Chaperone
Drew Calvert
I took my class to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where you get in free if you happen to be a student or a chaperone. “Chaperone” was one of my titles that year, along with “patient” and “ex,” which captured my roles in therapy and divorce proceedings respectively. “It doesn’t feel like you try anymore,” my then-wife complained one day, referring to my career as an artist, which, the less said, the better. The next day, it seemed, she was gone, and yet I continued waking and eating and reading the news and driving to work and paying our utility bills, which were now my utility bills. I used to make a living off the moneyed schlubs of Silver Lake. Now I teach studio art at a high school with a golf course.
We set off just after lunch, although I hadn’t eaten lunch myself, for I had been fetching the school van from Aleksander, the volleyball coach, who had failed to honor protocol and fill the tank with gas. To wit: while everyone else at Canyon Prep enjoyed their vegan Singapore noodles or broiled chicken empanadas, I was perusing the entrees at the Chevron kiosk on Baseline Road, opting for the soggy tuna wrap over the even soggier egg salad sandwich. Yet still I had no time to eat. Instead, I had to search for Shane, who was tardy to every school event and often wandered off into the foothills during lunchtime. The other students waited by the van, recording a TikTok dance in the shade of a jacaranda tree, while I roamed upper campus like a birder courting an Inca dove. Aleksander, the colleague who
had fucked me in the ass vis-à-vis the empty gas tank, was walking back to the main gym from the faculty cafeteria.
“Someone’s late for their field trip,” he said, giving me a highfive.à
I wanted to murder Aleksander, but there was no time for that. I slapped his hand.
“Boom,” he said.
“I’m looking for Shane.”
“Shane McGuinn? He’s over there by the clover patch.”
I looked where Aleksander was pointing. Shane was indeed by the clover patch. There are violet flowers and ancient trees and stunning mountain vistas here in Southern California, but Shane was by the clover patch with his easel and his sketch pad, drawing what appeared to be an abstract tessellation. In addition to being a thorn in my sock, Shane was a talented artist.
“Shane,” I said.
“Coming,” he said, without looking up. I’d love to see his medical file. It took him almost a full minute to finish drawing and pack up.
“What’d you see in the clover?” I asked. This was a question we used in class to explore our choice of subjects. The students with the least talent usually had the most to say.
“Green,” he said, as we walked downhill to join the rest of his classmates, who were still performing the “Renegade” in a loose delta formation.
At the museum, as you might expect, I took a laissez-faire approach. After half an hour or so I walked out to the parking lot, climbed in the van, and sat there alone, eating my tuna sandwich like a plumber between appointments. It was all over for me, I could tell. Having once been an “emerging artist” with exhibitions in Phoenix and a burgeoning reputation in the new L.A. art scene,
I was now an off-duty chaperone on his lunch break, eating a weepy tuna wrap and chiding myself for doing so, for the van was now a mausoleum of tuna vapors. Life was absurd. The spirit of tuna was everywhere.
I opened YouTube and watched some clips my wife and I once laughed at—a koala falling out of a tree, a cheetah overshooting its prey and tumbling wildly across the savannah. Pratfalls from the animal kingdom. The algorithm offered more: chimps belching, lemurs carousing. Soon I was watching a clip of a young girl wearing a blue parka splashing around in a puddle with her giant labradoodle. Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day. The labradoodle shook itself, soaking the girl, who squealed with delight. I watched it about thirteen times until I received a notification—an old photo of Nikka at a rooftop bar in Venice Beach, her lips pursed vertically to achieve what we called “fishy face” for the benefit of her nephew, who enjoyed nothing quite so much as imitating trout. The design team at Apple Inc. was taunting me with “memories.” There were thousands in the palm of my hand, each highly combustible. My wife is photogenic in addition to being thoughtful and kind. She loved me for as long as she could.
