The Chalk Artist

  Maia called after them, “Careful on those stairs.”

  Collin ran down quickly and then held out his hand, helping Nina with the last rickety steps.

  “Over here.” Guiding Nina past the toys and rusty bicycles, he led her to seven rolling blackboards, dark, old-fashioned, like the ones at school. Rising from the basement clutter, they stood mounted in wooden frames with casters underneath.

  Quickly, he took the wet towel and wiped the board in front, rubbing the surface clean of every bit of dust and dirt so that it gleamed in the dim light. Then he reached down to excavate a box brimming with chalk. “What would you like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you want?” Focused, almost fierce, he picked up a piece of chalk.

  She hesitated. “Well…what do you like to draw?”

  “Everything.” Already his hand was moving across the board. “Horses.” He found a clear space and drew a horse with mane and tail streaming. “Birds.” A pair of white swans glided from his hand, their long necks curving, reflections rippling in a glassy lake. “When I was a kid I liked castles.” In seconds he drew crenellated towers and pennants flying, drawbridge opening. “Now I draw people.” With one fluid line, he drew a woman lying on a beach—no, on a bed. It was Nina, leaning back, supporting herself with her elbows. That was her hair falling over her shoulders. Those were her arms, her breasts…

  “Collin!” She had never seen anyone draw so well, so fast. His horses turned their heads to look at each other, his castle stood on foundations of rough stone, his sketch of Nina captured her tender expression, her soft, mussed hair.

  He stood back for just a moment to admire his work, and then he wiped it all away. Castle, swans, horses, Nina’s portrait vanished, and in their place he drew the hemlock in front of his mother’s house. He worked with thick and thin edges, smudging snow onto the branches with his hand, outlining telephone wires in white. “What else?”

  What else? She’d like to know how he drew swans so easily. How did he toss off castles in five seconds? He was so quick! He’d told her about his asphalt water lilies and his sidewalk Van Goghs, but she’d been to street fairs, glanced at sidewalk art on Church Street. His work was something else.

  His art was quick but never crude or facile. His drawings were lively, streamlined, beautifully observed. As mimics capture gestures in performance, he drew essential details, the curve of a neck, the soft dent in a pillow, the arc of a careening sled. With each sketch, Nina felt a shock of recognition. She forgot the fight, entirely forgot her funk, lost all consciousness of place and time and Maia upstairs. He was drawing the hill at Danehy Park, the dwarf pines weighted down with snow. How did he do it? He seemed to steal from the world.

  By now he held four pieces of chalk in his hand. “Tell me what you want.”

  “A cat.”

  A white cat capered atop a brick wall, and then a calico on a windowsill, and a dark cat with white feet and white nose crouching in tall grass. “What else?” He never hesitated as his chalk moved across the board. Sometimes he erased a line or smudged it with his hand, but he seemed to have a picture in his mind. Another cat emerged, a slinky, half-grown animal, ginger with green eyes.

  “You couldn’t learn this in school,” Nina said.

  “No, but I drew all the teachers.”

  “You drew the wrinkle between Miss Dorfman’s eyes.”

  His right hand traveled over the board. “Go crazy,” he told Nina. “Ask for furniture.” He drew his mother’s kitchen table with six chairs. “Or tennis.” He sketched himself, long, sinuous, jumping up to serve. He looked at her. “I’m showing off.”

  “Don’t stop.” She remembered his words—“I have nothing to say”—but it seemed to her the opposite was true. He had everything to say.

  “What else?” he pressed.

  “Wait,” she said. “Just let me look.” He had charmed her, delighted her before. She had enjoyed him for himself. He didn’t need to impress her, but to her chagrin, she saw him differently now. It should not have mattered, but it did; she saw his gift. “No!” she begged. “Don’t erase your pictures.”

  With a defiant smile he took his rag and erased his art to start again with a sailboat skimming an imaginary sea.

  Her heart was racing, because she could help him if he let her. She didn’t tell him, because she was afraid once more he’d take offense. To tell him was to flaunt her own position. Worse than that, to judge him. You’re so good. What are you doing with your time? She watched in silence as he drew a sail swelling with the wind. She did not speak, even as the words rushed in her ears. Let me do something for you.

