The Italian Teacher(93)
But Connor, intoxicated on attention, takes it upon himself to contact museum directors, reiterating Bear’s oft-stated wish for prominent public display. Donation is a distinct possibility, Connor says, implying that he can arrange that. When he announces during an NPR interview that the Faces are destined for major public collections, Pinch is caught out. He contacts Eva, counting on her to slap down Connor. But she shocks Pinch by favoring bequests too. Museum placement is a stamp of approval for any artist, inflating the valuation of all the Bavinskys in private collections, most of which her gallery sold, and many of whose owners (prompted by Eva) are itching to test this ever-hotter market. Pinch cannot intercede without seeming to violate his father’s lifelong directives.
So he delays. The Faces sit in storage with the Petros Gallery. Pinch wakes in the middle of the night, stomach in knots, getting up to reread emails on the subject. Jing, who knows little of his predicament, is an unexpected oasis. What he always feared about a house-share—that she’d intrude when he sought privacy—has not come to pass. He is the one who moseys from his bedroom, checking if she’s around. He can tell just by listening: the tick of laptop keys, or the distant murmur of phone conversations in Mandarin. Jing has quit teaching and started a tourism company, catering to wealthy Chinese visiting Britain. Several nights a week she leads coach trips to Oxford, Bath, Blenheim Palace. She’s doing well, with five employees and an endlessly trilling mobile. When he asks about her workday, he hears of comical tourist mishaps and marvelously peculiar requests. He and Jing watch TV together too, mostly BBC documentaries about wildlife. Lacking Western physical reserve, Jing provides him battering massages, digging her thumbs into his pressure points to prevent flare-ups of his back pain. She also takes his pulses—not only of the heart but of the liver and kidneys too, though Pinch’s understanding of anatomy suggests that those organs do not palpitate. Still, he lets her prod and tweak, and invariably feels sturdier.
Yet Pinch is more frail than others in their late fifties. Worry about a relapse of his back problem causes him to avoid vigor, and he hasn’t exercised through dog-walking in years. People are always encouraging him to replace Harold and Tony, but he cannot. Making for the train station each morning, he treads tentatively along the sidewalk, dampening each step by wearing clunky white running shoes, which gives the impression of an elderly man, especially with his threadbare beige corduroys, ragged tweed jacket, and Panama hat.
One evening, Pinch is quizzing her about her onetime medical aspirations in China, curious as to why she never pursued that line of work. To his surprise, he discovers that she was political back in China, and that it destroyed her chances of serious study.
“You were a protester?”
“No, no. Nothing important.”
“But brave?”
She laughs, looking down. “No, no.”
Smiling, he watches her. “Jing at the barricades! I wouldn’t drive a tank at you!”
She frowns at him.
“I meant that in admiration,” he says. “Sorry, Jing. Not to make light of anything. Really. I’m useless in that department—never defended anything but stupid opinions about art. You know that I’ve never voted? Isn’t that terrible?” he says. “Listen, I’m making a decision. Right now. Okay? The second half of my life will be full of activism and . . . What’s funny? The idea of me with a protest sign is a bit hard to imagine, granted. At the very least, I’m giving more to charity.”
“I buy goats for a village in Niger.”
“You do not! Do you? Jing, you’re so much more decent than I am.” Forehead creased; disappointed in himself. “I want to march in a rally. Something meaningful. Keep me to that. Jing?”
She reaches out as if to touch him, then appears to change her mind. Theirs isn’t that kind of relationship. They resume language practice. She is teaching him Sichuan, while he corrects her English idioms.
“Chars?” she asks later that night. “What is the difference between ‘jug’ and ‘jar’?”
He’s reading, so responds distractedly. “Pretty much the same.”
“I’m going to bed. Do you want me to leave this door ajug?”
77
After mixing pigments at procrastinating length, Pinch loads his palette, approaches the easel, his bifocals swinging on a length of purple silk. He stands to one side, moves to the other. Beginning a new painting has always scared him. It’s worse now. The critics admired something he did. And strangers—queues of people waiting to enter the show in Bushwick—are standing behind him too, peeping. Should he recapture what pleased them? Or attempt what he wants? He remembers that nobody cares what, or if, he paints at all.
What, Pinch wonders, hands on his hips, if I confessed? He imagines interviews—people asking why he chose to depict what he did, why it meant so much to him. In this fantasy he sweeps aside all complications and lawsuits and criminal charges. As the dream dissolves, consequences glare at him. I am well and truly stuck.
As if outside himself, he glimpses this painter, here before his easel. Bear never once painted me. Dad certainly didn’t want me saved for posterity! And Pinch himself has never done a self-portrait, only depicting his legs and elbows and hands when young. Well, it’s bad enough seeing this gargoyle mug in the mirror each morning! He smiles. Actually, I could bring a mirror into the studio. He has a better idea—not to replicate his looks, but to paint the person who has happened to be Charles Bavinsky.