The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 4

  “You can go first,” I told him. Showering together wasn’t a step I wanted to take. “Don’t hurry.”

  “Ah,” he said, and shut the bathroom door behind him. The water cranked on. I think he knew I’d be gone when he got out.

  On the sidewalk I was feeling damp, slightly guilty, and more than a little like having to pee, but otherwise free. I hiked up my backpack, regretting having to leave my toiletries behind. Sometimes you just want to get out. The whole walk to the T, I waited for a call or a text asking where I had gone, but neither one ever came.

  Alex knew me.

  The smell of spaghetti sauce

  rode heavy on the humidity in my apartment. I dropped my backpack against the TV table. The stereo was playing Guster and colored sunlight from some of the crystal doodads Cara kept on the window sills danced across the scratched hardwood floor. The windows were open and the breeze fluttered the pages of the Junot Díaz book I’d left on the sill.

  “Something smells yummy,” I said, breathing hard from the heat and the three flights of stairs. I pried off my shoes and sat down on the coffee table to get rid of my socks.

  In the kitchen Jamar stood in front of the stove, stirring a bubbling, boiling pot. He was wearing only his boxers, red and white striped that made him look even more like an All-American Boy than usual. He had a nice chest but I’d stolen enough furtive glances of it when we met years ago to make it old news by now.

  “Hey Bradford,” he said. He had a toothy smile he used often. We were roommates in college, our freshman and sophomore years. Somehow from the paperwork on our room assignment he gleaned that my name was Bradford Fletcher. It stuck.

  I leaned in beside him to investigate the stove action. Pasta. In another pan sauce bubbled like magma. A pop flicked boiling tomato puree at me.

  “Ow, shit.”

  “Watch out.”

  “You’re making spaghetti. In your underwear. Hey, and you got a haircut.”

  “Cara did it this morning.” He rubbed the back of his close-cropped head. “Is it even? This feels like a nick here but Cara says it’s fine.”

  “You think she’d tell you?” I stood on my toes to examine his head. Jamar claimed he was six-four, but he was bashful about his height, so the truth was more likely six-six or six-seven. I once tried to measure him in his sleep but the tape ran out at his knee. “I don’t see any nicks.” I settled back on my heels and picked a spoon off the stove. “You look like a scary black man now, though.”

  “Go away, homo.”

  “Heh.”

  “And it’s not spaghetti, it’s rigatoni. Give.” He snatched the spoon from me. There’s a unique way that a straight black guy and a gay white guy can understand each other, and Jamar and I had it all worked out.

  “Spaghetti, rigatoni. The question is, why are you making all this? We’re not having people over, are we?”

  “It’s for Cara.”

  “All of this? She’s not preggo, is she?”

  “Don’t even—” He swooshed me away. I went along with it and danced backward but the truth is I would’ve been swooshed even if I tried to stand my ground, push-ups be damned. “I’m so a double-rubber guy. Don’t even think that, Bradford. It’s bad luck.”

  “What is?” Cara came out of her bedroom, hair done up in a starfish beach towel. A couple of reddish swirls hung out, dark and shiny from water. She had on jogging shorts and a gray t-shirt. She slipped her arms around Jamar’s bare middle, looking like she might be going to give him the Heimlich, and put her cheek against his ribs. She was short and looked short next to almost anyone, but it was striking next to Jamar. I couldn’t imagine what their sex was like, mechanics-wise. “Do you like his hair, Fletch?”

  “It’s very short. I miss the dredlets.”

  Jamar said, “It’s very hot out.”

  “Never base haircuts on weather. And you copied me.” I rubbed my own short hair.

  “Oh, it’s all part of my plan to create a duplicate Fletcher,” Cara said. “One who’ll actually marry me.”

  Jamar dripped a blob of sauce on the stove and was reaching for a paper towel when I wiped my finger through it and put it in my mouth. “Mmm.” I looked at Cara and said, “I’ve told you a hundred times I’ll marry you, Car. I just won’t play with your girly parts.”

  Jamar smirked.

  “Mmhm,” she said. She tucked her hair back up under the towel. “Speaking of, how was your weekend with Alex? We’ve been taking bets on whether you guys finally boned.”

