The Italian Teacher(87)
Whenever Francesca can spare him, even for just a long weekend, he makes haste to the cottage. No time to drive through France anymore. He flies to Toulouse, hires a car at the airport, guns through the mountains, all while prepping brushstrokes in his head. Once in the studio, everything slows. He scrutinizes his father’s paintings, deciding which is next. Once copied, the original goes in the attic behind the boxes of Natalie’s pottery. Decades from now, when Pinch is old and gray and beyond worrying about incarceration, perhaps he’ll reveal this scandal and find a grand museum to take Dad’s originals. Everyone will fall down with laughter.
For now, he labors in a nervous thrum, knowing that each additional fake ratchets up the chance of exposure. Among the scariest parts is his drive back to Britain, when he must break every speed law to arrive for work, sometimes nodding off for an instant on the road, a still-wet painting in the back of his car, which he rented in Toulouse but expensively returns in London.
Fortunately, Jing works long hours, so he can sneak the latest artwork into the spare room where he sleeps. He collapses on his bed, inhaling glorious paint fumes all night. When the canvas is dry, he ages it with floor dust and diluted coffee and pipe smoke (never letting himself inhale). Everything would be simpler if he could carry out his counterfeiting at a flat of his own, but the travel costs have eaten into his savings—a modest rent to Jing is all he can afford. But it’s richly worth this poverty. Every sale is an injection of euphoria: It’s vindication, even if nobody knows.
When next toiling at the studio, Pinch glances across the floor for his dogs, which are not there, nor anywhere. Pausing, he runs through the people (including both Harold and Tony in that category) who have liked him, wondering why they did—not in self-pity, but to understand. He raises his paintbrush, looking from an easel with the original to an easel with his imitation, a woman’s slender waist taking form.
He stops for lunch, slapping a handful of paté into a slitted half baguette, drops in a few cornichons, and munches right there, seated on the studio floor, washing down each mouthful with glasses of a deliciously dismal local red, which mellows the fierceness of his joy. He reaches out, as if to tap his mother’s hand. “I told you, Pinchy,” Natalie tells him. “You are really very good.”
2007
69
After four years, each half sibling has received at least one painting. To outward appearances, they are flogging Bear Bavinsky’s prized Life-Stills—held for decades by the artist, previously unseen in public—to the highest bidders, among them a Bulgarian wrestler (crime boss), a Malaysian baby-bottle billionaire (mass polluter), and a pharmaceuticals heir from Sweden (her art collection kept at a tax-dodging Geneva warehouse, among boxed-up Chagalls, Modiglianis, Picassos).
Pinch’s slow distribution of these forgeries has an unintended consequence: The art market is tantalized. Each sale sets a Bavinsky record, meaning those siblings to whom Pinch provided paintings early (the most deserving or most litigious) earned considerably less than family members at the end of the line. When the final Life-Still sells for $2.4 million, it’s a sum so large as to terrify Pinch. At these prices, future buyers will check the paintings closely. Then again, what is there to find? The provenance is impeccable, while the pigments and brushes are those that his father used.
When Utz closes for the Christmas holidays, Pinch packs his luggage, reminds Jing that Natalie’s immortal cactus in the kitchen requires no water, and he is gone. That night, he flops onto Bear’s bed at the cottage, watching a fly circle under the rafters. Maybe I’ll remember this sight in a prison bunk! He chuckles, sinking into reverie, imagining Barrows’ admiration and of Marsden’s amazement.
“You think I ignored you, Mars, when you said I should paint again,” he tells the room. “Guess what?”
But, no. I can’t speak about this.
He sighs, and sighs again, as if oxygen might inflate his mood. Lately his spirits have sunk. After all those efforts to placate his relatives, Pinch has copied and distributed everything and is left with nothing but a stack of Bavinsky originals hidden in the attic, which nobody can know about. And now what? His siblings aren’t even sated.
Downstairs he leafs through a copy of that commemorative booklet from Bear’s memorial service that includes reproductions of old family snapshots. Many of the kids are pictured when small, most eager, none smiling. Throughout childhood, Pinch longed for a team to join, full of best friends, as siblings were in the movies. To a degree, Birdie was that. The others all resent him. Dad always kept us apart, put us at odds. Was that on purpose?
A memory surfaces, perhaps his earliest: standing in Bear’s studio in Rome by the copper bathtub, which was scalding to the touch. Dad rising from the water, the man’s thick wet warm hand on his son’s head for balance, rough fingers pressing down, Pinch’s little shoulders tightening, his eyes looking up.
Everybody knows that Bear Bavinsky painted long after those days, well into old age. But nobody knows what.
Time to show them.
70
Next summer at the cottage, a black Porsche Cayenne growls into view up the driveway. At the kitchen window, Pinch raises his hand in acknowledgment and hurries out to greet his guest. Connor—the once-gelled ginger locks shaved to stubble—exits the vehicle, wearing a sports jacket with skull embroidered on the back, skinny black jeans, and black cowboy boots, with whiffs of boutique cologne emanating. “So awesome to be here again. I’ve been stoked this whole drive. You’re not letting me down, right?”