by Tom Rachman
“How so?”
“Because I never heard of the guy. He doesn’t count now. And neither do you.”
36
Once alone in the cottage, Pinch and Barrows fight in hushed voices. “I wasn’t ‘attacking’ anyone. And he should be grown-up enough to handle it. Anyway, you seem to be the one who’s offended.”
“Don’t tell me what he is or isn’t,” Pinch attempts, unable to keep up, unsure of his own views, just hanging on, terrified of what is happening, her every glance seeming to shout: good-bye. “We’re enjoying his hospitality, remember.”
“I’ll leave then,” she responds. “And, seriously, if you’re incapable of discussing controversy without taking it personally, you will struggle in academia. You’ll struggle at anything. The NYU admissions panel definitely got it right.”
“Thank you. Thanks.”
“I’m very sorry, but it’s hard for me to respect a grown man who acts like a worshipful little boy around his father.”
Flushing, he stands there, pointing at her, speechless.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asks.
“Fuck you.”
They lie in the dark for hours, neither able to sleep. Before dawn, she whispers: “I’m going.”
“We’ll discuss it in the morning.” He pretends to fall asleep but is lying there, sweating, scrambling for a way back.
At breakfast, Barrows tells Bear that she needs to leave because of an emergency back home, though it’s preposterous that she could’ve learned such news with no telephone out here. As she packs, Pinch stares at a window ledge dotted with dead bugs. “We came all the way here.”
“I haven’t forgotten that you paid for everything.”
“That’s not my point.”
“Seemingly, if you pay the bills, I’m your chattel.”
He slams the window closed, its latch shuddering, and points at her again, finger trembling. “You’re insane.”
She raises her eyebrows, as if to a third party. Barrows zips up her luggage. She lugs the suitcase outside, rebuffing his offers of help.
“You can’t thumb a ride from here to Paris,” he says. “Take the car, if you’re going. But please, can we talk for a second?”
“We did talk.”
“I lost my temper. I’m . . . I . . . I don’t know.”
She drops her suitcase on the gravel, looks at him, hatred draining away. “Don’t swear at me again. Okay? Please.”
He takes a half step closer. “Barrows, just—”
“Just hitting the road,” Bear calls out, tromping down from the studio. “An early start is always best.” He passes them, pops the front trunk on the Beetle, drops her suitcase in, and slams the hood, then hoists Barrows off the ground for a farewell peck on the cheek. Looking away, she expresses chilly thanks and slides into the driver’s seat. She doesn’t start the engine, instead staring through the closed window at Pinch, eyes wide: Can we talk?
Bear taps the roof twice, giving her a thumbs-up.
She starts the engine but remains in place, the exhaust cloud billowing. Pinch steps forward but is tugged aside by his father for a private huddle. “You, Charlie boy,” Bear assures him, “are another class from that girl.”
Slowly, the Beetle is reversing down the driveway, tires spitting up the stones and dust. Sharply, Pinch turns from his father, trying to catch her eye but only squinting at the glint on the windscreen. Bear waves at her in a semaphore sweep while addressing his son: “Better off without her, kiddo,” he says, holding Pinch in a one-armed hug. “We’re better off without her.”
Toronto
37
After flinging his suitcase into the house, Pinch sets out to find Barrows. When she drove away from the cottage, he had no way to reach her, so awaited their flight home, spending ten more days alongside Bear, who cavorted and socialized and never mentioned their departed guest. Each night, Pinch lay under the cottage rafters, head spinning from too much alcohol, tortured by the recollected spat and rehearsing what he’d say when he met Barrows at the airport. Once it was time to leave, he traveled by train and ferry back to Britain, almost forgetting that he had promised to see his mother. But he couldn’t face that, couldn’t bolster her, so he went directly to Heathrow. At the departure gate, he searched everywhere. “Sorry,” the airline rep told him finally. “That person’s name is not on your flight.”
Her housemate answers the door, peering disdainfully over her glasses when he asks after Barrows. “Cilla isn’t living here anymore.”
“Where did she go?”
“If she didn’t tell you, I can’t.”
“Did she leave for New York?”
