Art on Fire

by Hilary Sloin

  In preparation for Suzy Bishop’s visit, Charlotte had the driveway swept, the hedges trimmed, the rugs cleaned. She arranged a catered lunch, filled the dining room with fresh freesia. At 11:45 Francesca watched from behind the wisteria patch—according to Charlotte, the oldest on the Cape, limbs thick as squid strangling a 30-foot-wide lattice wall against the potting shed—as a small red VW Rabbit appeared at the bottom of the drive. Slowly the car crept up the driveway and stopped beside the entrance to the flagstone patio. Charlotte hopped like a bunny to the driver’s side, looking as if she were going to curtsy as the door opened and Lisa Sinsong, a.k.a. Suzy Bishop, stepped out. She shook Charlotte’s hand, dropped a cigarette onto the pavement, and squished it with the pointed sole of a leather boot.

  Charlotte spied Francesca hidden in the woody climbers. “There she is!” she cried. “Francesca!”

  Lisa didn’t wait for Francesca to step forward. Instead, she strolled over, cocky and self-assured. “Hey,” she said, her voice deeper than it had been the last time. With some difficulty she freed a small box from the snug front pocket of her jeans. “Happy Birthday. Sorry I missed the last seven.” She looked strung out and pale, as if she desperately needed to eat something green.

  “Francesca, this is Suzy Bishop,” Charlotte ran up from behind.

  “I know who it is.”

  “You do?” Charlotte turned full throttle and set a wary glare upon Lisa’s face. “Who is it, then?” she asked.

  “This is Lisa Sinsong. Lisa, this is Charlotte.”

  “Lisa,” Charlotte barely uttered the name, trying to identify its importance. She stared at the drawn features. “Lisa. You mean Lisa Gone?”

  “Yeah. Right,” said Francesca.

  Charlotte was rapt. How amazing to meet the subject of Francesca’s art, after having only known the art. And how plain this girl was. How very . . . Chinese. Small, thin, serious-looking. Her arms like noodles at her sides. Her pale neck. (Body thin as a chopstick. Eyes black as soy sauce.) More than ever, she was convinced of Francesca’s gift. It was incredible, the intensity of emotion Francesca had injected into such a plain face. An unadorned face. Once again, she was awed by the incredible power of art. She remembered a quotation she’d read recently, the words of H.L. Mencken: “Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.” The intensity, then, thought Charlotte, lies not in the subject, but in Francesca. Francesca had aggrandized this plain girl, breathed life into her tired face, enriched her pallor, added dimension to her limp form. Because she was in love. And it was this love, this deep and irrepressible love, into which Francesca had first dipped with her brush. And her beloved, this very plain Chinese girl, had gone to the trouble of creating an alter ego and tracking Francesca down, probably to avoid being rebuffed. How this girl must love Francesca, then! Charlotte wanted to rejoice! How suited to someone of Francesca’s genius to possess such a love, to tend to it so carefully, to guard it so jealously (she’d hid Lisa’s little present away in her pants pocket, not wanting to subject it to the ordinary light of day). Charlotte could have grabbed Lisa Sinsong and kissed her in that moment, or forced the two of them together in an embrace.

  Instead, she invited Lisa into the house for lunch, guiding her into the dining room where high sun poured through the picture window. A vase stuffed with freesia sat at the center of the table, the yellow flowers straining forward with the weight of their task.

  “Freesia,” Lisa smiled, pointing.

  “Do you like freesia?” Charlotte squeezed her elbow. “It is my very favorite flower.” She spoke in sparing phrases of broken English, the way people do when they are trying to capture the syntax of someone who speaks a foreign language. But Lisa spoke English as well as either of them; it was only her face that made her seem, to Charlotte, a foreigner.

  Francesca was distracted by a clash in color between Charlotte’s crimson velvet dress, forming a shelf at her ample bosom and falling steadily like curtains, and Lisa’s apple red sweater. She was highly sensitive to light and accustomed to dark, sedate hues; the contrast caused her to squint when shifting her gaze from one to the other. Her eyes felt scarred by the high sun drilling through slats of the blinds. She drank some wine, trying to relax, trying to slow down her thoughts.

