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After ten days of gloomy skies, one Saturday dawned clear and fine. Out the circle he’d rubbed clean in his little window, Mount Rainier’s gigantic, snowy crown hovered in the blue.
Such a day seemed too precious to spend begging in vain for work, so he took the few cents he usually would have paid for a day’s food and spent it on a streetcar up to Woodland Park, where there were amusements. He meandered by a Ferris wheel, a small zoo, a row of carnival games. Under a tree, he reclined in the grass and watched people enjoy themselves. Not everyone had lost everything. Not everyone spent their days hoping to cram sardines into cans. Some carefree people still dawdled and laughed in the sunshine, and rather than resenting them, he was pleased to know such lives were possible.
Presently a man set up two chairs and a little easel near the entrance to the zoo. He bought a balloon from a passing vendor and tied it to his easel, pinned up a sign that said caricatures 25 cents. Within minutes, a young father approached with his little girl, who sat squirming in the chair until the artist, with a flourish, presented her with his drawing. The father handed over a coin. Over an hour, the man sold three more portraits. A dollar! Jamie walked casually behind the artist’s easel when the next customer came. The subject’s face was recognizable but exaggerated, with giant eyes and a wild grin.
That same day, with almost the last of his money, Jamie bought a large pad of thick drawing paper and a box of charcoal pencils. A necessary gamble. For chairs he scavenged two apple crates. That night he recruited a few fellow boarders as models for his samples, and the next morning he went back to Woodland Park. He chose a spot beside Green Lake, far from the amusements so as not to impinge on the other artist’s territory. He weighted down his samples with rocks and propped a piece of cardboard against his crate on which he’d written PORTRAITS in big letters, embellished with sketched figures out for a day in the park: a mother pushing a baby buggy, children with balloons, a hatted man strolling, some leafy trees, a family of ducks. He hadn’t drawn many portraits before, but he thought he could do well enough.
Before long: his first customer, his first quarter.
Some sunny weekend days he made four or five dollars. Some gray days, he didn’t make anything. He experimented with different locations, different parks: Playland and the swimming beach on Lake Washington and Alki Beach on Puget Sound, where there were saltwater pools. When it drizzled, he sheltered near the Pike Place Market. In lulls, he drew general scenes—bathers lounging, children on a carousel, fruit peddlers at the market—and tried to sell those.
Jamie found he liked how the people he drew gave him permission to look closely and without hurry at their faces. He liked how people became vulnerable when they were about to be drawn, revealed more than they intended with their little adjustments. They sat up straighter or slouched, met his eye or evaded it. They seemed to become more themselves under his scrutiny, to radiate their most essential qualities. His special talent, he discovered, lay in his ability not only to see his subjects accurately but also to intuit how they wanted to be seen and to draw the overlap. His portraits were less flattering to the face than to the soul.
People seemed pleased.
One fine afternoon in July, as he waited beside Green Lake in Woodland Park, a group of three girls about his age sauntered by. All wore summer dresses and hats and ankle-strap pumps and radiated prosperity. A blonde led the way, plump and busty, striding forward with the confidence of someone who assumed she would be followed. The other two trailed after, both dark, one quite short and one quite tall. The short one was talking a blue streak and at the same time gnawing on a stick of rock candy. The tall one moved her long limbs tentatively, sliding along as though on ice she didn’t quite trust. She nearly stopped Jamie’s heart, that tall girl. She was leaning to one side, bending her ear toward her short, candy-eating companion. Her long, lowered eyelashes gave her a serene, enigmatic look.
The three glided on, a little flotilla of elegance, passing through the crowd, the park, the hard times as though none of it were of any consequence. Jamie watched the tall girl’s retreating back with the bereft feeling of having dropped something precious and irreplaceable into a deep lake.
“Hey, kid,” somebody said. “How much to draw my girl?”
Jamie turned, startled. A sturdy young man hitched his thumb at a sour-faced young woman, her arms folded across her chest.
“A quarter.”
The man’s face tensed, then sagged. “Nah, she don’t need it that much.”