The Studio on Traction Avenue

The studio smelled of jasmine and turpentine and the particular dust that lives in rooms where one thing has been worked on for too long. It was late June, and the heat off the concrete had been building all afternoon, and through the open loading door the sound of the city came up in layers: a freight horn, the hiss of tires on the wet pavement where a sprinkler had run long past its time, somebody's radio playing oldies two floors down.

Whit Garland was the kind of man who did not so much enter a room as annex it. He came in without knocking, a tall man in a linen suit that had cost more than most people's rent, carrying two coffees in a paper tray because he had seen the sign on the building and decided the artist inside needed one. He put the tray down on a crate of stretcher bars, looked around the studio with the flat, appraising eye of a man who priced everything, and found the one thing in the room that did not belong to the category of things he could price.

It stood against the far wall under a drop cloth, on a rolling easel, tall as a door.

"Don't," said Theo Brandt.

Whit had not touched it. He let his hand fall. "I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"Tell me it's not what I think it is."

Theo Brandt was thirty-four and looked older, the way painters do who have spent ten years trading sleep for pigment. He had a wide, kind face and the hands of a man who had learned to be gentle with them. He stood between the easel and his visitor, which was the first thing Whit noticed, because Theo Brandt was not a man who guarded things. He gave things away. He had given away half his work, the best half, to people who would hang it in rooms he would never see.

"You'll laugh at me," Theo said.

"Then it will be a first. I haven't laughed in weeks."

"It's not finished."

"Then it will be finished some other day. I want to see the boy you've been hiding. Everyone wants to see the boy you've been hiding. You've talked about nothing else for two months."

That was true, and it was the thing Theo hated most about himself, that he could not stop talking about it. He had met the boy in April, at a benefit at a gallery in Beverly Hills, a room full of people who had paid to be seen being charitable. Theo had gone because his dealer made him, had stood against a wall with a glass of white wine he did not drink, watching the room do its slow, expensive dance. And then someone had looked at him from across the room, and he had felt the look like a hand on his shoulder.

The boy was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, standing near the bar with the easy, unselfconscious posture of someone who had been beautiful for so long he had stopped noticing it worked on people. He was tall and narrow, with hair the color of wet sand and a face that seemed to have been designed by someone who had never had to compromise. There was a stillness about him, a stillness that had nothing to do with shyness. He watched the room the way a cat watches a yard.

Theo had crossed the room without deciding to. That was the thing that frightened him afterward, looking back. Somewhere between seeing the boy and standing in front of him, the decision had been made for him, like a hand catching a glass it has already seen falling.

"Jace Marlowe," the boy had said, and held out his hand. His voice was lower than Theo had expected. "I know your work. I mean, I know the work you showed at the Horton. The portrait of the judge."

"That was two years ago."

"I remember it. The way you did his hands."

And that was it. That was the entire engine of the two months that followed. A boy had remembered the way a painter had done a judge's hands, and the painter had gone home and lain awake, and had called his dealer at nine in the morning to say he wanted to paint a portrait, a real one, a full-length, the kind nobody did anymore.

Whit Garland settled onto a stool by the window and unwrapped his coffee. The afternoon light came in over the low buildings and laid a long, pale rectangle on the concrete floor. He was forty-six and had the face of a man who had been told he was interesting for so long that he had arranged his life around the compliment. His podcast had seven million listeners. His marriages, both of them, had ended in the papers. He said things on the air that other men said privately, and he said them in a voice like warm oil, and the country listened.

"So," Whit said. "The boy."

"Theo, his name is Jace."

"I know his name. Everyone knows his name. He's been on the cover of two magazines since April. The one they shot in the desert, the one with the horse. You saw it."

"I saw it."

"He's beautiful," Whit said, the way a man might say a thing was expensive. "That's not a compliment. That's an observation. Beauty that extreme is a form of luck, and luck is a form of debt, and debt always comes due. You've painted him. You've been painting him for two months, which for you is an eternity. You've mentioned him in four conversations, which for you is a manifesto. I want to know what it is you think you're doing."

Theo came away from the easel and stood at the window beside Whit, looking out at the street. A delivery truck was backing into the loading dock next door, beeping. A girl on a skateboard went by. The ordinary machinery of the city, moving on its rails.

"I'm afraid of it," Theo said.

"Of him?"

