The women of Fox Point wore black because someone was always dying. The men fished on boats out of New Bedford and got lost at sea, but this summer the fishing was bad and the men stayed home. I watched them out my studio window, saw how they crammed into the narrow strip of shade cast by the candy-colored houses, pitching pennies and telling stories while the silent women swept their cigarette butts from the gum-spotted sidewalk.
It was hot. I worked in shorts and my bra, making portraits with the bodies of angels and the heads of local politicians. I received good commissions but it didn’t matter because my boyfriend was a lobbyist. He paid my rent.
My studio was the third floor of a blue three-family house on the corner of Ann and Arnold streets. I’d lived here ten years, since my junior year at RISD. The air was a toxic stew of gesso, oil paint, and the adhesive I used to apply gold leaf. I gave the politicians halos. They paid extra for that.
The windows were open for a cross breeze. It came off Providence Harbor filled with exhaust from tankers and traffic on I-195. People drove that highway to the Cape, where Lenny and his wife had a beach cottage. Just thinking about that, him being there in the salt air with her while I roasted on Ann Street, depressed me and got the swarm working. I called it “the swarm” because it felt just like bees buzzing in my head, stinging me from the inside, and it started up every time I thought of Lenny and his wife.
I went to the window to cool my sweaty body, and maybe I didn’t mind the men looking up at me. They got an eyeful whenever possible. To them I was exotic. For one thing, I wasn’t from the Azores. I wasn’t married. They saw my lover come and go and it drove them a little crazy. The women in black hated me. I didn’t care. I just wanted the feeling in my head to stop, and the admiration of men helped. I’d been raised Catholic, more Madonna than whore, but all Catholic girls know you can’t be one without the other.
It wasn’t this clear-cut, but: Lenny was with his wife, so I would get what I could from these husbands closer at hand. You don’t want to be set up in life as always competing, but that’s what can happen if you grow up with a beautiful mother who sees you as the enemy. She tried to close her eyes to what my father did, and I can’t really blame her. Jealousy is a vicious master.
I stood at my window and smiled at the husbands, one in particular.
His name was Dominguez. Every time I glanced out he was watching me; as my grandmother would say, he had a bump on me. He’d helped me out every chance he got, like when he saw me dragging my garbage to the curb, or when I had a big grocery order to carry upstairs, or last winter, when my VW had gotten stuck in the snow and he’d attached chains to his Ford 250 to pull me out of the drift.
He and his wife, who was spending July in bed with a difficult pregnancy, lived with his mother, kitty-corner across Arnold Street. It was neighborhood knowledge that two of his four brothers were in prison for beating a man to death. The guy had come from Fall River to steal TVs from Fox Point families whose men were fishing at sea, but he picked the wrong house. Two brothers were home, and when they caught the intruder they killed him with baseball bats.
Dominguez stared up at me, but that day I didn’t smile back at him. I can’t say the plan hadn’t begun, but I am sure of this: it wasn’t yet conscious. The swarm first came when I was a little girl, seven, and I’d hear my parents in the next room, grunting in the dark, and my own jealousy would attack me, sting-sting-sting, until I was swollen from venom and tears. I’d have done anything to make those bees stop.
Down the street the bells of Holy Rosary tolled. It was late morning, not on the hour, so it had to be a funeral. I wished it were Lenny’s wife’s. If she were dead, I wouldn’t have to feel jealous anymore. Lenny would be mine alone. He wouldn’t just pay my rent, he’d love me day in and day out. That kind of love was all I’d ever wanted.
All week the temperature rose. Starting around eleven o’clock each morning the men would go in and out of Dominguez’s mother’s garage, getting beers. Their voices grew louder as the beer went down and they threw the pennies harder, betting on whose would land closest to the sidewalk crack. I heard the coins jingle through the racket in my head. Dominguez focused on my window with that black-eyed laser-beam look he had.
*
Around noon on Thursday Lenny called from the Cape.
“What are you doing, babe?” he asked.
“Working, love,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“About to head out on the boat. I miss you so much.”
“On the boat with who?” Oh, I was leaking poison, burning inside from all the bites and stings, and I could barely hear my own voice over the sound of wings humming louder and louder.
“Don’t get like that.”
“Why are you even calling me?”
“Look, I was going to say, drive out here. I can’t take being away from you.”
I didn’t reply.
“You can stay on the boat, she won’t know. I’ll meet you there tonight. I can’t be without you.”
“But you are without me. You’re there with her, and I’m here.”