The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  When he painted as an adolescent, Pinch replicated his father’s style (melded with Caravaggio, laughable as that seems now). Today he fumbles toward something of his own, negotiating color outward from a center point, tiny strokes, as if feeling through the void of each blank canvas. What marks his style is the deliberate inclusion of error: clots of red paint left untouched, black threads from hesitant bristles, stuttering lines in blue. From afar, faces emerge.

  He finishes each session with aching shoulders and calloused hands, light-headed in the best way. He wonders what Natalie would’ve made of this—that he’s painting again as she always wanted. With a little wine in him, he amuses himself by leaving a picture in the easel and swinging open the door as if Dad were walking in, discovering it there. He plays through the scene, hardening himself to his father’s commentary: “You want to please, Charlie, and it feels that way.” Pinch imagines rejoinders, facts to decimate Bear: “You are so much less than you planned, Dad.” But even mouthing this cruelty hurts Pinch. He’d never wound his old man, which is what Bear is now—old and frailer, no matter how he conceals it, laboring to appear just as ripsnorting as ever.

  But what if Dad saw one of my pictures and was impressed? Pinch closes his eyes, shakes his head, jabbing his stomach. So hard to imagine. His irritation flares; he pours another glass. After a few more, he locks the studio and the cottage too, striding unevenly down the single-lane country road, leaning against fences whenever headlights whoosh by. After an hour, he reaches a public telephone in the closest village. He’s phoning Dad to confess the sale—how nobody realized it was his, that it’s hanging there still. Nobody could tell the difference! You’ll be gone someday, Dad, and I’ll still be here.

  Bear’s current wife, Lulu, answers. “Hey, Charlie. Poppa Bear can’t talk right now.”

  “He’s working?”

  “Or what another person might call napping. Why couldn’t I get the young Bear Bavinsky?” she jokes. “That’s the problem with men. They wear out.”

  He makes a sound resembling laughter. “If you could tell him everything’s swell at the cottage, I’d be most thankful.” He puts down the phone and breaks into a blind run back up the winding tarmac, yodeling. If Bear had picked up, Pinch would’ve blurted the truth. Even in retrospect, the consequences chill him. He’d be banished from here. Pinch leaps, punches his fist in the air.

  Before the drive back to London, he tidies the art studio with utmost care, concealing his intrusion, leaving it exactly as mucky and messy as it was, not a spot more. He fires up the kiln, slides in all six of the canvases he painted on this visit. He stands outside with his pipe, a twirl of smoke from his hand, a twirl from the studio chimney.

  On the drive back to London, he keeps imagining those incinerated paintings on the asphalt that rushes beneath the car. They’re pictures nobody but he will ever know. And that’s how he wants it. Pinch returns to Utz replenished, full of affection for his students. He attempts silly jokes, and laughter bursts from his classroom. In the hallway he commiserates with fellow teachers, clucking in accord with their laments. “They’re crazy to complain,” he agrees. “Your course sounds excellent.”

  He is gracious because of his secret: that he isn’t really a teacher. Yet this makes him smirk. Me, a genuine artist! Yes, yes—an artist whose work hangs in the most exquisite collection in all of Nebraska!

  50

  After a few years at Utz, Pinch becomes a personality there, his self-satirizing quirks drifting into shtick: the white Panama hat in summer, the smelly briar pipe, his necktie of turtles, the socks with double-decker buses. Often he lingers after-hours, perusing grammar texts in the library or writing down one-liners from his favorite joke book, slipping them into colleagues’ mailboxes. When everyone has left, he strolls the corridors as if they were his, humming, muttering foreign phrases, sometimes even popping into the women’s staff toilets simply because you aren’t supposed to. He thrills at these unseen shows of nonconformity. One evening, before the mirror in the ladies room, considering his lamb-chop sideburns, Pinch mulls trimming them as per current fashion. Behind his reflection, a Chinese woman appears.

  “Jing!” He spins around.

  Bewildered, she retreats, the door closing after her.

