Art on Fire (8 page)

“I'll keep the car running.”

Graffiti covered the outside walls as high and wide as a person could reach hanging from the railing. Most of it was in Chinese, but there were the usual American imperatives: Suck my cock, Eat Shit, etc. Inside was dark even though it was still morning. Francesca ran her hand along the bumpy walls, guided herself past the mailboxes, all in various stages of disrepair—doors pried open, hinges hanging, locks broken and popping out like eyes. She climbed a staircase, two steps at a time, her heart pounding. The air smelled of burnt toast and old smoke. She heard water running through the pipes, silverware being shuffled, people speaking in Chinese. A piece of Scotch tape pressed to the center of a door said “Sinsong” in thick, black marker. Cigarette butts had been swept from all sides of the hallway and left in a pile in the corner.

She knocked quietly.

“Yes?” a man bellowed.

“Is Lisa home?”

“Lisa? Who there?”

A latch opened, then two bolts, then the door peeled back. Mr. Sinsong stood in a stained undershirt and belted pants. His black socks had holes at the big toes. His hair was greasy and very black, slicked to the back of his age-spotted forehead.

“Yes,” he said loudly. “How are you? What you want?”

“Is Lisa home?”

He looked beyond Francesca, wondering how she'd come to be here, standing alone in the hallway. “Lisa—” he bent backward. “Someone here for you. Yes, come in.” He stepped out of the way.

The room smelled thickly of bacon, as though it had been cooked there every single day, without the windows having once been opened. There was a damp, wet-carpet smell as well. Lisa stepped out of the bathroom wearing a worn blue bathrobe over Scooby Doo pajamas with feet. Her hair was bent in different directions, frizzy strands everywhere. “I knew it was you,” she said.

“Meet me at the Wash-O-Mat.” Francesca pointed toward the window. “I have a plan.” She was a character in a book now. Everything would come together.

Lisa shook her head.

“But my grandmother's waiting. She'll take us to the bus station.”

“I can't.” Lisa took a step back, glanced toward the kitchen.

“The Wash-O-Mat. Across the street.”

“I know where it is!” Lisa said, pushing Francesca toward the door.

“I'll be at the Wash-O-Mat. Waiting.”

“I'm not coming,” whispered Lisa, pressing closed the door.

Francesca galloped down the stairs, out into the blinding day. She perched on the edge of Evelyn's passenger's seat, one foot firmly rooted on the pavement. “Gram,” she said, as Evelyn shifted into drive. “We have to wait here. Lisa's coming.”

“What do you mean, she's coming?”

“She's coming with us.”

“Close the door,” said Evelyn.

“You don't understand—” Francesca's voice was desperate and high. “Lisa needs our help.” She held onto the door latch.

Evelyn turned and glanced at the building as if it were Chinese. “I told your mother I'd have you back by noon. You said you needed to see your friend. Now you've seen her. Now we're going.”

“No.” Francesca got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. Without turning back, she crossed the narrow street, onto the sidewalk, glancing up once at the beaten-up WASH-O-MAT sign,
its edges rusted and bent, before boldly pulling back the glass door. Inside felt like another country: humid, tumbling, filled with the muted sounds of machines and jingling coins. She did not look back at her grandmother. Instead she walked to the back of the room and glanced up at a bulletin board perforated by a smattering of pushpins. There were two index cards posted, written in Chinese by the same hand, with the same phone number at the bottom. In the middle of the wide, empty board was a poster for an MS walkathon with a pocket stuffed with postage-paid reply cards. And in the far corner a red sign announced a spaghetti supper and bake sale at a nearby church. Someone had written FUCK FAGS in ballpoint pen and DUKE AND LISA FOREVER inside a heart, with an arrow through both sides, disappearing in the middle. Francesca knew it was her Lisa in question. “Stupid boy,” she shook her head.

She turned toward the street. Evelyn's car was gone. “Okay,” she told herself, holding her hands in front of her and pressing her palms toward the ground. Her pulse was everywhere, making it hard to stand still. She felt her pockets, took out the twelve dollars she'd put there earlier, and counted them. “Okay,” she said again. A woman passed her, carrying pillowcases overstuffed with laundry. Francesca stepped outside. Still, the car was nowhere in sight. The sunlight hit her face, making it difficult to determine which window was Lisa's. She made a visor with her hand and saw someone watching her. Frantically, she gestured.

The Impala reappeared in front of the laundromat. Evelyn leaned toward the passenger's side and rolled down the window. “Get in,” she said.

Francesca shook her head, newly emboldened by Evelyn's return.

“I mean it. That's enough. We can call your friend later.”

Francesca folded her arms and pretended not to hear a word Evelyn was saying. She whistled and looked left to right, willing Lisa to emerge from the flesh-colored building.

“I will not leave you in this neighborhood. It's a bad neighborhood,” Evelyn said in a desperate whisper, so as not to anger lurking hoodlums.

Francesca re-entered the laundromat and feigned interest in a Chinese newspaper sprawled on the folding table. She heard Evelyn
pull away again and would not allow herself to look. The door to the laundromat opened, thrusting cold air inside, marked against the heat of dryers and the humidity of washing machines. Lisa had changed into pants, a turtleneck, and her white tennis shoes, still soiled from the day before.

“Where's your grandmother?” she asked, worried lines darkening her forehead.

“Gone.” Francesca shrugged.

“Gone?” Lisa looked out the window. “What do you mean? Where did she go?”

