The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  “Charlie, I got so much studying ahead. You know that.”

  “Yes. Fine,” he responds, hurt now. “I thought you wanted them.”

  “Don’t put me on trial here.”

  “But you said that. No?”

  “Can’t I change my mind?”

  “Then why did we marry?”

  “When do I have time to do anything, even to breathe?”

  “Can’t we breathe on weekends?”

  She doesn’t laugh. Neither does he.

  After this trip, they have sex less often. Each interruption to fetch contraception has become a weighted minute. Often they don’t resume. Julie has taken a step away from him, which makes him step forward, which causes her to back off once more—a two-step that becomes more strained as the months pass.

  “You were on the phone forever,” he complains.

  “Why do you hate it when I speak to friends?”

  “Talk to anyone you like. Just, I thought we were going to watch something on TV. Forget it, Jules. Could you be quiet coming to bed?”

  “Always am.”

  But he doesn’t leave. “Meet me under the covers?”

  “I’m doing homework, Charlie.”

  “Homework so pressing that you talked for two hours with Ben.”

  “That wasn’t two hours. And what makes you think it was Ben?”

  “Wasn’t it?” he says, despising himself.

  She and her ex-husband remain close—they grew up together, and you don’t forget that. He stopped drinking recently and is going through a vulnerable patch. When those two speak, Pinch hears her Geordie accent strengthening, her laughter echoing from the other room, the lights off in there. When he walks in, flicking on the lamp, she looks elsewhere, with reddest joyful cheeks.

  He and Julie squabble nowadays, and they never used to. It’s as if he were prodding for something—her ardor, her desire—that cannot come from pushing. When she suggests that he take a break from gray London, that he visit his father’s cottage in France, it leads to their umpteenth quarrel.

  “I’m not angry. But please, Jules, stop advising me. Okay?”

  “I’m not advising you. And what’s so bad if I did?” she says. “Your father would let you stay. And you’d do well with a break, rather than stuck inside this flat all day, translating rubbish about calculators.”

  “It’s a computer manual. But thanks for the condescension.” He adds, “Maybe both of us could go.” He turns away fast, filling the kettle.

  “I can’t, Charlie. Can’t.”

  “You could practice for your French class.”

  “France couldn’t save the likes of me. Some brains don’t absorb foreign languages.”

  “Not true.”

  “Actually, you should be a teacher.”

  “What is the point here, sending me off to my Dad’s place?” he says, voice raised, wavering. “Getting me out of your hair? If I don’t want to go, I’m not going.”

  “Just thought it’d be nice for you.”

  “I can decide what’s nice for me. Okay?” He looks at her, his future deforming: disinvited from her body, from shared old age, from nicknames of convoluted origin. “Jules, we are not at the end.”

  She makes the tea.

  He grabs a ballpoint pen, takes her hand, opens the palm, writes there. She reads it, looks up: “Can’t, Charlie. I’m sorry. I don’t feel that way.”

  With hideous clarity, Pinch sees himself: a pompous bore, a man he’d dislike. And he perceives the approaching solitude, closing around him. They both see it.

  45

  Pinch moves out and rents himself a second-floor flat in a scruffy terraced house in Earls Court. Within days, he is shocked awake—workmen erecting scaffolding over the front windows of all four rental flats, replacing daylight with metal poles and tranquillity with radio blare. He hides in the back bedroom, doing translations far from the workers’ banter—and also to prevent them from seeing him. He’s ashamed to stay inside all day without a single visitor.

  Each evening the building regains its quiet. He broods over Julie, stabbed by perceived humiliations, loathing his pettiness. He lies in bed, unable to sleep, beleaguered by thoughts. I, the same person hearing these gurgling pipes, will die. I’ll be dead for infinity. His mouth goes dry, palms clammy. He needs to squirm, to run outside. He remains still, breast shivering at each heartbeat. Someday I’ll hear nothing, see nothing. I’ll be erased like a floppy disk. Before then, I’m imprisoned in this skull. “You won’t go away.”

