The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  Outside, he lowers the rubbish into the metal bins with utmost care. But he can’t leave it. He stands in place, mind stalled until a stranger passes and nods. Pinch nods back and returns inside, her purple-silk bifocals ribbon saved in his pocket.

  39

  Pinch returns to Evenlode with three pots (an early Natalie fruit bowl, a tea mug, a ceramic sculpture). He offered to send a few pieces to Ruth, but she was too upset to accept. When he informed her of Natalie’s death, the line cut—she just put down the receiver. He called back, and she was shouting, too distraught to hear. “She wouldn’t do this! She would not do this!” The line went dead again.

  Back at Evenlode, Pinch resumes his studies, coasting numbly down the path to a doctorate. In the department, he agrees to any request, whether it’s attending wine tastings or teaching freshman Italian classes. He acts cordial as a buffer against damage. During dinner parties, he looks directly at strangers, as he hasn’t easily done since before puberty—yet his gaze is bland now, matched with bland smiles, never the slightest dispute, gaining him a reputation on campus as an insubstantial man.

  Toward the end of that first academic year, he travels to Manhattan by train, needing to see Barrows. For hours, he crisscrosses Central Park, glancing over his shoulder for muggers, almost wanting one, which would excuse him from stepping foot inside the Institute of Fine Arts. But there is no mugger, only a drug pusher in bug-eye sunglasses and crop top football jersey watching him, plus couples bounding past in tracksuit tops and white shorts, part of the jogging craze. Distracted by watching the runners pound by, he realizes why he traveled here: He wants to tell Barrows about his mother and the inescapable image of Natalie on the floor in her London flat, which flashes through him during faculty gatherings.

  If he tells Barrows, it’ll sound like a bid for pity. Perhaps it is. He never even introduced them—if they had met, Pinch could justify approaching her with the news. But he was ashamed of Natalie. He halts. “I’m movin’ here, dodo!” a runner barks, thudding past. Instantly, Pinch’s pulse is fluttering, as if he’d been threatened with violence. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, reminded that he has nothing to offer Barrows. He tucks his head down and returns to the train station.

  In his second year at Evenlode, Pinch speaks rarely to his father, unable to deal with Bear’s ego or to sustain throwaway remarks about Natalie. Pinch passes nights in the company of Martina, an Argentine grad student of comparative literature. A left-wing activist back home, she left Buenos Aires when the military took over, and she struggles with the American college lifestyle. After six months together, Pinch mentions Natalie’s death, stating for the first time that both his mother and his grandfather took their lives. He sees her thinking: You too? Instead, she says, “Only happy words in this room.” Things happened to her back home, and she cannot tolerate others’ sorrows. He is with her to speak Spanish, to drink wine (even if she’s the one doing the serious drinking), to sleep together sometimes—the pretense of connection.

  Now and then, he drives to suburban Philadelphia to visit the closest major museum, the Barnes collection. He recalls what Barrows once claimed of its founder, that the man made his fortune from gonorrhea treatment and spat on paintings to wipe off bits he disliked. Pinch wonders if it’s true and asks a guard, earning a blank stare. In Center City, he visits a giant new public sculpture, Clothespin by Claes Oldenburg, wondering if it’s good, unsure what that means to him anymore. He watches people, creating thought-paintings: Man Bores Wife Who Wants to Read or Girl Shouting as Bus Pulls Away. With a pocket-size Kodak Instamatic, Pinch lingers behind lampposts, snapping street shots, speed-walking from captured subjects. Once, he sneaks a picture of a hoodlum, only for the guy’s crew to surround him, demanding what in fuck he’s doin’, until they realize he’s just a coward and relent. The best photos—of bodies turning, eyes half closed, motives midway—Pinch enlarges. He pursues the instant before, or a fraction too late, the thinnest slivers of experience. Using a loupe, he studies strangers’ faces, speaking aloud to them, copying their features in pencil-and-ink compositions so large that they become abstracted in his sketch pad. But these drawings irritate him: They lack everything, are balanced, complete; all human drives canceled. He scrunches each picture, jams it among the food scraps in his kitchen garbage.

