The Italian Teacher(53)
“Charlie, I got so much studying ahead. You know that.”
“Yes. Fine,” he responds, hurt now. “I thought you wanted them.”
“Don’t put me on trial here.”
“But you said that. No?”
“Can’t I change my mind?”
“Then why did we marry?”
“When do I have time to do anything, even to breathe?”
“Can’t we breathe on weekends?”
She doesn’t laugh. Neither does he.
After this trip, they have sex less often. Each interruption to fetch contraception has become a weighted minute. Often they don’t resume. Julie has taken a step away from him, which makes him step forward, which causes her to back off once more—a two-step that becomes more strained as the months pass.
“You were on the phone forever,” he complains.
“Why do you hate it when I speak to friends?”
“Talk to anyone you like. Just, I thought we were going to watch something on TV. Forget it, Jules. Could you be quiet coming to bed?”
“Always am.”
But he doesn’t leave. “Meet me under the covers?”
“I’m doing homework, Charlie.”
“Homework so pressing that you talked for two hours with Ben.”
“That wasn’t two hours. And what makes you think it was Ben?”
“Wasn’t it?” he says, despising himself.
She and her ex-husband remain close—they grew up together, and you don’t forget that. He stopped drinking recently and is going through a vulnerable patch. When those two speak, Pinch hears her Geordie accent strengthening, her laughter echoing from the other room, the lights off in there. When he walks in, flicking on the lamp, she looks elsewhere, with reddest joyful cheeks.
He and Julie squabble nowadays, and they never used to. It’s as if he were prodding for something—her ardor, her desire—that cannot come from pushing. When she suggests that he take a break from gray London, that he visit his father’s cottage in France, it leads to their umpteenth quarrel.
“I’m not angry. But please, Jules, stop advising me. Okay?”
“I’m not advising you. And what’s so bad if I did?” she says. “Your father would let you stay. And you’d do well with a break, rather than stuck inside this flat all day, translating rubbish about calculators.”
“It’s a computer manual. But thanks for the condescension.” He adds, “Maybe both of us could go.” He turns away fast, filling the kettle.
“I can’t, Charlie. Can’t.”
“You could practice for your French class.”
“France couldn’t save the likes of me. Some brains don’t absorb foreign languages.”
“Not true.”
“Actually, you should be a teacher.”
“What is the point here, sending me off to my Dad’s place?” he says, voice raised, wavering. “Getting me out of your hair? If I don’t want to go, I’m not going.”
“Just thought it’d be nice for you.”
“I can decide what’s nice for me. Okay?” He looks at her, his future deforming: disinvited from her body, from shared old age, from nicknames of convoluted origin. “Jules, we are not at the end.”
She makes the tea.
He grabs a ballpoint pen, takes her hand, opens the palm, writes there. She reads it, looks up: “Can’t, Charlie. I’m sorry. I don’t feel that way.”
With hideous clarity, Pinch sees himself: a pompous bore, a man he’d dislike. And he perceives the approaching solitude, closing around him. They both see it.
45
Pinch moves out and rents himself a second-floor flat in a scruffy terraced house in Earls Court. Within days, he is shocked awake—workmen erecting scaffolding over the front windows of all four rental flats, replacing daylight with metal poles and tranquillity with radio blare. He hides in the back bedroom, doing translations far from the workers’ banter—and also to prevent them from seeing him. He’s ashamed to stay inside all day without a single visitor.
Each evening the building regains its quiet. He broods over Julie, stabbed by perceived humiliations, loathing his pettiness. He lies in bed, unable to sleep, beleaguered by thoughts. I, the same person hearing these gurgling pipes, will die. I’ll be dead for infinity. His mouth goes dry, palms clammy. He needs to squirm, to run outside. He remains still, breast shivering at each heartbeat. Someday I’ll hear nothing, see nothing. I’ll be erased like a floppy disk. Before then, I’m imprisoned in this skull. “You won’t go away.”
He reaches for the phone, dialing Bear. The call is brief—immediately, he perceives Dad’s impatience at his low state. Pinch puts down the receiver, hearing his own breaths, sensing blips of distress. He gains perverse relief visualizing himself hanging there from the ceiling. After Natalie died, he wrote a long letter to Ruth, an affectionate essay about his mother. She never responded. Nobody bothers to respond to me. I’m bitter. Bitter about everything.
Pinch needs to hear another voice, any besides his own. As soon as Birdie picks up, he hears himself acting, matching her flippancy, skipping lightly over his separation from Julie, seeking reports on the extended family, including the siblings and cousins of whom Pinch is scarcely aware. Birdie herself is still in Durham, North Carolina, working part time at a veterinary clinic while looking after three kids with her husband, Riley, who served three tours in Vietnam and now runs his own construction company. Birdie is on the Left (the “Mondale/Ferraro ’84” lawn sign is definitely hers), and he’s far to the Right (the “Reagan/Bush” sign is assuredly his). She cares for pets and livestock; he cares for nails and rebar. Their differences were once a source of flirty heat. But now that it comes to raising kids, the sardonic exchanges don’t end up in bed. Worse, his father’s bullying, which Riley always spoke of despairingly, has become his own tyranny exacted on the household. As for Birdie’s father, she is still raging at him. Bear flat out refuses to produce signed sketches for her—it’d be like printing money, she says. If he helped, she could leave Riley. Instead, she must keep her mouth shut and wait until the kids move out, which is years away.