The Chalk Artist Read online

  The Chalk Artist is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Allegra Goodman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Excerpt from “There is a pain so utter” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

  New Directions Publishing Corporation: Excerpt from “A Virginal” from Personae by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Goodman, Allegra, author.

  Title: The chalk artist : a novel / Allegra Goodman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : The Dial Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016001270| ISBN 9781400069873 | ISBN 9780679605041 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Computer games—Social aspects—Fiction. | Video games—Social aspects—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.O5829 C47 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016001270

  Ebook ISBN 9780679605041

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Hand lettering on title page and leaf ornament by Rachel Willey

  Cover design: Rachel Willey

  Cover photograph: Rosemary Calvert/Getty Images (leaves)

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Grendel’s Den

  Chapter 2: The Orchard

  Chapter 3: Emerson

  Chapter 4: Everwhen

  Chapter 5: Wait for Me

  Chapter 6: Snow Day

  Chapter 7: Dream

  Chapter 8: No Moon, No Stars

  Chapter 9: Drink Me

  Chapter 10: In Her Eyes

  Chapter 11: Caution

  Chapter 12: The Leopard

  Chapter 13: Crossing Over

  Chapter 14: The Visit

  Chapter 15: Open Door

  Chapter 16: The Interview

  Chapter 17: Arkadia

  Chapter 18: The Gates

  Chapter 19: Deer

  Chapter 20: Very Close

  Chapter 21: Face-to-Face

  Chapter 22: Pursuit

  Chapter 23: Admission

  Chapter 24: Discovery

  Chapter 25: Lucky

  Chapter 26: Walden Woods

  Chapter 27: Half Magic

  Chapter 28: The Question

  Chapter 29: The Kiss

  Chapter 30: Poetry Inaction

  Chapter 31: Joy Street

  Chapter 32: Two Rivers

  Chapter 33: Busted

  Chapter 34: Bird on a Wire

  Chapter 35: In the Hall

  Chapter 36: World-Jumping

  Chapter 37: Contagion

  Chapter 38: Win, Lose, or Draw

  Dedication

  By Allegra Goodman

  About the Author

  Her long hair curtained her face as she sat marking papers. Drunk graduate students surrounded her, but she didn’t even look up. Rock pounding, dishes clattering, this was Grendel’s in winter, the old Cambridge dive, loud, warm, and subterranean, half a flight down from Winthrop Street. A green lamp lit every table, a hundred mirrors hung on paneled walls. Collin watched her reflection from every angle. She looked so elegant and out of place.

  She came on Tuesday nights, and sometimes Thursdays too. She would order a Mediterranean salad and start grading papers. She was slender, fair, her eyes dark and shining, as though she knew some secret—she alone. Whenever he got close enough, he looked over her shoulder. Her handwriting was precise, her pen purple, extra fine. Once she glanced up and nearly smiled. You realize, he told her silently, if I drop something it’s your fault. If I break a plate, it’s all because of you.

  He saw guys leering, even if she didn’t. “Everybody’s looking at her,” he told Samantha, the bartender.

  Sam said, “Yeah, but mostly you.”

  Collin was twenty-three, bright, artistic, and unhappy. He had just left college for the second time, and although he had good reasons, his mother was upset with him. His ex-girlfriend Noelle was out of patience. His father was in the navy; he had not seen or even heard from the man in seven years. Collin had thought of enlisting, mostly to travel, but he had grown up on a street where signs in the front yards read WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. He never did enlist. He didn’t go anywhere.

  He worked at a bar and went out drinking afterward. Even if he’d enjoyed college and respected his instructors, even if he had excelled at Web design and programming, he didn’t have time to go to class. He was busy collecting tips and partying, waking up in other people’s beds. Sometimes he despised himself; not often. Sometimes he decided to get serious, but he kept working nights and sleeping in, and hanging with his high school friends, and all of this became a full-time job; youth itself was his vocation.

  For this reason, the girl’s diligence fascinated him. She sat for hours grading at her table, and she was so young—way too young to be a teacher. She should have known better than to sit alone down there. Few came to work at Grendel’s, and those who tried, didn’t get much done. They would open their computers and close them gratefully when drinks arrived. This girl did not respond to guys circling her table. She looked royal in her cardigans and trailing scarves and calfskin boots. He sketched her on his order pad. The princess of solitude, with a crown.

  One Tuesday, when she started packing up, her coat slipped off the back of her chair, and Collin ran to catch it for her. She stood to go, and he realized how tall she was, almost his height. He was close enough to see the gold flecks in her eyes, the freckles dusting her face. He held his breath as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. Then she thanked him, and rushed off.

  “Nice,” teased a waitress named Kayte. “Could you catch my coat too? Before it touches the ground?”

