The Painting of Porcupine City (16 page)

“Plus the constant worry,” Mateo went on. “It was like three big arrows that pointed back to SP.”

“How sad for your mom. It’s like she was betrayed by her husband and America at the same time.”

“Worked out in the end.”

He turned over and put his lips on my shoulder, almost as punctuation, and I felt my pulse quicken with the idea that when he said
worked out
he might’ve been thinking of me. I didn’t know if I wanted to be liked that way, or that much. But then against my hip I could feel him getting hard.

“Again?” I said, relieved, because this I knew exactly what to do with.

We quickly found, though, that we’d spent all of what we had overnight, and, boners dwindling, we lay on our backs again and looked up at the ceiling.

“What was the, uh, government like when you moved back?” I hoped it came across as a worldly question.

“Democratic by then. Corrupt as hell. But moving the right direction. Maybe that was the fourth point.”

“But it was home.”

“It was home.”

After naming a few more animals in the ceiling I said, “I think we need a shower.” I stretched my arms and discreetly smelled my armpit. My guts felt cramped, too, from going all these hours without passing gas. I’d forgotten how difficult it was to wake up looking OK. And yet Mateo seemed to manage it.

We hauled ourselves out of bed and he wrapped a sheet around us both. Underneath it, like a moving tent, we hobbled down the hall to the floral bathroom at the end, bumping into walls and each other the whole way.

The water felt good

and I liked seeing his body in the full light, especially when his eyes were closed against streams of shampoo suds and I could look with abandon. The tattoo on his arm of Boston was a familiar view of the city. I knew the buildings well—there were only three or four major ones: the Hancock, the Pru, 111 Huntington. He blew at me the suds that covered his lips. The tattoo on his other arm, the São Paulo skyline, was a single shaded block with a serrated top. It looked something like a comb. Not three or four major buildings in this skyline but dozens, even hundreds. I felt lonely and small just looking at its immensity. I focused on the suds working their way down his chest.

“I guess what I’m still missing,” I said as he rinsed, “is how you went from São Paulo into the house of your father’s mistress.”

“Hmm. I don’t know. Guess it was two reasons.” He pushed back his hair, held up two fingers. “First, I was doing a lot of graffiti. Like a
lot
. Barely went to school. Me and my friend Tiago, we’d miss whole weeks of school at a time. Go out on days-long binges of nonstop graf, like some kind of addicts or something. Stints so long I got sick doing it. Really scared my mom.”

“You won’t ever get to the Moon if you drop out of school, Mateo.”

“That’s basically what she said!”

“So she sent you away?”

“No, she sent me away after my dad got shot.”

“Jesus, he got shot?”

“Not killed or anything. He and my uncle were out, got held up at a traffic light. SP can be a pretty tricky place sometimes.”

“Everywhere can,” I said, though my mind ran with images of heavily-armed drug cartels.

He nodded. “But SP more than most. Anyway, he caught a bullet right here.” He squeezed my hip bone. “Went right through the door of the car. Shattered part of his pelvis. Went through. By some miracle, didn’t hit anything he couldn’t live without. They took the bullet out from back here.” He ran his hand around my back and circled his thumb against the bottom of my butt. “Walks with a limp and a cane. Always will forever.”

“He was lucky though.”

“Definitely. Scared the shit out of my mom, though.”

“I can imagine.”

“They wanted to get me out. Do my last year of high school in an American school. Re-establish myself. And go to college. And go to the Moon. I think my mom still hoped for that.”

What happened to facilitate

Mateo’s return to America was something that made him think of his mother Sabina as a monument, a wonder of the world, a towering figure like Christ the Redeemer who overlooked Rio. And though he raged against her plan at first and wrote his rage all across São Paulo, his awe at her sheer ballsiness was, in the end, what made him pack his bags.

His mom, man, she called her for help. Back then Mateo could barely wrap his mind around it and these years later he was no closer. The woman who, six years earlier, had nearly sabotaged their family. The woman who Sabina had packed up her family and switched continents to get away from. The same woman.

His mom
called
her.

