The Italian Teacher(83)
On Natalie’s old red Olivetti, Pinch types a response, with warmest greetings and a jokey summary of his own life, adding the email address that the Utz school recently forced on everyone. “P.S. Absolutely no need to pay me back.”
After breakfast, he ambles at a slow but acceptable pace to the Earls Court post office. Who was ever more elated to stand in an eleven-person queue? He chats to the adorable Jamaican granny working the wicket, Pinch gabbing away, as he’s seen others do. How angry that used to make him! Now he can gripe about his back and his doctor. “Well,” he says at his leisure, “must be off, my darling!” Everything has an exclamation point today!
Chattering to himself all the way home, he recalls Natalie’s manic spells, when she bounded around the art studio in Rome, and worked on pottery through the night. He always cautioned her to slow down. “Oh, enjoy your highs!” he tells her now. “Why didn’t I let you? Am I older now than you ever got? God, I think I am.”
He ponders Bear too. To succeed as an artist demands such a rare confluence of personality, of talent, of luck—all bundled into a single life span. What a person Dad was! Pinch decides that perhaps he himself had ability too, but this was insufficient: He lacked the personality. The art world was always beyond him. For the first time, he accepts this.
And he longs to tell someone of his painless state. After hesitating, he phones Jing. Might she come out for a drink?
The pint of lager looks huge on the pub table before her. He buys Jing a packet of prawn-cocktail crisps, then gobbles them himself, laughing to notice he has done so. He rises to buy more. “Look! I can get up and down!” When she tells of putting her house on the market to satisfy Salvatore’s greed, Pinch becomes indignant. “That’s terrible! You know, I should just buy the house,” he says. “Listen—what if we did a deal privately? You’d save, I’d get a mortgage, pay you a good price, and you could pay off that idiot without losing your home. I’d actually like to own property in London.”
“Slough.”
“That’s almost London.”
“My house is very cold, Chars.”
“I specialize in cold houses.” Thinking of the French cottage, he smiles. The absence of that place is what made him crumple this past year, perhaps as much as the pain itself. And he can return there now. “Look, I could rent your house back to you, so you’d get to stay as long as you liked.”
“It’s too big for me alone.”
“Then I take a wing. Why not? I need to move—I associate my place with Harold and Tony. I’d welcome a change.” Suddenly he doubts his own stream of promises. Does he, a man in his fifties, want a housemate? Does he want it to be Jing? Then again, if she speaks Mandarin around the house, that’d be useful. But does free language tutelage justify the purchase of a house?
He’s distracted again, grinning about that letter from Barrows—nostalgia overcomes him. He claps his hand upon Jing’s and gives a hopeful squeeze.
65
When fully sober, Pinch prefers to simply lend Jing ?10,000 to pay off her grasping ex-husband, rather than buying a charmless house in Slough. But there is fallout from his high that night: He left a tipsy voice mail for his landlord, giving notice, quite rudely too. Sheepishly, Pinch called back, but his flat had already been promised to someone else. Until he finds a place, Pinch must lodge in a spare room at Jing’s house.
On his first day back at Utz, he and she take the train into central London together. Francesca greets him warmly, explaining that she had to hire another Italian teacher in his absence. “Don’t look so worried! You still have the same number of hours.”
“Yes, great.” He lowers his head. “Thanks.”
He sits at his office computer, struggling to learn the new Utz software suite, when he discovers a pleasant surprise: an email from Barrows, who is insisting on restitution for their long-ago trip to France, estimating her debt at $2,000. This is a ludicrous sum, he emails back, warning her not to send a penny. If she does, he’ll never buy another of her books.
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Charles,
You read my books? Apologies! I’m boring the hell out of you (not to mention my six other readers).
—CB
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Barrows,
You have nothing to apologize for. I do buy your books, but confess that I’ve started none!
Yours sincerely,
Charles
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Ouch. How come?
—CB
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
I was afraid that I might be mentioned. (I’m only joking.)
Yours,
Charles
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Ha! . We have a saying at Princeton: “Have I read it? I haven’t even taught it!” My books are basically cultural takedowns in which I linger over phrases like “subversive sociality.” Avoid! Avoid!
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
You used a smiling face. I don’t know how to do that on my machine. If your fellow academics knew that you put smiling faces in your letters, you would be a pariah.