The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” He was quiet a minute. “You here with friends?”

  “One,” I said, happy to change the subject. “You?”

  “Me and the ex are trying to do the let’s-hang-out-as-friends thing. Totally awkward. I needed a smoke or five.”

  “I hear friendships with exes are tricky waters to navigate.”

  “Only hear?”

  “Well. Let’s just say you and your buddy aren’t the only guys I’ve never called back. —Excuse me a second.” My phone was buzzing. A text. Alex, with multiple question marks, wanted to know where I was. Before I finished typing a reply, he came strutting up the sidewalk.

  “There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Found me.”

  “Can we leave?”

  “Already? I was talking to—my friend here.” The one whose name I still could not remember.

  Alex nodded to the guy and said to me, “If it’s OK I’d really like to leave.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you in the cab, OK?” He turned to the guy. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Can you give him your number or something and you guys can pick this up later?”

  The guy gave a little shrug. “It’s probably already in his phone.”

  Alex looked at me and raised his eyebrows and went to grab a cab.

  “So. Have a nice night,” I said to the guy. “I hope things smooth out with your ex.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” I said, turning back, “how was it last year? With me. Fond memories?”

  “I’m not plucking flower petals for you or anything.” He breathed out some smoke. “Fond enough.”

  To the cabbie I gave

  my own address, and then Alex corrected me by providing the address of his sublet.

  “Oh,” I said, “yeah, that’s right.” Only then did I realize how flustered my encounter with the Forgotten Trick had left me.

  “Sorry I cock-blocked you,” Alex told me quietly. “I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t in the middle of a nightmare.”

  “You didn’t. It was my nightmare. He says I slept with him a year ago but I don’t even remember him.”

  “Maybe he’s lying.”

  “No. He described my bedroom.”

  “Oh. Well that’s embarrassing. For him, I mean. He must’ve been totally forgettable in bed.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. So what was your nightmare?”

  “I saw this guy Jimmy in there and bolted.”

  “That’s all? Who’s Jimmy?”

  “Oh it’s this whole big thing. Remember that wedding I went to a couple of weeks ago?”

  “The wedding with the camera?”

  “Mm. There was this guy there, we were at the same table. Hit it off.”

  “Jimmy.”

  He nodded. “Gorgeous. Funny.”

  “You didn’t tell me about this.”

  “We spent the night together. Me and Wedding Jimmy. The night and the whole next day. Largely in his bed. He was so good and it felt so good and he was nice too. I was like in shock.”

  “Wow. So what happened?”

  “Nothing. At the end when we had to go home I was like, When can I see you again? and he was all, Actually, I kind of have a boyfriend. Can you believe it? So tragically cliché.” He knocked his head against the window and sighed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? Are you his boyfriend?”

  “Hah.”

  “But thanks.”

  “So then what’s with the photos?”

  “I don’t know. Mementos.”

  “Of you and him?”

  He shrugged.

  “X-rated?”

  “No. PG-13. Well, we’re gay, so R.”

  “You waited a month to have them developed?”

  “I guess I wasn’t ready. Or I wanted an audience. I probably shouldn’t even pick them up.”

  “No, you should see them. They’ve gained a mythic quality in your mind. You’ll see them and you’ll see he’s just a dude, you know? Like all the others.”

  I put my elbows on

  the window sill and looked down at the shadowy street. Fond enough. The words still stung. I thought of the key-touching guy and searched my mind to make sure I’d never been with him before. I was sure I hadn’t, but there must’ve been a reason I was still thinking about him. No way should I be harping on a random guy over some three-second quote-unquote moment. He touched his keys. Big whoop. As if that meant anything. It felt like it did, though. It felt like I knew him, more than guys I’d actually been with. I lay back down on the couch and adjusted the pillow and fixed the sheet—it kept sliding off the leather.

  Fond enough. Fuck.