  On Sunday Nina met her friends Julianne and Lily at Henrietta’s Table. She decided not to mention Collin, because she didn’t need her friends passing judgment. The relationship was so new, she wanted to protect it—but they guessed. They knew that she’d been seeing someone. After all, she had been ignoring them.

  “He’s an artist,” Nina said at last. “Sometimes an actor.”

  “Oh, no,” said Julianne.

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh, no’?” This vehemence surprised Nina, because Julianne was studying to be an opera singer.

  “Sometimes an actor?” Lily asked.

  “I mean, he’s not just an actor,” Nina said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lily.

  “He’s smart, and he works hard.”

  “You’re blushing!” Julianne said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Only because you’re staring at me,” Nina protested, but Julianne had known her since first grade. The girls had grown up ice-skating, scribbling their names inside Nina’s closet, pitching tents in the music room of Julianne’s stone manor in Milton. This was a house so grand it had its own agent for photo shoots and concerts and commercials. Servants’ bells hung in the kitchen. The window seats were deep enough to put on plays.

  Nina had loved Julianne’s house because it made hers seem more ordinary. There had been something last days of Versailles about the empty ballroom and the vaulted dining room. Gold silverware and crystal filled the butler’s pantry, but it was hard to find anything to eat. Hundreds of gilt chairs arrived by truck for chamber music concerts, but couches were few and far between. At night, on the third floor, the girls lay in Julianne’s four-poster bed, and they heard distant music downstairs and far away. The house was so big that when Julianne’s pet tortoise escaped, he was never seen again.

  “Look at yourself.” Julianne held up her phone now.

  “No, don’t!”

  Julianne took a picture of Nina laughing and covering her face.

  “Is he cute?” said Julianne.

  “Is he an egomaniac?” said Lily.

  “He has an ego, but he’s not a maniac.”

  “So he’s just self-involved.”

  “No! The opposite.”

  “But he doesn’t have a job.”

  “He has at least two jobs,” Nina said. “Maybe three.”

  “Hold on.” Lily held her hand up. “At least two jobs, or at most two jobs?”

  Lily, Nina’s college roommate, had been adopted from China but raised a Klein in Santa Barbara. Her mother was a pediatrician, her father an endocrinologist. She had begun college as a writer and a humanist, comping the poetry board of The Advocate, studying folklore and mythology—but within the year, she’d dropped Old Norse and reverted to organic chemistry, dumping her boyfriend from Vermont, along with all his poet friends. In their matchbox room in Thayer, she had confessed to Nina, “Student poets suck.”

  “Didn’t e. e. cummings go here?” Nina asked. “And T. S. Eliot?”

  Lily said, “Yeah, but he didn’t write The Waste Land as an undergraduate.” Lily had lost all sympathy for literary guys. After graduation, she had crossed the river for Harvard Medical School, leaving Asgard far behind.

  “He’s talented,” said Nina.

  Lily said, “Apparently.”
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  “He’s a chalk artist.”

  “Like sidewalk chalk?”

  “He can draw anything.”

  “Okay.” Julianne considered this. “He’s good with his hands.”

  “Be serious!”

  “I am serious.” In her low-cut shirt, Julianne looked like a Renaissance goddess of spring, a buxom mezzo with strawberry-blond hair. “This is your transitional guy.”

  “What are you reading?” Nina said.

  “I’m not reading anything!” The language of recovery came naturally to Julianne, who had been in therapy since she was a child. “I’m just so glad.” She’d always said Nina needed to fool around.

  But Nina wasn’t fooling. “I think I can get him a job.”

  Lily pounced. “So he isn’t actually working.”

  “He’s working, but I have an idea he could do better.”

  “Doing what?” Julianne asked, because she kept an open mind.

  “I thought he could work at Arkadia.”

  Silence.

  “You haven’t seen him draw.”

  Julianne and Lily looked at each other. They knew Nina’s enthusiasms and her stubborn resolve. They had seen her disappointed tears.

