The Italian Teacher(65)
Out of pride, he sets a condition before he’ll attend. Bear must invite all his children to the opening—several have seen his paintings only in reproduction.
The gallery reserves the painter and son a suite at a stylishly underlit Midtown hotel, its employees as sleek as the guests, everyone dressed like hit men (hit men as imagined by Hollywood; lots of black Armani). Pinch winces apologetically to the checkin clerk when his father flirts with her. “I’d give you my room number,” Bear tells her, winking, “but I figure you noted it down already.” She laughs, for Bear is old enough now to find cute. And she perhaps noticed that his room is all-expenses-paid by a SoHo gallery that also left a mammoth gift arrangement of flowers, fruit, cheeses. This guy must be somebody.
In their suite, Bear dispatches the bellboy with a few bucks, closes the door, and slumps in an armchair, his forces spent at having acted as he once was, a front that he drops only around this child. “What does that say?” he asks, squinting at an itinerary left by the gallery. “Read it out for me, would you, Charlie?” Every item draws a sigh from Bear, who grumbles as if he’s above such crap, though it’s really because he’s afraid of managing all this. Pinch promises to cancel everything that isn’t mandatory. “Yes, can you?” Bear says with alacrity. “Please, do that, son.”
Shortly Bear has nodded off in that armchair and must be helped onto one of the king-size beds for an afternoon nap. He is unable to get his shoes off, so Pinch unlaces them. Everybody gushes about how Bear never slows down—he’s as driven today as when he was fifty! Because nobody is permitted to see this.
Dressing that evening, Bear blusters around the suite, cursing this palaver: to be trotted before art phonies, having to endure their imbecilic questions. Pinch stands at the perma-locked window, on the verge of confessing his forgery. What if Eva mentions the Mallard sale? She vowed not to, which means nothing. Pinch must prepare counterclaims. Am I walking into a public disaster? He stares down over West Forty-Sixth Street, remembering his last visit to this city, roaming Central Park, trying to summon the guts to see Barrows. That was right after Natalie died, when Bear told him: “Her pieces were never really first class.” Pinch’s outrage stirs anew at this man who rants behind him—those liver-spotted hands gesticulating, his dry lips flapping about the anguish of art-world attention.
During the town car ride to SoHo, neither of them speaks, each in his own funk. This will be the same gallery they visited together in 1965, though the neighborhood is much dolled up since then: yuppie pedestrians swinging shopping bags, gleaming storefronts, only a smattering of art spaces left. When the artist steps from the car, a welcoming committee awaits on the sidewalk: Eva (“Oh, let me kiss you, glorious Bear!”); a pretty publicist with orthodontically ideal whites (“You guys made it!”); and a bald gallery assistant in pink bowtie (“I am literally exploding with excitement right now”). To one side stands Connor Thomas, now on staff at Artforum, with ginger goatee and black eyeliner, long brown leather coat, and a red Manhattan Portage messenger bag that he clasps, dumbstruck before his idol. Everyone is gawking, not quite at Pinch, but near. It’s intoxicating, people approaching Pinch with earnest whispers, knowing that he alone has the ear of the grizzled legend.
Eva leads them all inside the gallery.
“You folks are all gussied up. I shoulda worn my dinner jacket!” Bear exclaims, inviting only one response, which Eva deftly offers.
“Your only duty is to be Bear Bavinsky.” She touches his arm. “Everything else—that’s for us to worry about.”
“Being Bear Bavinsky is a job I can just about handle.” Winking, he stuffs a bolt of tobacco into his pipe.
“Ohmigod,” the pink-bowtied assistant says, biting his lower lip. “So sorry: There’s no smoking in here.”
“Felix, I hope you are fucking kidding,” Eva says. “Bear Bavinsky smokes wherever he likes. This is his house.”
“Ohmigod, yes.”
Next she calls over Connor, who wrote the catalog text.
“I’m so honored,” he tells Bear, bowing. “I was thinking earlier how, for me, this is like meeting a figure from history.”
“From history?” Eva retorts. “Bear is very much of this era.”
“No, right, of course!” Connor sputters, blushing. “Just mean I can hardly believe it. Not that—”
“What I’m most jazzed about,” Bear interrupts, heavy paw on Connor’s shoulder, “is meeting the writer who did that helluva magazine piece. Point the kid out, would you?” Bear scratches his beard, glancing mischievously around.
Connor lowers his head. “You’re too kind.” He looks up. “I can’t believe you read that. I’m so honored.”
“You keep being honored,” Bear quips, “then you’ll run out of honor altogether, and you know where that can land a fella!” Everyone laughs to excess. “Word is, you wrote the program notes too, and a damn good job. Here’s an idea. How’s about giving me a guided tour? What do you say?”
“Wait, what?”
“The bum’s name is Bavinsky, am I right?” Bear says, sniffing.
“I would be—”
The toothy publicist interposes, “Do not say ‘honored’!”