The Unguarded Hour

Whit Garland's house stood at the top of a canyon road that had no business being as private as it was, a low glass box that appeared to float over the city at night, all of it on a ridge that caught the last of the sun and the first of the fog. Jace had been to houses like it, had been paid to stand in houses like it, but he had never been a guest in one, and he noticed the difference all evening: the way the food appeared without anyone seeming to cook it, the way the glasses were never empty, the way Whit's wife moved through the rooms like weather.

Whit's wife was named Cora, and she was twelve years younger than Whit and looked like a woman who had decided, early, that the best way to survive a marriage like hers was to be the most beautiful thing in the room and the least reachable. She shook Jace's hand with a cool, dry palm and looked at him with a flicker of something that might have been recognition and might have been appraisal, and then she was gone, and Jace was left with Whit, on a terrace above the whole spread of the city, with the canyon wind moving through the bougainvillea.

"You'll have to forgive my wife," Whit said, pouring him a drink without asking if he wanted one. "She has a theory that the only interesting people in Los Angeles are the ones you can't place. She's trying to place you."

"What did she come up with?"

"She came up with three things, all wrong. That you're an actor, which you are, but which is a job, not a fact. That you're from somewhere sad, which everyone in this town is. And that you're the most dangerous person in the room, which she means as a compliment and which you should never repeat to her."

Jace laughed. He had been doing a lot of that since Friday. He had gone home from Theo's studio with the sound of Whit's voice in his head, the way you go home with a song, and he had found himself saying things to his mirror, to his aunt, to the barista, in Whit's cadence, and it had felt like putting on a coat that fit better than his own.

"A dangerous person," he said. "What does that even mean?"

"It means someone who hasn't decided what he wants yet. The undecided are the only dangerous ones, Jace. Everyone else is predictable. The man who wants money can be bought. The man who wants fame can be flattered. The man who wants love can be used. But the man who hasn't decided—nobody knows what he'll do. He's the one who gets everything, because he's the one who's still free."

"I want things."

"Everyone wants things. Wanting is a hobby. Deciding is a career."

They ate on the terrace, the three of them, Cora appearing and disappearing like a fish in a pool, and Whit talked, and Jace listened, and the city below them went from gold to purple to a field of lights. Whit talked about his father, who had made a fortune in parking lots and spent his life apologizing for it; about his first marriage, which had ended when his wife had discovered that being married to a man who said everything beautifully meant living with a man who meant none of it; about the podcast, which he described as "a church for people who don't believe in anything, including me." He talked about youth as if it were a country he had been exiled from, and about beauty as if it were a weapon he had watched being used badly all his life.

"You're the first person in years," Whit said, "who's made me want to talk about it again. About what it's like. The being looked at. You do it so well, and you don't even know you're doing it."

"Maybe I'm just tired of being looked at."

"Then you're tired of the only thing you have. That's a luxury you can't afford, my friend."

Jace set down his glass. "Theo says you're a bad influence."

"Theo is a painter. He sees everything in terms of what it costs. He painted you because he loves you, and he loves you because you're the only person he's ever met who makes him feel something he can put on a canvas. That's not love, Jace. That's appetite with good manners. You can't build a life on being someone's appetite."

"And what would you build a life on?"

Whit leaned back in his chair, and the city burned behind him, and for a moment he looked like a man who had been asked a question he had been waiting his whole life to be asked. "On not being bored," he said. "That's the whole secret. The people who win are the people who refuse to be bored. They leave, they change, they break things, they start over. They don't ask permission. You've been asking permission your whole life, Jace. You've been standing in rooms waiting for someone to tell you what you're worth. I'm telling you. You're worth whatever you decide to take."

Jace went home that night through the canyons, with the windows down and the city sliding past, and he could not sit still. He called his agent. He called a photographer he had been avoiding. He stood in his kitchen at one in the morning and ate an orange and thought about the word "decide."

His aunt Gina was awake, because his aunt Gina was always awake, a thin, nervous woman of sixty who had raised him since his parents died on the 405 in a three-car pileup when he was six, and who had never once, in all the years since, treated him like anything but a loan she was terrified of defaulting on. She sat at the kitchen table in her robe, with her tea going cold, and watched him pace.

"You're different," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're different since that man. That Whit Garland. I heard him on the radio once. He talks like a man who's never been wrong, and the first time he's wrong, it'll kill him."

"He's not wrong."

"He's wrong about you. You're not a thing, Jace. You're a person. The world's going to tell you you're a thing every day for the rest of your life, because you're beautiful and they want to use you. But you don't have to agree with them."

Jace looked at her, and something moved behind his eyes, quick and unreadable, the thing that had woken up in Theo's studio and had not gone back to sleep. "What do you know about it?" he said. "You've been afraid your whole life. You've been afraid of everything. The world's been eating you for sixty years and you call it being good. I don't want to be good like that. I want to be alive."

Gina looked at him for a long moment. Then she stood, and took her cold tea to the sink, and poured it out, and went to bed without saying goodnight, and Jace stood alone in the kitchen in the dark, in the city's hum, feeling the new thing in him flex.

He did not sleep. He went to the window and looked out at the hills, at the thousand windows of the city, each one a room where someone had decided something, and he thought about the painting standing in Theo's studio in the dark, being young, holding the day, and he thought about what it would feel like to be the thing that lasted.

In the morning he called Theo and told him he wanted to come to the studio.

Theo said, "That's good, Jace. That's good." But there was a pause before he said it, a pause the length of a held breath, and Jace heard it, and did not care.

Out in the canyon, the fog was burning off the ridge, and the city was coming up out of it, and Whit Garland stood at his terrace railing in a robe with his coffee, watching the morning arrive, a man who had planted a seed and was waiting, with the patience of a man who had never once been disappointed by the things he grew.