  Alex came out of the bathroom and made an obvious detour into the living room. He stood for a moment near the end of the couch. “Do you want to watch a movie or something,” he said, “or are you ready to sleep?”

  “I could watch a movie. I might fall asleep though.”

  “They have a TV in there. Come to the bed with me.”

  He turned and left. No guffaw this time, not even a smirk, just the pat of footsteps as he went to the bedroom. I thought that was about right, and it was OK. At least I would still remember Alex a year from now.

  I slid off the couch and grabbed my pillow. I was wearing only my underwear and didn’t bother putting my t-shirt back on.

  “I’ll try to find something decent to watch,” I heard him say as I went down the hall. In the bedroom he was nosing around in a bookcase of DVDs.

  “I don’t understand owning movies,” I said. “Who wants to watch a movie more than once?”

  I dropped my pillow against a wood headboard carved into the shapes of fruit—apples, bananas, a pineapple. Strange for a bedroom. It was the kind of design you’d expect in a kitchen, on a carnival-glass lampshade or a set of ceramic canisters. The bedspread was rolled down to the foot of the bed and it pulled itself onto the floor when I lifted the sheet.

  “Anything good?” I said, fitting the pillow behind me to keep the fruit from jabbing my kidneys. I pulled the sheet up around my waist.

  Alex held out a disc I couldn’t see in the dark. “How about this? It’s some silly British gay movie. You seen it?”

  “No.”

  “OK.” He loaded the disc and came around and got into bed. “Where’s the—? Fletcher! You’re sitting on it!” He tugged the remote out from under me.

  The little flatscreen on the bureau lit up and music ushered in the opening titles. Outside on the street an ambulance went by, and then a Dopplered burst of hip-hop. A few minutes into the movie Alex slid closer and put his cheek against my shoulder. “You’re boney,” he said, poking my bicep. I felt with deadpan amusement the first twinge of what would soon be a dutiful erection.

  This was going to happen and it was going to be fine.

  For the first half of the movie the characters struggled with their sexualities in a way I couldn’t relate to. I’d never come out of the closet because I’d never exactly been in one—when I started going boy-crazy at age twelve I made sure everyone knew it. But the characters’ plunge into the sack halfway through the movie was plenty familiar.

  Alex had his hand on my thigh and up to this point I assumed it was there in cinematic anticipation—the way he would sometimes grab my arm during horror movies. Then we seemed to notice at the same time that I had a tent on my lap.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Ha.”

  He gave the sheet a playful tug, almost teasing, but it was enough to move the sheet aside. My dick stood protruding through the flap in my boxers.

  “Oh,” he said again.

  There was a chance now for conversation and we chose not to use it. No double entendres, no guffaws, no commentary of any kind. Just a slow, unimpassioned entwining.

  Unlike with the dudes on TV, no strategic shadows concealed anything and it felt funny (i.e., weird) to see my p
al Alex doing this. Funny (odd) to have his dick in my hand and his too-smooth chest against my mouth. Kissing was another thing that was funny (awkward) and we stopped after a brief try and never did it again—funny (curious) how it’s never awkward with strangers. And funny (humorous) when we couldn’t get my boner to bend back through the hole in my boxers, and decided just to leave them on. Despite all the funny it was fine. Alex’s skin was surprisingly cool and his body, though I’d never been with him this way before, was familiar. This had a weight. Not a great weight, but a weight. I certainly knew when it was nothing.

  The whites of his eyes glowed red and blue in the alternating flicker of the TV. British accents filled the background. Upset parents, intolerant classmates. Sometimes there was music. Alex looked up at me.

  “You’re so beautiful, Fletch.”

  I winced and began to wonder how fine this actually was. I was ready to go for a quick finish after that when Alex, lying on his back, banged his hand into the nightstand drawer and withdrew a box of Trojans.

  “Fletcher, will you?”