“I’m not in a position to tell you that information.” The door closes.
Pinch is back in his living room, clutching the briar pipe as tightly as possible, as if to crack the wood. In his other fist, he holds a set of keys from the cottage that he forgot to return, clasping them so the metal cuts into his palm. He extends his arm, gazes down it, measuring proportions, suddenly behind an easel in the Roman art studio, his paintbrush moving, its course seeming to precede his intent for an instant. He bites the pipe bit as if to crack his teeth, then searches for a Latin textbook, running through vocabulary lists, which strangely soothe him. He looks around. Could take a coach to New York, find her at the department. What would my argument be? I need you. That’s not a case; that’s a difference of opinions. “Whatever you like,” he says aloud, addressing Barrows across the empty living room. “But this is a mistake.” For me. Not for anybody else.
Soon, tenants will arrive at his house. He always pledged to leave upon finishing his studies. To go where? Pinch covers his eyes, wanting to erase himself. In agitation, he phones directory assistance to track down the number of the Institute of Fine Arts in New York then asks the secretary there how to reach an incoming doctoral candidate. They won’t pass on private details like that. “You’re not hearing my point!” He slams down the phone, telling the receiver: “Listen to what I’m saying!” He starts a letter to Barrows. But there was never any changing her mind.
He resumes his pacing, hemmed in by moving boxes. How can you be trapped by a future that hasn’t happened? He studies the wall, then hammer-fists his stomach, wincing at each blow. He is saturated with hatred for someone who has nothing to do with this: Temple Butterfield, a fake who is far more consequential, far more important, far more successful than Natalie, than Pinch ever could be. CalArts accepted an idiot like him. It’d have to admit someone like me. How hard could admission be? Very hard, Pinch imagines.
He marches into the bedroom that belonged to Marsden. He needs his friend here. The last report was that he’d moved to Los Angeles as a studio assistant to Temple. Pinch tracks down a fellow member of Marsden’s college entourage and learns the full account. Apparently, Temple made a video piece, Fairy Dust, featuring Marsden yapping to a fixed camera about various seedy affairs, childhood gripes, vitriol toward his family—punctuated by cocaine snorts and campy tears, all edited in jump cuts with the goal of a laugh riot. Studio International called Temple’s venture into video art both “freakily hilarious” and “deadly serious,” noting that its subject was “a real person” whose father was a member of the Canadian Parliament. In Ottawa, the Right Honorable Brian McClintock was shown excerpts of the film, which outed Marsden, prompting much of his family to disavow him. When Marsden returned to Toronto, he was ostracized even by his gallery friends there, owing to bitchy on-camera remarks mocking the Canadian art scene, calling it “easily a decade behind.”
Reached by phone, Marsden sounds suspicious to hear from Pinch, yet agrees to a drink at the St. Charles Tavern. He arrives forty minutes late—hair platinum blond now, a hoop earring—and with two older friends: a mustachioed fiftysomething antiques dealer with mahogany tan, and a veiny muscleman in a lime tank top who keeps massaging hi
s neck to banish a kink. These two stare through Pinch, swiveling around for cuter guys, then visit the bathroom to snort a few lines. Marsden, froggish eyelids fluttering, gazes across the table.
“I’ve heard the whole Temple story,” Pinch assures him. “I wondered if you might like a little commiseration.”
“And here you are to provide it. Just after the nick of time,” Marsden says. “I assume you came to boast about something.”
“The reverse. Barrows and I broke up. My doctoral applications went nowhere. I’ve got to leave the house soon and have no idea where I’ll go. I haven’t told my parents any of this. I’m kind of spinning downhill. My only hope is some obscure fellowship that I applied for because of a pushy professor. So, no: not here to boast.” He picks at a beer mat. “I’d actually just like to erase all this.”
“All what?”
“All the things I’ve misplayed. I’m sorry, by the way,” Pinch inserts tensely, unable to make eye contact, clearing his throat. “I’d erase whole parts of me. Throw them off a building. Throw myself off a building.”
“Oh, please,” Marsden says, standing in disgust. “Please.” He turns his back and joins his friends in the bathroom.
