The Italian Teacher(27)
In fine ballpoint, Pinch jots a perfunctory “yes the same” in tiny lowercase, as if to make a point about restraint. Inwardly, he is overjoyed that somebody here knows. In their next shared class, Marsden again settles next to Pinch. “Terrible thing this morning,” he whispers, as the professor rambles. “I woke up, looked around, and I’m in fucking Queen’s Park! I had to run all the way here. Could I still be drunk? Is that possible? By the laws of physics, could I be?” He drifts to sleep, susurrating through the early Renaissance, snorting to wakefulness as everyone else is donning overcoats and mittens.
Outside, the tall young man bounds after Pinch. “Something about Donatello?” he guesses, by way of recollection. “Then I lost consciousness.”
Pinch summarizes the class, leaning into the hard wind as if impatient for his next engagement, although he has nowhere next but home.
“You know everything!” Marsden exclaims.
“I’m just repeating what he told us.”
“No, no—you are a genius. How would you feel if I copied?”
“Copied what?”
“Everything. For the rest of my entire life.”
25
Whenever Pinch trudges up the slush-slimy steps of the Sidney Smith building, Marsden and his foppish entourage call to their grouchy new acquaintance. As if reluctant, Pinch joins them, frowning, moving from foot to foot in the subzero morning. Back when Marsden first buttonholed him, Pinch hastened to his house on Major Street, hung his coat on the rack inside, and ran whooping up to the third floor. Weeks later, Pinch has a distinguished role in Marsden’s clique of aesthetes: He is their sourpuss scholar, the future critic of renown.
Marsden—who hails from a patrician Ontario clan, his father a leading Conservative member of Parliament—has styled himself a bohemian since age ten, at considerable personal cost. For this, he is resentful of the slovenly interlopers who have tied on bandannas and acoustic guitars in recent years, claiming his countercultural turf. A group of flower children straggle down St George Street, bandying signs for an antiwar protest while caterwauling Country Joe and the Fish lyrics about the fighting in Vietnam.
“Vietnam?” Marsden heckles them. “Your war zone is the shower!” Back to his friends: “It’s like these people emerged from three decades in a yurt. Civilization is not about getting closer to nature. It’s about getting as far from nature as possible!”
“What’s a yurt?”
“I’d tell you, Nigel, but you’d have nightmares.” Marsden looks away, saying “Now I’ve lost my train,” which makes Pinch see a locomotive rushing past, a heap of pastel scarves piled up in second class.
Shortly thereafter, rumor circulates that Marsden has fallen seriously ill, bedridden at his Trinity College dormitory. Pinch buys an orange and sets forth to brave contagion—only to discover that Marsden’s infirmity consists of a middling case of the sniffles and a serious case of sloth. He is treating this condition with a combination of Gitanes and sentimental French records about la vie de bohème.
“Why are you in bed? You don’t seem ill.”
“I’m comfortable here, and have yet to hear a persuasive case to leave.” On the wall is a reproduction of Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted Above Head; on the floor, a hillock of cigarette butts. Most startling is what scurries beneath his bed: a squirrel that climbed in from the ivy. Marsden claims to have domesticated it, with powerful evidence to the contrary. Starved of admirers, Marsden talks and talks to his surprise guest, catapulting among subjects, lingering on slanders, especially of the bully boys in this residence whose romantic misdeeds he satirizes. “Sex,” Marsden comments, “is proof of the futility of mankind.”
“How?”
“Because the sex drive is never quenched. It keeps rising, as it were. And never does one accomplish anything with sex.”
“Well, children.”
“Not the way I do it,” Marsden responds, describing himself as “a homophile,” a term Pinch has never encountered, though he knows enough Latin to understand. It strikes him as sophisticated to take this admission in stride, and he wishes to match it with a revelation of his own. All he can confess of his own sexuality is virginity, which is entirely the wrong direction. So he resorts to ribald anecdotes about his father. “Once, Bear got his schedule mixed up about when he was supposed to meet his wife—long before my mom—at his studio in Greenwich Village. By mistake, he’d also invited his mistress at that exact same hour. Both women turn up, see each other, and go berserk. It’s, ‘Either she goes or I do!’”
“What did he do?”
“Well, he had them wrestle.”
“What?” Marsden sits up in bed.
“Yes, he made them wrestle for his affections.”
“That’s incredible!”
“Another time,” Pinch continues, registering this success, “Dad was painting my mother, and he started complaining that her hair was in the way, that he couldn’t capture the form of her head. He got a pair of scissors, gave it to her, and said, ‘Cut it all off, right now.’”
“And she wouldn’t,” Marsden says in hope.
“Not at first. But he kept on about it. Finally, she couldn’t fight anymore. She gave in. And then—as she’s raising the scissors, nearly in tears—he snatches them away! ‘I only wanted to see if you would,’ he told her.”