by Tom Rachman
He hardly resembles his mother—she, large and dark; he, small and sandy-haired. Yet even strangers find a similarity: how they walk, each footstep tentative, as if treading across a moving carpet. Their manner of speech is similar too—slow and fast to a metronome sounding only in their heads. He finishes Natalie’s sentences, and she knows what he’s about to say (though he denies it, changing course to prove his point). Pinch passes so much free time with her because his schoolmates find something amiss about him. At an age when boys in the same grade look five years apart, he is near the bottom of that scale. He stands too close, jabbers too fast, claiming miracles. “Yesterday I looked out my window, and Marilyn Monroe was there, sitting in a car!”
“She was not.”
When refuted, he falls silent, which makes everyone laugh. He is caught mumbling to himself a few times, and is taunted for it, so tries to stop. Before entering the school doors each morning, he avoids eye contact with Natalie—she knows how he dreads each day.
As for sports, Pinch considered himself good for a while. Until it became incontrovertible that he was not. Other kids hurl baseballs in vanishing arcs; he throws out his arm. “Sorry, Ronnie!” he hollers across the playground, shoulder throbbing. “I slipped on this dumb mud!” In the street with Italian boys, he rushes toward the soccer ball, his weight invariably on the wrong foot once he reaches it. He must reset or miss, and does both, slicing air, walloping ground. “Scusate, ragazzi!” he tells the departing stampede of boots. His knees bloody and encrusted with dirt, he tries not to mind, and runs after the others, who are too far downfield ever to be reached.
He watches Natalie prepare dinner, just the two of them because Bear is always working late. She cooks appallingly, which Pinch realized from dining occasionally with Roman neighbors who had invited him when Natalie was faring poorly with her nerves, as happens now and then—always presaged by explosions of anger about nothing. When Pinch perceives her plummeting, he talks fast, attempting to do something, not sure what, so recounts facts learned in class or makes up astonishing coincidences. “I passed these people on Lungotevere, and they were all talking about you, Mom, saying how much they like you.”
Natalie grabs him.
“What?” he asks in fright. “What, Mom?”
She holds on to him, almost violently. He pulls back in embarrassment, looking at his shoes.
When Bear returns, Natalie transforms, striving to mirror his mood. If he battled a painting at the studio, he enters in silence, a quiet that exudes across the apartment. On the other hand, if he completed a work, he marches in with a holler of “Where you reptiles at?” Doesn’t matter what time or who’s sleeping. And he’s right: They prefer to be awake for this. He tackles and tickles his son, hoisting and lowering Pinch like a squealing barbell in pajamas. More often than not, Bear recalls a flaw in his just-completed work, which compels him to rush back to the studio, leaving the scent of pipe tobacco and Natalie to sedate their hot-faced, wild-eyed boy. She races around until catching Pinch, who is forcibly soothed by the imprisonment of her embrace, his muscles twitching, then asleep.
8
Pinch waits beside his mother on the steps of their building, until she leaps up, shading her brow, waving to a malnourished fiftyish Englishman in tweed who lopes closer, hands clasped behind his back, supporting the weight of his canvas rucksack. Cecil Ditchley was her favorite instructor at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, which she attended straight out of high school, wanting to study among the British, who took pottery seriously. What she found were classes of chilly young men brooding over form. English pottery of the period, a critic remarked, had the elegance of “the tree trunk, the boulder, the flint block, if you like, the turnip.” But Natalie longed for more than turnips: to spin and raise and score in clay those expressionistic passions that had already transformed painting, sculpture, music. Why should art be beyond ceramics? But her classmates’ interest in her derived either from the hope of a cheap seduction or to request that she decorate their work—“Add something airy, Natalie.” It was Cecil who saved her, the solitary instructor to encourage that she throw her own pots. She loved Cecil for this, a connection without any hint of sex but only a wish (on her part, at least) to vault all intermediate stages and be devoted. They’ve corresponded in the dozen years since, growing closer in longhand. He was always too destitute to visit. But Bear intervened, sending a ticket.
