The Italian Teacher(99)

They walk out into a drizzle, quickstepping up the soggy turf. Jing fiddles with the two locks on the studio door. Inside, she flicks the light switch but they remain in darkness. She turns on her smartphone flashlight, its beam picking out matted brushes, twisted metal paint tubes, a table splodged with hardened slugs of color. But there is no art except an unfinished picture on an easel: a face shown overly close, viewed at invasive proximity, forcing its subject—a youth—to turn away, as if edging off the side of the canvas.

“That could be worth something,” Marsden says.

They can’t risk carrying it back to the cottage through the rain, so leave it for now, locking the studio.

“Well, that’s pretty much everything,” Marsden concludes. “There’s storage space in the attic, but it’s junk up there. Old boxes of his mother’s pottery. Nothing of value.”

The low clearance in the attic forces them onto their hands and knees. Her phone light illuminates dusty cardboard boxes of ceramics, many in tissue paper, a few cracked. Marsden unwraps a long-necked vase, reads the bottom, signed in the clay: “Natalie.”

He shows Jing. “Lovely, don’t you think? Is that glaze blue or green? It’s so dark up here. Gosh, there’s tons of pots. Not sure what you’ll want to do with them all.”

She angles her light above the boxes.

“It’s rafters that way,” he explains.

But the sweep of her beam halts.

“Holy shit,” he says.

It’s so cramped that they cannot reach the other side without first removing all of Natalie’s pottery. Marsden is touched by how gently Jing treats it, lifting pots from the disintegrating boxes, cradling each piece down the stairs, notwithstanding their shared impatience. “Nearly there.”

They approach the rafters, raise the tarpaulin. Stacks of paintings.

“Oh my God.”

“Let’s bring them down first,” Jing says, maintaining outward cool, but stiff with tension.

With utmost caution, they transport each canvas into the kitchen. Marsden—leg jiggling—counts them. “Twenty-six here. All Life-Stills. This is insane, Jing.” With her permission, he scrutinizes a few. “Wow. Just, wow.”

But gradually something troubles him. He checks another painting. And another. “I’m a bit confused now,” he says. “Okay, this requires a small admission. When I was here with Bear, I did something a bit naughty. One afternoon, I found his keys left in the cottage door. I went to return them to him, but noise was coming from upstairs—he was with a lady friend. So I tiptoed away. I had this key ring in my hand. Actually, the same one you have. And I found myself sneaking into his studio, which was strictly off-limits. I was just curious. And I saw a bunch of these Life-Stills. Which is what’s confusing me.”

“Why is that confusing?”

He does a Web search on her smartphone, bringing up an image that looks identical to the painting before them. “See that? A hedge fund manager bought this picture.” He finds an image of another painting in the kitchen. “Look, this is a Vogue shoot—this painting is in a mansion in Saint Petersburg.” After repeating this with several others, he turns to her. “Hate to tell you, Jing. These are copies. It did seem a bit too good to find original Bavinskys dumped in an attic. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe Bear made two of each painting?”

“Bear hardly kept one of each painting. These are copies. And, I’m afraid, not worth a penny.”





87


They’re famished, so they lock all the doors and drive to the nearest village for lunch, where the only restaurant is a drab pizzeria. They take a table by the door, chewing crusts, a downpour outside, an occasional car whooshing by. Neither says much, yet they have become closer by dint of their shared hope and shared disappointment. “Tired,” she comments.

He smiles, nods.

When she returns from the toilet, he watches her approach, feeling so fond of Jing for her kindness to his friend. She was terribly in love with Charles, Marsden knows, and is sorry that his friend never let himself fully reciprocate. “The unfinished painting on the easel—did you make out the face?” he asks her.

“Chars?”

“I’d need to see it under proper lighting, but I’m pretty sure, yes. I knew Charles when he was not much older than that. What’s odd is I have no memory of seeing that painting here.”

“Bear did it after you left maybe?”

“He died before I left.” He wipes his hands on a serviette, pausing, seeing Bear lying on the mountain path. “Come to think of it, that portrait couldn’t have been done in the studio. Bear didn’t paint the Faces here.”

“Yes, yes, he did.”

“You’re wrong, Jing. I was living here. And they weren’t around.”

“But Chars always brought them back from the cottage.”

They keep eating, neither tasting now.

“I have a scary feeling again,” he says.

“Me also.”

They drive fast back up the winding hill. The paintings are untouched, which almost surprises them—their focus made it seem as if the world were converging here. The cloudburst is over, so they lug the unfinished portrait into the kitchen. “Yes, it’s Chars,” she acknowledges. “As young man.”