The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 14

  “Heavens to Pete. There’s a bare Brazilian boy in my bed—boing!”

  The bare Brazilian rolled over, grinned, put a hand over his eyes. “I wanted to surprise you. Been waiting in here forever.”

  “That’s adorable. A-dor-a-ble. Adora-bubble. Did you know your chest hair looks like cotton candy? I want to eat it. Num num num.” I leaned down and licked his belly button, pressed my tongue into the fuzzy hole. His whole body went rigid and he grabbed me. “Oh, the bare Brazilian’s ticklish!”

  Laughing, he said: “What were you doing out there anyway?”

  “Couldn’t you smell?” He laughed. “How’d you get in without me seeing you?”

  “Secret.”

  “Same way you’ve avoided the Boston PD for years, I guess.”

  “Take off your clothes!” He tugged at my shirt.

  I sat down on the bed. “You should’ve told me you were coming, I wouldn’t have smoked. I’m totally flaccid stoned.”

  “No. Totally?” He sat up. He moved to put his hand on my crotch but hesitated. “Anything I can... do?”

  “Many men have tried.”

  “Damn.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well it’s not your fault.”

  “Do you need to...?”

  “I was hoping to,” he said bashfully.

  “I could give you a hand. So to speak.”

  “No,” he said with a little smile, but he didn’t try to stop me when I pulled aside the sheet. I rubbed my hands together to warm them.

  A couple minutes later his hands clenched into fists and with a yelp he filled the four-layer tarpaulin of Kleenex I had ready. It was sexy enough to make me suspect I could’ve gotten something up after all. But too late now.

  “Woooh!” He fell back on the pillow and threw a forearm across his eyes, a big smile showing under his Boston skyline.

  “You’re welcome.” I sat for a second, holding and beholding the tissue. “What am I supposed to do with this now? It looks like one of those bags for frosting cakes with.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Flush it for me? I’m in my nude.” He grinned and yanked the sheet up.

  I palmed the tissue and snuck out to the bathroom. Cara was still on the couch. “Gotta brush my teeth,” I told her, closing the bathroom door behind me. I lifted the toilet seat but imagined the tissues clogging the finicky pipes, so I dropped it in the wastebasket instead. It landed with a squishy thump. Then I brushed my teeth.

  When I came out Cara was straightening up the living room. She had two cups in her hands and an empty bag of Pirate’s Booty crumpled under one arm.

  “Did you brush ‘em up?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Let me check.” She walked up close to me with her lips puckered and pressed them against mine. It surprised me but was over too quickly for me to react. “Nice and clean,” she said.

  I whispered goodnight and went back into my room.

  I’d been asleep maybe

  an hour when Mateo’s phone started chirping. I rolled over with a gasp, thought it was the end of the world, glared at the clock radio with eyes that felt as big as planets. 2:01 a.m. I started to lay back down but checked the time again in disbelief. It was an hour I was well acquainted with seeing at the end of a day, but never at the beginning of one. This must be a mistake, then, maybe one of his train alarms he forgot to turn off.

  He shifted around under the sheets and reached out and killed the alarm. Beautiful silence resumed. Past midnight I’d laid there beside him, listening to the sounds of his breathing, feeling his movements—but now I just wanted to get back to sleep.

  A moment later, though, he was sitting up, the sheets sliding down to his bare waist. He was looking at his phone—it lit his face in an otherworldly glow. He rubbed his hair and yawned. Then he put the phone down and slid against me, circling his arm around my chest.

  “Time for me to get up, Arrowman.”

  “Up?” I whispered, genuinely a little night-delirious but mostly feigning it to keep from having to deal with him leaving. I reached and clutched the back of his thigh. “No up. Sleep.”

  “If I sleep,” he whispered against the back of my head, “how will the walls get painted on?”

  “Mm.”

  “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  “I know,” I said, thinking: Why? But by now I was more alert. Sleep was slipping away like an unaffordable luxury. I wanted to be asked to come along but I didn’t want to bring it up myself. It was hard to know what nights were off-limits for me. Some nights he went off by himself. I suspected that when we were together he only dabbled; something entirely different went on the nights he went out alone. Maybe tonight was for serious.

  “Are you really pretty tired?” he said, his hands cool against my chest. “Come out with me, if you want.”

  I looked at the clock again. “I’m used to being asleep for another five hours.”

  “I know.”

  “And we have work in the morning.”

  “I know. Bring your office clothes with you. I’ll show you how I change in my car. My car’s on the street.”

  I thought for a minute but when he peeled away from me I knew I was going to follow him wherever he went.

  The bathroom light nearly blew up my eyeballs. I squinted around for my toothbrush while he peed beside me—an act which seemed to me about the most intimate thing I’d ever experienced, and it sent an unexpected warmth through me. He flushed and stepped out of his underwear and got in the shower, the sound of the water suddenly different when he moved beneath the streams.

  I dropped my underwear and peed and noticed the wastebasket. Now that I was sober I couldn’t believe I just left his jizzy tissues sitting in there in plain view. (I was one to wrap used Q-tips in toilet paper to hide earwax.) The wastebasket was empty. Tomorrow—today—was trash day. Cara must’ve emptied it. I hoped she hadn’t realized what it was. She would think it was mine. God, that would be embarrassing. I’d never hear the end of it.

