Art on Fire (35 page)

“I'll be right in the neighborhood. I'll drop them off. Introduce myself.”

“I don't think that's a very good—”

“I'll call you when I get to New Haven,” said Francesca.

Charlotte stood up. She nodded her head for a long time, silencing one admonition after another. “You know,” she said, “You don't need those people. If you want to see them, I understand completely. But you don't need them. You are a much better, stronger person than any of them could ever hope to be.”

Francesca thought of a crow, cawing.

Charlotte walked to the door, then stopped. “Are you going to get
The Trilogy
? I assume you'll be seeing Lisa. I'm sure we could make room for those three works in the show.”

“I haven't talked to her. So I'm not sure.”

“But you wouldn't go to New Haven without seeing her.”

“Of course not.”

Charlotte hesitated. Something was wrong. But she felt Francesca holding her off. She'd never known Francesca's family as a direct influence, had no idea what sort of effect to dodge. Plus, the hour was too late for quick thinking; she was half asleep. “Send Lisa my love,” she said.

“Will do. Bye, Charlotte.”

After Charlotte had gone, Francesca took her paintings, one by one, and stacked them in the car. She removed some from their
stretchers, rolled them into cylinders, and laid them across the floor of the passenger's seat. She knew it was strange, irrational, but she could not stop the sudden compulsion to show her work to her family. A voice reminded her about the upcoming show in New Haven, but even this was not soon enough. Or it did not matter. Perhaps she just needed her work with her on such a daunting mission. She packed approximately nineteen paintings, closed the door to the woodstove, tugged on the cord to shut out the light in the center of the room, and stepped outside of the cabin, leaving the door ajar, as if all that had happened inside there were no longer of consequence.

It wasn't as though Francesca had never indulged fantasies of reuniting with her grandmother; she had, though with decreased frequency as the years piled up. Most recently, she imagined parking the VW in Evelyn's squat driveway, running up the front stairs (dragging her hand along the rusted banister), arriving at the top, ringing the bell, rubbing black and orange chips from the creases in her palm while she waited to surprise Evelyn. Unbridled joy and relief on her grandmother's face; that was the main thing. The familiar odor of dark chocolate peppermints, Tone soap, cigarettes; the afternoon sun sneaking through the dusty living room shutters.

Too late, apparently. There would be no visit, no tearful reunion. No shouting “Gram!” No driving Evelyn to Rose D'Antone for a hair setting or to buy the new Tom Jones record (which Francesca had heard and, in spite of herself, rather enjoyed). And even if Evelyn weren't dead, WHICH SHE WAS, nothing goes that way. Nothing does. Things that are so thoroughly fucked up don't just get fixed. There was comfort there, in the bleak reality, where all was familiar and finite, leaving no room for romantic regret.

Of course she would go to the funeral. She'd always planned to return to New Haven at some point, and this was an appropriate occasion. Now that it had happened, she had no choice but to go. She was being lured by something that had already been set in motion, and all that she could do now was to follow its course. At least she had her paintings with her: armor.

She'd packed an overnight bag—toothbrush, sketchpad, Vonnegut novel, one change of clothes, a suit for the funeral, a few paints and
brushes, and a blank canvas. The radio was playing “Burning Down the House” as she drove into the thinning darkness. Perfect middle-of-the-night music. She wondered whether any remains of the hut might still be standing alongside the narrow river where she'd long ago whiled away so much time. Perhaps just the foundation, which had been the most sturdily constructed.

She stopped at Cumberland Farms and bought two packs of Marlboros, hopping back into the car just in time to hear the rest of the song. It reminded her of Lisa, as did nearly everything. It had been on the jukebox one night while they shot drunken pool in a lesbian bar. Francesca had cornered Lisa against the wall, unbuttoned her jeans, and made her come quietly in the half darkness, in hazy view of the other women who pretended not to see. Thinking of it now, she felt a tightening inside her and this seemed wrong—lusting after a dead person. Everything she felt for Lisa now seemed wrong—perverse and inappropriate. How could she remain in love with a dead person? How could she stop loving a dead person?

Just over the Connecticut border she stopped at McDonalds and bought a coffee before taking her place in the restroom queue, which was surprisingly long for such an early hour. Each time she looked up, a pair of eyes seemed stuck to her like burrs. In Provincetown, she'd been spared such barefaced hostility. But here, people savored their disgust. Their eyes loitered on her body, all the way up, all the way down. Suddenly she hated her black jeans, her long, hard legs, all sinew and strength, the way her hands hung at her sides like an ape. She slurped coffee, peered down at the steam escaping through the sipping hole, avoiding her own face in the bathroom mirror as she leaned against the door, trying not to despair at the sight of her chiseled skull, her square jaw. (All she lacked was a beard.) Her hair was thick, haphazard, unkempt. But what bothered people most, she knew, was the heavy leather jacket, smattered with paint, a nascent pack of Marlboros peeking out from the side pocket. It made her a defiant, dissonant note in the world's symphony. Even worse, it suggested arrogance, pleasure taken in her perverse existence.

A woman in line glared at her. “This is the ladies' room,” she snarled. She led her twin boys into one stall, then pressed her head to
the door. “Tyrone, put down the lid when you're finished,” she ordered through the crack. “Zip up. Both of you.” She listened for flushing, then moved the boys to the row of sinks and supervised wash-up. Francesca spread the lapels of her jacket and thrust out her round breasts. She stared hard as the woman passed by, but there was no response, not so much as a glance of concession.

