The Italian Teacher(13)
Bear demonstrates how to square up sketches and map out a canvas, how to choose a ground, how to do grisaille underpainting, how to vary skin tones. Pinch loses track of anything beyond—except when Birdie makes snide remarks.
The studio door squeaks and Natalie enters, halting as if interrupting holy rites. She lifts away Pinch’s jacket, whispers something to Birdie, who shakes her head defiantly. Natalie returns an hour later with food. All four sit on the mildewed couch, Birdie grumbling about the meal.
“Goddammit, Elizabeth,” Bear snaps. “Natty prepared this, special for you.”
Eyes wet, Birdie clutches her fork tighter.
Bear returns to the canvas, nodding for his son to join, turning the boy away from the others. “Not everyone is an artist,” he says under his breath. “But for those of us that are, it’s war. You get me, Charlie? Total war, or you’re dead from the start. There is a reward, though. Out of this—” He holds up a paintbrush. “And that—” He jabs the bristles toward the canvas. “We get to live forever.”
Birdie drifts around to their side of the canvas, spilling forward and falling onto the picture, smearing paint everywhere. “Oopsy,” she says.
Forearms flexed, Bear faces her. Natalie watches, hand over mouth, as Bear drags his daughter by the elbow to the studio door. “What are you doing?” Birdie cries. “What are you doing, Daddy?”
Still clutching her, he gathers himself. “Bird, you can kick me as much as you like. But not them. Hear me?”
Birdie struggles to open the iron door, battling the mechanism, finally shoving it wide, blinking at the light. She runs outside, clanging the door shut, her weeping muffled in the alley. Natalie hurries after her. The crying fades as Birdie is led back toward the apartment.
Bear avoids Pinch’s gaze, mixing pigments. He opens the studio door. There’s only empty cobbles. “You should go back too.”
“Are you coming?”
“I don’t figure Bird wants me around too much!”
As the iron door closes him out, Pinch hesitates by Dad’s oil barrel. After a few minutes, the boy stealthily pushes at the door, opening it just a crack, and peeps into the studio where his father drags out an unfinished painting. Bear stands before it, pulling his thin hair. He reaches for his pipe—then glimpses the spy. “Your father is a lousy sonofabitch,” Bear says, staring at Pinch. “Not because he wants to be. I don’t want to be. Understand me? Do you, kiddo?” He approaches, hand extended. Bear closes the door.
That night, Pinch and Birdie lie head-to-toe, the only illumination a bar of light under his bedroom door. Pinch shuts one eye, attempting to flatten everything, turning her toes into geometry.
“We’re like two dogs, supposed to fight it out,” she says.
“Is that the name of a song, Birdie?”
“Sometimes, Charlie, I wonder if you’re all there.”
If Bear doesn’t come home soon, Birdie won’t see him before her early-morning departure. But time runs short: Natalie is already closing up the apartment for the night. Her heels click nearer.
The hallway light goes out.
“But we don’t, right?” Birdie whispers to her little brother.
“Don’t what?”
“Fight it out,” she says, voice cracking. “Do we, Charlie.” She pushes him. “We won’t.”
13
At the end of that summer, Bear departs for work in New York. Pinch finds out only after his father has left. Whenever he inquires into Dad’s return date, Natalie grows irritable. The school year starts and weeks pass. One evening, Pinch notices that his mother no longer wears a wedding ring. He hastens away from her, into the living room, and stands over the record player. She joins him, needing to explain—but he drops the needle, leaning his face into the dusty gramophone trumpet, the noise deafening him.
Soon thereafter, a representative of Mishmish Shapiro appears at their door, explaining that this apartment, sadly, is no longer available—it was previously offered to support an artist, but that man is no longer in residence. Natalie and Pinch return to living in Bear’s studio. The space seems so different; everything does.
At school, Pinch boasts of his father’s travels, saying he’s away temporarily, dragged abroad because of grand exhibits—such lies that the boy expects traces of them upon returning home: newspaper clippings or letters from afar. Instead, he pushes open the studio door to the stench of his mother’s cooking; strange soups, peculiar herbs. She crowds him, talking incessantly of pottery, which she has resumed.
Before, they managed with the one tiny WC here. Now that he is older, Pinch is appalled to hear her pee in the middle of the night. And she seems hardly to sleep. In his cot, he wishes for daylight so he can escape this jail cell. But morning arrives, and he hides under the covers, dreading school.
Early one Sunday, she plonks herself at the end of the couch, devouring a breakfast apple in her dressing gown, which hangs carelessly open, the gap between her two loose breasts visible, obscured by a black-bead necklace over freckled skin. “Get up, Pinchy!” She has become so obtrusive, mobbing him with cuddles, cavalier about her job search, and turning up with unwanted presents—a cat, for example, which immediately escaped down the alley. When he fails to share her highs, she lashes out, spitting fury for a minute, then prodding him to converse.