The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 5

  “You should dust back here,” he said, un-entwining himself from the cables in the back and then straightening up and giving a quick upward tug on his belt. “OK, let me test it.” He put the back of his hand—3, 2, 1 contact!—against my shoulder to push me away from the monitor. The touch was of dubious necessity, which I hoped boded well for the likelihood of future sexual relations. As he wiggled the mouse we watched the cursor scoot across the screen. Little did he know he was inches away from maximizing an email entirely about him. “OK. All set.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s what they pay me big bucks for,” he said sarcastically. He collected the other new mouse. The empty box he held over the wastebasket. “Can I toss this?”

  “Sure.” I reached for the box just as he let go—it dropped past my hand into the bucket. I recovered quickly and extended my hand. He shook it awkwardly. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Oh—the old mouse. Should I throw it away?”

  “Sure, it’s broken.”

  “I—didn’t know if we recycle them or something.”

  “No.”

  “OK. Thanks Mateo.” I liked how his name felt on my tongue.

  “No problem,” he said again.

  I turned back to my computer, surprised and intrigued that I’d felt so intimidated by him, and continued the email to Cara. In my re-telling Mateo had a special smile for me at the end of our encounter. Its absence from real life was a little annoying.

  Babette, from customer service,

  had my ear good. I didn’t mind because the day and its interminable afternoon were finally over. Today the subject was Babette’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who she suspected might be gay—Babette called it of the lesbianic persuasion. I’m not great at advice but at work I was apparently the go-to guy for all things homosexual, so I did the best I could.

  “You probably shouldn’t ask her about it outright,” I said, taking a big bag of shredded papers from her to carry out to the recycling. “You don’t want to rush her before she’s ready.” We went through the doors and the soupy, late-afternoon air instantly made me feel damp. “Just drop some hints, plant a seed about how it’d be no biggie if she is.”

  “But if she is,” Babette said, “I worry about, you know, prejudice and things.”

  I shifted my messenger bag away from my back, where it was pressing my shirt against damp skin. “If a person has support at home, um, I think she’ll be able to handle anything that—”

  The conversation spilled off my brain like an upset Scrabble board. In the parking lot Mateo was leaning into the open hood of his car, one hand holding it up as he peered in.

  Babette followed my gaze, shielding her eyes with some mail. “Looks like Matthew is having trouble over there.”

  “Mateo,” I corrected. It was too good a name to ever get wrong. He was rubbing his chin now. What we had here, ladies and gentlemen, was a hottie in distress. “Guess I better go see if he needs any help or anything.”

  “He’s gorgeous but he smells,” she said in a whisper, this time using the mail to shield her lips. “Have you noticed? As though he goes running around before coming to work. You know what I mean? Can’t be his clothes—he’s the most well-dressed one here. So I think that boy might need a lesson in soap.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never been one to complain about man-smell.”

  She laughed. “Maybe not when they look like him. Hmm, maybe I’ll introduce him to Lily, turn her straight lickety-split!” We both laughed. “In the meantime, get that boy into a bath,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. Then she giggled and her boobs bounced around. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply....”

  I batted my eyelashes. “Babette, what kind of vixen do you take me for, anyway?”

  “Scan-da-lous!” she said. “Thank you for your advice. Here, let me take that back.” She reached for the bag of shreddings. “Go be his knight in shining khakis.”

  I started walking in Mateo’s direction, slowly to limit sweat production. I tugged out some wrinkles the messenger bag strap was making in my shirt, moved the strap down so it accentuated my pecs.

  He dropped the hood closed and slumped onto the bumper in a pose resembling the Thinker. When I approached from around a minivan he stood up. The cuffs of his shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and turned up around his wrists. Too well dressed to be straight. Too un-groomed—because Babette was right, he did smell like he’d been running around—to be gay.

  “Hey.”

  “Fletcher.”

  “Some car trouble?” I said, thinking: This time he remembered my name. I raised a hand to block the sun from my eyes.