  After five years have passed at Evenlode, the seasons are too familiar to Pinch, as is his daily walk to the department. Freshmen still perturb him—they’re incapable of walking properly, forcing him to slalom. In the mirror, Pinch detects a frown, believing he wasn’t making one, only to recognize that this expression is now fixed on his brow.

  Evenlode was to be a way station, yet he has remained longer than most of his peers. The grad students he met early, Martina included, have accepted academic postings elsewhere or took civilian jobs. Many have started families. More than once, Pinch has brought flowers to a maternity ward, which always recalls the day when Barrows’ roommate went into early labor. How old will that child be now? Once, he and Barrows had a conversation under the bedsheets, he consenting to her plan for one daughter, an only child, which suited their ambitions. Whenever he passes a stroller, he peers in, wondering about these tiny humans. He’ll sweep aside his comb-over and consider the limpid-eyed, bobbleheaded occupant of the stroller. Pinch wiggles his eyebrows, suddenly conscious of how his rubbery adult face must appear. “Hello, little one,” he says, then a kindly nod to the parent and quickly onward.

  To satisfy his doctoral adviser, Pinch loads his thesis with extraneous material about Venetians inventing flat crystal glass in the late fifteenth century, which increased the popularity of self-portraits; Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage; Alberti’s remarks in Della Pittura about the reflected face of Narcissus in water as a foundational myth of painting; Caravaggio’s Narcissus as an allusion to mirror use in the High Renaissance. He will submit to any change sought, and composes letters of obsequious thanks—anything to escape here. He orders three copies of his bound thesis from a local printing press, mailing one to Barrows, an adjunct professor at Princeton, according to the bio on the back of her first book, Losing Lily Briscoe: Women and Myth from Gentileschi to Nochlin, just published by Yale University Press. The second copy he mails to Marsden’s last known address in Toronto. The third he mails to his father, now living in Maine with his present girlfriend.

  Pinch awaits the call, needing to hear his father’s opinion on work that, years back, was initiated for Bear. This, Pinch knows, is why he persisted with his dissertation: for this solitary review. He will ask Dad if he should seek a publisher, a small press perhaps. Or he could set up as an independent scholar, outside the college ecosystem, so he’d stand apart, able to express unpopular ideas, like those he and Bear always talked about.

  He hears nothing, so places the call himself. Bear’s girlfriend assures Pinch that the package did arrive. “Still sitting here on the console table.”

  “Could you tell him I’d love to know his thoughts? As soon as he can—as soon as is feasible, given work.” A week passes. Another. A third. Pinch orders himself to be patient. His mind keeps flipping back to this same subject. In bed, he rages over the wait. Finally, he calls Maine again, gets Dad on the line this time, talks about unrelated subjects—then shoots out his question.

  “Kiddo, you should be proud as hell of what you’ve done.”

  Beaming, Pinch leans forward, then rocks back, reaching for the pipe. He grasps it, thrusts it in air, shaking his fist. “I’m so glad to hear this, Dad. I feel lightened, completely. I wanted to tell you: I’ve been thinking about your biography again. You have so many amazing stories. I could be your stenographer. It’d be a way forward for me. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to get into an Ivy League—I’m sorry about that. But you saw this piece of writing. And it was okay, right? What do you think? I’d come out there, if that works. Or we could meet elsewhere. Whatever suits you.”

>   “Hold the line—Jenny’s waving at me. What is it, sweetheart? Yeah, just finishing up. It’s Charlie, the Italian one. Yep, that one. Ten seconds, babe. Charlie—you were saying? My undivided attention.”

  “So it was decent, the thesis?” He needs replenishing.

  “Helluva lot of work you did. And solid work.”

  “There are loads of your ideas in there. Did you notice?”

  “And I’m still waiting for my commission!”

  In haste, Pinch lights his pipe, coughs. “And you saw the dedication?”

  “Folks dedicate doctorates nowadays?”

  “It was on the first page—you didn’t see that?” He pauses. “Dad, I know you’ve been busy at the studio lately. But did you get a chance to read the whole thing yet?”

