The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  Before all this commotion, Natalie was enjoying a rare tranquil morning to work on her own art. She persists with her efforts but this proves challenging, especially with Bear now tickling Pinch, who shrieks and rushes off, only to return for more, giggling madly. Natalie preps clay, lines up sponges and turning tools and scrapers, fills her battered wooden bucket with fresh water from the drinking fountain outside, and plonks it by the potter’s wheel. She massages her neck, imagining sculptural forms, clay squeezed into mad shapes, lunatic glazes slapped on—what I want to make. Am I capable?

  Turning from her two males, she kicks the potter’s wheel into action, willing its motion to spur theirs. Bear promised to take their son to the Christmas fair in Piazza Navona today. Has he forgotten? Stomach tensed, she centers a lump of wet clay, hearing them horsing around, hunting missing socks and orphaned shoes. But gradually, Natalie grows beguiled by the wheel’s rotations and the shape rising under her hands. She torques around, a beseeching gaze at her husband.

  He raises his right hand, then hurries to the back of the studio, looking for something, dragging out a blank canvas on stretchers. “Stay how you are right now, Natty. That right there.”

  “I was doing work,” she implores him. “Bear?” She clasps a beige sponge, which dribbles down her wrist. The potter’s wheel slows, off-kilter rotations chafing her inner thigh.

  Bear apologizes as he circles Natalie, doing preliminary studies and contour drawings in a sketch pad, his charcoal stick cracking, carbon dust in the air. “Just a second. I swear. You’re too tempting—it’s your own goddamn fault!” he says as if joshing, but frowns, backing off, leaning in, alternating between her and the oversized canvas, whose front side he hasn’t marked but on whose back he wipes his hands, impressing black fingerprints and tobacco strings into the weft. He darts away to drop the gramophone needle. A record hisses, then wails. He needs a racket to work, a rhythm to his elsewhere thoughts. The jazz single lasts a few minutes, and he’s still laboring. Pinch crawls over, rowing both hands on the paint-thick crank of Dad’s portable Telefunken, cautiously lowering the diamond tip, which undulates over the wonky 78, one of a stack of records Bear purloined from the Armed Forces Radio Service during the war. Hiya, fellas. This is Gene Krupa. My trio and I are going to knock out a little jazz for you on this V-disc. A ruffling drumroll, vamping piano, hooting sax.

  Bear mutters, mixing paints, his forehead creased, pebbled with sweat. He glowers at the blank canvas, teeth edges grazing.

  “My clay is drying out,” she says.

  “No, I’m done here.” But not quite. Almost. Nearly. He flings on colors with the palette knife, buttery oils trembling. He drags a hog-hair brush across the support, ferrule scratching the canvas raw. “I’m finished,” he reiterates yet is still working, with bare fingers now, fingernails raking the image. “Don’t move. I’m finished. No, wait.”

  After the same record has played for the twenty-seventh time, Pinch prepares to drop the needle again, looking to his father for approval. Bear is occupied, cursing this bastard of a painting, especially when he achieves something sublime, as if it’s him against the picture and he just slipped something past his foe. He works on all parts of the painting at once, adjusting harmony, refining, obliterating—the pain of it being wrong, fucking wrong still. “A minute more, sweetie.”

  She clutches her bare knees, shivering. (Bear never closed the front door.) A magnified part of her body takes form on the other side of the canvas, but she doesn’t know which—his sitters are never allowed to know, lest they become self-conscious and adjust.

  Abruptly he halts, jotting something in the sketch pad. He tears out the page and summons Pinch, who is sent back to his mother with the folded note. She opens Bear’s letter, mailed from across the room: “To my Natty, loved more than paints can say.” What strikes her is that Bear signed it, his full name, underscored with a flourish.

  “Bear, please.”

  “Finishing up. Need you there one second. One more. Just.” His voice trails off, gaze alternating between her and his canvas, capturing something essential about her, and failing to hear one word.

  5

  Natalie was barely twenty, he nearing forty, when they met. It was July 1949, and Bear was browsing around a cramped art-supplies store near the Pantheon, searching for rabbit-skin glue. Natalie, in Rome that summer to study drawing, recognized him immediately, and with a flutter, because this man had been featured in newspapers. What was he doing here? Eavesdropping on his bungled attempts at the local language, she held her breath and stepped forth, addressing the clerk in French, which was as close as she got to Italian in those days. “Colle de lapin, peut-être?”

