The Italian Teacher(59)
“Quite straightforward, not too complicated,” he remarks about the typed page between them.
“Lucky,” she says, “that we never did have kids.”
“No, yes,” he says, signing fast. “Absolutely. Yes.”
49
As soon as the school holidays arrive he skips town, driving through France, windows down, air fluttering in, temperature rising as he travels farther south, cooling anew as he ascends into the Pyrenees. This time he informed Bear of the trip, priming him with concerns about burglars and squatters targeting seasonal properties. “I wouldn’t mind popping over to the cottage, making sure all’s well. You remember when I visited with Barrows? I stupidly walked away with an extra key! Just today, I happened across it in an old pair of corduroys. I could just let myself in, if you like.”
“A key to my studio?”
“No, no—we were only in the cottage, remember? It’s just a single key. But I can certainly try rattling the studio door, if you want. Make sure it’s secure.”
“Do that. Yes, fine—go, Charlie boy. Enjoy yourself.”
Fortunately, why Pinch might volunteer to spend his vacation at a remote cottage off-season is a question that never troubles Bear.
Upon arrival he goes directly to the studio, checking the damaged painting. Now that the canvas has dried, Pinch’s paint strokes blend in, the colors matching, except under closest view. And the retouched patch, considered without panic, isn’t that large. He sweeps up floor dust, rains it over the surface, abetting the impression of age, and rests the painting where it originally stood, restoring it to the historical record among the collected works of Bear Bavinsky.
Relieved, he settles in to the cottage, then drives off for food, and onward to Perpignan for art supplies. When he opens the studio again, he clutches a pile of enlarged street photos—those he snapped years before in Philadelphia. On blank canvases he sketches out the fuzzy characters in the background of shots—strangers who become his sitters during these days alone on the mountainside. Pinch begins each picture clenched with tension, any dab containing the presentiment of failure—and the soaring possibility of its opposite.
When he painted as an adolescent, Pinch replicated his father’s style (melded with Caravaggio, laughable as that seems now). Today he fumbles toward something of his own, negotiating color outward from a center point, tiny strokes, as if feeling through the void of each blank canvas. What marks his style is the deliberate inclusion of error: clots of red paint left untouched, black threads from hesitant bristles, stuttering lines in blue. From afar, faces emerge.
He finishes each session with aching shoulders and calloused hands, light-headed in the best way. He wonders what Natalie would’ve made of this—that he’s painting again as she always wanted. With a little wine in him, he amuses himself by leaving a picture in the easel and swinging open the door as if Dad were walking in, discovering it there. He plays through the scene, hardening himself to his father’s commentary: “You want to please, Charlie, and it feels that way.” Pinch imagines rejoinders, facts to decimate Bear: “You are so much less than you planned, Dad.” But even mouthing this cruelty hurts Pinch. He’d never wound his old man, which is what Bear is now—old and frailer, no matter how he conceals it, laboring to appear just as ripsnorting as ever.
But what if Dad saw one of my pictures and was impressed? Pinch closes his eyes, shakes his head, jabbing his stomach. So hard to imagine. His irritation flares; he pours another glass. After a few more, he locks the studio and the cottage too, striding unevenly down the single-lane country road, leaning against fences whenever headlights whoosh by. After an hour, he reaches a public telephone in the closest village. He’s phoning Dad to confess the sale—how nobody realized it was his, that it’s hanging there still. Nobody could tell the difference! You’ll be gone someday, Dad, and I’ll still be here.
Bear’s current wife, Lulu, answers. “Hey, Charlie. Poppa Bear can’t talk right now.”
“He’s working?”
“Or what another person might call napping. Why couldn’t I get the young Bear Bavinsky?” she jokes. “That’s the problem with men. They wear out.”
He makes a sound resembling laughter. “If you could tell him everything’s swell at the cottage, I’d be most thankful.” He puts down the phone and breaks into a blind run back up the winding tarmac, yodeling. If Bear had picked up, Pinch would’ve blurted the truth. Even in retrospect, the consequences chill him. He’d be banished from here. Pinch leaps, punches his fist in the air.
Before the drive back to London, he tidies the art studio with utmost care, concealing his intrusion, leaving it exactly as mucky and messy as it was, not a spot more. He fires up the kiln, slides in all six of the canvases he painted on this visit. He stands outside with his pipe, a twirl of smoke from his hand, a twirl from the studio chimney.
On the drive back to London, he keeps imagining those incinerated paintings on the asphalt that rushes beneath the car. They’re pictures nobody but he will ever know. And that’s how he wants it. Pinch returns to Utz replenished, full of affection for his students. He attempts silly jokes, and laughter bursts from his classroom. In the hallway he commiserates with fellow teachers, clucking in accord with their laments. “They’re crazy to complain,” he agrees. “Your course sounds excellent.”