The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 11

  “An astronaut? Your mom?”

  “Believe it. When I was a kid she wouldn’t shut up about astronauts. Told me a million times about how when she was a girl she watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. All the people in her neighborhood gathered around this TV in someone’s house. The Americans were walking on the fucking Moon, she’d say! Well she wouldn’t say fucking, but it was that kind of excitement. She’d say, the Americans are walking on the Moon. They’re crazy and amazing. They have left the Earth and they’re walking on the Moon.” He did his mother’s voice in an accent much thicker than his own. It made me smile. “So she wanted to be an astronaut too. But that wasn’t possible because Brazil had no space program. The road to the Moon went straight through America. But still. She was a nurse, training to be a nurse. Not exactly the right résumé, you know? So the next best thing was to be the mother of an astronaut. To get postcards from the Moon.”

  “One small step for Mateo,” I whispered, “one giant leap for the Brazilian people.”

  “She used to even use it as a threat, right? Like other parents use the Tooth Fairy or something. Be good or the Tooth Fairy won’t come. With my mom it was like, Finish your homework or you’ll never get to the Moon, filhinho.”

  I smiled. I was doing a lot of smiling tonight.

  “I don’t know how much that was really figuring into her insistence that they come here to have me. Probably more than she’d let on. Somehow she got my dad to agree. And they moved.”

  “Why Framingham, though? That’s so random.”

  “Why anywhere? They must’ve had some connection there.”

  “So you were born.”

  “Haha. Yes.”

  “Did they buy you tons of like rocket-ship baby clothes and stuff?”

  “Oh yeah. What they couldn’t afford, my mom made.”

  “I need to see pictures of that someday.”

  “Haha. There are plenty.”

  He went quiet. I didn’t want him to stop talking. “Did you go back to Brazil a lot to visit and stuff when you were a kid?” I wondered how he’d caught the touch of accent.

  “We couldn’t ever go, no.”

  “Never?”

  “My parents were illegal quickly. Overstayed their visas. Immigration is hard, you know? It’s not all drive up to Ellis Island any more, if it ever really was.”

  “Oh.” Immigration. Military dictatorships. This was so far outside my experience. It made me feel ashamed, though I’m not sure why.

  “We went back for good when I was about ten.”

  “What happened when you were ten?”

  “...”

  “I mean why’d you go back?”

  “My pai.... Hmm. My father had an affair with my landlady.”

  “Yikes. Wait, the landlady you have now?”

  He nodded.

  “You all lived in that house?”

  “No no no. Guess it’s kind of a long story.”

  I wanted to hear it. I looked at him expectantly.

  He pushed his hair back behind his ear. “Makes me kind of squeamish to tell it,” he said finally.

  “Oh.” I felt stupid. “Of course. Yeah. I would imagine it would. Sorry. I can get kind of nosey.”

  We were crossing the Charlestown Bridge on its pedestrian walkway, an expanse of holey metal grating that offered a vertigo-inducing view of the ink-dark river far beneath our shoes. From this bridge we had a killer view of its much grander neighbor, the Zakim. The multi-lane, cable-stayed bridge hanging between two forked obelisks (like two massive, upside-down Y’s) was decked out tonight in purple and blue light. Through the week its colors rotated like the colors on Mateo’s fingers.

  We stopped to look at it, and after a minute of silence Mateo sighed and said, “Someday, Arrowman. Someday.”

  “You’ll paint on it?”

  “Someday. Yes.”

  We watched the traffic move across it for a few minutes and then started walking again, over the bridge and on into the North End, where all the little Italian restaurants were closed for the night. Then he said, “You tell the story.”

  “What story?”

  “About why we moved to São Paulo. About my dad.”

  I looked at him, confused. “I don’t—know that story.”

  “I read your book,” he said matter-of-factly. “You can craft a romantic scene.”

  “But—that’s fiction. I don’t know what happened to your family.”