  “You’re a magician,” Bear told her, scratching the thicket of his beard. “And you just earned yourself lunch.”

  “For that?” she asked, unable to hold eye contact, wondering if he teased. These had been lonely weeks: a room rented at a convent where she pretended (with diminishing success) to be Catholic, and struggling through art classes conducted entirely in Italian.

  “Young lady, I’ve fed people for less.”

  “Lucky I didn’t do anything truly useful, or who knows what you’d owe me.”

  “I’d be buying you dinner too, maybe breakfast besides. Alas, it’s only lunch for now. What say you? I’d tell you I could eat a horse, but one of these locals might hold me to my word.” He winked, twinkling at her.

  Minutes later, Bear was leading her down a narrow, urine-scented Roman side street, laundry fluttering overhead, a tomcat scampering before them. The best lunch joint in the city lay straight ahead, he promised, his orotund American tones booming off the shadowed medieval walls that hemmed them in—until she emerged, dazzled by sunlight, on a tiny piazza, his promised restaurant across the way.

  Bear chose a table in the far corner and queried Natalie about her art, listening with genuine curiosity, conferring with her as if before a venerable colleague. She sat on her sweaty hands, sliding down in the chair to diminish her height to match his, while slowing certain responses to imply gravity—only to lose nerve and rush out the line, as if she were ever scrambling up a heap of words that kept collapsing beneath her. For safety, she moved the discussion back to him.

  Without airs, he recounted his dealings in the New York art milieu: quirky collectors, avaricious dealers, boldface-name artists she’d read about but whom he knew personally. In each story, he downplayed his role, as if he were a bumbler among the greats. At Franz Kline’s softball game, Bear struck out five times and chucked a ball at Harold Rosenberg, knocking out the critic’s tooth. “I was not asked back.” He drank homebrew cider at the de Koonings and threw up in their sink, earning the lifelong enmity of Elaine. When Bear visited Pollock’s barn in East Hampton, Jackson was drunk and threatened to “knock that wiseacre look off you.” He slapped Bear twice, left and right.

  “Were you hurt?” Natalie asked.

  “What people don’t realize about me is that I boxed in college,” Bear responded, smile forming. “Unfortunately, it was art college.”

  She laughed, confidence rising. “Plenty of painters slapped you around, have they, Mr. Bavinsky?”

  “Plenty would like to.” He explained that his paintings bothered that milieu. They scorned his jaunts around Europe, considering it hoity-toity that he dwelled in the pulverized Old Continent years after its most renowned artists had escaped to New York City, rendering that the capital of art, a metropolis suited to mammoth canvases and mighty brushstrokes.

  “So the Europeans are more welcoming?”

  “Not especially,” he admitted. “Pablo Picasso nearly took a swing at me one time.” At the time, Bear was in liberated Paris with a gaggle of fellow U.S. infantrymen, artistic souls stuck in uniform who called on the master’s atelier in Rue des Grand Augustins. “A pigeon is to blame, as so often it is,” Bear joked. “Nobody but the great man was to t
ouch this pet of his. Certainly not some lowlife such as yours truly. But I’ll be darned if that bird didn’t up and land on my shoulder. Is it my fault? Poor Pablo was torn up with jealousy. Watching me stroke that bird, he gets hotter and hotter, finally shouting, ‘All yous, outta here!’ Or however they say that in French. He marched up, grabbed my lapel, and shoved me halfway to the door.”

  “Did you fight him?”

  “What do you take me for? I’ve seen how that guy rearranges faces!”

  She grinned at that, cheeks burning, looking a smidgen too long. It was hard not to stare. The famous are compelling up close, like big game.

  A waiter in bow tie and waistcoat arrived, his eyebrows raised at her.

  Natalie hadn’t considered the menu—come to think of it, she hadn’t seen one.

  “Me, a piatto di Gillardeau oysters,” Bear interceded, to buy her time. “Then rigatoni alla amatriciana, and the roast vitello with that mushroom sauce. As for liquids, what are you selling in the way of vino rosso? Something we can wade through; surprise us.” The waiter nodded humbly and swiveled back to Natalie, hanging over her like a bat.

