The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  He spun a rack of novelty buttons and touched one shaped like a basketball. “Did you know Jimmy is athletic?” he mused, reminded of his jock loverboy even by mass-produced trinkets. “I had no idea he was.”

  “He was on the soccer team in college.”

  “Really?” he cooed. “He’s on this neighborhood basketball team, too. With all these straightboys.”

  “Amazing.”

  “You should come to one of his games. You can sit with me. I won’t mind if you oogle him a little. It’ll be fun.”

  “I don’t know.” Hearing about Jimmy secondhand was one thing; watching him run around in swooshy shorts was quite another. I might not survive it.

  I picked out a couple of CDs for Cara and after dropping Alex off I stopped for a cake. The cake spent some time crammed in Mike’s tiny fridge while he helped me work out my Perino tension in his loft.

  The work day was almost

  over. I was zoned out at my desk with my headphones on, waiting for the last two hours to tick by. If you keep moving windows and folders around it gives the impression of doing work. I rubbed my eyes. I still had a bit of a hangover from Cara’s birthday rager last night. Suddenly Mateo was beside me and I was awake. He was like a jolt of Brazilian coffee.

  “Oh—hey,” I said, tugging out my headphones. “You caught me dozing.”

  “That’s my trick.” He helped himself to a pen from my desk and wrote on a Post-It. His fingers were yellow today. He peeled off the note and stuck it to the bottom right corner of my monitor. “That’s where I live. Meet me at midnight. We have business in Charlestown.”

  “Tonight? I can’t tonight. I—have a date.”

  He straightened up just noticeably and his radiance dimmed by a watt. At least I thought it looked that way. “Ah. Who’s the guy?”

  “No one. This guy Mike.”

  “OK. Well.” He touched the Post-It. “For future reference, then, right? We’ll do it another time.”

  “Sure. I’m free pretty much any time.”

  He nodded. He stood on his toes and peered over the wall of my cube. “Think Larry’s looking for me.”

  “Hey, can I get your cell number or something too?”

  “Sure,” he said, then: “Didn’t I give it to you already?”

  “No, we’ve been kind of old-fashioned.”

  “Right. Well here.” He plucked the Post-It back and added his digits under the address—small letters and numbers in clumsy penmanship that looked nothing like the grandiose fonts of his graffiti.

  “For future reference,” he said again, reattaching it to my screen. “Have fun with Mike.”

  I watched him go, then rolled my chair across my cube, grabbed my messenger bag. I took out my phone, rolled back to the desk, and programmed in his number.

  Later in the evening, after I canceled on Mike, I used the number to tell Mateo I was on my way.

  Not all the houses on

  his street had their porch lights on so it was hard to read some of the numbers. The wrinkled Post-It on the passenger seat said 35. When I was in that range I kept an eye out for the gray Civic with the new battery. After a minute I spotted it parked on the street. The car was familiar in a way that tickled me. I’d been under the hood and, more importantly, in the trunk. If not for that accidental discovery I would be in bed with Mike right now. Mateo better make it worth it.

  I idled beside the Civic, leaning to the passenger window to peer at house numbers. None of these houses looked familiar, even though Mateo and I walked up this street the first night we went out. Had I been that spaced-out that night? Or—not spaced-out, but rather, singularly focused? Yes, probably.

  There was an empty space behind his car but it was small and I didn’t want to try squeezing in. The last thing I needed was to ding his bumper.

  It was OK just to wait. The street was quiet and I could stay where I was for now. The number of the closest house was—OK, good—35. It was red brick with white shutters, tall and narrow. Three floors, or two and an attic with windows. I craned my neck to see up, wondering if he lived at the top.

  The little front yard, with its short walkway and stone steps leading to a small porch with iron rails, was filled with carefully-tended flower beds and two bushes bursting with yellow forsythia.

  Mateo’s house. The home of Dedinhos. I had no memory of it, even though he almost certainly pointed it out when we were walking to his car. But of course whenever he pointed at something my eyes rarely went beyond the tip of his finger.

  I was about to text him when the front door opened, and then the screen door, and Mateo lifted his chin at me while he shut both doors quietly behind him. He came down the steps and tried to get in the car. I scrambled to unlock the door.

  “Nice house,” I said as he got in.

  He reached around and dropped his clinking backpack on the backseat. He was wearing a sleeveless gray hoodie and long black shorts, with tall black socks pulled up so that between shorts and socks there was only an inch or two of skin visible. It struck me as a tad silly in a way that made him less intimidating.

  “Thanks.”

  “Which window’s yours?”

  “Third floor. Attic is done over. I rent it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s fine. Between work and—nighttime stuff, I’m not here much.”

  “Yeah. Who lives below?”

  “A woman and her daughter.” He yanked his seatbelt across his chest and buckled it, fingers coming magnificently close to my thigh. “Oh—you can start driving.”

  “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  In the passenger seat he was even quieter than he’d been elsewhere, seeming totally unlike the person who was expounding on art philosophy the week before. He looked out the window mostly, directing me at intersections wth flips of his finger. Although he was still doing the navigating, this was the first time I wasn’t just along for the ride. Tonight, significantly or not, I was the ride. It altered our dynamic just enough to make me giddy. It was as close to equals as we’d been. We were becoming partners in crime. Literally. The only thing that seemed likely about having me drive was that he planned it that way. To bring me in.