  I hadn’t really expected that and I wondered if doing it would have the awkwardness of kissing, times a hundred. But it’s not a request you turn down if someone asks and you’ve already gone this far. I unrolled the condom down to the flaps of my boxers (with boxers and condom on was I technically even naked anymore? There was some relief in that) and added a dollop of lube from a little bottle Alex waved at me.

  He threw his legs over my shoulders. “Hurry, Fletcher. I need this.”

  “I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying. Jesus.”

  “Do it,” he said, and he was annoying me again. I put my thumb against his lips to keep him from talking anymore, and pressed inside.

  I held still until his face cued me to start moving. I could go on autopilot now. After a minute he squirmed out from under me and motioned for me to lay on my back. Then he climbed on top and put me back in, riding my hips. My boxers clung briefly to his butt each time he rose up. I watched him reach out and place his hands on the headboard in seemingly strategic positions against a pineapple and what looked like a pear. Their placement there seemed to bring new contentment to his face.

  “What are you doing?” I said, looking up through his arms.

  “They—hold this—headboard—like this. When they’re—making love. Their—hands go here.”

  “How do you know? Ow!” I put my hands under his ass to slow him down and to keep my dick from cracking. My erection was saying sayonara.

  He looked down and frowned. “C’mon—they do.”

  What a relief to hear this, especially after that stuff about me being beautiful. He wasn’t really fucking me at all, he was fucking the couple—the couple whose kitchen he cooked in and whose TV he watched, whose shoes he wore, whose towels he used, whose headboard he clenched when he came.

  Afterward I had no desire

  to share the bed with him and thought about sneaking back to the couch, but that was risking more drama than I wanted to deal with in the humid air at 3:00 a.m. Alex lay on his side, naked still but with the sheet over him, politely allowing some space between us.

  “Did you know that would happen?” It seemed about the least flirtatious thing he’d ever said.

  I said I’d had a feeling it would.

  “Did you—like it?”

  “It was nice, Alex,” I supplied. “Thank you.”

  “It was a long time coming.”

  “A lot of years, yeah.”

  He sighed. “Do you ever imagine what it would be like if we were—” But he stopped when he must’ve noticed I was looking out the window, barely hearing him. “Well. We have a ways to go yet before we get that desperate.” He pulled the sheet up farther and fluffed his pillow.

  A few minutes later his breath was rumbling steadily through his open mouth. I kicked off my half of the sheet and lay spread-eagle on the bed, allowing maximum area of my skin to touch the air. The fan chugged back and forth but the air it blew felt like dragon breath. My back and the backs of my legs and my heels and my shoulders were sticky against the damp sheet. My boxers clung like those lead aprons you have to wear when getting an X-ray. I went into my memory and imagined the morning had gone differently, that I’d been able to talk to the key-touching guy instead of losing him in the hubbub of the fucking canned spinach. I imagined going home with him instead of coming to Alex’s.

  I imagined the key-touching guy had a.c.

  I awoke like a zombie,

  stiff from tossing, damp from sweating, poisoned from the whirring fan’s dragon breath. I stumbled into the bathroom, passing the stainless-steel kitchen where Alex was cooking waffles just by bringing them out of the freezer into the fucking air.

  The cool shower softened my mood, though, and the memory of the hours I lay sweating beside the snoring, nude Alex began to recede like a polluted tide. With it went my sense of time. Hard to believe I had spent only one night with him, been here only one day. It could’ve been a lifetime. Because here was Alex’s underwear on the floor by my feet. Here were our toothbrushes side by side on the sink. All the hallmarks of a domesticity I stopped wanting long ago.

  I sighed and examined my shaven cheeks for patches missed. Then I got dressed, put stuff in my hair, dropped my towel over the bar on the wall, and opened the bathroom door. The air smelled of burning waffles.

  The photos were handed over

  in a blue envelope by a middle-aged woman whose nametag said Sherri. Alex paid with a leopard-print credit card and turned toward the exit with his fingers creeping up to his mouth to hide a grin.

  “Now that I have them I’m glad you made me get them.”

