The Painting of Porcupine City (34 page)

Adopted. Maybe that was actually true. Not by Vini’s own parents but by Mateo’s. Vinicius was living in Mateo’s room, in Mateo’s parents’ part of the house, while his own family lived upstairs. While Mateo lived in another country, on another continent, in another hemisphere. Figure that out.

A few hours later when Vinicius’s alarm went off and bleary-eyed he stumbled off to the cellphone stand, Mateo crawled up into his old bed and went back to sleep.

During the day he slept

or went off tagging the walls of São Paulo with Portuguese translations of his Facts. If it ever occurred to him to call me or get in touch with me, he didn’t follow through. His phone stayed off.

But I wanted him. I could’ve had Mike but avoided him for the same reason I was avoiding Alex and Jimmy: I didn’t want to see anyone I knew.

I would like to say that grief over Cara’s death gave me permission to go crazy, and that I seized it, and that rolling on E for three days straight I fucked so many guys I had to go in for a penis transplant halfway through. I would like to say that I drove crying through the night at treacherous speeds with the windows down, that I sat wailing at Cara’s grave in the slushy mud. I would like to say that I burned down our apartment to turn all memories of her to ash. I would even like to say that Jamar and I pummeled each other to bloody bits in a terrible, blame-hurling rage.

Nothing like that happened. What happened was: I hid in my room. For three days I hid in my room. I called into work bereaved and sat in my desk chair and looked out the window. Watching the light change. Watching the birds. One afternoon it snowed.

They all missed her, I knew, but I missed her the most because the hole her absence left in my life was the hugest. She hadn’t lived with her parents in years; Jamar was at home with his, and he had the baby to occupy him.
I
was the one who had to step around her things.
I
was the one who had to see her toothbrush sitting dried-out on the bathroom sink.
I
was the one who had to shut off her alarm clock when it throbbed beside her empty bed.
I
was the one who had to separate her mail from mine, who had to decide what to do with that fucking unfinished
Metro
crossword she left on the kitchen table.

I
was the one who had to live here, in an apartment that seemed snapped back away from the goal it’d been building toward, the one who had to feel the whiplash of a stretched elastic cut. Everything here looked off-kilter, a little wrong, as though it all belonged in some other universe. Baby things that had been given and received with such happiness and such joy became, in an instant, purely utilitarian. I let in Jamar’s father and Robbie and they pawed through these items, taking the essentials with them, the bottles and the diapers and the tiny clothes, leaving the rest lying dormant on the living room floor. A home that had been so ready to burst with new life now hung quiet and dusky with death.

Caleb. Jamar named him Caleb. Cara had liked it.

I sat in my bedroom and looked out the window. The two cans continued to stare back at me from underneath the fish tank. And I didn’t write a fucking thing.

Despite the size of São Paulo,

or maybe in reaction to it—a pushback against anonymity, a wall against loneliness—their circle was small, close, tough and incestuous in a way that called to mind a telenovela. Before he had bedded Aline, Vini was with her best friend Olive (a name so perilously close to his sister’s the affair couldn’t possibly last), whose brother was none other than Tiago do Nascimento. The same Tiago do Nascimento, of course, who, in the back of an armored Volkswagen, first got Mateo to admit, under penalty of releasing his earth-shaking grip on Mateo’s boner, that Mateo liked boys.

Depending on whose story you believed, Olive was now dating Edilson, a.k.a. Tucano, but that would make her something of a cradle robber, as he was nearly six years her junior. Edilson who, again, depending on whose story you believed, had once kissed Tiago’s left butt-cheek on a dare.

Colonel Fawcett’s happened

on the third night. Vini had told Tiago days earlier about Mateo’s return and there was coordination between the two to make sure Tiago would be there on the night Vini showed up with Mateo.

The Colonel’s was a little bar known for its manioc fries, its live music and its cheesy Amazonian decor.

Upon entering through the doorway, across which hung green streamers of plastic vines and a rubber snake, Mateo stuffed his hands in his pockets and Vini scanned the crowd. The light was dim and people flickered in shadows. Still, it took Vini only a moment to spot Aline and then he made a bee-line for where she was standing near the bar with two other girls. He’d worn his nice shirt and put something shiny in his hair—tonight he was going to make up for that thing with Camilla and win Aline back.

