Art on Fire (21 page)

She rested her bike against the garage, broke a trail through the fresh snow up to the porch, and rapped on the solid oak door.

As she expected, no one answered. She spanned the house for an entrance, examining windows, the back door, even the dryer vent. An unfastened hatchway looked promising. She pried apart the two
frozen doors, only to find herself in a sub-basement. She could smell the turpentine of the husband's studio, but there was no entry into the house. Once again, she followed around the exterior of the house, sliding her fingertips along the smooth siding. She checked underneath a pot of expired geraniums—her mother always kept a key under a planter of dead chrysanthemums on the porch—but there was nothing. She lifted, with some effort, a series of slate slabs forming a wall by the sprinkler. On the back porch, she tipped back the lid of an old tin milk-box with her boot. Finally! In the bottom of the box sat one key, the hole in its center filled with ice. She grabbed at it with frozen fingers until it came loose, then made her way around the side of the house where she attempted to force it into the notch on the side door. It didn't fit.

On her way back to the milk box, she spotted a red door at the bottom of a small, dark stairway, covered in cobwebs and fastened with a rusted padlock. Carefully, Francesca descended the icy steps into the small cave at the bottom and slipped the key into the lock. Reluctantly the arc loosened and she pushed open the door. Inside was a tiny room with a twin bed and a painted dresser. A baby's room perhaps, or servants' quarters. This room led to a long hallway, carpeted in soft blue. The house was musty and dark, but the moment she flicked a switch along the wall, the corridor lit up like a Broadway stage. Track lights made yellow pools across the floor, spilling light into rooms in both directions. She crossed a large vestibule and found herself in the kitchen, though it seemed impossible that she'd have gotten here from there, almost as though she'd traveled a secret passage.

The pantry was cool and empty but for several six-packs of beer, a bag of onions, a box of Oreo cookies, and some soup. Inside the refrigerator was an unopened jar of fancy mustard, milk, peanut butter, and a Tupperware filled with rotted crudités. A magnet held a list of reminders against the refrigerator door:

  
(1) water houseplants (3, including the cactus)

  
(2) dust

  
(3) turn on the alarm when you go out (obviously unheeded)

  
(4) switcharoo the lights to fake out intruders.

  
(5) Miss me. (A little smiley face and a line of X's followed.)

“Yuck,” said Francesca.

On the magnet was printed The Wallace Gallery, followed by an address. It took her a moment to recognize Charlotte's name. She made her way into the living room where the thermostat was located. She turned the heat high, as Lucky had done, then stepped back and stared at Edgar's painting. Was there genius in that? she wondered. In the choice of colors or the images evoked? She saw none of it.
Perhaps
, she thought,
I wouldn't know genius if it stabbed me in the eyeballs
.

Francesca climbed the stairs, past the bedroom where she'd spent one night less than two months before, then kicked open the door to the bathroom. The room was large and clean. A terrycloth robe hung on the back of the door—green, but not unlike Isabella's. She turned on the hot water, and climbed into the clean stall, held her face under the needling stream. She soaped every inch of her cold skin, scrubbed her head, her ears, and the back of her neck; lifted her leg and let the water squirm deep inside of her, then bent over and did the same. Until she was certain every area of her body had been flushed.

By the time she shut the water, the room was opaque with steam. Heat honeyed through the pipes. She wiped clear a spot of the mirror and splashed after-shave onto her face and neck, then opened a bottle of perfume and smelled Lucky. She wore the robe downstairs and made a cup of coffee, then perched in front of the bay window just in time to watch mothers gather at the bus stop to retrieve their children. Clustered like birds around breadcrumbs, they shifted in one large unit toward the paused bus. From a distance they were perfect—protective palms pressed to their sons' backs or caught in the clinging static of their daughters' hair. She imagined the even weight of their hands, their afternoon smell—cigarettes, coffee, faded perfume. Though she knew that up close, none of it really existed.

