The Italian Teacher(31)
28
Soon, Marsden has heard too much about Cilla Barrows, so he precipitates a meeting at the small library atop Sidney Smith Hall, where she works part time, collating prewar German art journals and alphabetizing yellowed leaflets on archeology. Within moments, he makes her laugh and lures her downstairs for a cigarette. It’s Marsden who bypasses her icicled first name in favor of “Barrows,” which pleases her because it evokes her parents, with whom she communicates rarely and opaquely. She is redeemed at the sound of their name, meaning her.
From an oil town in northern Alberta, Barrows was blessed in childhood by the proximity of an eccentric librarian who introduced her to the works of Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt. In high school, her education expanded further when several of her father’s friends made passes, proving themselves hairier versions of boys in her class, talking just as tediously about hockey and reckoning that any statement from her must be dubious. She toyed with a few grown men but disliked the results, including a memorable fistfight between two contenders, one’s hand slamming onto her icy windscreen, which didn’t shatter—ingenious engineering, she marveled, seated inside the vehicle, cratered glass inches from her face. She drove around the rutting males and resolved during a gentle black-ice skid that she would live in New York as an adult, never marry, and produce one daughter, her brainy accomplice. After the University of Alberta, Barrows proceeded to grad school in Toronto, where she shares a ramshackle house in the Annex with seven fellow Albertans.
Her budding friendship with Marsden—the first of many such bonds with urbane gay men—provides Pinch with close glimpses of Barrows. When he enters his living room, she is often there, drinking black coffee and smoking, with Songs of Leonard Cohen on the record player. She quizzes Pinch about deponent Latin verbs and presses him on comments made in seminar.
“When did you first know you were clever?” she asks him once, and Pinch bumbles out a nonanswer. He never considered himself clever until this instant. Thrilled, he wonders now.
Barrows—after a night of rye-and-Cokes with Marsden—excuses herself to the bathroom, then explores the house. Upstairs, she knees open a creaky door to a bedroom that, it transpires, contains a Latin speaker.
“Hey, I’m in here!” Pinch yelps.
“My apologies,” she replies, entering anyway, knocking on his door from the inside. She sits at the desk chair, her hands slid between the thighs of her flared jeans. “Are you gonna try to get me in?”
“In where?”
She points to his bed.
Pinch lies under a duvet, which he yanked to his neck upon her appearance. Below, he wears coral-red pajamas with white piping. “Convince you?” he stammers. “Why don’t you convince me?”
She pulls her hair back, eyebrows yanked higher. “Tell me something interesting. About yourself.”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
“I wear red pajamas.”
She smiles. “Right now?”
He juts a leg out from under the covers, flannel on display, his socked foot cold from nerves.
“You.” Pointing at him. “You are going places.” She smooths down her jeans and returns downstairs.
29
When Marsden flunks out of university, his politician father pulls strings for a position at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the errant son becomes a research assistant to the world’s leading expert on eighteenth-century Canadian schooner paintings. Oddly this fails to captivate Marsden, who drifts into employment at the Pilot Tavern, an artists’ bar in Yorkville. He and Pinch see less of each other, their schedules pulling apart, Marsden carousing till dawn, snoring as Pinch fries his morning eggs. They communicate via notes on the Frigidaire, each following the other’s day by plates in the sink.
When they do cross paths, it’s usually because of Barrows—Pinch is studying late and hears her voice. He tidies himself and makes an appearance, hastening gruffly past, as if motivated only by a need to fill his water glass from this particular faucet. “I’m a big drinker,” he notes, taking a gulp.
“Nobody drinks more water than I do,” Barrows responds.
“You are sorely mistaken there.”
His provocation sparks the water-drinking contest. The rules are as follows: Talk normally while matching each other glass for glass; whoever runs to the toilet first is the loser. After two gallons, Pinch rises, fake casual—then sprints. While peeing, he commends himself for not being competitive. But that’s untrue. It’s because he is competitive that Pinch concedes, just as he quit every sport he ever tripped through. To give up asserts that this contest doesn’t count, that the real battle is elsewhere—in his case, the war over taste. Because taste contains everything else, from morals to who you love to who you’ll vote for. And taste is a matter of life and death: One artist gains ground, another vanishes from the record. There’s only so much wall space. That’s Pinch’s battle. That is where he’ll triumph.
“Nobody drinks me under the table,” Barrows says. “What do I win?”
“Everlasting glory.”
“I’ll boast of it to my grandkids. In the meantime, Italian lessons?” She’s preparing doctoral applications and pondering a thesis on Sofonisba Anguissola, a student of Michelangelo deemed by Vasari to be the finest female artist of her time. Barrows hopes to get a book from it, but must read texts in the original. “So,” she concludes, “you get to be my teacher.”