The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  “Pinchy, I was asking you to keep it. Please.”

  Bear destroys paintings that he deems unfit, however, so Pinch must do the same. He stuffs it in the barrel, runs a matchstick down the wall, holds it for an infinity against his canvas, which finally smolders. Pinch blinks at the rising smoke, turning away, glimpsing his mother through the open iron door. Natalie stands behind his easel, looking toward the very view that he just painted and that now burns, curling submissively before him.

  Into the heat, he looks, imagining Dad’s face: that crinkly grin, the booming voice, a thick hand clapped on Pinch’s shoulder. “Well, I never, kiddo! Charlie Bavinsky! Well, I never.” Pinch shuts his stinging eyes, beaming.

  15

  Motorbikes buzz down the bumpy roadways of Rome, riders hopped in air and thudding back onto their tailbones. Before today, Pinch never rode a moped. The boys at his school—in raptures over pictorials of Mustangs and Cadillacs—snigger at the piddly horsepower of Italian vehicles and the effeminacy of these wops who cling to another man on a rinky-dink ciclomotore. If anyone from school were to see Pinch on the back of this Italian boy’s motor scooter, it’d be excruciating. But Pinch climbs on anyhow—to be invited by a fellow teenager is too rare an offer, even if Vittorio just wants to show off the neighborhood American to his friends.

  The dented white Vespa coughs to life, shuddering as it merges into traffic, all the sputtering vehicles edging toward a robin-breasted traffic cop at the intersection, who feigns blindness as a dozen scofflaws squirt past. The obedient motorists remain in place, fixing hairdos in side mirrors, revving in a rising growl until the lights change.

  Outside a café-bar in Parioli, Pinch dismounts, queasy from motion, sicker from anxiety at joining these unknown Italian kids cavorting here, including girls. He switches to Roman dialect, adopting their syncopated pip-pop cadence, their salty slang, hearing himself become coarser and bolder, as if previous speakers had chewed these phrases and his lips assume their swagger. The teens flirt and they howl, small groups ebbing away for conspiratorial sidebars, flowing back together. A boy in pink cashmere cuddles his eyeliner-blinky girl, their foreheads pressed together, necklaces swinging, the chains entwined for an instant, crucifixes clinking. They are sentimental and showy, acting out lovers’ tiffs as if soap-opera cameras rolled: girl with arms folded over small chest, her beau tugging at his sweetheart’s sleeve. “Ti voglio bene, amore! Smetti di piangere, ti prego!”

  Pinch is a source of fascination because he is a proper American. Or so they believe. By passport, he’s a Canadian like his mother. Anyway, when he utters English words, it sounds exotically American to them.

  “Jets!” a girl echoes when he mentions “jazz.”

  “BROOK-leen!” another cries, contributing the only English word that enters her mind, then hiding against her boyfriend’s shoulder.

  “Man-AT-tan!” someone adds.

  His celebrity increases when he claims intimate knowledge of New York City. This is not strictly true, but he is visiting there soon—a fact that makes him smile uncontrollably. The invitation came during his last phone call with Dad, who said casually, “Why in hell don’t I ever see you, kiddo? I’m busting for a bit of Charlie around these parts!”

  “Could I come out there one time?”

  “Nothing would make me happier, old man! Tell your mom to arrange it. On me, naturally.”

  Pinch has barely slept a full night since. At lunch break he pores over the school copy of the New York Herald Tribune to prepare himself: gleaming astronauts, President Lyndon B. Johnson, humble sportsmen doffing caps. Even the stock tables signify something now, pulsating beneath black print.

  Speaking to these Roman teens, he fixes on one girl—overweight, pimply—who watches him with viridian eyes, though he is seeing her in black-and-white, a photo of Jayne Mansfield in a cleavage-exposing blouse, his pulse quickening, casting ahead to Manhattan bohemia. He intends to kiss a girl during his New York trip, and hears himself confiding to the Italians what he has not dared tell his mother: He won’t be returning here. Rome is a backwater for the modern artist. Crumbled ruins, crumbled careers. He is moving to New York for good.

  “Magari, un giorno leggerò il tuo nome sul giornale,” the girl says, impressed.