  “Well, what do you and Clarice Lispector say? Doesn’t have to be factual to be true, right? Did you mean that?”

  “Huh. Yeah. Sure I did.” I paused. “Do you think of it as a romance, though? I mean, wasn’t this pretty hard for your family?”

  “It was what it was. I try to think of it in the best possible light. Try to make it worth what came after. That’s when I think about it, which is rare. But you brought it up. So you tell it. It’s OK if you don’t know the exact details about my life. You can fill in the blanks with what feels true.”

  I felt something in my chest, the fluttering of a tenderness I rarely felt outside of fleeting moments in various beds.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll tell it. I need a little background, though. How’s the story start?”

  “My landlady Marjorie worked at a middle school. As an art teacher. She works at a high school now, but back then she worked at the middle school, I think. And across the street from the middle school was an old-folks home. My dad was a groundskeeper there. I know that for sure.”

  “Do you not know much about it?”

  “Not much. I was ten. It’s never really been discussed except in bits and pieces. That’s why your telling is as good as mine.”

  “OK.” Like an old film it began flickering through my mind, complete with the smudges and soft lighting of old memories. It did nothing to quell the feeling in my chest. “She used to see him working across the street?”

  “I guess.”

  “When she took the kids out to recess and stuff?”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  I nodded, felt my lips scrunch up like some kind of fortune teller, one who was reading the past instead of the future. “I picture her standing like at the corner of the playground, with her back to the nursing home. Every once in a while she’d look over to check for the man who took care of the grass and flowers and stuff.”

  Already I was unsure of the tone. I felt weird. This was a story of adultery that apparently almost ripped Mateo’s family apart. Ripped them at least from their adopted country. And I was going on about flowers?

  “She’d be standing there,” I went on, “kids screaming and crashing into each other—maybe she’d have a whistle around her neck or something—but feeling a million miles away from the kids and the playground, and instead connected by an invisible thread to the man across the street, listening so intently for his sounds, sounds of rakes and shovels and hoes and sounds of him breathing and the sound of him dragging the back of his hand against his forehead, separating all that from the kids.... Do you think she’d go out during lunch to get things from her car, things she left on purpose so she’d have a reason to go out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think she’d like walk slow, glance across the street? Like on certain days of the week when he’d be mowing the lawn. He’d be shirtless and the sun would glint off his shoulders—”

  “Fletcher, this is my father. And he’s at work, he’s not going to be shirtless at work.”

  “Sorry. Well.”

  “Hmm. You were doing fine until the shirtless.”

  I was quiet a minute before going on. “During the day, between classes, she’d manufacture reasons to go out to her car, to see if she could spot him. This man in the sun with his floppy hair— Did he have floppy hair like yours?”

  “Haha. No. Short. He went baldy pretty early.” He rubbed his own thick hair. “I think I’m safe.”

  I nodded and rejected the detail and kept his father’s hair long in my
mind. “She thought he was beautiful. It made her happy to see him, walking back and forth across the lawn of the nursing home, his arms loaded with sticks or pruned branches, with watering cans and sometimes riding the green and yellow tractor. She thought he was beautiful. Especially against the backdrop of the nursing home, you know? You think of places like that as so kind of sterile and lifeless and sad and boring. As so stagnant. The only change, really, is people leaving and new people coming but it’s all the same. And against that, here was this man. And he was sweaty and he smelled, but he smelled like life, you know? Of doing things and being places. And his hands and fingers were always stained with—with soil.”

  I paused, thought: Reel it in. My heart was going like mad.

  “And although she didn’t even know his name, she felt like she knew him and the name was just something she couldn’t quite place. Just a missing piece where everything else about him fit so nicely. She felt like he could be hers, and in some way already was. Sometimes that made her feel silly, because, really, what did she know about this man? Nothing at all. Nothing. But she’d been lonely for a long time, and, uh— Maybe I’m getting off track here.”

