The Italian Teacher(29)
As for Marsden, his preference runs to rugged older men, typically married, prompting undignified couplings in city parks after nightfall. In contrast to Pinch, he experiences chest-crushing tenderness for beauty, whose sole consummation is physical, brief, incomplete.
26
Cohabitation, like foreign travel, presents the risk of getting to know one’s friends. But sharing a house only brings Pinch and Marsden closer. At times, Pinch finds his shirts ironed or his shoes polished at the bedroom door. When he cannot reach a jar on a high shelf, his lofty housemate retrieves it. If Pinch struggles to open it, Marsden pops the top, neither of them interrupting the conversation.
“You’re talking absolute pumpkin,” Marsden exclaims. “Art is too hung up with this right-on politics and dreary conceptualism. My tragedy, dear Charles, is to have been born in this age of brutes.”
“I thought you were going to say ‘this age of ugly feet.’”
“If I had feet like those philistine hippies, I’d probably like bad art too, from moral shock alone,” Marsden says, ignoring the ringing telephone. “Artists used to strive for beauty. Now they all want to ‘say something.’ Have you heard artists saying things? Bless their little hearts, they’re unintelligible!” To punctuate this, he flings the Philosophy of Aesthetics textbook over his shoulder, which is his way of dropping a class.
Perceptive, opinionated, highly educated, Marsden suffers from fast-fading passions, the results of which are strewn about this house: unread volumes by Sontag, Isherwood, Gide on the staircase; Jan Garbarek albums still in the cellophane; half-finished embroidery on the kitchen table. That which falls behind Marsden ceases to exist, as if it were his duty to start, another’s to finish. “My life is a flurry of inactivity,” he once said, and his degree prospects are indeed flurrying into the distant horizon. “What thrills me about pictures is the opposite of ‘saying something.’”
“What then?”
“Licking a painting,” he says, by way of example, “as I so famously did to a rather succulent Philip Guston at the Janis Gallery in New York, very narrowly avoiding arrest.”
“Are you going to get that, Mars?”
Finally, he snatches the phone. “Let me give him a shout.” Marsden covers the receiver, mouthing: “Your mother.”
After Pinch’s visit to London last summer, he and Natalie agreed to talk regularly. Given the expense of long distance, they limit themselves to ten minutes per week. When it’s her turn to call, the phone rings exactly on time. When it’s Pinch’s turn, he sometimes fails, humbled by a hangover or lost in schoolwork or in a swirling conversation with Marsden and cohorts. The following week arrives, and Natalie places her call, never reproaching Pinch for his oversight.
But this is not a day that either of them was expected to call. To his roommate, Pinch shakes his head.
“Seems that he’s not around, Mrs. Bavinsky,” Marsden reports.
Shunning Natalie only transports Pinch directly to her kitchen. He knows precisely where she’s sitting. He waves his arms to stop Marsden from hanging up.
“When I say he’s not around, Mrs. Bavinsky, I mean that he is. Or has just come around. Not in the sense of unconsciousness. In the sense of—”
“I’ll take it upstairs.” Pinch leaps two steps at a time and dives onto his bed, phone receiver flying from its cradle. He catches it. “I can’t really hear you, Mom. You need to speak louder.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.”
“I just wanted to hear how you are. Been ages.”
“Not ages. Has it?” Lately, he dreads these conversations, fearing that oddness creeping back into her voice, something wrong again, requiring urgent travel there. She is fragile, but so is his current existence: classes in which he thrives, and a friend. The possibility of returning to what he was before—that pimply boyish self, issuing gale-force words when he met someone—it terrifies him.
He exerts himself to converse as if Natalie were normal, speaking of his essays and of the snow but bypassing his social life. To tell of happiness feels disloyal. Both he and she watch the clock, counting down the ten minutes, each for opposite reasons.
“I think of you so often, Pinchy. With such warmth.”
He puts down the phone, harrowed, needing to restore himself to this house, this city. Then he dials Arizona, where his father lives with a new wife, Charlene, and their toddler, Johnny boy. Bear is always happy to hear from his Canadian son. Pinch, before speaking with his father, fetches his pipe, sparks it up, grinning at that boisterous booming voice: “Son of mine! What news from the true north, strong and free?”
Versed in art history now, Pinch dares raise topics of his father’s expertise, occasionally earning ticks of respect, even stirring Dad’s pleasure, which redoubles inside the youth, who presses the receiver hard against his warm ear. Above all, he quizzes Bear on the subject of Bear, his views on life and art, to which Pinch can listen for hours.
“Honestly, Charlie, I look at my work sometimes and think, Is that really what I meant?” he says, an echo on the line. “Or is it what I painted because that’s the limit of what I can do, and I’m not as good as I need be?” When Bear is among strangers, he presents himself as one who’ll freely tell tales against himself, immune to pomposity, stumbling through the nutty art world. But in private with Pinch, he is far more shrewd. Culture, he explains, is a pyramid: a few on top, many squashed under. You don’t say this aloud, he adds, because people want to believe that art is holy, crafted by a clergy of sinners. Pinch smiles, and Bear chuckles. “You like that, kid? “There is an unfunny subtext to this, however, because Bear’s work is increasingly overlooked. He is drifting from the history of art, replaced by those who are objectively worse. Yes, objectively. For Pinch deems artistic merit as fact, not opinion. His fury flames that Bear is subject to idiots, to peons who spurn transcendent work, leading the public to mediocrities and condemning a master to darkness. Pinch would hurt someone to correct this.