by Tom Rachman
In less than an hour, they have regressed. While apart, each remembered their fondest version of the other. But the Natalie who wrote him loving letters is absent, replaced by the Natalie of hospital courtyards, hands shivering, struggling to pluck another cigarette from her pack, biting it out with her lips.
Pinch tries to force back those recollections, saying, “I don’t even know what we’re talking about.” Citing fatigue, he retreats to his old bedroom, drags his suitcase in. He so longed to be here. Now he longs only to hide again under Toronto textbooks.
Over the following weeks, Pinch claims a more urgent need to study than exists. He also claims to want long walks on his own, but instead takes the Tube to view Old Master drawings at private galleries. He is obliged to knock on locked doors, his face appraised through the glass, whereupon he is admitted by a fawning clerk, who says with head tilted, “Let me know when I may explain.” Pinch, applying the thickest Canadian accent, responds: “Such neat drawings. Where’s the price tags?” After a few minutes of playing the heathen, he poses questions pointed enough to expose the ignorance of the snobbish clerk, whereupon Pinch leaves, flushed with pleasure, stepping into this jostling city—and empty to have nobody to tell this anecdote. What is mischief if not for retelling?
Every minute that summer is tense, he and she stepping around a quarrel that won’t explode but simply exudes. “But what is your life like there?” she asks, smoking, though he’s still eating a lamb chop. “You never give me a picture I can see in my head.”
“You know which classes I take.”
“Look, we can change your plane ticket if you’d rather fly back sooner.”
“I never said that.”
“You certainly don’t want to be here.”
Then, two days before departure, everything changes. They regress further still, becoming the best friends they were, perhaps are. They sit side by side at the kitchen table, scanning the Guardian for plays, exhibits, restaurants—suddenly there’s too much to fill the dwindling time. They hasten out for dim sum on Gerrard Street, seated at a vast table by themselves, taking opposite sides of a lazy Susan, each spinning the last dumpling away when the other’s chopsticks close in.
“Shall we get more?”
“More! More!”
“Tons more!”
On his final morning, he is buckling the straps on his suitcase when she appears in the doorway, saying, “I hardly slept last night.”
“Why?”
“You.” She wrinkles her nose. “Going.”
24
A preposterous young man swans into the lecture hall, ludicrously late for class and wearing a long Russian coat with ermine collar, froggish eyelids fluttering as he seeks a free seat, only to flop across three in a heap of pastel scarves. Pinch recognizes him as Marsden McClintock, a twit enrolled in two of his sophomore-year courses—that is, they have six hours in common each week. Failing to acknowledge this fool requires effort, which Pinch is fully prepared to make. But today, Marsden has plonked himself right beside Pinch, reeking of liquor, though it’s morning. Pinch leans away but Marsden’s long arm probes ever closer, bearing a note in purple and yellow crayon: “Are YOU a Bavinsky like HE’S a Bavinsky?” Beneath is a clothbound volume, Modern Art in the Americas, opened to a plate of “Shoulder XXVII, 1951.”
In fine ballpoint, Pinch jots a perfunctory “yes the same” in tiny lowercase, as if to make a point about restraint. Inwardly, he is overjoyed that somebody here knows. In their next shared class, Marsden again settles next to Pinch. “Terrible thing this morning,” he whispers, as the professor rambles. “I woke up, looked around, and I’m in fucking Queen’s Park! I had to run all the way here. Could I still be drunk? Is that possible? By the laws of physics, could I be?” He drifts to sleep, susurrating through the early Renaissance, snorting to wakefulness as everyone else is donning overcoats and mittens.
Outside, the tall young man bounds after Pinch. “Something about Donatello?” he guesses, by way of recollection. “Then I lost consciousness.”
Pinch summarizes the class, leaning into the hard wind as if impatient for his next engagement, although he has nowhere next but home.
“You know everything!” Marsden exclaims.
“I’m just repeating what he told us.”
“No, no—you are a genius. How would you feel if I copied?”
“Copied what?”
“Everything. For the rest of my entire life.”