  Collin watched for the girl on Thursday while he carried out chicken wings and plates of stuffed potato skins. He served foaming Guinness, caught bits of conversation: Seriously? How much did that cost? I feel guilty but…The Who pounding. Students wailing, “The exodus is here.” Busy night and no free time, but Collin kept watching until Sam started flicking ice at him from behind the bar. “Who’re you waiting for?”

  “Shut up.”

  “So you admit it.” Sam was tiny but in your face. She was compiling a book of vintage cocktails.

  “I’m not admitting anything.”

  True, Collin wondered about the teacher. He speculated about her at Broadway Bicycle School, where he taught wheel changing, tire patching—basic repair. She had sounded Americ
an, but he decided that she came from Paris. Or London. He said, “Inflate the tube and listen.” Maybe Barcelona.

  On Monday he colored backdrops for the theater company he had founded with his roommate, Darius. Working with wet chalk on old-fashioned rolling blackboards, he drew slender trunks and arching branches, layered cherry blossoms, white and pink. The edge of his chalk crumbled. He rubbed white and red together with his thumb, and he thought and thought about her. Sometimes she glanced up and she was looking at him, he was sure of it. The next second he would think, No, that can’t be true. Daydreaming about her, he felt lighthearted, amused. His fantasies were so chaste and so persistent. She was always sitting at her table, just out of reach, and he liked her there—although he was intensely curious. What was she doing all alone? A girl like that would have a boyfriend. There had to be some story. A long-distance relationship—but she didn’t look lonely. He wanted to know her. Or at least to hear her name.

  There were days she never even crossed his mind. He spent a weekend with Noelle. They went to a party and stayed out late dancing, and then they went to her place and he began undressing her. She laughed, and he knew why. Now that they’d sworn off each other their bodies were so eager.

  Late the next day they woke stale and headachy, annoyed with themselves. Even so, Darius’s girlfriend, Emma, had four tickets to Lady Lamb the Beekeeper in Davis Square, and so they went. All that time, Collin didn’t think about the girl, until Lady Lamb bent over her guitar, her long hair curtaining her face. Then suddenly he imagined the girl watching him. He saw himself through her eyes and he was cheap, and aimless. He felt poor, as well, although he didn’t consider himself poor. He considered himself free.

  —

  The next week, he was taking orders for a party of six when she materialized again. He looked up, and there she was, already seated in Kayte’s territory. He was not getting off early, but when he saw the huge stack of papers on her table, he made a secret deal with her. If you keep at it until eleven, I’ll walk out with you.

  All night he watched her table, willing her to stay. When she began to stir, he murmured: “No, you don’t. Keep working. You aren’t going anywhere.”

  Ten forty-five, she pushed back her chair. From behind, he saw her shoulders shaking, and thought she must be sobbing, or choking. He rushed over. “Are you all right?”

  When she looked up, she was laughing, not crying, and she showed him an essay. Curvy handwriting on lined paper, the title in bigger script: Juliet: Shakespeare’s Heroin. “What do you think?”

  A thousand ideas crowded his mind, none about her student’s spelling, as he watched her add an e. “Are you really a teacher?”

  She said, “I keep asking myself.”

  “You don’t look like one.”

  She shook back her long brown hair and glanced up at him, amused. “What’s a teacher supposed to look like?”

  “Old,” he told her. “Bitter.”

  “I’m bitter.”

  “How long have you been teaching?”

  “Three months.”

  “Your students are that bad?”

  She frowned as she looked down at her check. Annoyed? Or just figuring out the tip?

  He said, “My friend Darius was thinking of directing Romeo and Juliet, but he couldn’t find a church.”

  “He couldn’t get permission?” Already she was shouldering her bag, and standing up to go.

  “He wanted to do it in a cathedral with stained glass and confessionals, but the only church interested was Unitarian.”

  “Are you an actor?”

  Jean-Philippe, the busboy, was trying to get by, and Collin stepped sideways. “I’m an actor and an artist.” He regretted the words as soon as he said them. He sounded pretentious. “Mostly chalk.”

  She looked puzzled. “On sidewalks?”

  “Yeah, but other places too. I do all the art for Theater Without Walls.”

  “I’ve heard of them!”

  “In the Phoenix?” He turned, glancing backward at Kayte. Cover for me, he begged her silently. She was shaking her head, but he knew she liked him. Just five minutes. My tips are yours! “Wait, let me walk you out.” He handed the girl a leaflet for The Cherry Orchard, a new production at the MIT tennis courts by Theater Without Walls. Art Director: Collin James.

  “Tennis courts in December?”

  “They’re indoor.” He led the way upstairs and opened the door for her. The snow around them lit the darkness. “I’m designing the lights…and the trees. I’m in it too.”

