The Italian Teacher(2)
In attendance are sculptors, writers, and composers; Anglo women who married Italian nobility (gals from Wisconsin once, now princess-something); plus all the expat businessmen: the Procter & Gamble guy, the Aramco fella, the Coca-Cola man, alongside wives who, when their dearly beloved cracks a joke, either tilt forward uproariously or just sip a drink. “Well, he sure has your number, Joan!”
Natalie can pick out the artists from their outfits—baggy suits, scuffed shoes—while the socialites wear shiny silk numbers, yanking up long gloves and yanking along portly menfolk in three-pieces, gold watch-chains swinging. The groups can also be distinguished by topic of conversation: The moneyed all speak of art, the artists all speak of money.
“Wait just a second,” the middle-aged party hostess says. Squinting into pince-nez as if through peepholes, she sashays over, waving a clutch purse designed like a pink lobster and holding down a hat shaped like a high-heeled shoe. Mishmish Shapiro is an art collector of Californian provenance who, years before, escaped a bout of ennui by hurling herself into the beauty of Rome, landing in the arms of Count Ugobaldo, a shabby aristocrat who paints surrealist landscapes and cries. If she has an ulterior motive (and Mishmish always keeps a few handy) for having pressed Bear to attend, it’s to convince him to sell. She owns a couple of early Bavinskys, but he disavows those as juvenilia. His new paintings are the prize—they are truly something else, it’s said, and diabolically hard to lay one’s hands on.
“I was scared half to death that your mob wouldn’t make it,” Mishmish says cheerily, clasping Bear’s hand and touching Pinch on the head. “Oh, what an adorable scamp! You found him in some dark vicolo, did you?” She nods to a butler, who has been hovering, to add this ankle biter to those already stashed in a distant nursery. Once the boy is dispatched, Mishmish appraises the big-boned young wife of Bear, from her shoe straps to her beret. “Well, you sure are a tall drink of water,” Mishmish concludes. “Speaking of, who’s thirsty?”
“Oh, I would love a drink,” Natalie answers.
“Patience,” Mishmish replies acidly. “You’re not speaking to the barman.”
A flush rises up Natalie’s chest. She apologizes but is hardly heard: Guests keep noticing the celebrated painter in their midst and push closer, among them an oak of a man, branches aloft. “Well, if it ain’t big old Bear! How in the Sam Hill are you?”
“Holy smoke! Rod, old man! What brings you to the Holy Roman Empire?”
Natalie swipes two glasses off a waiter’s tray and hands one to her husband, who clinks distractedly, the crystal ting vibrating till her lips meet the rim. She holds her nose above the liquid, hiding herself in its fizz. As the scrum jostles her, strangers converge around Bear. A wall of backs closes before her.
3
Bear reaches through the crowd, dragging Natalie to his side. “My miraculous wife, a serious talent in her own right,” he says. “Tell them, sweetheart.”
A mass of eyeballs turns to her.
“Now listen here, Bear,” someone interrupts. “You’ve simply got to explain how . . .”
Nobody came to meet an unknown lady potter. They’re here for Bear Bavinsky, creator of expressionistic masterworks, wild colors crashing across each composition, a bare throat filling the huge canvas, or a roll of tummy fat, or a pricked shoulder. His detail portraits are too intimate—uncomfortably penetrating despite never once including a subject’s face.
In 1953, when Life magazine trumpeted Bear Bavinsky as “tomorrow’s action painter, conjoining twentieth-century dynamism with classical forms,” what it meant was, “Here’s an artist who doesn’t drizzle paints, as your kid could.” But what drew most attention was the photo of Bear’s New York studio with, in the foreground, the long leg of a female sitter, presumably undressed. And not just “presumably,” for the snapshot inadvertently included a mirror reflection of the woman’s right breast, the first occasion on which that eminent chronicle of Americana had featured a distaff nipple. Discovering its calamity, Life pulled the issue, turning a modest profile into “that notorious piece,” establishing Bear as the archetype of immoral Greenwich Village artist—precisely the type this expat crowd is itching to meet.
“What you got brewing, Bear?” asks the saucy wife of a Chicago adman. “How’s about a show for us yokels here in the provinces?”
“I fear you won’t get far,” Natalie warns her. “My husband never talks about his work.”
But the crowd’s attention remains stuck on Bear, who makes a nearly identical comment to hers, prompting stern nods all around. “Fact is, I burn most everything,” he continues. “Maybe six canvases a year make the cut. Mishmish, you won’t like this, but I never painted to get on the walls of some palace.”
Natalie adds, “Bear’s art is intended for the public—for museums, for places where regular people can see them.”
“Regular people at museums?” Mishmish responds. “If they start turning up at museums, what possible reason would there be to go anymore?”
Everyone laughs, after which Bear addresses the crowd. “My advice, folks? Don’t waste your time on a dope like me.” A wink, a half smile, a puff of his pipe. Everyone is beaming.