  Blushing, chuckling, he looks down at his shoes, in love with this young woman whom he’ll never see after today. He thrills at the self-sacrifice of this. The first of many loves, he thinks when lying in bed that night, impatient for the future.

  16

  Wearing blazer and tie, Pinch is sandwiched between two businessmen who squash him without compunction. Never having flown before, the boy lurches at each shudder of turbulence, scanning other passengers for panic. To calm himself, he visits the toilets, splashes water on his face, his fleshy pink lips gnawed, greasy blond hair short, a neat side-parting swept across, a few pale chin whiskers.

  He’s not the baby of the family anymore, and has younger siblings to meet in America. Pinch intends to take a big-brother role with them but is unsure what this entails. All he knows about his extended clan comes from Birdie, who is in her early twenties now, apprenticing at stables in Kentucky. (Her teen love of horses wasn’t just a phase, it turns out.) She stayed in touch, writing every few months since that summer, often to bemoan their father. With a chill, Pinch recalls her trip to Rome, a previous kid from a previous family, meeting the new Bavinsky clan. He cannot blunder, won’t crowd Dad, nor argue. Recently, Birdie was driving to a horse farm in Upstate New York and she dropped by Dad’s, meeting his new wife then writing Pinch a catty letter about the woman. “Just Daddy’s type, in the worst way,” she said—which has resolved Pinch to like the new Mrs. Bavinsky.

  At the airport arrivals, Carol spots him and waves. A big-boned blonde in her early thirties, she folds her chewing gum into a paper napkin, then smiles. “So pleased to meet you, son!” They drive and drive, ignoring each turnoff for Manhattan. Pinch always assumed that Dad’s mailing address of “Larchmont, New York” was a neighborhood of New York City. Instead, they motor deep into Westchester County.

  “I was so sorry we never met in Rome,” Carol remarks.

  “Oh yes,” he says, perplexed. “I didn’t really know you lived there.”

  “Oh, sure. That’s where me and your pop met. It’ll always feel so romantic to me: Bear’s studio by the Tiber. Makes me swoon still.”

  “You were there?”

  “Was I? How many hours I sat posing in that cave of his! But don’t you adore Italy?” she continues. “What I wouldn’t give for those Roman meatballs!”

  Hazily, Pinch gazes through the station wagon window. He orders himself to be charming. “Yes, meatballs are neat,” he agrees. “I guess that, um, guess I never thought of them as especially Roman. They make me think of Sweden.”

  “Where’s Sweden again, honey? Is that in Switzerland?”

  He turns to her. She looks back guilelessly, then at the road. “Gee, I sure love Europe.”

  He heaves his luggage into their sprawling suburban home, craning around for Bear, whom he expected at the airport. Pinch wipes his clammy fingers on the tie, chest thudding beneath.

  “Well, well, well—see what the wife dragged in. Put it there, kiddo!” Bear, not seen for four years, shoots out his hand as he strides toward Pinch. His youngest daughter, Widgeon, hugs to her father’s leg, a six-year-old goggling up at her own personal giant. Following is Dad’s eight-year-old, Owen, who lugs a thick medical textbook.

  Before thinking, Pinch charges to his father, causing the man to tuck his visiting son (suddenly little again) against his chest, kissing his temple, a big loving smack. “Been busting to see you!”

  That phrase—“busting to see you!”—fills Pinch nearly to busting. Yet he shrinks back, fearing he’s done something stupid and has deflated their affection. Scratching his beard, Bear grins down, admiring this half-grown l
ittle man. He grabs Pinch’s suitcase and lugs it upstairs, everyone tromping after. Pinch follows so close as to inadvertently step on the back of his father’s slippers. Owen keeps tapping his new stepbrother on the shoulder, and when Pinch turns, the kid holds up his medical book, open to an image of burn victims. Unaware, everyone continues to the guest room, where Bear tosses his son’s suitcase on the bed.

  “What I can’t figure,” Bear says, “is why it took you so damn long to come out here! It’s a helluva trip, I guess. Are we ever tickled to have you! We got some times ahead, Charlie! You on board?”