  He reaches for the phone, dialing Bear. The call is brief—immediately, he perceives Dad’s impatience at his low state. Pinch puts down the receiver, hearing his own breaths, sensing blips of distress. He gains perverse relief visualizing himself hanging there from the ceiling. After Natalie died, he wrote a long letter to Ruth, an affectionate essay about his mother. She never responded. Nobody bothers to respond to me. I’m bitter. Bitter about everything.

  Pinch needs to hear another voice, any besides his own. As soon as Birdie picks up, he hears himself acting, matching her flippancy, skipping lightly over his separation from Julie, seeking reports on the extended family, including the siblings and cousins of whom Pinch is scarcely aware. Birdie herself is still in Durham, North Carolina, working part time at a veterinary clinic while looking after three kids with her husband, Riley, who served three tours in Vietnam and now runs his own construction company. Birdie is on the Left (the “Mondale/Ferraro ’84” lawn sign is definitely hers), and he’s far to the Right (the “Reagan/Bush” sign is assuredly his). She cares for pets and livestock; he cares for nails and rebar. Their differences were once a source of flirty heat. But now that it comes to raising kids, the sardonic exchanges don’t end up in bed. Worse, his father’s bullying, which Riley always spoke of despairingly, has become his own tyranny exacted on the household. As for Birdie’s father, she is still raging at him. Bear flat out refuses to produce signed sketches for her—it’d be like printing money, she says. If he helped, she could leave Riley. Instead, she must keep her mouth shut and wait until the kids move out, which is years away.

  “One of Dad’s squiggles is not going to earn you big money, Bird.”

  “I heard a painting of his went for forty grand in New York last month.”

  “Not forty. Fourteen.”

  “Oh. Still. Fourteen thousand bucks is real money to me.”

  “Plus, that picture had a naked breast, which increases the price.”

  “Such a cynic, Charlie.”

  “It’s true: the breast augmentation,” he says. “That money isn’t going to Dad, you realize, but to a collector—someone who bought Dad’s art back when he was still selling it.”

  “Why doesn’t he just get over that stupid no-sales rule?”

  “Principles.”

  “Principles are peachy for them that can afford ’em.”

  “But Bird, how did you even hear about that sale?”

  “I got approached by a dealer. What she didn’t realize was, if I’d owned a Dad painting, I’d have sold it centuries ago.”

  “Who was this dealer? Eva Petros?” When Victor Petros died of a massive heart attack two years ago during Art Basel, his daughter took over. The Petros Gallery had parted ways with Bear by then but Eva is now doubting that breakup, especially with the fifties nostalgia fad. In the latest Interview magazine, Julian Schnabel was quoted as saying, “The painter who got me early is Bavinsky,” describing Bear as “the greatest of the modern American greats.” Not long after, that breast painting appeared on the secondary market, bought by Dennis Hopper, according to the Village Voice.

  “Why, you know this person?” Birdie asks.

  “I’m trying not to. Dad wants nothing to do with dealers, so I’m ignoring her.”

  “Do you have any of Dad’s art?”

&n
bsp; “I’ve asked him for stuff,” Pinch lies to make her feel better. “But no dice.” In truth, he would never consider bothering Bear for something. Only a few dozen of Bear’s paintings are in private hands. All of these are Life-Stills, as the oversized portraits of body parts are known—the few that he sold early in his career, a practice that trickled to a stop by the early fifties. After, he kept everything deigned worthy, burned the rest. Nobody is even certain what Bear has been laboring at all these years, whether more Life-Stills or a new series altogether.

  “He wouldn’t give anything, even to you?” Birdie marvels.

  Pinch is pleased by this remark—that Dad holds me in highest regard. Yet he despises feeling burnished by that, so he decides to help his sister and places a call.

  “Hot damn, Charlie, it’s nobody’s business how I sell my work. My own daughter, consorting with that Petros mob? You know that Victor Petros stole from me? Nine paintings I entrusted to that rat. And he sells them on the sly!”

  “Did you report him?”

  “How could I? The bastard gave me my percentage.”

  “So, wait—how was it stealing?”

  “Look, I never approved those sales, Charlie. In my book, that’s theft. They’re all the same.”

