The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  As she kissed him the trash bag fell out of Renaldo’s callused hands and colorful balls of crumpled construction paper rolled out like confetti across the floor.

  She closed the classroom door with one hand while holding his neck with the other. He slid his palm down her shivering belly, inside the waist of her corduroy skirt, and she let her body open like a flower to his gardener’s hands.

  When Mateo brought me into

  his house, if I’d had any brainwaves to spare, I would’ve thought it funny—funny strange—to be in the home of the woman whose life I was narrating earlier that night. I had from time to time in my so-called writing career imagined my characters springing to Pinocchio-like life and existing in the real world, but now that it was basically happening I should’ve found it freaky.

  Should have, but didn’t. Because although I was in her house Marjorie was now the furthest thing from my mind. Everything about everything was Mateo. The water glass he held to his lips, the glass he gave to me. The one painty hand he splayed against the kitchen cupboard when he leaned down to untie his shoes.

  Finally he interrupted long minutes of silence with two words: “Bedtime. Ready?”

  We crept up the stairs

  with our shoes in our hands and Mateo opened his bedroom door carefully to keep it from squeaking. He shut it behind us, revealing a big poster of the Zakim Bridge tacked to the back of the door. His room smelled a little musty and a little like cologne and a little like slept-in sheets. It was big and shadowy with sloping ceilings and three dormer windows standing blue against the low, dark wall. The room lit up suddenly and he withdrew his hand from a switch on a lamp on his desk—I saw that it was actually an old door lying across two metal filing cabinets. An open laptop sat on top, its screen dark. The walls were blank save for a cluster of off-kilter photos of people who must’ve been his family (a bald man who must’ve been Renaldo, a blond boy who looked out of place), and a framed poster of a fully-graffitied train in a city that was perhaps South American. Was that São Paulo? The poster was above the bed. Below the poster and above the pillows was a crucifix hanging from a nail—it cast a long shadow across the wall. I looked from the shadow to the rumpled sheets. My mouth was dry; the cool water he’d given me downstairs had been powerless to moisten it. Never since the beginning had being in a guy’s room felt like this. And never since the beginning had I been so uncertain about what was going to happen. Now Mateo was pulling his shirt over his head and I thought, This is going to happen. In the low light I looked for additional tattoos on his chest but apart from a burst of chest hair between his pectorals his skin was clear.

  “Whatcha looking at?”

  “Nothing.” I lowered my eyes and smiled. I started unzipping my hoodie.

  “My cousin did them for me.” He folded his shirt over the back of a chair and started unbuttoning his shorts.

  “Your tattoos? Yeah, you told me.”

  “Oh. Guess I forgot.” He pulled off his tall black socks, one, the other, hopping a little. He wore a thin black band encircling one ankle.

  “I remember.” I laughed, stepping out of my pants. I folded them and set them on top of my sneakers, straightened my boxers on my waist. “Vinicius, right?”

  “The one and only. Took a couple sessions and I had to be pretty drunk every time. I’m afraid of needles.” A grin. He hopped barefoot, all shadows and skin, across the room in boxers of plain white, or maybe yellow, it was hard to tell in the reading-lamp light. He lifted the striped blankets and rolled into bed. The mattress squeaked. There was no headboard.

  “Should I turn off the light?” I said, standing in my underwear near the door-desk. He watched what must’ve been my silhouette against the little lamp for a second before saying yes. I flipped the switch and his skin turned from orange to dark blue in the weak light from the windows. I felt my way to the bed. My fingers found the edge of the blanket and followed it up as I slid my bare feet across stiff carpet. It took this to remind me that I had not, in fact, memorized the route from a guy’s bedroom door to a guy’s bed. My hand went from blanket to sheet. I stopped. This couldn’t have felt more different from the other week with Alex, or the other day with Mike. Maybe because I still wasn’t sure what was about to happen. The fact that I would now have to make a conscious decision to get in bed with Mateo, as opposed to grabbing a blanket and crashing on the floor—which seemed equally plausible here in the dark—made the room explode in starbursts advertising newness and quality. I slid my foot another few inches on the carpet until my toe connected with what felt like a plastic stacker.

