The Painting of Porcupine City (37 page)

«Thank you.»

The moist river air made their faces glisten, and through their own silence they could hear the sounds of highway traffic many meters below.

«Fuck!» Vinicius slapped the door. «We forgot the paint!»

«How could we have
forgotten?
» Tiago exclaimed. But of course they had carefully planned to forget. If they’d remembered they wouldn’t have been able to tell Mateo, as Tiago told him now, «We can come back another night. Now that we have the key. We’ll do this again. You should stay in São Paulo.»

“Stay,” Vinicius told him in English. «You could be a king here, primo. This could be your castle. You have the key now!»

Mateo smiled. He looked at their faces, so excited, and out at the city, and down at his fingers holding the key. He shook his head. «I couldn’t be king in SP,» he said. «It’s too big, guys. There’s too many others.»

«A knight, then,» Vini said. «Stay. Knight can be enough, right? We’re all here. It’s so much more
fun
when you’re here.»

«Up there, I’m king. I will be. You guys, I love you but I have to go back. I love you so much but I have to go back.»

He looked at Tiago and Vini and shrugged, and because he could find nothing else to say he looked out at the vast megacity again. When he turned around he saw that Vini—sincere, gentle Vini, master strategist Vini—was wiping tears out of his eyes.

«Awh shit, V, come here,» Mateo said, and he pulled his cousin into his arms and felt Vini’s close around him. With his cheek against Vini’s blond head he wondered what the fuck he was doing, turning down this gift. His family was here, yes, Vinicius was right about that. And despite what he’d said he knew he could probably be a king here, too—he was good enough; in time he could be good enough. But he wanted to go back, felt compelled to go back. Standing at the top of this bridge that was so like the Zakim, he was now itching to be back.

He stood still, looking out at the city. He took a deep breath. He gripped the door in his painty fingers and started sliding it closed. Vini helped him. When they turned around they found that Tiago had already started back down the stairs.

For the past few days Jamar

had been acting as though my very existence offended him. For the past week, actually—almost the entire time he’d been back. He seemed so happy at first, a fragile happy but happy nonetheless, carrying the squishy new baby into the apartment. I’d made and taped to the living room window an IT’S A BOY sign that Jamar went gaga for, even though it was practically impossible to see from the street. “That’s awesome,” he kept whispering as we stared at the backward letters through the translucent paper. “It’s a boy.”

Maybe it was because the boy cried his entire first night at the apartment. Maybe it was because all our life-filled things made Cara’s seem more dead—our wet toothbrushes beside her dry one; a finished
Metro
crossword beside the one she left forever incomplete. Maybe he was still angry, as I was, that he’d allowed Cara’s mother to talk him into putting her in the ground. Whatever it was, on his second day back he turned on me, subtly at first—that night he didn’t say goodnight—and then more alarmingly. Several times I noticed him move Caleb out of a room I was in, into a room I wasn’t in—as though he didn’t want me near his son.

So I was surprised to find him sitting at my desk when I returned to my room after showering off a date with Mike. He was holding a few sheets of manuscript that he put back in the box on my desk. He looked like he had an agenda.

I secured the towel around my waist. “I’d prefer you didn’t read that.”

“Oh. Sorry. Been out boning college kids again?” In his voice was both sarcasm and accusation.

“Yeah, actually. And I really made him
squeal
.” I pulled on a sweatshirt even though my back was still wet. I started to move toward the socks on the floor but they were too close to him and I abandoned them. Wasn’t like I needed them, anyway—he insisted on keeping the thermostat at 73, for the baby. Instead I walked around to the other side of the bed. “Don’t turn around,” I told him. I exchanged the towel for underwear and pants. Then I told him I was going to make some oatmeal. A moment later he followed me out of my room and joined me in the kitchen, his hands in the pockets of his khakis.

“You need to grow up,” he said.

“Jamar, I’m not sure what it is, but you’ve been on my case for days and frankly I’m getting a little fucking sick of it. What were you doing in my room, anyway?”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Oh, ask away. Just ask me to move out and be done with it.”

