Art on Fire (16 page)

“Shoes? But are they white?” Lisa asked, then looked at Francesca and doubled over laughing.

“That's very amusing.” Isabella smiled tightly, her face about to crack and spill onto the floor in a million shards. She teetered through the kitchen toward the back door.

“How are you getting to the store?” Francesca called.

Isabella stuck out her thumb, then spilled out the door, onto the driveway.

Francesca knew she should follow her sister. Just the idea of it—Isabella hitchhiking—was foreboding. But Lisa stood beside her, exhaling smoke luxuriously in all directions.

“Too bad,” said Lisa. “How we both turned out.”

They climbed the stairs to the chilly attic room. Francesca flipped on the electric heater with her toe. When she turned around, Lisa had lit another joint and seated herself on the bed. “I knew you'd be tall,” she smiled. “Whenever I imagined you, I imagined you were tall.”

“I'm not that tall,” Francesca answered.

Lisa stared, noting Francesca's height, her straightness, the lack
of anything decidedly female. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

“No.”

“Me neither. I broke up with him after my abortion.”

“You had an abortion?”

Lisa held two fingers in the air.

“Two abortions?”

“I can't use birth control because my pedophile father searches my room. I think he likes to touch my underwear. But once he found my diaphragm and threatened to send me back to China. I've never even been to China.” She took a long hit, then continued talking with the smoke deep in her lungs, her voice tight, as if it were being squeezed from a tube. “Anyhow, I'm through with men. They disgust me.” Lisa exhaled, stretched her legs straight out in front of her and examined them. She looked up to see if Francesca was watching. “What do you think about my mascara?” she asked. “It's blue.”

“It's nice.”

“I like when it gets a little wet and sort of runs under my eyes.” Lisa took in too much smoke, coughed, and passed the joint to Francesca, fanning the smoke away. “Anyhow, men can't kiss for shit,” she said, taking the joint again, shifting her gaze from Francesca's eyes to her mouth to her eyes again. “Remember that hut?” she smiled.

Francesca nodded, ashamed.

Lisa pressed the lit end of the joint down against a saucer they'd designated as an ashtray. She released the last streams of smoke and seemed lost in thought for a moment. Then, rather suddenly, she leaned over and kissed Francesca. It was so quick, it seemed not to have happened. Then she did it again with her mouth open. She licked the inside of Francesca's lower lip. Heat covered Francesca's thighs, spread through her body. Lisa climbed onto Francesca, mounted her, wrapped her legs around the wide hips and pressed. Hard. It felt almost too good. Everything Lisa had wanted, everything she'd always expected unfolded like a slow stain. There was no tongue thrusting, no hands crammed under the cups of her bra or inside her underpants. She would not stop now, would not think long enough to stop until she'd consumed, crumb by crumb, this body
against her, so perfectly different from what she'd known, but exactly what she'd always wanted.

In the garage, Isabella locked the door from the inside, and walked around to the back of the Mustang. Ceremoniously, she sat on the dirt floor and lifted the lid of the shoebox, as if inside were a restless bird. She removed the newsletter and a roll of duct tape and took a five-yard coil of vacuum hose down from a shelf overhead where she had hidden it. After fitting the lip of the hose around the mouth of the exhaust pipe and securing it with the tape, she unfurled it as she walked around the side of the car. She squeezed the hose between the window molding and the glass, climbed into the car, and closed the door. The interior was dark and smelled of leather and gasoline. Isabella lodged the hose between two spokes in the steering wheel and positioned the opening inches from her mouth.

“Please don't let me end up a vegetable,” she whispered as she fitted the key into the ignition, and turned it. The radio blared loudly and the car jumped forward, then stalled. She tried again to no avail. “Shit,” she slammed the steering wheel. She tried again, and again the car skipped and stalled. How could this be? Her father ran this heap of tin for hours. Was it because the tail pipe was obstructed? She knew nothing about cars and so decided to run next door and ask the Big One. She'd seen her out there working on her truck on Sundays, greasy hands, rag hanging out of her pocket. Sometimes the Big One and Alfonse would meet in between the shrubs to talk guy stuff.

But what if she asks why I need to start the car? What if she insists on coming over to have a look? She's just that type. Jesus. What a pain in the ass. Why can't I die without a big production? Is that so much to ask
? She ripped the duct tape off the window, yanked the hose from the tailpipe, put everything back into the box, tucked the box behind a garbage can, and padded across the lawn determinedly. She squeezed through the hedges and stepped, reverently, onto the neighbors' lawn. Sappho sat on the stoop, his tail slapping the cement. He barked as she climbed the steps and rang the doorbell.

“Stupid mutt.” Isabella patted his head. She waved pleasantly when the Big One appeared, fuzzy behind the screen door. “Hi! I was wondering if you could help me. My father asked me to start up the Mustang each day while he's gone and just run the engine for a few minutes. But every time I try, it stalls out.”

“What gear is it in?” the Big One wiped her large hands on a dish-towel and glanced in the direction of the house.

Isabella shrugged. “Woops. Guess I should know that.”

