The Italian Teacher(46)
Before this, he never took much interest in her pottery, so she never gave him any. Now he owns it all. Picking up one of her recent ceramic sculptures, he holds it under varied light, wary of doing it harm—his limbs don’t feel wholly under his control lately. He envisages releasing the piece, watching it fall ever so slowly, smashing fast. He rests it on the floor alongside the others and lies beside them, watching her ceiling, hearing neighbors’ footsteps, listening to her darkness falling.
He turns on a lamp and surveys the pottery forest. Her sculptures are not as he imagined, not quirky and disordered. (“They’re mashed lumps of clay, Pinchy,” she said last summer. “Gestural craziness from your crazy mother.”) He presses his fingers hard into his throat, recalling that meeting, understanding it now as their last. These sculptures are not as she described—they’re elegant arcs, the clay raw on one side, glazed on the reverse, slashed in stone green and pebble blue, each piece hand-built, eerily smooth, frail.
None of her works will sit in a museum, he knows. Natalie, toiling through the night, or building slow pieces at her solitary workshop, or looking at him from her potter’s wheel in Rome—she was disregarded, and will remain so forever, among the billions whose inner lives clamor, then expire, never to earn the slightest notice. What reason is there to care about any art if nobody but I will ever care about these?
Cecil agrees to store the pottery that Pinch is unable to transport back to America. “Even without a funeral,” Pinch says by phone to his mother’s friend, “it’d be good to see you again.”
“We must do that. In person one day.”
Pinch wishes the old potter would invite him to Brighton. Cecil was her sole friend in this country. There is only silence on the phone line. “I feel that I need to talk about her,” Pinch adds, “with someone who knows her. Knew her. Another time.”
“I shall look forward to it, Charles.”
Toward week’s end, Pinch finally fills the rubbish bags, all in a hurry, trying not to view the contents, throwing in her bifocals; clay-streaked jeans and ragged Tshirts; an unfinished Iris Murdoch novel, her place marked with a ticket stub from a concert of Schumann piano sonatas on the night of her death, before she returned to this quiet room, hearing nothing beyond herself. On this same floor, she lay, tied a plastic bag over her head. He shuts his eyes. Plastic sucked in at each breath.
Outside, he lowers the rubbish into the metal bins with utmost care. But he can’t leave it. He stands in place, mind stalled until a stranger passes and nods. Pinch nods back and returns inside, her purple-silk bifocals ribbon saved in his pocket.
39
Pinch returns to Evenlode with three pots (an early Natalie fruit bowl, a tea mug, a ceramic sculpture). He offered to send a few pieces to Ruth, but she was too upset to accept. When he informed her of Natalie’s death, the line cut—she just put down the receiver. He called back, and she was shouting, too distraught to hear. “She wouldn’t do this! She would not do this!” The line went dead again.
Back at Evenlode, Pinch resumes his studies, coasting numbly down the path to a doctorate. In the department, he agrees to any request, whether it’s attending wine tastings or teaching freshman Italian classes. He acts cordial as a buffer against damage. During dinner parties, he looks directly at strangers, as he hasn’t easily done since before puberty—yet his gaze is bland now, matched with bland smiles, never the slightest dispute, gaining him a reputation on campus as an insubstantial man.
Toward the end of that first academic year, he travels to Manhattan by train, needing to see Barrows. For hours, he crisscrosses Central Park, glancing over his shoulder for muggers, almost wanting one, which would excuse him from stepping foot inside the Institute of Fine Arts. But there is no mugger, only a drug pusher in bug-eye sunglasses and crop top football jersey watching him, plus couples bounding past in tracksuit tops and white shorts, part of the jogging craze. Distracted by watching the runners pound by, he realizes why he traveled here: He wants to tell Barrows about his mother and the inescapable image of Natalie on the floor in her London flat, which flashes through him during faculty gatherings.
If he tells Barrows, it’ll sound like a bid for pity. Perhaps it is. He never even introduced them—if they had met, Pinch could justify approaching her with the news. But he was ashamed of Natalie. He halts. “I’m movin’ here, dodo!” a runner barks, thudding past. Instantly, Pinch’s pulse is fluttering, as if he’d been threatened with violence. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, reminded that he has nothing to offer Barrows. He tucks his head down and returns to the train station.
In his second year at Evenlode, Pinch speaks rarely to his father, unable to deal with Bear’s ego or to sustain throwaway remarks about Natalie. Pinch passes nights in the company of Martina, an Argentine grad student of comparative literature. A left-wing activist back home, she left Buenos Aires when the military took over, and she struggles with the American college lifestyle. After six months together, Pinch mentions Natalie’s death, stating for the first time that both his mother and his grandfather took their lives. He sees her thinking: You too? Instead, she says, “Only happy words in this room.” Things happened to her back home, and she cannot tolerate others’ sorrows. He is with her to speak Spanish, to drink wine (even if she’s the one doing the serious drinking), to sleep together sometimes—the pretense of connection.