The Italian Teacher(23)

20


Bear sleeps on the train back to Larchmont, with Pinch watching. Lightly, he rests his hand on his father’s upper arm, which rises and falls with the man’s heavy breaths. Stirring, Bear utters a peaceful sigh, draws his son closer, as if pulling a bony little cushion under his arm. “What a time!” Bear mumbles. “Told you we’d turn that place upside down.” His eyes remain shut, crow’s feet deepening from amusement. “And what an impression you made. They loved the hell out of you, Charlie.”

“At the gallery?” Pinch says, needing to hear this again.

“We made a scene all right! But not for talking about, hey?” He opens one eye. “You got that, kiddo?”

“After the gallery, we ate hamburgers for dinner at the hotel,” Pinch responds, as if recounting to Carol.

“With plenty of Heinz ketchup,” Bear adds.

The boy laughs, recalling that idiotic collage. “And baseball on the radio.”

“You are a solid customer,” Bear says, touching his forehead to Pinch’s temple, before settling back to sleep.

But Pinch still awaits an answer about moving here for good. As the train slows into Larchmont, passengers stand, smoothing suit jackets, collecting hats from the overhead racks, adjusting brims. Bear leaps to his feet, lifting Pinch as if he were a brown-paper parcel. “Back in the suburbs, young man,” he says. “Time to adopt our disguises, Charlie boy. Ready?”

Carol waits on the platform, talking a blue streak about Widgeon’s tonsillitis. Back at the house, Pinch runs to his room, opens his suitcase with the rolled-up painting inside. He darts to the top of the stairs, calling down when Bear passes along the corridor. “Could I show you that picture I brought? Would that be okay?”

“Be right up, Charlie.”

Chilly with sweat, Pinch sits on his bed, leg jiggling. The murmur of his father’s phone conversation downstairs drifts up, punctuated by Bear’s thunderous laughter, each bolt of which hits Pinch with such love for this man. The call ends. Bear clomps upstairs. “Well, kiddo, what you got? I know I’m gonna love this.”

Pinch unrolls the canvas and swallows. “Remember you told me in Rome to ‘paint close, but look far’? I always do that.”

Bear’s gaze flits expertly across the painting, absorbing a hundred details an instant. “Tell you what, Charlie. I will tell you what.” Bear packs his pipe, shaking his head. He looks up. “You did that, son of mine?”

Swelling with pride, Pinch nods.

With his knuckle, Bear pins down the edge of the curling canvas. “That is one hell of a leg.”

Pinch grins. “It’s mine. Like how you drew your legs when you were in the hospital as a kid.”

“Sure, sure.” Bear continues to scrutinize. “Young artists show me their work all the time. I can tell right away if a guy’s got something.”

Pinch commands himself to act like a professional. He’d give up his remaining life to hear Dad’s admiration for this picture. Pinch blurts: “Dad, did you think I could stay here? Here at the house?”

“You just did, Charlie.”

“For longer, I mean. To live.” His chest thuds. “If it’s okay with everyone.”

“You serious, Charlie?” his father says.

Pinch nods.

Bear pauses. “But is that fair to Natty? Doesn’t she need you there?”

“Mom isn’t like when you were with us.”

“Aw, come on—Natty never changes. Sweet girl. And a kid ought to stay with his mother.” He grabs Pinch’s arm. “Son of mine, I think the world of you. You know that.” He nods toward his son’s painting. “So I got to tell you, kiddo. You’re not an artist. And you never will be.”





Youth


   OIL ON CANVAS


   78 X 124 INCHES


   Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate





Toronto, 1971




21


He stuffs a bolt of tobacco into his pipe, sucks a matchbook flame to the bowl, and coughs discreetly, browsing the art section of a used bookstore on Bloor, paging through old catalogs, obscure pamphlets, dusty Dadaist treatises that make him sneeze. He crouches to peruse a work on Pop Art, finding color plates of works by now-celebrated artists, a few of whom he encountered years before at the Petros Gallery with his father.

That night, Pinch cooks a lavish dinner for two, having procured the necessary Italian ingredients on College Street: cans of peeled San Marzano tomatoes, guanciale, black olives, pecorino romano, capers in sea salt—every ingredient except someone to eat with. He prefers a test run before inviting a date, just to ensure that everything works, from the saucepans to the conversation. “You come from Toronto?” he asks the empty chair, reading off a sheet of questions resting beside his plate of steaming rigatoni. He tries again, with different intonation. No, that sounded perverse. Anyway, he’ll presumably know where she’s from by the time he asks her out. Pinch crosses off that question and proceeds to the next: “Do you like music?” But everyone does. He scribbles this out, printing over it, “What type of music?” Then, “Is the record too loud/soft?” And, “The other day, (HER NAME HERE), I walked past a protest against the Spadina Expressway. What is your position on that?”