The Italian Teacher(16)
Pinch and his father exchange letters now and then, Pinch trying to sound grown up, with all sorts of questions about New York and artists and baseball. Never does Pinch mention his own attempts to paint. He is saving that, a surprise for when they meet, when he’ll say, “Remember that lesson you gave me, Dad?” Meantime, Bear’s letters are warm and jovial, even if they rarely connect to his son’s questions. Bear mails a postcard whenever somewhere exotic, marked with a colorful stamp and his manly scribble across the back: “Write me soonest, Charlie boy!” So Pinch does, sending off an exuberant letter the next day, waiting months for his next snippet of Dad.
Their telephone calls are rarer still. The Italian state monopoly phone operator refuses to run wires into the studio, so incoming calls must be arranged at the apartment of neighbors, a family of carpenters who, for generations, carved ornamental altarpieces but whose sons are now selling West German vacuum cleaners. On the rare occasions Pinch hears that voice down a crackly phone line, he is so overexcited that he can barely think what to say, allowing Bear to lead the conversation. Then it’s over: Pinch is back in Rome, in the neighbors’ living room, and he failed to ask about anything: When might he visit America? Will Dad be coming here again?
“Enough of my lollygagging—I’ll leave you to it,” she says. To forget, Pinch hurries back to his easel, with Natalie lingering behind him. “I keep wanting to know what you’re thinking, why you did that bit. But, yes—I should get out of your hair.”
He considers the tip of his brush, which tickles a purple blob on the palette.
“Yes, yes,” Natalie mutters, and out she goes into the alley, without coat or destination. Pinch keeps working, until his mother pushes back inside. Three hours have passed, which seemed three minutes to him. She recounts her jaunt around the city center, how she stood on Ponte Milvio, watching the Tiber flow underneath. “Like a liquid forest.”
“A liquid forest, Mom?”
“That’s what it was like!” Natalie is thrumming again of late, that intrusive buzz. She speaks unguardedly about her job, how she hates everyone at Olivetti, how they are the idiots, not she.
“Why are you out of breath?” he asks. “Did you run back?”
“Yes, why not?” she answers, laughing, and wipes sweat from her upper lip, hastening to his side, studying the progress in his picture: a view out the studio door into the alleyway. “You,” she says. “Are really. Very! Good!” She pulls his shirt collar, yanking his neck. “Save everything, Pinchy. Even your so-called bad paintings. Or let me keep them. They’ll be worth a fortune.” Still the taller, she kisses him hard on his forehead, hugging him tight. In a whisper, her voice changes, normal for a moment: “You’re banned from throwing away anything. Please, Pinch?”
Back when he started painting, Natalie’s praise, her clasped hands and glee—they plumped his hopes. Yet fervor has dwindling worth. Soon, he cared less for her approval, craving others’, painting primarily for those who snub him, teachers who never remember his name, classmates who’ll be shocked when it’s known that Charles Bavinsky is someone important, and always has been. In daydreams, he discusses art with his father, grinning at the scene. It’s better, he decides, that we lived apart—saved me from embarrassing myself by showing lousy early work. But I’m ready now. Aren’t I? Only, not this picture. He drags the canvas to the empty oil barrel in the alley, returning for Natalie’s matches.
“Pinchy, I was asking you to keep it. Please.”
Bear destroys paintings that he deems unfit, however, so Pinch must do the same. He stuffs it in the barrel, runs a matchstick down the wall, holds it for an infinity against his canvas, which finally smolders. Pinch blinks at the rising smoke, turning away, glimpsing his mother through the open iron door. Natalie stands behind his easel, looking toward the very view that he just painted and that now burns, curling submissively before him.
Into the heat, he looks, imagining Dad’s face: that crinkly grin, the booming voice, a thick hand clapped on Pinch’s shoulder. “Well, I never, kiddo! Charlie Bavinsky! Well, I never.” Pinch shuts his stinging eyes, beaming.
15
Motorbikes buzz down the bumpy roadways of Rome, riders hopped in air and thudding back onto their tailbones. Before today, Pinch never rode a moped. The boys at his school—in raptures over pictorials of Mustangs and Cadillacs—snigger at the piddly horsepower of Italian vehicles and the effeminacy of these wops who cling to another man on a rinky-dink ciclomotore. If anyone from school were to see Pinch on the back of this Italian boy’s motor scooter, it’d be excruciating. But Pinch climbs on anyhow—to be invited by a fellow teenager is too rare an offer, even if Vittorio just wants to show off the neighborhood American to his friends.
The dented white Vespa coughs to life, shuddering as it merges into traffic, all the sputtering vehicles edging toward a robin-breasted traffic cop at the intersection, who feigns blindness as a dozen scofflaws squirt past. The obedient motorists remain in place, fixing hairdos in side mirrors, revving in a rising growl until the lights change.
Outside a café-bar in Parioli, Pinch dismounts, queasy from motion, sicker from anxiety at joining these unknown Italian kids cavorting here, including girls. He switches to Roman dialect, adopting their syncopated pip-pop cadence, their salty slang, hearing himself become coarser and bolder, as if previous speakers had chewed these phrases and his lips assume their swagger. The teens flirt and they howl, small groups ebbing away for conspiratorial sidebars, flowing back together. A boy in pink cashmere cuddles his eyeliner-blinky girl, their foreheads pressed together, necklaces swinging, the chains entwined for an instant, crucifixes clinking. They are sentimental and showy, acting out lovers’ tiffs as if soap-opera cameras rolled: girl with arms folded over small chest, her beau tugging at his sweetheart’s sleeve. “Ti voglio bene, amore! Smetti di piangere, ti prego!”