Pinch runs toward their guest—only to turn shy upon reaching him. The potter presents a bony hand and Pinch shakes it, his grip sliding down long tapering fingers, yellowed at their tips from roll-your-own cigarettes. “You are Charles,” the Englishman notes, sweeping back blond bangs that flop over his brow and give him youth, or did so from a distance.
Natalie leads her friend inside, showing him around their grand shabby apartment. Pinch trails after, buzzing at the precise frequency of his mother’s high. She is proposing a thousand outings for Cecil and querying him about his trip here on various third-class trains, while Pinch interjects rapid-fire questions about the life of a hermit (he expected a graybeard in rags).
“Activities are somewhat lacking in my parts,” Cecil explains with surprise, as if only noticing this deficit. London artists who are aware that Cecil Ditchley today inhabits a stone cottage in the Eastern Pyrenees (snowed in for weeks each winter, no electricity) mull over this image, pondering whether the man is tragic. On balance, admiration wins out. Careerists always salute those who lack ambition.
Long ago, Cecil was a beautiful youth and celebrated for it, passing through the arms of various lovers, of various sexes. After Cambridge, he dedicated himself to sculpture, influenced by Archipenko and Epstein and Moore. Pacifism turned him against muscular sculpture, and he moved to St. Ives in Cornwall, taking up residency at the Leach Pottery. To his surprise, he found himself a natural craftsman. Art required explanation, converting the maker into a talker, and he found it deathly embarrassing to profess what anything meant. Pottery, by contrast, meant only itself: A pot is for honey, a jug is for water.
These days, at his isolated home on the French side of Catalonia, Cecil digs his own clay and fells timber for the wood-fired kiln, barely subsisting off the sale of domestic pottery to local peasants, even though a dozen Ditchley ceramics would constitute a modest show on Bond Street. An enterprising London dealer once drove to Roussillon to procure crates of Cecil’s work for a pittance. But the potter’s location proved so remote that the dealer merely wasted petrol, returning home with a trunk full of wine and a foul mood.
Whatever the cost, Cecil sticks with his French exile, like those Cambridge spies who traded dreary postwar Britain for Soviet paradise, only to find themselves condemned to being irrevocably English abroad. Except that Cecil drinks gallons less liquor than Guy Burgess et al. For him, the beverage is Assam tea, whose loose leaves he keeps in a suede drawstring pouch that he pulls apart with chipped front teeth, inhaling India, distracted for a moment—he lived in Bengal as a child—then here again, back among them, even if Cecil is never entirely among those he is with, his sight line skimming above their heads, as if someone else were expected presently.
9
As Natalie and Cecil tramp through the scorching city, Pinch tags along, either scurrying a few steps ahead or lingering a few behind. “Nothing is like the sky in Rome,” Cecil remarks, causing Pinch to look heavenward, wondering what is special about the bright blue and the brushstroke clouds, the only he has known.
Beforehand, Natalie spoke to Pinch about how desperately she sought Cecil’s advice on restarting her art after all these years. She has lost any idea of what her peers are making—and they have no knowledge that she exists. Pinch waits, seeing his mother nearing the subject, then backing away. Cecil himself hardly speaks of pottery, as if it were vulgar to mention one’s vocation. He inquires about life in Rome and life with Bear Bavinsky, whom he hopes to know better. Natalie claims that her hu
sband is occupied with students, yet Pinch heard her telling Dad that the guest himself prefers time with her alone to discuss pottery.
As they wander across Piazza San Cosimato, Pinch stoops to a public drinking fountain, his rosy face under the gush of the spout. Cecil is checking if they’ll see Bear this evening, which is the Englishman’s last in Rome. How fascinating it’d be, Cecil remarks, to hear of Bear’s art.
“You’re not even going to ask what I’m doing,” Natalie blurts. “This whole time you haven’t.”
Pinch looks over, fountain water spattering gently. His mother’s neck is blotchy, flushed in patches as happens when she is rattled. Mom regrets this, he knows, but she can’t reel back her outburst.
“Suppose I didn’t want to intrude,” Cecil responds stiffly.