  “No, Arrowman, that’s right.” He looked at me with a delighted surprise that made my heart thump harder and made me uncomfortable, too. We seemed to be bonding and that was exciting. But what exactly were we bonding over? “Her husband left right after their daughter was born.”

  “OK.” I thought for a minute before continuing. I’d gone about as far as I could without co-opting our own story (or at least my illusion of it), because I didn’t have a lot of personal experience with, shall we say, courtship to draw from. The characters in this tale were going to have to meet soon. But how? My mind swung to car trouble but it couldn’t be car trouble. Car trouble was ours.

  He looked at me. “Stuck?”

  “Just thinking.” I paused. “One day when he was mowing the lawn and she was walking to her car feeling like she’d explode if she didn’t talk to him soon, she heard a thwunk and a crash and she spun around, for an instant thinking: gunshot. Then there was silence as the mower motor stopped, and then the man was crossing the street onto the school grounds. She’d forgotten about the noise and was convinced he was on his way to talk to her, finally. She was walking before she made any decision to go to him. Her mind was on nothing more than the wish that she’d had time to check her lipstick. The man was kneeling in the grass by the sign, the kind of sign you can stick letters on to alert passersby of parent-teacher conferences and stuff.”

  “I’ve painted on a lot of those kinds of signs.”

  “She arrived at the sign as the man was standing up, brushing grass off his knees. He wore blue Dickies and his workboots were green from walking behind the mower. His waist was thin, his shirt tucked in neatly. A patch above the pocket had the name of the nursing home, and his name—”

  “Renaldo.”

  “Renaldo Amaral. She turned the name in her mouth. His face was nervous—but up close like this it took her breath away. Those eyes.” I looked at Mateo. “They were green-green and made all the grass around him look gray in comparison. Then she looked at the sign and couldn’t see what was wrong. It was an accident, the man said. His accent was striking—not the Spanish she’d probably rather prejudicially been expecting. Something else. It was then that she noticed the glass in the grass. I hit a rock with the mower!, the man said. Well, she said, you do such a wonderful job over there. The man looked at her with a surprised smile, with green eyes and smooth lips, and said, Over there, but what about over here! And they laughed.”

  I was silent for a minute. I wanted to end it here.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Hmm. I guess you have the idea.”

  Somewhere in the Financial District

  now, near Post Office Square. Closer to dawn than to midnight. We lay on our stomachs beside a Dumpster in an alley, arms cushioning our chests on the cobble ground, looking across the street down into another alley between Starbucks and KaBloom. We’d leapt to the ground too suddenly for me to consider the grossness of it. I hoped there were no rats. Mateo put a finger to his lips, grinning. “Ssshh.”

  I nodded. My heart was thumping against the stone. This was the first time we’d seen another writer. We’d been quick to hide and so far he hadn’t seen us.

  “Let’s see if I know who it is,” Mateo whispered. The guy had on a baggy t-shirt and shorts with pockets that bulged conspicuously in the shape of cans. “Be cool to see somebody I know of.”

  “Have you met others?”

  He nodded. “I keep to myself. Most are more social. There’s different philosophies.”

  “Hey,” I said, “do you know who writes those Facts?”

  “Facts?”

  “The ones that are all over. The ones that say obvious things like SKY IS BLUE or whatever. You’ve seen them.”

  “I know them, sure. No, I don’t know. No one knows, but rumor has it it’s some oldster who’s been at this shit since we were in diapers.”

  “Cool.”

  The guy across the street pulled out a can and aimed it at the wall. Before spraying he glanced around, looking much more cautious than Mateo did when Mateo was doing the same thing.

  “Maybe this is the guy who writes the Facts,” Mateo said. “Let’s see what he does.”

  I nodded, but even I could tell this guy was too nervous to be the guy.

  He put paint to the wall, a big arc that after a few strokes became a C. He made a few more and spelled out CATHODE. He wrote the same thing twice more in different styles, one of which covered part of my still-wet ARROWMAN.

