The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

  The first image emerged, a line drawing of Daphne in silver. Next, a sketch of Daphne slouched down on the shuttle bus. Daphne leaning over, playing pool. Daphne drinking at a bar. Daphne gaming like a dervish with her arms outstretched. One by one, each image filled Nina’s field of vision, and she saw Daphne with her wide eyes and her laughing mouth and her cropped hair. She saw all this and she saw the time Collin and Daphne spent together. Daphne drunk and funny, messed up, impudent.

  Then she saw Daphne sitting just for him. Full color, fully shaded, Daphne in her hooded sweatshirt, Daphne unzipped, Daphne in her undershirt, Daphne undressed.

  “How could you draw her like that?” Nina gazed at Daphne’s arched back, her breasts, soft and white, in contrast to her patterned torso, her black-inked collarbone.

  “They’re just studies.”

  “Studies of what?”

  “They’re not important,” Collin said. “That’s what you have to understand.”

  Nina said nothing.

  “I didn’t even keep them!”

  She was remembering the summer day they’d spent together. The pine trees and the heat, the taste of salt. She had asked him, “Do you draw Daphne?” And he had lied to her, even at that moment. He’d lied to her then.

  Now he told Nina, “I was practicing. I was just experimenting, and I erased them all.”

  “I can see why.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that! They were just like chalk drawings. I wasn’t trying to keep them from you. I didn’t even keep them for myself.”

  “Is that why you said you didn’t draw her?”

  “I said it because…it wasn’t important. And it didn’t matter.”

  She closed the laptop and hugged it to her chest.

  He struggled to explain. “I want to be open with you. That’s why I’m showing you the sketches.”

  “You’re showing them because you’re afraid of Peter.”

  “No! I’m showing them because I won’t let him hold this over me—or us.”

  Over days and weeks Nina had dismissed Daphne from her mind; she had fought against distrust. Now all she saw was Daphne’s body and her inked arms and her kissed mouth. All this had happened. It was still happening. Collin spent every day with her. “You see her all the time. You’ll see her today.”

  “No, I won’t. I don’t want to see her.”

  He could talk as much as he liked. His drawings drowned him out. They weren’t ordinary. They weren’t occasional. There were too many.

  “I’m being honest,” he protested.

  “You have to be honest!” she shot back. Peter had Collin’s art, and Peter had Daphne, and now Peter had Collin too. Because of this, Collin had confessed what he’d been keeping from her. He could say that these were only sketches. He could insist he didn’t take them seriously. She knew better. After all, he’d drawn her too. She read a whole relationship in these studies, a second life entirely, overlaying theirs.

  “Nina,” he said softly.

  “Just get away from me,” she said. “Just leave.”

  —

  He left in frustration, but arrived home guilty. There were no little lies for Nina. There was no action without meaning. Wasn’t that what he loved about her? Now he had hurt her; he’d misjudged her. He reached for his phone without a plan, without any motive but apology.

  Too late. Nina didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to see him. When he texted and he called, she didn’t answer. All Saturday, he left her voicemails. He wrote emails. He kept starting them, anyway. Dear Nina, This is such a mess…; Dear Nina, I realize…They weren’t any good.

  Darius said he had to stop. On Saturday night, he took Collin to The Plough & Stars and said, “Believe me, the only thing worse than cheating is going on and on about it.”

  “I didn’t cheat!” Collin burst out.

  “Whatever,” Darius said. “Stop talking about it.”

  He began writing on a yellow legal pad. Nina, I shouldn’t have kept those drawings from you. Please believe me when I say they didn’t matter. The sketches aren’t important. I don’t think about them. I think about you.

  His words were colorless. They could never capture what he felt. After all, what could he say? I lied. I should have told the truth when you asked. But also—you’re different from anyone I know. A bunch of drawings, a few late nights, a girl taking off her clothes. What did any of it matter? Noelle had worked as a model at the Museum School. Collin never took it personally—but Nina looked inside art, uncovering intentions. She had seen his curiosity, his pleasure, his intense attraction.