Heart thudding, Pinch holds still, humiliated. He stuffs a few dollars under the ashtray and takes a dozen steps along Yonge Street, fixing all attention on his feet to snuff out the shame. Someone calls his name. He turns, orienting to Marsden’s voice.
“Jumping off a fucking building?” Marsden shouts, standing in the barroom door. “You are never doing something that stupid.”
“I know.”
“You’re not allowed,” Marsden says, choking up. “Okay? Because I said. Okay?” He pushes back inside the tavern, vanishing in there, lost in darkness for years more.
Evenlode, Pennsylvania, 1976
38
Quakers founded Evenlode College almost a century before, but by the time Pinch arrives, little of that peaceable sect remains except in the name of varsity teams, The Quakes, whose furry mascot, Temblor, is everywhere on campus—sweatshirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, many of them themed with Stars and Stripes in this year of the American bicentennial.
Pinch explores his new college town, sidestepping flocks of drunken teens who stagger between a support system of frat houses, burger joints, drop-in clinics. Taking refuge in his one-bedroom rental, Pinch looks out the window, a church sign across the road: “Afterlife Guaranteed!” Thank God, he thinks, that this fellowship lasts only nine months.
He makes a showing at the department, introducing himself to Howie Zwinkels, a sociology professor with high-culture pretensions, who established the college’s art history program in 1973. Vigorously, he shakes Pinch’s hand, saying how he admires Bear Bavinsky. “Now I let you in on a little secret: All this rigmarole is nothing but a front for my wine club,” he kids. “Imagine how excited I am to get an Italian speaker on board.” He drags out a case of Tuscan reds and produces an Italian-language wine guide, which Pinch is compelled to read aloud. He translates so well that Zwinkels declares: “Forget this silly fellowship, Charles. Do your doctorate here!”
Pinch smiles politely.
“I’m not joking,” Zwinkels says.
“Wow,” Pinch responds, appalled. “Gosh. Maybe.” Privately, he remains fixated on NYU, where he plans to transfer next year to join Barrows, even if she doesn’t yet know. He’ll require Zwinkels’ reference to apply there. For now, Pinch must please the man. When they chat, he finds himself mimicking the professor’s body language, arms folded, heel against the wall, accent shifting closer to Zwinkels’. After the weekly brie-and-Chianti tastings, Pinch closes the door to his one-bedroom, reading the church sign again.
After several weeks, he has a visitor, Widgeon, last seen a decade earlier, clinging to Bear’s leg in Larchmont. Today, she’s an overweight seventeen-year-old in an excess of makeup who is considering colleges for next year, with far more anxiety than hope. It was Birdie—a qualified vet now, married and living in North Carolina—who arranged this visit. She keeps Pinch informed on their extended family in irregular, funny letters. With typical snark, she explained that their half sister lacks smarts or a good education—might Evenlode be an option?
He escorts Widgeon around campus, shows her his office. “Any questions? Don’t be shy.” She shakes her head vigorously, as if he’d requested that she summarize Kissinger’s strategy on China while performing a Nadia Comăneci floor routine. “Ask me anything, even if it sounds silly. Even if—” The office phone rings. Before answering, he tells her, “I keep getting calls for the last guy who was here.” He picks up, saying, “Greg has left the department.”
“Who? What?”
“Dad!” Pinch says. “How did you get this number?”
Widgeon hurries to her feet at the mention of their father.
“Dad, you know who’s here with me? She came for a visit of—”
Bear says, “Your mother died.”
For an instant, Pinch detaches, his eyes drawing in light, brain incapable of translating it; ears deafened, sensing only a plastic phone receiver; lips dry; hands cold; nauseous saliva under his tongue. He stares across his desk, Widgeon waving for her turn with Daddy.
“I’m sorry to say, Charlie, that she did it to herself. Stupid goddamn thing.” Solemnly, Bear explains how he heard, that Cecil tracked him down through the Petros Gallery.
“What do you mean?” Pinch says, not able to grasp, or care, how Bear came to know. “What do you mean?” He opens his eyes wider for a clearer reality than this. The horror repeats, as if he weren’t informed once but learns anew with each pulse of consciousness, falling from an airplane, spinning in somersaults down. “I don’t understand.”
