The Cruel Line

Theo did not see it. That was the first thing Jace understood, standing in the studio with the proof of his own damnation three feet away, that Theo, who had painted the face, who had looked at it longer than anyone alive, did not see that it had changed. Theo saw a painting. Jace saw a ledger.

He stayed an hour. He let Theo hold him, let Theo tell him it wasn't his fault, let Theo say the things a friend says, and all the while the painting stood against the wall behind them, and Jace did not look at it again, because he knew that if he looked at it again, he would see more, and he was not ready to know how much he had already paid.

He took it that night. He came back to the studio at midnight, alone, with a borrowed van and a tarp, and he wrapped the painting and carried it down the stairs like a body. Theo had not locked the loading door. Theo never locked the loading door. Jace had counted on that, on the single weakness of a man who trusts you.

He drove up into Silver Lake with the painting lying flat in the back of the van, and the city slid past, and he thought about the way the mouth had curled, the small, hard cruelty at the corner, and he thought about what else the face could learn.

The house stood at the top of a steep, narrow street, a 1920s bungalow that had been in his family since before he was born, the house his parents had been driving home to when they died. His aunt Gina had kept it, had dusted it, had paid the taxes on it out of her pension, had never once been able to bring herself to sell it. It was the house Jace had grown up in, the room he had slept in as a boy, the whole of his inheritance.

He carried the painting up the stairs to the room at the end of the hall, the room that had been his bedroom, and he stood it against the wall and locked the door and put the key in his pocket, and then he went down to the kitchen and stood at the sink for a long time, looking out at the city, and the city looked back with its thousand lights, and none of them knew.

He saw the line again in the morning. He unlocked the door, went in, stood in front of the painting in the gray light, and the cruelty was still there, at the corner of the mouth, and there was something new, something in the eyes, a flatness, a glaze, a look of having seen what Jace had seen in the gray car that morning and chosen to keep it. Jace stood in front of it, and he felt no horror. He felt, for the first time in his life, safe.

It was in that room, on that morning, that he made the deal with himself. He would keep the painting. He would keep it locked, and he would keep the key, and he would live the life he had been offered, the life Whit had described, the life that belonged to a face that did not age. And when the painting had taken everything, when there was nothing left of him but the face, he would destroy it, and he would be free.

What he did not know, standing in that room at twenty-two, was that the face would take him years to spend.

The first year was a honeymoon. He went everywhere, and his face was on the sides of buses, in the pages of magazines, on the screens of a hundred million phones, and it did not change. He worked. He was good, and then he was better, and then he was famous, which was a different thing entirely. Directors who had looked through him at the casting call looked at him now with the avidity of men who had been told they could have anything in the store. He gave them what they wanted, and he took what he wanted, and the city watched and approved, because the city loves nothing so much as a beautiful thing that keeps its promise.

The second year, the rumors began. There was an actor who checked into a clinic the week after Jace's name was linked to his. There was a heiress whose marriage ended, a senator's son who stopped returning calls. There was a boy, a twenty-year-old dancer, who disappeared from the party circuit entirely and was never spoken of again in Jace's hearing. None of it touched him. His face was untouched. His face was the alibi his whole life had been waiting for.

He went to see the painting rarely, and then less, and then almost never. He knew it was changing. He knew it from the way people looked at him and then looked away, from the thinning invitations and friendships, from the way he could look at himself in a mirror and see the boy from the studio and know that somewhere upstairs, in the locked room, in the house at the top of the steep street, that boy was being spent.

His aunt Gina saw him at a party in the third year, a thing she had not done since he was a child, and she stood against a wall in her good dress with her glass of white wine, and watched him work the room, and when he came to her, she said, "Jace. You haven't changed."

"I know."

"Not a day. Not a line. Everyone's saying it. I've heard three people say it tonight, that you haven't changed in three years, that it's like you're not aging at all. And I looked at you, and you know what I thought? I thought, my God, that's not a blessing. That's a contract."

He laughed. "Gina. I'm fine. I've never been better."

"You've never been more handsome," she said. "That's not the same thing. You're twenty-five years old and you have the face of the boy I raised, and you have the eyes of a man I don't know. Something's eating you, Jace. It's just not eating your face."

She went home that night, and she did not call him for a long time after, and when she did call, months later, to say she had sold the house, no, the other house, the one in the valley, and was moving to a place in the desert, he heard in her voice the sound of a door closing gently, and he let it close.

He was twenty-six when he finally went back to the room. It had been four years. He stood in the doorway in the dark, and he did not turn on the light, and he looked at the painting where it stood against the wall, and the thing he saw there, in the gray light from the window, was not a face he knew. It was a face that had been living without him, and it had aged as he had been meant to age, and it had been living, all that time, in the exact measure of everything he had done. It was not beautiful. It was not young. It was a record, and it was accurate, and Jace stood in front of it and felt the thing he had felt the morning Lena died, the terrible, familiar relief.

He locked the door. He went down to the kitchen and poured himself a drink and stood at the sink, looking out at the city, and the city looked back, and he raised his glass to it, to the contract, to the years, to the face that would never leave him, and he drank.