  Late at night, Collin anguished over Darius’s words. He considered his own denials and felt guiltier than before. To be honest, he would have cheated. He would have slept with Daphne, but she didn’t let him, so he drew her instead.

  Loving Nina didn’t mean he’d changed; he was the same guy as before. The same except for his remorse, his growing understanding as the hours passed. She had trusted him. She had risked her heart with him. Why had he taken it so lightly?

  How could you? he kept asking himself. And at the same time that other voice grew stronger. The voice demanding, Why are you surprised? She’s way too good for you. You knew it all along and now you’ve proved it. This was inevitable, his conscience told him. Give up. You don’t belong together. He told himself all this, and yet his heart jumped every time he got a message. If only he could reach her.

  —

  Nina turned off her phone. She left her computer closed on the table. She couldn’t bear his explanations and apologies, abject but self-serving. His images possessed her, multiplying in her mind, and she filled in the blanks, imagining where his art would lead. Collin was undressing Daphne, touching her, caressing her.

  She didn’t eat or drink. She had lessons to prepare, but when she looked at Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the words seemed foreign. It was not Night, for all the Bells / Put out their Tongues…What did that mean? She had no idea. Only when she was calm and happy had she understood those lines about despair.

  At some point Sunday night, Nina’s alarm clock began beeping. She struggled to open her eyes, and did not remember falling into bed. She did not remember anything in those first moments between sleep and waking. Then her disappointment came crashing down upon her. Pinned, she looked out at her shadowy room and saw her laptop blinking, her stacks of papers, Emily Dickinson facedown on the floor.

  Monday, she thought, and then, I can’t. She had nothing to say, and nothing to give. I believe that each of you has a unique contribution to make, she had typed on her syllabus. Therefore, I expect you to come to class prepared. I understand that you are very busy, but I am asking you to make this class a priority, as it is a priority for me…Had she really written that? God, how insufferable she had been.

  She forced herself to shower. Threw on some clothes, gathered papers, remembered to run a comb through her wet hair. When she took the elevator down, she was surprised to find her car keys in her hand.

  It was street-cleaning day. When she arrived at school she saw the trucks, Phil’s Towing—WE MEET BY ACCIDENT—hitching up and pulling the parked cars away. Raindrops beaded on her windows as she drove past the school, looking for a legal space. Then her windows fogged. She was driving in a cloud.

  Slowly, she climbed the stairs with the last stragglers. She had had no coffee; she hadn’t even brushed her teeth. She hugged her thick copy of Dickinson to her chest. The bell was ringing, but a crowd stood outside her classroom door.

  “Miss! Miss! Check this out,” her students called to her. Her class was standing room only. As soon as she saw her blackboards, she knew why.

  Her double boards had been transformed. Black no longer, they had changed into a pair of landscapes—two views of the Eliot Bridge over the Charles, one in winter, one in summer. The winter river glimmered white. Snow outlined the bridge, bare bushes, and park benches on the icy bank. The world was cold, the sky pale, with just a hint of red suggesting the e
arly-setting sun. Next to this winter scene, the summer river showed the same bridge and trees, but here the dark water danced under a bright sky. The bridge was ruddy, the bank thick with grass and tender leaves. The pictures were huge, but also detailed. In winter you could see a lost mitten on one snowy bench. In summer, a family of ducks clambered up the riverbank.

  “Who did this?” Trey asked.

  Rachelle wondered aloud, “How’d they get in?”

  “Is this, like, vandalism?” Tentatively, Candace touched the summer riverbank, smudging the grass. “It comes off.”

  “Stupid,” said Trey. “You know it’s chalk.”

  “All right, everybody in my class sit down,” Nina said. “Everybody else—go where you belong.”