Natalie observes Pinch, his bangs soaking. She tells Cecil, “I was only joking. Ignore me.”
The two adults walk on, a step farther apart. Occasionally, Cecil veers away to peek through the dark doors of a church, not calling her to join him. They arrive back at the apartment and separate to wash for the big meal.
Bear, who barely had a chance to greet Cecil, has promised to treat their guest to a farewell banquet at the best trattoria in town. On the walk toward Largo Argentina, Bear raves about the pizzas. “Nothing better outside Napoli. I’m telling you: Got to try this.” They bundle inside, each ordering one of the much-touted pizzas—except for Bear himself, who opts for “il fried di fish.”
“Dad!” Pinch bellows, smiling. “You always do this!”
“La frittura di pesce, signore?” the waiter confirms. “Ottima scelta.”
Bear taps the boy’s chin playfully, asks the waiter for a couple of “bottiglia di bubbly vino,” then tells Cecil: “No matter how I try, I cannot learn this damn language. Something missing in this nut of mine,” he says, rapping his temple. “Thank God for my translator here.” He gives a cheek kiss to Pinch, who is lobster red from sun and pride. Dad does this—spreads his mood, the man’s pleasures clapping you on the shoulder. Even Cecil approaches jollity and confesses admiration for the painter’s work. Bear claims the same of Cecil’s pottery (though Pinch heard Dad say before that he hadn’t seen a single piece).
“What in hell are you doing living on a damn mountain?” Bear demands. “Move here to the Eternal City, brother!”
The merriment only increases when Bear solicits Cecil’s expert opinion on the recent ceramics by Picasso. The little Spaniard doesn’t even make his pots, Cecil says, but merely “adjusts” those of true artisans. Nothing delights Bear more than the disparagement of his overpraised rival. “Pablo hasn’t a drop of your talent,” Bear professes, slamming his open palm on the table for emphasis, causing the Englishman to cough in mortification and insist on his own mediocrity.
“What you’re producing is art, Cecil. Art to the highest degree,” Bear persists, grabbing Natalie’s hand across the table, pulling her into this estimation.
She withdraws her fingers, as if to fetch something from her purse, fumbling in there for cigarette and lighter.
“You’re not doing some second-rate craft!” Bear reiterates to Cecil.
“Oh, I don’t know. Potters get so exercised about art versus craft. But the older I get, the more I prefer craft. With craft, you know if a piece is right. Is the pot so cumbersome that the farmer’s wife couldn’t lift it? Is my glaze poisonous? A pot is either correct, or it is not. Whereas art is never quite good or bad. Art is simply a way of saying ‘opinion.’”
The notion that art is never good or bad is so alien to Bear that he fails to hear it. “Here’s the real problem,” he resumes. “Soon as a piece has a use, then the blowhards won’t accept it. If I took three Botticellis and hammered them into a side table, the critics would look at those exact pictures and call them second-rate. The same damn pictures!”
“Please don’t hammer Botticellis into a side table, dear man.”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing critics hate more than a hinge,” Bear says. “And you, out there in the countryside, fighting that wood-fired kiln! Natty tells me it’s a ton of timber for each firing. That can’t be true.”
“Two tons actually. The real struggle is stoking for three days, round-the-clock.”
“I won’t stand for it! I’m forking out for a proper kiln, state-of-the-art. Picasso has one, I bet. Can’t picture him stoking a goddamn thing!”
“You’re far too kind. I couldn’t possibly.”
“Couldn’t you?” Natalie mutters under her breath. “Why you came here, no? Broke.”
Cecil looks over, pained.
“What’s that, sweetie?” Bear asks his wife, calling to the waiter for a bottle of red now. He returns to Cecil. “I’m warning you. You don’t let me help, and there will be dire consequences. For a start, I tell Romolo to cancel your pizza—and Romolo listens to me.” Affectionately, Bear pokes his son’s gut. “Cecil, I’m determined on this point. You are going places, and I want to say I helped.”
