Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [146]
“It’s hardly worth it, surely,” said Michael, so relaxed by now that he did not even feel that he was taking a risk in issuing the mild contradiction. “He’ll be dead soon enough, won’t he?” In the Green Carnation Suite of the New York Majestic, Oscar Wilde stood before a full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss.
“Ivory and rose leaves,” he murmured. The sound of his voice, lower in pitch and more musical than he remembered it, gave him an exquisite thrill.
He repeated the phrase reverently, as though it were a magical incantation: “Ivory and rose leaves.” Oscar had never been afraid of vanity. He was a man ready and willing to address his own reflection in the most admiring terms, provided only that it remained full of youth and perfect in its symmetry. Whenever it grew old, as it had three times over, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration and became a mocking reminder of the hazards which he and all men of his obsolescent kind still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.
“One hundred and thirty-three years old,” he said softly. “One hundred and thirty-three years old, and young again. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale…” He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. It was one of only half a dozen in full bloom, and he twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image.
The flower was a trivial creation, only a little more elegant than the variety which the horticulturalists of old had wrought without the aid of genetic engineering, but it had been a necessary endeavor. It was a joke, of course, but a very serious joke. The never-ending games which Oscar played in consequence of his name were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a deep-seated obsession as well as a mischievous fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. He had always felt that life, if it were to be lived to the full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations; a cause. Perhaps, as Charlotte Holmes and Michael Lowenthal clearly believed, his own cause was hardly less mad than poor Rappaccini’s—but then again, perhaps all causes that had the power to change the world were bound to be reckoned mad until they bore sweet fruit.
He placed the flower in the mock buttonhole of his neatly tailored SAP black suitskin. Black was, he thought, the perfect background for a green carnation—and a room full of green carnations was the perfect background for a man in black.
Oscar was fully aware of the debt of gratitude which he owed to his wallflowers.
Furnishing hotel interiors was vulgar hackwork unbefitting a real artist, but a real artist had to make a living, and the commonplaceness of such commissions could always be slightly offset by such flourishes of unorthodoxy as having it written into every contract that one suite of rooms should be fitted with green carnations instead of the more fashionable roses and amaranths and should always be available for his exclusive use.
His clients did not mind in the least his making such demands; they were, after all, paying for his fashionability rather than his technical dexterity, and he could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly extrovert eccentricity. There were now hotels in thirty-six cities which could provide him with a distinctive pied-a-terre, and he felt entirely justified in thinking of the green carnation suites as