  She felt a fool to replicate Bear’s order, as if broadcasting that she had no ideas of her own. So she delayed, a blush spreading up her chest. She glanced at other diners’ choices, her toes curling under the table. “I’m keeping everyone waiting.”

  “Everyone who?” He beckoned her closer for a little friendly advice. “Would it offend you, my new friend, if I had them bring you what I got? You won’t regret it. Best dishes in the place. That’s a promise.”

  So they took the same meal, and Natalie raved about each plate, eager to affirm the senior artist’s wisdom. She matched him in glasses of Barbaresco too, the room growing warmer, louder. When the roast veal arrived in thick dry slices, Bear pointed to a shared gravy boat. She dripped a dot of this sauce at the edge of her plate—after which Bear deluged his meat, the steaming porcini sauce oozing everywhere.

  “There are folks that drip their gravy to one side,” Bear commented, “and there are folks that pour it right over everything.”

  “I’m always worried about ruining what I already have,” Natalie said. But the truth was more complicated. Sometimes she had lurched into rash decisions, and suffered regret—the kind that deepens, its pang worsening over time. This defect made Bear especially appealing: His cavalier style safeguarded her; he emboldened Natalie to try. So, she upturned that gravy boat right over her own meat, watching him. He reached out, touching her cheek with fondest familiarity—for the sauce was all gone but for one drop, which hung off the lip of the inverted crockery, straining to fall.

  In Natalie’s life, few men had touched her face with romantic intent, typically during civilized conversation, when a fellow’s lips smushed clumsily into hers, his eyelids ardently shut, hers fluttering. But Bear was different—not a schoolboy in Montreal, nor one of the self-serious chappies from art college in London. She wasn’t even panicking this time, though her pulse raced. It was as if she had walked onto a property and knew uncannily: This is my home. This is where I’ll live.

  Claiming a need for the ladies room, she stood, feeling the booze as she edged across the raucous dining area, shifting her broad hips at each red calico tablecloth, all presided over by Italian businessmen, many pausing to ogle the foreign girl. Natalie kept her gaze down, stepping over napkins and toothpicks, her eyes smarting from the rising cigarette smoke. Outside, she inhaled deeply, the sanpietrini cobblestones rubbery under her heels. She walked fast around that small piazza, halting at the limestone facade of a church, against which she pressed her overwarm face—only to leap in fright when a bicycle juddered past, its rider gesticulating to his fiancée on the back as they trundled by a torn movie billboard. Under the restaurant awning, a hangdog waiter waited, surveying her.

  Does he see that I don’t fit here?

  When Bear was busy tangling with Pablo, she was still in high school, a pretender even there, unable to tell anyone about home, where her father was sick, and worsening. In Natalie’s mid-adolescence, her father shot himself in the face. He survived, disfigured, nursed upstairs, his moans coming from that room. Back then, she confided this only once, to her high school art teacher, Mr. Fontaine, a failed sculptor who introduced her to abstract art and to pottery. “Could there be abstract pottery, Mr. Fontaine?” she inquired, when they were alone in a classroom after school. He answered by thrusting his tongue into her mouth, edging her hand to his groin. Behind his smock was the dusty blackboard, marked from a history class, obliging her to read “The Diet of Worms” throughout that jerky first sex act, after which Mr. Fontaine slumped and tucked in his shirt, treating her frigidly ever afterward.

  Standing tipsily in the piazza, she experienced a surge of vindication: I’m in Europe, dining with a proper artist. She glared at the hangdog waiter, causing him to slink back inside. Legs wonky, she strode toward the restaurant. A painter who will go down in history is waiting for me. Right this instant. She covered her mouth, saying to her hand: “I’m an artist.”

  As she entered the dining room, Bear summoned her urgently. Red-cheeked, she settled across from her future, ignoring the fresh boat of gravy but daring under the table to touch his hand.

  6

  She has been posing for hours, listening to that same jazz record. “Bear, I can’t.” Words struggle from her throat. Minutes more pass—until he throws his paintbrush across the studio floor, threads of ultramarine spitting, causing Pinch to leap from the gramophone.