  “Yes, sir!” In Rome, he sometimes wondered if Bear really was so splendid. But love sluices through the teenager just to stand before Dad, who grabs Pinch in a roughhouse cuddle, leaving the kid determined to upturn his whole life, to speak his mind, to denounce those who deserve it, to adore those who require it, to paint sublimely—suddenly certain that he will. Shy to be smiling like this, Pinch looks anywhere else.

  “I started to think,” Bear adds, “that your mother would turn up here with a pitchfork if I didn’t send you a ticket. Good old Natty!”

  Pinch tries to dismiss this—hearing Mom’s name jars him.

  Then Bear winks, immediately restoring his son’s smile. “Young fella,” the man says, poking Pinch’s ribs. “You need a little shut-eye.” He nods to the others, and everyone makes their way out.

  Abruptly, Pinch is alone, alert to any sound in the house, their voices downstairs. He looks through the window down at the backyard, a long lawn, a swing set backed by maples. Momentarily, he’s distracted by arithmetic. If that funny kid Owen is eight and Widgeon is six, both were born while Dad was in Italy. Is that possible? Dad and Carol weren’t even married then. Bear was often away from the Marinetti apartment, working late. Pinch banishes the thought—I’m here.

  He unbuckles his suitcase, pulse quickening: A rolled canvas lies there. He lifts it out with trepidation, unfurling it on the bed, his knee planted on a corner. The leg survived—that’s what this painting depicts, his bare left leg. Pinch is too timid to ask strangers to sit, and it feels dopey to keep painting Mom, so he depicts his own body. Also, that’s how Bear learned to draw, sketching himself in enlarged detail after he leaped from a window as a little boy for kicks and ended up in traction. Pinch snorts with amusement—what a card, Dad, even then!

  Summoning courage, Pinch makes himself consider his painting. Sometimes, it has seemed excellent; other times, awful. But his attention is too fractured to evaluate it now. He sniffs pipe tobacco from downstairs and steps onto the landing, marveling that his father is Bear Bavinsky, who is a floor below and will be taking Pinch everywhere these next two weeks, showing him the life of a famous painter in New York. Standing at the banister, Pinch imagines enduring in history, a major painter, he and Dad recalled together. And he cannot restrain himself, bolting downstairs, finding a raised newspaper in the den, Bear on the other side, smoke rising behind the page. “Dad, could I show you something? When you get a minute.”

  “Weren’t you resting?” Bear lets the newspaper page wilt. “Shoot, kiddo. What’s on your mind?”

  “Just, there’s a painting I did that I brought for you to see. Remember how you showed me all that stuff in Rome? I’ve been painting since then. I paint all the time. I never said it in my letters because I was lousy before. Maybe I still am lousy.” He looks up, pursuing a denial—then hurries out more words. “Maybe you could tell me if it’s okay. Or if it’s no good. I don’t mind. Either way. Dad?” He scrutinizes his father’s expression. “Only if you have time.”

  “You are painting pictures? Chip off the old block! Hell, I’d love nothing more than to see what you put together.”

  From euphoria, Pinch’s voice leaps in register. “Can I show you now? I could get it from upstairs?”

  But Carol enters with a tray of peanut butter cookies. “Widgeon made these, you guys. I only helped, got me?” She gives a stage wink. “Ain’t that so, Widgey?” The little girl—fingers jammed in her mouth—clings to Carol’s leg under the woman’s dress, peeking at this overgrown boy in their house.

  Bear grabs three cookies, pops one in his mouth, uttering all manner of approving moans, the crumbs accumulating down his beard, the little girl clapping in excitement. Bear leans to Pinch, raising one eyebrow, whispering through crumbling cookie: “We can’t properly cut out right now, with the little darling like this. You understand.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I am busting to see what you did, kiddo. We’ll find the right moment. What say you?”

  Before Pinch can respond, Bear has grabbed his squealing daughter with one arm, hugging her lovingly, flinging her in the air.

  17

  Every day, Bear drives to his barn in North Salem to paint, come hurricane, war, or the visit of a child. He is going to show Pinch the messy old place as soon as he finishes a major work currently under way.

