The Italian Teacher(28)
“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Charles, but your father is a monster,” Marsden says approvingly.
Pinch beams with pleasure, even if both stories are lies (the wrestling promoter was Picasso; the barber, Giacometti). Encouraged, Pinch drops the names of other art stars whom Bear knows. And he tells of his own visit to New York at age fifteen, when he attended the opening of the legendary Petros Gallery in SoHo, where Dad jokingly introduced him around as an up-and-coming artist.
“You’re an artist, Charles?”
“No, no. I might’ve wanted to be. I dreamed of it back then, in a stupid childish way.”
“Oh,” Marsden responds, pondering the scene. “Isn’t that a little cruel then? Building you up, then packing you off to the provinces?”
“You’re missing the spirit of it. It was quite a memory he gave me.”
“I suppose.” Still in bed, Marsden reaches under the mattress for a bottle of warm retsina, jams the cork into the liquid with his thumb, splurting a puddle of white wine onto the floor, which encircles the pile of cigarette butts, making a squalid desert island. “You’re definitely not wicked enough to have been an artist,” Marsden comments.
“Aren’t I?”
“You suffer the fatal flaw of being quite lovely, Charles. And every great artist has to end up in hell. Then again, imagine how beautifully it’ll be decorated.” He passes the bottle. “What disturbs me is that you aren’t more twisted, given your papa. I, by contrast, never saw a single nude besides statues. Yet I end up an inveterate pervert.”
“You’re hardly a pervert.”
“How dare you deprive me of my finest trait? Though, frankly, homosexuality is a simple act of reason. The male body is far more beautiful than the female. That much is indisputable.”
“Consider yourself disputed.” Pinch takes a glug of the wine, a shudder of well-being passing through him. He contemplates the lips of this person. But no—Pinch cannot muster physical attraction, much as he’d like to. “If men were beautiful, Marsden, why is beauty always portrayed as a woman?”
“Because artists are servants of the rich, and the rich are men. They’ve always wanted their pinup girls.”
“Great art is not a matter of sex.”
“My dear friend! What else would it be?”
As they guzzle the wine, Pinch hears himself admitting to his paltry record in matters romantic—a few flirts as a guard at the National Gallery; a girl or two he fancies in classes, each of them cold when he addresses them, as if Pinch might just launch himself on them.
“Well, that’s your error: failure to launch.”
Pinch speculates that it’s his undeniable ugliness and is slightly hurt when Marsden fails to contradict this. So he shifts to that favored subject of the lovelorn: personal ambition. His current aspirations took shape while at the National Gallery. Employed to view the crowds, he viewed the walls instead, imagining a Bavinsky there among the Holbeins, Turners, Gainsboroughs. During breaks, Pinch explored the basement reserve, inspecting once-worthy art now relegated to the racks: unfashionable Mannerists, devotional works, pictures by dead apprentices of greater dead men. In his ill-fitting guard’s jacket and polyester slacks, he visited Zwemmer’s art bookshop on Charing Cross Road, happening across a biography of Renoir by the artist’s son—a volume of aggrandizing rubbish about that mediocrity. Even Renoir could be made important! What if a sublime painter got that treatment? What, Pinch began to think, what if I wrote the biography of Bear Bavinsky? A rush of optimism as he foresaw Dad’s approval, not to mention the hours they’d talk and debate. What if I even become famous for it? He skimmed artist biographies in the bookshop, finding no more sons but plenty of professors. So that is what he decided to become.
The needle reaches the end of a Jacques Brel record. Embarrassing snippets of Pinch’s confessed ambitions echo in his ear. He pulls out his pipe, stuffs it with tobacco. “That’s not for telling anyone, Marsden. Just a stupid idea of mine. Don’t say that around. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“You brought me an orange, Charles. I consider that an act of heroism. And you spoke in confidence. I hold to privacy as does a cat.”
“Do cats hold to privacy?”
“Have you heard one talking? And there’s too much talking,” Marsden says in an unfamiliar tone, sincere for the first time in their acquaintance. “You can pull this off, Charles. I’m sure you can. Absolutely certain. If it’s what you want, my friend.” With this, Marsden emerges from bed, shoeless but otherwise fully dressed, in his Russian wool coat over white fencing knickerbockers. For encouragement, he touches Pinch’s forearm then turns and whistles for his squirrel, Balthazar, to no good effect, before standing at his sash window, gazing into the dark quad.
Never does he refer back to Pinch’s needy ambitions, as if words in alcohol should remain suspended in that liquid. This sensitivity prompts Pinch weeks later, when the Trinity College residence expels Marsden because of the squirrel, to offer him a room. Fortunately, he leaves Balthazar behind.
After sixteen months of monastic solitude, Pinch begins to go out by night, walking across the underbelly of Toronto, chaperoned by the protective Marsden, who diverts any bid to lure his earnest scholar into debauch. Pinch even engages in a few trysts with women whom Marsden introduces. These are affairs with boozy beginnings, sober endings. But they win him confidence—he didn’t realize how little he had until it materializes, changing everything, from his posture to his voice. Love affairs also reveal a quirk in Pinch’s tastes: He is oddly unattracted to any woman he finds beautiful.