Art on Fire

by Hilary Sloin

  “And don’t think I don’t know what just happened to my property,” continued Evelyn. She whistled like a bomb landing. “I might as well burn the house down and collect the insurance.”

  The telephone on the kitchen wall rang loudly. Alfonse jumped up, almost knocking his chair backward. “I know who that is . . .” he said in a singsong, then winked at Francesca. “Hello . . .” he said in the same teasing voice. His eyes looked away as he held out the receiver. “Francesca, baby, it’s for you.”

  Francesca put down her slice of pizza and stood. She moved slowly around the perimeter of the table, took the receiver from her father. “Thanks, Papa,” she said, then moved into the hallway. “Hello?” she said, half asking.

  “Hi. It’s me,” said the grown-up voice on the other end, followed by a long exhale.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember me? Lisa Sinsong. I called to wish you a Happy Birthday.”

  Francesca pulled the phone cord taut through the center of the small kitchen. She opened the doors to the linen closet and stepped inside, her nose inches from a stack of crisp sheets. “Thanks,” she whispered.

  “It is your birthday, right?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I’m a genius, stupid. I remember things. How about we get together and party?”

  Francesca hesitated. She spread her fingers against the clean sheets, her moist palm drawing out the sweet smell of laundry detergent. “My parents are going away tomorrow,” she said before she could think better of it.

  “No shit, that’s perfect. I’ll take the bus. Meet me at the shopping center at noon. Okay?”

  Francesca nodded, her heart racing.

  “OKAY?” repeated Lisa.

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.” Francesca moved out of the dark closet, back into the lit kitchen. Her arm lifted; her hand deposited the receiver onto the wall phone. But she was nowhere to be found.

  “Was that your boyfriend?” Evelyn teased.

  “It was a girl,” Alfonse said quickly, looking closely at his daughter, noticing, unpleasantly and for the first time, that she was no longer 7, 8 or 9, or 10, 11, 12, even 13. That there was, in fact, nothing improper about Francesca having suitors. Still, he could not picture them. What sort of boy would she prefer? A big boy. Athletic? No. Artistic? Maybe. This seemed most likely, but even this—his tall, strong daughter next to a sensitive, long-haired boy in pale jeans and a T-shirt—seemed incongruous. Anyhow, it had been a girl’s voice.

  “What’s his name?” Evelyn persisted.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.” Francesca’s face reddened. She pushed some pizza crusts around on her plate, wanting the subject to change.

  “Let me guess . . .” Evelyn made a humming sound, “Larry.”

  Francesca opened her eyes wide and jutted her chin forward, an exaggerated display of disgust. “Gram!” she cried. This wasn’t the worst thing, people thinking there were boys, that boys posed some healthy, normal threat. She blushed and giggled and looked down at the table, as if it were all true: She had a boyfriend, maybe his name was Larry, but she was keeping him a big, normal secret. She could call Lisa back, say that her parents had changed their minds. Or she could just not be at the shopping center. Ridiculous: the idea that she’d leave Lisa standing there, forlorn and frightened—though there had been not the slightest hint of forlorn or frightened in Lisa’s cocky tone.

  How strange that only the night before, sprawled on her bed in the sleepy purple light, she had tapped out the letters of Lisa’s name with her toes under the covers, as if she’d been beckoning in a secret code. Lisa rarely produced a conscious thought, though she was still the imagined audience whenever Francesca did something impressive—when she’d won the art contest, hit a home run in softball, sped her bike fearlessly down a steep hill. Sometimes, walking across the linoleum tiles in the school hallways, Francesca spelled Lisa’s name absentmindedly, assigning a letter to each alternating panel of color.

  “Ready, Freddie?” Evelyn called from the living room. Alfonse hopped up and turned off the lights, grinning as Evelyn entered from the kitchen threshold with the cake extended in front of her, her face tilted away from the groping flames.

  “Happy Birthday . . .” she sang in brassy, Ethel Merman style. Alfonse joined in enthusiastically, singing off-key. Evelyn moved away from him, singing louder to drown him out.

