Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  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.”

  “Are you as good with a baseball bat as your brothers?” My mouth was dry, I was full of histamines, crusty infected sores in my brain, on the inside of my skin, all those bites.

  “What the fuck?” He started to move away, but I gestured for him to stay where he was. I kept working. Now his broad forehead was a knot, his thoughts visible to me. I stroked paint on canvas, and even through the noise in my head I could read his mind. Here’s what he was thinking: his brothers were in the ACI because they’d bashed a guy’s head in, and why was the neighbor lady bringing up blunt instruments?

  His gaze flicked at my west-facing windows. “You should pull your shades.”

  “I need light for my work.”

  “I don’t like the other men looking up at you,” he said. Oh God, I got that. He was possessive. Oh yes, I could work with that. His eyes were on me now, his lashes long and thick as a child’s. I laid down my paintbrush.

  “I don’t want them,” I said.

  The tension in his face relaxed. Let me take your pain away. I knew how to do it, the skill came to me as easily as my next breath.

  He yanked the cord, lowering the green paper shade. We stood a foot apart in the hot, darkened room. He wore a stained white T-shirt that smelled of sweat and smoke. He kissed me hard, drew blood from my lip. He licked it.

  We pulled off each other’s clothes, knelt on the floor by my easel. His rough fingers felt so different from Lenny’s smooth office hands. He entered me and his chest hit against mine over and over, slap slap. I heard waves hitting the boat’s hull, banging against it as it slipped offshore; Lenny and his wife in the cockpit, my jealousy stinging and killing me from the inside, slap slap.

  Dominguez came fast. Soon he sat up. Afternoon light blazed through the cracks between the shade and window frame, illuminating his body, and I saw flecks of gold leaf, dropped from my subjects’ halos and wings, caught among the whorls of his black chest hair. The sight made my eyes sting. I know what is holy. I know that love is a sacrament, and I felt it for Lenny. I was going to kill someone, but for love, for the only reason that mattered.

  “You going to keep painting me?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “You want me to?”

  He gave a shy smile. “Yeah.”

  “There might be something I want you to do for me in return.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t you know?” I whispered. I stared into his eyes, willing him to figure it out. I had mentioned the baseball bat. He was going to break into Lenny’s house, pretend to steal TVs, murder his wife. Lenny would be back at work and the kids would heading to summer camp next week, after they returned from the Cape.

  “Hurt someone,” he said.

  “Yeah.” I was chilled by how easily he said it.

  “Hurt them bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For you,” he said.

  “Yes, for me.” I trailed my fingers through his chest hair. My fingertips twinkled with gold, and I wrote my name on his skin but I felt a little sick.

  “You won’t look at the other men?”

  “Out there?” I gestured toward the window.

  “Any other men.”

  “I won’t look at them,” I said.

  He nodded, pulled my face to his, and kissed me so hard I bit my own lip. The pain shocked me. When he left I ate a pint of ice cream and made myself puke. Bulimia is a pretty word, sounds so much nicer than what it is. I’d been doing it for so many years I didn’t even think about it, just did it. In that instant the swarm stopped. Everything was quiet, peaceful inside, just the drip of slow poison, the leaky faucet of jealousy that never really went away.

  * * *

  The days passed. As I worked on Dominguez’s portrait, a form emerged: not a guardian angel at all but Lucifer, holding a gilded baseball bat dripping blood. The image gave me nightmares; my own work scared me as it never had before. I always painted what I wanted to see in someone, not what was really there. Do you think all those politicians deserved halos? But with Dominguez I couldn’t disguise anything. For the first time in maybe forever, or at least since childhood, I was painting what was true, not what was wanted.

  I avoided Dominguez. The more I painted him, the more I began to blame him for my own thoughts of murder. If not for what I knew about him and his brothers, I would never have thought of killing Lenny’s wife. That wasn’t me. I’m not a killer, I know what is holy, love is a sacrament that shouldn’t end in death.

  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 hur
ricane 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.

  “You’re right. It doesn’t. Have you finished my painting yet? Let’s go up, I want to see it.”

  Once again the swarm was gone; for the second and last time, Dominguez had chased it away. I led him up the stairs and felt his hot breath on the back of my neck, and knew what would happen to me when he saw it wasn’t there.

  THE PIG

  BY JOHN SEARLES

  Arnold Street

  Fort Lauderdale from October to March, Providence from April to September—that had been Charlie and Joy Webster’s plan for retirement. And for the first five years, that plan had worked out just fine. As soon as the air began to cool and the leaves began to turn, the couple closed up their clapboard house on Arnold Street, loaded suitcases into the trunk of their Oldsmobile, and headed south for the Sunshine State. But this year—their sixth since she’d stepped down from her job as a high school art teacher, and he had retired from his work as a high school security guard—Charlie Webster drove home alone to Providence. Beside him in the passenger seat, strapped in by the seat belt, there was only a bright pink, pig-shaped, ceramic cookie jar—a cookie jar he was using as an urn.