  Bear kicks his easel, which shakes, and he wipes his hands on a discarded Herald Tribune. He leads Natalie from her potter’s wheel, around his canvas, so that she may finally view the portrait: the paint thick and wet and glossy, scratched off in parts by his fingernails, a convulsion of colors. The image is enlarged almost to abstraction, yet it is distinctly her: just hands, nothing more, her fingers knotted as when she speaks, fearing herself dull, fraudulent. And he sees that.

  Bear opens his shears into an X.

  “What are you doing?”

  He stabs the canvas, slices diagonally, paint accumulating up his hand, a lip of fabric gaping.

  “Bear! Why are you doing that? Can you say something to me? Bear?”

  “It’s not right. I can’t remain in the same room with this fucking insult.” He drags the ripped canvas into the alley, crams it into the oil barrel that he keeps for this purpose, and slops the painting with kerosene. He clacks open his Zippo, flicks the wheel, flame swaying. He calls over Pinch, places the lighter in the boy’s hand, holds him around his midriff, and lifts him toward the picture. “Flame steady, kiddo.”

  “Don’t,” Natalie pleads. “That’s my whole day, wasted. Please, Bear. Could you consider—”

  The painting ignites. Bear pulls their son back to safety, depositing him on the cobbles, stroking the kid’s head in thanks. Apologetically, Bear approaches his wife, nestles his face against her neck.

  Destruction is a relief as completion never can be. But it’s his completion, his destruction, his relief.

  1961

  7

  The eleven-year-old flattens both hands against their giant building door and pushes, exchanging suffocating heat for the cool mosaic-floored lobby. His parents follow, the three Bavinskys racing for the elevator cage, which is so small that Bear must suck in his gut—only to swell it once the door closes, mushing his wife and son, both in hysterics. “Dad, you’re making me hit the buttons with my head!”

  Not long after Bear settled in Rome, they moved to these swanky lodgings, a nineteenth-century apartment last occupied by the futurist poet Filippo Marinetti that retained the man’s chintzy wallpaper, faded rectangles marking where paintings once hung. Years earlier, Mishmish Shapiro bought the property to loot its art and left the place vacant until hearing that “the Bears,” as she calls them, were shacked up in an art studio. So the Bavinskys
upgraded to Prati, once meadowlands north of the Vatican walls, now insurance companies, advertising offices, bourgeois residences. If this area has gone up in the world, so has the country since those tough times after the war. All down Via Veneto, cabarets are packed now, film producers disporting themselves alongside wasp-waisted coquettes, while ancient Roman sites are flush with playboy tourists leaning on columns, their diamantine laughter echoing through the ruins.

  As for Pinch, he attends a private international school aimed at kids from the United States—Bear prefers his son to grow up American. The student body consists of diplo brats from the coasts, army brats from the South, business brats from the Midwest, plus the children of assorted oddballs who landed in Rome for the cheap living. Even though many of his classmates were born in this city, the prevailing mood is scorn for Italian ways. Everyone returns from summer vacations with Sears Tower postcards, Yale pennants, Hawaiian tans.

  As for Pinch, he has never traveled. Natalie, who tends home year round nowadays, would happily venture abroad. But Dad can’t give up a day of work, weekends and holidays included. Also, he’s occupied with an admiring coterie of junior painters, students, artists’ models—Bear is beloved by them all. Just when Pinch worries that he’s nowhere near the top of his father’s list, Bear will pick him out: “Forget school today, young Charles,” he says using Pinch’s proper name. We’re going to the movies, me and you. Far as your teachers are concerned, you got a fever. What say you, old man? We on?”

  On such occasions, Natalie could use her husband’s studio for her pottery. When Pinch and Bear arrive home, however, she is busy with household chores, mending torn shirts, turning up trousers, bad-tempered because of this endless burden—although it’s she who adds more duties. When her toils are complete, she grows impatient, obliging Pinch to accompany her somewhere, perhaps inventing a task: “Come grocery shopping. I need help with the bags.” Together, they evaluate the market stalls, boycotting those who fiddle with the scales, knowing she’s a foreigner. On weekends, Natalie takes her son to Porta Portese, the vast outdoor flea market, where they fill out his latest collection: old maps lately, coins before, medals next. They ride bikes too, tracing the city walls, Pinch veering dangerously into traffic, looking back to ensure that she is suitably scared.