The Painting of Porcupine City (38 page)

Behind me two cabs zoomed by, as if in a chase.

I hadn’t yet decided what to write. Or if I could write. Anger boiled from my twisted stomach. What was I even doing here? I was here because of her. Here because of what she had done. And she wasn’t even here to have to deal with any of it. Once upon a time Jamar left me a mess with Cara and now Cara had left me a way bigger mess with Jamar. Had she even known? Had she ever even suspected? Would she ever have
told
me? Anger warmed my hands and there was only one thing in the whole world I wanted to write now.

FUCK YOU, CARA. I wrote it huge, each letter three feet tall, using both colors, all of both colors, going over it and over it until they ran out. When I was done, it was there and it was true, as true as any Fact Mateo Amaral had ever written.

I dropped the empty cans on the ground and ran.

I walked the entire Freedom

Trail, which took a couple of hours, and then I grabbed a cab back to the apartment.

Caleb was crying in Jamar’s bedroom and I could hear Jamar making cooing noises to try to quiet him down.

I thought about just slipping into my room.

I put my backpack on one of the kitchen chairs. Very slowly washed the paint off my hands in the sink. Took a deep breath while it swirled down the drain. Made myself go into Jamar’s room.

“How is he?” I said.

Caleb was wriggling on his back on Jamar’s bed, naked from the waist down. A gnarly scab sat where his belly-button would be. Jamar taped a dirty diaper across itself and put it in the trash. The room smelled like poop.

He looked at my face for a minute. I wondered if he’d thought I would just flee into the city and never come back. “He’s OK. He just had some poopy problems— Didn’t you, coolguy?” He looked up at me with an ambiguous expression. “You read the journal.”

I nodded.

“And then—did you clean? It smelled like Lysol.”

“I threw up.”

He nodded. “Me too.”

He put a fresh diaper on the baby and packed him back into his blue feetie pajamas, set him in the crib at the foot of the bed. I didn’t know how Jamar learned how to do all this stuff so fast. I couldn’t imagine doing any of this stuff at all.

He stood up and rubbed the small of his back and looked at me hesitantly. “So. Now you know.”

“Yeah. Um, Jamar—” I started to tell him I was so sorry for what happened—that was what I was going for, anyway, but I ended up just crying all over the place. And then Caleb was crying. And then Jamar was crying too. And then we were laughing and Caleb was sucking on a pacifier. And finally we were talking, which did not come as easy as crying.

“Were you just reading her journal,” I said, “or did you go looking?”

“I went looking. I suspected.”

“What made you?”

Jamar laughed, this welcome laugh. “Bradford, have you
seen
Caleb? Kiddo’s white!”

“Oh—I guess I just thought he was fair-skinned or something.”

“I guess you haven’t seen lot of black babies.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t seen a lot of babies, period.”

“I thought at first he might’ve been, you know,
switched
. In the hospital. But no, they noticed it right away too. They said it was
interesting
but that I shouldn’t necessarily worry. Everyone’s different, right? But I dug out her journal from early summer, and read through to see if there’d be any, you know, clues. I was pretty scared, man. I had no idea what to expect.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, was I going to find she was cheating on me? I know she’d never do that.”

“Of course.”

“When I saw it was you. That was a whole different can of worms. I mean, I
know
you. What would happen to
me?
”

“What do you mean? Nothing’ll happen to you! You think I’d try to take him from you?”

“You think a lot of things, reading something like that. A lot of things go through your mind.”

“I wouldn’t ever do that.”

“He’s all I have of her now, Bradford, and I’ll never let him go. And I love you, man, but I’ll pick him over you every time.”

“I know.”

“That also means I’ll never pawn him off on you.”

“Jamar, but I think—”

“So just remember that.”

“Jamar—”

“I’m telling you all this because I want to be a good man.”

I could see in his face that he was determined never to look back and think of this year as
that year
. And when I realized that I was standing here now for the same reason I moved in with Cara
that year
, I said goodnight without telling him what I was thinking.