  Maybe in Brazilian culture sleep was not as married to sex as it was in America. Maybe we were just going to sleep. Maybe anything. Maybe everything. I stood by the bed, the mattress against my bare knees, looking at him.

  He was lying on his side watching me. At last he smirked. He lifted his arm open wide. “Come here, Arrowman.”

  I full-on guffawed. Of course. Of course. I got into bed and his arm closed tight around me.

  “Bull’s-eye,” said Mateo.

  Our lips met with no delay.

  There was no mystery here anymore, at last, thank god. There was also no angst in his movements, no floodgates opening or anything like that, no grand, life-altering relief—nothing to suggest he’d never done this before. There was just warm, welcoming spit. I tried to match the gentle darts of his tongue, to keep pace, in the moments when I wasn’t marveling at how smooth were his lips and tongue, how soft and sweet like some kind of gummy, translucent candy.

  No, there was nothing to suggest he’d never done this before, and everything to suggest this was just how he did things. Surprise wrapped in surprise.

  He pushed back the blanket and slid on top of me without ever taking his lips off mine. I could feel him hard against me. I ran my hands over his body. New Guy, Mateo, Dedinhos. His skin was in some places baby-smooth and in others—I moved my hand up the inside of his thigh—coarsely hairy. His torso was soft, especially near his hips, as though still, at age twenty-five-ish, he hadn’t entirely shed his baby fat. The smooth electricity of his body against mine energized my every cell.

  He was strong. He pinned me, let me go, pinned me again. I tasted the sweet saltiness of his skyline tattoos. São Paulo on my tongue.

  Kneeling in the dark to rid him of his underwear there was a spark as the cotton tugged across his pubic hair, and the area around his pelvis lit up briefly in a flash, and after glimpsing it, no way could I leave it, so I filled my mouth with it, and felt his hands seize the back of my head, and heard Mateo laugh.

  Afterward when we were done

  and the windows glowed pink he crawled naked to the end of the bed, reached down and heaved the blankets up off the floor. I sat up, looked dizzily around, touched my lips, yawned. I reached to the floor too, for what I thought was my underwear, but it was a t-shirt. I reached around, dragging my fingers along the carpet, found my boxers and put them on.

  “Do you have to use the bathroom?” he said.

  “Oh—no, I was just gonna, you know, get going.”

  He stopped fixing the blankets. “Really? It’s 4:30 in the morning.”

  I dithered. “Yeah—”

  “How come?”

  Because that’s what happens afterward. “I was going to let you get some sleep.”

  He shook folds out of the blanket. “You should stay if you want.”

  “I don’t have any clothes, though. For work tomorrow.”

  “Arrowman, there’s no work tomorrow. It’s Saturday.” He reached out and gave a tug on my boxers. “Go to sleep.”

  I looked at the bed. He had it mostly re-made. The sheets were straightened, the pillows fluffed. He’d prepared it for something I had little practice at.

  I looked at the lightening windows, at my clothes stacked on top of my shoes across the room, at his tattoos, at his hair, which was goofily, vulnerably messed.

  “I’m not a prick,” he said, patting the sheet. “I
f that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t come from your Porcupine City. I’m more like—pizza. Even better the second day.” He smirked.

  God he was cute. “Like pizza, huh?”

  “Like pizza with noni fruit on it. Good for you.”

  “OK.” I pulled back the covers. “I guess I can’t resist a man with a good simile.”

  “I think you mean metaphor,” he said, sliding over. “Oops, no underwear allowed.”

  I sighed as though getting naked again was such a bother, and then, laughing, maneuvered under the covers and let my boxers fall to the floor. He was lying on his back. I lay on my stomach beside him. He curled his fingers around my elbow, rubbing it with his thumb. It felt odd to be touched now that the sex was over.

  “I mean simile,” I told him. “A metaphor would be you saying you were a pizza. You said you were like a pizza. Similes use like.”