  Reluctantly, students from other classes backed out the door. They couldn’t take their eyes off those pictures. No one could. Nina gazed at the blackboards and saw the Charles sparkling in white stillness, as it had that first snowy winter night. It hurt, but she could not look away. She saw the scene as if no time had passed, and she was there with Collin and without him, looking at the same river twice.

  Meanwhile her kids were taking pictures with their phones. “Okay,” Nina said softly. “You know the rule.”

  Reluctantly her students shoved their phones into their pockets and their backpacks. They found their seats, but couldn’t settle down.

  Zachary echoed Trey. “Who did this?”

  Nina took a quick attendance. Colleen, Matisse, Jared, Australia, Candace, Rachelle…

  “Because he’s, like, a genius,” Zachary said.

  “How do you know it’s a guy?” Australia demanded.

  From force of habit, Nina turned to write, DO NOW, on the board. She stopped. There was no room, and the rivers were too beautiful to erase. Setting down her chalk, she began her lesson. “Dickinson leaves space for your own imagination. She leaves a space around each word so you can think about it. “Memory is a strange Bell…What do you associate with the word bell? Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell. What’s a jubilee? What’s a knell?”

  The kids shifted restlessly. She called on Sebastian, and he just stared at her. She was heartless in her students’ eyes, standing with her back to this amazing art.

  Australia was pointing to the footings of the chalk bridge and asking Trey, “That’s the place where the geese live, right?”

  “No!”

  Several kids corrected her at once. “The geese live at the BU Bridge.”

  “We’re looking at Memory is a strange Bell,” Nina said, but she was distracted too. How had he gotten in? How many hours had he spent on this? Amazed, she thought, You must have worked all night. Affronted, she thought, And you think that you can color over everything. “All right, listen up.”

  Nobody paid the least attention.

  “I’ll wait,” Nina announced, but she thought—how? How could she get through this lesson and four more classes as well? “I’m ready.”

  “Shut up, Liam,” Tanya responded to some unseen slight.

  That did it. Nina yanked open the file drawer of her Steelcase desk and found her water bottle. At last her students hushed as she unscrewed the cap.

  Silence as Nina poured out the water, wetting her industrial-size eraser just as she had seen Collin do. A long horrified sigh as she swiped the center of Collin’s winter river. “Miss,” they murmured. “Ohhh,” they exhaled, as she ruined Collin’s beautiful illusion, sweeping it clean. She felt almost criminal, but she didn’t stop.

  When she turned around to face her kids, they sat chastened in their metal chairs. For the first time, they were afraid of her, because her eyes were filled with tears.

  —

  She was faster than her students when the bell rang. First out and down the stairs. She would have fifteen minutes to wash her face, to soak paper towels and press them like a rough compress against her closed eyes. She got to the staff restroom, and realized that in her rush, she had forgotten the key.

  She glanced behind her, but she saw Jeff coming. She turned and ran down the hall, took the back stairs to the basement.

  In the therapy room she could close her eyes. She could shut herself inside—but someone else had come down here as well. She saw him at the end of the dark corridor, typing into the keypad on the wall, disabling the alarm.

  “Stop!”

  The boy shrank back, trying to disappear. Too late. Nina threw herself between Aidan and the door. This is how you do it, she thought. This is how you skip out in the middle of the day. What do I tell him? How do I keep him here? What can I do? The questions tumbled over one another, as her mind woke. Now. Now. Today of all days. “Aidan!”

  He turned back, trying to avoid her. He wanted to walk back to class, pretend nothing had happened, but she had caught him and she wouldn’t let him go. He knew he was in trouble. She knew this was her chance.

  He was unreachably tall, eyes fierce, head crowned with tangled golden hair.

  “You know you can’t leave school.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You have class,” she said. “You’ve got my class now.”

  Silence. He didn’t move, but she braced herself against the door. “I know what’s going on.”

  That irritated him, her sad-and-disappointed look.

  “I know you’re smart. I know you’re capable…” Standing with her back against the door, she remembered Maia’s advice. Be funny. But I’m not funny. Be desperate. Now Nina told Aidan, “I’ve seen your work.”