Francesca shrugged.

“What will you do?”

“I told you, I'm running away.” She patted her pocket.

An old woman entered the laundromat. She wore a pink cotton housedress under a yellow apron with bulky pouches weighted down from coins. Her hair was mostly gray, with a few sharp black strands like cracks in a moonlit sky. She smiled at Lisa, looked suspiciously at Francesca.

Francesca sat in a plastic chair that was attached to a line of others pressed against the wall. She gathered up the Chinese newspaper and opened it in front of her face. “I'm not leaving without you,” she said into its folds.

“Okay,” said Lisa. “But I'm going home.” She waited.

The Impala reappeared. This time Evelyn parked and got out. She entered the laundromat, pulling her coat closed around her substantial girth, doing her best not to look at anything around her. “Is this the friend?” She nodded toward Lisa. “She looks alright to me.”

Lisa backed away, toward the door.

“No!” said Francesca, standing up. “Don't go—”

“She has to go,” said Evelyn. “Go on now,” she smiled at Lisa. “Go on home. Franny will call you tonight and you girls can make a date to see each other. I'll even pick you up.”

Lisa waited one more moment, then turned and passed through the door, out onto the narrow street.

“See?” said Evelyn. “She went home like a good girl.” She pulled on Francesca's sleeve and led her out to the car, this time meeting little
resistance. Francesca was relieved by the familiar smell of the broken air conditioning. She hadn't chosen this. She'd tried to save Lisa, but Lisa wouldn't come. She peered through the back windshield, thought she saw Lisa's shiny black head, but as the car moved several feet forward, she saw that it was only the darkened window, venetian blinds pulled closed against the day.

For dinner that night, Alfonse took Francesca to Pepe's pizza on Wooster Street, his old neighborhood. He pointed out, as he'd done many times before, the small brownstone where he had been reared by his aunt and uncle. (His parents were killed when he was only three, victims of an airplane crash on their way home from a holiday in Italy. It was because of this tragedy that he'd never been there.) Alfonse once again showed Francesca the old storefront, now a Subway shop, in which his uncle had run a pizzeria. It was there Alfonse had been employed all through his adolescence until the business could no longer hold its own against Pepe's and Sally's, and had finally surrendered. Alfonse had gone to work for Luciani's landscapers, and had soon moved out of the old neighborhood into downtown New Haven.

No one at Pepe's remembered Alfonse, and though he claimed to remember the pizza maker, he did not try to say hello. They chose a table up front by the window and ordered a small pepperoni and a pitcher of ginger ale. Alfonse told Francesca he was sorry “about all that had happened with your little friend—”

“Lisa,” interrupted Francesca, almost violently.

“Lisa. I'm sorry, baby.” He hesitated before bringing up the topic in which he was most interested—his own intruded-upon love, a young, perfect (more perfect with each passing year) love, scribed on a face that remained fresh as white sheets on the line in the backyard of his mind. Still, almost thirty years later. He shook his head. “Your sadness reminds me of a girl I loved.”

“What girl?” asked Francesca.

“A girl I knew before your Mama, long, long ago, way back in
medieval times,” he joked in that adult way, simultaneously relishing and resenting his ripened age. Outside, a man was walking two strange dogs with rat ears and skinny, nervous bodies. One sprayed against a lamppost, the other, at the same moment, began compulsively rolling on the ground. Alfonse stared with a blank expression; Francesca considered laughing, but decided against it.

“You know, baby, each thing that doesn't work out means something else will.”

“I don't care about anything else,” said Francesca.

The pizza arrived, and Alfonse began pulling the slices apart, loosening them, making the cheese bleed onto the metal plate. Francesca quickly pulled a slice away and dropped it onto her plate, blowing on it. Her stomach was empty; she hadn't eaten anything since the rugelach at her grandmother's that morning.

“You know,” Alfonse said with his mouth full, then stopped to chew, having secured his position as speaker. He swallowed. “You can talk to me about anything.” Francesca thought he sounded like a faker, like he was recycling lines he'd seen in a movie scene between a father and daughter. “Anything at all. That's why I'm your Papa. To help you.”

“Okay.”

They ate for several moments. Alfonse took a sobering sip of ginger ale, swallowed. He looked up toward the kitchen, where one could watch the pizza maker throw the ball of dough into the air, catch it on his hardened fist so that it immediately spread out and dripped down the length of his wrist. In quick, fleeting thoughts, he remembered the old restaurant, all his dead relatives.

“Grandma says you were very upset.”

“Not really.”

Alfonse was an ambiguous father, a quixotic, kind presence who lurked about in the children's lives, surprising them with stuffed animals and tickling. But it was clear Francesca needed someone here, and Vivian had been too repulsed by the day's events to lend a hand. So the task had fallen upon Alfonse, and he was flailing about in the dark, trying to prove to himself that his parental love was unbiased and blind and that it mattered not to him that Francesca appeared to be taking her tomboy-ness to a pathological level.

“Is your friend in some kind of trouble?” He stopped eating and folded his hands under his chin, resting his elbows on the table. An isosceles triangle, thought Francesca.

“No.” She threw her crust back onto the pizza plate.

“Well, then why did you tell Grandma it was an emergency? Why did you have her bring you to such a bad neighborhood?”

“It's not a bad neighborhood.” To Francesca, it was a perfect neighborhood. Its residents, and all the Chinese people of the world, were supremely fortunate and imbued with a magical quality: All of them were related to Lisa Sinsong.