The Italian Teacher(44)
“If she didn’t tell you, I can’t.”
“Did she leave for New York?”
“I’m not in a position to tell you that information.” The door closes.
Pinch is back in his living room, clutching the briar pipe as tightly as possible, as if to crack the wood. In his other fist, he holds a set of keys from the cottage that he forgot to return, clasping them so the metal cuts into his palm. He extends his arm, gazes down it, measuring proportions, suddenly behind an easel in the Roman art studio, his paintbrush moving, its course seeming to precede his intent for an instant. He bites the pipe bit as if to crack his teeth, then searches for a Latin textbook, running through vocabulary lists, which strangely soothe him. He looks around. Could take a coach to New York, find her at the department. What would my argument be? I need you. That’s not a case; that’s a difference of opinions. “Whatever you like,” he says aloud, addressing Barrows across the empty living room. “But this is a mistake.” For me. Not for anybody else.
Soon, tenants will arrive at his house. He always pledged to leave upon finishing his studies. To go where? Pinch covers his eyes, wanting to erase himself. In agitation, he phones directory assistance to track down the number of the Institute of Fine Arts in New York then asks the secretary there how to reach an incoming doctoral candidate. They won’t pass on private details like that. “You’re not hearing my point!” He slams down the phone, telling the receiver: “Listen to what I’m saying!” He starts a letter to Barrows. But there was never any changing her mind.
He resumes his pacing, hemmed in by moving boxes. How can you be trapped by a future that hasn’t happened? He studies the wall, then hammer-fists his stomach, wincing at each blow. He is saturated with hatred for someone who has nothing to do with this: Temple Butterfield, a fake who is far more consequential, far more important, far more successful than Natalie, than Pinch ever could be. CalArts accepted an idiot like him. It’d have to admit someone like me. How hard could admission be? Very hard, Pinch imagines.
He marches into the bedroom that belonged to Marsden. He needs his friend here. The last report was that he’d moved to Los Angeles as a studio assistant to Temple. Pinch tracks down a fellow member of Marsden’s college entourage and learns the full account. Apparently, Temple made a video piece, Fairy Dust, featuring Marsden yapping to a fixed camera about various seedy affairs, childhood gripes, vitriol toward his family—punctuated by cocaine snorts and campy tears, all edited in jump cuts with the goal of a laugh riot. Studio International called Temple’s venture into video art both “freakily hilarious” and “deadly serious,” noting that its subject was “a real person” whose father was a member of the Canadian Parliament. In Ottawa, the Right Honorable Brian McClintock was shown excerpts of the film, which outed Marsden, prompting much of his family to disavow him. When Marsden returned to Toronto, he was ostracized even by his gallery friends there, owing to bitchy on-camera remarks mocking the Canadian art scene, calling it “easily a decade behind.”
Reached by phone, Marsden sounds suspicious to hear from Pinch, yet agrees to a drink at the St. Charles Tavern. He arrives forty minutes late—hair platinum blond now, a hoop earring—and with two older friends: a mustachioed fiftysomething antiques dealer with mahogany tan, and a veiny muscleman in a lime tank top who keeps massaging his neck to banish a kink. These two stare through Pinch, swiveling around for cuter guys, then visit the bathroom to snort a few lines. Marsden, froggish eyelids fluttering, gazes across the table.
“I’ve heard the whole Temple story,” Pinch assures him. “I wondered if you might like a little commiseration.”
“And here you are to provide it. Just after the nick of time,” Marsden says. “I assume you came to boast about something.”
“The reverse. Barrows and I broke up. My doctoral applications went nowhere. I’ve got to leave the house soon and have no idea where I’ll go. I haven’t told my parents any of this. I’m kind of spinning downhill. My only hope is some obscure fellowship that I applied for because of a pushy professor. So, no: not here to boast.” He picks at a beer mat. “I’d actually just like to erase all this.”
“All what?”
“All the things I’ve misplayed. I’m sorry, by the way,” Pinch inserts tensely, unable to make eye contact, clearing his throat. “I’d erase whole parts of me. Throw them off a building. Throw myself off a building.”
“Oh, please,” Marsden says, standing in disgust. “Please.” He turns his back and joins his friends in the bathroom.
Heart thudding, Pinch holds still, humiliated. He stuffs a few dollars under the ashtray and takes a dozen steps along Yonge Street, fixing all attention on his feet to snuff out the shame. Someone calls his name. He turns, orienting to Marsden’s voice.
“Jumping off a fucking building?” Marsden shouts, standing in the barroom door. “You are never doing something that stupid.”
“I know.”
“You’re not allowed,” Marsden says, choking up. “Okay? Because I said. Okay?” He pushes back inside the tavern, vanishing in there, lost in darkness for years more.
Evenlode, Pennsylvania, 1976
38
Quakers founded Evenlode College almost a century before, but by the time Pinch arrives, little of that peaceable sect remains except in the name of varsity teams, The Quakes, whose furry mascot, Temblor, is everywhere on campus—sweatshirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, many of them themed with Stars and Stripes in this year of the American bicentennial.