  Lisa finished her first glass of Chardonnay and cleared her throat. “Charlotte,” she said sweetly, “were you aware that Francesca once built a hut?”

  “What?” Charlotte faced Francesca, eyes wide. “You didn’t build that place, did you?”

  “What place?”

  “You know.” She made a face, as if something sticky were crawling on her leg. “Where you work . . .” Charlotte leaned forward.

  “I don’t live in a hut. I live in a cabin,” Francesca said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Charlotte, abashed. “What’s the difference, really?”

  “Oh, this was amazing,” Lisa chattered on. “It was more like a little—” she turned to Francesca and smiled.

  “It was made of sticks and mud,” Francesca interrupted.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t do it justice.” said Lisa.

  Charlotte pointed her fork at Francesca as if to say, You devil. “Tell me about Francesca as a child,” she addressed Lisa exclusively. “I know so little about her.”

  “I like it that way,” said Francesca.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Lisa said, ignoring her. “She’s dying for someone to take an interest in her. No one paid attention to her. They were all too busy waiting on her sister. They missed Francesca entirely,” Lisa looked at Charlotte, gesturing with her hand to Francesca behind her, as if she were the prize behind door number three. “There she was, right in front of them.”

  “That’s a tragedy,” Charlotte said.

  “It all worked out in the end.” Francesca lit a cigarette. She might have been annoyed by the exchange, the two women chatting as if she were a character in some novel they’d finished months ago. But she was happy. Happy, happy, happy. And, too, a little bit drunk. She never drank. In fact, it occurred to her now, the last time she’d tasted anything alcoholic had been the night Lucky had seduced her on the blue divan. At least, she thought, I got a painting out of that. Actually, her thoughts continued on, I got a studio out of that, too. In a sense, I owe it all to Lucky Perkins. That cunt.

  She refilled her glass, trying to go with the strange turn of events, to relish, simply, Lisa’s reentry in her life. But happiness made her nervous. It promised too much and contrasted starkly with the monotony of life: sleep, paint, eat, smoke. Occasionally, fuck. All of it ordered, all of it designed to keep at bay anything that might make her afraid. She preferred her world unmoved: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Yearning was untidy. It was like leaking, leaving behind a trail of things you need but could not manage to hold onto.

  “Actually,” Lisa turned to face her, “Francesca’s sister called me one night. Drunk. It was her birthday and she’d just had intercourse for the first time.”

  “That’s not funny,” said Francesca. “Don’t joke about that.”

  “I’m not joking. She looked up my number.” She turned to Charlotte and addressed her, though the story was clearly meant for Francesca’s benefit. “’Do you remember me?’ she asked, ‘I am Isabella DeSilva.’

  “‘Francesca’s sister!’ I said, which was the last thing crazy Isabella wanted to be remembered for.” Lisa took a long slug of wine. “Then she told me this very involved story about some friend of her mother’s who had this son who looked like an angel—literally, she kept saying. He was literally an angel. She was sort of amusing. But you could feel that things were not right. Here.” She pointed to her head, then took a drink. “Anywho.”

  “Anyhow,” corrected Francesca, moving Lisa’s wine glass away. “I’m glad she’s alive. Of course I knew she was. I could feel it. We are sisters, after all. Whatever the hell that means.” Francesca examined Lisa’s tidy profile, wanted to kiss a straight line from her cowlick at the ve
ry center of her hairline, down to the dimple in her chin. “So what happened with this guy?” she asked.

  “Well . . .” Lisa looked at Charlotte and managed a sly, charming smile. “He had drugs, I guess. A tiny little spoon, was how she described it.”

  Francesca looked at Charlotte. “That’s cocaine, Charlotte. You use a little spoon.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I work in the art world!” said Charlotte, rapt by the story, wanting to know how it all turned out.

  “And I guess they went down to the basement—”

  “The basement!” interrupted Francesca.

  “Yes, and Isabella was wearing some fancy dress of your mother’s and she had a bottle of vodka stashed down there.”

  “She loves vodka,” they both told Charlotte at the same time.

  “And, of course, he had sex with her. And then, I guess, she realized she’d been used and she tried to kill herself.” Lisa reached for the glass but Francesca had the base of her large hand wrapped firmly around its stem; she held Lisa’s eyes steady.

