“Why is that a curse?”
“Because.” She sighs. “He’s named after the main character inThePicture of Dorian Gray.”
“What’s wrong with that?” She’s going to have to spell this out for me.
“Wow. Okay. So,ThePicture of Dorian Grayis about this young, wealthy man who has a painting of himself commissioned. The artist is so taken with Dorian’s good looks, he becomes obsessed with him. It ends up being this artist’s masterpiece. In the course of the sittings, Dorian’s introduced to another man, a lord. I can’t remember his name, but this lord shows Dorian the dark side of London.”
“Dark side?”
“You know, drugs, prostitutes, things of that nature. The London underbelly.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Anyway, Dorian gets so deep into this underbelly, it goes on for a long time, and he ends up murdering someone. But the part about this story that made it so strange was that no matter how old or debauched Dorian got, it never showed. Years pass and he never ages or changes. None of his excess affects him. Instead, all of his bad, terrible deeds appear in the painting.”
“Huh? How?”
She shrugs. “Something about the painting. It takes on all of Dorian Gray’s ugliness.”
“What happens?”
“Well, Dorian hides the painting, but he still visits it. In the end, he stabs the painting, and it kills him.”
“What? It kills him? How?”
“Well, by stabbing the painting, he’s stabbing himself.” She nods. “Blood even seeps from the painting.”
I raise a brow. “Wow. That sounds like a great story. That’d make a great movie.”
“They’ve made it into a movie. It’s old, though.”
“Fascinating. Maybe we could find it somewhere and watch it.”
“As long as we don’t have to watchThe Great Gatsby, I’m all in.”
“Maybe I’ll just read the book.” I give her a smirk.
Daisy’s head hits the back of the sofa. “No. Please don’t. Trust me, Daisy Buchanan is the worst person in the world.”
“Worse than Dorian Gray?”
She purses her lips. “Well, no. But she’s pretty bad.”
“Fine. Let’s see where that Dorian Gray movie is. If I have to get one of those online movie subscriptions, I will.”
“Let’s check. Do you have a computer?”
“Yep. Let me get it.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Daisy
In the end, we found a movie calledDorian Graythat was filmed in 2010.
“Told you it was disturbing,” I say as the credits roll.
“It was, but what a creative story.”
