The Italian Teacher(24)
Smirking, he shakes his head. Poor girl! We’d better hope the food comes out well. Pinch stabs another forkful, raising it to his lips, his mouth watering. There was an interesting question here. He reads down the sheet: “I notice that you”—blob of red sauce—“yourself.” He dabs the stain, touches it to his tongue. Too acidic? “I notice that you”—blob of red sauce—“yourself.” You what yourself?
He jumps at the noise of an engine coughing and looks out the window over a tree-lined street of the Annex, watching a Volkswagen camper van disgorge record crates and shaggy students. His fellow University of Toronto freshmen are another species to Pinch. They’re mere months from high school—one summer since lunch bells and locker smells, testing their new adult privileges, trading rock ’n’ roll albums and philosophizing. By contrast, Pinch is a grown man of twenty-one, and presents himself as such: his receding blond hair side-swept, a tweed jacket and tie, corduroy bell-bottoms ironed with a sharp crease up the middle. Only his thick sideburns are unkempt, and this is less about fashion than incompetent shaving.
He hasn’t had a classmate since age sixteen, when he returned from visiting his father in Larchmont. Upon arriving back in Rome, he told Natalie that he wasn’t going to paint anymore, intending to wound her as he had been wounded. Her entreaties only pushed him to burn his best efforts, then his supplies; in the end, everything. What remained was the two of them in a cramped art studio. His aim succeeded: He had hurt her badly. And she had stopped trying with him. She decided to move back to London to resume her own art. He could come if he wanted. He didn’t, but had no alternative. So, by correspondence from London, he completed his remaining high school courses, a minimal burden that left him most of each week free in a dark cold city. He haunted the museums, watching other visitors, confabulating their lives, wishing for the courage to address someone.
At first Natalie roared through a frenetic period of work, pulling overnighters at a pottery cooperative in North London, talking immodestly about her art—until, with crashing clarity, she saw herself: These pots were desperate, botched; she possessed nothing. Natalie struggled to sleep, grew paranoid, thin, smoking constantly. Once he came home to find her seated in the kitchen, a bread knife resting on her thigh. “Just need to go to bed for twenty-four hours,” she said. “Then I’ll get on with things.” Two days later, he watched her being led down a beige hospital hallway. Several spells in psychiatric wards followed.
After Pinch received his diploma in the mail, he found work as a guard at the National Gallery to bring in a little money (though Bear helped out with fat but irregular checks) and also to escape home, where Pinch found himself insufferable, having assumed the role of nagging parent to his mother: “Open your mouth, so I know you took them.” Every workday at the National Gallery ended with a plunge in spirits as he walked over the Churchill mosaic and out the portico entrance to Trafalgar Square, tensing further as he stepped onto the Tube train and rigid by the time it clattered into Belsize Park, their home stop. No matter how fine his day, it was dashed as he walked into their basement flat, hearing her smoker’s cough from the kitchen, Natalie barely responding to his greeting, he yearning to tell of a famous museum visitor, say, or a stupid new policy, or the guards from Mauritius who were teaching him Creole.
Each night he cooked their dinner, lest Natalie go without—left to herself, she consumed only coffee and smokes, a regimen that alone could set off another manic-depressive episode. He tried to replicate dishes tasted in Rome, struggling to recall (and to find) the ingredients, apologizing when his experiments ended in catastrophe.
Sometimes Natalie was still loving—and he spurned her then.
“I think you hate me,” she said.
“I don’t.”
“Is there anything you like about me?”
He changed the subject, never explaining the source of his anger: that she had encouraged him, had adored his painting, had stoked his hopes, telling him, “You are really very good.” Yet he wasn’t. He couldn’t forgive Natalie for that. In secret, he wrote to her estranged mother, asking about Canada. Pinch dreaded telling of his contact with Ruth in Montreal. But she responded unexpectedly, hugging him, holding on tightly, whispering, “So pleased you’re doing this,” as if she were his mom again. Pinch turned formal, showing her the course catalog, a map of campus, where he’d be living—a collage of information plastered over his guilt.
“The funny thing about having a child,” Natalie told him, “is that it’s really about not having the child. That’s what raising one is. Doing everything possible so they’re able to leave you. Not that it’s a credit to me. You raised yourself, Pinch.”
“That’s not true,” he said, hurrying her attention back to his upcoming studies.
Now Pinch explores his large new home in Toronto, owned by Ruth and lent for his time at university. Previously it was a student flophouse. Four bedrooms bear the scars of former occupants, with psychedelic pen doodles on walls and the stench of wet dog. He ventures into empty rooms and floorboards creak. In darkness he stands there, hands on hips. I must do well here.
In class the next morning, he hunches over a small desk, taking copious notes to avoid stray gazes from the surrounding students, all women, which turns out to be the case in most of his art history courses, though nearly all the professors are men. Here, a middle-aged academic in a leather jacket lectures to his pretty favorite, who fiddles with a bouncy pendant. When the prof poses questions, Pinch shoots up his hand, answering in a rush, his throat constricting.