Art on Fire

by Hilary Sloin

  So much for feeling better.

  Upstairs, she brushed her teeth, moving about quietly so as not to rouse her parents, whose company in that moment was as welcome as pins lodged under her fingernails. One more inane conversation in which they’d all behave as if things, having gone a wee bit awry, were now happily repaired, and Francesca felt she might come unhinged, kidnap her sad sack of a sister and return to the beach, never to see or speak with her parents again.

  She put on the same clothes she’d worn yesterday, then stepped outside into the cool morning air. It was Sunday; the museum was closed, so there was nothing to do about the paintings. At least, Francesca decided, she’d busy herself by taking a drive; maybe she’d find the housing project where Lisa had lived or drive through downtown New Haven and visit the laundromat where she’d waited, in vain, for Lisa to run away with her so many years ago, when she still swelled with innocence and bravado enough to try and save her.

  For a moment Francesca mistook for a raccoon or possum or some other suburban pest the body of her sister, seated inches from the car door on the paved ground, wearing a bulky white sweatshirt and corduroys. Isabella’s eyes were closed, her palms pressed flat onto the cold, wet grass.

  “Isabella?”

  Isabella opened her eyes.

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “Maybe. I think I couldn’t sleep so I came out here.” She looked up toward her room, remembering.

  “Have you been here all night?”

  Isabella shrugged. “I think so. I think I have. I was so upset after dinner. So I came out here, hoping LeeAnn would step outside. She often does and we have a nice chat, and then I feel better.”

  “Who’s LeeAnn?”

  Isabella jutted her chin toward the neighbor’s house. “You’d remember her if you saw her, I’ll bet. She’s blond.”

  “But aren’t you cold?”

  Isabella shook her head. “I never get too cold. A person can learn to tolerate extremes in temperature. For example, when it’s really hot outside I hardly sweat. My body simply adjusts. Sometimes I’ve stayed out all night during snowstorms, though often I take breaks in the garage so I don’t get wet. Because once you get wet, a formidable chill is unavoidable.”

  “But why not read or watch TV if you can’t sleep?”

  Isabella’s face tensed. She looked away from Francesca and focused on the side of the neighbor’s house. “I prefer the outdoors. It soothes me.”

  “I understand that.” Francesca squatted down beside her sister. “I often stay up all night working and take breaks outside. Sometimes I just stroll along the road outside my cabin or I ride my bike or I just sit in my car and smoke.” She patted the passenger’s side of the VW.

  “Maybe we get it from Papa. He loves the outdoors.”

  “Maybe.” Francesca groaned and stood up. “Well, if Mom and Papa ask where I am, say that I went to do some errands. Could you scoot over so I can back out?”

  Isabella looked up at the car, unconvinced that her location precluded this. “Can I come? Please? I won’t even speak. I’ll just sit quietly and watch things out the window.”

  “Alright,” Francesca said. “But let me get some of these paintings out of the car so there’s room.”

  “What paintings?” Isabella stood and peered into the car. Sure enough, piled willy-nilly on the floor of the passenger’s side, the back seat, tucked into all the floor spaces, even resting up top on the rear ledge, were paintings—many, many paintings—some taken off their stretchers and rolled into loose cylinders, fastened with shoelaces, others stacked flat and tight. “Tell me those are not your paintings.”

  “Of course they are. What other paintings would I be driving around with?”

  Isabella punched Francesca’s arm playfully. “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Your paintings are in that little hunk of tin? What are you, nuts?”

  “I didn’t want to leave them on the Cape.”

  “That’s crazy, man. What about those? You took them off the frames?”

  Francesca shrugged. “I couldn’t fit them in the car on their stretchers.”

  “No,” Isabella shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Help me bring them inside.”

  “You wanted to show Mom.” Isabella pointed at Francesca, grinning. Something about this idea thrilled her, that her sister, like her, could be driven by some pathological need to impress their mother.

  “Are you coming or not? Because if you’re not coming, I’ll just leave them there.”

  “Of course I’m coming. Duh.” Quickly, Isabella covered her mouth. “Mom hates when I use that word.”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t bother me. You can say ‘Duh’ every five seconds for all I care.” Francesca opened the passenger’s door and pulled out several of the paintings. There were twelve rolled and tucked into the front floor space on the passenger’s side.

  “Can I help?” Isabella asked, rubbing her hands together.

  Francesca handed her sister the cylinders, one by one, passing them carefully, as if they were babies. “Just put them in the garage.”

  “The garage?” cried Isabella. “What are you, crazy? That garage is about to fall down all over itself. We can’t put them in there. Imagine if it collapsed while we were at the funeral and all of your paintings were destroyed?”

  “I don’t want to imagine that,” Francesca said.

  “We’ll put them in the house. In the basement with you. Or in the attic if you want. It’s very dry up there.” Isabella coughed to emphasize her point. Francesca continued to pile paintings on Bella’s out-stretched arms. “I don’t understand this at all,” Isabella said, pulling away to indicate she had enough to carry. “What if you’d crashed and your car had exploded?”

  “Then I’d be dead.”

  “What about posterity?”

