I spent the next two years on seven paintings: Humility, Obedience, Chastity, Modesty, Temperance, Purity, and Prudence. Scheduled to be shipped to the flagship gallery in Paris in three and a half months, they were beautiful and enormous and easily the best things I’d ever made. Loosely based on the seven saintly virtues, they were the paintings that graduated me from recovering Catholic no-collar girl painter into independent adult artist. They were an exorcism of the words that named them, from the guilt that had dogged me through years of wondering how I was supposed to be a person who pursued only her own interests, who was never aligned, who was never part of a family, who did not wake up every day ashamed of herself for being childless and alone. I was not pure of heart, chaste of body, obedient to authority, humble before others, prudent in my actions, temperate in my behavior, or modest in my appearance—and I no longer felt bad about it. I was free from the burden of being only a girl. I had become an old maid, a woman of my own, a master of my medium. They were my crowning glory.

And all seven of them were in my loft on the day it burned to the ground.

2011

2011

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Here is exactly how it happened. It was the middle of May. I was thirty-four. I still lived on Dutch Street, in that same floor-through loft where I had once shoved seven hundred dollars into Cady’s palms, where I slept on a king-size mattress on the floor and my living room was made of thrift-store 1970s furniture, dark wood upholstered in gaudy plaids that you could only sink into. I’d never left, because it was big and it was cheap and it was in Manhattan. Though it was mostly illegal, and I thought I might die there—a fifty-fifty shot between old age and becoming the victim of a serial killer—I was fine with either outcome because I didn’t want or need any other kind of place to live. The loft was my home, my work space, my everything. It was my whole world.