  Since Charlie was not yet ready to face questions and condolences from neighbors and what few friends they had left in the city, he slipped the car into the garage at the back of the house, then slipped into the back door as well. Normally, Joy called ahead and arranged for a former student they knew and trusted from their days working together at Central High School to come by and use the hidden key to prep the place for their arrival. But since Charlie had neglected to do so, he was left to go down to the basement with a flashlight—flipping fuses, cranking on the water, and sizing up the withered remains of so many unlucky mice that had been snapped in the traps while they were gone. Soon, the house rumbled to life. Baseboards and pipes knocked away, though things remained shadowy inside since Charlie kept the curtains drawn and lights low.

  As for that cookie jar, its detachable head had been crafted with an impossibly large snout, flared nostrils, a toothy smile, and googly black eyes. Those eyes stared right back at Charlie as he carried The Pig from room to room. When he sat at the kitchen table eating whatever microwavable meals he excavated from the freezer, The Pig watched him. And when he settled into bed at night, The Pig rested on Joy’s pillow, watching his fitful tossing and turning all night long too. But there was more: somewhere back on the highway, deep in the Carolinas, Charlie had begun talking to The Pig. And now that he was home, he kept up the habit, jabbering away to that watchful face as though talking to his wife. The man’s rambling sentiments could be boiled down to the lyrics of those country songs he liked to listen to on the long drives north and south: You were always on my mind . . . I’m so lonesome I could cry . . . I fell into a burning ring of fire . . . I went down, down, down as the flames went higher . . .

  On and on, those strange and sentimental one-sided conversations went, punctuated by bouts of his mournful weeping and long moments of his doing nothing but sitting in Joy’s art room at the back of the house, staring blankly at her flattened tubes of paint and dry brushes, trying to put the pieces together of how it had all come to such an unexpected end. Things might have gone on this way forever, but on the third day after Charlie Webster’s return, he discovered that there was not much more than ice cubes left in the freezer and canned lemon curd and dried beans in the pantry. For that matter, the toilet paper and paper towel stock was dwindling fast and, without his wife around to keep things tidy the way she liked to do, the place was already a mess.

  Not far away on Waterman Street, there was a Whole Foods where Joy had always shopped, but Charlie didn’t dare go there because of his growing fear of familiar faces popping up and all the questions and condolences that were sure to follow. In the short while since he had returned home, people had come knocking on the front door—sometimes this was followed by the sound of heavy footsteps walking to the rear of the house and more knocking on the back door. That knocking, those
footsteps, the accompanying deep voices in clipped conversation—all of it had caused Charlie to clutch The Pig tight and carry it with him to the narrow bathroom beneath the stairs, where he waited, his heart thrumming like the engine of the Oldsmobile, until whoever they were had gone. The last time it happened, he snuck to the backyard afterward and removed the key hidden beneath a patio flagstone, to prevent anyone who might find it from coming inside.

  And so, the lack of basic sundries and his dread of Whole Foods led him to hunt down Joy’s old address book from the desk in her art room. In it, he found the number of a woman they used to know who wiped cafeteria tables and mopped floors over at Central High, but who had also cleaned their house a few times when Joy threw out her back. Tünde—that was the woman’s name, though a pack of those miserable, wise-ass, shit-for-brains students he was once paid to keep in line had taunted her with the nickname the “Hungarian Barbarian.” That name for her, like so many of the names they came up with for the faculty, including the name they came up with for Charlie, had a cruel but uncanny accuracy about it. In Tünde’s case, those brats had nailed it with the combo of her ethnicity and great height and broad shoulders, which, despite her pretty face, left her looking like some rough-and-tumble female wrestler.

  When he picked up the phone to call Tünde, the line was dead. Had Joy arranged for the service to be shut off while they were away too? He could not recall, since he had left so many of those details to her, particularly after he’d begun having what she referred to as his “little mental slips” a few years before. Charlie might have used his cell, but in yet another “little mental slip,” it had been mistakenly left behind in the bathroom of a Florida gas station in the earliest hours of the trip home. It was just as well since he hated the way that thing kept buzzing in his pocket. Without a landline or a cell, his only option was to wait until dark, pull on a hooded sweatshirt, and walk the neighborhood with his head down until finding a pay phone—yes, an actual pay phone—that stood like a mirage in front of the Shell station on Wickenden Street. As he fished change from his pockets, Charlie stared at the page torn from Joy’s old address book. His wife, forever doodling, had drawn a thunderbolt over Tünde’s name and a squiggly line through her number, though thankfully it was still possible to decipher.