  “Hey, he’s painting on my tag.”

  “He’s a toy or he’d know better. That shit’s frowned upon.”

  “It is? What’s a toy?”

  “A newbie. Or a poser. This one’s probably a poser. Doesn’t even know what he wants to write. Look.” The guy had written FUCK YOU. “Bet he works at the KaBloom,” Mateo said. “Flower boy. Yeah, he definitely works there. Or worked. See how angry he is? Graffiti should never be about vendetta.”

  “Am I a toy?”

  “Technically. But a newbie toy, not a poser toy. Ssshh.”

  “What are you?”

  “Sshh.” He held out his finger to shut me up. “Let’s say a knight. Some might say a king but I’m modest. Wait—”

  And then suddenly there were lights, and in one second Mateo had his backpack in one hand and the hood of my hoodie in the other and we were running, out of the alley and down. For the first time in my life I was running from cops. Or more likely rent-a-cops, but it was exhilarating to think they were cops. While you’re actually being chased it hardly matters by whom. A singular thought pounds in your brain: don’t get caught. Don’t get caught. Whether the chaser wants to tag you It or slap you into cuffs, the feeling’s the same: Don’t. get. caught.

  “Go go go!” Mateo was almost laughing, loving this.

  Our sneakers clapped on the sidewalk and we pulled the strings of our hoods tight to hide our faces, just in case. Down and through another alley, across the park in Post Office Square, kicking up mulch, shrubs whacking our arms. And then we were in the street, a brighter street, skidding out of our speed, breathing heavy, acting casual, wiping our faces. No wonder you smell like adventure at work, I thought. “You spend every night doing this, don’t you?”

  He smiled an out-of-breath smile. “But that’s enough for tonight. We’ve been all over!” He stepped toward me face to face, close enough to stop my breath and silence my mind. I could feel his breath on my eyelashes and on my lips. I was sure he was going to kiss me. Instead he gently tugged the ends of my hoodie strings. “We’ll get your car tomorrow. OK? Come home with me?” I nodded, heart pounding even harder. We caught a cab.

  This is how it really

  happened: The nursing home in Mateo’s mind and in my story was not, I now understand, a nursing home but a seni
or center owned and operated by the Catholic Church. And the middle school across the street wasn’t a middle school but a day-care center/preschool also run by the Church. On one side of the street people were raised up; on the other side they were sent off; and a half-mile down the road was the church were they were tended to for the years in between. One maintenance staff managed all three properties.

  Marjorie had indeed noticed Renaldo for the first time outside of the senior center, so one afternoon when he came into her classroom to gather the trash, it felt to her like a follow-up meeting. Familiarity had been growing within her, whether he knew it or not.

  The affair, the actual consummation of the affair, that I had been reluctant to narrate to Mateo, ran through my mind as I watched out the window of the cab while he sat silently beside me, clutching his backpack on the floor between his knees. All the possibilities of it. The fact that for Marjorie it had worked out.

  Marjorie had been pushy with Renaldo, she knew. He was quiet, shy, did not wear a wedding ring (she checked and delighted in his bare knuckle). She began waiting for him at the end of each day, sometimes staying late to wait, long after the toddlers were picked up by their parents. When he arrived she thought it was with more eagerness than collecting trash ought to warrant. After several weeks of this, when she knew his name, when she knew well all the ordinary things they small-talked about, in front of a long corkboard onto which were push-pinned three-dozen construction-paper hands decked out as turkeys (because it happened in November, not at all the summer), she kissed him.

  It had the taste of an affair, his lips against hers, a forbiddenness that made her heart sink even as it pressed closer to his. But she couldn’t decide what kind of affair. Was it adultery? He hadn’t ever mentioned another woman. Or was it simply the affair of a groundskeeper and a preschool teacher behind closed Catholic doors? Or was it the affair of a Brazilian immigrant and a frumpy New Englander named Marjorie Miller? She didn’t want to know and the ambiguity offered permission.