The Portrait Was Supposed to Show Me Exactly as I Am — Until I Saw What My Friend Had Softened

PART 1

The first thing Beth changed was my hair.

I noticed because the silver streak at my right temple had been there longer than my divorce, longer than the red reading glasses in my purse, and long enough for my daughter to stop calling it gray and start calling it “your stripe.”

In the portrait hanging on the gallery wall, the stripe was gone.

I stood six feet away from a forty-by-sixty-inch version of my own face and wondered whether I was looking at the wrong file.

“Is this the final print?” I asked.

Beth Howard came around a stack of framed photographs carrying a roll of blue painter’s tape in her teeth. She took it out and smiled.

“Yes. Isn’t the paper gorgeous? The blacks came out exactly the way I wanted.”

The paper was gorgeous. Heavy cotton rag, matte enough that the window light did not glare across it. The photograph itself was one I remembered from our session: me sitting sideways on a plain wooden stool, one hand resting on my knee, mouth open in the beginning of a laugh because Beth had said something rude about my ex-husband’s devotion to quarter-zip sweaters.

I remembered liking the frame when she showed it to me on the back of the camera.

The woman on the wall still looked like me.

She just looked like me after a discreet committee had met to discuss my face.

My silver streak had been darkened to brown. The creases beside my mouth were there, but faint enough to suggest excellent sleep and no history. The soft skin under my jaw had been tightened. The small horizontal lines across my neck had become a suggestion instead of anatomy. Even the shadows under my eyes had been lifted until I looked rested in a way I had not looked since my forties.

I moved closer.

“Beth.”

She was checking the level on another frame.

“Mm-hm?”

“What did you do to my neck?”

The level stopped moving.

She lowered it slowly.

“Your neck?”

“This one.” I touched my own throat, because apparently the wall version was not available for cross-examination.

Beth gave a small laugh. “Angela, I did the normal finishing.”

“What is normal finishing?”

She looked at the portrait, then at me.

We had been friends for eighteen years. I knew the exact expression she made when she was deciding whether I was actually upset or merely being difficult for recreational purposes.

“Color balance. Skin cleanup. A little shaping. Nothing dramatic.”

I pointed at my temple. “Where is the gray?”

“I warmed your hair.”

“You made it brown.”

“I matched the overall tone. The light caught that section almost white.”

“It is almost white.”

Beth’s mouth tightened.

Around us, the neighborhood gallery smelled like fresh paint and coffee from the café next door. Eleven large portraits leaned or hung along the white walls. The show was called SECOND LIGHT: WOMEN AT MIDLIFE. Beth had spent nearly a year talking about it as an answer to every photograph of a woman over forty that made aging look either tragic or heroically inspirational.

No makeovers, she had told me when she convinced me to sit for her. No apology tour. No pretending forty-five is twenty-nine with a better retirement account.

That was why I had said yes.

A white wall card had already been placed beside my portrait.

ANGELA REED, 50

Administrative Manager

Unfiltered portrait, natural light

I read the second line twice.

“Unfiltered?”

Beth followed my eyes.

“That’s gallery language.”

“It is English.”

“It means the series isn’t beauty-filter content.”

I turned back to the portrait. “Then what do you call this?”

She crossed her arms.

“I call it a finished photograph.”

I could hear the defensiveness now, which irritated me more than if she had admitted she had overdone it.

“Did you do this to everyone?”

“Do what?”

“Make us look younger.”

“I did not make you look younger. I made the image cohesive.”

“Beth, I am standing right here.”

“I know what you look like.”

The sentence came out sharper than she meant it to. We both heard it.

I looked at the portrait again.

There were details she had kept. The little dent above my left eyebrow from running into a cabinet door at fourteen. The slight crookedness in my front tooth. A freckle near my collarbone. Those details made the altered ones more unsettling, not less. This was not a fantasy face. It was my face edited according to rules I had not been told existed.

“Show me the original,” I said.

Beth glanced toward the back room.

“Angela, the opening is Friday. I still have six labels to mount and Rita’s print is being delivered in an hour.”

“Then this should take two minutes.”

She sighed.

I did not move.

Finally Beth set the level on the floor.

“Fine.”

She led me through the black curtain into the studio office where her computer sat beneath two shelves of camera bodies and hard drives.

She woke the monitor and opened my session folder.

There were hundreds of thumbnails.

Then she clicked one file, and the unedited photograph filled the screen.

My silver streak came back first.

So did my neck.

So did a face I recognized immediately.