The Italian Teacher(5)



“Did you fight him?”

“What do you take me for? I’ve seen how that guy rearranges faces!”

She grinned at that, cheeks burning, looking a smidgen too long. It was hard not to stare. The famous are compelling up close, like big game.

A waiter in bow tie and waistcoat arrived, his eyebrows raised at her.

Natalie hadn’t considered the menu—come to think of it, she hadn’t seen one.

“Me, a piatto di Gillardeau oysters,” Bear interceded, to buy her time. “Then rigatoni alla amatriciana, and the roast vitello with that mushroom sauce. As for liquids, what are you selling in the way of vino rosso? Something we can wade through; surprise us.” The waiter nodded humbly and swiveled back to Natalie, hanging over her like a bat.

She felt a fool to replicate Bear’s order, as if broadcasting that she had no ideas of her own. So she delayed, a blush spreading up her chest. She glanced at other diners’ choices, her toes curling under the table. “I’m keeping everyone waiting.”

“Everyone who?” He beckoned her closer for a little friendly advice. “Would it offend you, my new friend, if I had them bring you what I got? You won’t regret it. Best dishes in the place. That’s a promise.”

So they took the same meal, and Natalie raved about each plate, eager to affirm the senior artist’s wisdom. She matched him in glasses of Barbaresco too, the room growing warmer, louder. When the roast veal arrived in thick dry slices, Bear pointed to a shared gravy boat. She dripped a dot of this sauce at the edge of her plate—after which Bear deluged his meat, the steaming porcini sauce oozing everywhere.

“There are folks that drip their gravy to one side,” Bear commented, “and there are folks that pour it right over everything.”

“I’m always worried about ruining what I already have,” Natalie said. But the truth was more complicated. Sometimes she had lurched into rash decisions, and suffered regret—the kind that deepens, its pang worsening over time. This defect made Bear especially appealing: His cavalier style safeguarded her; he emboldened Natalie to try. So, she upturned that gravy boat right over her own meat, watching him. He reached out, touching her cheek with fondest familiarity—for the sauce was all gone but for one drop, which hung off the lip of the inverted crockery, straining to fall.

In Natalie’s life, few men had touched her face with romantic intent, typically during civilized conversation, when a fellow’s lips smushed clumsily into hers, his eyelids ardently shut, hers fluttering. But Bear was different—not a schoolboy in Montreal, nor one of the self-serious chappies from art college in London. She wasn’t even panicking this time, though her pulse raced. It was as if she had walked onto a property and knew uncannily: This is my home. This is where I’ll live.

Claiming a need for the ladies room, she stood, feeling the booze as she edged across the raucous dining area, shifting her broad hips at each red calico tablecloth, all presided over by Italian businessmen, many pausing to ogle the foreign girl. Natalie kept her gaze down, stepping over napkins and toothpicks, her eyes smarting from the rising cigarette smoke. Outside, she inhaled deeply, the sanpietrini cobblestones rubbery under her heels. She walked fast around that small piazza, halting at the limestone facade of a church, against which she pressed her overwarm face—only to leap in fright when a bicycle juddered past, its rider gesticulating to his fiancée on the back as they trundled by a torn movie billboard. Under the restaurant awning, a hangdog waiter waited, surveying her.

Does he see that I don’t fit here?

When Bear was busy tangling with Pablo, she was still in high school, a pretender even there, unable to tell anyone about home, where her father was sick, and worsening. In Natalie’s mid-adolescence, her father shot himself in the face. He survived, disfigured, nursed upstairs, his moans coming from that room. Back then, she confided this only once, to her high school art teacher, Mr. Fontaine, a failed sculptor who introduced her to abstract art and to pottery. “Could there be abstract pottery, Mr. Fontaine?” she inquired, when they were alone in a classroom after school. He answered by thrusting his tongue into her mouth, edging her hand to his groin. Behind his smock was the dusty blackboard, marked from a history class, obliging her to read “The Diet of Worms” throughout that jerky first sex act, after which Mr. Fontaine slumped and tucked in his shirt, treating her frigidly ever afterward.

Standing tipsily in the piazza, she experienced a surge of vindication: I’m in Europe, dining with a proper artist. She glared at the hangdog waiter, causing him to slink back inside. Legs wonky, she strode toward the restaurant. A painter who will go down in history is waiting for me. Right this instant. She covered her mouth, saying to her hand: “I’m an artist.”

As she entered the dining room, Bear summoned her urgently. Red-cheeked, she settled across from her future, ignoring the fresh boat of gravy but daring under the table to touch his hand.





6


She has been posing for hours, listening to that same jazz record. “Bear, I can’t.” Words struggle from her throat. Minutes more pass—until he throws his paintbrush across the studio floor, threads of ultramarine spitting, causing Pinch to leap from the gramophone.

Bear kicks his easel, which shakes, and he wipes his hands on a discarded Herald Tribune. He leads Natalie from her potter’s wheel, around his canvas, so that she may finally view the portrait: the paint thick and wet and glossy, scratched off in parts by his fingernails, a convulsion of colors. The image is enlarged almost to abstraction, yet it is distinctly her: just hands, nothing more, her fingers knotted as when she speaks, fearing herself dull, fraudulent. And he sees that.

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