Ditched, Mateo looked around and sighed. He reached onto the bar and grabbed a few of some guy’s fries when he wasn’t looking and, biting off the ends, wandered farther into the small, crowded room. At the far end a band was playing on a stage which stood only about two feet off the ground so it was hard to see them through the patrons’ heads. One of the lights above the stage had a broken fixture—a bulb was hanging by a wire, rotating gently. The light lashed Mateo’s face before continuing its rotation and returning him to the shadows. He leaned against a vine-covered post and looked around, eyes following the spotlight.

It drew his attention to the side of the room, where a row of two-person tables lined a wall festooned pith helmets, machetes and taxidermy birds. Tiago was sitting at one of the tables. The chair across from him was empty but his sister Olive was standing behind it rocking it forward as she leaned across the table to tell her brother something. Tiago shrugged and laughed. His front teeth were crooked and he’d always been embarrassed about this and rarely showed them, preferring instead to make his introductions with his body, which was lean and strong and over which he had much more control. Because the smile was rare it had always stopped Mateo in his tracks, and still did tonight.

Some people between Mateo and Tiago shifted around, blocking Mateo’s view, and when they shifted again, like a magic trick, Olive was gone.

Mateo took a deep breath and released himself from the viney post. The spotlight hit him once more before he arrived at the table.

«Hi Tiaginho,» he said.

Tiago looked up, not surprised, not un-surprised, fleetingly hating Vini for setting this up, fleetingly feeling the stirrings of a boner, fleetingly feeling his hand clench into a fist, fleetingly wanting to cry. He had on a black t-shirt that matched the black, half-inch plugs in his earlobes. His dark hair was as short as it could go without being shaved.

«Just Tiago is fine,» he said finally. His voice was deep and he was making it deeper. «We’re not exactly familiar. In fact I’m having trouble
placing
you, estrangeiro.» He put his finger to his caramel-colored chin and scrunched his heavy eyebrows.

«Awh, don’t be like that. I missed you too.» Before sitting down he lay a kiss on Tiago’s cheek. Tiago frowned but didn’t pull away. «What are you drinking?»

«Cachaça and Coke.»

«Give me a sip?»

With one finger Tiago pushed the glass across the scratched table. «Finish it. I don’t care.»

«I just want a sip.» Mateo lifted the glass to his lips and felt the ice knock against his upper lip and realized his whole face was hot. He held the liquid in his mouth for a second before swallowing. It tasted harsh and sweet and like home. Maybe he’d finish the drink after all. «You look good.»

Tiago shrugged. «You grew your hair out?»

Mateo rubbed his own head. «Yeah. You like it? I had a fugue a year or so ago and came out of it with my hair long. Kind of liked it that way. What do you think?»

«I like it better how it used to be.»

«Ah.»

There was silence.

«You still have those? Your fugues?»

«I don’t know. From time to time.» Mateo looked across the room and saw Vinicius talking with Aline. Hard to say how it was going—Vini was making big gestures, but she had her arms crossed and wore a look that made it clear that whatever Vini was saying, she’d heard it all before. Mateo knew she had.

He rubbed his thumb across the glass, turned to check out the band. «Is he singing into a megaphone?»

Tiago didn’t respond and after a moment he said, «Your cousin tells me you’ve got yourself a shanty queen.»

Mateo put down the glass. «His name is Fletcher.»

Tiago made a sharp motion up and over with his eyes. «Gotta be a shanty queen saving cash on airfare. Why travel here when he can get a brasileiro all his own without leaving America, right? Does he suck your toes and tell you how
exotic
you are?»

«It’s not like that.»

Now Tiago narrowed his eyes. «It’s always like that with the gringos.»

«It is?»

«Yes.» He looked away, then up at a bird on the wall over his head. «I don’t know.» For a while they looked at their hands and devoted an inordinate amount of attention to the band. Finally Tiago touched the tabletop to get Mateo’s attention and said, «So why’d you come back?»

«Just realized it’d been a while.»

«A while? Two years. More than a while, Dedinhos.»

«Fair enough. A long while.» He touched the glass, took another sip, the ice cold on his tongue. Vini was holding Aline’s hand now. «How’s V doing?»