  “Ew, what makes you think we boned when we’ve never boned before?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “the sleepover, the sultry weather. Plus you haven’t been going out as much lately. We figured you’d have a jizz overload or something.”

  Had I been going out less often? I guess I had, now that she mentioned it. “Well, you’re right,” I said. “We boned.”

  “I win!” Jamar pumped his fist.

  “Twice, actually. I’m just not sure he knew it was me.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s got this weird fantasy thing about the couple he’s house-sitting for. Some kind of domesticity fetish or something. You know Alex. I think he was playing a game of replace-the-face in his head while we were doing it.”

  “You should try taking him on a date some time,” Jamar said.

  “Yeah. Right, Jamar. Sure. Me and Alex. Wooooo.”

  He smirked. “All I’m saying is, maybe it’s time you start looking for a guy to settle down with. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “OK, happily-ever-after is my cue to bail,” I said. “You,” I said to Cara, “would you mind giving him a pinch on that fine black ass of his, for me?”

  “Gladly.”

  “Not while I’m cook— Yipe!”

  “Hey,” she said to me, “since you’re home, how would you feel about this pot-luck I have to go to?”

  “What kind of pot-luck?” I said suspiciously. “Is this a Big Brothers thing?”

  “Yeah, a work thing.”

  “Isn’t that his job?” I pointed to Jamar.

  “I’m going car shopping with the Robot,” he said.

  “Your brother got his license?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice.”

  “Please Fletcher?” Cara said. She pressed her hands together. “There’ll be at least one cute guy there.”

  “Oh, I’m not falling for that. What you really mean is cute like seven-year-old orphan cutie patootie cute.”

  “No, I mean cute like late-twentysomething chemistry teacher cute.”

  “Hey, chemistry!” Jamar said.

  “No more guys,” I told her. “My pelvis is still sore from Alex riding on me.”

  “You can try talking to a guy, Bradford,” Jamar said.

  Cara snorted. The timer started dinging. Jamar twirled the strainer and emptied the pasta over the sink, steaming the already moist air.

  “Oh all right,” I said. “Just let me take a freaking shower first.”

  “You’re a life-saver. You can carry the spaghetti.”

  “It’s rigatoni,” said Jamar.

  I hoped this one cute

  guy at the pot luck, this teacher of chemistry Cara had promised, would turn out to be the key-touching guy—but this guy never touched his keys, and he wasn’t even that cute. I didn’t try talking to him, not even about the weather. Instead I stuffed my face with various desserts and clung to Cara like a shadow.

  “Jimmy Perino?” she said, forking onion chunks away from the otherwise edible potato salad on her paper plate.

  “Can you believe it? Alex, of all people, with Jimmy Perino. It’s a stake through my heart. The only consolation is that they’re not together anymore. If they were actually dating I’d die.”

  A pair of Little Brothers ran past us carrying what looked like a giant inflatable grasshopper, while their Bigs tagged along with plates of half-eaten food.

  “I guess I vaguely remember a Jimmy Perino,�
�� Cara said finally. “Blondish? Oafish?”

  “He’s hardly oafish. You’d remember him if you saw him. How were you not paying more attention back then?”

  “I was with Jamar!”

  “Whatever.”

  “Poor you. Your favorite frenemy was fu— being naughty with your dream guy.”

  “He’s not my dream guy. He was my dream lay.”

  “I repeat, poor you. The world is just passing you by, isn’t it?”

  I raised my hand and spoke as with a sock puppet: “Blah blah.”

  “How about that new guy at your office?”

  “Mateo. I’m working on that.”

  “Work harder. He sounds foxy.” She held out her plate; she’d given up on the potato salad. “Go get me one of those cupcakes, cupcake.”

  Monday was cooler but the

  office a.c. was still waging war with last week’s heat, unaware that the weather gods called a truce. I sat shivering at my desk, curled practically fetal in my chair, left hand tucked under right armpit for warmth, eyeballing the filing cabinet. In one of the drawers was a frumpy but toasty sweater (green wool, zipper-up) specifically for use on days when the a.c. was on hyperdrive—but it was way too Mr. Rogers to risk being seen in now. I wanted to have an extra spring in my step in case I ran into Mateo. No telling when a chance encounter might occur. The sweater would stay in the drawer.