Back inside, I browsed the paintings, tearing up—discreetly— over Monet’s Gladioli. Nikka and I had paused fondly over this very painting during our third official date. It was Saturday. We were in grad school. I bought her a drink at the White Horse Lounge, where they served cocktails corresponding to astrological charts. We talked about Edward Hopper, how his final paintings featured no people, only empty rooms. That was the start of a good phase, the only good phase I’ve had. I painted portraits of writers via their bedrooms, sheds, and offices. More recently I’ve become abstract—the rooms are now imaginary, and all of them are mine. My therapist claimed abstraction was a defense mechanism, so I
found a new therapist. I folded the old one’s invoice into a lush paper rose before igniting it with a Bic lighter. Defense mechanism or not, nobody wants to buy anything from an abstract portraitist. Hence my new employment scheme of educating the nation’s youth. Leaving Monet behind, I noticed my iPhone was at nine percent. I searched for an outlet and found one in the corner of the Renaissance room. I plugged in and scrolled through my email, a wild and perilous realm. There were documents I had to sign to finalize the divorce, but I wasn’t able to sign them—I mean, technically, it didn’t work. Repeatedly I pressed the screen to apply my e-signature, but the program wasn’t accepting it. “Error 404,” it said—a decent name for an art piece. I can picture it at LACMA. Soon I would need to alert my bank, the IRS, our landlord, and my insurance representative of my pending divorce and downfall. I had 30,000 unread emails. Most of it was spam, but there were all kinds of valid requests. Rather than respond to them, I created a new Gmail address, this time using my middle name. I wondered what majestic creature my wheezing soul would inhabit next as compensation for this dreary carnival of a go-around. Probably a dolphin, I thought. I fantasized about making the sound of a dolphin very loudly, an absolutely piercing cry to shatter the candelabras. Unfortunately, before I had the chance to issue my dolphin’s cry, a gallery attendant approached and said, in a voice that was far too loud, “Sir, the outlets are not for use.”
I didn’t appreciate this at all. The use of “sir” to a person in their late twenties should be taboo, even if such a person’s hairline screams middle age. Nobody’s ever prepared for that inaugural use of “ma’am” or “sir.” It’s a similar thing with hemorrhoids. What I did in the moment was, I promise, uncharacteristic. I am by nature obsequious, the kind of sir who apologizes to other sirs even when it’s they who’ve trampled on my foot. I said, “Just let me charge my phone, please. It’s an emergency.” I explained
that I was a chaperone, that I needed to have a juiced phone in case one of the students fled or punched through a rare Magritte and needed daddy’s checkbook. I was sorry to break the rules, I said, but in this case, I was doing so for a justifiable reason.
“Sir,” she said, and I said, “Ma’am”—probably too forcefully. I don’t think I yelled. I didn’t yell. I just said “ma’am” forcefully, perhaps a little ironically, but this, I thought, was better than saying “Fuck off back to your corner post.” Even so, she huffed and puffed. The woman was fairly heavyset; she likely would have pinned me to the marble floor if needed. Perhaps her life had exploded, like mine, and she was merely exercising her one modest power, which was certainly her prerogative. In any case, the moment was tense. We found ourselves at an impasse. It was my failed art career and divorce against her loneliness, her blister of a life. We stared each other down. She looked at me as if I’d just harpooned her in the chest, then she made a big show of composing herself.
“Sir, the outlets are not for patrons’ use,” she said, more calmly this time.
“All I need is five minutes.”
“Please, they are not for use.”
“Ma’am, let us make an exception.”
“If you don’t unplug, I’ll ask you to leave.”
A vision appeared to me then of myself twenty minutes hence: bloodied, handcuffed, crimson-faced, flanked by burly officers from the Pasadena police force, one of whom would lower my head as he eased me into the squad car. It was my turn to huff and puff. The day before, in the L.A. Times, I’d read about a man who’d slashed the tires of his dentist. The act made perfect sense to me. I felt a terrific heat in my chest and a bellow gathering steam in my pipes. There was no crime I wouldn’t commit. A small crowd was gathering near the entrance to the Renaissance room.