  He’d said we had business

  in Charlestown, and that’s where he led me. When he told me to park I pulled into a space between two white sedans.

  When I got out of the car I spotted right away the glowing obelisk of the Bunker Hill Monument beyond the roofline of a row of houses. I wondered if that was part of our business in Charlestown. The Navy Yard was nearby too, though I wasn’t sure where. We weren’t going to paint on the U.S.S. Constitution, were we? That would make tagging the Zakim Bridge look like child’s play.

  Not Old Ironsides, and not Bunker Hill—Mateo had something simpler in mind. A house on a street with houses so close together they looked like one long building. A house at the end of the row, made semi-private by a big leafy tree and a curve in the street. It was under construction heavy enough to warrant an entire temporary façade, complete with a wide, garage-like door—a façade of the type seen on coming-soon stores in malls. Blank plywood begged for paint.

  Although the street was sleepy it was much more out in the open than anything we’d done so far, and not until Mateo clapped a can into my hand did I realize I was shivering.

  The element of possibly being caught made it more authentic, though—that was obvious just from watching Mateo. He was going a lot faster than he had before, and he kept glancing side to side to make sure the coast was still clear. He dashed out a quick, gorgeous mural of the Bunker Hill Monument. Although he seemed barely to be paying attention to his work, I sensed that he was in tune with everything, perfectly harmonized with the city around him, one eye on his wall and the other on everything else. Since this felt so serious I tried to put an extra something in my Arrowman to push it from simple tag to decoration, if not quite art.

  When we were done he sna
pped some pictures with his Polaroid and we were walking. Not toward my car, really, just strolling away in that Whatever do you mean, officer? kind of way. Whenever we left a scene after painting it always took me a long time to lose that charged-up, fight-or-flight feeling I had when the paint was streaming. But it seemed to melt off him immediately. He could be standing ten feet from a finished piece and appear as though he had nothing to do with it. In the beginning I thought this was him being cocky; only later would I understand it was because painting made him feel no guilt.

  “When you do pictures instead

  of tags,” I said as we walked, not to break our silence—which wasn’t an uncomfortable one—but because I wanted to hear his voice again and the subtle stresses of its Portuguese tint, “you don’t sign them as Dedinhos or anything.”

  “No.”

  “So how will people know they’re yours?”

  “Hmm. Why do they need to know?”

  “I don’t know. So you get credit?”

  He laughed. “Why would I want credit? I work hard to avoid getting credit. Credit means cuffs, Arrowman.” He shifted his backpack and the cans clinked inside.

  “I don’t mean credit to Mateo Amaral. I mean, like, so Dedinhos gets credit. So people will know all your stuff is done by one guy. So then you could make a smudge on a trashcan or something with a marker and people would say, Ooh, that’s his.” I wiggled my fingers and made that heavenly chorus sound, aaaooouuh.

  He laughed again and looked at me. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, so— If we didn’t know Michelangelo painted the Mona Lisa—”

  “Arrowman. Leonardo!”

  “Sorry—Leonardo. I always got the Ninja Turtles mixed up too. I mean if we didn’t know Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, it would be getting passed around at yard sales rather than worshiped at the Louvre.”

  “Maybe. I like to believe it’d still be in the Louvre even if it was anonymous.”

  “But the name assigns value.”

  “Monetary value. Not artistic value. The two things are completely separate. I’m only interested in one.”

  We walked for a while in silence. The idea of a graffiti artist who didn’t want credit seemed to go against all of what little I knew about graffiti artists—artists whose art was their name.

  “When I was putting out Porcupine City,” I said, “I thought a lot about using a pen name.”

  “Heh. A novelist’s tag.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it was a reluctance to be truly associated with it.”

  “A gay thing?”

  “No. No, I couldn’t give a shit about that. I’ve been out since puberty. It just goes back to me realizing on the precipice of publication that I didn’t like my main character. And he was so obviously me.”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, if you say he’s you, then he’s you. You would know. But I don’t think he’s obviously you.”

  “Well, that’s cool I guess.”

  “The main character was with a lot of guys.”

  “Yeah. A lot of villains.”

  “So you’ve been with a lot of guys too, then?”

  “Some would think it’s a lot. Some would think it’s hardly any.”

  “How many?”

  I wondered why he was asking, why he cared. I wondered what I wanted to tell him, since I felt no obligation to tell the truth. And I wondered whether I even knew the number. How many other guys, besides the one with the slip-on Vans, had I forgotten?

  “It doesn’t matter. I look at the number different now. It makes me happy now,” I told him, telling myself too. “It makes me feel like I have a little something with each one of them. The guy I had plans with tonight? Mike. He’s a nice guy, you know? That’s all that matters.”

  “You sleep with him?” He turned to look at me with those green eyes.

  Out of the blue I felt very embarrassed. It wasn’t anything to do with his tone, which had no particular emphasis, and his eyes weren’t judgmental. I just felt embarrassed. And I wasn’t used to feeling that way.

