by Tom Rachman
“Don’t hurt yourself, Mr. Schwarzenegger,” she says, grinning, taking a step closer.
He meets her gaze. Switching to English, he says, “I’ve been busting to do this,” and leans in to kiss her.
“Oddio!” she cries, recoiling as if he were contagious. She hooks the thick curls behind her ear, unable to look at him, adjusting a framed picture of a man on one of the shelves. “I’m sorry, Charles. I’m engaged.”
“What? Oh, you completely misunderstood,” he insists ridiculously, throat flushing crimson. “I was reaching past you to take down some of the dictionaries. After all, you’re far too tall for me to kiss—I couldn’t reach, even if I wanted to!”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I wasn’t worrying. Just as point of fact.” He gives a nervous cough. “I’m here to move furniture.”
“Forget that, Charles. The janitor will do it. Really. Thank you, though.” She fills a Bankers Box with papers as a way to conclude the excruciating exchange.
“Isn’t even heavy,” he says, legs apart, grasping one side of the bookcase, then the other. As if to tighten his grip, he shifts about, unsure how to give up.
“Charles, it’s much too heavy with the books still in. I’m not joking.”
“Oh, it’s not even full!” He tries again, vein bulging in his forehead. “I’m going to get this.” He holds his breath, straining, grunting, then slaps both hands underneath a shelf for leverage.
“That’s not stable!”
But he is lifting it; he’s managing—until the shelf flies up and volumes of the Enciclopedia Zanichelli crash down, bashing into him, her desk, the floor. She squeals, for the entire shelving system is coming apart. A vase falls, smashing on the carpet, glass shards everywhere, water seeping from downed irises. Dictionaries on the higher shelves shower down. Pinch raises one arm to sustain the falling bookcase, the other to protect himself, hardcovers cascading onto him.
“Charles! Stop! Please!”
Finally, to save himself, he darts away, inadvertently barging her into the hallway, the shelving clattering down behind them, her possessions smashing onto the floor, an office wrecked in seconds. He lands on his knees, and pain shoots from his spine. He clasps the sweat-soaked back of his shirt. He cannot breathe.
Above him, Francesca holds her breast, which he inadvertently elbowed. She hurries into the office to collect the smashed photo of her fiancé. Pinch tries to stand, but the back pain knocks him back down.
“Charles, I think you must go,” she says, in English. “Okay? I must clean.”
He tries to rise. Another bolt of agony. “Sorry,” he says, wincing, “I can’t move. Something with my back. I’m in serious pain.”
She helps him to his feet, as if he were a senior citizen. Fighting down a scream, he shuffles out, insisting that he’s better now, just fine, though inwardly obliterated by nerve damage so agonizing as to erase her voice, almost erase his shame.
At the end of the corridor, he turns, is out of view, and lowers himself, holding his breath until he lies on the coffee-stained carpet, blinking up at white fluorescent. He holds still, praying nobody comes. Minutes later he overhears Francesca speaking with muted horror into her desk phone, then locking up her office for the night and leaving.
A half-hour later, footsteps approach. Jing stands above him. They have not spoken much of late—Pinch has been dealing with his father’s death; she with the demise of her marriage. With much difficulty, she helps him to stand, then leads Pinch outside to flag down a black cab. She insists on accompanying him home. Neither speaks during the ride. “We are both working late again,” she says finally, on the fold-down seat opposite him. “We are the outcasts.”
He reaches over to shake her hand, but the movement tweaks his spine again. He grips her fingers.
“Almost home,” she tells him.
Jing offers to help him inside, but he declines, claiming that the drive did him good. Alone, he inches up the entrance stairs, struggles for the house key in a tight pocket, and makes it inside his flat, the dogs snuffling his trouser legs. He can’t even crouch to pat them. He stands there, cringing to recall an hour ago. So pathetic, still trying at this age, like the last middle-aged man on the dance floor.