  “Art dealers?”

  “These relations of mine. Sniff a profit and—I hate to say it—they turn into goddamn rats.”

  For years, Bear has been gripped by the inheritance wars among Picasso’s surviving wives and lovers and children, not to mention the tawdry recent case regarding Mark Rothko, whose gallery bilked his estate after he committed suicide. Such tales have caused Bear to consider taking one last wife, a special lady who’d be his posthumous custodian. “I cannot have my life’s work ending in the sock closet of some idiot junk-bond tycoon, or with a rat like that Petros girl. You know as well as I do, Charlie: Bear Bavinsky never produced a thousand canvases a month.”

  “Everything you keep is carefully chosen.” Pinch looks up at his ceiling, hearing himself slipping into the old relationship with his father, seconding every opinion, padding him.

  “My paintings aren’t for throwing around higgledy-piggledy,” Bear continues. “When the big museums come calling, that’s another matter. We accept those checks, no question. But if I let my kids turn the Bavinsky name into a bankroll—well, it ain’t happening. Kills me that Birdie is stuck in a lousy marriage. But my work has to stand up, not be the payoff to some bum my daughter shacked up with. I won’t be around forever. We have to get this right, Charlie.”

  Bear has long spoken about placing his art in only the most important collections, but this is different. It’s the testament of a man readying for a time after his own life and who interprets that demise not as obliteration but as a sort of paralysis, his body quiescent, his will alive. The absurdity of this, plus the callous remarks about Birdie, incense Pinch. Heaven forbid we should want something from our lives—even after yours is done! Total allegiance is what you demand, with the hint that one of us might become your favorite. And, Pinch realizes with self-disgust, I won that contest. Few of Dad’s other kids are even allowed his private phone number. But I kowtow. I’m his servant. So I was chosen.

  “Oh, I couldn’t agree more, Dad,” he says, heart thudding, wondering if Bear detects the sarcasm. “Not to sound over the top, but your paintings deserve the most prominent exposure. Venues fitting their stature. Suited to how they’ll be understood in the future. Speaking as a former scholar, Dad, I believe fiercely that important art must be available for viewing by people of all stations. Not just those with extra white space on their mansion walls. That’d be fine if you were an industry like that heathen Salvador Dali. But that’s not Bear Bavinsky. Never has been. Never will be. There’s not enough Bear Bavinsky to go around!”

  “Not enough of you or me to go around, son,” Bear responds approvingly. “It’s us two in this dogfight. Anyone disposes of my work for money alone, it’s betrayal. Plain and simple. But you won’t stand for it.”

  “Not while I’m alive and kicking. No, sir!”

  “You know it, don’t you, Charlie? You know. They are yours. My paintings. All I got. Not for the other kids.”

  “Where do you even have them, Dad?”

  “At the French cottage. All my old pictures, right there in the studio. No rat will find that place. But when I croak, kiddo, I’m leaving you the keys. When I check out,” Bear concludes, “I’m in your hands. You, my boy. You are the one.”

  Although Bear never realizes it, this is the moment when his son takes over.

  46

  Without telling anyone, Pinch heads to France. He is cantankerous throughout the drive, recalling taking this route alongside Barrows, plus Julie telling him to “freshen up” with a spell at the cottage. The pity burns into him still.

  Pinch parks outside the cottage, slams the car door, marches toward the art studio, praying that these old keys—tossed in a suitcase pocket after his trip here with Barrows—will work. He tries them one after another, turning left and right, wiggling, shaking. The bottom lock opens but the second remains locked. He is at the end of hope, tries one last time—and the tumblers turn.

  Dim morning light silhouettes Pinch. (It’s dawn; he drove through the night.) Before him is the potter’s kiln and an easel, as if Natalie were to one side, Bear to the other. But this is distinctly Dad’s territory. Propped around the walls are Bavinsky canvases, front sides turned from view. This is what Bear has clung to; these are to be his legacy. More than two dozen huge paintings. Pinch turns, looking back through the studio door as if there were someone behind, spying.