“If I were going places, I’d be there already, I daresay.” Cecil looks into his lap, as if a map rested there. “You know, I did want to sculpt once, and would’ve cut off my left arm merely to be adequate. But my drive just went.” He looks up. “To tell the truth, I’ve felt better ever since.”
“Hear that, Natty? Take a page out of this man’s book.”
“A page?” she responds, smoking hard. “You’re saying I ought to give up on making art?”
“What in hell you talking about, sweetie?”
“I never gave up,” Cecil clarifies. “Merely that I stopped trying to impress people I didn’t even care for.”
“Why impress anyone, if not the people you don’t care for?” she responds.
“Point is,” Bear intercedes, clasping her forearm, “can’t let the bastards get you down is all Cecil’s saying. But sure, the business ain’t for everyone. It’s a foul mess, art is. Am I right?”
Cecil nods wistfully. “Can be, yes.”
“You are a talent, my Natty. If you want to be. All it takes is a bit more oomph. But who says you’ve got to?” He takes a drag off her cigarette, then stubs it.
“I was still smoking that.”
“You hearing what I’m saying, sweetheart?” He takes her hand, his other on Cecil’s chest, gripping the man’s tweed jacket, as if unifying two comrades. “It’s not just me saying so. Your teacher agrees. Ain’t that so?”
Cecil’s eyebrows rise in confirmation.
“You’re humiliating me,” she tells Bear.
“I’m saying you’re swell,” he corrects her. “Who cares what others think! Oh, for crying out loud.” He drops her hand, releasing Cecil too, and fills his own glass too high with wine.
“On what basis might I be decent?” Natalie asks, hope in her voice.
Pinch realizes that, oddly, it’s Bear’s disapproval that stirs his mother.
“Crazy girl.” Bear pulls her chair closer, grabs the back of her neck. “I love the hell out of you, Natty. That is what matters.” He pulls an abandoned pizza crust from her plate, stuffs it into his mouth, and pokes her ribs till she’s in hysterics. Only Pinch sees that his mother’s laughter isn’t pleasant—she’s nearly in tears, pushing her husband back.
Finally, Bear returns Natalie’s body to her control.
Wiping sweat from her upper lip, she holds her own throat, glancing around the trattoria, as if everyone noticed, though the only person watching is Pinch, who pretends to busy himself by gobbling the leftover fiori di zucca. Bear and Cecil resume their sloshy conversation about art versus craft, and Pinch turns his attention there, as if spectating a sporting contest from the stands, most of the action in Dad’s favor.
Bear runs his hand repeatedly through thinning shiny hair, holding the floor as he recounts tales of his failures of long ago, each of which renders his current glo
ry all the richer. When the bill comes, he insists on snapping it up. “No wrestling me for it, Cecil. You’d probably win, and how would I live that down?
The four promenade home down Via del Pellegrino, which is dark and deserted, punctuated by conversation from apartments above. Bear—to emphasize points—keeps stopping, taking Cecil’s forearm, declaiming to his new pal (rather too loudly for this hour). The modest potter chortles, and Natalie steps away, idling outside locked storefronts, Pinch beside her—until a mouse runs over his shoe, causing him to kick the air in fright. The center of Rome is unnerving at night; Pinch has heard of knifings. When a teenager barrels toward them, Pinch tenses, tracking him, watching the kid stop at a decaying pastel-red facade, then holler to a high floor, whose closed shutters crank upward, revealing a little sister, who darts from sight, the glow of light within, the tick of forks.
Bear takes Cecil’s shoulder, leading him forth, and their convoy sets off again, right down the roadway. A distance back, Pinch feeds his arm under Natalie’s, both mimicking Dad and trying to speed her pace, lest they be stranded here.
“Not once,” Natalie mumbles, lost in an argument only she can hear. “All night.”
Pinch looks at his mother, contemplates her, almost asking what she meant—then he slips free, sprinting ahead to join the men. As they turn the corner onto Via dei Banchi Vecchi, Pinch glances back: his mother on distant cobblestones, allowing herself to drop farther and farther behind. On they walk until Natalie is lost from view.