  “Don’t you remember Jonah?” Lily said.

  Nina quieted a little, even as she said, “He’s nothing like Jonah.”

  Lily said, “You felt used.”

  Nina told them, “He’s an artist, and he’s incredible.”

  “Oh, my God,” Julianne told Lily. “She’s completely in love with him.”

  Her friends didn’t understand. They assumed Nina was slumming, although they would never use the word. Of course sidewalk art was just as valid as anything else, and joining TeacherCorps was meaningful. It was the kind of thing everyone should try. They believed all this, and then they were startled when Nina actually followed through. She didn’t mean it, right? She was just rebelling. This was her version of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—dating a chalk artist, and teaching school.

  They were prejudiced. No, that wasn’t fair. They just wanted to protect her. They were glad she’d found Collin; relieved that she had slept with him. What alarmed them was her urge to help him. She’d been seeing him for what? Six weeks? Obviously he cared about her, but he knew who her father was.

  Julianne said, “I wouldn’t help him get a job.”

  “Why not?”

  “You aren’t thinking,” Lily said.

  “I am thinking. I haven’t decided anything.”

  “Good,” said Julianne. “Don’t!”

  “Don’t introduce them?”

  “Just don’t decide.”

  Nina’s friends hugged her after dinner. The three of them stood outside the Charles Hotel and said goodbye and love you. Julianne and Lily were driving back to Brookline. They offered to drop off Nina, but she said no. Are you upset? they asked. Of course not, she lied, and she walked home alone.

  She wished she’d never told them. Her desire to help Collin tarnished in the open air. She would not admit that they were right, but their doubts awakened hers. Once she introduced him to her father, there would be no going back. She would be pulling strings, and he would always see her that way. She would be manipulating the situation—giving up any pretense of equality. What would that be like? Risky, Julianne said. Big mistake, said Lily. How can you tell what he really wants? Julianne had asked gently, and of course Nina knew what that meant. You have too many things he needs.

  They didn’t understand, because they didn’t know him. She thought they might change their minds once they met Collin. Then she admitted to herself she wasn’t sure.

  He had laughed when she showed him her father’s house. It was at night and everyone had been out of town. He’d stepped into the hushed foyer and he’d laughed and laughed. “Is this for real?” It wasn’t the grand Victorian that flummoxed him, not the gables and turrets and tall windows, but the art inside, the white-flower painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, the eye-popping Lichtenstein of a woman crying on the telephone, the gold Buddha in the dining room.

  When Collin saw the statue of Venus standing in the library, he caressed the goddess from her broken shoulder over the curve of her breast and through the folds of her drapery to the hem of her robe. Exultant, he said, “It’s like a gallery, but you can touch, and no one’s watching!” He seemed to forget that Nina was watching him. He seemed to forget everything.

  Sleepless that night, she sat up, marking Discovery Journals.

  Q. Why does Hester Prynne conceal the identity of her child? Does her decision make sense to you?

  In large, round handwriting, Marisol wrote: Hester Prynne not revealing the father of her child isn’t so impossible to understand. 1. It’s embarrassing. 2. In those days it was not appropriate.

  Tiara wrote: It is dangerous to reveal anything when your a Puritan.

  Dangerous, Nina thought. That was the word. Not the games at Arkadia. The people there.

  To me the whole book is ironic, wrote Xavier.

  Sevonna said, Without secrets life would be so blatantly obvious it would be ridiculous.

  Collin might enjoy her help, and he might resent it too. He might be grateful, but she wasn’t sure she wanted gratitude. She imagined his mixed feelings, his guilty delight. She considered how he might treat her, as if he owed her something, or as if she’d trapped him in some grand plan.

  Diana’s entry was an inky thicket. Everybody’s got secrets. Whats more interesting is when you find out other peoples. Then the question is do you tell on THEM? For example my twin and I were like blood brothers only moreso. Now its like he moved away. I hear him whispering daphne daphne.

  Daphne? Nina stopped there, puzzled. Then the word receded into the tangle on the page. Maybe because he has something to hide, Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to write in a confusing way. Sometimes its like Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to be deep.