  Cigarette Burns, 1987

  Hailed as the definitive work of the pseudo-realist31 movement in American art, Cigarette Burns is arguably the most popular of deSilva’s paintings. Its presence is ubiquitous on dormitory walls, postcards, café placemats, and in college classes, where it is subjected to endless deconstruction. Many feel that Cigarette Burns is her purest, most intellectually satisfying work. It is, interestingly, also the only remaining painting that depicts no human subject. Human life is implied, even central, but no longer on the premises. The viewer peers, like a voyeur at a crime scene, into the soft center of a bed, at the magnified fibers of a stained bedspread, dusty pastel flowers smothering its surface. At center are three large cigarette burns, grotesque and greedy as wounds, their insides black and ragged, bleeding out into brown bruises. At their borders, puffs of fiberfill escape the confines of the quilted panels. A flare of light spills across the bed, a light so hotly yellow, so shiny and slick, it reeks of Armageddon or, at the very least, Hell. Paul deVaine compared it to the aura felt by migraine sufferers just before the onset of a brutal headache.32

  Conversely, Village Voice art critic Michael Reilly finds Cigarette Burns to be a facile painting. He calls its focus myopic and its lack of human presence “narcotizing,” asserting that it is precisely this drugged effect that has invited such indiscriminate acceptance: “It is the only painting of deSilva’s that doesn’t tell you the naked truth. For example: Two girls fucked in this bed (What She Found). Or: I’m your worst nightmare (Bunyan). Or even: ‘Every-woman’ is crazy (Study of White Figure in Window). In “Cigs” as it came to be called, she sacrifices depth for simplicity and palatability and succumbs to her own internalized homophobia. A savvy strategy, it turns out, since this remains her most popular canvas. Massachusetts has recently secured the copyright for its use in an upcoming anti-smoking campaign. What would deSilva, a pack-a-day enthusiast, have said about that?”33

  Conversely, Cynthia Bell, in Lesbians in Oil, conducts a thorough deconstruction of the painting. Having theorized that the setting for Cigs is a cheap motel, “the choice of three burns,” she posits, “is no coincidence or simple aesthetic choice; the number three represents other, a third gender. It symbolizes deSilva’s ambivalence about her gender identity.”34

  Larry Barnes, author of the Daily News column “Free Places to Take the Kids,” became obsessed with the painting after viewing a posthumous exhibit of deSilva’s work at MOMA in 1993. His outré disapproval of her paintings led him to implore readers who were admirers of the artist to write in and tell him him why. “Convince me,”35 he wrote in a special addendum to his usual column, calling it “Free Places Not to Take the Kids.” He coined deSilva the “demented offspring of the feminist movement . . . All you have to be is angry, female, and dead, it seems, to get a show in New York these days,”36 ranted Barnes. Interestingly, he deemed Cigarette Burns the only piece worth viewing in the whole collection, calling it a “meditation on one of the less discussed dangers of smoking.”37

  Lucinda Dialo writes of Cigarette Burns, “The painting is about sex. It is evidence of sex; it is the absence of sex and in its place the memory of sex; it is what is missing reminding us of what once was. It is emptiness and loss and desire for sex. It is a cheap bedspread. It is disappointment, thwarted desire, everything gone, all options exhausted. Like the last rest stop on a dark, monotonous highway, a fleabag motel with browned windows and a sign on the gravel lot that says ‘Keep Off the Grass. ’”38

  Chapter Ten

  Isabella stood on the wall of the bathtub peering out the window as
her father loaded up the Pontiac with two suitcases and a Styrofoam cooler. She still did not believe that the car would actually leave the premises, hover over the wide street, then disappear. She ran to the edge of the landing and grabbed the banister. “Bon Vivant!” she waved to her mother.

  Vivian looked puzzled. “Do you mean ‘Bon voyage,’ honey?”

  Isabella bristled. “Of course not. I know my French. I was being wry.”

  “Of course you were. How silly and literal of me. 'Bon vivant!”

  “Goodbye, lovebug. Take care of your sister. Keep writing!”

  “I will,” Bella waved again, cocked her head in a gesture which she hoped indicated appropriate sorrow.