“Do you think I’m a good man?” he said. I looked at him, startled. He was unshaven and his eyes were dark. I should’ve felt a pang of guilt—he was going through a
Porcupine City
of his own and I had failed to stage an intervention—but instead I just felt pissed that the kid was taking such a toll on Jamar’s looks.

“A man? Well I assume you have a penis. I mean, you made Caleb.”

“Fucking-hell, Bradford, I’m being serious.”

I put aside the oatmeal, dragged out a chair across from him and sat down, knocked the heel of my palm against the underside of my chin, looking terribly attentive.

“A good man as opposed to what, Jamar? A good l
aaa
dy?”

He didn’t tell me to go fuck myself and that made me worry I’d crossed a line.

“A dude. A guy. A bro,” he said. “I don’t want to just be a guy, but that’s all I’ve been since I was a kid. I’m not even comfortable saying the word
man
.”

I sighed. “I guess I’ve never thought about a difference.”

“There’s a difference,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“Both have dicks.”

Jamar shook his head. “You’re a guy.”

“Fuck you.”

“
Fuck you
, you say. So you know it’s better to be a man than a guy. Because being a man is the harder thing to be. ...And I’m asking you.” He shook his head.

“Maybe I’m not the one to ask. Maybe it takes one to know one.”

“Maybe it does. You don’t care about being one?”

“I’m still not clear on what we’re even talking about. Do I want to wear a suit and tie to work and kiss my vacuuming, pearls-wearing wife every day when I get home? No, I don’t. Sorry. Sorry!”

“That’s not what it’s about.”

“Then what
is
it about, Professor Andrews? Educate me.”

“It’s about— What have you done since college?”

“What do you mean, what have I done?”

“You sit at a job you don’t like. You’ve been with more guys than I can begin to imagine. You dumped the only good one just so you could fellate some loser.”

“I didn’t fellate him, actually, I tongued his asshole.”

“Oh, awesome.”

I looked down at the floor while I gathered myself. “I published a book, which you seem to have left out of your glowing biography.”

“And who pushed you to get it published?”

“Cara. So? That makes it less valuable? That someone cared enough to encourage me?”

Her name seemed to have startled him and he looked off-balance now. “I don’t know,” he said. “No, it doesn’t. I’m sorry.”

“And what the fuck business is it of yours how many guys I’ve been with anyway, Jamar?”

He pressed his face in his hands. “Fuck fuck fuck.” He sighed, and I knew the lead-up was done and now it was going to come out, whatever it was. And it did. He looked directly at me and said: “I think I hate you.”

I hadn’t known what to expect from this but it wasn’t that. It certainly wasn’t that. “Uh. Come again?”

He didn’t say anything. He looked down at his hands.

“So Jamar, you hate me now? Care to elaborate on that or anything? I think I’ve been pretty fucking accommodating of your little
project
in there since you’ve been back.” I looked at him for what felt like a long time and when he didn’t respond I pushed back the chair and got up. “Happy Saturday night to you too, shithead.” I’d never called him anything like that before and it made my stomach turn. I tried to pour some sugar into the bowl of dry oatmeal but the little door was sealed shut because no matter how many times I told him Jamar would not stop holding the sugar container above his steaming coffee thereby moistening the sugar and turning it into cement on the hinge of the little sugar-door. I unscrewed the cover and dumped on way too much. Sugar dust caught in my lungs and I coughed. “Mother
fucker
.”

Jamar said, “Caleb is yours.”

I turned and the sugar top clattered into the sink, stainless steel on stainless steel. My teeth rang. “Fine, Jamar, fine. I’ll babysit your kid all night if it’ll get you out of my fucking hair.”

“Caleb is your boy.”

I put down the sugar before it had a chance to slip out of my hands. “If you’re trying to get a smile out of me you’ll have to try harder.”

He looked at me and his eyes were red and full of tears. “Please don’t make me say it again, man. It just about killed me to say it once.” He crossed his arms on the table and rested his chin on his wrists.

“Jamar—
What?
What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You think I’m his father? You think I had an affair with Cara? I’m a fag, Jamar, for fuck’s sake! I don’t sleep with women.”

