They were large portraits, all similar, like the repetition of a single ambition, to infinity. There was always one person, nude, and almost nothing else, an empty room, a corridor. They were not handsome people, they were ordinary bodies. They were simply standing—but the force with which they did so was particular, as if they were geologic sediments, the result of millennial metamorphoses. Jasper Gwyn thought that they were stone, but soft, and living. He felt like touching them: he was convinced that they were warm.
At that point he would have left, that was enough, but outside it was still pouring, and so Jasper Gwyn, without realizing that this would mark his life, began to look through a catalogue of the show: there were three, open, on a light wood table, the usual large, ridiculously weighty books. Jasper Gwyn observed that the titles of the paintings were the rather stupid type you might expect (Man with Hands on His Lap), and that next to each title was written the date of execution. He noticed that the painter had worked on them for years, twenty, more or less, and yet, apparently, nothing in his way of seeing things, or in his technique, had changed. He had simply continued to paint—as if it were a single action, but very extended. Jasper Gwyn wondered if the same thing had been true for him, in the twelve years when he was writing, and while he was searching for an answer he came to the book’s appendix, in which there were photographs taken while the painter was working, in his studio. Without realizing it he leaned over a little, to see better. He was struck by a photograph in which the painter was sitting placidly in a chair, turned toward the window, looking outside; nearby, a model whom Jasper Gwyn had just seen in one of the paintings on display in the gallery was lying nude on a couch, in a position not very different from the one in which she had been caught on the canvas. She, too, seemed to be gazing into emptiness.
Jasper Gwyn saw in it a time he hadn’t expected, the passing of time. Like everyone, he imagined that that sort of thing happened in the usual way, with the painter at the easel and the model in place, motionless, the two engaged in a pas de deux whose rules they knew—he could imagine the foolish chatter, meanwhile. But here it was different, because painter and model seemed, rather, to be waiting, and one would have said that each was waiting on his own account—and for something that wasn’t the painting. He thought that they were waiting to settle at the bottom of an enormous glass.