  “Doesn’t want to start. I know fuck-all about cars, alas.”

  “But I thought you were the I.T. guy!” I said, laughing at my own joke, but his non-reaction made me realize it made no sense. I crossed my arms. “Well, does it make any noise when you turn the key?”

  “I’m supposed to turn the key?” he said. And I was astonished to witness, for the first time in the six days of our vague acquaintance, a genuine smile. “Sorry, no, I know that much. I’m just kidding.”

  I laughed again. Maybe too much, too loud. I checked myself, shifted from foot to foot, hooked a thumb under the strap across my chest. Why was I being such a dork?

  “When I first tried there was a—” He made some whirring and ticking sounds. “But now there’s nothing.”

  “Sounds like it could be the battery?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I’ve been letting it sit for a half-hour or so, but it didn’t do any good.”

  “No, that’s not going to help.” I looked around. My car was ten or so spaces away. “I wish I could jump you but I have no cables,” I said, thinking: I wish I could just plain jump you. “Open it up?”

  “It’s OK, you don’t have to.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “OK.” He went around and pulled the latch inside and then splayed his blue fingers against the hood of the gray Civic, lifting it. It was kind of a shitty car, but that boded well for gayness: Mateo spent his money on clothes and not cars. I pointed to the stick and he stood it up.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing looks crazy broken, but I’m no expert. Battery looks kind of old though. This thingy here is pretty corroded.”

  “It’s probably kind of old,” he said with finality, as though it were a death sentence rather than a diagnosis. “Well, thanks for the look. Have a nice night.” He started to reach for the stick.

  I laughed. “You think I’m just going to leave you stuck here?”

  “I’m not exactly stuck, since I have to be right back here in like—fourteen hours.”

  “Uh, yeah, but I imagine you’d want to go home and shower.” Poor choice of words, Fletcher. “And sleep, of course,” I amended quickly. “Let the dog out. Watch TV.” I stopped.

  If he took offense he didn’t show it—I figured he probably couldn’t smell himself, and the paint on his hand was such a fixture he’d probably forgotten it was there. “Yes, that would be nice,” he said.

  I jingled my keys in my pocket, wondering if that meant he had a dog. “Well there’s an AutoZone down that way a ways.” I pointed to some trees but I meant past them. “I could give you a ride.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No, it’s cool.”

  “Thanks. So should we write down this battery stuff or what? Want to be sure I get the right kind.”

  “I could take a photo with my phone.”

  “Let’s just bring the whole thing with us,” he said, jiggling the cord.

  He sat in the passenger

  seat with the battery on his lap. His fingers were blackened with car grease, on top of the blue. He looked diseased, a refugee from a medieval plague. But there was something articulate and sexy about his hands, too, even beyond the mystery of their ever-changing color.

  He seemed oblivious to the grease on his hands as well as t
he grease that was surely getting on his pants, which were nice enough to be described as slacks. I reluctantly put a mark in the straightboy column. Someone who put money into his clothes wouldn’t be so careless about dirtying them up. Probably this guy had a girlfriend who managed his wardrobe. It made sense, actually. A disappointing amount of sense.

  His cheeks were shining with sweat and a few licks of hair around his sideburns clung to his skin as though dipped in wax. His smell, while noticeable in the office, was all but gone now, and I realized I never would’ve noticed it at all outside the sterile, filtered, perpetually-chilly office air. It was the smell of life, of living, of activity. It was foreign at work but fit perfectly outside it.

  “So how do you like the job so far?” I asked.

  “It’s OK. Pays the bills.”

  “Where did you work before this?”

  “At my last job.” He smiled. Man, his teeth were white. Then he looked out the window for a while, drumming his fingers on the battery. “Speaking of which, how much for a new battery, do you think?”

  I didn’t know. “Like fifty maybe?”

  “Huh. Figured more.”

