by Tom Rachman
When he turns his head to consider the “Soup of the Day” on a blackboard, her jollity subsides in the periphery of his vision only to reassemble when he turns back. “So you dare to make pottery without a function—what would Cecil say?” he jokes.
“Dear old Cecil.” After his awkward visit to Rome, they fell out of touch for several years—Natalie cringed to recall her wretched state when he was there, how she misinterpreted everything. But they are back in touch again, and she still loves Cecil; he’s still her supporter. “He’s in Brighton now, still making the same terribly serious pots.”
“Do you see him often?”
“When he can stand me. And your father? How’s Bear? I marvel at that man.”
“Same as ever.”
“It’s so hard to believe we were together. Don’t you find? Anyway, the force of will in Bear is incredible. I envy him that. You need to be selfish as an artist—that’s why it’s so much harder for a woman.” She pauses her rapid-fire stream, looks hard at Pinch. “I was at the craft shop the other day, and someone said, ‘Natalie used to be married to Bear Bavinsky.’ Another person went: ‘Were you his muse?’ I told them, ‘When people say “muse,” you know they mean “assistant”?’ They thought me very bolshie, very women’s lib.” Fast, Natalie sips her mint tea, looks around as if everyone were staring. “But your father was an encourager of mine. It was Bear who bought my potter’s wheel in Rome. Made me feel like a proper artist. I shouldn’t forgive him for that! He inspires people, makes you feel you can. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s fair, like when kids get told: ‘You can become the president or an Olympic gold medalist! Just put your mind to it!’ Such rubbish.”
“You never told me I could be an Olympic athlete,” he says.
“There are limits to what is credible, Pinchy.”
He laughs. At first, Natalie seemed to blare her eccentricity. But this is a peek at his mother again, as if she were on the other side of a door and now leans out, and they see each other, know each other too well.
“I don’t get why you always talk as if your career ended, Mom. You were just saying how well your sculptures are going. You can’t doubt everything. You love your work, so it’s worth it, right? You even loved Dad, right? Or you wouldn’t have waited in Rome all that time for him.”
“It was different in those days. I could hardly have returned to college in London while raising a baby, unmarried. At least in Rome, we had a place to live for free. But, of course, I was very keen on Bear.” She smiles. “As your father liked to say, ‘Natty, you’re one in a million girls!’ Eventually, I realized he meant it.”
“You must’ve known he was like that. You two started seeing each other as an affair.”
“But I was so young, Pinch. I didn’t understand much of anything. And I was so unsure of myself. If someone told me I ought to do something, I figured they knew. What amazes me is I ever had the guts to tell Bear to leave. Seeing your father’s face! Like a scolded little boy, poor thing.”
“You broke it off?”
“I asked him to leave, yes. And immediately started regretting it. But it was impossible to back out. He got angrier and angrier, wouldn’t listen to me anymore. I suspect he was ready to go himself. He shouted for a while, burned a few paintings, and went.”
“Why burn a few paintings? Out of anger?”
“No, no. He just didn’t want to leave anything substandard behind. Your Dad, as you know, is very worried about people seeing substandard work.”
“Worried?” Pinch says. “Dad doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”
“I’ve never met an artist who didn’t worry what everybody thinks. Or what are they doing it for? Some act like they don’t care, but you can pick those out—they’re the misanthropes. ‘I’ll hate the public before the public hates me!’ Oh, poor Bear.” A half smile. “I’ve never been able to get mad at your father. Why is that?”
“Because there’s no malice in Dad. He’s just that way. Like a huge ship, powering forward on his mission, and nobody can stop it.”
“I see,” Natalie notes, “that you’re still very engaged with Bear.”
He looks to the restaurant clock, irritated. Nobody likes to be understood without warning.
“I can’t stick around for ages,” he says. “But let’s keep talking.” He looks at Natalie and his spirits sink. She has skill and knows her craft. But he wishes she would stop hurting herself in this attempt to be an artist. It’s so effortless for Bear, so beyond her.
