Art on Fire (19 page)

Unopened bags of fertilizer and peat moss were neatly shelved along the sides of the garage. There was no smell of oil like back home. No grit on the floor. The walls were painted a smooth, industrial gray and on them hung gleaming, unrusted yard tools.

“This is the cleanest garage I've ever seen,” said Francesca.

“Thanks.”

“It wasn't necessarily a compliment.”

Lucky turned and looked at Francesca. “You're a smart-ass,” said Lucky. “I like that in a girl.” She opened the side door to the house, then stood back, taking a deep whiff as Francesca passed through the narrow space. “Straight ahead,” said Lucky.

Francesca walked through the foyer. She turned back to watch Lucky drop her keys on a dark farm bench, then kick off one shoe with the other and use her naked foot, toes thick with Misty Mocha enamel, to slide the remaining shoe to the ground. “Let's sit in the kitchen,” she said. Francesca nodded and followed Lucky down a long hallway, then sat on a stool abutting the counter.

“Is this a mansion?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess so.” She put a finger in the air. “Actually, technically, I don't think it is, because I think to have a mansion you have to have a certain number of acres? Maybe? I really don't know. But Edgar—” Quietly, she pressed along the cool marble floor, each footstep leaving a temporary, steamy smudge. “That's my husband—” She turned and looked firmly at Francesca. “He calls it ‘the mansion.' But he's a big show-off.”

Francesca couldn't tell whether that was said affectionately or not. “Does he live here?”

Lucky opened her eyes wide, shocked. “No! My God! He hates it here. I hope you don't mind,” Lucky pulled a box of ziti down from the cabinet. “But we're going to have pasta.”

“I don't like steak anyhow,” said Francesca. “Other than hot dogs, I'm pretty much a vegetarian. Can I smoke in here?”

Lucky removed an ashtray from under the sink. “Everybody likes steak,” she said. “You're just being a good sport.” She pulled a jar of Ragú down from the second shelf of the cabinet. Francesca could see the cabinet was empty, but for one box of cereal and three cans of clam chowder. “Edgar's a pretty well-known artist,” she said. “Those are all his.” She nodded at the kitchen walls. The titles were painted in black in the bottom corner of each canvas.

Francesca hadn't even noticed the strange paintings, though suddenly they seemed to be everywhere. In the kitchen alone, there were four:
Long and Narrow
occupied a wall between the broom closet and the refrigerator,
Squat and Wide
hung over the oven, and two small paintings—
Orange on Yellow, Yellow on Orange
—were asymmetrically arranged over the kitchen sink. In the living room, explained Lucky, was Edgar's most famous painting. Soon it would hang in the Provincetown Museum of Art. She put down the box of ziti and the unopened sauce and motioned for Francesca to follow. They passed under a threshold, across white carpeting to a bar with black leather sides fastened by furniture tacks. “How about a scotch, mon amour?” Lucky flicked a switch and a series of track lights flooded a large, abstract painting depicting a series of lines, one after another, like an illustrated echo or the rings made by tossing a rock into still water. A pale blue light washed the canvas clean.

Lucky cranked the heat higher, then ran her hands up and down her naked arms. She stood close to Francesca. “I hope you don't mind a little heat. I like to keep it tropical, so I can wear as little clothing as possible and still break a sweat.” She poked Francesca's ribs and chuckled at her own joke, then sighed and crossed the room. She poured two scotches and carried them to the coffee table. “Here's your drink,” she said.

Francesca stared at the painting.

“He's got a whole studio in the basement,” Lucky continued. “Paint, canvases, easels. I'm surprised he doesn't keep a live model chained down there.” She flopped down on the plush, blue divan, and held Francesca's scotch in the air. “Plant your caboose right here,” she said.

Francesca turned and saw Lucky reclining on the divan, her hand balancing the drink inches above the floor, eyelids heavy with lust.

“Guarantee this is the best scotch you'll ever have,” Lucky said, placing Francesca's glass on the coffee table.

Francesca took the glass of scotch and sat on the couch, far away from Lucky. She sipped the hot liquid, continuing to stare at the painting. “It's awful,” she said, thinking both of the scotch and the painting.