  “I mean I have slept with him. But it’s not like we do it every time.”

  I wanted to change the subject, swing myself out of this position where I suddenly felt vulnerable. I wanted to turn the tables. I almost asked him how many girls/guys/people he’d slept with, but I hesitated long enough to regroup and to realize I didn’t want to ask that question. Especially since I was more and more sure he was straight. Asking it would forfeit the mystery. And without this mystery between us, we had... what, exactly? Spraypaint? A mutual employer?

  “Is the Navy Yard over there?” I asked instead.

  “Right down there,” he said, pointing.

  “We’re not going to— Are we?”

  I half expected him to run into the entranceway and somersault over the gate. But he smirked and kept walking. If we were going to tag Old Ironsides it was going to be on another night.

  We just walked. I didn’t care where we were going, but I wanted to put some distance behind the sex talk. I asked him if he’d ever been to Honduras.

  “Honduras,” he said. “Nope. Why?”

  “No reason. My mom lives there. She’s always asking me to visit and I always avoid it. I have this recurring nightmare about forgetting English—forgetting language—and I think being surrounded by Spanish would basically be the same thing. I don’t know Spanish.”

  “Your mom lives in Honduras? Why?”

  “She’s an agricultural anthropologist.”

  “Uh. Cool.” He laughed. “I’ll pretend I know what that is.”

  “There’s this tree there called the noni tree. Ever hear of it? It makes this fruit that’s pretty nasty tasting but has about a million pounds of antioxidants in every ounce. Like a pomegranate mixed with Godzilla.”

  “Haha. No, can’t say I’ve heard of a noni tree.”

  “She’s trying to show the people who live in this particular area of Honduras how to cultivate it so they can sell the fruit to health-food yuppies in America and get rich.”

  “Cool. But you say it tastes nasty?”

  “It won’t make your eyes water or anything, but it’s not pleasant.”

  “You have some?”

  “She sends me boxes of it from time to time. The juice. But I’m like never sick, so make of that what you will. You’ll have to come over some time and try it.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Maybe you will?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  The night air grew humid

  and I thought it might rain, but really it was just the wind changing direction and blowing ocean air in from the Harbor. It felt steamy. Mateo’s bare arms glistened when we walked under streetlights, and when we passed the neon signs of shuttered storefronts the moisture on his skin caught the colored light and made it look like he was glowing.

  I stole glances, stepped wide around potholes in the sidewalk and slowly up curbs to let him get a half-step ahead of me as we walked, just far enough so I could freely take in the sight of his glowing arms and tall black socks. And then he would turn and slow down to let me catch up. His backpack clinked and every so often he’d dip into some nook or cranny and write DEDINHOS. Little Fingers. I had no idea where we were going.

  When he stood up after

  markering a hand on a mailbox he saw me rubbing my calves and he asked if I was tired.

  “No way. Just breaking myself in.”

  He laughed.

  “Where are we going to, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, clicking the cap back onto the marker. “I was just following you.”

  “But I was following you.”

  “Hah. Then we’re fucked.”

  “My car’s way back that way. You seemed like you had someplace in mind. More business?”

  “No. Guess I just like to walk. I like how the city sounds at night. Why, you have somewhere to be? Mike waiting
for ya?”

  “No. No one’s waiting.”

  We passed a group of college kids on their way home from somewhere, probably a bar. Among them it felt more special to be with Mateo. Our reason for being out at this time of night was so much more secret and cooler than theirs. I thumbed the can in my pocket and smiled.

  “How about your parents?” I asked Mateo when their voices had faded down the street. “Any noni trees in their lives?”

  “Mine? They’re in Brazil.”

  “You mentioned. There’s a weird John Updike novel by that name, by the way.”

  “...”

  “So what are they doing in Brazil?”

  “Living. They’re Brazilian.”

  “Oh. Yeah, of course. Ha. But you’re American?”

  He nodded. “Just like you.”

  He announced this similarity with enough of a something in his voice to send a charge through me. As though this point of commonality made him see me entirely anew. But I could tell he was playing.

  “You were born here, I mean.”

  “Yup. My parents got married and moved here. To Framingham, Massachusetts. Their only child was born—that’s yours truly. They got here just in time.”

  “You mean they moved here to have you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “Land of the free, etc.? I don’t know. Wasn’t great there. Military dictatorships and what-not. Economy was fucked. My mom used to tell about how inflation was so bad, buying groceries she’d try to run ahead of the guy with the sticker-gun to grab the stuff before he jacked up the prices.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s beautiful too, though, some of it. The kind of beautiful it’s hard to know what to do with sometimes.”

  “I bet.”

  “But my mom was intent on having an American baby.”

  “An American baby,” I mused. Up to that point I’d rarely considered that there were any other kind.

  “My mom was in love with America,” he said. “Still is, though it’s a more mature, bittersweet love now, I think. Not the school-girl crush it started out as.” We came to an intersection with a car going through too fast. He put his arm out to keep me from stepping off the curb—it was unnecessary but I liked his glowing skin so close to me. “She wants to be an astronaut,” he said as we crossed.