by Tom Rachman
“At the gallery?” Pinch says, needing to hear this again.
“We made a scene all right! But not for talking about, hey?” He opens one eye. “You got that, kiddo?”
“After the gallery, we ate hamburgers for dinner at the hotel,” Pinch responds, as if recounting to Carol.
“With plenty of Heinz ketchup,” Bear adds.
The boy laughs, recalling that idiotic collage. “And baseball on the radio.”
“You are a solid customer,” Bear says, touching his forehead to Pinch’s temple, before settling back to sleep.
But Pinch still awaits an answer about moving here for good. As the train slows into Larchmont, passengers stand, smoothing suit jackets, collecting hats from the overhead racks, adjusting brims. Bear leaps to his feet, lifting Pinch as if he were a brown-paper parcel. “Back in the suburbs, young man,” he says. “Time to adopt our disguises, Charlie boy. Ready?”
Carol waits on the platform, talking a blue streak about Widgeon’s tonsillitis. Back at the house, Pinch runs to his room, opens his suitcase with the rolled-up painting inside. He darts to the top of the stairs, calling down when Bear passes along the corridor. “Could I show you that picture I brought? Would that be okay?”
“Be right up, Charlie.”
Chilly with sweat, Pinch sits on his bed, leg jiggling. The murmur of his father’s phone conversation downstairs drifts up, punctuated by Bear’s thunderous laughter, each bolt of which hits Pinch with such love for this man. The call ends. Bear clomps upstairs. “Well, kiddo, what you got? I know I’m gonna love this.”
Pinch unrolls the canvas and swallows. “Remember you told me in Rome to ‘paint close, but look far’? I always do that.”
Bear’s gaze flits expertly across the painting, absorbing a hundred details an instant. “Tell you what, Charlie. I will tell you what.” Bear packs his pipe, shaking his head. He looks up. “You did that, son of mine?”
Swelling with pride, Pinch nods.
With his knuckle, Bear pins down the edge of the curling canvas. “That is one hell of a leg.”
Pinch grins. “It’s mine. Like how you drew your legs when you were in the hospital as a kid.”
“Sure, sure.” Bear continues to scrutinize. “Young artists show me their work all the time. I can tell right away if a guy’s got something.”
Pinch commands himself to act like a professional. He’d give up his remaining life to hear Dad’s admiration for this picture. Pinch blurts: “Dad, did you think I could stay here? Here at the house?”
“You just did, Charlie.”
“For longer, I mean. To live.” His chest thuds. “If it’s okay with everyone.”
“You serious, Charlie?” his father says.
Pinch nods.
Bear pauses. “But is that fair to Natty? Doesn’t she need you there?”
“Mom isn’t like when you were with us.”
“Aw, come on—Natty never changes. Sweet girl. And a kid ought to stay with his mother.” He grabs Pinch’s arm. “Son of mine, I think the world of you. You know that.” He nods toward his son’s painting. “So I got to tell you, kiddo. You’re not an artist. And you never will be.”
Youth
OIL ON CANVAS
78 X 124 INCHES
Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate
Toronto, 1971
21
He stuffs a bolt of tobacco into his pipe, sucks a matchbook flame to the bowl, and coughs discreetly, browsing the art section of a used bookstore on Bloor, paging through old catalogs, obscure pamphlets, dusty Dadaist treatises that make him sneeze. He crouches to peruse a work on Pop Art, finding color plates of works by now-celebrated artists, a few of whom he encountered years before at the Petros Gallery with his father.
That night, Pinch cooks a lavish dinner for two, having procured the necessary Italian ingredients on College Street: cans of peeled San Marzano tomatoes, guanciale, black olives, pecorino romano, capers in sea salt—every ingredient except someone to eat with. He prefers a test run before inviting a date, just to ensure that everything works, from the saucepans to the conversation. “You come from Toronto?” he asks the empty chair, reading off a sheet of questions resting beside his plate of steaming rigatoni. He tries again, with different intonation. No, that sounded perverse. Anyway, he’ll presumably know where she’s from by the time he asks her out. Pinch crosses off that question and proceeds to the next: “Do you like music?” But everyone does. He scribbles this out, printing over it, “What type of music?” Then, “Is the record too loud/soft?” And, “The other day, (HER NAME HERE), I walked past a protest against the Spadina Expressway. What is your position on that?”