That, he decides, was my final attempt. Enough. Enough of other people. All I need is my cottage: Disappear there, stay within the borders of a canvas. That is my company.
Old Age
OIL ON CANVAS
64 X 150 INCHES
Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate
63
Afternoon tutorials start in seventy-two minutes, but Pinch remains in bed. Exerting his stomach muscles, he wills himself upward but only howls. The torture originates in his spinal column. But people are waiting. He cannot stay here. Get up!
With a shriek, he forces himself vertical and punches the bedside table—except that hurts too. Pulse racing, he is rendered mindless, in primal distress. He holds still, tries to catch a breath, and proceeds to the nightmare of dressing.
His walk to the Tube station is normally eight minutes. Today he needs almost forty, each footstep an act of self-harm. Pedestrians push past, grumbling, taking him for a daytime drunk. On the train platform he tenses his muscles, unable even to wipe perspiration that rolls down his bald pate, halting in an eyebrow—then slithers ticklishly down the bridge of his nose.
The train doors open. Crowds shove in all directions. He edges inside, clasps a pole with both hands, the metal slippery under his grip. The carriage lurches forward. He takes strangulated gasps at each bump.
Pinch expected his pain to recede when he got active. But he shouldn’t have traveled. I need a doctor. While in line at the pharmacy, he swallows four ibuprofens, dry. Before the first tutorial, he takes four more. They numb him only slightly, alarm messages still arrowing to his brain.
“Everything all right, Mr. Bavinsky?”
“Yes, yes, Monique.”
“Do you have a fever or something?” she asks, shifting her chair away from Pinch, who is dripping.
“No, I’m fine. Cerchiamo di parlare in italiano, d’accordo?”
He makes it through the day and home, where Harold and Tony leap around his ankles, needing dinner. He can’t stoop to upturn the can of dog food into their bowls. “Sorry. Later.” Breathing with as little expansion of his lungs as possible, he unbuttons his drenched shirt. His shoulder muscles are a solid block, so taut that his neck shivers. After an hour-long effort and many yelps, he is lying on his bed.
By dawn, Pinch has not slept and is bursting to pee. This is unlike yesterday, when movement was only unbearable. Today he seems to have lost executive control, pain overriding volition. “I’m stuck,” he mumbles, picturing an insect pinned to a board. I am the source of these thoughts. Why am I saying them aloud? “Stop that.” His words emerge with a gust of breath, lowering his rib cage, causing fresh violence to his spine. Shivering, he inhales, smelling his own sweat.
Not yet fifty, and I’ll need a wheelchair. He moves his eyes to the left, right, up, down. Locked-in syndrome—now that would be suffering; this is not. Come on—get up! Failing, he screams out.
The cordless phone is too far on his bedside table. But if someone calls him, he could lunge in that direction, perhaps knock the phone off its base, which will connect the call. Then shout for all he’s worth.
The day passes. Nobody phones.
A human bladder is like a balloon, he reassures himself. Can it explode like a balloon? “Prior to the invention of aluminum tubes,” he says to distract himself, “artists kept paint in pig bladders. Oh, screw it.” He pees on himself.
The dogs are seated at the base of his bed, looking quizzically upward. He hears only their panting. “If nobody saves me and you’re hungry, boys—get stuck in!” He chuckles, trying to suppress it. “Only, after I’ve snuffed it. Agreed? B
oys?”
And the phone rings.
Whimpering, he jabs toward it, shoving the bedside table. The phone wobbles. It teeters. And it plunges from sight onto the carpet. He shouts his predicament, does so thrice, wondering who hears. Please don’t be a telemarketer.
Two hours later, someone is fiddling with the lock to his front door. He recognizes the voices of Jing and his landlord, a bizarre mix of unrelated parts of his life. Immediately he downgrades his fear from existential to social. Are my trousers stained? Will they smell urine?
His landlord grimaces, but Jing appears unbothered. She takes control, calls the ambulance, demanding that they drug him before attempting a move. She is formidable. “Oh, right,” Pinch mutters, disappearing into the fog of a serious painkiller, “you studied medicine once.”
