“You know it’s not like that with her and me. I’m only staying for the kids. You’re the one, you know that.”
“I wish I were recording you.” It was my voice, but the words came from someone else. “I’d play it back to her.”
“Ha,” he said, one swift bark, then silence.
He was waiting for me to take it back. I held my breath; I knew I should say I was sorry, I didn’t mean it, I’d never do that, but the relief that poured through me made the pain stop, just for that moment.
“If you ever did—” he started to say. I clung to the receiver. We’d been seeing each other for two years and at first it was okay, but the longer we went on the more I began to feel like a human hive full of venomous insects. She must have walked into the room at that moment, because he hung up. I felt I might die every time he chose her over me.
I’d met Lenny when he asked me to paint his portrait—I’d done many of his friends and clients. He sat for me, and I felt loneliness pouring off him—it’s like that with some married men I’ve painted. They are so unhappy living without real connection. Their wives tend their marriages as if the husbands were plants; they weed, water, and prune fresh growth, and anything new or challenging gets lopped off.
I wouldn’t do that. I know what men want. It’s my special gift, one I’d always had. It couldn’t be celebrated in school, I never won a blue ribbon or high honors for it, but I got my rewards in other ways. A secret glance means everything. The way they can’t stop looking at me, and me knowing they think about me when I’m not there. The way my father petted me like a cat and called me his sweetheart, his real sweetheart.
I paced my studio. Sweat ran between my shoulder blades and I felt torturous hunger. I was a bottomless pit. I put on a sundress and went downstairs. Clink, clink, I heard the pennies still hitting the pavement.
Dominguez watched me open my car door. I did not look at him because I wanted to drive him crazy; and what I was doing—it wasn’t in the front of my mind, but somewhere near the base of my brain, in that stew of feelings and instincts, not thoughts, nothing as clear as that—was setting the bait. His mother and her sister stood off to the side in their Cape Verde black, whispering and leaning on their brooms, and their hissing voices sounded like the drone in my head.
I drove a few blocks down Wickenden Street to Adler’s Hardware and picked up two gallons of C2 Eggshell acrylic, drop cloths, and a few brushes and wood scrapers—heavy items that would encourage help in carrying them. By the time I got home most of the men would have gone inside for lunch and siesta.
And they had. I took my time lugging my bags out of the car. I didn’t have to wait long.
“Hey.”
I turned, and there was Dominguez. He gestured at the paint cans. I handed them to him, just like that. The feeling of power made my heart race. I still had it; this was how Lenny had responded to me, how they all did, no words necessary, just the language of desire. I had thrown a glance his way, and here he was. I unlocked the door and he followed me up three flights.
Inside my studio he placed both gallons on the counter. He regarded my canvases-in-progress: Salvatore Delano as Michael the Archangel, Jackie Donnelly as Gabriel, Lenny—my third painting of him—as Raphael, and the extended Guidone family in a large tableau inspired by Botticelli’s Assumption of the Virgin, showing hierarchies and orders of angels, massive amounts of gilt glowing around their heads in the afternoon light.
“You did these?” Dominguez asked.
“Yes.”
“Who are those men?”
“Just jerks.”
“Huh. That looks like real gold,” he said, pointing at Lenny’s halo.
“It is.” I use thousands of 23-karat sheets, as fine and fragile as moth wings, mail-ordered from the same Florence studio that had supplied Fra Angelico in the fourteenth century.
I went to my easel, replaced a canvas-in-progress with a blank one. Dominguez watched me study him. I grabbed a brush soaking in linseed oil, wiped it off, and swished it through a glob of olive-tinted flesh tone I’d mixed on the palette that morning. Never glancing away I outlined his head, neck, and shoulders. The steady humming filled my head. I was so tired of it, I wanted it to go away, I’d do anything for it to stop.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Painting you. Is that okay?”
He didn’t say a word but his lips twitched. Men love to have their portraits done. Twenty minutes later I had a pretty good start. His features were bold, easy to capture. Because of the way he watched over me, I saw him as a first-sphere angel who guards the tree of life.
“You’re strong,” I said.
“Yeah.”