Free The Painting by Nina Schuyler Page B

fish.
    He watches her pause and step tentatively into the house. Perhaps an old man from town has heard of Ayoshi’s healing hands and has come to her, hoping to ease stiff joints or bad digestion. Or someone who’s come to pray atthe temple. The gardener drives the cart down the pebbled path. Hayashi cranes his neck to look again. No one. The gardener steps down from the cart, opens the gate, drives the horses through, then closes it. Maybe after all this time, she has finally made a friend, someone from town. But a man? Hayashi swivels around once more to see if he might see the owner of this name. She was calling for a man named Sato, but there is no one.
    O VER TEA, SATO TELLS her the world is rapidly changing. She would love America, its openness, its informality, its eagerness to make a mark on the world. Brash, he says, there is no sense of history or tradition or protocol. Poor people become rich. Rich people become poor. Or maybe Paris, which is now at war, but after the war, she should go. It’s teeming with artists, writers, painters; or perhaps London with its theater and a king and queen. He sips his tea and gazes out the window. Japan is poised for a tremendous transformation. It’s certainly needed. How does she stand it? The silences, the politeness, the hierarchy, the pressure to conform. He shudders and hunches his narrow shoulders. That will change, he says. Fortunately. It’s all about to rip apart.
    How did you know I was here? she asks, lifting her gaze from her steaming tea.
    He says he was passing through. He heard she lived in the area and thought he’d stop by.
    She’d like to ask how long he might stay, what he plans to do. She’d like to ask what is he doing here. It’s a surprise, she says, your arrival.
    He sets his cup down. I remember that look, he says. That pout, the clamped jaw. You don’t want me here. He looks at her closely. Her face, pale and drawn tight. She looks older than her twenty-seven years, he thinks. He has been to the drought-stricken countryside of northern China and seen the victims, their skin stretched taut. Behind the vacant look lay ravenous hunger.
    No, that’s not true, she says, prickling at his directness and feeling even more irritated by his presence. It’s surprising. I’m surprised you’re here. After so long. She sips her tea. Sato, you look so tired. Do you want to rest? Hayashi should be here in an hour or so. Why don’t you rest?
    I won’t stay long, says Sato.
    Please. Stay as long as you wish, she says, forcing a smile. And she tells him again, he is her guest. A welcome guest.
    Thank you, he says. I think I will lie down and rest.
    W HY HAS HE COME ? she wonders, as she walks to the studio. Her delicately balanced life now feels thrown off, but by what exactly she couldn’t say. Your friend, she tells herself. He is your oldest, dearest friend.
    She mixes water into a bowl and sprinkles in dried red paint, stalling, not able to paint. How can she, her mind filled with the image of Sato sitting before her, with his hands now blue veined and bony. And behind the man, the young boy swelling out, the precocious boy who was selected by the government, along with twelve other boys, all of whom were fluent in English, to study abroad. Sato always loved to tell this part of his story. He’d learned English when it was illegal to do so, and he was rewarded for disobeying the law.
    He wrote her letters, saying he was staying on in Europe after his school program ended, even though his parents wanted him home and so did the government. The government paid his travel expenses and his tuition on the condition that he study military science. He took business courses instead and formed his own company. He insisted she come to Europe. And how she read those letters and reread them and dreamed of joining him, not as a girlfriend, always as a younger sister; he was eight years older than she and full of advice. Oh, maybe once there was the typical girlish