“Well, you need to put it in neutral.”

“Neutral. Huh.”

“That's the one in the center,” the neighbor said, amazed at how completely useless a genius could be. “Just pull the stick shift out of first, move it around a little until it's disengaged, just sitting there in the middle.” She moved her hand around in demonstration. “And don't forget to open the garage door,” she called.

Isabella waved on her way back through the wall of bushes, then disappeared into the garage.

Morning light blasted through the attic windows. Francesca rubbed her eyes for several moments before her grandmother came into focus, standing in the doorway.

“Gram,” she said, only then remembering the naked girl beside her.

Evelyn was smoking. “Where's your sister?” she asked.

“I don't know—”

“She's not in her room.”

“She's not?” Francesca felt fuzzy, still half-stoned from the night before.

“And who is that?” Evelyn jutted her chin at the bed.

“That?”

“In the bed.”

“That's my friend.”

“What kind of friend. Your
boy
friend?” Evelyn slammed the door behind her and hurried down the stairs in her orthopedic shoes, hitting each step hard as a rock.

Francesca shook Lisa's shoulders. “You have to get up,” she whispered. “My grandmother's here.”

Lisa opened her eyes, made a visor with her hands. “Fuck me!” she slapped her head hard. She jumped off the bed, quickly dressed, and stepped into her sandals, hopping around as she struggled to get the straps over her heels. She slid her seven rings from Francesca's night table expertly into position.

“Go out the front,” Francesca whispered, feeling her heart pounding in the base of her throat, making it difficult to breathe. “Oh God,” she repeated, following Lisa down the stairs.

“It's okay,” Lisa said at the bottom, then kissed Francesca quickly on the mouth. Already her face seemed to fade. Francesca held the door open and watched Lisa cross the grass, then stop to adjust a slippery ankle strap. Hurry, thought Francesca, glancing back toward the driveway. When she looked out again at the lawn, Lisa was gone.

Sirens neared and two police cars pulled into the driveway.

Upstairs the ashtray was full of butts and two roaches. Lisa had forgotten a watermelon lip gloss, left it standing up on the nightstand. There were three cigarette burns in the bedspread and the smell of Breck shampoo.

Neighbors recounted screaming sirens, the arrival of an ambulance and several police cars, and the disturbing early morning sight of an unconscious Isabella being pulled from the Mustang, spread on a stretcher, and carried away. The Little One stood with her arm around Evelyn who, much to everyone's shock, cursed repeatedly her own daughter for spawning such creatures. The Big One watched from inside the house. She knew Isabella's intentions and had considered checking on her in the middle of the night. But she hadn't. She didn't know why; was it disinterest? Fear of what she'd find? But Isabella had not secured the hose properly, the garage was leaky, and the car eventually ran out of gas. So she was not found dead, just semi-conscious and humiliated.

The painting
What She Found
is concerned with Francesca's last day in New Haven, the day she fled Connecticut, stuck out her thumb on Highway 15, and set her sights on Cape Cod. The large canvas portrays an elderly woman who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Evelyn Horowitz: gray-haired, smoking, wearing rhinestone-studded reading glasses and an engagement and wedding ring, both occupying the same finger.

The bed in the background is not Francesca's: No lavender bedspread covers the two figures sheltered beneath the heavy comforter. All that is visible of their bodies are their dark heads, and only from the back, facing away and pressed deeply into the wrinkled beige pillowcases. The light is dramatic and inconsistent, cutting glaring strips through the blinds, dowsing one wide wooden beam while missing completely other spots of the room. The light doesn't make sense; one assumes it is not supposed to, further evidence that the world has been upturned. The elderly subject at the front of the canvas is bathed in a dim electric light. Her face is large and grossly detailed. With abject horror, she stares at the viewer, demanding our sympathy. On the floor beside the sleeping figures are two white bras, hurriedly strewn, along with a sweatshirt and a white blouse.

What She Found
is intriguing on many levels. It is the first canvas to tell the story of budding lesbianism. In addition, while it impels the viewer to feel offense at the central subject's ugly prejudice and
self-righteousness, it also invites us to sympathize with her situation.

Lucinda Dialo writes extensively about this painting in
Messenger of Conflict: Homophobia and the Lesbian Artist: “What She Found
portrays the artist's split sympathies. If we knew nothing about deSilva (and I suggest we know far too much), we would not be able to glean from this painting where her sympathies lie. Is she in collusion with the disgusted subject—the poor, elderly woman who walked in on such a shocking and illicit scene? Or does the artist favor the two girls, innocently asleep in the bed, unaware that their secret has been discovered, and their lives changed forever?

“deSilva's decision not to assert her own bias here is fascinating. The subject of the painting is the horrified onlooker; but is she the protagonist? What about the two young girls in the background, washed in the chaos of natural light, sleeping close and protected only by the dark comforter? They are pure in their nakedness, desire, clinging to one another and hiding from the hostile world. The work betrays the artist's ambivalence about homosexuality, her struggle to understand the connection between love and disapproval, and, one could argue, her fierce disappointment in the family unit.
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