  Another day, another dollar, another dude to watch out for.

  So far today there were no chance encounters to rival that lunchroom encounter of last Friday, and it was 11:00 already. I was getting impatient to know what color his hand was today. I’d already been on two beverage runs and one bathroom run and had scored not even a glimpse.

  I gazed at the clock and sighed. The end of the morning—when lunch was so close yet so far away—always passed slow.

  A stack of manila folders sat on my otherwise pretty blank desk (I never felt the need to decorate), each one a chapter in some book about the health-care industry, HMOs And You. Last week when I was making the book’s copyright page I’d permitted myself to test Homos And You, a much more interesting title (one that would no doubt sell better, too). This I changed to Homos Heart You before returning it to its true title, saving, and submitting it to the art department, which consisted exclusively of an overworked woman named Sonia, two cubes away.

  “Check your in-folder, Sonia,” I’d called out.

  “Checking it, Fletcher,” she’d called back through the padded walls.

  Aside from my soda-machine chats with the talkative Babette from customer service, that was as stimulating as conversation usually got at work. I blamed the ugly fluorescent lights, which made everyone here look like blue zombies. Everyone except for New Guy, who somehow seemed immune. If this were a movie New Guy would be the lone survivor of a zombified wasteland, out of whose miracle blood a vaccine could be formulated to save the world.

  New Guy, who I hadn’t seen yet today.

  I looked for a little while at the crumpled accordion of manila folders on my desk before pulling off the top folder and opening the corresponding file on my computer. The book was supposed to be getting finalized for print. This was my favorite part of an otherwise pretty boring job. Setting the type, making it permanent. What I saw the reader would see. It was reasonably satisfying, which is to say that when I was doing it I only had to check my personal email every fifteen minutes instead of every five.

  I worked for a while, still stopping every few minutes to rub warmth into my hands and then, why not, to check my email, which I kept discreet at the bottom left corner of the screen. A new one from Cara asked whether I’d seen New Guy yet. Reluctant to let her down, I got up and took another walk, this time detouring all the way to the I.T. cubes, as far from both the soda machines and the bathrooms as it was possible to get without leaving the building. When I spotted him I felt like a jungle explorer glimpsing a rare Amazonian feline.

  He was slouched in his chair, his back to me as I strolled nonchalantly/creepily past his cube. His left hand was on the keyboard but unmoving. His right, the one that changed colors, was folded in front of him, blocked from my view by the chair and his crisp-shirted torso. He looked asleep. On his screen was a scary-looking program we didn’t use in my department. Was it that boring?

  I refilled my coffee near the soda machine, then went the same long way back, hoping for a better view I could exaggerate into a fun reply for Cara—but he was in the same position as before.

  After I told Cara all this (employing rare frowny-faces in my email), she suggested I manufacture an encounter and we ran through a few scenarios before settling on one. At noon I placed my mouse on the floor, put my heel on it and, clearing my voice loudly, stomped down.

  The casing cracked edge to edge across the top and one of the buttons sprung up like the hood of a crashed car. Way too much. No one would believe this was accidental. I picked it up, wondering what to do. There was another, older mouse in one of my drawers—I could try for more authentic damage on that one or, maybe better yet, cut my losses and use it as a replacement.

  But that hair. Those eyes!

  I picked up the phone and left a voicemail for I.T. detailing my hardware issue. There was a fifty-fifty chance a new mouse would be delivered by New Guy. I’m not much of a gambler but I could live with those odds.

  With a broken mouse there was nothing I could do while I waited, so I pretended to look through folders and let my mind wander. Mostly it wandered to and over and around and into Jimmy Perino. Then someone was in my cube.

  It wasn’t New Guy, though, it was Bassett. My heart sank, my libido got whiplash. Larry Bassett was only in his late thirties but acted like he was seventy-five—even styled his hair in a comb-over he didn’t need. Tall and gaunt with a weary plainness, he reminded me of someone from a Philip K. Dick novel. No mysterious green-eyed hottie by any stretch. And before he got around to any maintenance or anything, Bassett always spent ten minutes talking about his most recent knee surgery and maybe even modeling the scars.