  While waiting, Pinch spends his hours with Carol, who treats him to a matinee showing of the The Sound of Music, takes him around the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, brings him on suburban shopping trips, the hi-fi panel in her Oldsmobile playing doo-wop, radio broadcasters’ patter flooding through the boy. He hasn’t adjusted to hearing English everywhere—still thinks of it as the language of school or home, but not a sound of passersby. Each afternoon, Carol picks up Owen and Widgeon from day camp. Pinch tries to be the big sibling Birdie was for him, but neither child buys him in this role, Widgeon bolting if left with her half brother, Owen talking back in gibberish. “Oh, baby,” his mother says indulgently. “Don’t do that, baby.”

  After dark, Bear comes home, sometimes near midnight. When possible, Pinch finds excuses to stay up, claiming he was reading or listening to the radio. But it’s so late that Pinch has time only for a bit of clumsy flattery before being bundled to his room. He sits on the bed, painting ready in case Dad passes the open door. At his window, Pinch contemplates the rustling darkness out there, the guest bedroom reflected back, himself in pajamas, forehead against the pane, which mists at each breath. He wonders what time it is in Rome, which seems like another planet, one he was never meant to inhabit. In the fogged window, he writes his initials, thoughts wandering back to the Roman studio, his mother. But an artist can’t worry about other people. Think of the middle-aged French stockbroker who left his wife and kids to paint in the tropics, never bothering to see them again, scarring them forever. Who doubts Gauguin was right to go? Yes, you must act, if you are to become someone. Pinch’s innards contract at the thought of telling Natalie, she taking the call in their Italian neighbors’ living room, returning to the studio alone.

  The next night, when Carol is fixing her husband a whiskey sour at the cocktail trolley in the den, Bear sits at the kitchen table, leafing through the newspaper, Pinch watching, needing to take advantage of this rare moment alone. “There was a man on my plane, Dad. I forgot to tell you,” Pinch says, too loudly, then lowering the volume. “He was talking about your paintings the whole flight.”

  Bear lets the page flop like a dog’s ear, chuckling at this yarn. “That so, Charlie?”

  Caught out, Pinch looks away, persisting with the fib, his voice dwindling. “He was saying how the Museum of Modern Art wants to buy more of your paintings.”

  “News to me.”

  “Yes, he said that.”

  Bear flaps the newspaper upright again.

  There was so much time for this vacation, but Pinch is hurtling toward the final days now. And Pinch hasn’t worked up the courage to ask his father. He planned to explain everything at Dad’s barn: how strange Mom has become, how she talks to strangers, how people nod to shut her up and look past the foreign woman, staring at her son.

  “You think there’s still time to maybe see your studio, Dad?”

  “I cannot wait to show you, kiddo.”

  “You do recollect,” Carol sa
ys, handing over his tumbler, ice cubes clinking. “You recall that Charlie here leaves in three days, right?”

  “He’s got a week or more! Ain’t that so, Charlie?”

  “I leave on Monday.”

  “Well I never!” Ben casts aside the paper, pages flying across the carpet, and he focuses on his son. “Now I’m really mad: You, about to go, and I got this nonsense in the city!”

  “You’re away tomorrow?” Pinch asks, panicking.

  “Should be back Sunday, kiddo.”

  “Oh, honey,” Carol interjects. “Bring the poor boy, why don’t you?”

  “To the Petros opening? I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Charlie, you’d go blind from boredom.”

  Pinch nods fast, then shakes his head faster, then stops, flushing.

  “Can I come? Please?”

  “Not sure we can arrange it this late,” Bear responds, tapping his pipe into the ashtray. “Aw, hell—why can’t I bring my own son? To hell with those people!”

  “You two boys could stay the night in the city,” Carol suggests.

  “Carousing till all hours,” Bear adds, jabbing Pinch’s ribs. “What do you say, Charlie boy? You and me, kiddo. We on?”

  18

  On the Larchmont train platform, Bear spreads himself across a bench, placing Pinch alongside him, one hand on the teen’s head, the other flipping through Partisan Review, a wreath of pipe smoke expanding from him. Pinch—tingling where his father’s fingers press—views the tracks, filling them with the night ahead. Painters and sculptors. Modern art itself, into which he’ll walk this very night. He leaps to his feet, earning hardly a glance from Bear, who returns to his reading.