  “Ah, what do I know about essays? What counts is that you celebrate tonight. It’s a helluva accomplishment, what you did. You know, most fathers worry that their kids are doing too much celebrating at college. I worry you’re not doing enough! You need to raise a glass to yourself, kiddo.”

  “I’m on my second mint tea already,” Pinch says, attempting to play along, lifting his mug as if for Bear’s perusal. “Drinking from one of Mom’s ceramics, actually. It took me ages to use this. I’ve got tons of her pottery in storage with Cecil. Could I get him to send you a few pieces, Dad?”

  “Poor Natty.”

  “You always liked her work.”

  “Whenever I saw your mother’s art, I thought one thing: She wants to please, and it felt that way. No, her pieces were never really first class. That’s why I always—”

  Pinch hangs up, then raises the receiver, hand shaking, needing to smash the phone against the wall. But he’s afraid. Of harm. Of damage. Of missing Dad’s return call. In fact, Bear doesn’t call back. Pinch was planning to propose moving to Maine and finding a place nearby, so they could start on the biography.

  He pulls open the fridge door, hard enough that it slams against the cupboard, shuddering jars. Off cold shelves, he grabs at anything, gorging himself nearly to suffocation. Eyes watering, he dry heaves into the sink, grasps the metal faucet with both hands, rows it violently back and forth, unable to snap it. He punches the wall at full force, and howls from the pain. A dent in the whitewash. He hits it again, a red smear, his knuckles throbbing, dripping blood on the linoleum. He is unable to catch air. “Not done yet,” he says, body quaking, eyes blinking. “I’m not done yet.”

  Adulthood

  OIL ON CANVAS

  96 X 182 INCHES

  Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate

  London, 1981

  40

  Under thunderous rain, Pinch hurries down a muddy path, squelching after the elderly man who marches briskly ahead. “I’m getting a little soaked, Cecil! Could we take cover? If that’s okay?”

  Over the years, Pinch has often reflected on the noble hermit of his childhood, a man who plowed ahead with his pottery, irrespective of the world’s taste. After Natalie died, they spoke by phone but didn’t meet until today. Cecil arrived in his Morris Minor outside Pinch’s rented flat near Belsize Park, returned the stored boxes of Natalie’s pottery and said, “Shall we walk?” So they find themselves here, on an ill-judged hike across Hampstead Heath, during which Pinch has seen little but the back of the man’s waxed Barbour coat.

  Cecil veers off track, tramping toward the closest road, where he directs Pinch into a drab café, shakes off the raindrops, and points to a table. Tea arrives in chipped cups, the saucers slopping with milky brew. Cecil betrays no unease, but Pinch feels it, so tosses forth questions, each dropping like a dead fly between them.

  “Is it even wetter than this in Brighton?”

  Cecil sweeps aside gray-blond bangs, a plop of rain landing in his tea. “It rather varies. On the time of year.”

  Pinch copies Cecil, sweeping across his own hair as if readying for the school photo: a thirty-one-year-old teenager with bad skin and thinning locks, damp tweed jacket, pipe in breast pocket. He smiles, willing Cecil to mirror his warmth. Pinch is fond of this man who, in his small way, kept an eye on Natalie, no matter how difficult she could be. Pinch won’t confess it yet, but this recent decision to move back to England was partly to assume his mother’s bond with Cecil. For weeks, Pinch has awaited this meeting, needing counsel from the wise old potter, to hear how to salvage a bungled young life. Sitting opposite Cecil, however, Pinch speaks only of Natalie.

  “What did you make of her work?” Pinch asks.

  “She was quite skilled.”

  “Why do you think other people weren’t interested?”

  “Oh, there’s very limited acclaim in ceramics.”

  “But she was good, right? People should have paid more attention to her work, no?”

  For a spell, Cecil remains silent. His sight line sweeps above Pinch’s head, as if a plane with a banner were dragging his response across the sky, though it’s just a bug scuttling over the café window. “What is has never been what ought,” Cecil answers finally. “You pose an is/ought question. When I was younger, I dabbled in ‘oughts.’ I have retired to ‘is.’” He sips his tea soundlessly.