He needs only a day in the ward. The doctor prescribes analgesics and muscle relaxants, and speaks of a possible operation. Edgily, Pinch explains that he drives long distances, must visit France regularly. Can’t be trapped here.
“Listen to your back,” the doctor says.
Once home, he finds himself on that same bed. He lies in a drugged torpor, replaying the humiliation in Francesca’s office, squeezing his eyes shut to blacken the event, which runs on a loop.
Daily, Jing stops by to walk and feed the dogs and to pick up his groceries and tidy. She expects no gratitude and ignores it when offered. Once, Pinch is in a bleak mood and snaps at her, deploring himself afterward. The next day she returns, seemingly unbothered, claiming to have nothing better to do after work. But she does have another concern: Salvatore is demanding a big settlement in the divorce, claiming she forced him out at Utz, which is nonsense. He’s pushing for her to sell their marital home and pay him a lump sum, probably so he doesn’t have to work anytime soon. Jing bought that place with her own money, and resides there today—she’d be cast from her own house.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Jing, but your husband disgusts me.”
“Thank you.”
“He doesn’t even speak Italian. Did you know that? It appalls me how few of our colleagues take languages seriously. I know hardly anybody else who takes advantage of the free classes.”
“I’m doing Beginner French.”
“We’re almost the only ones. Nowadays,” he adds bitterly, “the main reason people get hired at Utz is they’re good-looking.”
“It is lucky,” Jing comments, “that they do not have this policy when we apply.”
He laughs, then winces. “Don’t be funny, please.”
But he finds very few causes of amusement. His infirmity drags on. Each night, he lies rigid in bed, in the clutch of pain.
“Do you need me to come over there?” Marsden asks, calling from Toronto.
“I’m fine.”
“Could you do something to distract yourself? Your dad said you painted before. Couldn’t you get back to that?” Marsden asks. “I could send you a set of pastels or watercolors. Let me. You should, Charles. You should do this.”
Pinch boils at the suggestion, which he takes as patronizing, an allusion to what Bear said during their final exchange. Pinch wants to retort that he’s not some pitiful amateur—a work of mine once hung in Nebraska of all places! But in his current state, to characterize himself as a painter would be absurd. Nothing sadder than those who declare themselves artists when not a soul cares what they create. Effort and humiliation feel so close. “You’re trying to cheer me up. You’re trying to be kind. I know, Mars. But it’s having the opposite effect. Actually, I should probably go.”
When the phone rings minutes later, Pinch snatches it up, needing to redo that conversation. But it’s a disgruntled sibling, bullying him for details about the will. Pinch ends the call in haste, turns off the ringer, lowers the volume on the answering machine to zero.
In coming weeks, the tape clicks on at all hours. He is besieged by those savages. He pictures them breaking into his cottage, bashing down the door to the studio, pillaging everything, smashing Natalie’s pottery. In the shadows of his bedroom, Utz students are snickering as he enters the classroom and fellow teachers are gossiping: “He threw himself at Francesca! Revolting, right?”
He turns on the bed, punishing himself by torquing his back—immediately repenting, begging his pillow, surrendering anything. Let them slice me apart; just stop this. The orthopedic surgeon remains so cautious, telling him to wait and see.
Eventually Pinch does improve slightly and is able to distract himself by reading his Advanced Latin textbook from university and by leafing through the daily papers (La Repubblica, Die Zeit, Le Monde, El Paìs), which Jing collects from a local newsagent. When Tony falls ill (“In solidarity with me,” Pinch says, stroking him), Jing transports the dog to the veterinary clinic. He never returns. Harold cannot manage without his lifelong ally. The animal sleeps all day and doesn’t last till year’s end. Pinch wasn’t present to comfort either of his dogs when they were put down. He won’t forgive himself for that. He cannot stop imagining them, each there alone, looking around for him.
