The Painting of Porcupine City (39 page)

“I’m just telling you now. So you have some time.”

“OK.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, touching his hand gently, then lifting it by the thumb to search beneath his palm for puzzle pieces. “You’ll find another place. Get a roommate. Or shack up with that boyfriend of yours.” She reached out and rubbed his arm through his sweatshirt—her mention of me had raised goosebumps on his skin. “Are you warm enough in this? When you go out?”

“When I go—out?”

“To paint.”

“To paint?”

“Oh don’t look so surprised.” She tapped the cigarette on the rim of the ashtray, knocking free a tiny avalanche of ash. “And don’t look so worried, for Pete’s sake, Mateo.”

He looked at her quizzically. “How?”

She looked back at him. She understood that he really wanted it to be a secret, so she left out the point about so much of his laundry being spattered in spraypaint. She left out all the nights she’d heard him or seen him creeping out of the house. She ignored his hands.

“A long time ago your mother told me about your graffiti,” she said, “and once something like that gets into a person I guess it doesn’t ever get out of him. Plus, I’m an art teacher. I sensed it. Magic.”

He smiled.

“But I understand that it can be a kind of secret thing. Since you’ve never mentioned it, I haven’t either. But I’ve kept my eye out. And I
think
I know which ones you do, but I’ve never been sure. The ones that are everywhere. The beautiful ones. The words. Am I right?”

“The Facts?”

She leaned forward. “Is that what you call them?” Her breath moved the smoke.

“That’s what Fletcher calls them. What makes you think those are mine?”

“Oh, because there’s so much Brazilian influence in them. It’s more, I don’t know,
grand
than the dumb tags you see around here. It’s more than just tags. Tags are about the person doing the tagging. They say,
I was here.
This is me. I exist. Pay attention to me.
Yours are about the reader and writer coming together. Yours are about
community
. Typical of what you see on a lot of streets in cities in Brazil. Hey, come on, don’t look so surprised!”

He was blushing beneath the yellow kitchen light. This felt more like coming out than coming out ever had.

“At first I set your rent so low as a favor to your mother. God knows I owed her. But I’ve long since thought of it as my way of quietly patronizing the arts. My civic duty! They’re really beautiful, Mateo. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one that didn’t make me think or make me smile. And make me glad we’ve had this little arrangement over the years. You’ve made me feel like a benefactress.”

He looked at the smoke and the puzzle pieces and after a moment he said, “They wanted me to stay. In SP.”

She looked at him. “Your family?”

“My cousin. And my friend.”

“Well, that’s something to think about, definitely. You can decide what you want to do now. Maybe it’s good timing, with the house. But whatever you decide, I’m thankful, Mateo, that what you do, you’ve done in a place where I’ve been lucky enough to see it.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Pish posh.” She picked up her cigarette but it was almost burned down to the filter. “Go, go. And be careful.” She took a quick puff before it went out.

P A R T

F I V E

Small Steps, Giant Leaps

March came in like a

lamb that year, and then had second thoughts. The sky had a big pile of snow in reserve and dumped it down all at once mid-month, its last chance to make up for the warm winter. We knew a big one was coming—the
Globe
called it THE IDES OF MARCH—and Jamar took Caleb to his parents’ house out of fear that we’d lose electricity during the storm. We didn’t, but the drifts on the sidewalk made it practically impossible to leave, so I sat in the apartment wrapped in blankets by myself—reading, writing, but mostly thinking about Cara. Everything gets a little more supernatural in a blizzard—the way the lights flicker and the TV goes in and out, the way the snow climbs high against the windows and muffles the street sounds. During the blizzard it was even easier than usual to imagine her shuffling groceries in the kitchen or camped out at the end of the couch with her journal.

Her journal. I only ever read one page in that multi-notebook, multi-year journal of hers: the entry of June fifteenth. What she wrote had been the truth as she’d known it, but her facts were wrong. I was sure of that by now. There was never a eureka moment inside my head, no lightbulb ever hovered over it—it was more like the slow and careful excavation of memories to back up a theory I’d felt from the start. It was a terribly lonely realization, one that held no obvious place for me. The windows rattled and I wished I’d gone with Jamar and Caleb, as he’d invited me to do.

