“Did you know someone here?” Sarah asked. “Is that why you came?”
They had already circled the lake and were back sitting in the shade on his apple crates. Embarrassed, he told her about his vague plan of haunting the dock in search of his father.
“What would you do if you found him?”
“That’s a good question. I don’t actually know.”
“Are you sure you want to find him?”
“I think so. It must mean something that I keep thinking about it.” Though he’s never sure what to imagine after the first flash of recognition.
“Even though he’s given no sign he wants to be found?” Her voice was friendly, curious, firm, a bit teacherly.
He said, “I think he owes me…” He couldn’t think how to finish the sentence. “A conversation.”
“What if he’s awful? Or insane?”
“I’d try to help him, I think.”
“Maybe it’s less that you want to know where he is and more that you don’t want to not know.”
Mulishly, he said, “I don’t see how those are so different.”
She smiled, a trace of pity on her long face. He wanted to draw her again. Not a Madonna this time but someone disguised as a Madonna. “Then I hope you find him. I can’t imagine life without my father. He looms large. Gloria and Hazel and I think we’re so wild, going around the city by ourselves, but we’re just as coddled as anything. The only reason I’m allowed my bit of freedom is that I’m the youngest, so my parents have had to relax some, if only out of exhaustion.”
“Youngest of how many?”
“Five.”
He realized he had been so pleased by her attention, so happy to be known again by someone even in some small way, that he’d failed to learn anything at all about her. “You tricked me into talking about myself this whole time,” he said. “Now you. Start at the beginning, please.”
“Tricked you?” she repeated. She looked at her delicate silver wristwatch. “Unfortunately, I have to go home. I’ll be in big trouble if I stay to tell you my life’s story, although it will seem very dull after yours.” She stood. “Can we meet again?”
Trying to conceal his euphoria, he said, “We have to. Otherwise I won’t forgive myself for rambling on.”
She promised she would come again the next day.
* * *
—
He spent the night in a fever. He ached to kiss Sarah, to feel her slender torso against his. He thought he might actually trade his life to see her naked. He wanted, with an uneasy undertow of shame, to do to her what he had seen that unknown man do to Gilda so long ago, to press her under his weight, to dredge and rut and dig at her. Most of all, he wanted her to want him to do this.
As muddy dawn lightened the window, he took up his drawing pad and started sketching in a frenzy. Sarah from the waist up, bare-breasted. Sarah lying naked with her arms behind her head, her legs demurely crossed. Then Sarah with her legs apart, a shadow between them to disguise his uncertainty.
Their second meeting, he had to keep fighting off erotic reveries as they walked around the lake. Her nearness, her bare forearms, her lavender aroma overwhelmed him, but he made himself try to listen, to repay the attention she’d given him.
She told him about her sisters and brother, her parents, her English sheepdog, Jasper. Her mother was passionate and political but, in Sarah’s opinion, also too submissive to her father, a businessman, who was alternately jovial and overbearing and tolerated his wife’s causes as long as she didn’t bore him with talk of them. She said she would go to UW like her sisters, though if it were up to her she’d go somewhere farther away, like Wellesley or Radcliffe. （“Isn’t it up to you?” Jamie said, and she laughed and said nothing was up to her.） She mentioned she had shown his portrait of her to her father, who was, as Hazel had said, an art collector.
“I think Father’s self-conscious about his origins,” she said. “Art is one way for him to show how cultured he’s become. I don’t mean to make him sound superficial. He loves it genuinely and is very knowledgeable. I asked him if he’d heard of your uncle, and he had. He thinks he might even own one of his paintings.”
“That seems unlikely.” But, after he’d spoken, Jamie realized he had no idea how far Wallace’s paintings might have traveled.
“He’s fairly certain. He said I should invite you over to see it. He’ll have it brought out of storage. He wants to meet you. ‘The Portraitist,’ he calls you.”