Art on Fire (33 page)

“You want paintings back?” snapped Mr. Sinsong.

“No. Thank you.” Slowly she replaced the receiver and opened the doors, stepped out into the soft darkness. She thought about going inside to talk with Sherry, but the lights in the pizzeria had been turned down low. As Francesca walked along the silent street toward her cabin, she felt she had been hurled, hard, back into her original, unabridged life—the unprettied version. Everything since leaving
New Haven had been one of those contrite dream sequences television writers concoct to bide time until they can come up with a viable story line. Instantly, as if it had been a dog sleeping in the corner, her real life woke up.

Her instinct had been correct all along: Lisa had needed to be saved.

Now she would never have to worry about whether she
could
make Lisa happy, whether she
could
be someone's mate, live as a normal person, have normal person needs. Lisa had made her own decision, a decision Francesca hated even while she understood it. Life, she concurred, was a terrible, crushing thing. But couldn't Lisa have given Francesca the opportunity to make it better? Had Lisa always planned to die like her mother—in one final, willful gesture after a life of submission?

Then and there, Francesca decided there would be no other loves. Ever. This would be her homage to Lisa.

She dreamt daily of New Haven. Sometimes the dreams were terrible—e.g., she was trying to tell her mother that her grandmother had stopped breathing but her mother wouldn't stop talking about inane, unimportant matters. Or: A violent killer was stalking the family, running about with a steak knife through the darkened halls of 312 Riverview Street while she painted, rather dispassionately, on the garage door. She heard screams as her family was attacked, and finally ran into the house to call 911, but upon reaching the operator, found she'd been struck dumb. She ran through the halls and discovered the entire family huddled on the bathroom floor, bloodied from stab wounds. “Save us,” whispered her mother, the only survivor.

She stacked the winter's supply of wood, shifting it from where it had been dumped, just a few yards from the train tracks, to a pile behind the cabin. She sat on the edge of her bed smoking, staring at the canvases before her,
Bunyan
and
Study of White Figure in the Window
, both incomplete. She watched time move—the afternoon light dimming into the faded yellow of evening, the blueberry shade of dusk, midnight's
smoky navy. She awaited the gradual invasion of light as the next day moved in.

She left the cabin only when she ran out of cigarettes, had to use the outhouse or restock the woodpile, or needed food. No one knew the reason for this self-imposed isolation. Francesca had peddled the usual story: hard at work, can't be interrupted, antisocial artist type, and so forth. But the sudden cessation of her once-weekly trips to the art supplies store downtown had alarmed the proprietor, who loved Francesca's work as well as her loyal patronage. He had called Charlotte to express his concern, Charlotte had spoken to Sherry, Sherry had contacted Shanta, and Shanta had left a message on Sherry's machine that said, rather curtly, “I have no idea where she is or what she's been doing. And I don't care. Sorry. Ciao.”

Occasionally Francesca stepped out into the cold air and climbed into the passenger's side of Lisa's car to smoke, worrying a tear in the upholstery, digging her finger deep into a break in the foam. Sometimes she flipped through the softened papers in Lisa's glove compartment and touched old cigarette butts marked by pink lipstick. She thought she smelled Lisa inside the vehicle, which made her feel that in some small way, Lisa was alive. If a person's smell still existed in the air, they had not been eradicated. A smell, after all, resulted from chemistry, from the confluence of things alive. It was all that was left of Lisa—the dirty black interior, the ashtray stuffed with butts, bird droppings turning yellow and black on the windshield. Francesca sat in the car and cried in her small, understated way. She no longer felt entirely alive.

Then, late one afternoon, she awoke from a long nap to the first dusting of snow. She stretched her body so tall that her feet hung over the edge of the top bunk. Her eyes spanned the circumference of the room, as if seeing its contents for the first time. There were clothes piled on a chair in the corner. The stove was ticking rapidly, sending waves of heat in all directions. Her paintings waited like patient lovers, untouched for weeks. The cabin was oddly clean, the floors swept, the dishes put away, ashtrays emptied. Obviously, amid her stupor of grief and isolation, she'd managed to tidy up, though she remembered none of it. The only thing she recalled was endless, pervasive sadness and the interior of Lisa's car.

Francesca sat up and pressed down on her stomach, trying to quell a sick feeling of hunger. She spotted a Snickers bar in a basket, on top of the chest where she kept her clothes, and hopped down from the bed, tore off the wrapper, and began to eat. Within moments, she was chewing with abandon, making espresso on the stove, rigging up her favorite Laura Nyro song, “Brown Earth,” on the cassette player. Then, as she waited for the coffee to spit and cough and threaten to pour in a frenzy over the sides of the espresso maker, she found Lisa's bottle cap on the counter top and put it in her pocket. She turned to face a blank canvas stretched and stacked against the wall. At once, without permitting a reprisal of despair and inertia, she lifted the canvas up onto an easel. She opened a window and stoked the fire, shed her heaviest layer of clothing, stripping down from three sweatshirts to two, and lit up a smoke.

Outside, snow had sprinkled the tracks, salted the dying grass that surrounded the cabin. Lisa's Volkswagen was parked alongside the wall of the cabin; the Styrofoam smiley face rammed onto the antenna bounced about in the winter wind. Francesca brought her bicycle inside the cabin and laid it against the wall, then crossed the room and lifted a brush from its resting spot on the palette. Worms of paints had dried on the metal plate. She squeezed out a fresh bit of blue, mixed black and white to create a snowy gray, added a tawny shade for depth, and began to paint a portrait of the pay phone. Who knew more about the secrets and suffering of man than a pay phone? Who encountered more strangers in crisis; people in love; panicked children needing a ride home? News of lovers' suicides? What object ran smack into the human condition with such frequency? And what was the ratio, wondered Francesca, of plain calls—“I'm sorry I'm late. I'm stopping at 7-Eleven. Do we need milk?”—to—“I still love you, even if you are fucking her.”

