“Can you tell what that’s going to look like?”
“No, not yet. The two of us still have to figure that one out.”
“Figure out how I look three-dimensionally?” Mariye asked.
“That’s right. A painting is a flat surface, but it still has to have three dimensions. Do you follow me?”
Mariye frowned. I guessed she might somehow associate the word “three-dimensional” with her flat chest. In fact, she shot a glance at the curves beneath her aunt’s thin sweater before looking at me.
“How can somebody learn to draw this well?” Mariye asked.
“You mean like these dessan?”
She nodded. “Yeah, like dessan, croquis, things like that.”
“It’s all practice. The more you practice the better you get.”
“I think there are a lot of people,” she said, “who don’t improve, no matter how much they practice.”
She sure hit that one on the head. I had attended art school, but loads of my classmates couldn’t paint their way out of a paper bag. However we thrash about, we are all thrown in one direction or another by our natural talent, or lack of it. That’s a basic truth we all have to learn to live with.
“Fair enough, but you still have to practice. If you don’t, any gifts or talents you do have won’t emerge where people can see them.”
Shoko gave an emphatic nod. Mariye looked dubious.
“You want to learn to paint well, correct?” I asked her.
Mariye nodded. “I like things I can see as much as things I can’t,” she said.
I looked in her eyes. A light was shining there. I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what she meant. But that inner light was drawing me in.
“What a strange thing to say,” Shoko said. “Like you were speaking in riddles.”
Mariye didn’t respond, just studied her hands. When she did look up a short while later, the light was gone. It had only been there a moment.
* * *
—
Mariye and I went to the studio. Shoko had already pulled out the same thick paperback—at least, it looked identical to the one she had brought the previous week—and settled down on the sofa to read. She seemed totally engrossed in the book. I was even more curious than before as to what it might be, but I didn’t ask.
Mariye and I sat across from each other about six feet apart, just as we had the last time. The only difference was that now I had an easel and canvas in front of me. No paints or brush, though—my hands were empty. My eyes hopped back and forth, from Mariye to the canvas to Mariye again. All the while, the question of how best to portray her “three-dimensionally” was running through my mind. I needed a story of some sort to work from. It wasn’t enough to just look at the person I happened to be painting. Nothing good could result from that. The portrait might be a passable likeness, but no more. To turn out a true portrait, I had to discover the story that must be painted. Only that could get the ball rolling.
We sat there for some time, me on the stool, Mariye on a straight-backed chair, as I studied her face. She stared back at me without blinking, never averting her eyes. She didn’t look defiant so much as ready to stand her ground. Her pretty, almost doll-like, appearance sent people the wrong signal—at her core, she had a strong sense of herself, and her own unshakable way of doing things. Once she’d drawn a straight line, good luck getting her to bend it.
There was something in Mariye’s eyes that reminded me of Menshiki, though I had to look closely to see it. I had felt the similarity before, but it still surprised me. Their gaze had a strange radiance—“a frozen flame” was the phrase that leapt to mind. That flame had warmth, but at the same time, it was cool and collected. Like a rare jewel whose glow came from deep within. That light expressed naked yearning when projected outside. Focused inward, it strove for completion. These two sides were equally strong, and at perpetual war with each other.
Did Menshiki’s revelation that his blood might be running through Mariye’s veins influence me? Perhaps that had led me to unconsciously link the two of them together.
Whatever the case, I had to transfer that glow in her eyes to the canvas, to capture how special it was. The core element in her expression, the thing that cut through her modulated exterior. Yet I still hadn’t located the context that made such a transfer possible. If I failed, that warm light would come across as an icy jewel, nothing more. Where was the heat coming from, and where was it headed? I had to find out.
I sat there for fifteen minutes, gazing at her face, then at the canvas and back again, before finally giving up. I pushed the easel aside and took a few slow, deep breaths.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
“Um, sure,” she answered. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I want to know more about you. If that’s okay.”
“Like?”
“Well, what sort of person is your father?”
Mariye gave a small smirk. “I don’t know him very well.”
“You don’t talk?”
“We hardly see each other.”
“Because he’s busy with work?”
“I don’t know anything about his work,” Mariye said. “I don’t think he cares about me that much.”
“Doesn’t care?”
“That’s why he handed me over to my aunt to raise.”
I took a pass on that one.
“How about your mother—can you remember her? You were six when she passed away, right?”
“I can only remember her in patches.”
“What do you mean, in patches?”
“My mom disappeared all of a sudden. I was too little to understand what dying meant, so I didn’t really know what had happened. She was there and then she just wasn’t. Like smoke.”
Mariye was quiet for a moment.
“It happened so quickly, and I couldn’t understand the reason,” she said at last. “That’s why I can’t remember much about that part of my life, like right before and after her death.”
“You must have been pretty confused.”
“It’s like there’s this high wall that divides when she was with me and when she was gone. I can’t connect the two parts together.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Do you get what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said. “My sister died when she was twelve. I told you that before, right?”
Mariye nodded.
“She was born with a defective valve in her heart. She had a big operation, and everything was supposed to be okay, but for some reason there was still a problem. So she lived with a time bomb ticking inside her body. As a result, everyone in our family was more or less prepared for the worst. Her death didn’t hit us like a bolt from the blue, like when your mother was stung by hornets.”
“A bolt…?”
“A bolt from the blue,” I said. “A bolt of lightning that strikes from a cloudless sky. Something sudden and unexpected.”
“A bolt from the blue,” she said. “What characters is it written with?”
“The ‘blue’ is written with characters for ‘blue sky.’ ‘Bolt’ is really complicated—I can’t write it myself. In fact, I’ve never written it. If you’re curious, you should look it up in a dictionary when you get back home.”
“A bolt from the blue,” she repeated. She seemed to be storing the phrase in her mental filing cabinet.
“At any rate,” I went on, “we all had an idea what might happen. When it actually did, though—when she had a sudden heart attack and died, all in one day—our preparations didn’t make a bit of difference. Her death paralyzed me. And not just me, my whole family.”
“Did something change inside you after that?”
“Yes, completely. Both inside and outside. Time didn’t pass as it had before—it flowed differently. And, like you said, I had a problem connecting how things were before her death with the way they were after.”
Mariye stared at me without speaking for a full ten seconds. “Your sister meant a lot to you, didn’t she?” she said at last.
“Yes,” I nodded. “She did.”