The Italian Teacher(30)
“Dad, I know about your new art going only to museums. But maybe you should rethink that. If you let a few go privately again, might that—”
“The market is a sewer. It needs to be there, but don’t make me go look. Okay?”
“No, you’re right. Remember that absolute shit we saw at the Petros Gallery? I never witnessed such worthless junk in my life.”
“Charlie, every piece from that show—every piece—is worth more than anything I ever did.”
“It won’t last.”
“Says?”
“Hey, Dad, I’ve been meaning to tell you something—this idea I’ve been playing at. Pretty much my whole university career actually.” His hands get clammy, mouth dries out. “Just, obviously, I’m a nobody now. But I had this idea, Dad: how I could become a professor, and write books eventually.”
Bear takes a drag on his pipe, which prompts Pinch to relight his own, puffing hard.
“Pete’s sake, kiddo, finish your story!”
“So, okay, so I was planning something. That you concentrate on your painting while I get into academia. Eventually, I end up somewhere influential, in a position where I can affect opinions.” Stated aloud, the conspiracy sounds deluded to Pinch. He rushes toward the end, to mask his doubt. “If I got your art even a bit of what it deserves, that’d be worth a huge amount. To me. Or. Don’t you think? I know great art rises in due course. But maybe it can do with a lift sometimes.”
“Who said great art rises naturally?”
“That’s what I mean.” Gaining momentum, Pinch wonders if this might really be a good idea. “One can’t let idiotic criticism take its course, Dad. We’ve seen its course.” He opens his palm, as if pleading in court, the phone cord wrapped around his forearm, briar pipe gripped in his hand.
“Listen. Listen,” Bear interrupts, adding nothing, holding the floor, smoke audibly blown from his nostrils, Pinch able to imagine that gray cloud twisting around his beard. “Edvard Munch once said, ‘Paintings are my children—they’re all I got.’ But here’s what I say. You, Charlie boy, are a helluva man. I think the world of you. You know that? We got work ahead.”
“I could pull this off, you think?”
“We’re fighting the same war. Comrades at arms,” Bear responds. “So it’s back to work, I say. For the both of us.”
After placing down the receiver, Pinch opens the door to the bedroom balcony. He walks out there in his socks, which are instantly soaked and freezing. Breath clouds dissolve as he mutters in the various foreign languages he studies. He shoves a line of snow off the wooden balcony edge, the flakes glimmering as they sink before the streetlight glow. “I’m actually doing this. I’m going to do this.”
1975
27
She pulls the marked Latin exam from his hand and carries it away. “Hey! Hang on!” Pinch calls out, hurrying to catch up as she disappears down the stairs. “What are you doing?”
Even once they’re outside the building, Cilla Barrows—his main rival in the art history master’s program—hasn’t answered. But she does stop, scanning his answers while lazily chewing the collar of her burgundy roll-neck, the fringes of her suede jacket swishing. “Hold it up for me,” she says when Pinch reaches her.
“Hold my own exam for you?” But he does so.
She runs her hands through her hair, pulling it tightly back—looks painful—a deft twist into ponytail elastic, all while surveying his answers. She lights a long thin white cigarette and holds a loose lock of bangs under her nose, smelling it.
A recent arrival on campus, Cilla Barrows moves around with more consummate assurance (and a better sense of direction) than Pinch, even though he completed his entire undergrad here. Since their first master’s seminars, she has made herself known, standing over the classroom garbage can, sharpening pencils and peeling a grapefruit too, devouring it instead of a midday meal while making comments from the doorway, the professor so dumbfounded that he permits it. More than a few instructors have taken to delaying class for her arrival, shuffling papers, glancing down the hallway, until: “Oh, fine, here you are.” As for her comments, they’re well-reasoned and startling in equal measure, such as when she dismisses the oeuvre of Piero della Francesca.
“You’re ruining all my favorite artists,” a fellow student whimpered.
“You’d prefer to live in a dream world?” she replied.
The student’s crumpled expression suggested that, yes, she would.
Pinch, still displaying his exam for her, asks, “Why are you smelling your hair?”
“Expensive shampoo.” She holds out the strand for him to sniff, but he demurs.
“The university trustees would be thrilled that your scholarship money is going to cosmetics.”
“They’d be pleased to know that I steal this shampoo from my roommates,” she counters. “Scholarship money is strictly for cigarettes and whiskey. You beat me by two, bastard.”
“Ninety-three is still excellent.”
“Not as.” She lifts the corner of his exam to her mouth, bares her teeth, and bites it, giving a quiver of a smile that holds till she turns, striding away down the frosty sidewalk.