  Pinch rests his jittery hands on the table, steepling his fingers, which he never does—only to notice that Cecil is himself making this gesture. Pinch reaches for the napkin dispenser, but finds Cecil’s long tapering fingers doing the same. “Sorry—you first,” Pinch says, embarrassed by this compulsive mimicry, so useful in acquiring foreign words, so obstructive in expressing his own.

  “You had further questions? About Natalie?”

  “I feel,” Pinch begins, “I have this feeling that what happened with her involved me. In some way.” Unable to look across the table, he gives a forced laugh.

  “Oh, it’s madness.”

  “What I said?”

  “What she did. You can’t dwell on it.”

  “That’s all I can do.”

  Cecil wriggles higher in his seat, as if to signal an end to melancholy talk. “Tell me: What news of the great Bear?”

  Pinch wants anything but to speak of his father. Cecil launches into reminiscences of that charming meal together in Rome, declaring himself awfully grateful to Bear for having bought that vast electric kiln at the cottage—not to mention having later taken the entire property off his bankrupt hands. “And he’s as productive as ever, is he? And still represented by the Petros Gallery? Very fashionable place. How is Bear’s press? Journalists must be a bore.”

  “Dad holds his own.” Why, Pinch wonders, must I reflexively puff my father? Has a single reporter approached my father in years? When one of Bear’s early paintings came up at a minor auction house last year, the lot went unsold.

  “But how,” Cecil persists, shaking the last drop of tea into his mouth, “how would you say his work is selling?”

  Pinch rambles about the scarcity of museum acquisitions since the oil crisis, how private galleries care only about selling wall meat to financiers these days, and corporations are busy bejeweling their headquarters with slabs of Jasper Johns, Diane Arbus, Modigliani.

  “Yes, yes,” Cecil resumes, “but what does a good Bavinsky go for today?”

  Pinch is taken aback. Why should Cecil, who chose a poor man’s trade, lust at the pornography of another man’s wealth? Perhaps because Cecil took the noble path, finding only hunger at its end. An artist’s noble vision isn’t enough, Pinch realizes. You must succeed. And he reads the old potter before him with plunging clarity—that only manners brought Cecil here.

  “Looks like the rain is stopping,” Cecil remarks. Shortly, he stands, shakes hands, pays up. Pinch watches the waxed Barbour coat stride away for good. This cherished artist—requiring only his tools, caring nothing for the world’s wants—he doesn’t exist. Perhaps no such person ever has.

  Readying to leave the café himself, Pinch glimpses him
self reflected in the window, mud on his shoes, caked up the hem of his corduroys. Cecil was the last person to view him, so that man’s impression holds sway: the son of my sad Canadian friend, an unattractive boy, testing my courtesy, so ferociously wanting something—wanting someone.

  41

  Pinch awakens with a start, breathing heavily, shaking off another nightmare about poverty. For years, he subsisted with the help of his grandmother, scholarships, teaching stipends. But he moved to London with scant savings, no job, no friends—and the expectation that Cecil would somehow resolve it all. Instead, Pinch has rent payments upcoming and a fast-dwindling bank account.

  London itself seems harsher than he left it, with a thin surface of civility covering deep pools of aggression. During his decade away, there were race riots and power cuts, IRA bomb threats, everyone going on strike, from the gravediggers to the bakers to the hospital staff. The bad-tempered ripples persist, with Mrs. Thatcher pointedly extolling those who succeed, those with a ferocity for profit and the sharp elbows to achieve it—much the traits that Pinch lacks. Wandering around his neighborhood, he walks slowly, apprehensively. Then crossing the street, he must hurry across the roadway as drivers hurtle murderously toward him, perfectly willing to maim a stranger to make a point about the rules. Even the kids in polyester school uniforms disconcert him, marauding down the high streets, shrieking out as if to raise two fingers at the plodding grown-ups whom they must someday become.

  Pinch will not ask for money from Ruth or Bear. He sends copies of a speculative letter to art history departments across southern England and Wales. Nobody responds. Checking the master copy of that letter, Pinch sees with mortification that he professed himself “moist grateful” for their consideration. And they moist certainly grant him none.