  “You perform in Sennott Park, right?”

  “We perform all over. We did The Tempest on a traffic island.”

  “That’s it! I read about the car accident.”

  “It was just one guy hitting a pole,” he said. “Nobody got hurt.”

  She smiled.

  “Come to The Cherry Orchard. I’ll get you a ticket. Give me your name and I’ll put you on the list.”

  She didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no. She just looked at him, and her eyes were so dark and bright that he drew closer, until she began to laugh.

  “Or not.” He took a full step back.

  “I wasn’t laughing at the play.”

  “Why, then?” He had wild curly hair, black eyes, a quick, athletic body, a defensive look.

  “I don’t know,” she said in some confusion.

  “Come if you want,” he said coolly.

  “Okay,” she said, automatically polite.

  He didn’t ask her name; he pretended she was just a customer. “Have a good night.”

  Collin could not remember why Darius had insisted on the MIT Bubble. Maybe he’d assumed he could reserve all the courts. As it happened, the actors got just one. All through The Cherry Orchard they competed with the skid and squeak of athletic shoes, and the thwack of tennis balls. Sometimes a stray ball flew over from guys rallying just steps away.

  The idea was no chairs. Everyone could walk freely so that, as the play progressed, the audience followed the action, advancing, retreating, and approaching the net. There was no set except for Collin’s chalk orchard, his blackboards filled with blooming trees.

  The other idea—all Darius—was to stage the play as farce. They had fought about this. “Dude,” Collin had told Darius, “the lady returns to where her kid drowned and then finds out she’s going to lose her house.”

  “Yeah, so?” Darius was a big guy, not as tall as Collin, but broader. Smart, and avant-garde, and something of a rainmaker, he came up with grants from the Cambridge Arts Council, permission to perform in public places.

  “The play is sad,” Collin said.

  Darius dismissed this. “Yeah, the sad version is really overdone.”

  In performance, Darius’s girlfriend, Emma, romped across the court, starring as the romantic Ranevskaya, who would lose her childhood home, her past, her everything. Emma was more folk-rock Mainer than Russian nobility to begin with, and when she spun around calling, “Goodbye, old house, old grandfather house,” you had the feeling she was excited to move on.

  Pouring imaginary tea as the servant, Collin listened to the audience’s cautious laughter, and he wanted to dash his imaginary teapot onto the court and smash all his imaginary cups and saucers too. Where was the darkness in the play? Where were the shadows? In rehearsal Darius had conceded that some moments were bittersweet. Now, under rented lights, nothing bittersweet came through. No darkness, except for Collin’s seething servant, and Noelle, who played Ranevskaya’s daughter Anya.

  Everyone wore street clothes instead of costumes, and Noelle dressed in a little undershirt and a pair of frayed jeans that fit her like a second skin. She was an ex-ballerina with spiky hair and a pierced tongue, and she was pissed. She had a lot of anger in general, but she was angry at Collin in particular. They’d had a huge fight the night before, during which she had said, among many other things, “First of all, I hate you. Second of all, you are one hundred percent bad for me, because the only t
hing you care about is the beginning and the end. You can never be in the middle; you can never actually be with someone or learn something or get something done, because you’re always starting and then leaving, which is why I hate myself after I’ve been with you.”

  Even now, performing, he heard hostility in every one of Noelle’s lines. At the end of the play, she was brutal when she announced in her husky smoker’s voice, “The cherry orchard is sold, it’s gone, that’s true, but don’t cry, Mama.” Noelle was hard-core for an ingenue.

  Collin was glad the girl from Grendel’s hadn’t come. Her laughter haunted him, because she had known then—she’d known in advance exactly how the play would be. Pretentious and amateurish all at once. Everyone watching related to or sleeping with the cast. After Act II, a couple of strangers wandered in, but they were carrying their racquet bags.

  He could see the audience tiring, clustering near the baseline. They perked up when the estate was sold and all the characters said their goodbyes. As soon as Chekhov’s characters began talking about the future, everybody started folding camping stools and gathering bags. People were already heading out when Collin flipped his blackboards over, one by one. The audience froze for just a moment as he revealed his chalk drawings on the other side. Jagged stumps, fallen petals, broken branches, a holocaust of trees.

  —

  “Don’t touch the art,” Collin’s mother, Maia, told him at the party afterward. “Do you have pictures of that orchard?”

  “Darius had the camera.”

  “Hey,” Maia called out to Darius, who sat on a couch overflowing with actors. “Do you have photos of Collin’s orchard?” She was unhappy with Collin and also fiercely proud, saving every scrap of art, celebrating each performance, inviting the whole cast to her winter solstice celebration. “That orchard was the best character in the play.”