The Italian Teacher(26)
In the rail carriage from Heathrow, he studies English feet: scuffed dress shoes, bandaged pinkie toes (the first week of sunshine, sandals still tight). At Belsize Park, he steps into the morning, blinking. Minutes later, he’s in her doorway, Natalie before him, only her hair different, shorter now, a black bob haircut with strands of white. He wants to apologize or thank her or cover his eyes and think for a minute. She lives in the same garden flat they shared for years, and Natalie herself seems mostly the same. But Pinch finds himself different, realizing only as he steps through the door.
She offers a packet of Maltesers. “Still your favorite?”
“I don’t often eat sweets in Toronto.” (When he unpacked on his first day in Canada, he found packets of Maltesers secreted throughout his luggage.)
“You must get back into the habit, Pinchy. I bought you lots.”
“Let me start then.” He opens the packet, tosses a few into his mouth. “This place smells exactly like before.”
She leads him through the kitchen, past her small-press cookbooks and jars of carob and sticks of dried rosemary, past her stubby cactus that never takes water and grows measly defiant spines. Out on the patio, they sit at the bistro table, she shading her brow from the sunlight, steam curling from the cups of mint tea. Natalie has an unreal aspect: She is Pinch’s most familiar sight, viewed since before his clocks started. Yet she isn’t as he expected—not quite his mother today but a middle-aged woman.
“It’s so lovely to have you here,” she says. Natalie speaks of her current pottery, jokes that she works far better without him around. She speaks of colleagues at the craft shop, denouncing them so scathingly that Pinch hears himself defending strangers.
“I’m doing better now,” she protests. “Can’t you give me credit for that?”
“I do.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
He mentions Ruth, speaks of her frailty, urging Natalie to travel back to Canada after all these years.
“You’re taking her side now?”
“I didn’t know there were sides.”
In less than an hour, they have regressed. While apart, each remembered their fondest version of the other. But the Natalie who wrote him loving letters is absent, replaced by the Natalie of hospital courtyards, hands shivering, struggling to pluck another cigarette from her pack, biting it out with her lips.
Pinch tries to force back those recollections, saying, “I don’t even know what we’re talking about.” Citing fatigue, he retreats to his old bedroom, drags his suitcase in. He so longed to be here. Now he longs only to hide again under Toronto textbooks.
Over the following weeks, Pinch claims a more urgent need to study than exists. He also claims to want long walks on his own, but instead takes the Tube to view Old Master drawings at private galleries. He is obliged to knock on locked doors, his face appraised through the glass, whereupon he is admitted by a fawning clerk, who says with head tilted, “Let me know when I may explain.” Pinch, applying the thickest Canadian accent, responds: “Such neat drawings. Where’s the price tags?” After a few minutes of playing the heathen, he poses questions pointed enough to expose the ignorance of the snobbish clerk, whereupon Pinch leaves, flushed with pleasure, stepping into this jostling city—and empty to have nobody to tell this anecdote. What is mischief if not for retelling?
Every minute that summer is tense, he and she stepping around a quarrel that won’t explode but simply exudes. “But what is your life like there?” she asks, smoking, though he’s still eating a lamb chop. “You never give me a picture I can see in my head.”
“You know which classes I take.”
“Look, we can change your plane ticket if you’d rather fly back sooner.”
“I never said that.”
“You certainly don’t want to be here.”
Then, two days before departure, everything changes. They regress further still, becoming the best friends they were, perhaps are. They sit side by side at the kitchen table, scanning the Guardian for plays, exhibits, restaurants—suddenly there’s too much to fill the dwindling time. They hasten out for dim sum on Gerrard Street, seated at a vast table by themselves, taking opposite sides of a lazy Susan, each spinning the last dumpling away when the other’s chopsticks close in.
“Shall we get more?”
“More! More!”
“Tons more!”
On his final morning, he is buckling the straps on his suitcase when she appears in the doorway, saying, “I hardly slept last night.”
“Why?”
“You.” She wrinkles her nose. “Going.”
24
A preposterous young man swans into the lecture hall, ludicrously late for class and wearing a long Russian coat with ermine collar, froggish eyelids fluttering as he seeks a free seat, only to flop across three in a heap of pastel scarves. Pinch recognizes him as Marsden McClintock, a twit enrolled in two of his sophomore-year courses—that is, they have six hours in common each week. Failing to acknowledge this fool requires effort, which Pinch is fully prepared to make. But today, Marsden has plonked himself right beside Pinch, reeking of liquor, though it’s morning. Pinch leans away but Marsden’s long arm probes ever closer, bearing a note in purple and yellow crayon: “Are YOU a Bavinsky like HE’S a Bavinsky?” Beneath is a clothbound volume, Modern Art in the Americas, opened to a plate of “Shoulder XXVII, 1951.”