Tiago leaned over to see through the crowd. «Well he’s wearing his get-back-together shirt. He says it looks nice and comes off easy. It’ll work again. They’ll get back together. It never lasts long.»

«I don’t mean tonight, I mean like in general.»

«OK I guess. What do you mean? You talk to him like every day, according to him.»

«I mean things he might not tell me about. He steering clear of the favelas and that kind of shit? The drugs?»

«Far as I know. But
I’m
not his cousin.»

«You’d tell me, right?»

«Probably.» He looked down at the table, at Mateo’s hand on the glass, the familiar colored fingers, and then at that foreign city tattooed on the sweetest, most vulnerable part of his arm. «You know you can’t just come in here and sit down with me and have a heart-to-heart with me about things like we’re still together or like I’m your friend or like, fuck, like we’ve even had a word in the past two years, Dedinhos.» He looked Mateo in the eye briefly and then looked down again. «I mean when you take off, you take off.»

«I know.» Mateo smiled, a defensive smile he could only sustain for a moment before it dropped away. He rocked the glass from side to side.

Tiago felt his cheeks grow hot and prickly and his mouth dry out. «Do you want the rest of that?» he asked. Mateo looked up; when he didn’t say anything Tiago pulled the glass back and swallowed the last of the cachaça-and-Coke. Finally he sighed and said, «Come on.»

He led Mateo outside because it was too hard to talk in Colonel Fawcett’s. And they started walking because it was too awkward to stand face to face or even shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk. Better to be moving.

The night was sticky and there was a light, hot breeze. They saw a guy standing on another guy’s shoulders, scrawling with a two-inch roller above the door of a Metro station in the scribbled, messy style of the pichadores. Tiago rolled his eyes.

«Go show them how it’s done,» Mateo said.

Tiago shrugged.

«Do you still go out?»

«Sure,» Tiago said. «Not as much. It’s not like when we were little kids and could go out painting as long as we liked and still have a home and breakfast to come home to. Paint doesn’t pay bills.»

«Word. So you’re hawking cell phones now, huh?»

«Vini and me.»

«That’s cool you guys work together. Must be fun.”

«He’s a fun kid. Crazy sometimes. A flirt. He can’t let a pretty girl go past without trying to kiss on her. Usually gets away with it too. He sells twice the phones I do.»

«I bet you sell plenty.»

«Sometimes.» Tiago smiled and there it was, the smallest revelation of crooked teeth. «And no, to answer your question, I don’t think he’s getting into any trouble. At least not in the favelas. And most girls don’t carry guns.»

«Good.»

«He’s doing some crazy shit with stencils lately, though.»

«I’ve seen.»

«He’s better than you,» Tiago said. He’d intended to say it with bluster, like a jab, but it came out almost as a question.

And Mateo just laughed.

At the top of the plaza stairs, the bottom side of which was one of the places Vini had stenciled, they sat down side by side. Across the street a pair of old-men fado singers were standing on a corner spitting rhymes back and forth, cheered on by a few passersby as though it were a spontaneous, late-night boxing match.

«Last I knew you were in construction,» Mateo said after watching the singers for a minute.

«Concrete.»

«Right.»

«Bitch-ass boss fired me. Right when I was doing the patio at the library.»

«Sorry. Why?»

«I don’t know. I guess he heard something about me he didn’t like.»

«Oh.»

«Before I left I made sure to tell him he has a tiny dick.»

«How do you know?»

«I saw it in the bathroom once. Like a little bean.» He measured on his finger.

«Heh.»

«How about you? Vini says you publish books.»

«I’m just the computer guy there.»

«Is that where you met your boy?»

«Yup.» They watched a street vendor push a closed-up cart down the street, taking the long way to the top of the plaza to avoid the stairs. «I wonder how Vini is doing.»

«By this time he’s usually fingering her in the alley outside the Colonel’s.»

Mateo laughed.

«I’m telling you, he’s a ladies man.»

«I don’t get it.»

«What?»

«Ladies.»

Tiago laughed. «Me neither. How could I find one who could throw me over her shoulder the way you used to?» They could hear the street vendor’s push-cart rattling somewhere behind them.