I went back the next

night to paint over my piece, to get rid of it, and found it defaced. Most of it was blocked over in white, and new words had been added. FUCK YOU, CARA now read CARA IS MISSED. In the corner of the D was a familiar wiggle of paint, yellow and white. I boiled.

At least he was back.

Before I’d even taken off my jacket Monday morning, I went stomping down the hall, the I.T. department a flashing target on my shit-list. I turned the corner into his cube and my eyes lit like laser beams on the back of his head. The way he was sitting, I knew he was doing the sleeping trick.

I put my hand on his shoulder and spun him away from the desk. His eyes snapped open and his wing-tip shoe knocked against my shin.

“Let me see your hand.”

“Hi Fletcher— How are you doing?”

“Show me your hand.” I exclaimed it in an office yell through clenched teeth.

“My hand?” He held up his left hand.

“Your other—”

“Fletcher, I don’t know what you’re—”

I grabbed it and saw that his fingers were yellow.

“I knew it was you. You had no right to touch my stuff, Teo. That was mine. You had no right to change it.”

He sighed. “It wasn’t true, Fletcher.”

“Like hell it wasn’t true, it was totally true. You of all people have no idea how true. It was true when I wrote it. I was angry. And what gives you the right to decide what is and is not true? To deface my work? Huh?”

“You used my paint.”

“...So? That gives you ownership over everything I do with it?”

“Fletcher, it wasn’t true.”

“That’s for me to decide, not you.”

I turned and walked out of the cube. I heard his chair squeak but then Bassett was there and he said:

“Amaral, where have you
been?
”

In the movies and on

TV they always carry a box, a cardboard box that seems to have been designed specifically for clearing out desks and cubes of the laid-off and the fired. Boxes about twenty by sixteen, always coverless so we’re allowed to glimpse sad belongings protruding: picture frames, coffee mugs, employee-of-the-month ribbons that scream weakly against the injustice of this. Are these boxes marketed just for this purpose? Do companies keep stacks of them in their supply closets?

When Mateo passed by my cube and said, “Meet me in the parking lot,” he was holding no such box, but he was wearing his coat and he had some papers in his hand and the H.R. woman, Allison, was walking beside him, all business.

His car was running so

I opened the passenger door and got in. It was warm in there.

“Teo.”

“Fletcher.”

“At first I thought it was only
me
you didn’t tell you were going away. But then they started asking around.”

He shrugged. “You told them?”

“Of course. It’d been days. I didn’t want Bassett filing a missing persons. —Why didn’t
you
tell them?”

“I forgot?”

“You can’t miss ten days of work without telling anyone and expect to just walk in on the eleventh day as though nothing happened.”

He smirked and looked at me, slapped his hand against the wheel. “That’s
exactly
what Bassett said!”

“It’s common sense.”

“Well.”

“Well what?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now.”

We sat quiet for a moment. I looked at my hands, and at Mateo’s hooked over the wheel. “I stopped by your house and Marjorie told me you went to SP.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Wanted to.”

He was acting like a child but he still looked beautiful, I’ll give him that. Even fired and miserable he looked beautiful. He had a tan he could not have gotten at this latitude, and new short black scruff on his chin made his eyes all the brighter.

“Was it good to be home?”

“Boston’s my home. But it was good to be there. I left right after I left—the hotel. Valentine’s night.”

“I stayed.”

He nodded. “So. Everything you hoped for and more?”

“It was fine. You were right—he was like all the others. Most of the others.”

I expected him to ask if Jimmy was better than him, and maybe that’s actually what he said when he said, “Was it worth it?”

I looked out the window. “To be honest I haven’t thought about it much. Kind of got overshadowed, you know?”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry,” he said, “about Cara. Marjorie told me.”

I shrugged. He knew and still hadn’t tried to contact me?

“I feel very bad about it,” he went on, “and I don’t really even know what to say.”

“It was hard. It’s going to be hard for a long time.”

“How’s Jamar?”

“Dealing.”

“And the baby?”