I called Mike, just to talk, but he was so deep in a raid he hadn’t even realized it was snowing.

I called Mateo, even though we hadn’t spoken since the day he got fired. I do things in blizzards I wouldn’t do otherwise. There were things he would have to be told, sooner or later.

“If you happen to be in my neighborhood,” I told either him or his voicemail (the connection was so poor I couldn’t be sure), “you should stop by.” It cut out before there was any reply. I didn’t call back to make sure he heard.

A couple of hours later, though, when I was halfway through watching
Wonder Boys
, he walked through my door. I would say that he waltzed, were he not so loaded down in winter gear; it had that nonchalance. The nonchalance annoyed me. It had taken me a lot of effort to make the call and apparently none for him to show up. I paused the movie and stood up.

He was wearing one of those ski masks bankrobbers wear (if not for the unmistakable eyes I probably would’ve reached for a weapon); it glistened with snow and a tuft of hair stuck out through one of the eyeholes like an overgrown eyebrow. He pulled off the fingerless gloves I’d given him for Christmas and dropped them on the floor. Snow skittered like diamonds across the wood and commenced turning into dozens of little puddles. He pulled off the mask. His hair stood up big and staticky for a second before gravity weighed it back down. His cheeks had a week’s worth of beard that mixed into the scruff on his chin, and darkness cradled his eyes.

I asked if he was all right.

“Sure,” he said, looking at me curiously. “What do you mean? I got your call, thought I’d come by and say hello.”

“Oh. Yeah. I wasn’t sure it went through.”

He started unzipping his jacket and I noticed his fingers. They were covered in layers of paint and the knuckles and backs of his hands were dry and cracked. I couldn’t tell whether the cranberry-colored grooves in the chapped places were paint or blood.

When he had everything off—the jacket, the snow pants, a sweatshirt—he was standing in my living room in a gray waffle shirt and white long-johns—underwear—and I wasn’t sure what to do with that. I could see the shape of his penis through the thin fabric. It seemed too familiar for what I thought we’d become. I felt turned-off in an uncomfortable way.

“Have you been painting during the day?” I asked.

“Yeah. Blizzard makes a good disguise.”

“But how can you run, with these drifts?”

“How can they chase?”

I looked at his face and hands again. “But the blizzard started yesterday. You look like you’ve been out longer than that.”

“I have. There’s lots to do.”

“I guess so. I thought you only painted at night so you wouldn’t get caught?”

“Huh? Oh. No. Only painted at night because I had to work during the day. But now that I’m unemployed, no holds barred.”

I didn’t find that comforting. There was something in his eyes that was making me nervous.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“Nah, I’m OK.” He was still standing at the door, a wind-blown vampire waiting to be invited in.

“Some hot chocolate or something, at least?” I wondered why I was offering because in fact I wanted him to put all his gear back on and leave.

He accepted the hot chocolate and came and sat in the kitchen while I boiled water and worked the flimsy plastic scoop into a container of powder. Then we moved to the couch, just touching our tongues to the liquid until it was cool enough to drink. I could smell him—not like at work; it was more intense—mixing oddly with the chocolaty steam.

For a time I thought we were enjoying the quiet, relishing the pressurizing cabin that silence can be for two people who’ve been apart, but soon I realized he’d dozed off. I took the nearly empty mug off his lap and he woke up. He got up. I thought he was going to the kitchen but then I heard him flop onto my bed.

With the mugs in my hand I went to my room. He was lying face-down on my bed and I could tell from the way the long-johns stretched across his bum that he wasn’t wearing underwear. I looked away.

“Mateo, what are you doing?”

“I’m a little tired,” he said, rubbing his face into my pillow.

“But you’re in my bed.” I put the mugs on my desk. “I guess I don’t understand what’s going on here. You told me the unstoppable force—”

“I just want to sleep. No forces. Come sleep.”