Snow accumulated quickly. By late afternoon a power line was sprawled across the road. The lights went out; the television was useless. Wind forced the screen door to open and slam shut against
the side of the house. Francesca sat at the breakfast bar, eating a plate of Oreos. Through the kitchen window she studied the darkened sky; an eerie brightness passed behind it, swift clouds the color of baby aspirin.

She pushed away the plate of cookies and felt sick. As though she'd been punched in the gut. What was she doing here, wearing the bathrobe of a man whose wife she'd fucked? Where were her parents? Why didn't it frighten her to be here, illegally? She could be arrested, wind up in jail. She might never see anyone again. Would she miss anyone? She thought of Lisa. And Evelyn. She missed them a little, if she allowed herself. They had loved her in their stingy, unreliable way.

Francesca knew she never wanted to return to New Haven. She couldn't stay here, of course, in Lucky's mansion, but she could remain on the Cape forever, work for Gus, finagle free pizza from Sherry, free burgers and coffee from Snak-Shak Wendy, eventually venture into Provincetown and find other girls like her. Still—she glanced at the wall phone—it would be nice to talk to someone who knew her. Someone who loved her, no matter how ineffably. The wall phone could give her a swig of humanity. She could hear her grandmother's voice, learn she was forgiven. Evelyn might beg her to return. Her parents surely would. Their indifference would have fermented into contrition and guilt. “Thank God you're all right,” they would say.

But what if no one cared much to hear from her? What if they'd hardly noticed her absence, except to be relieved? What if Evelyn hadn't forgiven her? What if Evelyn hated Francesca so much for what she was, she could never love her again?

Still, she had to talk to someone. She grabbed the receiver of the wall phone and dialed Lisa Sinsong's number. She remembered every digit.

“Hello,” barked Mr. Sinsong.

“Is Lisa there?”

“Lisa gone.”

“Gone?” Francesca repeated. “Well . . . when is she coming back?”

“She not coming back,” he said and hung up the phone.

Francesca walked numbly, determinedly, toward the basement as if she'd been there many times before.

“Lisa gone,” she said aloud.

The door was covered in plastic and taped closed to keep out the cold air. She yanked at a loose end and tore off a Texas-shaped piece of paint along with the tape, then lit a candle that sat on the telephone table and used it to guide her way down into the decisive darkness. Immediately, her eyes watered from turpentine and mold. She stepped onto the cool floor and held the candle out, spilling a spooky warm light across the cement. Three votive candles sat on a small table; she lit them as well.

At the center of the low room two wooden easels faced the same point. Stretched canvases lined the wall like record albums, forming a ledge beneath a series of cubbies that were built into the walls and stuffed with hundreds of paints. On an old, rickety table, the tops of brushes peeked over the lips of mason jars, grouped by size, thickness, material. Rectangular cans of turpentine formed a pyramid in the corner; before them was a laundry basket filled with rags. Francesca felt she'd stumbled into a Tolkienesque paradise, a subworld stocked with the supplies to her soul. Here, in a rich lady's basement, where she ought not to be, was everything she needed. She stroked a virgin tube of white, then pushed her finger down hard and dented the metal. The canvases were rough and scratchy as the shell of her snorkel jacket. She lifted one and placed it on the easel before her, then lit a cigarette and stepped back to examine it. The blanched color reminded her of Isabella. She remembered her sister dressed as Anne Frank, walking around the house with a yellow star sewn into her clothes, speaking in a German accent. What a weirdo, Francesca laughed. Why would anyone adulate a girl who spent her life in an attic, then died of typhoid and lice? Where was the glamour in that—in premature death and posthumous appreciation, public scrutiny of your diary? She would never understand Isabella. And it could not simply be genius that separated them: her own mediocrity, Isabella's superiority. How then to explain Lisa's preference for her, when Lisa, Francesca knew instinctually, was the more intelligent of the two? She wondered whether her sister was even alive, but she had the sense it would
take a nuclear explosion or a car falling from a skyscraper directly onto her head to decimate Isabella. There was something iron cast about her, something impermeable. Still, it was suddenly apparent to Francesca how isolated she was: No Evelyn, no Lisa, no mother or father. No crazy sister—irritating, but at least there. No one loved her anymore and in turn she felt no love swishing about in her heart. She wished she had a dog. Or even a turtle. Something she could look at in the evenings. Something she could touch.

