The Art Class

The community center on Milwaukee Avenue had offered an evening painting class for years, but this fall only three people signed up. On the first Tuesday, they sat in a circle of paint-stained chairs and looked at each other the way strangers do in an elevator: politely, briefly, and with a certain amount of suspicion.

Frank Kowalski was sixty-four and had retired from the Chicago Police Department the previous spring. He was a large man with a quiet voice, and he held his brush as if it might go off. Next to him sat Daniel Mehta, an accountant in his thirties who had arrived ten minutes early, checked the fire exits twice and apologized to the coat rack when he bumped into it. The third student, Yadira Fuentes, was seventeen. She had moved from Havana to Chicago with her mother two years earlier, and she spent most of the first evening drawing in a small notebook that she kept closed whenever anyone looked her way.

Their teacher, a cheerful sculptor called Grace Okafor, did her best to break the ice. "Nobody here is a professional," she said, "so nobody here can fail. Tonight we are going to paint an apple. Just an apple. Do not overthink it."

Daniel overthought it. He measured the apple with a ruler, mixed seventeen shades of red and, after an hour, had produced something that looked like an accounting spreadsheet with a stalk. Frank painted his apple gray. Yadira painted a perfect apple in about four minutes and then, when she thought nobody was watching, added a tiny green worm wearing a hat.

"Why gray?" Grace asked Frank at the end of the class. He shrugged. "Thirty-five years of night shifts," he said. "Everything I looked at was gray. I suppose I got used to it."

Slowly, the class changed. Grace moved them on from fruit to portraits, and portraits, it turned out, were a dangerous thing to ask strangers to do. To paint someone, you have to look at them for a long time, and people who are looked at for a long time tend to start talking.

Daniel was the first to open up. While Frank painted him, he admitted that he had always wanted to study art, but his parents had persuaded him that it was not a sensible career. "Sensible," he repeated, with a small, sad laugh. "I have been sensible for fifteen years. I am very good at it. I am also extremely bored." Frank nodded slowly. He knew something about doing the sensible thing.

Then it was Frank's turn to surprise them. When Yadira asked whether he had ever arrested anyone famous, he told them that for the last ten years of his career he had not really been chasing anyone at all. He had worked with witnesses, sitting with frightened people for hours and drawing the faces they described. "I must have drawn two thousand faces," he said, "and every one of them was somebody I never wanted to meet." The others stared at him. The man who had been painting in gray was, in his own way, the most experienced artist in the room.

Yadira was the hardest nut to crack. She was talented, everyone could see that, but she treated her notebook like a state secret. It was Daniel who finally got her to share it. He showed her his own worst painting, a lopsided self-portrait in which he looked like a worried potato, and said, "If I can show you this, you can show us anything." She laughed for the first time in weeks and opened the notebook.

It was full of houses: blue houses, pink houses, crumbling houses with balconies full of plants and washing. "My grandmother's street," she explained. "I draw it from memory, so I don't forget it. She is still there. We talk on the phone, but it isn't the same."

By December, Grace had a plan. The community center was holding a winter exhibition, and she suggested that the three of them work on one large painting together. They argued about it for a whole evening, which Grace took as an excellent sign, and finally agreed to paint Yadira's grandmother's street in Havana, but at night, as Frank might have seen it, with every window lit up in a different color.

Daniel planned the perspective with mathematical precision. Frank painted the faces of the neighbors leaning out of their windows, faces Yadira described to him just as witnesses once had, only this time they were people she loved. Yadira painted the houses and, in one corner, a tiny green worm wearing a hat.

On the night of the exhibition, a woman in the crowd stopped in front of the painting and asked who the artists were. Frank looked at the other two and smiled. "We are," he said. "All three of us. We are in the same boat." It was not quite the right idiom, Daniel thought, but it was close enough.