I was getting angry enough to show it. “I don’t want to sleep with you. You stink. You’re dirty. When was the last time you showered?”

“Yesterday,” he said, frowning into the pillow. “Uh. Two days ago? I don’t know, Fletcher, I’ve been busy.”

I sighed, angry that I wanted him. But it was the old him I wanted. Seeing him in my bed made me remember how it’d felt with him in it when things were good, how it’d been my favorite thirty-square-feet in the universe. Now it was just growing sour beneath him.

“Fine,” I said. “Sleep here. But you have to shower first. And there’s razors under the sink.”

Without a word he got up and walked past me and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help take off his clothes. I wanted to shampoo his hair and rinse it with water from a cup. The bathroom door closed between us and I just listened to the water run. One thing was clear: I wouldn’t be telling him anything about Caleb tonight.

I lay on my side on the side of the bed, thinking, watching the fish swim around their simple, well-lit world.

The shower ran for a long time and then the sink went on and off, on and off. Then he came back to my room and walked around the bed and sat down on the floor, Indian style, so he was face-to-face with me. He was wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist and his tattoos popped against the skin of his arms and his damp hair was pushed back behind his ears. He’d shaved and his smooth cheeks glowed tropical blue in the fish-tank light.

“I don’t want you to be worried about me,” he said.

I rolled onto my back to get away from his eyes. “How can I not be? You seem like you’re—” I wanted to say
crazy
. I meant
crazy
. “You seem like you’re getting way too deep into this.”

“It’s just what I do,” he said gently. “It’s just what happens. Don’t be worried.” He reached up and took my hand. “Do you know that between Cook and the job I had before that, I didn’t work for four months? I take these opportunities to do what I really love and then when another opportunity comes along, I pull out of it and get back to normal. Don’t be worried.”

“I don’t like seeing you looking like a—homeless man.”

“Awh Fletcher. Come on. Come on now. No one’s homeless.” He took my hand that he was holding and touched it against his cheek. “See? All smooth.” He stood up and climbed over me and lay down on the other side of the bed. I scooted over to give him room, but not too much—I wanted to be close. He smelled like soap now, and shaving cream and Listerine. “You told me once, that when you were writing
Porcupine City
you got so obsessed with it that you forgot about everything else in your life. You told me Jamar actually tried to stage some kind of intervention because you were ignoring your friends!”

“Yeah.”

“Well see? We’re just the same, you and me—that’s all.”

I fell asleep in my clothes with my face against his hair and my hand locked tight in his against his belly, but when I woke up at 5:00 a.m. the towel he had slept in was folded neatly on my desk chair and there was no other sign that he’d been there, other than the puddles of snowmelt left by his boots.

The rest of March passed

and I didn’t see him even once, although I started noticing a lot more new Facts around the city, which I took to mean he was still at it full time. I also counted two separate articles in the
Globe
—with headlines like VANDALISM ON THE RISE or some shit—noting the increase in graffiti and calling on the mayor’s office for some sort of crackdown.

None of the new Facts seemed targeted at me, though, and that hurt. One evening I drove past Marjorie’s house, for no other reason than to catch a glimpse of Mateo’s car, to feel that feeling I got from being in on his secrets. But the car wasn’t there, and near the driveway was a snow-covered sign featuring the face of a grinning realtor. To this sign a second sign had been appended: SALE PENDING.

That sign brought a funny mix of feeling. Funny strange. Mateo’s absence—and the further absence the sign portended—made me feel less like I was carrying a secret of my own. But still I worried about him. And I kept my eyes on the walls.

April came and Jamar’s family

leave time away from work was drawing to a close. It was something we both were aware of and tip-toed around. On the calendar in our kitchen the date throbbed like a cold-sore. Jamar hadn’t quite figured out what he wanted to do with Caleb when he had to go back to work.

“I guess Jamar’s mom told him she’d take the kiddo a day or two each week,” I told Mike. I lay on his mattress looking at the ceiling a few feet above my face, while he crawled around gathering up our clothes. Mike had given up Warcraft for Lent, and so had been calling me almost every day for the past week, to help fill the void.