“Caleb. He’s OK. Someday he’ll be sad but right now he’s a baby. So.”

“Caleb. Like Superman? Kal-El. Kal-elb. Not really, I guess. Close.”

Despite everything I found myself smiling. My anger at him had softened with his firing. The firing had been his punishment for leaving and I was satisfied with that for now.

“How did you know the Cara piece was mine?”

“I knew,” he said. “But I could tell by the comma. It was the graffiti of an editor. Not a lot of us bother with commas.”

I smiled. “Yeah. Probably not.”

He was looking away out the window and I used that chance to really look at him, and began to remember us, shades of our times in this car. “So where are we now, Mateo?”

Tonelessly he said, “At the place of my former employment, Fletcher.”

“I mean where are
we?
”

He sighed. He looked out the window, which had fogged, and he wiped his hand across it. “I think we made our choices on Valentine’s. The unstoppable force met the unmovable object.”

“But I think we—”

“I just got fired. OK? Another time.”

“Yeah.” I reached for the door handle. “That’s fine.”

Through the fogged window he watched me cross the lot and go back in the building. He cranked up the defroster and put the car in drive.

He felt a certain relief, a knee-jerk relief that never had to consider consequences.
You don’t have to go to work anymore!
this relief told him.
You can paint 24/7. You haven’t a care in the world.

The sky was overcast and while he was driving a few snowflakes whisked across the windshield, but after five minutes they stopped. Then they started again and went for ten. It was hot chocolate weather, and he went through the drive-thru of a Dunkin Donuts to get one.

I thought maybe he’d call

me that night, but he didn’t. Instead he laced up his painty shoes, pulled a wool hat down to his eyebrows (he always felt colder in Boston after being in SP) and started down the dark staircase of Marjorie’s sleeping house.

He’d already entered the kitchen when he saw her sitting at the table, pressing a puzzle piece into its place, pressing hard and then abandoning it in search of one with a better fit. An ashtray sat amidst the scattered cardboard shapes; a wispy column of smoke rose from it and orbited the carnival-glass lamp hanging over the table.

“Marjorie—” His sneakers squeaked on the linoleum. “You surprised me.”

“Sorry.” She waved some of the smoke away from the ashtray and clasped her hands on the table. Then she looked him over. “Haven’t seen you around much lately, stranger.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He put his hands in his pockets. She asked him how his trip had been and he told her, “It was nice. Just needed to get away for a bit.”

She took the cigarette from the tray and put it to her lips. “Happens to the best of us. Lots of comings and goings around here lately.”

“When does Phoebe—?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “My god,
tomorrow
.”

“Guess I lost track....”

“It snuck up on all of us. Funny, we waited in line for years to get her into that place and now that it’s here—
Psshh.
”

“That why you’re still awake?”

She smiled. “I’m so afraid, Mateo!”

He could tell she was serious but the funny way she bugged her eyes gave him permission to smirk. He walked closer to the table.

“Of what?”

“All kinds of things. Am I doing the right thing? Is she going to be happy? Am I going to be happy? It’s been just the two of us—three of us for so long.”

“You said she’s loved all her visits there.”

“Oh she
loves
it. And that’s another fear. If she’s happy there, will she forget me?”

“She’s not going to forget you.”

“I know she’s not. But I’m a mother and I worry! What can I do?”

She took a big drag on the cigarette and put it down and rifled through the puzzle pieces. She picked one up and pressed it but it didn’t fit and she flicked it aside.

“Well—”

“I’m going to sell the house,” she said. She crossed her arms and leaned forward. The corner of her mouth pulled up in what would’ve been a smile if there’d been something in her eyes to match. Instead it was more of an invitation for him to chew that over.

“You’re— Really?”

“Mm. I won’t need this whole place with Phoebe gone. Too big. Too much to take care of. It needs a new roof, you know that better than anyone. I don’t want to bother. You understand, I hope.”

“Oh. When?”

“Not until after she’s settled. Spring.”

“OK.” He hadn’t told her he lost his job at Cook and now he knew he would keep it to himself.