“Variation”

“Sometimes it takes heartbreak for art to come to life.”

“Tell me about him.”

Ava looks up from her sketchpad, “Who?”

Nick gestures to the pad in front of her, where the corner of a mouth has started to take shape, “The boy you keep drawing.”

There is a smudge of charcoal across Ava’s left cheekbone, and another to one side of her forehead. Her fingers are coated in gray and leave streaks against the white of the mug of tea she tips to her lips. “Mm,” she hums, eyes crinkling like the corners of a smiling mouth. When Nick takes the sketchpad, she doesn’t move to stop him. He flips through it.

“You never used to draw this much,” he comments, when it becomes clear she won’t respond, “Not even when you were my student.”

“I remember drawing lots, Sir.”

Nick raises an eyebrow, gesturing at the pad, “Not with this kind of attention, especially to a single subject.”

“You were always telling me ‘practice makes perfect.’” She says, still sipping at her tea, “What do you think?”

Nick flips through the book. On nearly every page, the same face stares back at him: smiling, smirking, pensive, mischievous, angry. Occasionally they are accompanied by full-body croquis—a tall, stocky, loose-limbed figure standing with arms folded, or holding a book, or gesturing with his hands to a hastily sketched-in crowd. “Good. Impressive, actually. You’ve always had a good eye, just—”

“—no patience. I remember you always said that.”

Nick had taught Ava’s figure-drawing class in her first year at art school. She’d been sixteen then, an ambitious teenager with high expectations for her talent, and the determination to develop it as quickly as possible. Trouble was, she could never stay still long enough for it to develop—while other students spent session after session on the same pose, the same portrait, Ava breezed her way through the handbook they’d been given as if it were a race. He recalled the perennial expression of frustration on her face whenever, at the end of each session, all the students displayed their work—everyone seemed to be improving in leaps and bounds while Ava, having mastered the basics, proceeded no further. He’d tried to explain to her, then, that while she had the talent, improvement took patience and repetition, but she wouldn’t have it, and as the semester went on grew increasingly discouraged.

“How long have you been working on these?”

“This book? Or all my drawings?”

“All of them.”

Ava purses her lips and squints, and Nick can almost hear the gears whirring in her head as she struggles to make a rough estimation. “A year, I think?” she says, finally.

“That’s quite long.”

“I’d stop every so often, for weeks at a time...”

He’s counted over twenty sketches in this book alone, ranging from rough and somewhat abstract to more detailed, dynamic renditions. But always of the same subject: a boy, not much older than Ava herself, with a broad, friendly face that was almost handsome, and a near-perpetual smirk, even when he was thinking. Many look like they were copied from photographs, but today, Ava has none with her. No references, she draws purely from memory—something she hadn’t been able to do, all those years ago.

Nick lets out an appreciative whistle, then hands her back the sketchbook. Ava smiles. “If I’d turned this in, Sir, would you have given me a higher grade?”

Nick laughs, “I believe I gave you a pretty decent grade.”

Ava’s smile is tight, “Decent enough.” She says coolly. She picks up her cup again and starts sipping her tea, eyes half-closed and looking down.

“You haven’t answered my earlier question.”

“Hmm?” Ava says, looking up.

“Who is he?” Nick gestures to the sketchpad.

Ava sighs, shrugs. “No one special.”

Nick raises an eyebrow. “One year’s worth of sketches and no one special? I doubt.”

“I did say I stopped for weeks at a time.”

“Still, a year’s worth of practice. I couldn’t even get you to stay on one reference photo for a week.” When it’s clear Ava won’t reply, he sighs and says, not without sadness, “He has to have been important enough for you to start drawing again.”

By the end of the term, Ava had managed to finish the most poses of anyone in the class, but none of her sketches showed the same progress as her peers. They were good enough for her to pass—she did have talent, after all—but it was clear she could have done better, if she would just take more time. Nick had taken her aside and recommended that she re-take the course in the summer, when her workload was light enough for her to, ideally, focus more on the class. She’d nodded and promised to do so, but though teacher and student had kept in touch (it was a small school, so it was hard not to), come summer term she did not re-enroll, and the next thing he knew she’d transferred out, taking up Arts Management at a private business college.

“I didn’t have talent,” Ava murmurs, “It was a lost cause.”

“Not by the looks of what you have here.”

“I can’t draw anyone else.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.” Ava’s gaze is steady, so different from the anxious teenager with the ever-shifting eyes that Nick remembers. Her gaze pins him for a long moment, then it shifts back down to the cup.

Finally, she speaks. “I was happy with my choice.”

“To shift out?” Ava nods. “You did have talent, Ava. You still do.”

“Not enough—”

“Pardon the term, but that’s bull and you know it.”

Ava shakes her head, “Maybe. But it doesn’t change the fact that I was happy. Am happy. I’m good at what I do, Sir.”

“I don’t doubt you are. But you could have been one of the artists whose work you sell, not just the person selling them.” Ava shakes her head, and it is Nick’s turn to sigh—his former student is still stubborn, still doubting herself after all these years and fifty sketches that should be enough to prove her doubts unfounded.

“I was happy,” Ava repeats, “I didn’t want, no, need, to draw. Not for a long while after. It wasn’t something that mattered to me anymore.”

Nick sighs. “So what changed?”

Ava gestures to the sketchbook, to the boy’s smirking face rendered in smudged charcoal. “Him.”