25
Whenever Pinch trudges up the slush-slimy steps of the Sidney Smith building, Marsden and his foppish entourage call to their grouchy new acquaintance. As if reluctant, Pinch joins them, frowning, moving from foot to foot in the subzero morning. Back when Marsden first buttonholed him, Pinch hastened to his house on Major Street, hung his coat on the rack inside, and ran whooping up to the third floor. Weeks later, Pinch has a distinguished role in Marsden’s clique of aesthetes: He is their sourpuss scholar, the future critic of renown.
Marsden—who hails from a patrician Ontario clan, his father a leading Conservative member of Parliament—has styled himself a bohemian since age ten, at considerable personal cost. For this, he is resentful of the slovenly interlopers who have tied on bandannas and acoustic guitars in recent years, claiming his countercultural turf. A group of flower children straggle down St George Street, bandying signs for an antiwar protest while caterwauling Country Joe and the Fish lyrics about the fighting in Vietnam.
“Vietnam?” Marsden heckles them. “Your war zone is the shower!” Back to his friends: “It’s like these people emerged from three decades in a yurt. Civilization is not about getting closer to nature. It’s about getting as far from nature as possible!”
“What’s a yurt?”
“I’d tell you, Nigel, but you’d have nightmares.” Marsden looks away, saying “Now I’ve lost my train,” which makes Pinch see a locomotive rushing past, a heap of pastel scarves piled up in second class.
Shortly thereafter, rumor circulates that Marsden has fallen seriously ill, bedridden at his Trinity College dormitory. Pinch buys an orange and sets forth to brave contagion—only to discover that Marsden’s infirmity consists of a middling case of the sniffles and a serious case of sloth. He is treating this condition with a combination of Gitanes and sentimental French records about la vie de bohème.
“Why are you in bed? You don’t seem ill.”
“I’m comfortable here, and have yet to hear a persuasive case to leave.” On the wall is a reproduction of Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted Above Head; on the floor, a hillock of cigarette butts. Most startling is what scurries beneath his bed: a squirrel that climbed in from the ivy. Marsden claims to have domesticated it, with powerful evidence to the contrary. Starved of admirers, Marsden talks and talks to his surprise guest, catapulting among subjects, lingering on slanders, especially of the bully boys in this residence whose romantic misdeeds he satirizes. “Sex,” Marsden comments, “is proof of the futility of mankind.”
“How?”
“Because the sex drive is never quenched. It keeps rising, as it were. And never does one accomplish anything with sex.”
“Well, children.”
“Not the way I do it,” Marsden responds, describing himself as “a homophile,” a term Pinch has never encountered, though he knows enough Latin to understand. It strikes him as sophisticated to take this admission in stride, and he wishes to match it with a revelation of his own. All he can confess of his own sexuality is virginity, which is entirely the wrong direction. So he resorts to ribald anecdotes about his father. “Once, Bear got his schedule mixed up about when he was supposed to meet his wife—long before my mom—at his studio in Greenwich Village. By mistake, he’d also invited his mistress at that exact same hour. Both women turn up, see each other, and go berserk. It’s, ‘Either she goes or I do!’”
“What di
d he do?”
“Well, he had them wrestle.”
“What?” Marsden sits up in bed.
“Yes, he made them wrestle for his affections.”
“That’s incredible!”
“Another time,” Pinch continues, registering this success, “Dad was painting my mother, and he started complaining that her hair was in the way, that he couldn’t capture the form of her head. He got a pair of scissors, gave it to her, and said, ‘Cut it all off, right now.’”
“And she wouldn’t,” Marsden says in hope.
“Not at first. But he kept on about it. Finally, she couldn’t fight anymore. She gave in. And then—as she’s raising the scissors, nearly in tears—he snatches them away! ‘I only wanted to see if you would,’ he told her.”
“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Charles, but your father is a monster,” Marsden says approvingly.
Pinch beams with pleasure, even if both stories are lies (the wrestling promoter was Picasso; the barber, Giacometti). Encouraged, Pinch drops the names of other art stars whom Bear knows. And he tells of his own visit to New York at age fifteen, when he attended the opening of the legendary Petros Gallery in SoHo, where Dad jokingly introduced him around as an up-and-coming artist.