Jumping in place, Widgeon beams at him. “Let me speak to Poppa!”
Bear states facts that accumulate like a highway pileup, nothing reaching Pinch, although the images will never leave him: “six days on the floor before they walked in . . .” and “a plastic bag over her head . . .”
When he puts down the phone, Widgeon is crestfallen. “Why didn’t I get to talk to him?”
“Something happened,” Pinch says, standing.
“Okay, but still,” she says softly.
Pinch leads her from the department, points her toward the train station, unable to react when her angry tears brim. “I have to leave now?” she says.
“Sorry.” Alone at his apartment, Pinch stands under the shower for so long that the hot water runs out, the spray thinning to a dribble—then pelting down icily. He gasps, not allowing himself to escape the cold. An hour later, he remains nude, sitting on the closed toilet, teeth chattering, this thudding horror. He covers his eyes with the towel, looks at the darkness. Natalie looks back, shrugs.
When he reaches her flat in London, Pinch washes all the dirty dishes, careful that no crockery touches, as if the slightest ding would crack him. He attempts to arrange a funeral but finds only a few numbers in her phone book. When he calls them, a few don’t even recognize the name: “Sorry, who died?” Others feign distress and sympathy, clearly just wanting the gossip: “What happened exactly?” Finally, Cecil intervenes, asking if a funeral service is absolutely necessary. And so, Natalie is cremated. The urn awaits pickup.
After a few days, he forces himself to deal with her bedroom, on whose floor Natalie died. He opens her closet, dresses swaying. He gathers summer hats, empties her underwear drawer, pausing at the bedside table: her bifocals on the purple-silk ribbon. He opens a rubbish bag. But hours later, Pinch remains cross-legged on the floor, studying artifacts, nothing discarded. What is my objective here? To respect her privacy? Or limit my pain? Or preserve something of Natalie? Accomplishing one aim violates another.
Before this, he never took much interest in her pottery, so she never gave him any. Now he owns it all. Picking up one of her recent ceramic sculptures, he
holds it under varied light, wary of doing it harm—his limbs don’t feel wholly under his control lately. He envisages releasing the piece, watching it fall ever so slowly, smashing fast. He rests it on the floor alongside the others and lies beside them, watching her ceiling, hearing neighbors’ footsteps, listening to her darkness falling.
He turns on a lamp and surveys the pottery forest. Her sculptures are not as he imagined, not quirky and disordered. (“They’re mashed lumps of clay, Pinchy,” she said last summer. “Gestural craziness from your crazy mother.”) He presses his fingers hard into his throat, recalling that meeting, understanding it now as their last. These sculptures are not as she described—they’re elegant arcs, the clay raw on one side, glazed on the reverse, slashed in stone green and pebble blue, each piece hand-built, eerily smooth, frail.
None of her works will sit in a museum, he knows. Natalie, toiling through the night, or building slow pieces at her solitary workshop, or looking at him from her potter’s wheel in Rome—she was disregarded, and will remain so forever, among the billions whose inner lives clamor, then expire, never to earn the slightest notice. What reason is there to care about any art if nobody but I will ever care about these?
Cecil agrees to store the pottery that Pinch is unable to transport back to America. “Even without a funeral,” Pinch says by phone to his mother’s friend, “it’d be good to see you again.”
“We must do that. In person one day.”
Pinch wishes the old potter would invite him to Brighton. Cecil was her sole friend in this country. There is only silence on the phone line. “I feel that I need to talk about her,” Pinch adds, “with someone who knows her. Knew her. Another time.”
“I shall look forward to it, Charles.”
Toward week’s end, Pinch finally fills the rubbish bags, all in a hurry, trying not to view the contents, throwing in her bifocals; clay-streaked jeans and ragged T-shirts; an unfinished Iris Murdoch novel, her place marked with a ticket stub from a concert of Schumann piano sonatas on the night of her death, before she returned to this quiet room, hearing nothing beyond herself. On this same floor, she lay, tied a plastic bag over her head. He shuts his eyes. Plastic sucked in at each breath.