The Italian Teacher(58)
Pinch walks around London unnoticed as ever. But for the first time, it feels like a choice, not evidence of failure. Nobody knows what I am in secret, what I’ve done. In Hyde Park, he looks benevolently at groups picnicking on hairy wool blankets, splashing wine and conversation. Previously he hated the showy joy of strangers. Now he’d like to fit among such people. And perhaps will. He has a plan, and is thrumming to start.
On his first day of the new job, Pinch steps past a knot of cigarette-puffing students outside the Utz language school, remembering the steps to lecture halls in Toronto. And it occurs to Pinch, perhaps for the first time, that he isn’t a young man anymore.
This branch of the Utz chain is in Bloomsbury, a location calculated to harvest British Museum visitors after they’ve goggled at the plundered treasures of an empire shrunken territorially, expanding linguistically. The bulk of trade is teaching English to foreigners, but Utz also offers German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian—this final option employing Pinch, who will conduct classes by evening, private tutorials each afternoon.
Back at Evenlode, he taught an introductory Italian course, working off a rigid college syllabus. Yet Utz demands that its teachers not simply instruct but entertain. Consider yourself a cruise ship performer, one administrator told him. Some classrooms resound with sing-alongs, but Pinch’s innovation is more sedate: an Italian-speaking-only policy in his classes intended to help pupils adjust to the sounds but that terrifies timid beginners, who sit there praying that he’ll call on anyone else.
At first Pinch’s classes flounder, students scowling, faith shifting to hostility. In some cases, he feigns a coughing fit and excuses himself to the staff toilets, where he hides in a stall, regaining composure. A single boneheaded student can undermine an entire two-hour session, as when Pinch asks Lower Intermediate to complete the sentence “Non ho mai . . .” (I have never . . .), and someone answers, “Non ho mai toccato una scimmia” (I have never touched a monkey), causing a pothead at the back to ramble about the monkey that resided at his parents’ commune. “I loved that monkey. His name was Ringo.”
“Solo italiano, ragazzi!” Pinch reminds them. “Allora, Karen, sei tu la prossima. Per favore, completa la frase: ‘Non ho mai . . .’”
“What sort of monkey?” another student says. “My favorite is chimps.”
“Chimps aren’t monkeys. They’re apes,” a third student notes.
“Italiano!” Pinch interjects. “Solo italiano, ragazzi!”
Certain sessions do work, and Pinch grows addicted to that: It’s like placing a child on a wobbly bike, pushing away anxiously—and she’s off! On occasion, everything proceeds so well that class ends too soon. They’d all happily continue, were it not for the Mandarin teacher, Jing, who takes the room next, addressing him in one whip-crack syllable, “Chars!,” as if to rebuke him for the travesty of his preposterous name, for the irrationality of English spelling.
A perk at Utz is that teachers may enroll in other courses for free. Pinch signs up for Advanced French, Advanced Spanish, and Intermediate German, sitting in each class with the textbook on his lap, stopping himself from answering the teachers’ every question. When Jing next evicts Pinch from his classroom, it stirs a thought, and he becomes the newest pupil in Introductory Mandarin.
Pinch considers with fresh sympathy his fellow commuters on the Tube, reading of TV programs or talking of wallpapering the kids’ room (but can we afford it?), of summer holidays (but can we afford it?), of schools (but can we afford it?). Arriving at work, he gabs with the janitors, who teach him phrases in Romanian. Then he marks assignments, pausing for lunch with fellow teachers or sneaking out for a stroll around the British Museum.
Dawdling before the Rosetta Stone, he contemplates a few attractive women he tutors, fantasizing about heedless affairs. At a novelty shop near Utz, he buys silly colored socks to wear in class—a conversation-starter perhaps, a wink to someone perceptive that he is not just a teacher here but something besides. On weekends, he prepares complex three-course meals, date-rehearsals at which he drinks a bit too much and eats a lot too much, scooping out a fourth helping of tortiglioni alla barbara and refilling his glass of rioja. “Don’t mind if I do,” he says aloud.
After a few months at Utz, he meets Julie for lunch, his satchel heaving with Chinese and German dictionaries. They must sign papers to finalize the divorce, and both intend to do so with civility. They’ve been in touch occasionally since he moved out, working through the shared paperwork. But this should be their last meeting. He imagined kissing her today; he even researched hotels around here.
Outside the restaurant, she greets him amicably, distantly, in a brown suit jacket with fierce shoulder pads, pleated trousers, silver hoop earrings. She graduates with her sociology degree soon, and he’d like to compliment her—to say, “You look so professional, Julie.” But he doesn’t want to intrude; often he feels she is stiff-arming him. Perhaps that’s fair. He was overbearing, always there with advice, knowledge, “help.”
They take a table at the PizzaExpress, which turns out to be an inappropriately peppy setting, a waiter swinging by to check in repeatedly, which forces them to fall quiet. Pinch longs to break her reserve, to reminisce about happily starving together when too poor to turn on the radiators, wearing socks and sweaters in bed. While she pages through documents, a strange thought passes through him, a counterfactual idea, that they did have a child together, a daughter, and she’s alive somewhere—that Pinch and Julie are still together in that place, not coupled awkwardly at this restaurant but seated at a dinner table in their kitchen in Belsize Park, the three of them.