“You’re an artist, Charles?”
“No, no. I might’ve wanted to be. I dreamed of it back then, in a stupid childish way.”
“Oh,” Marsden responds, pondering the scene. “Isn’t that a little cruel then? Building you up, then packing you off to the provinces?”
“You’re missing the spirit of it. It was quite a memory he gave me.”
“I suppose.” Still in bed, Marsden reaches under the mattress for a bottle of warm retsina, jams the cork into the liquid with his thumb, splurting a puddle of white wine onto the floor, which encircles the pile of cigarette butts, making a squalid desert island. “You’re definitely not wicked enough to have been an artist,” Marsden comments.
“Aren’t I?”
“You suffer the fatal flaw of being quite lovely, Charles. And every great artist has to end up in hell. Then again, imagine how beautifully it’ll be decorated.” He passes the bottle. “What disturbs me is that you aren’t more twisted, given your papa. I, by contrast, never saw a single nude besides statues. Yet I end up an inveterate pervert.”
“You’re hardly a pervert.”
“How dare you deprive me of my finest trait? Though, frankly, homosexuality is a simple act of reason. The male body is far more beautiful than the female. That much is indisputable.”
“Consider yourself disputed.” Pinch takes a glug of the wine, a shudder of well-being passing through him. He contemplates the lips of this person. But no—Pinch cannot muster physical attraction, much as he’d like to. “If men were beautiful, Marsden, why is beauty always portrayed as a woman?”
“Because artists are servants of the rich, and the rich are men. They’ve always wanted their pinup girls.”
“Great art is not a matter of sex.”
“My dear friend! What else would it be?”
As they guzzle the wine, Pinch hears himself admitting to his paltry record in matters romantic—a few flirts as a guard at the National Gallery; a girl or two he fancies in classes, each of them cold when he addresses them, as if Pinch might just launch himself on them.
“Well, that’s your error: failure to launch.”
Pinch speculates that it’s his undeniable ugliness and is slightly hurt when Marsden fails to contradict this. So he shifts to that favored subject of the lovelorn: personal ambition. His current aspirations took shape while at the National Gallery. Employed to view the crowds, he viewed the walls instead, imagining a Bavinsky there among the Holbeins, Turners, Gainsboroughs. During breaks, Pinch explored the basement reserve, inspecting once-worthy art now relegated to the racks: unfashionable Mannerists, devotional works, pictures by dead apprentices of greater dead men. In his ill-fitting guard’s jacket and polyester slacks, he visited Zwemmer’s art bookshop on Charing Cross Road, happening across a biography of Renoir by the artist’s son—a volume of aggrandizing rubbish about that mediocrity. Even Renoir could be made important! What if a sublime painter got that treatment? What, Pinch began to think, what if I wrote the biography of Bear Bavinsky? A rush of optimism as he foresaw Dad’s approval, not to mention the hours they’d talk and debate. What if I even become famous for it? He skimmed artist biographies in the bookshop, finding no more sons but plenty of professors. So that is what he decided to become.
The needle reaches the end of a Jacques Brel record. Embarrassing snippets of Pinch’s confessed ambitions echo in his ear. He pulls out his pipe, stuffs it with tobacco. “That’s not for telling anyone, Marsden. Just a stupid idea of mine. Don’t say that around. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“You brought me an orange, Charles. I consider that an act of heroism. And you spoke in confidence. I hold to privacy as does a cat.”
“Do cats hold to privacy?”
“Have you heard one talking? And there’s too much talking,” Marsden says in an unfamiliar tone, sincere for the first time in their acquaintance. “You can pull this off, Charles. I’m sure you can. Absolutely certain. If it’s what you want, my friend.” With this, Marsden emerges from bed, shoeless but otherwise fully dressed, in his Russian wool coat over white fencing knickerbockers. For encouragement, he touches Pinch’s forearm then turns and whistles for his squirrel, Balthazar, to no good effect, before standing at his sash window, gazing into the dark quad.
