The Ayukawa family lives in a fine white house on Oppenheimer Park. Miss Ayukawa—eighteen years old, a nisei born in Canada—sits for him in a large parlor furnished in a ponderous Western style with dark rugs and heavy furniture. His painting of the neighborhood has been mounted above a long walnut sideboard. The room might have been gloomy but for the large windows. It is a breezy, unusually sunny morning. As Jamie makes preliminary sketches, rafts of yellow light and leafy shadow sweep across the floor.
“We’ll never have this light again,” he says. “I shouldn’t get used to it.”
She wears a plain brown day dress; her hair is swept up in a smooth twist. Sally, she’s said to call her. Her beauty doesn’t escape him even in his downtrodden state. “I should remember this city as gray because it almost always is,” she says, “but I think I’ll remember the sunny days best.”
“Remember it?” He glances at her grandmother, present as a chaperone, clad in a cotton kimono and asleep on a burgundy silk sofa. Her needlework lies abandoned in her lap; her wire-rimmed spectacles have slipped toward the tip of her nose.
“I’m going to Japan. I’m getting married.”
“Oh, I see.” Her tone does not invite congratulations. “And this portrait is…a wedding gift?”
Her upper lip flattens in anger. Her feathery eyebrows draw together. “It’s for my parents to remember me by.”
He doesn’t know what to ask that will unearth what he wants to know. Instead he asks her to tip her head down just a bit. After two hours, a uniformed maid comes and ushers him out.
The next time he comes to the house, the day is overcast, but the scene is as it was before: Sally in the brown dress, beside the same window; her grandmother asleep on the sofa.
Sally gazes out the window, still and steady, but as Jamie works, he senses inward agitation. He has not looked at a person so carefully in a long time, is out of practice trying to depict, the way he had in Seattle, the tidal zone where a person’s inner and outer selves wash together. “How do you want your parents to remember you?” he says, moving his brush rapidly over the canvas.
“As I am, I suppose.”
“What I mean is, a person’s thoughts show through. For example, if you want to leave behind a version of yourself that’s happy, you should think about happy things.”
“Happy things,” she repeats, looking again out the window. “I’m going to a country I’ve never been, where I know no one, to marry a man I’ve seen one photograph of. I’m afraid an abundance of happy things doesn’t spring to mind.” Her voice has risen, and she and Jamie both look at her grandmother, who does not stir.
“Only one photograph,” Jamie says. “Is that…common?”
“It used to be, coming the other way. My mother was a picture bride. My father was already here. Their families arranged the match. She didn’t mind—her generation didn’t expect anything better. But I’m from here. My father has odd ideas. He doesn’t want to go back himself, but he says it’s important we don’t lose touch with our homeland. His homeland.”
With a small sigh, her grandmother rouses herself. She pushes her spectacles into place. “Junko,” she says, and asks a question in Japanese that Sally answers, her tone light.
“She wants to know if you’re making me beautiful,” she tells Jamie.
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d told you to paint me as I am.”
“They’re the same,” he says, made reckless by his persistent, mortifying melancholy over Judith. He doesn’t know if he is trying to drive away his sadness or make it worse by groveling before another unattainable woman. Sally does not translate. She settles back into her pose, but now she looks directly at him rather than out the window.
“What does junko mean?” he asks after a while.
“It’s my Japanese name,” she says. After a pause, she adds, “I don’t like it. I’d rather just have one name.”
He returns three more times. She continues to watch him while he paints. He sees—or thinks he sees—different moods sweep through her gaze the same way the leaf shadows blow across the floor. Defiance is what he chooses to paint, defiance but, as a mercy to her parents, none of the anger that comes and goes. He sees curiosity, too, when she looks at him. Judith only ever looked amused or bored. Impossible, perhaps, to spend so many hours looking into a person’s eyes and not imagine an unspoken intimacy.