His own painting, a six-by-ten-foot rectangle of Oregon shoreline, had a wall to itself, off to Sarah’s left. She studied the Carr for another minute before stepping sideways to the next canvas. After another period of contemplation, she moved on again, drawing closer to Jamie’s painting while keeping her gaze averted. Deliberately, he thought. Everything about her seemed deliberate. Lanky elegance had replaced her timid adolescent gawkiness.
He began to maneuver through the people, seeking a better vantage for when she finally looked at his painting, though part of him also wanted to leap between her and the canvas, to forestall her judgment by assuring her that he already knew it was inadequate, a failure, like all his work.
Someone grasped him by the shoulder, stopping him. “Marvelous,” said a man Jamie remembered vaguely as having something to do with the museum, small and pink and curly-forelocked as a cherub. Was he a board member? The man pumped Jamie’s hand. “Absolutely marvelous. My congratulations.”
Jamie thanked him distractedly. Sarah was on the last canvas before his.
“I must ask you,” the man said, straining onto his tiptoes, trying to catch Jamie’s eye, “how did you develop this technique—style, I suppose—of creating angles? The sense of folding? Its effect is so original—you’ve intrigued me! Did you simply stumble upon it?”
“Origami,” Jamie said shortly. He downed the last of his champagne, set the glass on a tray held aloft by a passing waiter.
“What?”
“Origami. Japanese paper folding.”
“Really? Really. The little birds and frogs? Fascinating. I would never have made the connection, but I see. I see! Tell me—have you spent time in the Orient?”
Sarah squared her shoulders, pivoted left, and stepped in front of Jamie’s painting.
Sea and sky were gray, barely differentiated except through the brushstrokes, subtle angles suggesting the billows of clouds and the rhythmic geometry of swells and currents. In the foreground loomed the huge haystack shape of the famous basalt formation on Cannon Beach. This he had rendered, in contrast to the sky and ocean, as flatly monolithic, a black void. Sarah was very still against its darkness.
“Mr. Graves?” said the cherub.
Jamie’s body was dissolving into anxious effervescence. His mouth was dry. “Excuse me,” he whispered, brushing past the man just as Sarah turned from the canvas.
What was her expression? He tried to fix it in his memory for later examination: cheeks flushed, eyes wide and liquid and active, neither recognizably appreciative nor obviously displeased but clearly provoked.
When she caught sight of Jamie, she startled and froze. Her flush deepened, spreading rapidly down her throat to her décolletage. Pressing a hand to her sternum, she smiled sheepishly, tremulously.
In a fluster, he hurried toward her, tugging at his cuffs, cursing himself for being too proud to buy his own tuxedo. He’d told himself he didn’t care how he looked, that he had no wish to pretend to be a fat cat （though Jamie was no longer by any means poor）， and now his comeuppance was to resemble a scarecrow. He darted to kiss her cheek. “Sarah.” He didn’t dare say anything else. When he’d imagined their meeting, he’d failed to account for adrenaline, for shaking knees, trembling fingers. He jammed his hands into his pockets.
“I wondered if you would be here,” she said. She touched her throat. “I’m so nervous. Why am I nervous? We’re old friends.”
Gratified by her admission, nettled by the word friends, he said, “Old sweethearts, actually.”
“We were children,” she declared, laughingly but with a note of insistence, and chattered on before he could reply, saying, “I can hardly believe it. I see your name attached to these really truly extraordinary—really, Jamie—these paintings, not just this one but others, too, and I still picture a boy.” The crowd pressed in densely, and she was pushed closer, almost against his chest. All of him was alive to her. She clasped his forearm quickly, almost covertly. “I tried to imagine you grown up and couldn’t, but now that I see you, you make perfect sense.”
He was studying her. “I know what you mean. You’ve changed but you haven’t.” The bones stood out more sharply in her long face than they had, but still there was an inevitability to her adult self. The long, veiling eyelashes that had given her a shy, modest affect as a girl were blackened with mascara, and as she looked up at him through them, he sensed with some disquiet a new artfulness to her.