  “She didn’t do it obviously,” said Lisa.

  “Did this really happen?” Francesca asked.

  “Would I drive all the way here, track you down—which was not easy to do and would have been impossible to accomplish had I not seen the article about you in the Register—”

  “Oh!” Charlotte smiled, pleased at the reach of the publicity.

  “—just to make up this story?” Lisa tugged on the stem of her glass, pulling it free. She emptied it, then slapped it down onto the table. “Excellent.”

  “So, Isabella didn’t die?” Francesca asked quickly, knowing she hadn’t, feeling obligated to ask.

  “I would have told you that. I would have begun the story by telling you that. Or not. Actually, I wouldn’t have told the story. I mean, I would have found some more tactful way of telling you. I am capable of tact, you know.” Lisa smoothed her napkin on her lap. “She just wanted the boy’s attention.”

  Lisa asked Charlotte whether she was permitted to smoke. Francesca located a lovely marble ashtray in the kitchen, placed it beside Lisa’s small, left hand, and watched as Lisa’s fingers unraveled the plastic cord on a pack of Camels, rumpled the cellophane coating into a ball, and tucked it, discreetly, beneath the lip of her plate. Then she neatly unfolded the foil corner of the pack. Camels, thought Francesca. Not Marlboros or Winstons or Newports. Not Gitanes like Shanta. She didn’t roll her own like the Chinese girl Francesca had picked up in a bar one night just because she reminded her—ever so slightly—of Lisa. Camels. It was too perfect. How she loved the expression on Lisa’s inebriated face—a perfect balance of goodness, mirth, and a manageable sadness. She loved Lisa’s sadness—that it was there and that it was manageable. Tears started inside her. She leaned in and lit Lisa’s cigarette, watched her pale skin glow against the match flame. Then she lit a Marlboro for herself.

  “Lisa is the chess champion of the world.” Francesca said.

  “Really?” asked Charlotte.

  “No.” Lisa began to shake her head, hard, one side to the other, exhaling a long, much-needed first drag. “No, no, no, no, no. Christ, Francesca.” She turned to Charlotte. “A) I was, was the chess champion. I am no longer. B) It was of the U.S. girls division, not the world. And C) I was about three.”

  “She was at least ten,” Francesca said.

  “Isn’t that lovely how you brag about each other. If only we all had someone to brag about us. Then we’d never have to sing our own praises,” said Charlotte, feeling sorry for herself.

  “Charlotte owns this beautiful gallery on Commercial Street. Let’s take Lisa there, Charlotte, and show her the gallery—” offered Francesca.

  “I wasn’t trying to solicit that,” Charlotte winked at Lisa. “Though it was my gallery where Francesca had her very first show.”

  “I’d love to do that. Tomorrow. But right now, I’d like to take a nap.” Lisa forced a yawn. “I’m whupped.”

  “Where are you staying, dear?” asked Charlotte.

  “Yeah. Where are you staying?” asked Francesca.

  Lisa shrugged. “Wherever,” she said, having known from the moment she’d thrown her small suitcase into the trunk of the car that she’d stay wherever Francesca would have her.

  Francesca waited outside while Lisa said her good-byes to Charlotte. She removed her shoes and rubbed her toes on the cool, thick blanket of grass. She pointed in the direction they were to go, following behind Lisa, studying, Lisa knew, her walk, her movements, the shimmying of her hips. Everything seemed slowed almost to a halt. They were both drunk, groggy from the afternoon sun, the food, desire.

  “So, do you still play chess?” Francesca called from behind.

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s a long story,” Lisa sighed, exhausted, as if she’d been trying to tell it over the course of her entire life and had been interrupted each time. “Is this where you live?” she asked, pushing on the door.

  Francesca nodded, pulling out a set of keys. “All my work’s in there. So I keep it locked.”

  “You live alone?”

  “Of course, alone.” Francesca fitted the key into the padlock and pushed open the door.

  Everything seemed turned up to full volume: the air was crisp, the sun too bright, the ocean rough; even the birds seemed to be shouting. Lisa felt desire, like an itch, as she crossed in front of Francesca. She stood inches from her; heat and longing filled the space between them.

