The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  After Bear fell out of fashion in the sixties, he endured years of personal doubt, womanizing compulsively, drinking to medicate his knee and back pain. “When an artist disappears for this long,” Connor writes, “it is rarely a tale of mirth.” After decades of anguish, the biographer says, the late portraits mark Bavinsky’s redemption.

  History will never know that Bear was simply blocked: painting and burning, painting and burning, unable to believe in what he created anymore. Not a single genuine work survives from the midsixties onward—around the same period that Pinch went to Larchmont.

  In Connor’s manuscript, two anecdotes particularly amuse Pinch: that the young Bear—caught by his first wife with a lover—had staged a wrestling match between the two women, and that Bear had once ordered Natalie to shear off her hair before he painted her to gauge the exact shape of her head. Connor interviewed Marsden for the chapter about Bear’s death, and these chestnuts must have come up. Pinch refrains from correcting either yarn. His intent is not for the biography to be accurate, but to be indelible. The only part Pinch asks to change is a line describing one of Bear’s sons as “a onetime would-be painter who ended up teaching Italian.”

  “I’m a professor of Italian at the Utz School of Language in London,” he tells Connor. “Actually, no—make it ‘an Italian teacher at Utz.’ I’m not a professor.”

  “Drop the painter bit entirely?”

  “I bet you wrote a couple of sonnets as a teenager, but you’d feel pretty silly if someone referred to you as ‘the would-be poet.’”

  “Point taken. For now and ever, you are the Italian teacher.”

  75

  Among those who attend the Faces show in Brooklyn is the noted academic and author Cilla Barrows. In an email she raves to Pinch about what she saw. He rereads her note, a bolt of joy each time. “You should have told me you were going!” he responds. Back when he composed letters on paper, he didn’t exclaim constantly. But something about online exchanges turns his prose into musical-theater dialogue:

  Priscilla Barrows wrote:

  Tell you? How come? Is there a VIP lounge at Petros?

  Charles Bavinsky wrote:

  If only! So you really liked it?

  Priscilla Barrows wrote:

  Muchissimo. Thoughts of Sickert, Lucian Freud, Soutine as always.

  Charles Bavinsky wrote:

  Dad hated to be compared, but those are all great painters!

  Priscilla Barrows wrote:

  Let’s just agree the paintings are very Bavinsky. It took me a few decades, but I get Bear Bavinsky now. I can even boast of having once met the great man.

  Charles Bavinsky wrote:

  You even dated the great man’s son!

  Why does anyone reach out to an old flame? It’s never entirely innocent. He sees her in their Paris hotel room, lying on the bed, her shirt off. Pinch shakes his head, partly to rid himself of a sexual image while at his workplace, partly because he and Barrows erred—we should be together still. He reads her message again, whispering to the screen, “I painted those. Barrows? That was me.”

  76

  Pinch always planned to sell the Faces to whichever Qatari royal or Kazakh mining mogul or Italian fashion house owner bid the most, irrespective of how distant the paintings ended from public view. Actually, the farther the better. It was safer that way. And he wanted none of the profits, having always planned to split the money among his siblings—a reparations fund from Dad. Anyway, that was the idea.

  But Connor, intoxicated on attention, takes it upon himself to contact museum directors, reiterating Bear’s oft-stated wish for prominent public display. Donation is a distinct possibility, Connor says, implying that he can arrange that. When he announces during an NPR interview that the Faces are destined for major public collections, Pinch is caught out. He contacts Eva, counting on her to slap down Connor. But she shocks Pinch by favoring bequests too. Museum placement is a stamp of approval for any artist, inflating the valuation of all the Bavinskys in private collections, most of which her gallery sold, and many of whose owners (prompted by Eva) are itching to test this ever-hotter market. Pinch cannot intercede without seeming to violate his father’s lifelong directives.