  “Maybe you should look at them before you decide that.”

  “Because if nothing else, it’s a deposit for the spank bank, you know?”

  “True.”

  He whirled around, holding out the envelope. “You look first. I can’t do it. I can’t do it!”

  I took the envelope and slapped it against my palm. “Let’s go sit down.”

  We parked ourselves on a bench near the food court and Alex clasped his hands between his knees. I tore the sticker and pulled out the glossy three-by-fives.

  “Wedding cake. Bride. Bride and groom kissing. Bride and groom dancing.” I handed them to him one by one, five pictures like that. Boring. But at the sixth I knew instantly what the fuss was about. The sixth showed a blue-eyed jock in a tie, mugging for the camera with his cheek pressed against Alex’s. During the fraction of a second it took me to complete a double-take something very small but powerful shriveled inside me. “Your Jimmy was Jimmy Perino? From Shuster?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “You know him?”

  “Well yeah.”

  “Did you—?” The obvious question: did I fuck him.

  “No, but I wanted to, all through college. Jimmy Perino was like my all-time biggest missed opportunity. I thought he was straight. Everyone said he was straight!”

  A grin tore across Alex’s face like some kind of injury. “Apparently he came out late. Like senior year.”

  “...” I handed him the photo and pretended to watch someone loaded with shopping bags tug at the mall’s glass door. “So Wedding Jimmy was Jimmy Perino. You had sex with Jimmy Perino.”

  “The proof’s in the pudding. Here, let me see.”

  He took the remaining photos and flipped through, and yes, here was one clearly after the reception. Their heads were on big white pillows, their faces were flushed, their shoulders were bare.

  I took the photo and looked it over. I wished there was more to see. Jimmy: he had thick shoulders, killer biceps—classic, like a roofer, just like I’d imagined when I’d imagined him shirtless. And I’d imagined him a whole lot more than shirtless. I was desperate to know everything but to give Alex nothing. I dialed down my envy, cleared my throat. “So. It was good?”

  “It was so good, Fletch. It was the sweetest and craziest sex of my life. The things he does!
It’s like he’s trying to make up for lost time.”

  “Better than me?” I said. Jimmy Perino. It was impossible. It was unfair.

  Alex blushed a little. “Nobody’s better than you.”

  I could tell he was lying but I smiled and smiling softened my mood. “Jimmy Perino,” I mused. “Wow.” I handed the photos back to him. “These are art. You could frame these.”

  “I’m glad you’re here to see them with me. And not just because I like making you jealous—I had no idea you were that into him, I promise. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “I don’t like going around harping on straight guys.”

  “But not all straight guys are really straight.” He laughed. “Anyway, your envy’s a bonus. It’s pretty rare that you’re jealous of my sex life.”

  In a weird way, I was touched.

  We looked through the remaining photos. There were a half-dozen more photos of that same shot, as though they wanted to be sure to get it, in various conditions of blur. One photo of lampshade, and one of knee.

  Alex sighed. “That’s all I have left of the bastard. His fucking knee.”

  I still couldn’t get it

  through my skull, and if not for the photo evidence I wouldn’t have believed it at all. Not for a second. That my silly, guffawing pal Alex had been with Jimmy Perino. And recently. If only I’d known last night that my dick was sharing the same space inside Alex that Jimmy Perino’s once occupied.

  When we got back to the apartment we had sex again, on the couch, with the photos spread out like a buffet on the coffee table. We’d been looking at them and then it just happened. It was better than the first time, more exciting—but more awkward afterward.

  We lay on the sticky leather couch, him wearing only his shirt, me with my pants still snared around one foot. We looked at each other knowing we’d both have rather been with Jimmy. That we hadn’t been fucking each other at all, but the photos. I looked up, away from him. The ceiling sported decorative swirls of plaster that were flaking in places like white scabs.

  Finally he peeled himself off the couch, stood up, held out his hand for the condom, which I slipped off and gave him. He invited me into the shower.