“His name is Rafe. He was my classmate, that first year of business school. He was taking international business, actually, but we shared many of the same core subjects so I saw him all the time, until eventually we were paired up on a project. A business plan, I remember. We started talking and sort of became friends.”

“And he agreed to model for your drawings?”

“…Actually, I modeled for his.

He drew cartoons, little comic strips. It was his way of staying awake through classes. When we would sit together, he would sketch me, illustrate our conversations. He always made them out to be funnier than they were.

After that business plan project, Rafe would asked to be paired with me in every class we took. He said we made a great team. Of course, I didn’t argue. I liked Rafe. I…liked him.

And he liked me, or so I thought. When we were working together—in class, during Free Period, after school at the coffeeshop on campus—it was like I was the only person in the world that mattered. We’d talk about music, books we liked. He’d show me his comic strips. I—” Ava sighs, “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this, Sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“No, really, this is too, it’s too…”

“Personal?”

Ava nods.

Nick shakes his head. “Art is always personal, Ava. That’s why it’s a talent, not just a skill. If it could simply be learned, then all your classmates—even the ones who stayed in the program—would have been artists by now. But not everyone makes it, no matter how good they are. Because it takes something from you to make it. Art takes something out of you. That’s how you know it’s good.”

“When you’d get so profound, Sir?”

“Right around summer term, when you didn’t take my class.”

Ava smiles, wryly, and for a split-second her smirk mirrors the boy in the drawings. “Noted. So, are my sketches art?”

“Well, Ava, you tell me.”

Ava looks down at her cup, swirling it around in her hands as if trying to read the tea leaves swimming at the bottom for answers. Finally, she lets out a gut-deep sigh. “They definitely took something out of me.

Each time I drew one, I could zone out, just focus—shade here, smudge there, make sure the proportions are accurate. It wasn’t him, it was a drawing, and while I was sketching it I could forget. But in the end, it was still his face staring up at me. So I’d start another. And another. Hoping each time that the next one would be the one to make me numb. Like when you repeat a word over and over so much it loses its meaning. Only it never lost its meaning. It was always still Rafe.

I fell for him, that year, so slowly that by the time I’d noticed it was too late—I was head over heels. And he seemed to be falling too, or maybe that was what I wanted to believe…” Ava takes a deep breath, puts the cup down and rests her palms on the table, as if trying to keep her balance.

“One day, the teacher called for pairs, and I looked for him…and he’d already chosen another partner. Another girl. Later he’d tell me that he’d liked me, that he’d considered it, but that after he had he…he figured it would have never worked, and that he was sorry if he’d given me the wrong impression. He told me I was beautiful, that anyone else would be lucky to have me. I just wasn’t for him.

Next thing I know, I’m looking at the school paper, and there’s our comic, the kind he always used to draw for me…only I’m not in it. The new girl is.” Ava half-laughs, “But hey, it happens, right?”

Nick is unsure what to say to his former student. She looks so old now, older than the twenty-two years (Not even, he thinks.) she is supposed to be. “I’m sorry.” he blurts out, finally, “That had to have been…difficult.”

Ava smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, which suddenly look so much older than the rest of her face. “It’s all good, Sir. Ancient history. Anyway, I got a good bunch of drawings out of it.”

“Better than good.”

“So you say. You’re the real artist here, not me.” She pushes the sketchbook towards him, “Here, you can have it, Sir. Have them all. Consider them a thank-you for coming to see an old student and listening to her woes.”

Nick pushes the sketchbook back, “Keep them. They’re worth a lot more than you think.”

“Oh?” Ava raises an eyebrow, “How so?”

Nick smiles, “I started teaching another class, art history, a few years back, starting with the summer after you left. One day, when we were covering Van Gogh, I asked my students to identify what it was that made his artwork so great. Of course, you have a room full of art students, so you get answers like use of color, light, his style…but one student, in the back of the room, said something very interesting.”

“Which was?”

“He said that it was sadness that made Van Gogh’s work so beautiful. Because he had been working out of heartbreak, and while it drove him mad it also gave him genius. Sometimes, Ava, it takes heartbreak to make art come alive. The best artists made beauty out of ashes.” Nick glances as Ava’s fingers, caked in smoky gray, “Or, in your case, charcoal.”

“I was always better at pencils.”

Nick smiles, “That you were. You should put your sketches out there. Get them seen. It’d be a shame to just keep them in books.”

“And if he sees them?”

“Who cares?”

Ava grins, then picks up the sketchpad and puts it in her bag. She takes the last swig of her tea and gets up to stand. “Thank you for the advice, Sir. It was nice seeing you again.”

“Good to see you too, Ava.”

Six months later, Nick is leaving the mall when he spots a poster for an art exhibition entitled “Variation,” taking place at the mall gardens. The exhibit features works by one Ava Agsalud, and on the poster is a rough ink sketch—a croquis, but one that betrays a practiced hand—of a young woman sitting at a table, pencil in hand, a cup of tea and an open sketch pad in front of her. On closer inspection, the sketch pad bears the slight outline of a strong jaw and smirking mouth.

I guess you can draw someone else. Smiling, Nick turns back and heads towards the events hall.

END.

Critique welcome and encouraged. Like what you’ve read? Hit the green ‘Recommend’ button below so that others might find this story and provide their own input. ☺

I mostly write poetry, and you can check it out (as well as my other personal detritus) here.