  So he delays. The Faces sit in storage with the Petros Gallery. Pinch wakes in the middle of the night, stomach in knots, getting up to reread emails on the subject. Jing, who knows little of his predicament, is an unexpected oasis. What he always feared about a house-share—that she’d intrude when he sought privacy—has not come to pass. He is the one who moseys from his bedroom, checking if she’s around. He can tell just by listening: the tick of laptop keys, or the distant murmur of phone conversations in Mandarin. Jing has quit teaching and started a tourism company, catering to wealthy Chinese visiting Britain. Several nights a week she leads coach trips to Oxford, Bath, Blenheim Palace. She’s doing well, with five employees and an endlessly trilling mobile. When he asks about her workday, he hears of comical tourist mishaps and marvelously peculiar requests. He and Jing watch TV together too, mostly BBC documentaries about wildlife. Lacking Western physical reserve, Jing provides him battering massages, digging her thumbs into his pressure points to prevent flare-ups of his back pain. She also takes his pulses—not only of the heart but of the liver and kidneys too, though Pinch’s understanding of anatomy suggests that those organs do not palpitate. Still, he lets her prod and tweak, and invariably feels sturdier.

  Yet Pinch is more frail than others in their late fifties. Worry about a relapse of his back problem causes him to avoid vigor, and he hasn’t exercised through dog-walking in years. People are always encouraging him to replace Harold and Tony, but he cannot. Making for the train station each morning, he treads tentatively along the sidewalk, dampening each step by wearing clunky white running shoes, which gives the impression of an elderly man, especially with his threadbare beige corduroys, ragged tweed jacket, and Panama hat.

  One evening, Pinch is quizzing her about her one-time medical aspirations in China, curious as to why she never pursued that line of work. To his surprise, he discovers that she was political back in China, and that it destroyed her chances of serious study.

  “You were a protester?”

  “No, no. Nothing important.”

  “But brave?”

  She laughs, looking down. “No, no.”

  Smiling, he watches her. “Jing at the barricades! I wouldn’t drive a tank at you!”

  She frowns at him.

  “I meant that in admiration,” he says. “Sorry, Jing. Not to make light of anything. Really. I’m useless in that department—never defended anything but stupid opinions about art. You know that I’ve never voted? Isn’t that terrible?” he says. “Listen, I’m making a decision. Right now. Okay? The second half of my life will be full of activism and . . . What’s funny? The idea of me with a protest sign is a bit hard to imagine, granted. At the very least, I’m giving more to charity.”

  “I buy goats for a village in Niger.”

  “You do not! Do you? Jing, you’re so much more decent than I am.” Forehead creased; disappointed in himself. “I want to march in a rally. Something meaningful. Keep me to that. Jing?”

  She reaches out as if to touch him, then appears to change her mind. Theirs isn’t that kind of relationship. They resume language practice. She is teaching him Sichuan, while he corrects her English idioms.

  “Chars?” she asks later that night. “What is the difference between ‘jug’ and ‘jar’?”

  He’s reading, so responds distractedly. “Pretty much the same.”

  “I’m going to bed. Do you want me to leave this door ajug?”

  77

  After mixing pigments at procrastinating l
ength, Pinch loads his palette, approaches the easel, his bifocals swinging on a length of purple silk. He stands to one side, moves to the other. Beginning a new painting has always scared him. It’s worse now. The critics admired something he did. And strangers—queues of people waiting to enter the show in Bushwick—are standing behind him too, peeping. Should he recapture what pleased them? Or attempt what he wants? He remembers that nobody cares what, or if, he paints at all.

  What, Pinch wonders, hands on his hips, if I confessed? He imagines interviews—people asking why he chose to depict what he did, why it meant so much to him. In this fantasy he sweeps aside all complications and lawsuits and criminal charges. As the dream dissolves, consequences glare at him. I am well and truly stuck.

  As if outside himself, he glimpses this painter, here before his easel. Bear never once painted me. Dad certainly didn’t want me saved for posterity! And Pinch himself has never done a self-portrait, only depicting his legs and elbows and hands when young. Well, it’s bad enough seeing this gargoyle mug in the mirror each morning! He smiles. Actually, I could bring a mirror into the studio. He has a better idea—not to replicate his looks, but to paint the person who has happened to be Charles Bavinsky.

