The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  “I just wanted to hear how you are. Been ages.”

  “Not ages. Has it?” Lately, he dreads these conversations, fearing that oddness creeping back into her voice, something wrong again, requiring urgent travel there. She is fragile, but so is his current existence: classes in which he thrives, and a friend. The possibility of returning to what he was before—that pimply boyish self, issuing gale-force words when he met someone—it terrifies him.

  He exerts himself to converse as if Natalie were normal, speaking of his essays and of the snow but bypassing his social life. To tell of happiness feels disloyal. Both he and she watch the clock, counting down the ten minutes, each for opposite reasons.

  “I think of you so often, Pinchy. With such warmth.”

  He puts down the phone, harrowed, needing to restore himself to this house, this city. Then he dials Arizona, where his father lives with a new wife, Charlene, and their toddler, Johnny boy. Bear is always happy to hear from his Canadian son. Pinch, before speaking with his father, fetches his pipe, sparks it up, grinning at that boisterous booming voice: “Son of mine! What news from the true north, strong and free?”

  Versed in art history now, Pinch dares raise topics of his father’s expertise, occasionally earning ticks of respect, even stirring Dad’s pleasure, which redoubles inside the youth, who presses the receiver hard against his warm ear. Above all, he quizzes Bear on the subject of Bear, his views on life and art, to which Pinch can listen for hours.

  “Honestly, Charlie, I look at my work sometimes and think, Is that really what I meant?” he says, an echo on the line. “Or is it what I painted because that’s the limit of what I can do, and I’m not as good as I need be?” When Bear is among strangers, he presents himself as one who’ll freely tell tales against himself, immune to pomposity, stumbling through the nutty art world. But in private with Pinch, he is far more shrewd. Culture, he explains, is a pyramid: a few on top, many squashed under. You don’t say this aloud, he adds, because people want to believe that art is holy, crafted by a clergy of sinners. Pinch smiles, and Bear chuckles. “You like that, kid? “There is an unfunny subtext to this, however, because Bear’s work is increasingly overlooked. He is drifting from the history of art, replaced by those who are objectively worse. Yes, objectively. For Pinch deems artistic merit as fact, not opinion. His fury flames that Bear is subject to idiots, to peons who spurn transcendent work, leading the public to mediocrities and condemning a master to darkness. Pinch would hurt someone to correct this.

  “Dad, I know about your new art going only to museums. But maybe you should rethink that. If you let a few go privately again, might that—”

  “The market is a sewer. It needs to be there, but don’t make me go look. Okay?”

  “No, you’re right. Remember that absolute shit we saw at the Petros Gallery? I never witnessed such worthless junk in my life.”

  “Charlie, every piece from that show—every piece—is worth more than anything I ever did.”

  “It won’t last.”

  “Says?”

  “Hey, Dad, I’ve been meaning to tell you something—this idea I’ve been playing at. Pretty much my whole university career actually.” His hands get clammy, mouth dries out. “Just, obviously, I’m a nobody now. But I had this idea, Dad: how I could become a professor, and write books eventually.”

  Bear takes a drag on his pipe, which prompts Pinch to relight his own, puffing hard.

  “Pete’s sake, kiddo, finish your story!”

  “So, okay, so I was planning something. That you concentrate on your painting while I get into academia. Eventually, I end up somewhere influential, in a position where I can affect opinions.” Stated aloud, the conspiracy sounds deluded to Pinch. He rushes toward the end, to mask his doubt. “If I got your art even a bit of what it deserves, that’d be worth a huge amount. To me. Or. Don’t you think? I know great art rises in due course. But maybe it can do with a lift sometimes.”

  “Who said great art rises naturally?”

  “That’s what I mean.” Gaining momentum, Pinch wonders if this might really be a good idea. “One can’t let idiotic criticism take its course, Dad. We’ve seen its course.” He opens his palm, as if pleading in court, the phone cord wrapped around his forearm, briar pipe gripped in his hand.