  Holding the new mouse in his hand, still in its carton, he told me about how on Sunday when he was leaving for church he’d slipped on pea-stones someone had scattered on his front stoop. He’d nearly gone sprawling into the hydrangeas.

  “That’s really terrible, Larry,” I said. “You need to be more careful.”

  “It’s the neighborhood kids again,” Bassett said. He made a motion as though to approach my computer—installation seemed imminent!—but then he backed off and leaned against the filing cabinet. He sighed. “Two weekends ago they rammed a stick into my garage door’s pulley-chain thing, you know the thing that hoists up the door? They’re setting traps.”

  The neighborhood kids were always making life hell for Bassett, but as far as I knew he had no kids of his own. Wondering if those facts were related, I nodded politely, delivering appropriate cues of sympathy and surprise. Just as Bassett was trailing off, New Guy appeared around the edge of my cube. His blue-fingered fist was raised in an aborted knock. Blue.

  “Oh, Larry,” he said, “you beat me to this one.”

  I nodded at him. He lifted his chin at me.

  “Ah, thank god,” Bassett said. “You can do this. You’re half my age. You’re at your peak. I’m in steady decline, about to hit bottom. Install this man a mouse, will you?” He pushed the new mouse against New Guy’s stomach and withdrew from the cube. I could hear him groaning through the maze of cubicles as he retreated to his own.

  “I think he’s twice his age,” New Guy said. I guessed it was a joke but he wasn’t smiling. “Did you order a mouse? You left a voicemail about a broken mouse? —You’re Fletcher, right?”

  The first two questions were odd given that Bassett had been in my cube and already dished out the instructions—but maybe New Guy liked to go by the book. The one about my name, though, that was a hope apocalypse. Did he really not know my name?

  “Um. Yes. I’m Fletcher. I called. Just one
is fine. I’m not ambidextrous.” I grinned. I’d tricked New Guy into coming but I didn’t know what to do now that he was here—here among all these mice, under this garish lighting where I never look my best. “I can install it myself, if you want. You probably have other things—”

  “It’s my job,” he said. “Yikes, what’d you do to this guy?”

  He picked the mouse up off the desk to examine the carnage—this gave me an opportunity to slide my focus from the mouse to his knuckles. The way the paint faded along the back of his hand was indicative of spraypaint. It looked precisely as though he’d been holding something small to paint it, and his hand caught the residual spray. Maybe he was a modeler.

  “I—stepped on it,” I said.

  He raised a dark eyebrow. “You walk around on your desk?”

  “It fell on the floor.”

  “No.” He held the plug-end of the cord against the back of my computer and let the mouse dangle over the edge of the desk. “It’s not long enough to fall on the floor.” The mouse swung gently like a pendulum. “See?”

  “Oh. It unplugged and then fell on the floor.”

  His green eyes drilled straight into mine, somewhat mocking, totally hypnotizing. “I think you broke this on purpose.”

  My cheek twitched. I felt it. “—Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. You like hearing about Larry’s neighbors?”

  “Oh. Haha. I sure do. But no. It came unplugged. And I stepped on it. A series of unfortunate events.”

  “Quite a series. OK. Well. Blue or black?”

  “Sorry?”

  “They’re different colors,” he said. I was looking at the fingers. “Blue? Or black?”

  “Oh, the mouse, sure. Blue’s fine. Whichever.”

  He shrugged. He put the black mouse on the filing cabinet and tore open the blue one.

  I leaned forward in my chair, clasped my hands between my knees. “Cooler out today.”

  “I guess. Need to get in here a sec.”

  “Sure.” I scooted my chair over to give him access to the computer. Then he was right there, leaning over my desk, fighting with the mouse plug. His belt was scuffed brown leather and sat low on his hips. His crisp shirt was tucked-in neatly, making his torso look long and lean, a swimmer’s body. I felt my eyes roll up. I was tripping on hotness.