  “Ciao, Bella,” Alfonse bowed in the doorway. He loved to don an accent when saying this, blow kisses, and bow like an opera singer. He was tall and tidy in his black wool overcoat, black wool scarf, and the ridiculous fisherman’s hat he wore every day since he’d found it in the basement in a garbage bag full of clothes earmarked for Goodwill.

  Isabella listened for the sound of the engine turning over, so quiet she almost missed it, then gravel crunching under the rubber tires. When she was certain they’d gone, she ran to her bedroom and closed the latch on the door. She pulled a shoebox from beneath her bed, upon which she’d written PROPERTY OF I. DESILVA. DO NOT DISTURB in thick, black marker. With reverence, she lifted the lid and removed the most recent issue of Born to Die. The six-page newsletter, on white paper, was stapled in the upper left corner, printed in blue on a mimeograph machine. Always be grateful for the mind you have. For though it has brought you grief and torment, it also affords you the means to end your anguish, read a bold call-out. The paper had recently been sold to a grassroots Christian organization called KIND (not an acronym), and the Letters to the Editor column reflected readers’ concerns that the new editor, Joseph Paul, was trying to push them away from suicide and toward God—a far cry from the old editor’s monthly homage to some great artist or thinker who had ended his or her own suffering with an exclamation point. Joseph Paul, conversely, concluded each issue with a Christian prayer and the admonition: “Praise God, since the truth of His existence will soon become more than mere speculation.”

  Now is a good time for a drink, thought Isabella. Her sister was off somewhere, probably dissecting a frog or poking her fingers in an anthill. Her parents: gone. How delightful it was to be truly alone. It almost made her want to live.

  “Perish the thought!” she cried and headed for the liquor cabinet. She opened the two doors with great fanfare, as though behind them a ballroom awaited. “Ahhh,” she sighed, deeply moved by the tall figures of glass—multishaped, variously colored—each filled to a different level. She considered lining them up across the floor, ordered according to the amount they contained, or, more interestingly, according to her opinion of them, then playing them with a spoon, like a xylophone.

  She stopped and recalled her sobering purpose. How easily one became sidetracked.

  Isabella took a long and mournful swallow of vodka, then lowered the heavy bottle with a thud, and stared sadly at the white wall before her. She wished she’d kissed someone. Just once. The small woman in the house next door would have been her first choice. Though she’d have settled for that policeman who picked her up one late afternoon after she’d drunkenly wandered miles from home, and dropped her off in time for dinner. The Chinese girl from the party all those years ago. Even her sister. She puckered her lips and closed her eyes, imagined a mouth against hers. Would it be warm or cold? Wet or dry? Would the skin feel like suede or denim? And how hard would she press? Where would her body grow weak, where would it ache for more?

  She pulled out the newsletter, re-read a sidebar on composing and placing the suicide note. The note must be carefully executed, emphasized the author, and only when all else was firmly in place.

  Make sure to place it where it will be found. You can’t imagine how many families find the corpse hanging or in the car or shot through the head and spend weeks not only mired in grief, but confounded as to what drove their loved one to do it. All because the culprit—the incesting stepfather, loan sharks, homosexuality—remained unknown due to poor placement of the note.

  Determine places frequented by your addressee. Some suggestions reported by our readers: the bathroom mirror, the telephone receiver, the refrigerator. For those of you whose families employ a maid or butler, you may choose to leave the note in their, no doubt, capable hands, but do not blind yourself to the possible pitfalls of involving a “messenger” (e.g., latent hostility or class rage, meddling, absentmindedness, to name a few possible obstacles).

  Never place the note on or around the toilet, on pillows (many people get into bed with the lights already out), in a car (what if they are so devastated by your expiration, they never again leave the house?) or on a piece of furniture with cushions. If you must drop it in the mail, always use certified. Return receipt, for obvious reasons, would be gratuitous.”39

  “Well,” said Isabella, “No note for me. What would I write? I am a miserable, disturbed genius with no hope? Goodbye? I’m sorry? or I’ll miss you? Don’t cry for me? No, I cannot. I will not leave them eternally comforted by lies. Better they suffer with the truth.”