  I flushed and got in the shower, catching the spray of water that ricocheted off his shoulders.

  “Babette told me a while ago that I had to get you into a shower,” I said with a mischievous grin as I sealed the curtain against the wall. “Guess I succeeded.”

  “Babette from work?” His hair lay flat across his face as though he’d had a bucket of black paint dumped on his head.

  “Yup.”

  “What made her say that?”

  “Well—” My grin may as well have made a sucking noise as it drained off my face.

  He stopped soaping. “I don’t like smell or something, do I? Fletcher?”

  “Of course not!” I didn’t know what to say. “Well it’s been really hot out for the past few weeks, and obviously that’s the only time she’s known you. And she doesn’t know what you do on your way to work.”

  He covered his face with his hands. “Oh god, I smell. How could you not tell me?”

  “You don’t smell. I like it. You just smell like you have a life, that’s all. You’re not sterile.”

  “I shower every day like everyone else.”

  “You don’t smell.”

  “I reek.”

  “You don’t reek.”

  “I’m like Pig-Pen.”

  “You’re not like Pig-Pen. Come on.”

  “I’m lucky I don’t have flies around me all the time!”

  “Stop. You don’t smell. You’re beautiful. I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Oh.” The water streamed between us while we stood averting our eyes, wearing little smiles. “You do?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Maybe you do?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  Tired isn’t really tired

  when it comes from making out with a hot graffiti artist under highway overpasses. Or when it comes from swapping paint-misted clothes for office clothes in the backseat of a gray Civic parked at the rear of the office lot. That kind of tired is more like t
he kind of tired that comes when you’ve just had good sex. Not tired but satisfied. Not tired but—dare I say it?—content.

  Which is why Mike’s text barely phased me. I received it at my desk not long after having lunch with Mateo. Mike was heading home for a few weeks and wanted to know if I was up for a send-off. I thought the news was best delivered by voice, so I called him.

  “Please tell me you’re free,” he said before even saying hi. “It occurred to me all of a sudden that I’m going to be in the woods for three weeks. Three weeks is that perilous timeframe that has me clawing the walls, and there’s not a lot of guys banging down my door in Maine.”

  “I wish I could,” I told him, “but I’ve kind of started seeing someone. Crazy, huh?”

  “Is this the right number?”

  “Haha.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Guy from work.”

  “Nice. Cute?”

  “Very.”

  “Nice,” he said again, a little melancholy.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No no no, don’t be. This is part of the deal.”

  There was a long pause, then—a silence as deep as a dropped call. I didn’t know what to say either. This was uncharted territory.

  “I could raid my phonebook,” I said finally. “Try to connect you with someone?”

  “I’m sure you could. But no. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe there’s a lobsterman waiting to fall in love with me.”

  After hanging up I looked at my phone, trying to remember whether I’d ever turned down a hook-up with Mike, other than that first time. I didn’t think I had. I wasn’t sure I’d ever turned one down, period. Doing it should’ve felt worse.

  “You look busy,” Mateo said suddenly, sarcastically. He was standing in the hall outside my cube, holding a monitor. A cord hung swaying against his legs.

  “Mike,” I said, referring to the phone.

  “Your special friend.”

  “I told him I made a new friend.”

  “Cool,” he said simply, and continued down the hall.

  He was only puttering,

  I was sure of it now. Sometimes he would ask me what he should paint. Other times he would just doodle, literally: squiggles and stars and the type of things I put on notepads when I was on the phone. It seemed amateur, un-urgent. It was pretty and creative but it wasn’t the type of work that would compel someone to get up when the day was a mere two hours old and go out into the night, spelunking through alleys in dangerous parts of the city.

  For all the knowledge I was accumulating about my new friend Mateo Amaral—from the details of his mother’s yearning for space travel to his thoughts on Da Vinci—this was the remaining mystery. When I was there, he wasn’t doing what he did. It was starting to seem obvious. On the nights I was there, he was just playing. Dedinhos was a ruse, a pen name, a—what had he called it?—an apelido. Something to disguise a whole lot more.

  The last day of June,

  when we’d been hanging out for a month, on a day following one of the nights he slipped out without waking me up, I nearly drove into a parked car. My boss Janice’s. In the Cook parking lot I sat idling, staring up at the billboard at the back of the lot, until a car behind me—Randy—tooted.

  “Yeah, yeah, Porn Randy, I’m going.”

  I parked and got out and walked over and looked again, standing below the billboard looking up, probably gaping like some kind of idiot. In green and white bubble letters the billboard bore the words ARROWMAN IS.

  My hand met my forehead and ran back over my hair. “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said aloud. I looked for his car, which wasn’t in the rear corner of the lot like usual. I spotted it a few spaces over. So he was here.

  I dropped my stuff in my cube and made my way to the I.T. department, offering obligatory good-mornings along the way. He was in his cube unpacking hardware from a cardboard box, bits of foam peanuts static-clinging like snowflakes to his tattoo buildings.

  “Hey you.”

  “Morning, Fletcher.”

