The Italian Teacher(20)
Pinch scans the questions, too anxious suddenly to understand his own handwriting. He stammers out a query about that lesson in Rome, how Bear taught him traditional methods like mulling paints and squaring up, yet Bear himself doesn’t necessarily apply such old-fashioned techniques. “Did you show me that because,” Pinch ventures, having prepped this line, “because an artist should know the old ways so he can forget them, and go forward freely?”
“What is this, an interview?” He ruffles his son’s hair, pulls him close. “You’re a smart one. Know that? You could explain a thing or two to these bums we’ll meet tonight, I promise you.”
Gaining momentum, Pinch dares another question about when people sit for you. “Should I talk and get them when they’re reacting? Or should I say nothing and let them grow bored, then get them when they’re distracted and not thinking that I’m watching? Because I can’t really talk and draw at the same time. Mom says you’re like that,” he adds, having posed this question chiefly to cite a trait they share.
“Charlie, let me tell you a story about me and portraits. After art college, I got this commission to paint some couple’s little daughter. When I tell you that the only notable thing about that gal was the ears, you better believe me! Immense, they were, like an elephant’s. I set up my easel, pose the little darlin’, and I paint her. The parents, they see the finished product, and they’re speechless. The lady, she goes, ‘Can’t you do anything about the ears?’ I say: ‘Why, sure: Pay a doctor to pin them back, and I’ll paint her fresh!’” He pinches Pinch’s thigh. Unsure of the point, Pinch grins. His father continues: “That is all you need know about portraits, Charlie. Are you accurate or are you cruel? That is the difference between a good painter and a great one. Because it’s impossible to be true and kind. Not been done.”
“But if you’d painted her without elephant ears, the parents would’ve complained too, wouldn’t they? They’d say she didn’t really look like that.”
“Oh, Charlie. You should know by now: Nobody sees themselves.” Bear raps the window, bothered suddenly. “What can I tell you, kid? What’s there to say about making paintings?” He looks hard at his son. “My real life, it’s when I’m working. It’s entirely there. The rest—everything—is flimflam. And that’s tragedy. Because what am I really doing? Wiping colors across fabric? Tricking people into feeling something’s there, when it’s nothing? When I’m doing the work, I almost think it adds up. Then they drag me to some farce like tonight, and I’m reminded what my job really is: goddamn decoration. Understand?”
Pinch, stabbed by his father’s virulence, replies softly, “I don’t know.” For if this is tragedy, then Pinch wants his share: a mission like Dad’s, a trapdoor through which to pass, on whose other side is real life, making everything on this side fleeting and void. “Dad, can I stay here? With you and Carol? And— and work on my painting? Is that something that—”
“You give me hope, Charlie. You know that? We will make this so special tonight, me and you. We’ll show them, hey? Buddies. You hear?” He shakes his son’s hand, a tight grip. Bear rests the crumpled copy of Partisan Review in his son’s lap, throws his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Pinch, fighting back tears of relief, stares hard out the window, hardly breathing. He clutches the magazine all the way to Grand Central.
19
The Checker taxi trundles south past Houston Street, passing industrial buildings and punctured garbage cans, whose pungent ooze trickles onto the sidewalk. The cab halts before a cast-iron facade, six stories of fire escape, the doorway defaced in spray-paint scrawl. Out front, a delivery truck idles, its clicker blinking. Bear and Pinch get out, father leading son up a rickety staircase to the second floor, where a tin sign—“Heights Manufacturing (Dresses) Inc.”—designates a previous tenant. Pipes run down the soaring ceilings of the newly converted gallery, machine parts and fabric bolts still heaped on the floor. A workman in overalls makes pencil marks on a wall, hammer jiggling on his tool belt.
The opening tonight features younger artists than Bear Bavinsky, including three who are already present, sharing a bottle of Schlitz: a tall black woman in a Mondrian dress and orange bead necklace, and two jittery white guys, whom she teases, both in velvet jackets, leg-strangling black jeans, and Beatle boots. Nobody notices the middle-aged painter at the entrance, with his adolescent son in tie and blazer.
The artists’ giggly banter sounds across the room, names drifting mystifyingly into Pinch’s ears: “Henry Geldzahler” and “Barry Goldwater” and “Lee Strasberg”—worryingly, he hasn’t heard of any of those artists. On a far wall, two blue fluorescent beams are mounted into an X. Beside this hangs a collage of Heinz ads. The largest work, however, is a plywood board stenciled with pink and yellow speech bubbles that contain no speech. Unsure how to react, Pinch turns to his father.
“Planning to buy?” the black woman asks, approaching Bear. “Or just looking?”
“Neither, if it’s all the same to you,” he replies.
Smirking, she asks what brings him here, and looks most entertained to hear his name. “Shit, I’ve heard of you. But you’re not on tonight.”