  “Ah. That’s what I get for trying to be all smart.” He yawned.

  “I’m tired too.”

  “Can’t believe you were going to bail on the after-party.”

  At first I wasn’t sure what he meant, then I realized he meant this.

  “I can’t believe you never told me you like guys, Mateo.”

  He lifted his head off the pillow and stared. “Sure I told you,” he said, with a tonal concession to the fact that he hadn’t. “OK, but a little mystery is good for the soul.”

  “Yeah.”

  I guess I should’ve seen it. I should’ve known. But in my world guys normally didn’t operate like this, with this kind of slowness, this kind of reserve. Normally there was no mystery. In my world guys were out, loud. You went to a place where gay guys go, you found one, you went home with him. This was so different. And special. Was it special because it was different? Or different because it was special?

  “Well,” he said, “now you know, in living color.”

  “It was a heck of a way to tell me. Rubbing yourself all over me like that.”

  He laughed. “You liked it.”

  “I loved it. But it was fun, not knowing.”

  He smirked. “Now that you know, are you not interested anymore?”

  “Maybe I’m interested.”

  “Maybe you are?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  As the sun lit up

  the bedroom we lay on our backs, pointing out shapes in the plaster swirls on the ceiling. His boxers, which in the dark I thought were white or yellow, were in fact pink. The blankets were rolled down into hills that elevated our feet. There was something nice about his feet; they looked solid and sturdy, good for a quick getaway. I absentmindedly fitted his black leather ankle band in between my toes. My feet were usually good for a getaway too. I could barely believe I was still here, still in this bed now that the sun was up. I wondered if he used his parents’ story to keep me around. Did he know I couldn’t let a narrative drop in the middle? There was still so much more I wanted to hear.

  “Do you know how long your father and Marjorie were—together?”

  “I always see that one as a horse with an elephant trunk,” he said, pointing up at one of the plaster swirls.

  “Why not just an elephant?”

  “Too svelte. —I can’t imagine it was very long. Maybe only days. Maybe only once. My father makes mistakes like anyone but he’s not a deceptive man. Can’t imagine he kept it from my mother for long.”

  “Oh.” I felt surprised to be disappointed that the romance—Mateo had given me permission to think of it as a romance—had been so short-lived.

  “And after the affair my mom was like, Screw this, Renaldo.”

  “You were ten?”

  “Almost.”

  “How’d she find out?”

  “He told her.”

  “Wow. How much do you remember about it?”

  “I remember one time them talking loud in the kitchen area, then my mom turning the telenovela up loud (my aunt used to mail her Brazilian soaps on tape), and then them going in the bedroom to yell. Seemed like the next thing I knew, we were splitting for SP. Just like that. But now that I think about it, it must’ve been a while. I remember it was snowing when they had the fight, and when we went to the plane I was wearing shorts. So it was probably a lot of things, but I’m sure it was mostly the affair. But also my granny died, which opened up some space in the house my tia and tio lived in.”

  “Sorry, I’m not— The words.”

  “Oh. My aunt and uncle. My mom’s sister and her husband. Vinicius’s parents.”

  “Oh, oh.”

  “And then there was the fact that America just wasn’t catching on for them, I think. They sure as hell tried. But like, they were illegal at that point, so there was all the shit that came with that.”

  Which is why when an America—for there was nothing more American than Marjorie Miller, who’d never lived more than twenty miles from Boston Common, whose ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War—sought him out, welcomed him, gave him access to privileged places.... Well.

  “Plus the constant worry,” Mateo went on. “It was like three big arrows that pointed back to SP.”

  “How sad for your mom. It’s like she was betrayed by her husband and America at the same time.”

  “Worked out in the end.”

  He turned over and put his lips on my shoulder, almost as punctuation, and I felt my pulse quicken with the idea that when he said worked out he might’ve been thinking of me. I didn’t know if I wanted to be liked that way, or that much. But then against my hip I could feel him getting hard.

