The Italian Teacher(49)
“You had further questions? About Natalie?”
“I feel,” Pinch begins, “I have this feeling that what happened with her involved me. In some way.” Unable to look across the table, he gives a forced laugh.
“Oh, it’s madness.”
“What I said?”
“What she did. You can’t dwell on it.”
“That’s all I can do.”
Cecil wriggles higher in his seat, as if to signal an end to melancholy talk. “Tell me: What news of the great Bear?”
Pinch wants anything but to speak of his father. Cecil launches into reminiscences of that charming meal together in Rome, declaring himself awfully grateful to Bear for having bought that vast electric kiln at the cottage—not to mention having later taken the entire property off his bankrupt hands. “And he’s as productive as ever, is he? And still represented by the Petros Gallery? Very fashionable place. How is Bear’s press? Journalists must be a bore.”
“Dad holds his own.” Why, Pinch wonders, must I reflexively puff my father? Has a single reporter approached my father in years? When one of Bear’s early paintings came up at a minor auction house last year, the lot went unsold.
“But how,” Cecil persists, shaking the last drop of tea into his mouth, “how would you say his work is selling?”
Pinch rambles about the scarcity of museum acquisitions since the oil crisis, how private galleries care only about selling wall meat to financiers these days, and corporations are busy bejeweling their headquarters with slabs of Jasper Johns, Diane Arbus, Modigliani.
“Yes, yes,” Cecil resumes, “but what does a good Bavinsky go for today?”
Pinch is taken aback. Why should Cecil, who chose a poor man’s trade, lust at the pornography of another man’s wealth? Perhaps because Cecil took the noble path, finding only hunger at its end. An artist’s noble vision isn’t enough, Pinch realizes. You must succeed. And he reads the old potter before him with plunging clarity—that only manners brought Cecil here.
“Looks like the rain is stopping,” Cecil remarks. Shortly, he stands, shakes hands, pays up. Pinch watches the waxed Barbour coat stride away for good. This cherished artist—requiring only his tools, caring nothing for the world’s wants—he doesn’t exist. Perhaps no such person ever has.
Readying to leave the café himself, Pinch glimpses himself reflected in the window, mud on his shoes, caked up the hem of his corduroys. Cecil was the last person to view him, so that man’s impression holds sway: the son of my sad Canadian friend, an unattractive boy, testing my courtesy, so ferociously wanting something—wanting someone.
41
Pinch awakens with a start, breathing heavily, shaking off another nightmare about poverty. For years, he subsisted with the help of his grandmother, scholarships, teaching stipends. But he moved to London with scant savings, no job, no friends—and the expectation that Cecil would somehow resolve it all. Instead, Pinch has rent payments upcoming and a fast-dwindling bank account.
London itself seems harsher than he left it, with a thin surface of civility covering deep pools of aggression. During his decade away, there were race riots and power cuts, IRA bomb threats, everyone going on strike, from the gravediggers to the bakers to the hospital staff. The bad-tempered ripples persist, with Mrs. Thatcher pointedly extolling those who succeed, those with a ferocity for profit and the sharp elbows to achieve it—much the traits that Pinch lacks. Wandering around his neighborhood, he walks slowly, apprehensively. Then crossing the street, he must hurry across the roadway as drivers hurtle murderously toward him, perfectly willing to maim a stranger to make a point about the rules. Even the kids in polyester school uniforms disconcert him, marauding down the high streets, shrieking out as if to raise two fingers at the plodding grown-ups whom they must someday become.
Pinch will not ask for money from Ruth or Bear. He sends copies of a speculative letter to art history departments across southern England and Wales. Nobody responds. Checking the master copy of that letter, Pinch sees with mortification that he professed himself “moist grateful” for their consideration. And they moist certainly grant him none.
As a stopgap measure, he takes freelance work translating technical documents. The pay is low and tallied by the page, so he must work from first light, forking drippy fried egg between his lips, scanning his daily allotment. By dinner, he has done twelve hours, his only human contact the sound of footsteps from the flat above. When he bumps into those neighbors outside the building, he greets them with inflated cheer, hoping to precipitate a conversation. They nod, smile briefly, keep walking. So Pinch must take his companionship more stealthily, eavesdropping when on the Underground. He lingers amid the pub-leaving throng at a local chippie, handling a newspaper cone of breaded cod, drizzle-painted with tomato sauce, the malt vinegar wrinkling cryptic crosswords and editorials damning the miners.
By far his closest relationship is with the Bengali clerks at Imperial Foods, which he visits for pipe tobacco and Maltesers—all his daily pleasures and most of his meals derive from there. He chats with shelf-stockers, restores products misplaced by other customers, commiserates after a skinhead smashes the window and calls them “fackin’ Pakis,” which is geographically incorrect, Pinch notes, in addition to being disgusting.
When a new cashier is hired, Pinch makes his status at the shop known to her, asking after the owner by name. As she packs his items, the paper bag tips, a misshapen grapefruit lolloping down the checkout lane. He tosses it in the air (muffing the catch) and reads the name tag—“Julie M”—pinned to her orange jumper. She is distracted, and takes a pen from her apron, notes something in her palm. At the exit, Pinch pauses. “What did you write before? I’m just curious.”