It was then that I caught a glimpse of Shane, who’d been standing just a few steps behind the gallery attendant. He had witnessed the whole sordid exchange. Another vision appeared to me then, a vision of me and the head of schools sitting awkwardly in her office, going through the play-by-play with a fragrant, pinstriped lawyer. Shane was reaching into his pocket, presumably to text a friend, possibly to film whatever misdemeanor might ensue. But no—instead of producing his phone, he took out a sleek portable charger. Space-gray, the size of a wallet. He didn’t say a word, Shane. His expression hardly changed. He just handed me the portable charger and said, “Here, you can use this.”
I spent the rest of our afternoon perusing the work of Édouard Vuillard, whose muted greys and greens and browns were just the palette I needed. Shane had ventured off in the direction of the expressionists. His portable charger worked like a dream. I studied Vuillard’s domestic scenes and thought about Shane’s behavior in one of our previous class discussions. We’d been debating the pros and cons of the “Art for Art’s Sake” movement, the kernel of modernism. Half the students defended Walter Pater’s vision of fleeting beauty; the other half articulated John Ruskin’s faith in the social and ethical value of visual art. Shane had doodled through most of class. He was silent, then as always. But when Leslie Kim shared her view that art was “therapeutic,” he had cracked a wry smile, evincing cynicism beyond his years. Art is not therapeutic, of course. It’s a viper at the bosom of life, an unbelievable hassle. What I find therapeutic are my edibles and couch cushions, into which I frequently scream. But seventeen-year-olds need to believe that art is therapeutic, and the role of the high school art teacher is not to disabuse them, so I toe the line. I seek to “inspire.” Only Shane seemed to know the truth—but maybe not the whole truth. Don’t do it, I wanted say. Do not mess around with art. His talent was
undeniable. When I gave each student a sheet of paper and a small tube of sky-blue paint, he created a miniature porcelain vase, then crumpled it up at the end of class. He never explained his work. “This is a red shoe,” he’d say. “This is a black and yellow horse.” I’d seen a draft of his college essay: a drawing of two stick figures locked in fervent coitus. I recommended Brown, where they love that kind of shit.
The museum was crowded, surprisingly. Most of the students were on their phones, giggling, preening, breaking off to hold hands or steal a kiss behind the statues of Buddha. Meanwhile, Shane stood silently in front of Kandinsky’s Heavy Circles for at least fifteen minutes. For five of those minutes, I stood behind him, silently, like a chaperone. I had no idea what his life was like. He’d never once confided in me, and his parents had failed to show up to the student-teacher conference. The counselor once asked me whether Shane “collaborated” in class. I told her he was doing fine, by which I meant he successfully avoided compromising his work for the sake of social credit, though I left that part implied. Without his knowledge, I’d submitted Shane’s work to national contests.
There was traffic heading back to school, but I felt calm. Art endures. I knew that when I got home, I would paint something remarkable and keep it for myself. I would paint until I died, it seemed. In the rearview, I saw Shane slumped in the back seat of the van, alone, gazing onto the foothills. He was going to be a great success, and probably a monster. The other students were pecking at their phones. One was napping. I drove us back to school in time for the parents and legal guardians to take their children off my hands. But Shane’s mother was running late, so I remained a chaperone for another half hour. In a way, I was pleased to have some time alone with my protégé. We sat on a bench in front of the school and waited for his mother as the shadows of elms
lengthened on the wide, dappled lawn. It felt like we were in a painting together—a painting called Chaperone. Or maybe we were in his painting, the title of which I couldn’t fathom and wouldn’t even dare to guess. A gorgeous obscenity, no doubt. I’d hang it on my wall.
Fool that I am, I tried to engage. I said I’d noticed him looking at Kandinsky’s Heavy Circles, and I asked him what he’d seen in the piece, for I, too, had once gazed longingly at Kandinskys; perhaps we’d glimpsed the same hint of the spirit world beyond. He glared at me as if I’d tried to haggle for his soul. “Circles,” he said, inserting his earbuds. He listened to ambient rock until his mother arrived in her blue Jetta. This was a lapse in manners, of course, but I was relieved—proud, even—that he had kept his secret. I didn’t take it personally. With beauty, nothing’s personal.