  He presses the tip of his sable brush into a shiny blue knob of paint, swipes the laden bristles across the center point of the canvas. Gingerly he proceeds outward, his nose close enough for its tip to become flecked with color. Many hours later he retreats, bashful to have painted himself. His gaze drifts down the shaft of the paintbrush, halting at his tight fingers. “Artists shouldn’t question,” Natalie once said. “We should just do, like ants.”

  “Why am I talking?” he asks the studio. “Only me here.”

  But he finds solidarity here, linking himself with all those quiet types who looked upon blank surfaces with expectation, those who mark objects to erase themselves, who dissolve in the bliss of work. Pinch raises his brush, leans forward on the balls of his feet, floorboards creaking. From the corner of his eye: all these painterly tools, a kaleidoscope of colors, his companions. Is that tragedy? That the peaks of my life are entirely inside? Other people—those I so craved— mattered far less than it seemed. Or is this what I pretend?

  As the tide of sadness flows closer, he returns to work, misplacing himself there, though it’s his own image taking shape before him. After a measureless stretch of time, he wipes his brushes on rags, drops them into the turps jar, and sits beside the spattered boom box on the floor, clicking a CD into action. His father required bopping jazz to work, but Pinch cannot hear music while painting. Only after.

  He lies on the studio floor, fingers laced behind his head, knuckles pressing with pleasant soreness into the wooden boards, his entirety absorbing Schumann’s Kinderszenen op. 15, no. 1. “Von fremden Ländern und Menschen.” He inhales the paint fumes, his breath quickening, eyes stinging. He sits up, glances around: a blurred, joyous sight.

  2010

  78

  It is entirely sensible when Pinch and Jing—he nearing sixty, she nearing fifty—initiate a sexual relationship. She’s matter-of-fact about the human body, and her bluntness amuses him. They continue to sleep in separate rooms, however. Intercourse is just something that happens when it suits both parties, like her bruising massages. Equally, they have reached genial accord about running the household: She vacuums and gardens, never squeamish about snipping slugs in two with the secateurs; he does their laundry and irons, even if he’s falling behind lately, so weary all the time. These past years have exhausted him. For once, he should try a proper vacation, catch up on sleep, not just race off to France. He ponders this an instant. Never!

  “Did you bring down the napkins?” Jing asks.

  “Yes, yes.” But he hasn’t, so opens the cupboard, reaching for them. She laughs to have caught him out. “I’d done it in the future!” he protests. “The future past. Hey—I invented a new verb tense.”

  They often share meals; it’s harder to shop for one. “If you’re cooking tonight, make something horrible, so I don’t overeat again,” he says. “Look at this abomination.” He lifts his shirt to expose his paunch.

  “You’re thin.”

  “Hey, don’t minimize my gut,” he replies. “I put a lot of work into this.” Yet she is right—he’s trimmer with age. “Lack of exercise clearly agrees with me.”

  When they’re splitting dinner one night, he burns his tongue on the chicken soup. The injury takes ages to heal, with the annoying side effect of causing him to salivate constantly, which makes him thirsty, which makes him glug water, which makes him pee. He is reminded of his water-drinking contests with Barrows, so sends her an email, which proves awkward when his situation takes on a different shade.

  A visit to the doctor places Pinch on the wrong side of that window between the healthy and the ill. “I quit years ago. My father was the heavy smoker—perhaps I inherited this from him,” Pinch jokes, without amusement.

  “It isn’t something you inherit,” the oncologist replies. “As I tell all my patients, three out of four people will suffer from cancer over the course of their lives. Given enough time, it’s the natural state of cells.”

  “I don’t find that particularly comforting.”

  The oncologist speaks of Kaplan-Meier curves, how each case is different, that we’re talking about a range here.