  “Listen. Listen,” Bear interrupts, adding nothing, holding the floor, smoke audibly blown from his nostrils, Pinch able to imagine that gray cloud twisting around his beard. “Edvard Munch once said, ‘Paintings are my children—they’re all I got.’ But here’s what I say. You, Charlie boy, are a helluva man. I think the world of you. You know that? We got work ahead.”

  “I could pull this off, you think?”

  “We’re fighting the same war. Comrades at arms,” Bear responds. “So it’s back to work, I say. For the both of us.”

  After placing down the receiver, Pinch opens the door to the bedroom balcony. He walks out there in his socks, which are instantly soaked and freezing. Breath clouds dissolve as he mutters in the various foreign languages he studies. He shoves a line of snow off the wooden balcony edge, the flakes glimmering as they sink before the streetlight glow. “I’m actually doing this. I’m going to do this.”

  1975

  27

  She pulls the marked Latin exam from his hand and carries it away. “Hey! Hang on!” Pinch calls out, hurrying to catch up as she disappears down the stairs. “What are you doing?”

  Even once they’re outside the building, Cilla Barrows—his main rival in the art history master’s program—hasn’t answered. But she does stop, scanning his answers while lazily chewing the collar of her burgundy roll-neck, the fringes of her suede jacket swishing. “Hold it up for me,” she says when Pinch reaches her.

  “Hold my own exam for you?” But he does so.

  She runs her hands through her hair, pulling it tightly back—looks painful—a deft twist into ponytail elastic, all while surveying his answers. She lights a long thin white cigarette and holds a loose lock of bangs under her nose, smelling it.

  A recent arrival on campus, Cilla Barrows moves around with more consummate assurance (and a better sense of direction) than Pinch, even though he completed his entire undergrad here. Since their first master’s seminars, she has made herself known, standing over the classroom garbage can, sharpening pencils and peeling a grapefruit too, devouring it instead of a midday meal while making comments from the doorway, the professor so dumbfounded that he permits it. More than a few instructors have taken to delaying class for her arrival, shuffling papers, glancing down the hallway, until: “Oh, fine, here you are.” As for her comments, they’re well-reasoned and startling in equal measure, such as when she dismisses the oeuvre of Piero della Francesca.

  “You’re ruining all my favorite artists,” a fellow student whimpered.

  “You’d prefer to live in a dream world?” she replied.

  The student’s crumpled expression suggested that, yes, she would.

  Pinch, still displaying his exam for her, asks, “Why are you smelling your hair?”

  “Expensive shampoo.” She holds out the strand for him to sniff, but he demurs.

  “The university trustees would be thrilled that your scholarship money is going to cosmetics.”

  “They’d be pleased to know that I steal this shampoo from my roommates,” she counters. “Scholarship money is strictly for cigarettes and whiskey. You beat me by two, bastard.”

  “Ninety-three is still excellent.”

  “Not as.” She lifts the corner of his exam to her mouth, bares her teeth, and bites it, giving a quiver of a smile that holds till she turns, striding away down the frosty sidewalk.

  28

  Soon, Marsden has heard too much about Cilla Barrows, so he precipitates a meeting at the small library atop Sidney Smith Hall, where she works part time, collating prewar German art journals and alph
abetizing yellowed leaflets on archeology. Within moments, he makes her laugh and lures her downstairs for a cigarette. It’s Marsden who bypasses her icicled first name in favor of “Barrows,” which pleases her because it evokes her parents, with whom she communicates rarely and opaquely. She is redeemed at the sound of their name, meaning her.

  From an oil town in northern Alberta, Barrows was blessed in childhood by the proximity of an eccentric librarian who introduced her to the works of Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt. In high school, her education expanded further when several of her father’s friends made passes, proving themselves hairier versions of boys in her class, talking just as tediously about hockey and reckoning that any statement from her must be dubious. She toyed with a few grown men but disliked the results, including a memorable fistfight between two contenders, one’s hand slamming onto her icy windscreen, which didn’t shatter—ingenious engineering, she marveled, seated inside the vehicle, cratered glass inches from her face. She drove around the rutting males and resolved during a gentle black-ice skid that she would live in New York as an adult, never marry, and produce one daughter, her brainy accomplice. After the University of Alberta, Barrows proceeded to grad school in Toronto, where she shares a ramshackle house in the Annex with seven fellow Albertans.

