Art on Fire (14 page)

“Don't know,” said Isabella cheerfully.

“I see.” The sounds of ice against glass. “And what do the women do with the money?”

“I told you,” snapped Isabella. “I haven't worked out all the details.”

“No, no, of course not,” said Mrs. Val Noonan, her voice straining with supplication. “And why would you? It's a work in progress. Why, not only that, it's the
first draft
of a work in progress.”

“I have to go,” said Isabella, suddenly exhausted, as though she'd been running for weeks, and only now had stopped to sit down. She found the mechanics of storytelling—plot, character development, etc.—frustrating and upsetting, preferred to focus on the passages that made her flutter inside. Descriptions of the lovely room at the top of the stairs where the runaway girl lived. Dust bunnies. Nicks in
the shag carpeting. The sun pushing through the small, perfect window. Sloped ceilings, wind chimes and mobiles, faint opera rolling up through the radiator pipes. And, of course, the blond.

On Francesca's 18th birthday, Evelyn arrived at dinnertime with the archetypal yellow cake—cloudy lemon filling, grainy red roses on white frosting, Happy Birthday Francesca sprawled in lazy jelly script at a dissecting angle. Alfonse had completely forgotten. He cursed himself, but more fervently cursed Vivian, whom he felt merited a greater portion of the blame, being the mother and, thus, the one charged with keeping track of things. It was because of that damn job, pulling her in a million different directions, he muttered while ordering the pizza. He scrambled to make the house festive, unraveling streamers already marred with scotch tape and blowing up a few balloons he found on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, surplus frippery from Isabella's last birthday celebration.

Vivian was working as a paralegal at Kasselbaum Kasselbaum Steele, a large New Haven law firm. She worked late each evening, usually returning home around midnight, still nursing a ten-inch tall coffee from 7-Eleven, still speeding from the No-Doz or Dexatrim she'd taken at lunch time to carry her through the afternoon. Up, up, up she was, all through the long, useless hours between cogency and sleep. Bug-eyed in Alfonse's reading chair, her foot tapping restlessly, she stared at the TV lineup: the end of Late Night, Don Kirshner, sometimes a horror movie or some madcap comedy with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Occasionally, she'd still be there when Davey & Goliath aired at 6 a.m., her face tinted a chilly, sleepless blue.

The marriage was crawling toward its demise. In a last-ditch effort, Vivian had signed them up for a Marriage Encounter weekend in the Catskills; they were scheduled to leave the next morning. But asperity settled over the hopeful weekend before it had begun. Alfonse was disgusted that Vivian had forgotten Francesca's birthday. He left a
message for her at work and hurried the Valiant down to the shopping center, hoping that somewhere other than the pharmacy and the liquor store might still be open. He arrived as the office supplies store was closing up and managed to quickly select a box of charcoal pencils from the window display. Driving home with the silver foil-wrapped package beside him on the seat, a curly green ribbon taped to its center, his mood changed. He felt he'd done right by his daughter, and instead of his gift being a last-minute, scrambling purchase, he decided he'd selected it carefully, after much deliberation.

Isabella was hard at work on
A Gift to the Universe
. She'd imposed upon herself a period of confinement during which she could leave her room for only five-minute intervals. She had determined that anything she needed to accomplish outside her room could be done in five minutes or less: a shower, a snack, a quick pee, or even a bowel movement, a long swallow of vodka. At 5:47, when Alfonse left the house to purchase Francesca's gift, while Evelyn was cleaning the kitchen and Francesca was sequestered in the attic, Isabella, who had remembered her younger sister's birthday all on her own, slipped downstairs and deposited a card on the dining room table. Made from a sheet of shirt cardboard folded in half, it pictured Isabella's own attempt at artistic expression—an abstract black and white something or other that resembled the mid-section of an insect. Inside she'd written in black ink: Happy Day of Inception, and signed it, as she signed everything, “I.” She returned to the sanctuary of her room.

The pizza arrived. Evelyn, Alfonse, and Francesca gathered around the small table.

“I'm starving!” Francesca declared, grabbing at a steaming slice and burning the roof of her mouth. She took a long drink of Pepsi, and sat with her mouth open, waving her hand in front of it.

Alfonse wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Well, I just don't know about tomatoes this year,” he said as if they'd been immersed in this topic. “Last year we had that terrible disease, so it might be a good idea to skip a year. Give the soil a rest.”

Evelyn looked up at him, the point of the pizza in her mouth, her chin close to the plate. She turned to Francesca and rolled her eyes. “Since when does soil need to rest?” she said. “I got schvarzas moving
into my neighborhood.” Her open mouth displayed flakes of charred crust.

“What?” Alfonse leaned over, detecting German.

“Schvarzas. Blacks,” said Evelyn. “Blacks moved in right across the street. Right where I can see them, going to church on Sunday in those pastel-colored schmattas they wear with the big productions on their heads. I don't know how they all fit into one car, the women have such big rear ends.” She chewed heartily with her mouth open, crumbs filling the spaces between her slack gums.

Francesca imagined her mother pulling into the driveway, removing a package from the backseat. She had no idea what was contained in the package, nor did she care. Something large and cumbersome that would require her mother to back through the door in order to get it inside. Something that could not possibly have been selected with Isabella in mind.

“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.

Hailed as the definitive work of the pseudo-realist
³¹
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