The Italian Teacher(61)
“If it went in the fire, why would I talk about it now?” Bear responds gruffly.
Pinch suffers a pang to hear his father’s rebuff, but suppresses this. His main reason for these calls is to know when Bear will next invade the cottage, which normally happens for a few weeks during the summer, casting Pinch into panic that his father might notice something this time. Fortunately, Bear detests looking back at his own art—he has decided that the works preserved at his studio are sublime, and he can’t risk reconsidering that view, so keeps the paintings turned to the wall. Pinch never rests until his father leaves the cottage again, at which point the place is his own. At any opportunity he may vanish there, always vague to colleagues at Utz. Fellow teachers, sipping coffee in the staff room, rib him for taking the same vacation every year. “Where is this glorious villa of yours?” they ask. “Why don’t I get an invitation?”
Pinch looks into his Styrofoam cup, black liquid jiggling. A polite smile. He deafens himself to their banter, holding the scene before himself, converting their faces into shapes, colors, a flat composition. “If only it were a villa,” he responds. “More like a heap of old stones!” Nobody needs to find that place, or know what becomes of him there.
Amid cycles of teaching and painting, Pinch turns forty. He deems it a meaningless milestone, yet is moved when his colleagues throw a surprise party, including a Tesco strawberry cake and two bottles of prosecco. The overtanned receptionist produces a gift certificate, bought on behalf of everyone. The card says “Happy 50th Birthday!,” which is a little embarrassing; they make a joke of it. But he does look older than his years, with a hunch of which he is hardly aware, lacking anyone intimate enough to correct his downward trend. Only a few cross-swept strands of hair still intervene between his bald dome and the rain. A paunch juts over his belt, as if peeking off a high diving board.
Many more terms begin, and many more conclude, each time with a few departing students who request snapshots with him, promising to mail back copies from Tokyo or Cairo or Boston, or wherever their hard-gained vocabulary is to gently decompose. Now and then he falls for a woman in class and almost flirts. But he dreads being the creepy teacher—he considers Salvatore that, so becomes the sexless one instead.
Sometimes Pinch awakens from dreams in which someone was in love with him. He rarely remembers details, just a hollowness. He pushes his thoughts away from such nonsense and back to the cottage, considering techniques achieved last time, which he must replicate on the next. With the passing years, he attains a new vibrancy in his paintings, especially after putting aside the street photographs from Philadelphia and referring only to memory, eyes clenched then springing open to re-create faces from his past, not for accuracy but abstracted, recognizable only to him. Before leaving the cottage, he destroys all his latest efforts—it’s strangely exhilarating, leaves his chest pounding.
Only once does he save a work from the flames—a woman’s chin, which began as Julie’s, became Barrows’, and ended up as that of someone he hasn’t yet met, perhaps will. He can show her, saying, “Isn’t that you?” He hides the wet canvas in the attic, behind boxes of Natalie’s old pottery, which he has gradually driven to the cottage, both for safekeeping and because this tranquil setting seems right for her art, alongside his.
For company in London he adopts two dogs from the Battersea animal shelter, fluffy white mongrels called Harold and Tony whose previous owner died. The man’s body remained undiscovered for three weeks, but his pets were fine. “Not even hungry,” the shelter employee tells Pinch, raising her eyebrows. “You put two and two together.” As a result of such ghoulish rumors, nobody wants these dogs. But Pinch prefers outcasts, so takes them. Walking from the shelter he picks up the sniffly little dogs, their pink tongues hanging out, fangs glistening. One licks his hand with delectation. “No, boy! No!”
By the mid-nineties, Pinch can scarcely recall life before Harold and Tony, conducting long conversations with his roommates (doesn’t matter in which language) and venting about work or the bruises of London living. Neither dog is overly bothered, which always makes Pinch less upset.
Then someone has sex—not with Pinch but with Mallard Dwyer. And everything changes.
52
Pinch is practicing Chinese tones in his living room, and his dogs are howling along, when an unfamiliar sound reverberates from the wall: his telephone. A paralegal is calling from Los Angeles with questions about Judy-Lynn Mendez.
“Who?” He is immediately on edge. She was the actress who married Mallard Dwyer, and who prompted him to start an art collection. But Mallard, it turns out, was caught in bed with an even younger starlet whom he met in the shoe department and befriended in the hot tub. The upshot is that lawyers are tallying assets, including a painting sold by the Petros Gallery. Apparently Eva directed the paralegal to Pinch, saying he would be happy to provide details on provenance.
Inwardly raging at Eva, he switches the receiver to his other hand, wiping his sweaty palm on the couch. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he replies.
“Is there a number for your father possibly? He’s living, right?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You misunderstand. My father is alive. I just don’t see any reason to let you harass him about a sale he had nothing to do with. He doesn’t like to be disturbed. All right?”