  The ride was over in

  five minutes even though I stopped at yellow lights. I wanted more time but it was unlikely I could’ve gotten anything more out of Mr. Zipped Lips if I’d had an interrogation lamp. I wanted to find a hook, some little quirk or peccadillo upon which to hang the hat of a connection, but so far he was giving me nothing.

  He insisted on dragging the old battery into the store with us. I was hoping to roam the aisles looking for the batteries, to prolong the errand, but he showed his crapped-out battery to the first salesperson we saw. We picked out a new one that matched. Carrying them both, one on top of the other, made his shoulders look amazing.

  At the cashier he pointed at the display—$57.45—and said to me, “You were close.” He slid his debit card through the machine in a way that was cute or clumsy or even a little precious—but not quite a hook. And then we were back in my car.

  “So do you have lunch with Megan and Candace a lot?” I asked.

  “From work?”

  “Yeah. I— I saw you coming in from lunch today, with them.”

  “Oh. No, I haven’t ever had lunch with them. I was in the parking lot playing with the car. Just crossed paths with them on the way in.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason.” Again I stopped for a yellow light. This time he seemed to notice but didn’t say anything. “So then your battery died during lunch?”

  “Since this morning.”

  “Oh.” But that didn’t make sense. “Since this morning? How did it die this morning?” I pulled into the parking lot and stopped alongside the gray Civic.

  “Must’ve left the radio on last night or something.”

  Then how did he drive it to work? Before I could ask, he said, “Will you show me how to put it in?”

  At this I tingled. I’m not one to boast but I’d been asked that before. “Sure.”

  “I mean install the battery.”

  “—I know what you meant.”

  I got out of the car and before I turned around I nursed the What-was-that-about? look I could feel plastered on my face, savoring it there for a second or two before pulling on a mask of indifference. When I turned around he’d set the new battery on the asphalt and was poking his fingers through the plastic wrap.

  “Hand me your keys,” I said, “I’ll pop the hood.”

  He fished in his pocket and extended his hand. In addition to two car keys, his office key, and what looked like a house key, there was a blue Swiss Army knife and a tiny LED flashlight. All these things rode together on an orange carabiner. Sadly the keychain offered no clues about his identity. No hooks. I unlocked the car door, hoping the inside would be more interesting, would yield more clues, would feature a pride sticker or an Out magazine. But there was nothing of note except for a phone charger in the dash, the CD of a band with a Portuguese name wedged between the seats, and an open can of Red Bull in one of the cupholders. A few empty coat hangers hanging from the ceiling handle in the back clicked against the window. The only interesting thing about the inside was that all the backseat seatbelts were tucked out of sight. That was weird. Didn’t he ever drive friends around? I pulled the hood release and shut the door.

  He’d lifted the hood and was extending the pole. I picked up the old battery from the back of my car and went around to the back of his Civic. I put the key in the lock, and turned it, and his trunk sprang up, and like a big amazed fish I was snagged on the mother of all hooks.

  “Wow.”

  Built into his trunk were four plywood shelves, cut through with maybe two-dozen holes and padded at the bottom with egg-crate foam. Almost every hole was home to a can of spraypaint, one of every color in the rainbow and then some. A black backpack sat in the middle. A hooded sweatshirt, black with a sparkling coating of the surrounding colors, hung over one of the shelves; another was balled up farther back. An open box for a three-pack of Polaroid film was lodged at the side.

  And then there was a sharp elbow in my ribs and I was pushed and the old battery clattered to the ground, barely missing my toes.

  “Don’t look in there!” he yelled, and he slammed shut the trunk hard enough to make the antenna on the hood swish to and fro like the tail of a nervous cat.

  I held up my hands. “I’m sorry! Jesus! I was just putting the batt—”

  “It’s none of your fucking business!”