“If you’re in difficulty, Pinch, would you tell me?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, what purpose do I have then? Really, though?”
“Lots of purposes.” He fails to cite one.
“I saw you as a friend too early,” she says. “I burdened you, like I burden all my friends. No wonder people run out on me. What do I offer?”
“That’s stupid. When I was growing up, you were by far my closest friend.” Only by saying this does he realize it’s true. “And you achieved lots at a very young age, Mom. You uprooted yourself at, what, nineteen? Went all alone to London. I couldn’t have done that.”
“How I see it, looking back, is that I got myself into a predicament. I was pretending to be a grown-up. But I couldn’t pull it off. Probably I should never have left Canada, should’ve settled down there, worked in a craft shop, married a nice accountant. I got so far into this artist impersonation that there’s been nothing left but to keep it up.”
“Do you regret having me when you did?”
“No,” she responds with alarm.
“What?”
“Just that I think—I know—that I let you down. Terribly.” She twists her necklace, trying to assert control over herself, slowing her breathing. At last she looks up, lips together, wet eyes blinking. “I keep having this feeling, Pinch. That I’m floating through each day. Like I’m here, but this isn’t anything to do with me anymore.” She indicates everyone in the restaurant, also nodding to the window over the street. “What people are busy with—eating or traveling or even just meeting someone fresh—that part of life is behind me somehow. I had my opportunities. Some went well, some less so. But I’m past that.”
“You make it sound like you’re a hundred years old. You’re young still. And remember, Cecil said something like this when he came to Rome. Telling us how he’d put all ambitions behind him and felt much better for it. Right? Maybe it’s a stage. That you don’t care so much. It’s healthy.”
“And yet,” she interjects, a light in her eyes, that of a younger self, “I so want you to see my pottery, Pinchy. I want you to tell me what you think. To say, maybe it’s all right. I want approval. I still do.” She shakes her head, touches her throat, forces a laugh. “When I’m dead, I’ll probably be worried that people don’t like my headstone!”
“Mom, you are doing much better. Seen from outside. You’re working, throwing again, managing.” He needs her to be okay.
“Of course, I’m doing well! My son is here from Canada—what else could I want?”
“That I don’t run off, as I probably have to.”
“As you must do. Run as far as you can. Don’t look back.” She smiles.
“When I fly back to Toronto, I go via London. Could I maybe visit your workshop then?”
“I would so love that.”
“You can show me these famous sculptures of yours,” he says. “We can have a proper talk.”
She taps the scalding teapot, her fingertip leaping from the heat, then back, held in place. “I’d so value your opinion, as a fellow artist.”
“Fellow artist? The last thing I made was your mint tea.”
“You only poured it.”
“See: I’m not even a tea artist.”
Her eyes brighten again. “We’re still friends, you and I.”
Embarras
sed, he chuckles, noticing all the people of his age around. “Actually, on the way over here, I was remembering our rides around Rome—going to Galleria Borghese on our rattly bikes. Me, veering into traffic to scare you.”
With recollected anxiety, she touches her chest. “I know.” But something distracts her. “I’m annoyed. I’ve left out so many things.”
“Tell me.”
“You need to go. We can discuss everything tomorrow.”
“I’m not here tomorrow.”
“But I’ll talk to you anyway. I do every day. Did you know?” she tells him, returning behind her door of eccentricity. “I suppose you can’t hear me talking from across the Atlantic. I wake up and say: ‘Hello, Pinchy, what are you up to this morning?’ Like when you were little in Rome.”
“What did we discuss this morning?”
“I said, ‘See you in a few hours!’”
The waiter deposits their bill.
“I’m sorry my girlfriend couldn’t make it,” Pinch says, looking away. “She had a meeting at the Courtauld, and it—”
“Yes, you mentioned.”