When finally she secured a stall, Francesca sat on the toilet, propped her elbows on her naked thighs, rested her head in her hands. Exhaustion came fast. She listened to the sounds peculiar to public bathrooms—the anonymous rush, then trickle of urine; a round of flushing toilets; accidental flatulence. People knocked on her stall; she ignored them. Finally, she pulled on her jeans and stepped out under the jitter of fluorescent lights, passed again through the gauntlet of stares. At the mirror ladies were busy holding their hands under the automatic taps and pounding up on the soap dispensers, examining their tired faces in the bad lighting, frowning, trying to fix what they saw with lipstick and rouge. She envied them the solace of the ladies room. She'd never known, nor would she, the ease of exchanging sweet, uncharged smiles with other women, the slowing of breath that occurs away from the assessing stares of men. Nor would she ever experience the solidarity they felt in scrutinizing her, despising her. Evelyn, she knew, was one of them.

Isabella wore a swimsuit under her clothes. It was her latest innovation, to emphasize her shrinking form, the slow dissipation being the result of a diet Vivian had insisted upon after Isabella gained 26 pounds in the mental hospital. She sat in the living room now, on the day after Evelyn Horowitz's death, awaiting the arrival of her long-disappeared sister. She tried to think of her grandmother, to feel anything at all about poor, dead Evelyn. But ever since she'd received word of her sister's imminent return, she'd been distracted. Never mind the fact that the seam of the bathing suit pulled at the tender flesh inside her thighs. She crossed her legs, uncrossed them, recrossed them with the other leg on top.

“I know,” she said, surprised when the words escaped the barrier of her lips, “I'll make a cup of tea.” A cup of tea, thought Isabella, was a good, slimming thing, with the added benefit of calming her nerves or at least helping her appear to be someone who possessed calm nerves. She walked into the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. Slowly, ceremoniously, she removed the flat red box of teabags from the cabinet, pulled one out by its string, and placed it in a mug. Each movement she performed carefully, self-consciously, as though her sister was already home. Watching.

In the hospital, with no vodka to slow down her thinking, Isabella had learned to soothe herself by enumerating metaphors: the crack of ice cubes under heat (mania) versus the slow bleeding of brown tea into hot water (depression). The patter of boiling water on the pillow of tea (mania) versus the immeasurable slowness of heat (depression). Less coherent analogies followed: the hyperproductive, prodigious fertility of tropical fauna (mania) versus the cold, still bottom of the sea (depression). Cities were mania; farmlands, depression. Paris was
mania; New Hampshire, depression. The jungle, mania; the tight claustrophobic woods of New England, depression. Cars, food, music. All of it could be mania, all of it depression. Occasionally, one could be trapped inside both moods at the same time. This was the worst of all feelings. A fast slowing down. A slow speeding up. A car accident in slow motion; a coma full of busy, sexy adventure dreams while people stood over you, talking, weeping, holding flowers, invading your pleasure.

She was, she decided, looking forward to seeing her sister. She'd never really disliked Francesca. It was more of an overcrowding problem: There hadn't been room in the house for both of them. There were only two bedrooms, after all, and they were a physically substantial family—every one of them but Vivian clearing five-seven, every one of them but Vivian sporting broad shoulders and wide hips. In fact, Isabella thought, she'd even missed Francesca from time to time. After all, she'd been the one to learn of Francesca's existence from a newspaper article, to cut out her picture and track down Lisa Sinsong (that bitch), to make sure Francesca was alright.

She was glad to have a sister. Someone with whom she imagined playing charades and eating pizza, running about the neighborhood in the wee hours and setting the dogs on edge. Though she wished Francesca had grown up as expected, into a simple, ugly girl with scant personality, employed by a factory or a bar, flipping burgers or pumping gas, and living in New Hampshire in a trailer. Perhaps coming home to visit occasionally, very occasionally, accompanied by a mangy mutt whose presence drove Vivian so crazy, she couldn't wait for Francesca to leave.

But friendship seemed unlikely now that her sister was a cult figure while Isabella was a melted candle, a smoked cigarette, the ashy remains of a wet, fireplace log. The antithesis of the child prodigy, having nothing to look forward to but appointments with her psychiatrist, advancements in pharmacology, and the hope that, if she did not kill herself, she might lose her mind once and for all, rather than simply misplacing it over and over again and finding, upon its return, that it offered less promise and more grief.

These were her thoughts at the moment she heard the crunching of gravel under tires.

She ran to the picture window, pressed her palms to the glass, leaving sticky childish prints behind, and watched as a small, red VW Rabbit came to a stop at the bottom of the driveway.

“Mom! Come quick,” she screamed, then ran upstairs and hid in the attic.

Francesca parked in the bottom of the driveway. Everything around her appeared set to a different scale: The house was a bleary shade of tan, standing squat, situated too close to the neighbors. The lawn was brown, hungry from winter's pillage. It occurred to her, for the first time, as she pulled up on the brake and unfolded from the car, that her family was rather poor. She'd always known they weren't rich, but in comparison to what she'd seen on the Cape, the house, the neighborhood, and all that surrounded it looked shabby and neglected.

She took a deep breath and tossed her cigarette into the shrubby hedge. She bent over and touched her toes, then slowly erected herself. Mindfully, she folded her leather jacket and placed it neatly on the driver's seat. Time slowed way down. She rolled out every moment that remained between standing outside in the driveway (here, she lit a cigarette, took a long, vital drag) and entering the house she'd fled so desperately. Then the back door swung open.

“Francesca! Honey! You're here!”

Vivian shook with sobs. Her hands flailed ahead of her as if they were lost in mist, trying to pull Francesca all the way from the car. “I can't believe it's you!”