Seven Years

He was twenty-nine, and he looked twenty-two, and the difference between those two numbers had become the difference between the life he lived and the life the city thought he lived. The city had a word for him by then, and the word was not a name. It was a quality, a rumor, a weather system that moved through rooms ahead of him; people said Jace Marlowe did not age, and they said it in the tone of people who were not sure they believed it and were not sure they were allowed to say it out loud, and the fact that he did not age had become, by the seventh year, the least interesting thing about him. He had made nine films. Two of them were good. He had bought a building downtown and filled it with things he did not need — the cars, the paintings, the furniture of other famous dead men — and he had become, without ever intending it, a collector, which is what beautiful men become when they discover that nothing they collect can be kept.

He did not go to the room often. That was the discipline of the contract, the part nobody saw: he rationed his own looking like a man rationing a drug, because he had learned, over the years, that the painting did not only age with his sins. It aged with his intentions. It aged with the things he had almost done. He had gone up there once, in the fifth year, after a night when he had not done the thing he had been offered, when he had let a girl in a parking lot walk away from his car, and the face in the painting had not changed for the better, and he had understood that mercy was not a credit in this account. The account — Whit's word, which Jace had borrowed and made his own — only ever moved one way.

He thought about destroying it, in the fifth year, in the sixth year, in the small hours when the house was too quiet. He thought about it the way a man thinks about a tooth that needs pulling. He never did it. The painting was the only thing he had ever owned that could not be taken from him. It was the only thing that knew him. In a city built on surfaces, it was the one deep place, and he could not bring himself to close it.

The frame-maker came in the sixth year. His name was Dale Pemberton, and he was sixty-two, and he had been building frames for forty years out of a shop in Atwater Village that smelled of sawdust and hide glue, and he was one of the last men in the city who did the work with his hands. Jace had heard about him the way the rich hear about the last of anything. He had wanted a frame for the painting in the locked room, a proper frame, a serious frame, the kind of frame that said the thing inside was meant to outlast the room.

Pemberton came to the house on a Saturday with his measuring tools and his quiet, appraising eyes. He did not ask to see the painting. Jace brought it down in the tarp, and Pemberton looked at it for a long time, and then he looked at Jace, and then he looked at the painting again.

"That's you," Pemberton said.

"It's an old portrait."

"It's you, and it's not you, and I've been doing this work for forty years, and I've learned not to ask questions about paintings." He ran a thumb along the edge of the canvas, feeling the stretcher. "But I'll tell you one thing, because you're paying me and I don't like to take money for nothing. Whatever you paid for this, it's the most honest thing you'll ever own. I can see it's been taken care of. I can see it's been kept in the dark. And I can see it's been waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"To be finished." Pemberton straightened up, and his face was unreadable. "I'll build you the frame, young man. I'll build you a frame that will outlast the house. But I won't ask what it's waiting for, and you won't tell me."

The frame took three months. It was walnut, hand-carved, with a gilded inner lip, and when Pemberton delivered it, in a padded van, with his apprentice carrying the corners like a coffin, Jace stood in the hall and watched them hang the painting in the room at the end of the hall, and the frame was the most beautiful thing he had ever owned, and the face inside it, lit for the first time in years, was the worst.

He paid Pemberton in cash. Pemberton counted it twice, folded it, and said, on his way out, "I've framed a lot of things in my life. Paintings, mirrors, photographs, one dead man's medals. I've never framed anything that looked like it was holding somebody's life for them. You take care of yourself, Mr. Marlowe."

The party was in October, in the seventh year, at the house on the hill, and the city came the way the city comes when it has decided a thing is an event. Blair Fontaine came, the heiress, married now to the senator's son, wearing something that had cost a small country's budget, and she kissed Jace on both cheeks and looked at him with her flat, knowing eyes and said, "Darling. You haven't changed."

"I know."

"It's uncanny. I saw you at the premiere in March, and you looked exactly like this, and I saw you at the thing in Malibu, and you looked exactly like this, and I've started telling people you're a vampire. It's the only explanation that doesn't frighten me."

"The other explanations frighten you more?"

"They all do. Every single one. You're the only man in this city who's gotten younger while the rest of us have gotten older, and I want to know your secret, and I want you to know that if you tell me, I'll never tell a soul."

Skyler Wu came late, with a crowd. Skyler was twenty-four and had been twenty-four for the four years Jace had known him, and he was the closest thing Jace had to a friend, which meant he was the person who stayed after the other people left. Skyler lived in the rooms Jace no longer used, in the hours Jace no longer kept. He knew the address of every party that mattered and the name of every drug that didn't, and he looked at Jace the way a boy looks at a lighthouse, with the faith of someone who has decided that the light is the only safe thing in the dark.

"You look good," Skyler said, in the kitchen, at two in the morning, when the house had thinned to the people who stayed. "You always look good. I've never once seen you look bad. It's the thing about you, Jace. You're the only person I know who looks like the morning after doesn't touch him."

"It touches me. It just doesn't show."

"That's what I mean." Skyler looked at him with his bright, ruined eyes. "That's the thing. You're the only person I know who it doesn't show on. And I think that's the scariest thing I've ever seen in this town, and I've seen everything, Jace. I've seen the whole inventory. And you're the scariest item in it."

The party ended. The city went home. Jace stood at the window in the dark, looking out at the lights, and the phone buzzed in his pocket, and it was a link from Blair, a gossip column, a headline in a typeface he knew, and under it a photograph of himself at the party, and the headline said, in so many words, that Jace Marlowe, the boy who never ages, had been seen, for the first time in years, with a face that looked like a man who had something to hide.

He read it twice. He felt the small, cold, familiar relief, and then he felt something else, something he had not felt in years, a knock at the frame of his life, a question about the account.

Theo Brandt was at the door the next morning.

He had not seen Theo in four years. Theo had gone away, had shown the portrait nobody had ever seen, had not, had gone to New York, had come back, had grown older, which was the thing Theo did now, the way other men grew hair or debts. He stood in the doorway of the house on the hill, a man of thirty-eight with gray at his temples and paint under his nails, and he looked at Jace the way you look at a photograph you have been told is of someone you used to know.

"Jace," he said.

"Theo."

"You haven't changed."

"I know."

"I read the column," Theo said. "And I read the ones before it. And I've been reading them for seven years, Jace, the way you read a chart for a sickness, and I've watched you get more famous and more feared and more alone, and your face has not moved once. Not a line. Not a day. And I know what that means, because I know what you're keeping."

Jace stood in the doorway, and the city was bright behind Theo, and the house was dark behind him, and he said, "You don't know anything, Theo. You painted a portrait. That's all you did. You painted a boy in good light."

"I painted a boy," Theo said, "and I put too much of myself into it, and I've paid for that every day since. And now I'm going to do the thing I should have done seven years ago. I'm going to look at what's left of him."

He stepped into the house. Jace did not move to stop him.

He did not know, standing there, that he would not leave the house alive. He did not know that the frame Pemberton had built was about to hold its first and only dead thing. He only knew that the knock had come, the question had arrived, and that the account, after seven years, had come due.