"Of what I put into it. Every portrait that's any good is a portrait of the painter. The sitter is just the occasion. That's the secret nobody tells you. You look at a great portrait and you're looking at the man who made it, standing behind it in the dark. I've spent ten years learning how to be honest in paint, and I've never once been as honest as I was this month. I can't exhibit it. I can't let anyone see it. If they see it, they'll see everything."

Whit looked at him for a long moment, then laughed, a soft, genuine sound, the first genuine sound he had made all afternoon. "My dear man. You're in love with him."

"I'm not—"

"You're in love with him, and you've painted the thing you're afraid to say, and now you're terrified someone will read it. That's not a secret, Theo. That's a painting. It's what paintings are for."

"Get out."

"I haven't finished my coffee."

"Then finish it outside. You're going to ruin it. You're going to get in my head and you're going to ruin the one good thing I've done."

Whit stood, took his coffee, and crossed to the door. At the door he turned. He did this well, the turning at the door; it was a gesture he had perfected on the air, the exit that invited the follow. "You misunderstand me," he said. "I'm not here to take anything from you. I'm here because I met your boy's agent at lunch, and your boy has been telling everyone who will listen that he's sitting for the greatest painter in Los Angeles. He wants to meet you socially. He wants to meet your friends. He has no idea, Theo, none at all, what he is, and I thought, before this beautiful creature gets eaten alive by this town, someone should tell him the truth about the only thing he'll ever own."

"What truth?"

"His face," Whit said. "You've painted a face that will be gone in ten years. He should know what he's spending."

He was gone. Theo stood in the middle of the studio, in the smell of jasmine and turpentine, and listened to the city do its work outside. After a while he went to the easel and took the edge of the drop cloth in his hand, and stood there, and did not lift it.

At five o'clock the loading door went up again, and the light came in low and amber, and Jace Marlowe walked into the studio with the sun at his back, so that for a moment he seemed to be made of it. He was wearing a white shirt and jeans and had a bag over his shoulder, and he was carrying a paper bag of oranges he had bought on the way, and he set them on the crate where the coffee had been, and looked around.

"It smells like church in here," he said.

"It's jasmine. There's a vine on the fire escape."

"I didn't know you had a fire escape."

"There's a lot you don't know about me."

Jace smiled. It was a good smile, uncalculated, and it did what good smiles do, which was to make the room seem smaller and warmer and more his. "I've been thinking," he said, "about what you said. About the portrait. About not showing it."

"And?"

"And I think you're wrong." He walked past Theo to the easel, and Theo did not move to stop him, because he never could, not then. Jace took the drop cloth in both hands, the way you take a sheet off furniture in a house you're about to leave, and lifted it.

The painting was five feet tall and three wide, and it was not finished, and it was already the best thing Theo Brandt had ever done. It was Jace as he had been on the third afternoon, in the amber light, one hand in his pocket, head turned a little as if someone had called his name from behind him. There was nothing in the painting that was not true. There was everything in the painting that Theo had never said.

Jace stood in front of it for a long time.

"It's me," he said finally.

"Yes."

"It's me, but it's not me. It's—" He stopped. He did not have the words. He had never needed the words, not for this. "It's what I look like when nobody's watching."

Theo felt the floor tilt under him. "You see it."

"I see it. I've been looked at my whole life, Theo. On the bus, in the grocery store, in the casting rooms. I've been looked at so long I can tell you the difference between the way people look at a thing and the way they look at a person. This is the first time anybody ever looked at me the way you do. I didn't know it was possible to be seen like this."

He turned from the painting, and his eyes were bright, and he was smiling, and Theo understood that he would do anything this boy asked of him, anything at all, and that this was the thing he had been afraid of since April, and that it had not gotten any smaller for being named.

"Don't show it to anyone," Theo said. "Not yet. Let me finish it."

"Why can't anyone see it?"

"Because," Theo said, and could not finish.

Jace looked at him, and something passed across his face, quick and unreadable, and then he let it go. "Okay," he said. "I'll wait. I'm good at waiting."

He picked up an orange from the paper bag, held it to his nose, and bit into it, rind and all, the way a kid would. The juice ran down his chin. He laughed at himself, wiped it with the back of his hand.

Theo watched him, and thought about the word Whit had used, and knew it was true, and knew it was the least of it.

Out on Traction Avenue the light went long and red, and the city turned itself over to the evening, and the studio filled with the smell of orange rind and jasmine, and the unfinished painting stood against the wall, facing the room, patient as a door nobody had decided to open.