Smirking, he shakes his head. Poor girl! We’d better hope the food comes out well. Pinch stabs another forkful, raising it to his lips, his mouth watering. There was an interesting question here. He reads down the sheet: “I notice that you”—blob of red sauce—“yourself.” He dabs the stain, touches it to his tongue. Too acidic? “I notice that you”—blob of red sauce—“yourself.” You what yourself?
He jumps at the noise of an engine coughing and looks out the window over a tree-lined street of the Annex, watching a Volkswagen camper van disgorge record crates and shaggy students. His fellow University of Toronto freshmen are another species to Pinch. They’re mere months from high school—one summer since lunch bells and locker smells, testing their new adult privileges, trading rock ’n’ roll albums and philosophizing. By contrast, Pinch is a grown man of twenty-one, and presents himself as such: his receding blond hair side-swept, a tweed jacket and tie, corduroy bell-bottoms ironed with a sharp crease up the middle. Only his thick sideburns are unkempt, and this is less about fashion than incompetent shaving.
He hasn’t had a classmate since age sixteen, when he returned from visiting his father in Larchmont. Upon arriving back in Rome, he told Natalie that he wasn’t going to paint anymore, intending to wound her as he had been wounded. Her entreaties only pushed him to burn his best efforts, then his supplies; in the end, everything. What remained was the two of them in a cramped art studio. His aim succeeded: He had hurt her badly. And she had stopped trying with him. She decided to move back to London to resume her own art. He could come if he wanted. He didn’t, but had no alternative. So, by correspondence from London, he completed his remaining high school courses, a minimal burden that left him most of each week free in a dark cold city. He haunted the museums, watching other visitors, confabulating their lives, wishing for the courage to address someone.
At first Natalie roared through a frenetic period of work, pulling overnighters at a pottery cooperative in North London, talking immodestly about her art—until, with crashing clarity, she saw herself: These pots were desperate, botched; she possessed nothing. Natalie struggled to sleep, grew paranoid, thin, smoking constantly. Once he came home to find her seated in the kitchen, a bread knife resting on her thigh. “Just need to go to bed for twenty-four hours,” she said. “Then I’ll get on with things.” Two days later, he watched her being led down a beige hospital hallway. Several spells in psychiatric wards followed.
After Pinch received his diploma in the mail, he found work as a guard at the National Gallery to bring in a little money (though Bear helped out with fat but irregular checks) and also to escape home, where Pinch found himself insufferable, having assumed the role of nagging parent to his mother: “Open your mouth, so I know you took them.” Every workday at the National Gallery ended with a plunge in spirits as he walked over the Churchill mosaic and out the portico entrance to Trafalgar Square, tensing further as he stepped onto the Tube train and rigid by the time it clattered into Belsize Park, their home stop. No matter how fine his day, it was dashed as he walked into their basement flat, hearing her smoker’s cough from the kitchen, Natalie barely responding to his greeting, he yearning to tell of a famous museum visitor, say, or a stupid new policy
, or the guards from Mauritius who were teaching him Creole.
Each night he cooked their dinner, lest Natalie go without—left to herself, she consumed only coffee and smokes, a regimen that alone could set off another manic-depressive episode. He tried to replicate dishes tasted in Rome, struggling to recall (and to find) the ingredients, apologizing when his experiments ended in catastrophe.
Sometimes Natalie was still loving—and he spurned her then.
“I think you hate me,” she said.
“I don’t.”
“Is there anything you like about me?”
