Art on Fire (15 page)

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

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 movies 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—”

“I don't think so,” Francesca took a step into the middle of the room.

“I swear to God, just a few minutes ago. Okay, maybe an hour. But still, an hour ago! After not having thought of you for all these years.” Isabella smiled, her head bobbing slowly up and down like an afterthought. “So, what have you been doing with your life?”

“Not much. You?” Lisa said dryly, searching in her bag for a cigarette.

“Not much. Except for my book.”

“Yeah, Francesca told me. Congratulations,” Lisa said into her pocketbook.

“What's in the box?” asked Francesca.

Isabella pulled the shoebox closer to her chest, her eyes darting nervously. “Shoes,” she said. “Back to the store.”