  “I don’t think about posterity, Isabella.” Francesca shook her head. Her sister was so strange, but compelling. There was something about her mind that Francesca wanted to understand, to follow, and her responses to things couldn’t be called emotional or intellectual, but were something else—instinctual. You could feel the intelligence ricochet off her like electricity. But it seemed to have no reason for being and nothing to do.

  They brought the first batch of paintings down into the basement and deposited them on the card table. Isabella sat on the daybed, winded from the effort and enthusiasm. She rubbed the gritty bedspread with her hands. “You hated this bedspread,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think Mom put it here on purpose?”

  “No,” Francesca said. “Do you?”

  “It wouldn’t be unheard of. She does that sort of thing—tiny, passive-aggressive gestures. But I don’t know why she’d do it to you. What does she have to be angry with you about? Except that you left the family and never called to say you were okay.”

  “No one ever tried to find me,” Francesca said, lighting a cigarette. She leaned against the wall and stared at her sister.

  “Yes, they did. They tried to find you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Duh . . .” Isabella covered her mouth, then remembered she didn’t have to. “I remember them talking to the police.” Isabella stared at the paneled wall, wincing with shame. “But I was in the hospital. So they were distracted.”

  “What the hell happened anyway?”

  “I tried to kill myself. Didn’t Lisa tell you?”

  “Lisa?” Francesca asked, startled at the sound of Lisa’s name uttered by someone else, uttered anywhere other than inside her brain. “Yes, she did. But I thought it was something more recent.”

  “Oh. Right. There was that time, too.” Isabella stared at a crack in the paneling. She pushed her index finger into the slat where the plastic had separated and tried to widen it. “I have an allergy to life,” she said sadly. “I tracked her down, you know. When I heard you were alive. I called every Sinsong until I found her,
then told her what I’d read in the paper. And she said she’d get in touch with you. Did she? Did she get in touch with you?”

  Francesca nodded.

  “Could I have a cigarette?” Isabella asked, thinking her sister looked cool.

  Francesca held out the pack. Gingerly, Isabella took one and leaned in for a light. She sucked on the cigarette, smoke puffing out like stuffing from all directions. “Is this where you slept?” she made a sympathetic face. “It reminds me of a prison.”

  “Yeah. Me too. The whole house reminds me of a prison.”

  “Want to come sit next to me?” Isabella patted the bed.

  Francesca moved slowly across the room, then sat on the daybed beside her sister.

  “How is Lisa Sinsong?” Isabella asked.

  “Why do you say it like that? Her whole name?”

  Isabella turned toward her sister, panicked, as if she’d been accused of something diabolical. “I don’t know,” she stammered. “I guess . . . I think . . . I like the way it sounds. I think that’s the only reason. And then, too, I guess I’ve always been interested in Mrs. Sinsong—whose first name I do not know—because of how she died, jumping off the building and all, in the middle of New York City.” Isabella paused. “Hey,” she said, “Why don’t we go visit Lisa? See? No last name that time. I can learn.”

  “Because she’s dead,” Francesca answered flatly, staring down at the notches of her knee, visible even through her heavy jeans.

  “What?”

  “She killed herself a few months ago.”

  Isabella stared straight ahead while the words sunk in. Silently she rifled through a series of responses, all of them inappropriate, then sat for a moment until she could think of something reasonable to ask, something a normal person would want to know. “Did you see her before she died?”

  “She’d just visited. A few weeks before.”

  “Was she depressed?”

  Francesca looked long at her sister, trying to remember. “I guess so. She wasn’t very happy. But then—”

  “Who is?” interrupted Isabella. “Certainly not Lisa. Not you. Not me.”

  Francesca shrugged. “I didn’t take it that seriously. I knew she was still living with her father. I knew she was still scared of her father. But I thought maybe she’d move to the Cape and we’d live together. So, no, I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t realize she was particularly depressed. I missed it entirely. I missed it totally.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Isabella said. “You can’t draw that conclusion.” Isabella spoke surely, sounding for the first time like an older sister, “Some people just don’t enjoy life. In the same way that some people might not be interested in children or work or love. Some people just aren’t that enamored of life. It seems counter to our purpose as human beings, I know, because that’s what we’re here to do: live. So, it’s depressing for those people.”

  “Are you like that?” asked Francesca.

  “Yup.” Isabella stubbed out the cigarette, thinking of poor, little Lisa, so many years ago, of her own sick fascination . . . Oddly, there was a strong current of life running through Isabella, almost a violence, something unstoppable, and it seemed she couldn’t end her life even as she tried. It was the opposite of Lisa, whose commitment to her own existence was tenuous at best.

  “Was it a building?” asked Bella. “Did she jump off a building?”

  “No,” Francesca said. “She shot herself in the head.”

  “She put a gun to her head?”

  Francesca nodded.

  “Wow,” Isabella said, newly impressed, her mind spinning with weird emotions—envy, admiration for Lisa’s chutzpah, newfound courage to take matters into her own hands. “Where’d she get a gun?”

