In the middle of the third night, I got out of bed. I have been known to scrap paintings but I always reuse the canvases. I don’t have money to burn, I just gesso them over and start fresh. But I wanted this one gone. I removed the canvas from the wood stretchers, cut the painting into tiny shreds until the scissors hurt my hands, and placed the pieces in the garbage. I prayed for help, Dear Jesus and Mary, dear angels and saints, help me, I’m your daughter, I’m good not bad.
The next night, when the men were home at dinner, I took a walk. A group stood outside the Holy Rosary Church hall, alcoholics waiting for their meeting. On Wickenden Street people spilled from bars and restaurants onto the sidewalk. This was the new Fox Point. Back when I’d first moved here, RISD students and faculty were the exception. Now we were taking over, replacing the Portuguese families who had immigrated during the 1800s to fish and work in the factories. I wished developers would knock down the house across the street, send Dominguez and his family packing so I wouldn’t have to think about him ever again.
At Amelia’s Café, I ordered an espresso. Thunderheads formed over the hurricane barrier. I wished for rain, respite from the heat. Since that hour with Dominguez, slowly, a little more every day, the buzzing had increased. Imagining Lenny’s wife’s murder had soothed my jealousy for a time, but now I felt the insects inside again. My hands shook. I had gold leaf under my fingernails. I tried to dig it out, but the disturbance just made it sparkle more.
I pictured Lenny and his wife on the Cape. He would be thinking of me and she’d be doing a crossword puzzle that kept her in her own world while he longed and longed for me. Jealousy was back, eating me alive. I had to get rid of it, had to dispel the swarm. Thunder rumbled, and I jumped.
Bulimia is like an internal storm cell: build-up, violent release, and then sudden peace. It gets rid of whatever you’ve swallowed. At treatment they called it “the daddy disease”—girls who don’t get enough love from their fathers, or too much of the wrong kind, like me, the bad touching, become bulimic. Treatment gave me tools to fight the impulse, but what’s an impulse but a bunch of nerve endings firing in the brain? What I had was bees.
Oh, I wanted to claw them out of my body. At the India Street market I grabbed the most fattening food I could find—Portuguese sweet bread, chunky peanut butter, Marshmallow Fluff, potato chips, Frosted Flakes.
Hurrying home, my arms ached from the heavy bags. A grape arbor covered a neighbor’s driveway. Purple finches had nested in the lush green vines. I slowed to listen. It was dark, but I heard their wings rustle.
The innocence of nesting birds made my throat ache. I could drive away from Fox Point and never return. I would head west, back to the factory town in Connecticut where I’d grown up, erase Lenny and the affair. The only problem about going home was that my father would be there.
“Baby,” Lenny said, stepping out of the shadows as I approached my house.
“Len,” I said, shocked to see him.
“I had to be with you.” Beaming, he held out his arms and I walked toward them. Medium height, thick around the middle, and balding, he looked just like what he was: a middle-aged midlevel power broker. But I saw past that: being an artist’s subject can feel like being loved, and although more than one has thought he was in love with me, the only one I have ever loved back was Lenny. He took care of me in small ways and large ways; he paid my rent, and didn’t that count for a lot?
Rain poured down, soaking us. Lenny pulled me behind the back steps, out of the neighbors’ sight. The plastic handles of the grocery bags dug into my hands, but I dropped them when he pushed me against the side of the house.
My arms went around him; I felt his heart beating against mine through our wet clothes. His hands moved up, over my breasts, up to my throat. I felt his fingers tighten around my neck. I opened my eyes and saw his red face, eyes full of sorrow and drive.
“You were going to tell her,” he said, strangling me.
No, I wanted to say. I would never do that. I’m good, I’m a good person.
The thud of Lenny’s head exploding sounded like a pumpkin being smashed, and the red spray felt hot on my face. I gasped for breath as his hands slid from my neck and he crumpled to my feet. My savior and his baseball bat stood haloed by yellow streetlight.
Oh, Dominguez, oh Lucifer. My painting, destroyed by my own hands, had come to life.
I watched Dominguez drag Lenny by the feet into the weeds alongside my house, behind the garbage cans where I had thrown the cut-up pieces of his portrait. Lenny’s blood smeared behind him, a slick and viscous trail washed into nothing by the downpour. Dominguez cleaned his bat on Lenny’s shirttail, propped it against the steps.
He kissed me. I smelled copper and cigarettes. I tried to steady myself against the back steps, but he grabbed my hand and molecules of gold transferred to his fingers.
“I don’t like you looking at other men,” he said. “I told you.”
“I know.” My voice came out in a croak.
“Is he the one you wanted me to hurt?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.