He changed the subject, never explaining the source of his anger: that she had encouraged him, had adored his painting, had stoked his hopes, telling him, “You are really very good.” Yet he wasn’t. He couldn’t forgive Natalie for that. In secret, he wrote to her estranged mother, asking about Canada. Pinch dreaded telling of his contact with Ruth in Montreal. But she responded unexpectedly, hugging him, holding on tightly, whispering, “So pleased you’re doing this,” as if she were his mom again. Pinch turned formal, showing her the course catalog, a map of campus, where he’d be living—a collage of information plastered over his guilt.
“The funny thing about having a child,” Natalie told him, “is that it’s really about not having the child. That’s what raising one is. Doing everything possible so they’re able to leave you. Not that it’s a credit to me. You raised yourself, Pinch.”
“That’s not true,” he said, hurrying her attention back to his upcoming studies.
Now Pinch explores his large new home in Toronto, owned by Ruth and lent for his time at university. Previously it was a student flophouse. Four bedrooms bear the scars of former occupants, with psychedelic pen doodles on walls and the stench of wet dog. He ventures into empty rooms and floorboards creak. In darkness he stands there, hands on hips. I must do well here.
In class the next morning, he hunches over a small desk, taking copious notes to avoid stray gazes from the surrounding students, all women, which turns out to be the case in most of his art history courses, though nearly all the professors are men. Here, a middle-aged academic in a leather jacket lectures to his pretty favorite, who fiddles with a bouncy pendant. When the prof poses questions, Pinch shoots up his hand, answering in a rush, his throat constricting.
“Well . . .” the professor responds, stretching out the pause. “You are correct in point of fact.”
Pinch didn’t think there were points other than fact. Chastened, he resumes his febrile note-taking, throat blotchy. In bed that night, he replays his classroom blunders, burning with self-scorn, tugging at his hair. Barefoot, he opens the refrigerator, plucking pieces of cold rigatoni from a bowl. “Come here often?” he says, smiling at a red-sauce spatter on the linoleum. “It was dinner. But is it art?”
22
His emaciated grandmother wears penciled eyebrows that rise in skeptical arcs, her short yellow hairdo pasted down, giving Ruth the impression of a shriveled lemon. On her dining table in Montreal, she places a sweet loaf, candied cherries and almonds glistening, and she urges Pinch to eat, then to eat more (it’s awful). She touches none herself. “I’m on a diet.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t be,” Pinch responds, wishing to please the only relative he knows in this country, who is also paying his tuition.
“Since 1926.”
“What is?”
“My diet.”
He laughs—Ruth meant this as wit yet she appears annoyed at his response. She returns from the kitchen with two china teacups tinkling in saucers, each containing perfectly clear hot water. He sips, unsure if this too is a joke and whether he’s allowed to smile. Instead, he thanks her. Much of that afternoon he is expressing gratitude. She wants this, expects this—and repudiates it when offered.
Pinch always worried that involving himself with Ruth risked awakening hostilities between her and Natalie. The two women never communicated by phone, only the rarest letters, which Natalie read in a fury, one hand clasping the writing paper, the other hand clasping her shirt. Seated across from Ruth, who is supporting him, who is acting far more like family than Natalie has for years, Pinch feels poignant kinship for his absent mother. “What was Natalie like when she was little?”
Ruth fails to offer a portrait so much as a case study, telling of crippling anxiety, intense friendships that ended in fiery breakups, a girl who was insufferable in adolescence. Pinch attempts to broaden this account, adding his mother’s subsequent accomplishments, how she set herself up overseas, raised him alone in Italy.
A framed photo of David sits on the mantel, and Pinch expresses regret that his grandfather died before they could meet.
“That’s what she told you? Before you were born?”
Pinch—distressed to learn of his mother’s deception—nevertheless claims that he must’ve misunderstood. But Ruth pursues the topic, seeking the safety of anger. She speaks as if having wanted to state this for years, to correct what her daughter has lyingly fed her Italianized grandson, who wasn’t even brought up remotely Jewish, who knows nothing of David, nothing of our past or our lives in Canada. “Did she tell you David put a gun to his head? That he shot himself?”