  Nina imagined speaking to her father. I have to ask you something. It was a big thing to ask—a serious and revealing question.

  Go ahead, Viktor would answer, and as he listened, he would jump three steps ahead of her, and he would laugh.

  She turned off the light and lay awake in bed. She couldn’t keep Collin from her father. Knowing her, he must know Viktor—but not so soon! Coming to Arkadia, Collin would know her uncle Peter too. This gave her pause. Her father was scientific and jovial, devoted to technology. Peter was artistic and perverse.

  Arkadia was harsh, fantastical, a tricky labyrinth. She wanted to shield Collin, but that seemed wrong, discounting his independence and his gift. She remembered just a week before, she and Collin had celebrated their birthdays at a little place called Carmen, in the North End. Brown kraft paper covered all the tables, and as they ate, Collin covered the paper in black pen, sketching places they had been—the bike shop, the bar at Grendel’s, the stone castle atop Prospect Hill. When the waitress arrived with their check, she looked wide-eyed at the illustrations and said, “Do you want me to wrap that up for you?”

  I have to help him, she thought the next morning, as she drove to school. But was there some way she could do it indirectly? She wove through winter streets, looping around the Cambridge Common, dipping into the underpass, and she wished she could help him secretly.

  She was not surprised to see police when she arrived at Emerson. She assumed patrol cars meant a safety drill, but then she saw security blocking off the sidewalk, a traffic jam of cars and school buses redirected to the back entrance. She had to circle the block to find a parking place.

  Inside the school building, yellow tape cordoned off the lobby, and police officers were directing students downstairs to the gym. CAUTION POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Vandals had attacked the building, spray-painting the entryway.

  “Oh, wonderful,” said Mr. Allan.

  Mrs. West was demanding, “How did they get in?”

  The black graffiti extended across the lobby wall in a series of initials over a foot high. The other
teachers didn’t know yet what the letters meant, nor did Mr. DeLaurentis, who stood outside his office, talking on his phone. Was it a new gang? Or some random prank?

  Only Nina understood. She knew instantly, and her face burned. There she’d been, plotting to find Collin a job. Now she wished Arkadia away, along with its obsessive fans. They had tagged her own school with UnderWorld’s catchphrase, See You In Hell.

  CUCUCUCUCU​CUCUCUCUCU​CUCUCUCUCU​CUCUCUCUCU​CUCUCUCUCU

  Across the river, Kerry was catching up on paperwork when she received a text from Emerson. Partial lockdown, vandalism with violent videogame content, classes continuing, increased security, no imminent danger, please wait until dismissal before coming to school. She read all this at once, and then twice, three times, but the only words she saw were “violent videogame content.” She hardly noticed signing out, zipping up her coat, shouldering her bag to leave the ICU.

  She had no idea what was going on, but her thoughts were all for Aidan, even as she glanced back at patients and parents in their glass-walled rooms. She left—although you could never leave entirely—and took the elevator down to the lobby, which was teeming with families and strollers, musicians toting their guitars, pet therapists leading wise-eyed dogs, hospital ambassadors, costumed clowns.

  Kerry hurried past bright murals and saltwater aquariums. Reaching back, she retied her thick blond hair, stuffing the ponytail into her hood. She passed a girl in a wheelchair with head support, then a man-size boy, clinging to his mother. “Bless you,” Kerry said, as the boy sneezed loudly, and then sneezed again.

  She was a believer. She believed in four-leaf clovers and shooting stars. She believed in Jesus and in angels, although they worked mysteriously. She had seen more of death than most, and she believed, to some extent, in ghosts—not the ghoulish kind, but the quiet ones who come to you in dreams.

  She had her superstitions about shoes on tables, and open umbrellas in the house. She had her rituals, and she was not ashamed of them. After all, she worked in a place where knowledge ended and belief began. She got out of bed on the right side, and when she had a chance to swim in the echoing War Memorial pool, she used only a red kickboard—red for happiness—never blue. She didn’t think that she could sway the universe, but she hoped that you could nudge it with a prayer.