  After a minute at the entrance, he walks up the overgrown lawn, leaving the door wide open, purposely reckless (though petrified to do so). Fear causes him to hike faster into the woods. It’s freezing, dewy, slippery. He has hardly eaten since departing London yesterday evening—just a fatty pork pie on the hovercraft. Shivering as he strides, Pinch speeds up to generate warmth, jogging now, gasping, pushing himself to go faster. Stumble on a stump and you break your leg—that’d be the end. Nobody finds you here.

  In the closest town, he buys a ham baguette, and devours it on the street. Back at the cottage, he glugs a bottle of red wine, draining the contents in fifteen minutes, then tossing it out the window. The bottle lands silently on the grass. He finds a flask of Armagnac and downs that in large gulps, then storms back into the studio as if to punch someone, the location still infused with eye-stinging visions: Barrows sprawled on the floor, Pinch bursting in, disgracing himself.

  He scours the place for something to give Birdie. Not a painting but something small, secondary and obscure—a piece he could sell on the sly. He finds no old sketchbooks, however, no napkin doodles, nothing extraneous. Bear is so controlling about how he’ll be seen. Pinch kicks the air, nearly losing his balance, only now realizing how drunk he is. “All this fucking way for nothing.” He wavers before the huge canvases, whose reverse sides are smudged with Dad’s handprints, tobacco burns fraying the fabric. Pinch lurches at the closest painting, wiping his hands—still greasy from the sandwich butter—right there on the back of a canvas.

  This fails to quell him, so he drags the canvas over, clutching the stretchers with one hand, pushing the rear of the picture with his other, jaw clenched, dropping to his knees to shove harder still, closing his fist now, knuckles twisting into the spine of the painting, the fabric taut, tacks buckling.

  A pop: paint sprinkles, flaking down the front side. And Pinch falls back. He stands in haste, blood drained from his head, dizzy, ill, panicked yet still drunk enough for defiance. He tosses the painting aside. It falls on its face, banging onto the floor as he staggers away.

  After a dry-mouthed slumber in the cottage, Pinch awakens in his father’s bed, nauseated. At each step he takes to the bathroom, his brain shudders. He sits to piss, covering his eyes. He retains enough booze in his
blood to wish that someone burned the whole art studio, that he could run away. He’s also sober enough to decry his lunacy of five hours before, and to dread consequences. What did I do?

  He runs a bath, looks furtively out the window. What if Dad were to turn up? Pinch sits in the hot water, sweat rolling down his forehead. He pulls at his hair, a blond strand coming off in his hand, floating away in soapy water. He digs his fingernails into his hairy thighs, scratching hard enough to incise red lines. That painting is worth more than I’ll earn in my life. It is part of art history. Or was.

  It occurs to Pinch that he doesn’t even know which picture he ruined—never even turned it around. Barefoot, he hastens across the frosty lawn in a towel. He dries himself before entering. Teeth chattering, he walks toward the painting, picks it up, wipes away floor dust, and turns it around: an oversized picture of a woman’s hands, a tangle of fingers, the image disastrously cracked, an entire patch missing, the underdrawing visible on stained canvas. But still, Pinch recognizes these hands: his mother’s.

  Like an insect in a matchbox, he paces back and forth across the studio. He shudders from the cold, yet throws his towel into a heap by the door. He keeps checking the damage, naked and crouching there, chewing down his fingernails. Each look sickens him anew. The canvas is distended where he rammed his fist. He finds pliers, picks off the bent tacks, frigid hands pulling the canvas tight—which only causes more paint to flake. In dismay, he grabs his hair, plier tips jabbing into his scalp. Slow down!

  He returns to the cottage, puts on clothes, makes coffee—and returns to the studio. He places an easel beside the damaged painting. Arms quavering from caffeine now, he hoists the damaged painting, rests it on the horizontal tray, lowers the holder, screws the wingnuts tight. He flicks on a floor lamp, leaves it a few steps behind him. The shadow of his own head obscures much of his mother’s hands. He keeps moving to reveal the extent of the damage, yet cannot get out of the way, condemned to his deformed shadow dancing before him.