Pinch nods.
“Did she tell you that he didn’t die? That he didn’t do us that favor. Couldn’t even get that right. He went on for years. And who had to nurse him?” She jabs her own chest.
“Why did he, Ruth?”
“He was miserable,” she says unhelpfully. “Kept telling everyone how decrepit he was. What’s funny,” she adds with an inauthentic smile, “is to shoot himself! You never saw a less violent man. They didn’t even let him fight in the war. He was a man who went around on a bicycle, for God’s sake! He lay upstairs for years, brain half removed. But he was too healthy in body—wouldn’t fade away, not for years. How does a wife say she prefers her sick husband to die? I’ll tell you how: ‘It’d be a mercy.’ Meaning, ‘a mercy’ to me.”
“And to him,” Pinch says.
“You weren’t here. Someone never brought you.” Ruth allows her cigarette to leak a gray curlicue, never inhaling. “Here’s the strange part: I was broken up when David did pass away. Why?” She scrutinizes Pinch.
He looks to the man’s photo: wiry, bald, stern.
“Of everyone, it was your mother who was closest with him. Why else run so far away? Not because she hated me—well, not only that.”
After the subject of David exhausts itself, any other topic seems frivolous. She doesn’t dismiss Pinch, though—it’s as if she can’t face his leaving, so will sit here, saying “Mmm . . .” to his dull accounts of classes. Abruptly she stands. He gets to his feet, pledging to return. She tells him to write first. He does so, almost every two weeks, asking about her daily life of which she revealed so little. At first he proposes a return visit. But she never writes back—unless he falls slack in his correspondence, whereupon a two-line letter arrives, containing neither salutation nor her name, just “Do you need stamps?”
23
Toronto is swallowed beneath clouds. As the plane shudders, Pinch grabs an armrest, nervously flicking the ashtray, peering in at elbows of cigarettes there. It’s summer break, and he is flying back to London. As a freshman, he performed well but not so superlatively as to gain notice, instead dissolving into the blinking ocean of survey-course undergrads. His letters to Natalie described fellow students, told tales of camaraderie, all fabricated. His was a solitary year; he counted down until today.
In the rail carriage from Heathrow, he studies English feet: scuffed dress shoes, bandaged pinkie toes (the first week of sunshine, sandals still tight). At Belsize Park, he steps into the morning, blinking. Minutes later, he’s in her doorway, Natalie before him, only her hair different, shorter now, a black bob haircut with strands of white. He wants to apologize or thank her or cover his eyes and think for a minute. She lives in the sam
e garden flat they shared for years, and Natalie herself seems mostly the same. But Pinch finds himself different, realizing only as he steps through the door.
She offers a packet of Maltesers. “Still your favorite?”
“I don’t often eat sweets in Toronto.” (When he unpacked on his first day in Canada, he found packets of Maltesers secreted throughout his luggage.)
“You must get back into the habit, Pinchy. I bought you lots.”
“Let me start then.” He opens the packet, tosses a few into his mouth. “This place smells exactly like before.”
She leads him through the kitchen, past her small-press cookbooks and jars of carob and sticks of dried rosemary, past her stubby cactus that never takes water and grows measly defiant spines. Out on the patio, they sit at the bistro table, she shading her brow from the sunlight, steam curling from the cups of mint tea. Natalie has an unreal aspect: She is Pinch’s most familiar sight, viewed since before his clocks started. Yet she isn’t as he expected—not quite his mother today but a middle-aged woman.
“It’s so lovely to have you here,” she says. Natalie speaks of her current pottery, jokes that she works far better without him around. She speaks of colleagues at the craft shop, denouncing them so scathingly that Pinch hears himself defending strangers.
“I’m doing better now,” she protests. “Can’t you give me credit for that?”
“I do.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
He mentions Ruth, speaks of her frailty, urging Natalie to travel back to Canada after all these years.
“You’re taking her side now?”
“I didn’t know there were sides.”