The Italian Teacher(32)
For her introductory lesson, Pinch arrives at a Hungarian diner on Bloor, greeted by the whiff of stewed meat and paprika. He sits at a window table and watches the waitstaff sail about. A cook’s hand juts through the kitchen cubbyhole, thrusting forth a bowl of steaming goulash. Pinch looks outside, picking at a sticker on the window. From the other side, a tapping: her chewed fingernail.
To begin, he explains basic Italian grammar. But she grows impatient. “Yes, I get that part.” Her chair screeches back and she moves to another table, not asking his opinion, although she’s right: It was drafty by the door. A half hour later, she ends the lesson with equal brusqueness, and Pinch is left with his cooling crimson soup. He takes this lesson to be their last. But Barrows solicits another. He accepts every further invitation, no matter how ill-timed. And gradually, he comes to know her, even identifies a frailty, the first he’s discerned in Barrows. Languages: She has no ear for them.
“You can’t hear the double consonant?”
“It’s the same sound!” she insists.
“It’s not. Listen: freddo. Not: fredo.”
“Why can’t I get this?”
By their next lesson, she has labored at “freddo” for hours—she does not accept blundering twice. Still, she hears no difference. When he reads aloud a passage from Vasari, she says, “I’ll never say a single phrase of Italian like that. I hate you, Charles.”
That night in bed, when he is poring over Les Mots et les Choses by Michel Foucault, his door creaks open again. “What color pajamas?” she asks.
He wriggles up in bed. She approaches his bedside table, turns off the banker’s lamp: blackness. “You could say any color now.” A bedspring squeaks where she sits.
Pinch—willing his eyes to adjust—fumbles for the light chain, but touches her knee instead. “Sorry,” he says, pulling back. But she doesn’t retreat. He reaches out again, returning his fingers there.
“Still just a knee,” she tells him.
“I can’t see what I’m doing,” he says, raising his arm. “This?” He rests his fingertips on her collarbone, the heel of his hand against her chest, which sets his own to thumping. He draws her closer, thumb parting her blouse, top button straining in its eyelet. In darkness, he cannot see whom he kisses, which intensifies the sexual blur—until a half hour later his bedside light clicks on, cigarette smoke rising under the bulb, and he is altered, amazed that this is he and that is she: Barrows, undressed on his bed. And that’s what her body looks like, and her slender hand atop his sheet, the chipped polish on her nails. He just kissed those fingers; he’d be allowed to do so again now. She rolls over, sighing peacefully, the softness of her backside against his bare hip. Only his pajama top remains on. She casts back her long chestnut hair, which cascades ticklishly over his face. He blinks through the strands, inhaling the scent of rose-patchouli shampoo and the distant musk from between her thighs.
After that night, Barrows and Pinch become a combined force, the stars of their program, already talking of where they’ll live together in New York next year when doctoral students at NYU. Marsden fades into the background, his views on art silly, conceived chiefly to shock. And rarely does Pinch call his father anymore. As for the weekly calls with Natalie, he keeps missing them, stung with guilt when he thinks of it. Everything is moving at rocket speed: He and Barrows roaring through final assignments, reading voraciously when not talking voraciously, finalizing proposals, consulting prospective PhD advisers—not to mention nightly beer and pretzel sessions at the Blue Cellar Room, and morning sex that erases every other consideration.
Pinch lies awake before dawn, her warmth nestled into his. Blips of disbelief pass through him that she finds him kissable. Her roommates let it be known that Pinch is a puzzling choice—balding and decked out like a high school math teacher, so shy as to appear witless. But her priority is a man intelligent enough to keep up. And it doesn’t hurt that he cooks Italian.
He places before her a plate of osso buco. “This,” she says, “is the life.”
“I just realized. You don’t want a man, you want a servant.”
“That’s not fair.” Tasting, a long mmm, devilish smile. “Why can’t I have both? A man servant. Or how else am I to get anything done?”
They hardly consume that meal, however, because the phone rings. It’s her pregnant roommate, screaming. Barrows takes control of the situation, flagging down a taxi on Harbord Street and dragging Pinch along to help. On arrival at the hospital, Pinch questions the expectant mother in a show of vast ignorance about premature labor. But this is what Barrows wanted him for: to help distract the petrified mother until her twenty-year-old husband reaches the maternity ward.
Upon the breathless arrival of the prospective father, a nurse tries to calm him: “Don’t look so worried, my dear. Once the baby arrives, you’ll fall in love.”
“Hopefully with the baby,” Barrows quips, earning a stifled laugh from Pinch, a frown from the nurse.
On their way out, Barrows grabs Pinch’s hand, slaps it to her hip. They proceed down the hospital corridor, her flank purposely bumping against him every second step. “Wondering if I could suggest something,” he says.
“I’m all ears.”
“Go to bed with me?”