  She thought for another moment. Perhaps a note that says thank you. She pictured writing it, placing it somewhere for Vivian to discover. Thank you for what? For the bizarre genes? Alcoholism? An obscenely high IQ? Severe emotional problems? Misanthropy? Sexual perversion? Voyeurism?An intense and persistent awkwardness around people?

  Instead, she skipped this step and decided to move on to the last task: the final meditation. She sat comfortably on her bed, back to the wall, and closed her eyes, thrusting her thoughts as far back as the imagination would fling them, conjuring up early memories. There were those delightful afternoons spent on the living-room floor while her mother ironed or watched soap operas in the bedroom of the old apartment. When Francesca was still a tiny baby imprisoned in her playpen, Isabella would sit, much in the same way she was seated now, and concentrate hard until her body began to float, lifting itself into the air and hovering inches above the carpeting, steady as a hummingbird, for several seconds at a time before gently drifting back down.

  Life had seemed so full of promise.

  Francesca untied her denim jacket from around her waist and passed her arms through the sleeves, snapped it across her chest. It was early on Saturday; the sun spread like lava over the Connecticut hills. She turned onto busy Whalley Avenue, careful to remain to the right of the white line that separated the road from the pedestrian world. At the top of the hill, the high school looked like a prison, squat and beige, surrounded by a chain link fence. Cigarette butts escaped underneath the jagged meshing.

  She wanted to appear just-arrived when the bus pulled up in front of Friendly’s, so she roamed the shopping center, feigning interest in the darkened windows with For Rent signs, kicking aside flattened soda cups. In the window of the stationery store was the same box of pencils her father had given her the night before. Two big-bellied salesmen in the appliance store rested their Friendly’s coffee cups on top of unsold washing machines. In the window of the Puppy Center, a tiny beagle slept inches from its stool, its water dish overturned, wet and matted newspaper strips lining the bottom of its cage. Behind the shopping center, the ancient paper factory spewed clouds of smoke.

  When she turned toward the bus stop, Lisa was waving. “Here I am!”

  She wore a short skirt and gaudy, flesh-colored platform shoes with chunky heels. Thick straps held her small feet in place; her dark red toenails peeked between them like prisoners. Cheap plastic sunglasses made her look, at first, like a movie star, and then, as Francesca neared, like a hooker. There was nothing identifiably different, nothing Francesca could point to and say “Aha!” Yet Lisa was entirely altered, as though someone had tossed her in the air like confetti. Tough and a little trashy. She looked like one of those girls in TV m
ovies who runs away and takes up with perverted men, then kills them.

  They walked home slowly, cutting through the loading/unloading parking lot in back of the stores. Lisa’s voice was throaty from cigarettes, every sentence punctuated by an expletive. She referred to her father as the pig, the prick, the pervert, and the pedophile. She pushed the hair off her face, her many silver rings flashing through her black mane like lights in darkness. “Eventually I’ll leave,” she said. “Get out of fucking Chinksville. Go to Cape Cod. That’s where people enjoy life. The water, the restaurants. Everything you need.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Francesca.

  Lisa drew a map in the air, starting high above her head. “It’s a peninsula,” she explained, extending a line all the way out to form a severe point, “surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Cape Cod Bay on the other. The two bodies of water converge,” she said slowly, and brought her hands high up over her head and then together.

  Isabella reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped to steady herself, having finished nearly half the bottle of vodka. “Honey, I’m home!” she shouted, clutching her shoebox as she swung around the side of the banister, slid across the linoleum foyer and under the threshold that led into the kitchen. “Delightful!” she called in an English accent, then screamed at the sight of Francesca and Lisa leaning against the counter, staring at her.

  “You scared the fucking shit out of me. Jesus,” she said, and put her hand to her heart.

  A strange perfumed smell hung in the air. Isabella sniffed to the left and right. “Is that marijuana?” she asked, intrigued. Francesca shook her head, then looked at Lisa. They giggled intimately.

  “Lisa,” Isabella snapped her fingers, running through the alphabet in search of Chinese sounding last names. “This is completely bizarre because I was just thinking of you. It’s like I conjured you—”