  He knows Jing only superficially from her Mandarin classes, and because she is married to Salvatore, a fellow Italian teacher who gives Pinch the creeps—part of why he’s kept his distance from Jing. What irks him about Salvatore is that nobody seems to see what a phony he is, how the pretends to embody the stereotype of an Italian, bursting into opera during class, offering shots of limoncello, chirping “Ciao, bella!” to female students. But this guy, who claims to be Sicilian, was born in Wales to immigrant parents and speaks appallingly bad Italian. Nobody learns anything in his classes—yet everyone adores Sal! For a while he haunted Pinch’s office, sitting without permission on his desk, yammering away in English. “I got this really hot bird in Intermediate. You seen her, Carlito?”

  “No, actually. But I saw your wife in the hall earlier.”

  “Why you talking about Jing, mate? I’m telling you about this Katya bitch.”

  “And what Jing was telling me about Chinese dialects was so amazing.”

  “You’re a knob.” That was the last time Salvatore bothered him.

  Pinch remains vexed that anyone could like such a fraud. But, ah well—this is your day job. Who even cares about working at Utz?

  Apparently, he does. For, caught in the ladies room, he rushes into the halls, scanning for Jing, concocting a lie to preserve his job. He’ll call it a blunder, beg her to keep it to herself. When he locates Jing, she’s entering the men’s room.

  “If you use that toilet, I go here,” she says matter-of-factly.

  Smiling, Pinch returns to his office. What an oddball she is. Anyway, he seems to be safe. Until, minutes later, Jing knocks at his office door. “I am going outside to eat sandwich,” she says.

  “Good idea.”

  “You come?”

  She leads him to a sandwich bar near Russell Square. Pinch orders only a mint tea, resenting this outing—he’s only here to ensure that she doesn’t plan to tell on him. At least he can use the occasion to practice Mandarin. Jing says nothing unprompted, so he asks about her life in China. Her family hails from Sichuan, but she grew up in the far west, Xinjiang. Her father, a professor of medicine, was ordered out there during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, a well-bred doctor, was assigned to herd goats. Clandestinely, she educated Jing, teaching the girl a smattering of French and English and guiding her through the medical books left behind by her late father.

  “What happened to him?” Pinch asks.

  “Some students, they beat him to death,” she says.

  When Jing was grown, she undertook a long and punishing trek to London full of unstated indignities. She always intended to study medicine, but it never came to pass. This renders her current job at Utz both a triumph and a shame: better than she’s had, far less than she should’ve.

  Switching to English (Jing too wants practice), she says, “Chars, do you consider me a humor person?”

  “I consider you a serious person,” he says, believing this to be her desired reply, though it fails to satisfy her. “Do you consider yourself funny?”

  “I like to be funny. Also,” she adds, “I am ticklish.”

  “Not sure that counts.”

  “You laughed.”

  He reverts to Mandarin: “I have books of jokes in my office. I lend you one. I give it in your office.”

  She opens her soggy sandwich to inspect the contents, failing to notice that he is readying to leave. But his glimpse of her lonely dinner stops him. He sits again, as if merely having adjusted his underpants.

  After their stilted dinner, the two become distant friends, bumping into each other in the halls after everyone else has vacat
ed. Sometimes he tags along for her after-work sandwiches—he never wants one himself, but it’s too sad leaving her to eat alone. Moreover, he respects Jing. She’s the only other serious linguist on staff. This makes him increasingly uneasy about what he knows: that Salvatore is entirely unfaithful, constantly hitting on students. Look, Pinch reminds himself, workplace melodrama doesn’t concern me. What matters is at the cottage.

  1990

  51

  Pinch maintains loose contact with his father, speaking now and then, unsure what he feels about Bear Bavinsky nowadays. He does wish they could speak about painting—not so Dad would praise his art necessarily, but for the pleasure of a shared interest. Instead he inquires into Bear’s ongoing work. “Are you keeping a lot of these pictures? Or most go into the fire?”

  “If it went in the fire, why would I talk about it now?” Bear responds gruffly.