Marjorie’s skin turned to ice

when she heard the voice on her answering machine. She had never spoken to Sabina before but her accent instantly called to mind that time. Six years collapsed to minutes like a wormhole in space-time and all the progress she’d made during that time in overcoming that thing seemed to disappear too. Suddenly it was all right there, rushing back—the sound of his voice, the warble in his throat as he told her about Sabina, and that they were leaving, and that he could never see her again. The anger she’d felt. At him. At herself.

She had pressed DELETE without listening to the full message, hoping the woman would not call back. What could she possibly want that would cross all those years and all those miles? Her thoughts jumped first to motives of retaliation, then leapfrogged to fear: Had something happened to Renaldo?

Two days later Sabina’s second call caught Marjorie on her way out the door, and Marjorie, after the greeting, was going to use that as an excuse.

“I’m about to go out,” she was going to say. “Could we talk later?” Later, of course, as in never.

But before she had a chance, Sabina, swallowing every ounce of her considerable pride, told Marjorie, “I need your help. For my son.”

At the end of a terrible, wonderful hour, there was a deal, much more than the simple advice Sabina had intended to ask for, or ever imagined, much more than she thought she could accept from this woman of all people—much more than Marjorie had ever intended to offer.

Marjorie questioned her motives in offering it. What business did she have opening her home to Renaldo’s teenage son? What did she hope to gain? Did she hope to see shades of Renaldo in the boy? Did she hope to pretend the boy was their own son, a surprise relic of their brief time together?

It felt dangerous, too. She knew nothing about this Mateo Vinicius Armstrong Amaral, who was apparently truant, prone to—what had Sabina called them?—fugues. She couldn’t expose her young daughter Phoebe to something like that.

It was when, at last, Sabina revealed
why
Mateo was truant that it all seemed to open up and become justified and right and obvious. It wasn’t drugs or theft or gangs or violence. Mateo was an artist. An art student. Just like the ones Marjorie spent all day teaching, encouraging, pushing and helping. An art student. And probably a good one. At the very least a dedicated one. It clicked. And at the end of a terrible, wonderful hour, there was a deal.

That same long night Sabina had lain in bed. Sending her son to live with her husband’s old mistress? Insane. Totally, utterly insane. The woman was her arch enemy. She hated her and hated her for years with a passion conjurable only by a woman from the land of the harsh São Paulo sun. She’d changed continents to get away from her. And now she was going to, basically, invite her to shelter her only son?

Sabina felt sick. In bed she rolled against Renaldo. He didn’t sleep well anymore, was plagued by constant pain, and as she stroked his belly and side (tickling distracted him from the pain), her fingertips found the thick cord of scar that seemed to tunnel through him like a worm.

In the morning she informed Renaldo of her decision—somehow it had always been her decision. And Renaldo, with much sadness, agreed. Sadness because he understood that, in some way, he was losing his son. Mateo was going to a place Renaldo would never be allowed to follow.

Mateo stood at the top

of the stairs in Marjorie’s old Jamaica Plain house, listening, listening. He tilted his head and bent his brow. He heard a car go by outside; the mutt a few houses down barked twice. But from this house there was only silence. Silence and the last few drips from the faucet behind me.

He turned when I opened the bathroom door the rest of the way. We’d run the water cold against the morning heat and there wasn’t much steam. I wore a towel around my waist.

“Clean?” he said.

I nodded. “What are you doing?”

“Listening. They’re out.”

“How’d you get dressed so fast?” I walked down the hall leaving footprints on the wood.

“We should go get your car,” he said, following me into his room. Stepping into my underwear, I modestly turned to cover myself, stopped, we both laughed.

“Nudity is so situational,” I said.

“It looks good on you.”

I pulled up my boxers. “I hope I didn’t get a ticket.”

“I’ll pay it if you did. It’s my fault we left it.”

“
Fault
is hardly the right word.”

We had breakfast and took the T to Charlestown and walked and found the car mercifully free of orange parking tickets.

“Can I get a ride home?” he said as I unlocked the door.

“No,” I smirked, and he got in.

For shits and giggles we drove to the street with the construction, where last night, when things were so much different—was that really only twelve hours ago?—we’d painted on the plywood wall. I drove by slowly.