  Francesca shrugged and patted her sister’s knee. “That’s enough,” she said. She gestured for Isabella to follow her up the stairs. As they passed through the kitchen, they heard Vivian and Alfonse stirring on the second floor.

  “Tonight,” said Isabella, “this place will be crawling with little old Jewish ladies.”

  Francesca popped the trunk and began unloading the remaining paintings. The door to the house next door opened and LeeAnn Frank stepped outside, her hands wrapped around a tall, oblong mug of coffee. Steam drifted up and into her face. Francesca noticed her at once—she was rather beautiful—and watched as LeeAnn kicked the welcome mat free from the ice that had soldered it to the porch. She wore gray sweatpants, a large, navy sweatshirt with YALE in block white letters. Her graying hair was pulled straight back into a shiny, unwashed pony tail.

  “LeeAnn,” called Isabella, her voice pitched loud and desperate.

  The neighbor looked up and waved.

  “LeeAnn, come meet my sister,” said Isabella.

  LeeAnn leaned her broom against the front of the house and patted some loose strands on the sides of her ponytail. She walked, barefoot, along the frozen ground and squeezed in between the hedges until she stood, shivering slightly and hopping from foot to foot. “Nice to meet you. I remember when you were a little girl.”

  “You do?” Francesca asked, extending her hand. “How could that be?”

  “Francesca,” Isabella offered her assistance. “LeeAnn has lived in that house for—how long has it been LeeAnn?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “LeeAnn has lived in that house for 20 years. And she’s a piano teacher.”

  “What’s that have to do with it, Bella?” asked Francesca, fumbling for her cigarettes and, finally, finding them.

  “Just that she’s an artist, too,” Bella offered, tentatively.

  LeeAnn began to shiver.

  “Are you coming over today?” asked Isabella. “We’re sitting shiva for grandma.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Grandma liked LeeAnn,” Isabella told Francesca. “We all do. She’s been our neighbor for a long time. I miss Sappho, too,” Isabella said, getting wound up, beginning to ramble. She felt little shocks of impulse working their way to the surface.

  “Who was Sappho?” asked Francesca.

  “Our dog.”

  Francesca nodded, putting the pieces together—a blurry picture of a big woman working on her car. A yapping dog. “Was it a beagle?”

  “No . . . duh. Golden retriever,” blurted Isabella.

  “Ah,” Francesca nodded her head. She opened her mouth, searching for something else to ask the blond neighbor, but it was too late. The back door opened and Vivian appeared in her bright blue terry robe.

  “Good morning,” she called over a yawn. “Oh. Good morning, LeeAnn. Isabella, are you bothering LeeAnn?”

  “No, she’s not, Vivian. We were just chatting.”

  “I introduced her to Francesca, Mom.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. LeeAnn, are those bare feet I see?”

  “Yes,” LeeAnn hopped back and forth faster, self-conscious now under Vivian’s watchfulness. She excused herself and slipped back through the hedges, turning once more as she opened the front door to the yellow house for a glance at Francesca, rewarded by the sight of Francesca doing the same.

  The sisters emptied the car of the remaining paintings, making several trips more through the kitchen and into the basement. Francesca hoped, over and over again, that Vivian would ask what it was they were carrying with such care, but she never did. Rather, Vivian, preoccupied by recent events—her mother’s death, her daughter’s return—put on a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, smoking and staring off at the cold, frozen yard.

  This is How She Looked in the Morning, 1989

  In a 1990 article in Genetics: The Journal of Science and Humanity, entitled “The Inexplicable Painting: The Phenomenon of Sororal Symbiosis as the Basis for Stylistic Inconsistencies in the Final Work of Francesca deSilva,” Psychiatrists May Jones and Ann Particip advance their theory of “metaphysical attachment”85 between the d(D)eSilva sisters. The authors challenge the authenticity of the painting This is How She Looked in the Morning, consid
ered to be deSilva’s final work, found in the garage the morning after the fire. They question whether the painting might have been the work of Isabella DeSilva. The majority of scholars, however, dismiss this hypothesis as absurd and, further, insulting to the artist’s legacy.

  The oils still wet when it was discovered, This is How She Looked in the Morning is an intimate portrait of the DeSilvas’ next door neighbor, LeeAnn Frank. Though all scholars agree that this painting is contradistinct from deSilva’s known body of work, the majority assert that the painting bears certain, definitive marks of the artist. Most fundamentally, the size, four feet by three feet, is consistent with deSilva’s work, though This is How She Looked in the Morning was painted on a scrap of wood taken from a pile at the back of the garage; thus the size might have simply been the result of a lucky find. Other imprints: the subject of the painting is, as always, female; there is the almost obligatory window; and, too, a seamless intimacy exists between subject and artist.

  No one argues that This is How She Looked in the Morning isn’t a sharp departure from the decadent and lustful environ of Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch or the tension of What She Found, or the alienation and social commentary of The Lisa Trilogy. The mood is wholesome, unbesmirched. White sun bathes the subject clean; the window is dusted in a fine powder; and while the subject is clad in only a white v-neck T-shirt, she seems to have inspired in the painter a chaste admiration, resulting in a portrait that transcends carnality.