The Italian Teacher(60)

He is gracious because of his secret: that he isn’t really a teacher. Yet this makes him smirk. Me, a genuine artist! Yes, yes—an artist whose work hangs in the most exquisite collection in all of Nebraska!





50


After a few years at Utz, Pinch becomes a personality there, his self-satirizing quirks drifting into shtick: the white Panama hat in summer, the smelly briar pipe, his necktie of turtles, the socks with double-decker buses. Often he lingers after-hours, perusing grammar texts in the library or writing down one-liners from his favorite joke book, slipping them into colleagues’ mailboxes. When everyone has left, he strolls the corridors as if they were his, humming, muttering foreign phrases, sometimes even popping into the women’s staff toilets simply because you aren’t supposed to. He thrills at these unseen shows of nonconformity. One evening, before the mirror in the ladies room, considering his lamb-chop sideburns, Pinch mulls trimming them as per current fashion. Behind his reflection, a Chinese woman appears.

“Jing!” He spins around.

Bewildered, she retreats, the door closing after her.

He knows Jing only superficially from her Mandarin classes, and because she is married to Salvatore, a fellow Italian teacher who gives Pinch the creeps—part of why he’s kept his distance from Jing. What irks him about Salvatore is that nobody seems to see what a phony he is, how the pretends to embody the stereotype of an Italian, bursting into opera during class, offering shots of limoncello, chirping “Ciao, bella!” to female students. But this guy, who claims to be Sicilian, was born in Wales to immigrant parents and speaks appallingly bad Italian. Nobody learns anything in his classes—yet everyone adores Sal! For a while he haunted Pinch’s office, sitting without permission on his desk, yammering away in English. “I got this really hot bird in Intermediate. You seen her, Carlito?”

“No, actually. But I saw your wife in the hall earlier.”

“Why you talking about Jing, mate? I’m telling you about this Katya bitch.”

“And what Jing was telling me about Chinese dialects was so amazing.”

“You’re a knob.” That was the last time Salvatore bothered him.

Pinch remains vexed that anyone could like such a fraud. But, ah well—this is your day job. Who even cares about working at Utz?

Apparently, he does. For, caught in the ladies room, he rushes into the halls, scanning for Jing, concocting a lie to preserve his job. He’ll call it a blunder, beg her to keep it to herself. When he locates Jing, she’s entering the men’s room.

“If you use that toilet, I go here,” she says matter-of-factly.

Smiling, Pinch returns to his office. What an oddball she is. Anyway, he seems to be safe. Until, minutes later, Jing knocks at his office door. “I am going outside to eat sandwich,” she says.

“Good idea.”

“You come?”

She leads him to a sandwich bar near Russell Square. Pinch orders only a mint tea, resenting this outing—he’s only here to ensure that she doesn’t plan to tell on him. At least he can use the occasion to practice Mandarin. Jing says nothing unprompted, so he asks about her life in China. Her family hails from Sichuan, but she grew up in the far west, Xinjiang. Her father, a professor of medicine, was ordered out there during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, a well-bred doctor, was assigned to herd goats. Clandestinely, she educated Jing, teaching the girl a smattering of French and English and guiding her through the medical books left behind by her late father.

“What happened to him?” Pinch asks.

“Some students, they beat him to death,” she says.

When Jing was grown, she undertook a long and punishing trek to London full of unstated indignities. She always intended to study medicine, but it never came to pass. This renders her current job at Utz both a triumph and a shame: better than she’s had, far less than she should’ve.

Switching to English (Jing too wants practice), she says, “Chars, do you consider me a humor person?”

“I consider you a serious person,” he says, believing this to be her desired reply, though it fails to satisfy her. “Do you consider yourself funny?”

“I like to be funny. Also,” she adds, “I am ticklish.”

“Not sure that counts.”

“You laughed.”

He reverts to Mandarin: “I have books of jokes in my office. I lend you one. I give it in your office.”

She opens her soggy sandwich to inspect the contents, failing to notice that he is readying to leave. But his glimpse of her lonely dinner stops him. He sits again, as if merely having adjusted his underpants.

After their stilted dinner, the two become distant friends, bumping into each other in the halls after everyone else has vacated. Sometimes he tags along for her after-work sandwiches—he never wants one himself, but it’s too sad leaving her to eat alone. Moreover, he respects Jing. She’s the only other serious linguist on staff. This makes him increasingly uneasy about what he knows: that Salvatore is entirely unfaithful, constantly hitting on students. Look, Pinch reminds himself, workplace melodrama doesn’t concern me. What matters is at the cottage.





1990




51


Pinch maintains loose contact with his father, speaking now and then, unsure what he feels about Bear Bavinsky nowadays. He does wish they could speak about painting—not so Dad would praise his art necessarily, but for the pleasure of a shared interest. Instead he inquires into Bear’s ongoing work. “Are you keeping a lot of these pictures? Or most go into the fire?”