  “Thank you for explaining that,” Pinch says, so terrified that he clings to manners.

  “Twelve to thirty-six, if you’re asking for a number.”

  “Months,” Pinch adds, smiling to appear cavalier. “That’s quite a range!”

  “My colleague can run through what’s next.”

  When Pinch walks from the hospital, he is unable to register sounds, perceiving other pedestrians as silent beings, who step around him. He needs to tell someone, a particular person: Marsden. The time difference makes it too early to call, and writing this in an email would be wrong. So Pinch carries on with his day, which passes in a slow blur: tutoring at Utz, evening classes, exchanges with colleagues, his tongue—the enemy now—darting about in action, then inert on the train home. I was lenient with my students. Why did the diagnosis produce that effect?

  Jing knows the test results were today. Hearing them, she poses myriad smart questions, none of which occurred to Pinch at his appointment. He ought to feel gratitude for her interest but is detached, imagining other patients confronting a case like his completely alone. There was probably someone like that in the waiting room today. Never does Jing doubt his diagnosis or urge a second opinion, as others will. Nor does she panic. This is the situation.

  “It’s good I know you,” he says.

  79

  The operation is gruesome and not worth dwelling on, he informs Barrows by email. Pinch says he’ll need months to retrain what remains of his tongue, but this proves untrue. Within weeks, he can speak very slowly and with a lisp, which strangers take to be mental impairment. To avoid such exchanges, he avoids talking, except with Jing or medical staff.

  For a man who spent his adult life teaching people to communicate, Pinch is unbothered to become mute. With others yammering all around, he eavesdrops and comes to an opinion: Only a fraction of speech transmits word meanings; the bulk is entirely social—to console, ingratiate, jockey. He writes down his own remarks, keeping pads and pens everywhere. This has a condensing effect. Hand gets tired, brain gets to the point.

  Pinch discovers something more. He had lazily assumed the Chinese to be a stoical people and had attributed this to the population size—too many souls to indulge in sentiment. But Jing, even with her medical knowledge, sobs when he displays his butchered tongue. This angers him. He must consider her now, alongside everything else. Yet her fragility protects him too—he can only pity himself when alone, and she rarely leaves him.

  For distraction Pinch flips through Natalie’s old pottery manuals: technical guides abou
t glazes and strident manifestos by Bernard Leach. He hates never having taken up pottery. Why did I overlook this? I’d probably love it. Mom tried to show me. Well, that’s decided: I’m learning it, the second I improve a little.

  After dark, the night terror descends, a cold finger against his breastbone. His eyes spring open on blackness. Such a mess that I’m leaving. And I am leaving. He hears house sounds, a distant police siren—all this will continue, as if I’d never been. He distracts himself by visualizing every room at the cottage. All of Dad’s originals, still in the attic. I must admit what I did. What can anyone do to me now?

  He lies still, trying to control his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Slower. The dread returns, that demon touching his chest.

  By morning he assumes his bright manner. “You know what they say?” (With Jing alone, he speaks shamelessly in his slobbery way.) “When it comes to dying, nobody got it wrong yet!”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “Not if I don’t have to.” He pokes her arm affectionately, joshing more than ever, gaining a warmth for people that he never before experienced—he’s become curious about strangers, and forgiving too. Pinch so wishes that he’d been this way all along.

  80

  He speaks often of the cottage, although a trip is inconceivable while undergoing treatment. He transports himself there by learning Basque. “The word for ‘sandwich’ is ‘ogitarteko’!” he informs Jing. “Isn’t that fantastic? Listen to this: ‘Hizkuntza bat ez da galtzen ez dakitenek ikasten ez dutelako, dakitenek hitzegiten ez dutelako baizik.’”

  His childhood nickname derived from Basque, he tells her. When Bear was traveling around northern Spain in 1947, he discovered a local bar food. When his next newborn arrived, he took to calling him “little pintxo,” which became “Pincho,” which settled into “Pinch”—how Natalie always referred to him.