of his erection. “I think I’ll die if you don’t.”

Basil’s own desire is purely mechanical, the same springing stiffness he might experience at the embrace of a rough young fellow or even a woman – but comparison is beside the point, and hip to hip with flies undone they are alike.

Harry’s body is reassuringly solid, thicker than it was when he still strode the playing-fields of Eton – his chest and stomach rising, his legs locking as Basil brings him off in their peculiar way. They have never been made for one another, but they have known each other for long enough that they have taken on the right shapes for this. Basil spans them both with his fingers, working him in strokes with sullen eagerness. The difference between them is that Harry must make a show of regretless pleasure, and Basil is all regret. This is how they once made up, when a quarrel punctured the layer of silly cynicism smoothing their friendship like grease – through the physical, through unromantic gesture and no great union of the minds.

There are things they cannot be for one another. Time collapses on itself, like a garment. All things considered, Harry is not father nor mother nor brother to any man. He has no deep antique authority over younger men, who are only younger by degrees, he is only pretending. What fools they’ve been, playing the wise old men. The three of them might have all been at school at the same time, if the years had shaken out just right and the boundary-stones of their times had fallen in more pleasant places. Where had Dorian gone to school? Who were his teachers in the first things of life? Who else has drawn the picture of him, and taken the measure of his cruel mouth?

(Nobody but you, Basil, a voice murmurs, a smooth sweet clear voice like the rubbing of glass. In the shadow of the ivy – oh, dreadful, dreadful.)

After all that, Basil lies against his friend’s chest, breathing the scent of his handkerchief. Lord Henry is sweeter for having spent; all his pretenses are gone, and his dishevelment has nothing of the pose left in it.

“Take me to your bedroom,” Harry whispers, horribly earnest. “I should like to make amends, if you’ll have me.”

Basil shakes his head. His throat is tight. “I can’t do that.”

“Am I so wicked? Would I spoil your bed?”

“You’re not wicked after all. I think you have a foolish way of loving, Harry.”

Lord Henry is his teacher in this as much as ever. His love is cloaked in whims and poses; it is true, but it is utterly useless.

“Or a lovely way of fooling.” Henry presses his fingers through Basil’s hair with evident delight, smiling against his cheek. Basil does not smile.

“You do not fool me, Harry. You never have.”

Basil withdraws without kissing him. Lord Henry goes through the business of putting himself to rights, cleaning away traces and fastening clever fasteners. He is making himself sleek again, like a valet.

“You’re still thinking of our mutual friend. So am I.”

“Go after him, if you like him so much, only be sure he does burn those letters.”

“And leave you here with your empty canvases? Basil, I couldn’t possibly.”

Basil presses a hand down his face. “Go.”