Pinch sees that she disbelieves this, correctly so. He didn’t want Barrows to meet his mother, fearing that Natalie’s strangeness devalued him. Now he is ashamed for that—yet still wouldn’t want Barrows present.
Natalie’s gaze sweeps across the restaurant, alighting finally on her son. “You need to go,” she says, her hand—a slight tremble from the meds—on his fingers. “So, so much luck to you, Pinch.”
He touches the top of her head—but is too upset and must stand in haste, unable to look at her. He mumbles thanks and is on the street, striding fast.
33
Barrows drives their rented Beetle onto a hovercraft across the Channel, then onward into France, motoring through the outskirts of Paris, he squinting at a map, directing them (very badly) toward their hotel near Montparnasse cemetery. The room is the cheapest available, a creaky-floorboards garret with a petrifyingly narrow balcony overlooking zinc rooftops. She passes an hour out there, gazing down, as he lies propped on the bed, puffing his pipe, observing her.
“What in hell are we doing inside?” she asks, spinning around. “We need to be there!”
With only two nights in Paris, they race through her itinerary. At the Louvre, she canters toward this painting or that, he accompanying, unable to study the art, only her. They return deliciously drunk to the hotel, she pawing at his belt, he watching as if viewing this from outside himself. On their last morning, they come downstairs asterisk-eyed and too late for the hotel breakfast, begging a maid for even a stale croissant (denied), then find a nearby bar and tear apart a pain au chocolat, dipping it in a shared café au lait, kissing hard outside, coffee breath, pastry tongues. “We already checked out of our room,” she notes.
“In the car?”
But there’s no time. They must reach Bear’s cottage by nightfall to avoid the expense of additional hotels. It’s nine hours by car from Paris, most of which she drives while he looks in puzzlement at the Michelin map in his lap, thinking of Cecil Ditchley, and of his mother, whom the cottage was bought for, and of his father too, who awaits them—the fact makes Pinch smile, erasing all worries. He regales her with tales of Bear, his artistic gambits, his rakish misdeeds.
“I must admit,” Barrows says, legs on the dashboard (Pinch’s turn to drive). “I’ve got mixed feelings about his work.”
“Mixed how?”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever loved it.” She adds, “Keep that to yourself, please.”
“No, I was planning to walk in there, thank him for flying us to Europe—then immediately point out that you consider his life’s work pointless.”
“I never said that.”
“You’re wrong, by the way,” he says, grip slippery on the wheel. He wipes his hands on his corduroy trousers. “Have you ever met an artist, a really serious one, before?”
“Temple Butterfield?”
“Hilarious.”
She pokes her finger in his ear, leans over, nips his cheek.
He dares a thought: Barrows needs me to become what she will. So here’s what we do. I come with her to New York and manage the unfashionable parts of her life—the cooking, the ironing, the cleaning. I want to be useful. He looks at her.
“Eyes on the road,” she says.
And I can do independent research in my own time. There is a way out of this.
“I’m sorry your mother didn’t have time to meet up,” Barrows says. “I’d have enjoyed that.”
“What if I reapply next year?” he asks.
“To NYU? Of course. If you want.”
“But what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me more about your mother. You keep changing the subject.”
He claps his hand on her thigh as if to push down the surge of emotion inside him. There’s a sharp turn ahead; he must return both hands to the wheel.
“Nearly there,” she says. “Nearly Bear.”
The roads keep narrowing: from highway to two-lane regional, to a belt of tarmac around the mountainside now. They lean into each turn, he hitting the horn in case another car races toward them, especially with the light fading. Finally, there: the roadside barrel, its staves splashed with red paint. He slows, turns in, the Beetle shuddering up a steep pebbly driveway.
The trip rushed by. He needs more time. More Barrows. Years more before they pull in. He yanks the parking brake, turns to her.
“About time!” Bear hollers, approaching through the dusky evening.