  “So.”

  “What’s up?”

  “When you get a chance, can we talk?”

  “Sure. What about?”

  “Oh I think you know.”

  “About the—?” He drew a big rectangle in the air, peanut pieces dropping off his arms. He looked sheepish.

  “Could be.”

  He dropped his head and smirked. “I’ll be over in a minute.”

  A half-hour later he entered my cube and tapped me on the shoulder with one green finger. We went outside and sat on the hood of his car.

  “How was your night?” he asked.

  And I replied, “You write the Facts, don’t you?”

  He smiled, looking both vulnerable and uncomfortable.

  “You know,” I went on, “I just thought you were some graffiti guy. I had no idea. I really had no idea.”

  “I am just some graffiti guy.”

  “When I knew nothing about graffiti I knew about you. Well not you. About the Facts. I’m kind of in awe.”

  “Don’t be in awe.”

  “You told me it was some oldster.”

  “I told you that was the rumor. There are a lot of rumors.”

  “Fair enough. So what do they mean?”

  “Aren’t they self-explanatory?”

  “Well yeah. Individually. But why? Why so many?”

  “Why not? Gotta write something. And maybe I’m not creative enough to describe other than what is.”

  I looked at him. He seemed different, suddenly. Bigger. He leaned over and bumped his chin against my shoulder.

  “I’ll never tell anyone,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “The billboard.” I pointed. “Did you not finish?”

  He crossed his arms on top of his knees and shook his head, embarrassed. “That was my last one of the night—it’s probably still wet. I came here to crash in my car for a while before work. I was thinking about you, thinking about what Arrowman is to me. I saw the board. I was painting, you know, and then it hit me that just by writing that, putting your name in the context of the Fact, as you call it—”

  “What do you call them?”

  “I don’t call them anything, I just make them. And by putting your name, which I think only I know—”

  “Which only you know.”

  He flashed a smile. “Which only I know. By putting it there, poof, Mateo is the Fact-writer. I realized it and damn, I froze. I think it’s the only slip-up I’ve ever made doing this. I just didn’t have time to go over it.”

  “Didn’t have time or didn’t want to?”

  “Hmm. That’s a question for another day, Arrowman. Maybe another night.”

  “I can see why you’re so secretive. I’ve read about you in the newspaper. You’re like a one-man graffiti army. Some cop is going to make his career off bringing you in.”

  “Please.”

  “Don’t be modest. You know. You must know. You wouldn’t be so secretive otherwise. But I won’t tell anyone. I’ll never tell anyone. Not just because I’m your— you know, friend. But because I respect you. I think it’s art. Like I said that first day.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad we got together before I knew this. I wouldn’t want you to wonder whether I thought of you as just—I don’t know—an arrow in my quiver.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  He held out his hand, palm up, and I touched mine to it—a very slow-motion high-five.

  “You have no idea how much I want to take you into the back of this car right now,” I told him.

  “I have some idea. Tonight.”

  “That’s so far away.” I slid off the hot hood. “Are you free for lunch?”

  He cleared his throat, as though to mark a more professional tone for the conversation. “I wish I was. I’ve got a meeting. Something about the new website?”

  “The perpetually-in-development website? The thing’s going to be ou
tdated before it ever goes online.”

  “But I’ll see you, huh?”

  “Yeah. Soon.”

  We started back toward the building.

  “Arrowman is!” he yelled, spreading his arms.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. How were you going to finish it? WELL ENDOWED? HOT IN BED?”

  “HOT IN BED is on the side of Symphony Hall,” he said. “And possibly one or two bathroom stalls.”

  “Har har.”

  “Arrowman is. That’s all!” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “You are, aren’t you?”

  A Fact in the process

  of creation was something I never expected to see—as far as I knew, no one, with the exception of a handful of people from São Paulo, had ever witnessed it—and watching it took my breath away. It was entirely different from anything I’d seen him do before. It looked almost like a dance, or some kind of martial art, or a mix of the two like capoeira, with graceful swings and turns of his bare arms and soft, deliberate movements of his legs. It was fast, much faster than how he normally painted when we were together, but it was more controlled, too. He even seemed to close his eyes at times, feeling the paint with some other sense.

  This piece, on the base of a support column of the Longfellow Bridge, had been started days or weeks ago, one of the many unfinished he apparently had in rotation. I held a can in my hand but it was like a beverage at a party, just something to hold—I wasn’t painting tonight, just watching. How could I paint when this was going on? How could I do anything? Cars thundered over the bridge above us but I barely heard them, and I noticed Cambridge reflecting in the river only as a backdrop to Mateo.

  I watched him and grew uncomfortable with the intensity and looked at the paint instead of him. This was serious, more serious than anything we’d done, an intimacy that made sex feel like a handshake.

  When he was done he stepped back and looked at his work, wiped his hand across his brow, flicked paint off his fingers. He looked at me and smiled bashfully, as though he were being seen naked for the first time.

  I didn’t know what to say and said nothing. After snapping a photo he picked up his backpack and we walked away in silence. The greenery of the park along the river enclosed us. Sailboats lined the docks. I asked what he’d really started to write on the billboard outside Cook.