The Italian Teacher(6)
Bear opens his shears into an X.
“What are you doing?”
He stabs the canvas, slices diagonally, paint accumulating up his hand, a lip of fabric gaping.
“Bear! Why are you doing that? Can you say something to me? Bear?”
“It’s not right. I can’t remain in the same room with this fucking insult.” He drags the ripped canvas into the alley, crams it into the oil barrel that he keeps for this purpose, and slops the painting with kerosene. He clacks open his Zippo, flicks the wheel, flame swaying. He calls over Pinch, places the lighter in the boy’s hand, holds him around his midriff, and lifts him toward the picture. “Flame steady, kiddo.”
“Don’t,” Natalie pleads. “That’s my whole day, wasted. Please, Bear. Could you consider—”
The painting ignites. Bear pulls their son back to safety, depositing him on the cobbles, stroking the kid’s head in thanks. Apologetically, Bear approaches his wife, nestles his face against her neck.
Destruction is a relief as completion never can be. But it’s his completion, his destruction, his relief.
1961
7
The eleven-year-old flattens both hands against their giant building door and pushes, exchanging suffocating heat for the cool mosaic-floored lobby. His parents follow, the three Bavinskys racing for the elevator cage, which is so small that Bear must suck in his gut—only to swell it once the door closes, mushing his wife and son, both in hysterics. “Dad, you’re making me hit the buttons with my head!”
Not long after Bear settled in Rome, they moved to these swanky lodgings, a nineteenth-century apartment last occupied by the futurist poet Filippo Marinetti that retained the man’s chintzy wallpaper, faded rectangles marking where paintings once hung. Years earlier, Mishmish Shapiro bought the property to loot its art and left the place vacant until hearing that “the Bears,” as she calls them, were shacked up in an art studio. So the Bavinskys upgraded to Prati, once meadowlands north of the Vatican walls, now insurance companies, advertising offices, bourgeois residences. If this area has gone up in the world, so has the country since those tough times after the war. All down Via Veneto, cabarets are packed now, film producers disporting themselves alongside wasp-waisted coquettes, while ancient Roman sites are flush with playboy tourists leaning on columns, their diamantine laughter echoing through the ruins.
As for Pinch, he attends a private international school aimed at kids from the United States—Bear prefers his son to grow up American. The student body consists of diplo brats from the coasts, army brats from the South, business brats from the Midwest, plus the children of assorted oddballs who landed in Rome for the cheap living. Even though many of his classmates were born in this city, the prevailing mood is scorn for Italian ways. Everyone returns from summer vacations with Sears Tower postcards, Yale pennants, Hawaiian tans.
As for Pinch, he has never traveled. Natalie, who tends home year round nowadays, would happily venture abroad. But Dad can’t give up a day of work, weekends and holidays included. Also, he’s occupied with an admiring coterie of junior painters, students, artists’ models—Bear is beloved by them all. Just when Pinch worries that he’s nowhere near the top of his father’s list, Bear will pick him out: “Forget school today, young Charles,” he says using Pinch’s proper name. We’re going to the movies, me and you. Far as your teachers are concerned, you got a fever. What say you, old man? We on?”
On such occasions, Natalie could use her husband’s studio for her pottery. When Pinch and Bear arrive home, however, she is busy with household chores, mending torn shirts, turning up trousers, bad-tempered because of this endless burden—although it’s she who adds more duties. When her toils are complete, she grows impatient, obliging Pinch to accompany her somewhere, perhaps inventing a task: “Come grocery shopping. I need help with the bags.” Together, they evaluate the market stalls, boycotting those who fiddle with the scales, knowing she’s a foreigner. On weekends, Natalie takes her son to Porta Portese, the vast outdoor flea market, where they fill out his latest collection: old maps lately, coins before, medals next. They ride bikes too, tracing the city walls, Pinch veering dangerously into traffic, looking back to ensure that she is suitably scared.
He hardly resembles his mother—she, large and dark; he, small and sandy-haired. Yet even strangers find a similarity: how they walk, each footstep tentative, as if treading across a moving carpet. Their manner of speech is similar too—slow and fast to a metronome sounding only in their heads. He finishes Natalie’s sentences, and she knows what he’s about to say (though he denies it, changing course to prove his point). Pinch passes so much free time with her because his schoolmates find something amiss about him. At an age when boys in the same grade look five years apart, he is near the bottom of that scale. He stands too close, jabbers too fast, claiming miracles. “Yesterday I looked out my window, and Marilyn Monroe was there, sitting in a car!”
“She was not.”
When refuted, he falls silent, which makes everyone laugh. He is caught mumbling to himself a few times, and is taunted for it, so tries to stop. Before entering the school doors each morning, he avoids eye contact with Natalie—she knows how he dreads each day.
As for sports, Pinch considered himself good for a while. Until it became incontrovertible that he was not. Other kids hurl baseballs in vanishing arcs; he throws out his arm. “Sorry, Ronnie!” he hollers across the playground, shoulder throbbing. “I slipped on this dumb mud!” In the street with Italian boys, he rushes toward the soccer ball, his weight invariably on the wrong foot once he reaches it. He must reset or miss, and does both, slicing air, walloping ground. “Scusate, ragazzi!” he tells the departing stampede of boots. His knees bloody and encrusted with dirt, he tries not to mind, and runs after the others, who are too far downfield ever to be reached.