I love these because I love thinking about you looking at me, Sarah Fahey had said about his drawings of her. Does Sally like thinking about him looking at her? When he works on the portrait at home between sittings, he feels a tension, a winching together that tightens into urgent desire. He adds a faint warp to the portrait’s background, a suggestion of curvature, of the room pulling away from behind Sally, pushing her closer to the viewer.
On the last day she sits for him, he slips her a scrap of paper with his address written on it, whispers that he’d like to see her again. She looks at the paper, slides it into her pocket. When she raises her gaze to him again, he sees contempt, and he has a terrible sense of having made a major miscalculation. None of what he’d sensed roiling in her had anything to do with him. He is just some unimportant man trying to insinuate himself into her hour of crisis. He paints falteringly for another half hour, gives it up. He will finish it in his apartment. “I’ve got enough from life,” he tells her.
Three nights later, in the small hours, there is a knock at his door: quiet but urgent, a light, persistent rapping. He gets out of bed and pads across, wide awake, thinking she’s come after all. He is filled with a vision of how she will look, how she will rush into his arms, how they will escape together.
Two men are outside the door, white men, neither as tall as Jamie but both built like steamer trunks. They push in before he can recover from his surprise, bundling him across the room by the arms, pushing him to the floor.
Through his terror, he wonders why he had ever thought Barclay would come personally. He’d always imagined being able to at least try to reason with the man, to appeal to his feelings for Marian, to explain that he needed to let her go.
One steamer trunk sits on him while the other closes the door, calmly turns on the bath tap.
“We just want to know where she is,” the one sitting on him says. “That’s all. We’ll leave you be once you tell us.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “She didn’t tell me. She knew better than that. She knew he’d send you. She was going to Seattle and then on from there to somewhere else. That’s all I know.”
“You expect us to believe you didn’t come up with a little plan together?” says the man by the tub.
“We’ll see,” the other man says matter-of-factly. He has a job to do, that’s all. There will be no appealing, no explaining. Jamie understands this as he is hoisted up beside the bathtub, struck in the face before his head and shoulders are plunged into the cold water.
“I don’t know anything else,” he says when he’s lifted out. Again he’s held under, brought out, struck. “Please,” he says until he can’t summon the breath to speak.
In the morning, he finds himself still alive, lying curled on the bare pine floor. He hauls himself up, runs a hot bath. The touch of the porcelain is horrible to him, the water full of menace, but the warmth eases his pain. Lying cramped in the tub, in water tinted pink from his blood, he plans what he will do.
Everything he will take with him fits in one suitcase. Some clothes, his better paints and brushes, sketchbooks. Because he will go from the Ayukawa house to the train station, he carries the suitcase in one hand by its handle and Sally’s portrait clutched carefully by a stretcher bar in the other. The paint is not quite dry.
The maid’s eyes widen when she opens the door, takes in his swollen face. “No,” she whispers. “Go away!” She makes a shooing gesture.
He says, “Please tell Sally—Junko—or her grandmother or whoever is home that I’m here, and I’ve brought the painting, and I need to be paid.”
“No,” the maid says again. “Go away!”
Jamie’s confusion is intensified by his general state of addledness, his pounding headache, his urgent, determined need to flee the city. Why would the maid send him away when he’s brought the painting? He needs the money he’s owed, no matter how rude he must be to get it. More loudly, he tries to explain again, asks for Sally. He is nearly shouting when a dapper man in a gray suit appears beside the maid. She retreats into the house with a bow.
Jamie has not met Mr. Ayukawa before. His thick bushy eyebrows are so unlike Sally’s feathery ones, but Jamie recognizes her expression when he draws them together. “I am surprised you would come here,” he says.
“I’m leaving town,” Jamie says, uneasy, “and I wanted to be paid. For this.”
He turns the canvas to face Mr. Ayukawa, and the man’s eyebrows fly up. His face is full of the same mournful astonishment as the face in the moon. When he speaks, it’s in a whisper: “Just tell me where she is.”