“Would you look at that,” I said.

“I know, right?” He clicked his tongue. “What is this neighborhood coming to? Such riff-raff running free.”

“Running free and defacing private property.”

“A shame, really.”

“Such a shame.”

“Reminds me,” he said, snapping a Polaroid of our graffiti, “I need more yellow.”

He bought his supplies

after work, he told me, because a guy in
slacks
and an ironed button-down got less hassle buying spraypaint than a guy wearing jeans and a hoodie.

What did he need today? He thought about which holes in his trunk compartment needed filling. He needed some blue and some lime. He also, as usual, needed more yellow. All Mateo’s people were yellow, a yellow the color of honey that sufficed to imply the skin-tone of anyone from a Fletcher to a Jamar to a copper-skinned brasileiro. Meant he had to carry fewer shades, which made his backpack lighter.

He was pretty sure the MBTA ripped off his style for Charlie, the cartoon commuter of ambiguous honey-colored ethnicity, who starred in advertisements for the T and on his namesake, the Charlie Card subway pass. But Mateo didn’t mind. He himself had lifted the yellow from Os Gemeos—The Twins—a pair of brothers, two of the biggest names in Brazilian graffiti. Not all of their people were yellow but a lot were, and those were the ones Mateo liked best.

He put the cans and a few fat-tipped markers on the counter, paid with cash, stuffed the change and the receipt in his pocket.

In the parking lot of the hardware store (one of the many he frequented on a rotating schedule; there were art-supply stores for the exotic colors, but art stores tended to get to know their clientele, and he didn’t like people asking questions) he stashed the cans in the trunk, dropping them into the plywood shelves. And when he parked outside his house he left them there, bringing in only the markers.

Marjorie and her daughter Phoebe were eating dinner—hot dogs and mac and cheese by the looks of it—on the stools at the kitchen counter, watching
Wheel of Fortune
on the little TV by the fridge. The kitchen table was overwhelmed by one of Marjorie’s huge puzzles, a half-finished Taj Mahal, which she spent Saturday and Sunday mornings piecing together while consuming cigarettes and English muffins.

“Hello,” Mateo said, shutting the door behind him. By the edge of the puzzle sat a couple of pieces of mail addressed to him—a credit card bill and a renewal notice for
Rolling Stone
. Also a thin square package, obviously a CD, wrapped in brown paper, bearing colorful stamps from Brazil. He picked them up.

“There’s a couple of hotdogs left, if you’re hungry,” Marjorie told him. She wore her graying brown hair always in a loose bun, and the paintbrushes she stabbed through it on school days were there. Usually too she had on an old flannel shirt, her getting-messy shirt, but that was gone for this weather and she wore only a pinkish t-shirt. Her skirt was paint-splotched tan cotton and on her feet she wore clogs.

“Hello Mateo,” Phoebe said, clippy, as though to catch him and keep him from leaving. She was working her way down off the stool.

“Hello Miss,” he said, lifting his arms and then putting them on her back when she collided with him and squeezed him around his middle. He stepped back to steady himself. She looked up, her chin just above his belly, and grinned; there was a blob of cheese on the corner of her mouth and a twinkle in her eye. She was only a couple of years younger than Mateo.

“You missed dinner!” she said, imperatively, the way she said most everything.

“I had to run some errands! I’m going to steal a wiener, though. Then I need to get to sleep!”

“Will you watch the dancing show?”

“Hmm. The dancing show isn’t on tonight. But I’ll watch it with you when it’s on, OK?”

“OK.”

He helped himself to two hotdogs and a scoop of mac and cheese, banging the spoon against the plate to get it off.

“How you doing, Marjorie? You look dressed for school.”

“Today was the first day of Art Camp,” she said, waving a fork with a chunk of hot-dog stabbed on the end.

“You go, Phoebe?”

She was climbing back onto the stool beside her mother. She nodded.

“Fun?”

“I asked mom if next time we can bring you!”

“And what did your mom say to that?”

“Yes.”

“Haha. Oh she did, huh? But I don’t know if my boss, Mr. Larry Bassett, would let me go. I’ll have to ask.”