The Italian Teacher(101)
He starts running, nearly losing his footing, skidding to a halt before the oil barrel, which is flaming from kerosene. Jing stands in the studio doorway, trying to drag out the Life-Still.
Marsden blocks her way. “You’re not.”
She tries to barge past, but he needs only a half step to deflect her.
She tumbles, losing her grip on the canvas, which he grabs. She hits the grass, gasping, winded from the fall. She hurries to her feet, nearly in tears, raising a muddy hand against him, as if to ward off violence.
“You think I’d hurt you? Never. Ever.” He offers his hand.
“They’re mine. I am allowed to do this!”
But he closes the metal lid over the barrel; the flames peter out. He places the Life-Still back in the studio and walks past her, back to the cottage.
Before the kitchen table he stands, hands on hips, staring down at these genuine works. He runs his fingers over the rough fibers of the back of a canvas, which is smeared with charcoal where Bear Bavinsky once wiped his hand. “I’m not,” Marsden mumbles. “This is insane.” Glancing around the kitchen, he recalls a scene just outside, Bear—eyes wide with rage—shouting at his son: “You work for me. Get it? You always worked for me. And you dare steal? Get this: I win. You hear? I fucking win.”
Marsden looks at the ceiling—then pushes out the cottage door, striding back through the rain, finger leveled at Jing, who sits in the studio doorway. Yet he bypasses her and stoops before the kiln. “This,” he says, “is how you turn it on.”
She meets his gaze, the briefest confirmation, and drags over the painting. Marsden stands at the far wall, staring fixedly away, wishing he could ask his friend how you make something of such beauty. Behind Marsden, she grunts from exertion, struggling to fit the large canvas inside.
“I’m not helping,” he tells the wall, then rotates. He takes the painting, stamps on one stretcher beam, which cracks, then does the same to the other side, folding it with ease, cramming canvas and wood inside. “We’re doing them all?” he asks. “If you say yes, I might be sick.”
Together they carry in every other Life-Still, moving in haste, dragging them up the lawn. Side by side, they kneel at the kiln, sweat drops splatting onto these last-century originals, which Marsden kicks and snaps apart, leaving her to ram them inside. He works fast, needing this to be over.
When every Life-Still is inside, he slams the kiln door, locks it. Looking pointedly at her, he says, “I did not do this.”
“I didn’t too.”
Through the peephole they watch as the temperature rises. Canvases curl. Elbows, hips, thighs—they yellow and burst into flames. Smoke rises up the chimney, spiraling over the valley.
They return to the kitchen, spent. Jing raises her clunky tea mug, clinks his.
“To Chars,” she says. “Artist.”
“To Charles!” Marsden affirms, voice cracking as he looks to the ceiling, blinking fast. “Best of artists!”
Before leaving the property, Marsden pockets a Cecil Ditchley mug—a token of this place, where he will never return. The lone object Jing takes home is that unfinished self-portrait of Pinch pictured as a youth, back when he believed he’d endure, that strangers would know of him someday.
Jing keeps that painting under his bed in the spare room. At times, she takes it out. Never for long. Just a look.
London, 2018
89
On the twentieth anniversary of Bear Bavinsky’s death, the first major retrospective of his work is organized at Tate Modern. Marsden and his longtime partner, Rob, close their Prince Edward County bed-and-breakfast for a few days and fly to London.
The museum is holding another show too, Selfie Shtick: Autofictions of the Contemporary Canon, where once-snarling, now-domesticated Young British Artists have chosen works by their personal friends, including huge plastic dog feces by a Taiwanese sculptor, computer-generated images of a Czech artist known for dressing up as Disney characters, and even a video series by Temple Butterfield. The exhibition has won rave reviews, so Marsden expects everyone to congregate there, allowing for a peaceful inspection of the Bavinskys.
But he is wrong. Crowds are trooping into Bear Bavinsky: The Body Politic, with throngs gathered before all of the paintings, which are ranged across eleven rooms. Many visitors take photos with their phones, wanting evidence of their proximity to greatness; others stand frozen with audio guides, learning about the artist’s private life: the opulent childhood in St. Louis, his precocious rebellions and wartime traumas, the fierce debates at Black Mountain College, the scene in Greenwich Village, his travels through bombed-out Europe, years in the critical wilderness, his volatile relationships with women, most notably his third wife, Natalie, now recognized as the painter’s muse, demonstrated by her appearance in so many of the Faces series. For context, the curators included a vitrine of eight ceramics by Natalie, marked “Courtesy of Xiao Jingfei,” whom visitors assume to be a tycoon collector.
The first rooms contain Bear Bavinsky juvenilia: childhood sketches drawn in a hospital bed, already showing promise; slapdash portraits from his army days; early experiments with abstraction; his unique style, approaching its consummation in the mature works that dominate subsequent rooms, including a triumphant display of eighteen Life-Stills from private collections, plus fourteen of the Faces, which were lent by museums.