  Her budding friendship with Marsden—the first of many such bonds with urbane gay men—provides Pinch with close glimpses of Barrows. When he enters his living room, she is often there, drinking black coffee and smoking, with Songs of Leonard Cohen on the record player. She quizzes Pinch about deponent Latin verbs and presses him on comments made in seminar.

  “When did you first know you were clever?” she asks him once, and Pinch bumbles out a nonanswer. He never considered himself clever until this instant. Thrilled, he wonders now.

  Barrows—after a night of rye-and-Cokes with Marsden—excuses herself to the bathroom, then explores the house. Upstairs, she knees open a creaky door to a bedroom that, it transpires, contains a Latin speaker.

  “Hey, I’m in here!” Pinch yelps.

  “My apologies,” she replies, entering anyway, knocking on his door from the inside. She sits at the desk chair, her hands slid between the thighs of her flared jeans. “Are you gonna try to get me in?”

  “In where?”

  She points to his bed.

  Pinch lies under a duvet, which he yanked to his neck upon her appearance. Below, he wears coral-red pajamas with white piping. “Convince you?” he stammers. “Why don’t you convince me?”

  She pulls her hair back, eyebrows yanked higher. “Tell me something interesting. About yourself.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Liar.”

  “I wear red pajamas.”

  She smiles. “Right now?”

  He juts a leg out from under the covers, flannel on display, his socked foot cold from nerves.

  “You.” Pointing at him. “You are going places.” She smooths down her jeans and returns downstairs.

  29

  When Marsden flunks out of university, his politician father pulls strings for a position at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the errant son becomes a research assistant to the world’s leading expert on eighteenth-century Canadian schooner paintings. Oddly this fails to captivate Marsden, who drifts into employment at the Pilot Tavern, an artists’ bar in Yorkville. He and Pinch see less of each other, their schedules pulling apart, Marsden carousing till dawn, snoring as Pinch fries his morning eggs. They communicate via notes on the Frigidaire, each following the other’s day by plates in the sink.

  When they do cross paths, it’s usually because of Barrows—Pinch is studying late and hears her voice. He tidies himself and makes an appearance, hastening gruffly past, as if motivated only by a need to fill his water glass from this particular faucet. “I’m a big drinker,” he notes, taking a gulp.

  “Nobody drinks more water than I do,” Barrows responds.

  “You are sorely mistaken there.”

  His provocation sparks the water-drinking contest. The rules are as follows: Talk normally while matching each other glass for glass; whoever runs to the toilet first is the loser. After two gallons, Pinch rises, fake casual—then sprints. While peeing, he commends himself for not being competitive. But that’s untrue. It’s because he is competitive that Pinch concedes, just as he quit every sport he ever tripped through. To give up asserts that this contest doesn’t count, that the real battle is elsewhere—in his case, the war over taste. Because taste contains everything else, from morals to who you love to who you’ll vote for. And taste is a matter of life and death: One artist gains ground, another vanishes from the record. There’s only so much wall space. That’s Pinch’s battle. That is where he’ll triumph.

  “Nobody drinks me under the table,” Barrows says. “What do I win?”

  “Everlasting glory.”

  “I’ll boast of it to my grandkids. In the meantime, Italian lessons?” She’s preparing doctoral applications and pondering a thesis on Sofonisba Anguissola, a student of Michelangelo deemed by Vasari to be the finest female artist of her time. Barrows hopes to get a book from it, but must read texts in the original. “So,” she concludes, “you get to be my teacher.”

  For her introductory lesson, Pinch arrives at a Hungarian diner on Bloor, greeted by the whiff of stewed meat and paprika. He sits at a window table and watches the waitstaff sail about. A cook’s hand juts through the kitchen cubbyhole, thrusting forth a bowl of steaming goulash. Pinch looks outside, picking at a sticker on the window. From the other side, a tapping: her chewed fingernail.

