The Italian Teacher(3)
Natalie knocks back another glass of champagne, bubbles burning her throat. She’s queasy, as if about to tumble. Everyone here is so much older and so sophisticated. On a passing tray she deposits the glass and steps back from everyone, clasping both hands atop her beret, cramming it down as if to stub herself into the marble floor. She watches these people yet sees only herself—big ugly hands, knobbled from making ceramics that nobody cares to see. Actually, the idea of them viewing her work fills Natalie with shame. She stops a passing man for a cigarette. He doles one out and moves on, never offering a match. Her unlit cigarette raised, she casts about, ignored. Cackles of laughter emerge around her husband. He may deplore these events, but he’s so skilled at them. Everybody solicits his views—about art in the Soviet bloc, about Ike’s health, about rival painters. “What I’d like know,” one gent says, “is whether you understand Se?or Picasso’s work. I mean truly understand it.”
Natalie wishes herself erased. Looking to a far wall, she glimpses something, her eyes narrowing. She stoops to see better. Among dangling purses and wobbly knees, Pinch is there, reaching up to a silver bowl, bringing down fistfuls of peanuts, gobbling them from cupped hands. He must’ve escaped the nursery, wanting away from his peers, much as she wants away from hers.
She moves through islands and eddies of people, and Pinch sees her approaching. His expression brightens, matching hers. Natalie opens her skirt pocket, and he deposits the peanuts for safekeeping. He points to her ear, which she lowers to his height.
“Mommy, can we go?”
Out in the courtyard, they sit on the lip of a burbling fountain, Pinch recounting adventures from when lost in this palazzo, that he found an old man asleep in the library, and a staircase in the wall, and a giant marble foot in the basement. She deposits another peanut into his hot palm—the hand closes fast, snaffling it to salty lips. From above, the party echoes, cries of amusement jabbing at her. She drags a strand of hair from under her beret, pulls it, straining the roots, her neck stiffening, jaw clenched against the pain.
The five-year-old reaches into her dress pocket. She squeezes him around the middle, trying to mimic Bear’s rough cuddles, almost tight enough to crack a rib. “You saved me,” she tells him, nose to Pinch’s ear.
Confused, the boy pushes back, looking at his snipped tie.
Rebuffed, Natalie takes out that unlit cigarette, holds it out as if for a waiter—then crushes it, sprinkling tobacco in the fountain, brown threads bobbing on the frothy surface. “Don’t worry,” she tells Pinch. “Your father will get here soon. He’ll save you soon enough.”
4
Bear’s studio was once a grain depot at the walls of a sixteenth-century prison, but today is a cave of a workshop, dingy because Bear prefers it that way, seeking extremes of shadow in his paintings. It’s also where they live, Natalie having first posed on the drapery at the back, then moved in, now raising their son here. The only sources of illumination are three scorching metal spotlights that Bear picked up from a props guy at Cinecittà, plus whatever daylight sneaks through the iron door. When it swings open late one Sunday morning in December, Bear stands there, fresh from his favorite bakery near Campo de’ Fiori, which he visited after a late night out.
“Hello, my reptiles,” he calls to them, lobbing a warm bignè toward his wife and another to the comic-reading Pinch, who fails to catch it, stumbling from bed to chase the bouncing pastry, which skitters down the paint-spattered stone floor. Bear quicksteps over and captures the custard-filled treat in a snatch, slapping it into his son’s hand, then flopping onto the boy’s narrow bed, the crunch of comic pages underneath. Grinning, Pinch stands by, stuffing in bignè, allowing Dad to poke him playfully in the ribs.
Before all this commotion, Natalie was enjoying a rare tranquil morning to work on her own art. She persists with her efforts but this proves challenging, especially with Bear now tickling Pinch, who shrieks and rushes off, only to return for more, giggling madly. Natalie preps clay, lines up sponges and turning tools and scrapers, fills her battered wooden bucket with fresh water from the drinking fountain outside, and plonks it by the potter’s wheel. She massages her neck, imagining sculptural forms, clay squeezed into mad shapes, lunatic glazes slapped on—what I want to make. Am I capable?
Turning from her two males, she kicks the potter’s wheel into action, willing its motion to spur theirs. Bear promised to take their son to the Christmas fair in Piazza Navona today. Has he forgotten? Stomach tensed, she centers a lump of wet clay, hearing them horsing around, hunting missing socks and orphaned shoes. But gradually, Natalie grows beguiled by the wheel’s rotations and the shape rising under her hands. She torques around, a beseeching gaze at her husband.
He raises his right hand, then hurries to the back of the studio, looking for something, dragging out a blank canvas on stretchers. “Stay how you are right now, Natty. That right there.”
“I was doing work,” she implores him. “Bear?” She clasps a beige sponge, which dribbles down her wrist. The potter’s wheel slows, off-kilter rotations chafing her inner thigh.
Bear apologizes as he circles Natalie, doing preliminary studies and contour drawings in a sketch pad, his charcoal stick cracking, carbon dust in the air. “Just a second. I swear. You’re too tempting—it’s your own goddamn fault!” he says as if joshing, but frowns, backing off, leaning in, alternating between her and the oversized canvas, whose front side he hasn’t marked but on whose back he wipes his hands, impressing black fingerprints and tobacco strings into the weft. He darts away to drop the gramophone needle. A record hisses, then wails. He needs a racket to work, a rhythm to his elsewhere thoughts. The jazz single lasts a few minutes, and he’s still laboring. Pinch crawls over, rowing both hands on the paint-thick crank of Dad’s portable Telefunken, cautiously lowering the diamond tip, which undulates over the wonky 78, one of a stack of records Bear purloined from the Armed Forces Radio Service during the war. Hiya, fellas. This is Gene Krupa. My trio and I are going to knock out a little jazz for you on this V-disc. A ruffling drumroll, vamping piano, hooting sax.