  That surprised him. He had not turned in many assignments.

  “On walls.”

  He stared in disbelief. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Her accusation made no sense. He searched her pale, tear-streaked face. What was wrong with her? Lazare wasn’t an adult anymore; she looked like a kid his age.

  Even so, she spoke as his teacher, with authority. “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  “What have I been doing?” he asked coolly.

  “Playing UnderWorld with Daphne. Tagging the school.”

  Then he went cold. Lazare was a mind reader, just like people said. No, she’d seen him. She’d watched him somehow—at school or in the park. How did she know? He understood, of course, that she was Viktor Lazare’s daughter. Neither in school nor in the neighborhood had she flaunted that connection, but it was creepy to consider now. “You talked to my sister,” he said in a hushed voice.

  “She didn’t let me.”

  “You came to my house.”

  The bell was ringing. She was going to be late. “I haven’t told anyone else yet.”

  “Wait.”

  She interrupted. “You have a choice. Meet me in my classroom after school and we’ll start working. Or meet me in the office with Mr. DeLaurentis.” She turned to go.

  “What do you mean—with DeLaurentis?” Now he was following her through the basement, up the stairs.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He trailed her to the classroom, where the other kids were waiting. Head down, he slipped inside and sat in back.

  All through her lesson, she sensed Aidan slouching in his chair, but she never spoke to him. She taught around him, calling on Becca to his left and Siddhartha to his right. Becca, could you read aloud? Siddhartha, why does Dickinson use the word abyss? Aidan looked up once, but she was careful not to catch his eye. She almost had him, and she wouldn’t press her point.

  “Look at Dickinson’s dashes,” she told her class. “What does she use them for?”

  “Punctuation,” said Miles.

  “Yes,” Nina said. “What else?”

  “Instead of commas?” Miles asked.

  “Look at these lines.” Nina wrote them on her chalk-smeared board.

  There is a pain—so utter—

  It swallows substance up—

  Then covers the Abyss with Trance—

  She repeated her question. “Why do you think she uses dashes?”

  Shana said, “T
o show where you should breathe?”

  “Good! Say more.”

  Shana hesitated and Nina had to resist the impulse to rush in and flood the room with questions. Did the dashes allow space for imagination? Could they be like rests in music? A nod to ambiguity? A way to honor the unsaid?

  She said none of this. She held back, calm and quiet. When kids talked in class or rocked their desk chairs back, when they flirted or they fought, she stood between them and pointed silently to the correct line on the page. After her disastrous morning she began to right herself, slowing down and teaching her lesson, class by class. She had thought the day would be impossible, her lessons incoherent. In fact, she made a lot of sense. She saw it in her kids’ faces. Less prepared than usual, she didn’t try to cover so much ground. She kept it simple, giving students time to think.

  “Thank you,” she told her fifth-period seniors, right before the bell. Her students looked puzzled, but Nina couldn’t tell them what she really meant. Thank you for crowding into my room. Thanks for whispering behind my back. Thanks for reading with me. She was grateful even when her kids refused her. I don’t get poetry. I still don’t understand. They took all her energy, and all her heart.

  When the last bell rang, her students thundered down the stairs, and Nina stood alone. Her windows were dusty, but her room glowed in the gold November sun. Washing down the last of Collin’s rivers, she thought, I taught more than one hundred kids today—and some of them were listening. She thought, I’m getting better at this. At the same time, she was deeply sad.

  “How do you know Daphne?”

  Aidan was standing at her desk.

  “Have a seat.”

  He remained standing. “How did you…?”

  She dragged over a chair. “I don’t want to talk about her. You’re here so that we don’t have to talk about her. Please.” She gestured to the chair.

  Wary, Aidan sat down.

  Nina took her grade book out, along with her weekly planner. “Okay. You owe me six vocabulary sheets, three journals, and two expositions. Then for next week you have your analysis, and your poem.”