  To begin, he explains basic Italian grammar. But she grows impatient. “Yes, I get that part.” Her chair screeches back and she moves to another table, not asking his opinion, although she’s right: It was drafty by the door. A half hour later, she ends the lesson with equal brusqueness, and Pinch is left with his cooling crimson soup. He takes this lesson to be their last. But Barrows solicits another. He accepts every further invitation, no matter how ill-timed. And gradually, he comes to know her, even identifies a frailty, the first he’s discerned in Barrows. Languages: She has no ear for them.

  “You can’t hear the double consonant?”

  “It’s the same sound!” she insists.

  “It’s not. Listen: freddo. Not: fredo.”

  “Why can’t I get this?”

  By their next lesson, she has labored at “freddo” for hours—she does not accept blundering twice. Still, she hears no difference. When he reads aloud a passage from Vasari, she says, “I’ll never say a single phrase of Italian like that. I hate you, Charles.”

  That night in bed, when he is poring over Les Mots et les Choses by Michel Foucault, his door creaks open again. “What color pajamas?” she asks.

  He wriggles up in bed. She approaches his bedside table, turns off the banker’s lamp: blackness. “You could say any color now.” A bedspring squeaks where she sits.

  Pinch—willing his eyes to adjust—fumbles for the light chain, but touches her knee instead. “Sorry,” he says, pulling back. But she doesn’t retreat. He reaches out again, returning his fingers there.

  “Still just a knee,” she tells him.

  “I can’t see what I’m doing,” he says, raising his arm. “This?” He rests his fingertips on her collarbone, the heel of his hand against her chest, which sets his own to thumping. He draws her closer, thumb parting her blouse, top button straining in its eyelet. In darkness, he cannot see whom he kisses, which intensifies the sexual blur—until a half hour later his bedside light clicks on, cigarette smoke rising under the bulb, and he is altered, amazed that this is he and that is she: Barrows, undressed on his bed. And that’s what her body looks like, and her slender hand atop his sheet, the chipped polish on her nails. He just kissed those fingers; he’d be allowed to do so again now. She rolls over, sighing peacefully, the softness of her backsi
de against his bare hip. Only his pajama top remains on. She casts back her long chestnut hair, which cascades ticklishly over his face. He blinks through the strands, inhaling the scent of rose-patchouli shampoo and the distant musk from between her thighs.

  After that night, Barrows and Pinch become a combined force, the stars of their program, already talking of where they’ll live together in New York next year when doctoral students at NYU. Marsden fades into the background, his views on art silly, conceived chiefly to shock. And rarely does Pinch call his father anymore. As for the weekly calls with Natalie, he keeps missing them, stung with guilt when he thinks of it. Everything is moving at rocket speed: He and Barrows roaring through final assignments, reading voraciously when not talking voraciously, finalizing proposals, consulting prospective PhD advisers—not to mention nightly beer and pretzel sessions at the Blue Cellar Room, and morning sex that erases every other consideration.

  Pinch lies awake before dawn, her warmth nestled into his. Blips of disbelief pass through him that she finds him kissable. Her roommates let it be known that Pinch is a puzzling choice—balding and decked out like a high school math teacher, so shy as to appear witless. But her priority is a man intelligent enough to keep up. And it doesn’t hurt that he cooks Italian.

  He places before her a plate of osso buco. “This,” she says, “is the life.”

  “I just realized. You don’t want a man, you want a servant.”

  “That’s not fair.” Tasting, a long mmm, devilish smile. “Why can’t I have both? A man servant. Or how else am I to get anything done?”

  They hardly consume that meal, however, because the phone rings. It’s her pregnant roommate, screaming. Barrows takes control of the situation, flagging down a taxi on Harbord Street and dragging Pinch along to help. On arrival at the hospital, Pinch questions the expectant mother in a show of vast ignorance about premature labor. But this is what Barrows wanted him for: to help distract the petrified mother until her twenty-year-old husband reaches the maternity ward.