Lucky shrugged. “Human beings will get used to anything.” She sucked on an ice cube and faced the painting. “It's called
Woman Fed Up with Marriage Fades
.”

“Sounds like a newspaper headline.”

“Ha, ha!” Lucky stuck her tongue out quickly. “Well, that's about as sentimental as the old goat gets. Can you tell it's me?”

Francesca looked hard and long. The lines were red and curvy. Was that meant to convey Lucky? “Not really,” she said.

“Good. Because that girl has no tits. And I have huge tits. Huge stand-up tits.” She pointed with her drink first to her tits, then to the painting. “It's in there, though. The person. He says she's faded because she's already left. I'll tell you, I haven't looked at the damn thing in—” she thought hard, “I don't know if I've ever looked at it.” There was silence while both of them stared at the painting.

“I don't think he's a very good artist,” Francesca said boldly.

“Bingo!” Lucky shot her finger in the air. She brought her long feet up onto the coffee table and rotated them at the ankles, then put her hand over Francesca's. She separated each finger, stroked it top to bottom, dipping into the thin skin that connected them. “You have hands like a boy,” she said. She placed Francesca's hand on her thigh, high up, where it was taut and warm. Francesca closed her eyes. “A
sweet, sweet boy,” said Lucky, leaning over and covering Francesca's mouth with her own, a giant open cave. Francesca tasted lipstick, scotch, cigarettes. Long, cool fingers climbed under her shirt. Lucky's tongue, cold from ice cubes, widened the gap between her gums and the inside of her lip.

Francesca loved Lisa. But as Lucky unbuttoned her shirt, took one olive pit nipple in her mouth, and sucked, hard, working the other one with her fingers, Lisa was as faded as a morning dream by afternoon. Lucky unbuttoned Francesca's Levis, followed her fingers with her tongue like a feather down the front of Francesca's body. “Lower,” Francesca moaned, trying not to squirm, trying not to do anything that would stop Lucky from continuing. Her jeans, peeled off, were tossed away. The snaps hit the coffee table, making a sharp sound. Lucky hung one leg over each of her shoulders.

“Please,” Francesca moaned, raising her hips.

“Please what, baby?”

“Pretty please?” asked Francesca

“What do you want me to do?” Lucky asked, her voice throaty and bossy.

“Lick me,” said Francesca.

“But I am licking you,” Lucky demonstrated the gentle, feathery touch along the outside.

“Inside.”

“Inside? Like this?” She pressed her tongue inside.

Still, this wasn't quite it, wasn't quite where Francesca needed her. “Not there.”

“No?” asked Lucky inching up.

“No,” Francesca breathed, her stomach butting into the air as Lucky neared the center, so slow, slow as honey, working all around until finally the warm, soft tongue barely touched the slippery bead, where all of Francesca's longing had converged. Lucky covered it with her mouth, blowing gently all around, making it swell larger and larger. Every flick of the tongue made Francesca want more, more than was possible, more than existed.

She loved Lisa. Still, she pressed against Lucky's open mouth, spread her legs as wide as she could. “Oh God,” she cried out, coming
hard. She threw her head against the arm of the couch, her hips in the air. Her toes pressed the other end of the couch so hard she might have separated the blue divan. And it was over. She guided Lucky's head away, could stand no pressure. Lucky lay across Francesca's naked chest. A fine moisture covered them like a blanket.

In a 1983 lecture at Yale University, preeminent feminist scholar Lucinda Dialo lamented the lack of a female erotic aesthetic: “What art in the Eurocentric tradition provides,” Dialo told a standing-room-only crowd of 250 students and art historians, “is an exhaustive record of the male subconscious, much of which, consistent with biological research, is sexual in nature. Any attempt by female artists to represent their own sexuality is necessarily influenced by this paradigm: The woman artist's eroticism either varies from that of the male; mirrors it; opposes it; or—God help her—intentionally ignores it. But always her work is measured against it.