There was, she decided, something very wrong with Isabella. Something that made it impossible to know her. As if there were, at her very core, something that interfered.

Francesca looked down at herself and wondered if she, too, were like this, if she were impossible to know. But Lisa had known her. At least for a moment. There had been love between them; not like with Lucky. She and Lisa had touched with slow, frightened fingers. Nervous fingers, the way people touch when they have something to lose. Then again, it might have just been first-time jitters; there was that possibility, too.

The blank canvas made her lonely. She stepped away from it, toward the cubbies, and pulled out, at random, unopened tubes (ignoring the wrinkled, half-used ones)—browns, oranges, greens, yellows—and squeezed a bit of black onto one of Edgar's pallets, over a pliant swell of dry paint. She placed a large dollop of white beside it, closed her eyes, and conjured Lucky's full breasts, the generous slope of her hips. She lifted her brush to the canvas.

“Lisa gone,” she said again, mocking Mr. Sinsong's accent, still holding the brush midair, frozen like a photograph. The tiny window at the top of the room reminded her of the attic—the severity, the drama of the light. The basement was the polar opposite. No wonder she felt comfortable. Once again, she'd found isolation. She remembered the light of her attic room in the hot, white morning, saw Lisa's arched feet dipped in dewy grass. Lisa's face came to her—the wide skull, the pearly skin.

And she began to paint.

By the time Francesca realized she had to pee, the power had been restored—nearly every light in the house was on. The lawn lamp
blared against the bright day. She cooked an entire box of pasta, ate several chocolate bars she found in a drawer, obviously Halloween surplus, made a pot of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and returned to the basement.

In her review of deSilva's 1993 retrospective at the Whitney Museum,
New Yorker
critic Clara Feinstein offers little praise of the thirteen extant paintings. She does, however, recognize the historical importance of the exhibit, providing as it does an opportunity for the public to witness a celebrated artist's humble beginnings: “Though in five, maybe ten years' time, Francesca deSilva will amount to no more than a colorful sidebar to 20th-century American art (except, of course, in feminist annals, where she will no doubt be exalted as a martyr, to the exclusion of other, more deserving artists), one hopes that this retrospective serves a higher purpose. Perhaps it will act as an agent of inspiration to young, unrecognized artists, a call for them to step up to the plate and pursue the enigmatic itch, so often the first stirring of creative talent. Perhaps these thirteen studies in mediocrity might infuriate these youngsters and impel them to ask themselves:
If that Francesca deSilva person can do it, why can't I
?”
⁴⁹

Lisa Gone
, deSilva's first work, is an unfettered portrait. Sloppy, harried, and teeming with emotion, it presages deSilva's dominant theme, her signature metatext: the exploration of the artist in relation to the subject. In
Lisa Gone
, as in later works such as
Woman with Stool, Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
, and
What She Found
, the artist struggles with her relationship to the subject at the same time as she grapples with the actual, physical execution
of the painting. Dialo describes the simultaneous coexistence of life and art as “electricity. One feels the painting inside the body, as if enduring a mild, yet pervasive, shock.”
⁵⁰

The subject is positioned slightly left of center (very possibly a miscalculation on deSilva's part, one that ultimately, like most of her technical errors, managed to enhance the work's perspicacious intensity). The face is serious and aloof, looking beyond the artist at some pale-colored object in the distance, the glare of which is reflected in the subject's dark irises. Behind Lisa, a long wooden table reveals one place setting, already sullied—lamb chops? Ketchup?—and left for her to clear. The fork, carelessly abandoned, dissects the plate at four o'clock. Were it not for the overall content of
The Lisa Trilogy
, the table setting might convey solitude; at worst, loneliness. But in the context of its companion pieces,
Lisa Gone
can only be interpreted to depict servitude, even abuse.