  I saw a fist forming at his side and for a second I thought he was going to slug me. Instead he raised it and pushed it against my sternum, like a very slow-motion punch, dimpling the vertical stripes of my button-down shirt. He left it there for two or three seconds while he glared at me with almost iridescent green eyes that made my brain hit the Moon. When he took his hand away there was a smear of black grease shaped like knuckles. The shirt was ruined. I understood that was the point.

  He pulled the keys from the lock and went around to the front of the car. With his forearm he brushed his hair away from his face but it flopped right back into his eyes. He stood looking at the engine. I watched, heart pounding. My back ran with sweat but my mouth felt dry. Though I’d been searching for clues, I still had no reason to believe this guy was gay, but I felt certain that if I was never able to be with him, even for a moment, in some way more significant than this, that my life would always have a hole in it. That I would die incomplete.

  “So you’re a graffiti painter, then,” I said, bending down to pick up the old battery. There were yellow shards of plastic casing on the asphalt. “It’s not exactly a mobile meth lab, you know.”

  “A painter,” he said, as though the word were an insult. “I’m a writer.”

  “You’re a writer? I’m a writer.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Stories. Books. A book. Fiction.”

  “Fiction. Pfft. That’s not writing.”

  “What do you write?”

  “I write the truth.”

  “Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.”

  “Says you. Have you been published?”

  “As a matter of fact I have. My novel sold over 65,000 copies.”

  “All to your mom.”

  “My mom didn’t even know about it. The question is, have you been published?”

  “I’m published everywhere.” He waved his arms. “Find me a bridge I haven’t published on.”

  “The Zakim.” Boston’s most glamorous landmark bridge.

  He frowned and squinted, sharpening his green-eyed glare into knives that seemed to want to slice and dice me. Clearly I’d hit a nerve. He returned his attention to the car and said, “Never mind.”

  I imagined myself grabbing a fistful of his carefully-ironed shirt, yanking him close and kissing him hard enough to split his lips against my teeth. “One week,” I told him instead, holding up a finger. “I g
ive you one week to paint on the Zakim Bridge.” I started walking around to my car.

  He looked up. “Or what?”

  “Or—I don’t know—I’m a better writer than you.” I sighed. “Can you handle the rest here?”

  He glanced over at the battery and looked like he wasn’t sure he could handle it, but he said yes, and he added a terse thank-you.

  “I’m sorry I looked in your trunk.”

  “Do me a favor and pretend you didn’t.”

  I got in my car and started it up, reached over and unrolled the passenger window. “For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with it. I think it’s kind of pretty.”

  “Right.”

  “And by the way, you ruined my fucking shirt!”

  A graffiti artist!

  A graffiti artist ruined my shirt! I drove home with all the windows down despite the heat, the wind in my mouth carrying the taste of elation, wearing the knuckle-smear on my chest like some kind of superhero emblem.

  Thak thak thak thak thak.

  My typewriter keys slammed laboriously over a sheet of paper, making it inky but only inky. They seemed to be doing it independently of anything my fingers were making them do. I was too distracted. My mind kept playing back Mateo’s weird, awesome request for me to show him how to put it in, and the way he’d clumsily re-phrased. Clearly he was aware of the double entendre. The nerves in my skin couldn’t stop recalling the angry, wonderful push of his knuckles. Oh, why the hell not, I thought, popping open my belt. I started beating off with the shirt spread out on my bed, knuckles of my left hand pressed against the greasy smear Mateo left beside the buttons.

  And in my head a stream of images: his hair eyes accent slacks arms shoulders Will you show me how to put it in? mouse mice 3-2-1 contact. Oh yes. A graffiti artist. Oh. Yes.

  A few minutes later and a few ounces lighter, I sat back down at my desk. Thak thak thak. Relieved (for the moment) of my little obsession, I felt every boring keystroke. Lately I knew it was time to quit when I’d slid so far down in my chair that my head was practically on the seat. Writing was gut-wrenching but I couldn’t stop, not even when my mind was elsewhere, not even when I had nothing to write. Sometimes it made me feel like a cutter.