The Italian Teacher(4)
Bear mutters, mixing paints, his forehead creased, pebbled with sweat. He glowers at the blank canvas, teeth edges grazing.
“My clay is drying out,” she says.
“No, I’m done here.” But not quite. Almost. Nearly. He flings on colors with the palette knife, buttery oils trembling. He drags a hog-hair brush across the support, ferrule scratching the canvas raw. “I’m finished,” he reiterates yet is still working, with bare fingers now, fingernails raking the image. “Don’t move. I’m finished. No, wait.”
After the same record has played for the twenty-seventh time, Pinch prepares to drop the needle again, looking to his father for approval. Bear is occupied, cursing this bastard of a painting, especially when he achieves something sublime, as if it’s him against the picture and he just slipped something past his foe. He works on all parts of the painting at once, adjusting harmony, refining, obliterating—the pain of it being wrong, fucking wrong still. “A minute more, sweetie.”
She clutches her bare knees, shivering. (Bear never closed the front door.) A magnified part of her body takes form on the other side of the canvas, but she doesn’t know which—his sitters are never allowed to know, lest they become self-conscious and adjust.
Abruptly he halts, jotting something in the sketch pad. He tears out the page and summons Pinch, who is sent back to his mother with the folded note. She opens Bear’s letter, mailed from across the room: “To my Natty, loved more than paints can say.” What strikes her is that Bear signed it, his full name, underscored with a flourish.
“Bear, please.”
“Finishing up. Need you there one second. One more. Just.” His voice trails off, gaze alternating between her and his canvas, capturing something essential about her, and failing to hear one word.
5
Natalie was barely twenty, he nearing forty, when they met. It was July 1949, and Bear was browsing around a cramped art-supplies store near the Pantheon, searching for rabbit-skin glue. Natalie, in Rome that summer to study drawing, recognized him immediately, and with a flutter, because this man had been featured in newspapers. What was he doing here? Eavesdropping on his bungled attempts at the local language, she held her breath and stepped forth, addressing the clerk in French, which was as close as she got to Italian in those days. “Colle de lapin, peut-être?”
“You’re a magician,” Bear told her, scratching the thicket of his beard. “And you just earned yourself lunch.”
“For that?” she asked, unable to hold eye contact, wondering if he teased. These had been lonely weeks: a room rented at a convent where she pretended (with diminishing success) to be Catholic, and struggling through art classes conducted entirely in Italian.
“Young lady, I’ve fed people for less.”
“Lucky I didn’t do anything truly useful, or who knows what you’d owe me.”
“I’d be buying you dinner too, maybe breakfast besides. Alas, it’s only lunch for now. What say you? I’d tell you I could eat a horse, but one of these locals might hold me to my word.” He winked, twinkling at her.
Minutes later, Bear was leading her down a narrow, urine-scented Roman side street, laundry fluttering overhead, a tomcat scampering before them. The best lunch joint in the city lay straight ahead, he promised, his orotund American tones booming off the shadowed medieval walls that hemmed them in—until she emerged, dazzled by sunlight, on a tiny piazza, his promised restaurant across the way.
Bear chose a table in the far corner and queried Natalie about her art, listening with genuine curiosity, conferring with her as if before a venerable colleague. She sat on her sweaty hands, sliding down in the chair to diminish her height to match his, while slowing certain responses to imply gravity—only to lose nerve and rush out the line, as if she were ever scrambling up a heap of words that kept collapsing beneath her. For safety, she moved the discussion back to him.
Without airs, he recounted his dealings in the New York art milieu: quirky collectors, avaricious dealers, boldface-name artists she’d read about but whom he knew personally. In each story, he downplayed his role, as if he were a bumbler among the greats. At Franz Kline’s softball game, Bear struck out five times and chucked a ball at Harold Rosenberg, knocking out the critic’s tooth. “I was not asked back.” He drank homebrew cider at the de Koonings and threw up in their sink, earning the lifelong enmity of Elaine. When Bear visited Pollock’s barn in East Hampton, Jackson was drunk and threatened to “knock that wiseacre look off you.” He slapped Bear twice, left and right.
“Were you hurt?” Natalie asked.
“What people don’t realize about me is that I boxed in college,” Bear responded, smile forming. “Unfortunately, it was art college.”
She laughed, confidence rising. “Plenty of painters slapped you around, have they, Mr. Bavinsky?”
“Plenty would like to.” He explained that his paintings bothered that milieu. They scorned his jaunts around Europe, considering it hoity-toity that he dwelled in the pulverized Old Continent years after its most renowned artists had escaped to New York City, rendering that the capital of art, a metropolis suited to mammoth canvases and mighty brushstrokes.
“So the Europeans are more welcoming?”
“Not especially,” he admitted. “Pablo Picasso nearly took a swing at me one time.” At the time, Bear was in liberated Paris with a gaggle of fellow U.S. infantrymen, artistic souls stuck in uniform who called on the master’s atelier in Rue des Grand Augustins. “A pigeon is to blame, as so often it is,” Bear joked. “Nobody but the great man was to touch this pet of his. Certainly not some lowlife such as yours truly. But I’ll be darned if that bird didn’t up and land on my shoulder. Is it my fault? Poor Pablo was torn up with jealousy. Watching me stroke that bird, he gets hotter and hotter, finally shouting, ‘All yous, outta here!’ Or however they say that in French. He marched up, grabbed my lapel, and shoved me halfway to the door.”