  “I’ve lived here since I left New Haven,” said Francesca. “Seven years ago. You knew I’d left New Haven, right?”

  Lisa nodded. “I feel bad.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Francesca said, glad that Lisa felt bad. “Did you wonder where I was?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Did you worry about me? Did you wonder if I’d been picked up by some serial killer, raped and murdered?”

  “Sure, I did. But you know, I was all fucked up.”

  “Really? What happened?” Francesca stepped behind Lisa and put her flat hands on Lisa’s stomach. She slid her fingers underneath Lisa’s sweater and sighed at the feel of soft, familiar skin, the shape of Lisa’s ribs.

  “Francesca,” Lisa said, “Please don’t hate me.”

  Francesca swallowed. “Okay.” She moved her hands up onto Lisa’s breasts, then leaned forward and kissed Lisa’s long neck, salty tasting and damp. She stroked the length of it with her tongue, and whispered into Lisa’s ear: “I used to think of you every time something happened to me. If I got stung by a bee, I’d think of you. If I ate a hot dog and it tasted good—or bad—I’d think of you.”

  Lisa turned, waiting for Francesca to kiss her full on the mouth, wanting to be filled with her tongue.

  “Did your father tell you I called?” Francesca asked.

  Lisa shook her head, lying.

  “He never told you?”

  She shook her head again, her eyes closed.

  “He said you were gone.”

  “I was gone. But now I’m back,” Lisa said. “Don’t you want to kiss me? I thought that would be the first thing you’d do.”

  “I was expecting Suzy Bishop.”

  Lisa smiled, pleased with herself. “Suzy Bishop. That was fucking brilliant. Right?”

  “Yeah. But I knew.”

  “You did not.”

  Francesca nodded, turning away from Lisa, her face cracking into a sly smile. “I did,” she whispered. “Not consciously. But somewhere in here,” she pointed to a place between her heart and her stomach, “I knew.” Slowly she pressed her mouth to Lisa with lips ajar, as if this modicum of restraint would preserve her. But Lisa leaned in and with one heavy breath, parted Francesca’s lips.

  There in the cabin, where Francesca felt more like a man than a woman, more like an artist than a man, she kissed Lisa in the intimate cool of autumn, surrounded by her paintings and the late afternoon light. She felt herself float out
of her body, out of the world. Her existence became only this: kissing Lisa. Hard. Then harder still, mouth straining open, tongue venturing as far as it would go. She tasted the inside of Lisa, licked the still familiar wide lips, the square teeth. Instead of the lavender oil Lisa wore in her dreams, the faint odor of smoke and onions lingered on her fingers and lips. Francesca’s body flooded with desire. With longing, and sadness and, no matter how she tried to deny it, tidal waves of genuine, never-to-be-duplicated love.

  Study of White Figure in Window, 1988

  One cannot discuss Study of White Figure in Window without first addressing the more complex issue: How much does knowledge of an artist’s personal life skew our interpretation of her work? Would this painting hold even a fraction of the interest it has generated if we knew nothing of deSilva’s tormented relationship with her sister, her struggles with depression and a less than nurturing childhood spent largely in an attic room, the fact that the painting was hidden beneath her bed, that deSilva returned to New Haven shortly after its completion and there died in a strange fire, the cause of which has never been determined?

  deSilva completed Study of White Figure in Window during her final months in Truro. Upon finishing the work, she hid it under her bed where it gathered dust; the corners of the stretcher became reinforced by cobwebs. The wood grew slack from swelling and shrinking with the changing seasons. It was not until after Francesca’s death in 1989 that Charlotte Wallace happened upon the canvas. Ever since its discovery, the quiet, arguably unremarkable painting has been the subject of relentless probing and analysis.

  In his essay, “Live Fast, Die Young, Watch the Vultures Feed,” Phillip Hamil expresses his deep dismay about the “junk addiction”79 he claims has afflicted both the academy and the public. “I’d like to think this lowly preoccupation is a misguided quest for truth. But I am convinced it lays bare a more insidious problem: a culturally sanctioned lack of curiosity that impels us to simplify works of art never intended to be simple. Art is not a code meant to be deciphered, as in ‘this object correlates with this object in the artist’s childhood,’ and so forth.