“If tomorrow’s out, then come the next night,” Lewis said. “Would you? I know it would mean the world to Sarah. We’re always having boring doctors over. An artist would be a breath of fresh air.”
Jamie had intended to leave the next day. To accept Lewis’s invitation, he would have to add not one but two nights at his hotel. No, it would be better if he pled other commitments, departed as planned. He was about to offer his regrets when Sarah touched his arm again. She said, “Please come.”
It was settled.
* * *
—
In the morning, Jamie went back to the museum to take in the exhibition without the obscuring crowds and the distraction of Sarah Fahey—Sarah Scott, he reminded himself. The gallery was empty. His footsteps sent up soft echoes. The canvases, all Pacific Northwest landscapes, abounded with trees and mountains, islands and ocean. The artists had taken different approaches to conveying light, had complicated or simplified their scenes in pursuit of different moods and effects, but still Jamie grew depressed looking at one after another after another. What was the purpose of painting all these branches and waves? No painting would ever definitively capture trees or the sea. But was that even his goal? Definitiveness? He longed to communicate something not about trees but about space, which could not be defined or contained. Was the pursuit in itself reason enough to persevere? He didn’t know.
All the other questions he had for himself concerned Sarah Fahey. For example, why had he agreed to go to her house for dinner? There was a simple enough answer: He wanted to see her again. He wanted that so badly he was willing to endure the excruciating presence of her husband and children, to witness another man living out a dream he’d once had for himself. But why? When he examined his feelings for Sarah, he found violent confusion. There was no giddiness in his heart, no euphoria, only churning unease. If he spent more time with her, though, he supposed his present feeling might have the chance to settle into something recognizable. Perhaps a sentimental, nostalgic affection. Perhaps indifference. Perhaps love, after all. He didn’t know which he was hoping for. Was love worth cultivating even if it came to nothing?
After he’d finished with the exhibition, he took a stroll through the museum to visit the Turner watercolors. By the time he emerged, it was eleven-thirty, and since he’d skipped breakfast, he ducked into the first diner he came across, sat at the counter and ordered coffee and scrambled eggs with toast. He was still waiting for his food when a cook in a soiled white jacket came out from the kitchen and switched on the radio perched on a shelf above the cash register, put the volume up so loud everyone in the room quit talking and turned to look. A clipped nasal voice was talking rapidly about Japanese envoys and the State Department, Thailand, and Manila. The president’s press secretary, the voice said, had read a statement to reporters. Slowly Jamie gathered that Japan had bombed a naval base in Hawaii. A teenage girl two stools down burst into tears. When the reporter said a declaration of war was certain to follow, some people cheered. The program ended with promises of further bulletins, dropped without fanfare back into regularly scheduled programming: the New York Philharmonic playing something dismal and discordant.
Jamie didn’t know where to go, so he walked toward the waterfront. Apparently others had the same idea because a crowd was already gathering, mostly men, milling around, casting baleful looks to the west, at Bainbridge Island and Japan somewhere beyond it, as though a swarm of airplanes might appear on the gray horizon at any moment and the men would…what exactly? Throw stones as the bombs rained down? Feeling foolish, Jamie left the crowd to its posturing, walked uphill. The city had taken on a stunned quiet, distinct from a normal languid Sunday hush. The tinny, ambient buzz of radios seeped from windows. People stood clumped on the sidewalks. To Jamie, the war so far had been like the sun, relentless and undeniable but not to be looked at directly. Distant continents were being consumed by suffering and death, and, even if the impulse was cowardly, he had avoided fully confronting the horror of it for fear that he, too, would be swallowed up. But there was to be no escape. He felt as he had as a child in the mountains when he’d found himself, more than once, trapped far from shelter as a storm approached, bristling with lightning.
From his pocket he drew Sarah’s embossed card. He remembered the street. She lived near Volunteer Park, not far from her parents.
* * *
—
Sarah opened the door after he’d rung the bell twice. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and new tears sprang up when she saw him. She didn’t seem to question why he’d come, only beckoned him inside, saying, “It’s too awful.” She hugged him quickly, almost roughly, then lifted the hem of her skirt to wipe her eyes, seeming for a moment like a little girl. “Anyway,” she said, laughing a little, “welcome.”