“In an unsexist, unbiased world, how would the woman artist depict eroticism? Answering this question is tantamount to measuring the beauty of a rose, unswayed by the cultural baggage piled onto each petal, the metaphors injected into each thorn. In our culture, we know, as if by osmosis, the meaning of the rose—whether this meaning exists in poetry, song, art, or even life. Each genus has a different meaning. A rose is not a rose is not a rose—not really. Which is perhaps why Stein's saying is so widely quoted: It promises simplicity where none exists.”
⁴¹

In 1986, Dialo stumbled upon
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
while reviewing a scantly funded, short-lived show at the Lower East Side gallery Shame the Peacock. The painting hung between
What She Found
and
Barbecue
(destroyed in the
1989 blaze).
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
moved Dialo so profoundly, she wrote to deSilva. An excerpt of the letter is reprinted here:

“When I gazed upon [
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
] I felt momentarily devastated, as though I'd finally witnessed what I could never actually envision but believed in nonetheless—rather the way religious men [sic] must contemplate the face of God. As you probably know, for years I've been bemoaning the lack, and even the impossibility, of a women's erotic aesthetic, one that would reach beyond the labiatic stamens of O'Keefe and the simultaneously self-deprecating/self-aggrandizing self portraits of Kahlo (not that I in any way disparage the genius of these artists). But gazing at your painting, I felt for the first time I was witnessing, even immersed in, an expression of unapologetic, unabashed, entirely female desire . . . What a welcome shift from depictions of banana penises and eroticized Christs.”
⁴²

Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
depicts a voluptuous, naked woman sprawled on a blue divan. The voluminous cushions mirror the Olympian curves of her body. She lies on her back, her right hand dangling, nearly grazing the floor. Her long, manicured fingers (the polish on the index and middle nails is noticeably chipped) straddle the bowl of a wineglass, tilting the thick red libation dangerously toward the mahogany floor. The tension of this image
disrupts an otherwise peaceful setting. It reminds us of the changing world outside the painting and creates in the viewer the sense that s/he is invading a private moment.

The painting is ardently sensuous; one can almost hear opera drifting in from an alcove, where an open window forces silky curtains to submit to the summer breeze. It is late afternoon. Outside, the sun is white and crisp; but the room where the subject rests is sleepy, as though she's just been made love to moments ago or has just awoken after a night of sexual pleasure. The rich, butterscotch tint to her flesh is in vibrant contrast to the royal blue couch. She is clearly the object of desire: The artist wants (and has likely had) what she paints. She gives us the luxuriously padded female with plump red lips, thick hair, and a body tender with life, post-coitally spread. One sharp and phallic spear of light invades through a cracked shutter, dissecting the subject's belly and concluding at the edge of her orange pubic hair.

Not surprisingly,
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
has been largely ignored by male critics. Michael Wright dismisses the painting as “thoroughly unerotic . . . unless one is titillated by alcoholism and pedophilia . . .”
⁴³
Larry Barnes, not surprisingly, found this painting particularly objectionable, dubbing it “Grotesque Expressionism.”
⁴⁴
It is hard to know which aspect of the painting men find so abhorrent: (1) the realistic portrayal of the female body; (2) lesbianism; or (3) the presumed context in which lesbianism prevails—i.e., an erotically charged atmosphere with no man on the premises.

“Why all the controversy?” asks Dialo. “What is so upsetting about a nude woman in her thirties with pear-shaped breasts, folded belly, double chin, chipped fingernail polish, and red pubic hair? Perhaps, it is because this is a
contemporary
woman, not a rotund, period-appropriate Rubens or a deconstructed Dora Maar. This woman has shuddered her way through a lifetime of orgasms.”
⁴⁵

Cynthia Bell takes Dialo's argument one step further, claiming the eroticism in the painting is not simply female, nor even lesbian, but specifically rooted in the butch/femme lesbian tradition—“One of the oldest and most thoroughly despised couplings in recorded history . . . No matter how earnestly, even desperately, the art world wants to embrace deSilva, she will never be one of them. In any other context, she would have repelled them—had they seen her on the street, they might have called out an insult, or if they were more genteel in their disgust, whispered ‘freak‘ or ‘muff-diver‘ to a companion. Certainly,
Woman Reclining on a Blue Couch
would pose a threat to their family values. deSilva is concerned with the
queer
experience of sex—woman to woman sex. This painting, more than any of her others, is a flagrant portrayal of lesbian desire. Scholars try to make it float in the mainstream, but it sinks like a stone.”
⁴⁶