34
The painter, well into his sixties now, seats his two young guests at a long farmhouse table in the kitchen beneath hanging lamps circled by flies. Pinch talks in a nervous rush: how they’ll need to find a real-estate agent in Prades tomorrow, must also tidy up the cottage for viewings, and look into the legal side of the sale.
“Nothing of the sort!” Bear interrupts. “I’ve decided to keep this pile of rocks, meaning you luckless rhubarbs came all this way for nothing. But there’s good news. I’m compensating you with fine dining—fine as possible in this neck of the woods—and even finer boozing all week.”
“Wait, what? You’re not selling?”
“I’d be crazy to. Have you any idea how cheap booze is around these parts, Pinch, my boy?” Winking, Bear reaches for his pipe.
Barrows has never heard her boyfriend called “Pinch” and flashes him a quizzical half smile.
Bear resumes his account of coming here a few weeks ago and taking an unexpected shine to this dump. He has befriended a local butcher, and the lady at the boulangerie, and a Dutch couple who run a wine cellar. Foreigners dot this area, it turns out, mostly oddballs who drifted here for the cheap living.
“I always pictured Cecil completely alone,” Pinch says.
“He was. The hippies and trippies didn’t turn up till long after his day,” Bear explains. “Now have a sip of this poison, will you?” He pours three overfull glasses of Côtes du Roussillon. From the first gulps, Pinch and Barrows ease into this rustic cottage, making merry with a coarse red, cold ham, crispy baguette, local butter.
“Why can bad wine taste so much better than the good kind?” Pinch asks.
“It’s the company,” Barrows responds approvingly. “The drink only tags along.”
“Cheers to that, sweetie.” Bear clinks glasses. “Know what else, kids? The very day after I get here, I just got to paint. Something in the mountain air. I drive breakneck to Perpignan for supplies and am working that very night.”
“Me, thinking you needed help with the language!” Pinch says. “You probably get along better without French than I do with it.”
“You deserve some credit, Charlie—you’re the one convinced me to buy this place in the first place for your ma.” He squeezes Pinch’s shoulder, then turns to
Barrows. “Always listen to this boy.”
Pinch, cheeks burning, presses his nose into the wine glass, inhaling happiness.
Bear leads them on a midnight tour of the property, flashlight beam skimming the lawn, up to the fringe of the forest, then around his art studio, a structure in disrepair. The painter opens its door only a crack, points his light inside for an instant, the floor littered with Cecil’s cracked pots, its air scented with clay dust and paint thinner.
“What are you working on?” Barrows asks, nodding at a large easel, the back of its canvas smudged with Bear’s handprints.
“We’ll never know,” Pinch answers. “Nobody goes into Dad’s secret chambers.” To his father: “I’m impressed you already found someone to pose for you.”
“These nutballs up here? They’re fighting to sit. Problem is they’re all smoking grass. Appointments mean nothing.”
“I’d turn up on time,” Barrows says.
“That so?” Bear says, expertly looking her up and down—a gaze Pinch has witnessed before.
As they all return to the main house, Pinch whispers to her: “His sitters pose nude.”
“Oh, come on—he’d probably just paint my arm or ankle or something. Isn’t that what he always does?”
“Even then, trust me, it’s nude. There’s a difference in how light reflects off fabric versus skin. It’s how my father works.”
“All right, kids, you get the run of the house. I’m camping in my studio for the duration. No arguing. It’s a democracy up here, and two beats one.”
“What if both of us vote for you to keep your house?” Barrows says. “We’ll be fine. We’re young.”
“Won’t hear of it.” He speaks as one who prevails, and adds that all his work is in the studio, and he can’t allow a couple of snoops to bed down there. “Not to mention, turp fumes’ll rot your college-educated brains.” He plants a good night kiss on Pinch’s forehead, another on hers. “Been busting to see you two.” He ambles off to his studio, crooning Sinatra for their benefit, a muffled medley of “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Witchcraft” that persists until the lights go out up there, and it’s all blackness except the firefly dots of vehicles creeping around the valley.