The Italian Teacher(80)
She helps him to his feet, as if he were a senior citizen. Fighting down a scream, he shuffles out, insisting that he’s better now, just fine, though inwardly obliterated by nerve damage so agonizing as to erase her voice, almost erase his shame.
At the end of the corridor, he turns, is out of view, and lowers himself, holding his breath until he lies on the coffee-stained carpet, blinking up at white fluorescent. He holds still, praying nobody comes. Minutes later he overhears Francesca speaking with muted horror into her desk phone, then locking up her office for the night and leaving.
A half-hour later, footsteps approach. Jing stands above him. They have not spoken much of late—Pinch has been dealing with his father’s death; she with the demise of her marriage. With much difficulty, she helps him to stand, then leads Pinch outside to flag down a black cab. She insists on accompanying him home. Neither speaks during the ride. “We are both working late again,” she says finally, on the fold-down seat opposite him. “We are the outcasts.”
He reaches over to shake her hand, but the movement tweaks his spine again. He grips her fingers.
“Almost home,” she tells him.
Jing offers to help him inside, but he declines, claiming that the drive did him good. Alone, he inches up the entrance stairs, struggles for the house key in a tight pocket, and makes it inside his flat, the dogs snuffling his trouser legs. He can’t even crouch to pat them. He stands there, cringing to recall an hour ago. So pathetic, still trying at this age, like the last middle-aged man on the dance floor.
That, he decides, was my final attempt. Enough. Enough of other people. All I need is my cottage: Disappear there, stay within the borders of a canvas. That is my company.
Old Age
OIL ON CANVAS
64 X 150 INCHES
Courtesy of the Bavinsky Estate
63
Afternoon tutorials start in seventy-two minutes, but Pinch remains in bed. Exerting his stomach muscles, he wills himself upward but only howls. The torture originates in his spinal column. But people are waiting. He cannot stay here. Get up!
With a shriek, he forces himself vertical and punches the bedside table—except that hurts too. Pulse racing, he is rendered mindless, in primal distress. He holds still, tries to catch a breath, and proceeds to the nightmare of dressing.
His walk to the Tube station is normally eight minutes. Today he needs almost forty, each footstep an act of self-harm. Pedestrians push past, grumbling, taking him for a daytime drunk. On the train platform he tenses his muscles, unable even to wipe perspiration that rolls down his bald pate, halting in an eyebrow—then slithers ticklishly down the bridge of his nose.
The train doors open. Crowds shove in all directions. He edges inside, clasps a pole with both hands, the metal slippery under his grip. The carriage lurches forward. He takes strangulated gasps at each bump.
Pinch expected his pain to recede when he got active. But he shouldn’t have traveled. I need a doctor. While in line at the pharmacy, he swallows four ibuprofens, dry. Before the first tutorial, he takes four more. They numb him only slightly, alarm messages still arrowing to his brain.
“Everything all right, Mr. Bavinsky?”
“Yes, yes, Monique.”
“Do you have a fever or something?” she asks, shifting her chair away from Pinch, who is dripping.
“No, I’m fine. Cerchiamo di parlare in italiano, d’accordo?”
He makes it through the day and home, where Harold and Tony leap around his ankles, needing dinner. He can’t stoop to upturn the can of dog food into their bowls. “Sorry. Later.” Breathing with as little expansion of his lungs as possible, he unbuttons his drenched shirt. His shoulder muscles are a solid block, so taut that his neck shivers. After an hour-long effort and many yelps, he is lying on his bed.
By dawn, Pinch has not slept and is bursting to pee. This is unlike yesterday, when movement was only unbearable. Today he seems to have lost executive control, pain overriding volition. “I’m stuck,” he mumbles, picturing an insect pinned to a board. I am the source of these thoughts. Why am I saying them aloud? “Stop that.” His words emerge with a gust of breath, lowering his rib cage, causing fresh violence to his spine. Shivering, he inhales, smelling his own sweat.
Not yet fifty, and I’ll need a wheelchair. He moves his eyes to the left, right, up, down. Locked-in syndrome—now that would be suffering; this is not. Come on—get up! Failing, he screams out.
The cordless phone is too far on his bedside table. But if someone calls him, he could lunge in that direction, perhaps knock the phone off its base, which will connect the call. Then shout for all he’s worth.
The day passes. Nobody phones.
A human bladder is like a balloon, he reassures himself. Can it explode like a balloon? “Prior to the invention of aluminum tubes,” he says to distract himself, “artists kept paint in pig bladders. Oh, screw it.” He pees on himself.
The dogs are seated at the base of his bed, looking quizzically upward. He hears only their panting. “If nobody saves me and you’re hungry, boys—get stuck in!” He chuckles, trying to suppress it. “Only, after I’ve snuffed it. Agreed? Boys?”
And the phone rings.
Whimpering, he jabs toward it, shoving the bedside table. The phone wobbles. It teeters. And it plunges from sight onto the carpet. He shouts his predicament, does so thrice, wondering who hears. Please don’t be a telemarketer.