Eyes brimming, he lies on the living room floor, studying the plaster medallion on his ceiling. He distracts himself by eavesdropping on the married couple who moved into the apartment below and used to have intrusively loud sex, until it was their newborn making the late-night screams. Pinch still hasn’t figured which language that family speaks. Someday he hopes to meet them and to say hello to their little kid, whose feeding times and sleep times he knows through the walls.
One morning he ventures outside for a slug-slow shuffle around the block. When returning to his building, the woman from the apartment below is struggling to hoist her pram up the stairs. Pinch stands there, so wanting to help, explaining at length about his back.
“It’s not necessary!” she says with a brisk smile, face red as a tomato, the sobbing baby needing milk, not this chatterbox neighbor. She shoulders the building door open. It slams behind her. She calls out from inside: “Sorry! No free hands.”
Sometimes, Pinch conducts tutorials at his home for longtime students, among them an aging ex-boxer who works for the London Underground and is studying Italian to keep alert as retirement nears; a thick-eyebrowed Catholic sister aiming to make the case for nuns’ rights at the Vatican; and a stockbroker who, having survived a brain tumor, is learning every Lorenzo Da Ponte opera libretto.
Jing schedules the tutorials on Pinch’s behalf, intending to raise his spirits. But they demoralize him. At Utz, his status derived from mastery in the eyes of his pupils. When they view his shabby flat, witness him moving around like a man of ninety, he senses himself shriveling in their perception.
At his next meeting with the surgeon, she finds enough progress to rule out an operation. “You will always have pain, but it can be managed. Who doesn’t have a war wound or two at your age?”
“Not sure it qualifies as a war wound,” he says, buttoning his shirt. “I got this running from a falling dictionary.”
When a nurse signs him up for a hearing test, as mandated for those his age, the results are worse than average. Nothing to worry about, she says.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” he responds lightly. “They’re not your ears!” If one faculty is deteriorating, others must be in equal decline. His body is decomposing from the inside—he keeps seeing the image of an apple rotting within its skin.
He looks at the cordless phone, intending to call Marsden. They haven’t spoken often since what happened at the cottage. But Pinch longs for that voice now. He picks up the phone but there is no dial tone—somebody is already on the line. (He forgot the ringer was off.) It’s one of his siblings’ lawyers.
“I haven’t sold any of the paintings. Stop contacting me!”
“Excuse me, Mr. Bavinsky, sir, according to legal records there was indeed a bill of sale. From your name to the name of a Mr. Dwyer of Omaha.
Occurring back in—”
Pinch slams the phone onto its base, the impact reverberating through him. Widgeon too is hounding him with requests for money to expand her business selling handmade greeting cards and candles online. And Birdie asked in a letter if something will go to her kids, noting that Bear never even bothered to meet them.
“What I think,” Marsden contends when they speak, “is just dump all the paintings on the market. Bear himself was doing an inventory, right? Perhaps he was thinking of selling.”
“Why are you pushing me, Mars?”
“Because I can’t stand that you feel obligated to him. Sorry—it’s not my business. But I hate it.”
Pinch is ashamed to admit that he’s clinging to these paintings. If he cedes control, what has he got? Everything feels like more than he can manage, from washing himself, to the thousand phone messages, to opening mail. He’s on disability leave, but the school won’t tolerate this indefinitely. He dreads returning there. Everyone at Utz has become so young, and they’re all more accomplished than he. His students talk casually of stock options and postings abroad. They brag of weekend getaways to Prague and check flashy Motorola flip phones. Previously, he always thought: None of this matters; in secret, I’m an artist! But away from the cottage for so long, he can’t understand why he ever went. His attempts at art seem the height of futility.
As a boy in Rome, he once calculated that when the Year 2000 arrived, he’d be a half century old. Thankfully, he never pictured his true millennial New Year’s Eve—fireworks fizzing outside, the muffled countdown of revelers in adjacent flats, his murderous rage at them, at everyone, even Marsden.