Never does he refer back to Pinch’s needy ambitions, as if words in alcohol should remain suspended in that liquid. This sensitivity prompts Pinch weeks later, when the Trinity College residence expels Marsden because of the squirrel, to offer him a room. Fortunately, he leaves Balthazar behind.
After sixteen months of monastic solitude, Pinch begins to go out by night, walking across the underbelly of Toronto, chaperoned by the protective Marsden, who diverts any bid to lure his earnest scholar into debauch. Pinch even engages in a few trysts with women whom Marsden introduces. These are affairs with boozy beginnings, sober endings. But they win him confidence—he didn’t realize how little he had until it materializes, changing everything, from his posture to his voice. Love affairs also reveal a quirk in Pinch’s tastes: He is oddly unattracted to any woman he finds beautiful.
As for Marsden, his preference runs to rugged older men, typically married, prompting undignified couplings in city parks after nightfall. In contrast to Pinch, he experiences chest-crushing tenderness for beauty, whose sole consummation is physical, brief, incomplete.
26
Cohabitation, like foreign travel, presents the risk of getting to know one’s friends. But sharing a house only brings Pinch and Marsden closer. At times, Pinch finds his shirts ironed or his shoes polished at the bedroom door. When he cannot reach a jar on a high shelf, his lofty housemate retrieves it. If Pinch struggles to open it, Marsden pops the top, neither of them interrupting the conversation.
“You’re talking absolute pumpkin,” Marsden exclaims. “Art is too hung up with this right-on politics and dreary conceptualism. My tragedy, dear Charles, is to have been born in this age of brutes.”
“I thought you were going to say ‘this age of ugly feet.’”
“If I had feet like those philistine hippies, I’d probably like bad art too, from moral shock alone,” Marsden says, ignoring the ringing telephone. “Artists used to strive for beauty. Now they all want to ‘say something.’ Have you heard artists saying things? Bless their little hearts, they’re unintelligible!” To punctuate this, he flings the Philosophy of Aesthetics textbook over his shoulder, which is his way of dropping a class.
Perceptive, opinionated, highly educated, Marsden suffers from fast-fading passions, the results of which are strewn about this house: unread volumes by Sontag, Isherwood, Gide on the staircase; Jan Garb
arek albums still in the cellophane; half-finished embroidery on the kitchen table. That which falls behind Marsden ceases to exist, as if it were his duty to start, another’s to finish. “My life is a flurry of inactivity,” he once said, and his degree prospects are indeed flurrying into the distant horizon. “What thrills me about pictures is the opposite of ‘saying something.’”
“What then?”
“Licking a painting,” he says, by way of example, “as I so famously did to a rather succulent Philip Guston at the Janis Gallery in New York, very narrowly avoiding arrest.”
“Are you going to get that, Mars?”
Finally, he snatches the phone. “Let me give him a shout.” Marsden covers the receiver, mouthing: “Your mother.”
After Pinch’s visit to London last summer, he and Natalie agreed to talk regularly. Given the expense of long distance, they limit themselves to ten minutes per week. When it’s her turn to call, the phone rings exactly on time. When it’s Pinch’s turn, he sometimes fails, humbled by a hangover or lost in schoolwork or in a swirling conversation with Marsden and cohorts. The following week arrives, and Natalie places her call, never reproaching Pinch for his oversight.
But this is not a day that either of them was expected to call. To his roommate, Pinch shakes his head.
“Seems that he’s not around, Mrs. Bavinsky,” Marsden reports.
Shunning Natalie only transports Pinch directly to her kitchen. He knows precisely where she’s sitting. He waves his arms to stop Marsden from hanging up.
“When I say he’s not around, Mrs. Bavinsky, I mean that he is. Or has just come around. Not in the sense of unconsciousness. In the sense of—”
“I’ll take it upstairs.” Pinch leaps two steps at a time and dives onto his bed, phone receiver flying from its cradle. He catches it. “I can’t really hear you, Mom. You need to speak louder.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.”