  Pinch suffers a pang to hear his father’s rebuff, but suppresses this. His main reason for these calls is to know when Bear will next invade the cottage, which normally happens for a few weeks during the summer, casting Pinch into panic that his father might notice something this time. Fortunately, Bear detests looking back at his own art—he has decided that the works preserved at his studio are sublime, and he can’t risk reconsidering that view, so keeps the paintings turned to the wall. Pinch never rests until his father leaves the cottage again, at which point the place is his own. At any opportunity he may vanish there, always vague to colleagues at Utz. Fellow teachers, sipping coffee in the staff room, rib him for taking the same vacation every year. “Where is this glorious villa of yours?” they ask. “Why don’t I get an invitation?”

  Pinch looks into his Styrofoam cup, black liquid jiggling. A polite smile. He deafens himself to their banter, holding the scene before himself, converting their faces into shapes, colors, a flat composition. “If only it were a villa,” he responds. “More like a heap of old stones!” Nobody needs to find that place, or know what becomes of him there.

  Amid cycles of teaching and painting, Pinch turns forty. He deems it a meaningless milestone, yet is moved when his colleagues throw a surprise party, including a Tesco strawberry cake and two bottles of prosecco. The overtanned receptionist produces a gift certificate, bought on behalf of everyone. The card says “Happy 50th Birthday!,” which is a little embarrassing; they make a joke of it. But he does look older than his years, with a hunch of which he is hardly aware, lacking anyone intimate enough to correct his downward trend. Only a few cross-swept strands of hair still intervene between his bald dome and the rain. A paunch juts over his belt, as if peeking off a high diving board.

  Many more terms begin, and many more conclude, each time with a few departing students who request snapshots with him, promising to mail back copies from Tokyo or Cairo or Boston, or wherever their hard-gained vocabulary is to gently decompose. Now and then he falls for a woman in class and almost flirts. But he dreads being the creepy teacher—he considers Salvatore that, so becomes the sexless one instead.

  Sometimes Pinch awakens from dreams in which someone was in love with him. He rarely remembers details, just a hollowness. He pushes his thoughts away from such nonsense and back to the cottage, considering techniques achieved last time, which he must replicate on the next. With the passing years, he attains a new vibrancy in his paintings, especially after putting aside the street photographs from Philadelphia and referring only to memory, eyes clenched then springing open to re-create faces from his past, not for accuracy but abstracted, recognizable only to him. Before leaving the cottage, he destroys all his latest efforts—it’s strangely exhilarating, leaves his chest pounding.

  Only once does he save a work from the flames—a woman’s chin, which began as Julie’s, became Barrows’, and ended up as that of someone he hasn’t yet met, perhaps will. He can show her, saying, “Isn’t that you?” He hides the wet canvas in the attic, behind boxes of Natalie’s old pottery, which he has gradually driven to the cottage, both for safekeeping and because this tranquil setting seems right for her art, alongside his.

  For company in London he adopts two dogs from the Battersea animal shelter, fluffy white mongrels called Harold and Tony whose previous owner died. The man’s body remained undiscovered for three weeks, but his pets were fine. “Not even hungry,” the shelter employee tells Pinch, raising her eyebrows. “You put two and two together.” As a result of such ghoulish rumors, nobody wants these dogs. But Pinch prefers outcasts, so takes them. Walking from the shelter he picks up the sniffly little dogs, their pink tongues hanging out, fangs glistening. One licks his hand with delectation. “No, boy! No!”

  By the mid-nineties, Pinch can scarcely recall life before Harold and Tony, conducting long conversations with his roommates (doesn’t matter in which language) and venting about work or the bruises of London living. Neither dog is overly bothered, which always makes Pinch less upset.

  Then someone has sex—not with Pinch but with Mallard Dwyer. And everything changes.

  52

  Pinch is practicing Chinese tones in his living room, and his dogs are howling along, when an unfamiliar sound reverberates from the wall: his telephone. A paralegal is calling from Los Angeles with questions about Judy-Lynn Mendez.