  “Again?” I said, relieved, because this I knew exactly what to do with.

  We quickly found, though, that we’d spent all of what we had overnight, and, boners dwindling, we lay on our backs again and looked up at the ceiling.

  “What was the, uh, government like when you moved back?” I hoped it came across as a worldly question.

  “Democratic by then. Corrupt as hell. But moving the right direction. Maybe that was the fourth point.”

  “But it was home.”

  “It was home.”

  After naming a few more animals in the ceiling I said, “I think we need a shower.” I stretched my arms and discreetly smelled my armpit. My guts felt cramped, too, from going all these hours without passing gas. I’d forgotten how difficult it was to wake up looking OK. And yet Mateo seemed to manage it.

  We hauled ourselves out of bed and he wrapped a sheet around us both. Underneath it, like a moving tent, we hobbled down the hall to the floral bathroom at the end, bumping into walls and each other the whole way.

  The water felt good

  and I liked seeing his body in the full light, especially when his eyes were closed against streams of shampoo suds and I could look with abandon. The tattoo on his arm of Boston was a familiar view of the city. I knew the buildings well—there were only three or four major ones: the Hancock, the Pru, 111 Huntington. He blew at me the suds that covered his lips. The tattoo on his other arm, the São Paulo skyline, was a single shaded block with a serrated top. It looked something like a comb. Not three or four major buildings in this skyline but dozens, even hundreds. I felt lonely and small just looking at its immensity. I focused on the suds working their way down his chest.

  “I guess what I’m still missing,” I said as he rinsed, “is how you went from São Paulo into the house of your father’s mistress.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know. Guess it was two reasons.” He pushed back his hair, held up two fingers. “First, I was doing a lot of graffiti. Like a lot. Barely went to school. Me and my friend Tiago, we’d miss whole weeks of school at a time. Go out on days-long binges of nonstop graf, like some kind of addicts or something. Stints so long I got sick doing it. Really scared my mom.”

  “You won’t ever get to the Moon if you drop out of school, Mateo.”

  “That’s basically what she said!”

  “So she sent you away?”

  “No, she sent me away after my dad got sh
ot.”

  “Jesus, he got shot?”

  “Not killed or anything. He and my uncle were out, got held up at a traffic light. SP can be a pretty tricky place sometimes.”

  “Everywhere can,” I said, though my mind ran with images of heavily-armed drug cartels.

  He nodded. “But SP more than most. Anyway, he caught a bullet right here.” He squeezed my hip bone. “Went right through the door of the car. Shattered part of his pelvis. Went through. By some miracle, didn’t hit anything he couldn’t live without. They took the bullet out from back here.” He ran his hand around my back and circled his thumb against the bottom of my butt. “Walks with a limp and a cane. Always will forever.”

  “He was lucky though.”

  “Definitely. Scared the shit out of my mom, though.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “They wanted to get me out. Do my last year of high school in an American school. Re-establish myself. And go to college. And go to the Moon. I think my mom still hoped for that.”

  What happened to facilitate

  Mateo’s return to America was something that made him think of his mother Sabina as a monument, a wonder of the world, a towering figure like Christ the Redeemer who overlooked Rio. And though he raged against her plan at first and wrote his rage all across São Paulo, his awe at her sheer ballsiness was, in the end, what made him pack his bags.

  His mom, man, she called her for help. Back then Mateo could barely wrap his mind around it and these years later he was no closer. The woman who, six years earlier, had nearly sabotaged their family. The woman who Sabina had packed up her family and switched continents to get away from. The same woman.

  His mom called her.

  Marjorie’s skin turned to ice

  when she heard the voice on her answering machine. She had never spoken to Sabina before but her accent instantly called to mind that time. Six years collapsed to minutes like a wormhole in space-time and all the progress she’d made during that time in overcoming that thing seemed to disappear too. Suddenly it was all right there, rushing back—the sound of his voice, the warble in his throat as he told her about Sabina, and that they were leaving, and that he could never see her again. The anger she’d felt. At him. At herself.