What was the percentage of good to bad, tragedy to glory, pedestrian to momentous? As she painted the soft shades of the body, she felt Lisa. Not in the cabin, not in her fingers, not even in her heart: in the colors and shape of the pay phone. Lisa seemed to be the paint Francesca used, into which she dipped her lean brush, messing with it, busting open its sleek shape, spreading it across the canvas, thinning
it, turning it into something else. Lisa was spilled like blood onto the painting, staining Francesca's fingertips, sticking to strands of her hair.

She lightened the black coal of the road that flew past the pay phone, softening its shade until the tar resembled ashes from a cigarette, creamy and smooth. It was nighttime; this she communicated by a violet sky, a creamsicle moon, the lit sign reading PHONE, and its Bell Atlantic branding below, all glowing the soft blue shade of deep water. She prodded the pay phone to life, capturing its particulars: the rounded wear of its push buttons, the scratches on the change slot. And then, after she'd detailed her subject and its surroundings, but before she added the human figure seated curbside, she painted in white graffiti on the gray asphalt, I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.

November 30 was the first bitter cold day in 1988. Evelyn, having once again eluded her nurse, Crystal (a.k.a. Pistol), stood outside the Stop'n Shop in her housecoat and slippers, metal clips dangling from a wasp nest of hair, her naked ankles blue and chapped from the cold. She conversed animatedly with other shoppers—though they pretended not to notice—and clutched a bag of unpurchased groceries (Pop-Tarts, orange juice, peanut butter). She'd just finished releasing onto the pavement a hot stream of urine that, having missed her red orthopedic shoes, followed two nuns and their carriage through the lot. No one looked as Evelyn straightened herself, adjusted her moist underwear, and pulled it from where it had gathered in her crack. Nor did anyone seem to notice the ambulance drifting quietly through the parking lot with its lights spinning. Shoppers fitted keys into car doors and transferred bags from metal mesh carts into neatly packed trunks. No one noticed the moment when Evelyn's life began to wind down like the end of a carnival ride, the music distorting, the horses rising and dipping in slow-motion yawns.

The double doors at the back of the white vehicle opened out and Evelyn stared as the paramedics hopped heroically from either side of the van. Like the opening to a TV show, she thought.

Vivian and Alfonse pulled up alongside the ambulance in Vivian's car, their emergency lights flashing. Vivian wished she'd eaten breakfast. Her mouth tasted like the inside of a dark, sealed box. But there had been no time for food. The last forty-five minutes had been devoted to string-pulling and brown-nosing, doing anything she could, with the help of Joycie Newman, to get her senile mother admitted to the Jewish Home. Kasselbaum Senior had thrown his weight around, and, ta-da, Evelyn rose like curdled milk to the top of the list.

Alfonse hopped out of the car, ran to Evelyn's side. “Mama,” he took her thin arm. Evelyn glared at him, her eyes watery and red. “Here,” she said, and handed him the bag of groceries. They watched the EMTs readying the back of the van. Vivian stepped out of the car, shivering, arms wrapped around herself. She seemed wispy in her light blue sweatsuit and brand new running shoes. Her hair was held off her shiny face by a matching blue headband.

“Who is that?” Evelyn barked.

“Mama, you know who that is.” Alfonse sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He placed the bag of groceries on the pavement.

Evelyn allowed herself to be led up the two steep metal steps into the ambulance, then seated on the hard gray bench. Finally, someone was helping her. Alfonse sat on one side of Evelyn; the female EMT sat on the other. Evelyn was relieved to be in the middle of two able-bodied people. “Dopey,” she said to no one in particular, sighing deeply, then looked at her daughter propped on the edge of the opposite bench. Vivian's eyes were tearing, either from the cold or sadness; who could tell?

“What's the matter with her?” Evelyn snapped.

“I think it was the largesse of her gestures that made them call,” Vivian ignored her mother, spoke directly to the EMT. “Thankfully, the manager knew her.” She'd always wondered what it would feel like to speak of her senile mother while she was in the room. Like so many other events in her life, it was, in the end, anticlimactic.

Evelyn's glasses had fallen from her face when she'd bent over in the parking lot. They hung idly from a chain and rested over a stain on her navy blue polo shirt. She turned to the sturdy woman next to her. “This is asinine,” she said. “I know exactly where I am. I'm at the Stop and Shop. It's Passover and I'm going to make matzo ball soup. Ask him,” she indicated Alfonse. “He loves my matzo balls.”

The vehicle began to move. Evelyn knew what was happening, even from inside the thickness of the bubble. She had named it the bubble, a plastic film formed between her and the world. Occasionally it seemed even to separate her from herself. At first, it had frightened her, but she'd grown used to its way of making things unreal, and, thus, less upsetting. Everything was far away and foggy, but some part
of her understood that she'd just stepped into the final phase of her life. It was a strange and welcome sensation. “Whew,” she sighed. She was so very tired. And she hated that horrible Pistol. White people, she'd decided, are lousy nurses. They were innately less kind.

Anyhow, thought Evelyn, twenty-nine years alone is enough. She'd had enough regret and heartburn and root canal. At first her friends had been a comfort. But now they were dead, one by one, without explanation, as if abducted. No one even bothered to call anymore to deliver the news. Unless she heard otherwise, she just assumed they'd all passed away: Sylvia, Gert, Molly, all her favorite ladies. And now, riding in the bumpy rear of the ambulance, she remembered Yitzchak's heart attack, how she'd screamed at the driver to go faster, be careful, faster, be careful, knowing that she was contradicting herself, unable to stop.