“Bradford,” he said, “that’s the only reason you’re still standing.”

It chilled me and I laughed, a laugh that sounded to my own ears desperate and maniacal. “Well, I would’ve thought you knew about this by now—but you kind of have to sleep with a girl to get one pregnant.”

“No. You don’t.” And then he said it again: “You don’t. Not if they love you enough.” He got up and went in the bedroom he and his wife had shared. I stood in the kitchen, oatmeal forgotten—I was shivering. Goosebumps covered my arms but my face felt hot. He came out with a notebook, one of Cara’s journals. He threw it down on the table—it slid and stopped against her unfinished puzzle. “June fifteenth. I don’t want to be here when you read it.”

“Are you—?”

“I’ll take him out.”

Through the living room window

I watched Jamar’s car drive away with Caleb hastily stuffed into a snowsuit and packed in a car-seat in the back. I paced around the apartment wracking my brain, trying to figure out what that journal might say that would give Jamar the ridiculous idea that Caleb was mine. I didn’t want any more surprises tonight. Cara and I had kissed exactly twice—once theatrically on a Halloween and that other time when we were stoned. And I’d once accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom and seen her nude from the waist up. But we certainly had never had sex. Caleb certainly could not be mine. When I’d assured myself that this was all a laughable misunderstanding I picked up the journal and flipped to the fifteenth of June.

I did something real

gross last night—I can barely even write it down—but at the same time I’m excited to write it down because that makes it real. Fletcher and I smoked-up last night. Then he went to write. Then he went into the bathroom. Then I cleaned up around the apartment and then I went into the bathroom after he’d gone to bed. I was still a little stoned, feeling good. I was peeing and I glanced down at the trash which I’d already emptied for trash day and saw, sitting there all alonely in the can, what was obviously a Kleenex of his Fletcher’s cum. I don’t even know what made me do it. OK, I know what made me do it. Because it was there, because I was there, because there was no one to know. Because he is what he is to me. It was still warm, I could feel the heat through the tissue. I held it and felt silly and then felt not silly. I was there to pee and now peeing was the farthest thing from my mind. It was like a little bit of Fletcher, a souvenir of a togetherness that will never be. And you’d have done it too, if you were there and if it was there. If you adored Fletcher like I do. Because in the moment it was close enough to the real thing, and it was exactly how the right-afterward of the real thing would’ve been. Not like being with him but exactly like
having been with him
(he would love the nuance of those tenses). But I feel bad, too. Not for Fletcher—his cum has been pretty much everywhere. So I don’t think he’d mind. But bad for Jamar, who I love. He’ll never have to know. This is mine. This is make-believe.

I was shivering so much

the flapping notebook fell from my hands. It hit the linoleum and although it closed it couldn’t take back what I had read in her swirly handwriting.

It felt as though she had reached through my belly button and was squeezing my stomach, digging her fingernails in. My eyes were running. My entire life felt suddenly veiled in uncertainty and I had no idea what was going to happen. I leaned forward, rested my forehead against the edge of the kitchen table. I was barely out of the chair making for the bathroom when I threw up all over the linoleum.

Putting the floor cleaner back under the sink, my eyes still wet, I saw a can of Lysol and my mind leapt to paint. I remembered the cans Mateo left under my fish tank last summer.

I went in my room and picked up the cans, two cans. Green and blue. Popped the cap off the green and shot a blast into my palm. It looked good still. I squeezed my hand into a fist and the paint pushed out over my lifelines.

I grabbed a backpack out of my closet and dropped the cans inside. Yanked on a hat. Rummaged in my closet for fingerless gloves.

Where was Jamar? When was he coming back? Was Caleb OK? For the first time ever I wondered if Caleb was OK. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be here when Jamar came back.

I pulled the strings of my hoodie tight and stumbled down the stairs. The night was cold. I was on the sidewalk. Jamar’s car was gone. I wondered where to go. Where to start. What to write.

I squeezed the can.

The frigid metal numbed my fingers. I held it to my face, soothed my burning cheeks with it. And then, rubbing my finger back and forth over the white valve, remembering its feel, I pointed it at the wall.