  “Who?” He is immediately on edge. She was the actress who married Mallard Dwyer, and who prompted him to start an art collection. But Mallard, it turns out, was caught in bed with an even younger starlet whom he met in the shoe department and befriended in the hot tub. The upshot is that lawyers are tallying assets, including a painting sold by the Petros Gallery. Apparently Eva directed the paralegal to Pinch, saying he would be happy to provide details on provenance.

  Inwardly raging at Eva, he switches the receiver to his other hand, wiping his sweaty palm on the couch. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he replies.

  “Is there a number for your father possibly? He’s living, right?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “You misunderstand. My father is alive. I just don’t see any reason to let you harass him about a sale he had nothing to do with. He doesn’t like to be disturbed. All right?”

  “I hear where you’re coming from, sir, but I do need to reach out to him.”

  “I’ve told you. There’s no reason to bother him.”

  “Don’t be abusive, sir.”

  “How was that abusive?” Pinch snaps, cornered by this twit, mind scrambling. “Look, call some other time.”

  “And you’ll have his number then? I could call Monday.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  For days, Pinch can barely sleep. He should’ve handled that better. Do they already suspect something? Will they track down Bear regardless? Pinch has never explicitly claimed that the painting was by his father. But that’s how it was sold, and he took tens of thousands of dollars based on this. And he’s inadvertently implicated Birdie too, by giving her the profits. He shakes his head, hand over his eyes. “What have I done here?” Would it be possible to buy back the painting from Mallard and hide this whole mess? But Pinch couldn’t possibly afford a Bavinsky. Priced out of his own painting! He wipes sweat off his upper lip, the dogs watching.

  “If I tell the truth,” he informs Harold and Tony, “nobody will be understanding. This won’t be okay.” His only chance is to keep lying, and hope that closes the matter. He must confirm directly what he previously implied—that this was an original Bear Bavinsky, gifted to Pinch by the artist himself. It’s better to gamble on that and hope Bear never hears of it than to let them ferret out Dad.

  Blood pressure rocketing, Pinch signs the affidavit and faxes it to a law office in L.A.

  “Coming through the machine as we speak,” the paralegal confirms by phone. “Great, good. They can move ahead with liquidating now.”

  “Liquidating?” Pinch goes cold.

  “Selling the work.”
>
  “I thought you just needed to confirm provenance for a valuation. You said this was just paperwork. Why didn’t you mention it was for a sale?”

  “Sir, you’re being abusive again.”

  “How have I abused you? How?”

  “I’m putting down the phone now.”

  For weeks Pinch jumps if anyone taps him on the shoulder. When the light on his answering machine blinks, he is terrorized, just circling it for days. When he finally listens, he finds a message from an American journalist who wants to speak in person; he’s coming to London. Hands on hips, Pinch envisages his impending catastrophe. “Stay calm,” he tells the dogs. Just keep lying. What does this guy know?

  Pinch calls in sick, saying he’s undergoing tests and won’t be back at Utz until the following week. He drives through the night to the cottage, where he stares at the touched-up original of Natalie’s hand, whose replica is now awaiting sale. Pinch glances at the other Bavinsky originals around him. He pulls out three more, turns them around—so powerful, Dad’s art, so perceptive and honest. As trying as Dad can be, as egotistical, he understands people, better than I ever have, better than Mom did, better than anyone I know. What if I just tell him? Might he understand? Would he say nothing, to save my skin? It’s too much of a gamble. If Bear becomes enraged, all manner of disasters follow—not least, this studio taken from Pinch’s life. His heart sinks.

  He turns on the kiln, heat emanating from the open doors, and drags over the original Hands IX, shoving it inside the inferno. He slams the doors, locks them. Pinch feels deathly ill. Back at the cottage, he avoids the sight of himself in the mirror, as he avoids the sight of smoke rising from the studio chimney. He turns the spigot on a wine box in the kitchen, fills a pottery mug to the brim, downs it.