The Finished Picture

The portrait was finished on a Friday. Theo had known it was finished the way you know a fever has broken, in a sudden, unmistakable ease. He had been working on the hand, the one in the pocket, and had stepped back to mix a color, and had looked at the canvas the way you look at a room you have just finished moving furniture in, and the fight went out of him.

He stood in the middle of the studio in the late light and did not touch it. He had done this eleven times in his life, eleven times he had stood in front of a finished painting and known it was good, and it had never once felt like this. The other eleven had been his. This one was not. This one had gone somewhere he could not follow.

He called Jace. He did not call Whit. But Whit came anyway, because Whit had made a study of the studio's hours and knew that Fridays were when the light came in low and amber and Theo's door stood open to the street, and Whit believed in being present for the moments when other men finished their best work.

He found Theo standing in front of the easel with his hands in his pockets.

"It's done," Whit said.

"Yes."

"May I look at it?"

"You're looking at it."

Whit walked around the easel slowly, the way a man walks around a car he is considering. He took his time. He had been a critic once, before he had been anything else, and the habit of looking had never left him, only the pretense of fairness. When he had finished, he stood beside Theo and looked at the painting a while longer, and then he said, "It's the best portrait of this century. Of this century so far. And you'll never show it."

"I'll never show it."

"Because it's true."

"Because it's true."

Whit nodded, as if this were exactly what he had come to hear. "Then it's a tragedy, and I'll drink to it. Do you have anything that isn't paint thinner?"

They were still laughing when the loading door went up and Jace came in, and the light came with him, and the room changed in the particular way rooms changed when he entered them. He was twenty-two and he did not know his own weight yet, the way very beautiful people do not, and he moved through the world as if the world had been arranged for him, which it had, so far, been.

He saw the painting and stopped. He had been talking, something about the shoot he had done that morning, about a director who had made him stand in a wind machine for three hours, and the talk died in his throat. He walked to the easel as if to a window in a house on fire.

Theo watched his face. He had been waiting for this moment for two months, had imagined it in a hundred versions, and the actual thing was none of them. Jace did not smile. He stood very still, and his face did the thing it did when he was truly moved, which was to go blank, absolutely blank, the way a face goes when it cannot decide between the things it feels.

"It's me," he said.

"Yes."

"It's me," he said again, and this time there was something new in his voice, something Theo could not name at first and then, with a cold certainty, could. It was fear. "It's me, and it's not going to change. It's going to stay like this. This is the day. This is the exact day, and it's going to stay this day forever, and I'm going to get older, and this—" He touched the frame, not the canvas, the way you touch something you're afraid to smudge. "This is going to stay."

Whit had been watching him with the quiet attention of a man who has seen the moment he came to see. Now he moved, unhurried, and put himself between Jace and the painting, so that Jace had to look at him instead. It was a trick, a host's trick, and it worked.

"You're right," Whit said. "You're absolutely right, and nobody's ever told you the truth about it, so I will."

"About what?"

"About the only thing you own. Listen to me, Jace. I'm going to say this once, and you can spend the rest of your life proving me wrong. You have one asset. One. It's not your talent. Talent is common. It's not your work ethic. Half the city works harder than you do. It's your face. Your face is the only thing you have that nobody else can buy, and the clock on it started running the day you were born, and it has been running the whole time you've been standing here, and it does not care about your plans."

He let that sit. In the studio, through the open door, the city made its evening sounds. A truck. A siren, far off. The jasmine coming in on the air.

"The average face," Whit said, "has maybe sixty good years, if you're lucky and you're careful and you don't smoke and you live in the right place. Yours has ten. Maybe eight. You have the kind of face that doesn't age gracefully, Jace, it ages cruelly, because it's not a face that was built to carry a history. It was built to be looked at. And the thing about being looked at is that the looking stops. The cameras stop. The rooms stop. And one day you'll be forty, and you'll be handsome, and nobody will care, because handsome at forty is a different animal, and you'll know it, and that will be the worst thing that ever happened to you, worse than any failure, because it's the one thing you can't fix."

Theo said, "Whit—"

"Let him finish," Jace said. He had not taken his eyes off Whit. His face had gone still in a different way now, the way a lake goes still before a storm.

"So here's the truth," Whit said. "Youth is the only currency that doesn't clear. You can spend it, and the world will take it, and you will get nothing back but the memory of having spent it. Or you can hoard it, and it will rot in your hands. There is no third option. There is no way to keep it. There is no way to save it. It goes, and it takes everything with it, and the people who tell you otherwise are selling you something."

He smiled, and it was a kind smile, and it was the cruelest thing he had said all day.

"Live, Jace. That's all. Live while you have it. Don't listen to the people who want to make you small and careful and good. Good people are boring people, and boring people are dead people, they just haven't stopped moving yet. Be afraid of nothing. Want everything. You're the only person in this room who's still young, and you're the only person in this room who doesn't know what that's worth."

He stepped aside, and Jace was looking at the painting again, and the painting was looking back at him with his own face, with the amber light caught in it, with the hand in the pocket and the head turned toward the door, young, young, impossibly, wastefully young.

"How sad it is," Jace said quietly.

"What is?"

"That it will stay like this. That it will never be older than this day. That I'll go on, and get tired, and get lines, and get old, and this will just—sit here. Being this. Being me, the way I am right now."

He stepped closer to the canvas. His reflection did not move in it. The painting was not a mirror; it had already made up its mind.

"If it were only the other way," he said. "If I could stay like this, and it could grow old instead. If I could be the thing that lasts." His voice had dropped to something almost below speech. "I'd give anything. Everything. I'd give my soul for that."

Whit laughed, a soft, delighted sound. "That's a poor trade, my friend. You'd be giving away the only thing you have left."

"You don't know what I have," Jace said, and there was an edge in it that made Theo take a step forward.

"Don't," Theo said. "Jace. It's just a painting. It's you. That's all it is. It's a record of a good afternoon. It doesn't have any power over you. You have to know that. A painting can't take anything from you."

Jace turned and looked at him, and the look on his face was something Theo had never seen there before. It was not anger. It was not fear. It was something older, something that had been asleep in the boy since the day he was born, and had just woken up.

"How do you know?" he said.

He did not wait for an answer. He went out through the loading door into the blue evening, and the door stayed open, and the jasmine came in, and the finished painting stood in the amber light, patient, holding the day it had been given, refusing to give it back.

Theo stood in the middle of the studio for a long time, looking at the empty door.

"It's just a painting," he said, to the room, to himself, to the thing on the easel that had been his best work and now felt, for the first time, like something that belonged to someone else.

Whit picked up his coffee from the crate where he had left it. "Of course it is," he said. "Go home, Theo. He'll be fine. Boys like that are always fine. They don't have enough in them yet to be anything else."

He left. Theo did not hear him go. He stood in the studio until the light was gone and the room was dark, and then he went home too, and the painting stayed where it was, on the easel, in the dark, being young.