The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  Thak thak thak.

  I sat up when I heard the front door open and close and the swish of a grocery bag, and soon the nose of Cara nudged into the space of my cracked-open door.

  “Smello,” she said.

  I laughed. “You may enter.”

  She pushed open the door. “I’m home.”

  “I see. Was that groceries?”

  “I went to the farmer’s market in Copley.”

  “Nice. Cukes?”

  “Several. Have some.”

  “Yum. Where’s Jamar tonight?”

  “Working now. He’ll be here. Hey, I’m disappointed your broken-mouse encounter with Sexy New Guy wasn’t more interesting. How could he not resist ravishing you?”

  “No. After work it got a lot more interesting.”

  “Oh? Another encounter?”

  “Such that he was in my car.”

  “You screwed him in your car? Fletcher!”

  “No. I wish. No. But lo, he layeth his hand upon my breast.” I reached for the shirt, held it up.

  “What happened to your shirt?” She came closer to inspect it. “Are those—knuckles?”

  “I’ll tell in vivid detail. Would you cut me up a cucumber?”

  “In exchange for the story, yes. Let me change my clothes first.”

  We sat on the couch in the living room with a plate of raw veggies, passing the salt shaker back and forth while I regaled her with the tale of The New Guy & The Old Battery, followed by an ecstatic episode of What Was In His Trunk. Her face registered appropriate shades of intrigue and surprise—but I think most of it was for show; she was playing along. Usually my stories had more, shall we say, simmer than this. I’m sure she wondered what all the fuss was about when the story had its two main characters parting ways in a parking lot. I hadn’t even kissed him. Maybe I was wondering the same thing.

  “So he’s a graffiti painter.” She salted a cucumber slice.

  “Apparently.”

  “That explains the fingers.”

  “Yup.”

  “Mysterious.”

  “I mean obviously he was some kind of artist, but he’s not exactly watching Bob Ross episodes and painting happy little trees in his bedroom, knowI’msayin’?”

  “He’s a criminal,” she said.

  And I repeated it, loving the word. “Yeah. He’s a criminal.”

  At a little after 11:00

  the following morning I received an email from one [email protected]. The subject line said Lunch? but there was nothing in the body of the message except for his default office signature.

  Mateo Amaral / I.T. Assistant / Cook Medical Publishing, Inc.

  I leaned back in my chair and said, “Hm.” If he was contacting me I could afford to take my time responding. I suppose, you gorgeous shirt-wrecker, I could be bothered to have lunch with you. I opened an email window and fired off the gossip to Cara. We analyzed his intentions over a dozen email back-and-forths.

  Cara: “So do you think this lunch is a date?”

  Me: “I don’t know. His invitation was literally one word.”

  Cara: “To me the single word implies a nervousness or a bashfulness that shows you have rendered him speechless... which clearly hints that his intentions are romantic. Thus: date.”

  Me: “That’s one way to look at it.”

  Cara: “Do you even remember how to have a date?”

  Me: “I think I can figure it out, biatch.”

  Cara: “So he hasn’t responded back to you?”

  My mouth dropped open. I’d been so busy analyzing that I’d forgotten to actually reply. The original message was now an hour old.

  Sorry to keep you waiting, I slammed out, breathless, afraid the invitation had expired. Lunch would be cool. How about 12:30?

  I sent it and scrambled to the restroom to check my hair.

  A few minutes past 12:30

  there was a knock on the wall of my cube and Mateo said, “Hey.”

  “Oh. Hi.” I closed a few windows—one containing some final words of encouragement from Cara, who was acting like I’d really never done this before—and spun around to face him.

  “How’s the new mouse working out for you?” he said.

  “Clicks like a champ. Thanks.”

  “Staying connected OK this time?”

  “Yeah. Guess you put it in there pretty tight.” I watched his face. Nothing.

  “Yeah. Hey, want to eat outside?”

  “Sure, I just need to grab my sandwich from the fridge.”

  We detoured silently to the break room and I smelled his smell, and then we emerged into the sunny outside and I couldn’t smell it anymore. He looked awesome in the sun, which went against my original instinct that he’d look best at night amid shadows.

  I followed him to the curb at the edge of the parking lot and we sat down there in the shade with our sandwiches. His pant legs went up enough to reveal a few inches of blue-and-white argyle socks and a half-inch of fuzzy, olive-skinned shin.

  “Busy today?” I said.

  “A little.”

  “Me too.”

  We ate for a while in what would’ve been silence if not for a pair of birds squawking on the roof, and I was starting to wonder why he bothered asking me to lunch.

  “How’s the car?” I said. “Get the battery in OK?”

  “Yeah. Started right up. So I guess that’s what it was.”

  “I guess so.”

  He finished half of his sandwich and started in on the other half. “That’s kind of why I asked you to lunch, actually, because—”

  “—Oh?”

  “—Because I wanted you to know I feel— Well, it wasn’t cool. What happened yesterday.”

  I paused mid-chew. Peanut butter gathered in my cheek. “What wasn’t cool?”

  He crossed his arms over his knees, his sandwich dangling from fingers that today were orange. He looked off into the corner of the parking lot. “When you saw what you saw in my car. That just wasn’t cool.”

  I forced the glob down my throat. “I told you I was sorry.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “What more do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. Just know that I’m pissed off about it.”

  I laughed—not the appropriate thing to do, given how serious he looked, but I couldn’t help it. “Did we stumble into a therapy session or something? Would you like me to air my grievances too?”

  “If you want.” He took a big bite of sandwich, tilted a water bottle to his lips, looked at me expectantly.

  “Never mind.”

  “See, you still have whatever secrets you have, Fletcher. Me, I don’t have mine anymore. Because of what happened. And I don’t like how that feels. Understand?”

  I looked at his hand and then down at the sand on the pavement between my shoes. “I guess so.”

  He gave his shirt collar a tug. “This is my secret identity, right? It’s for show. It’s not who I am. When I’ve got a can in my hand, that’s who I am. That’s the real Mateo. It’s not your fault that you figured me out. I know you weren’t snooping. It wasn’t on purpose. Accidents happen. But all the same I’ve lost something and I wanted you to know it.”

  “Maybe you should look at it not as losing something, but as sharing something,” I said. OK, it was a direct quote from my novel, and maybe that’s tacky, but it totally applied.

  “Well I wouldn’t have chosen to share it.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it a little more this time, but only a little.

  “S’OK.” He popped the last bite of crust into his mouth and washed it down with the rest of his water. He put the empty bottle on the curb and placed his hands flat on the sidewalk behind us, stretched his legs out over the hot asphalt. I looked out at the parking lot, where the sun glinted off bumpers and hubcaps, took another bite of sandwich and decided not to push this conversation any further. I’d been with weird guys but this guy was really weird. The question was whet
her he was prohibitively weird.

  He shifted his butt on the curb, drew up his legs and rested his forearms on his knees. He looked up in the sky and shielded his eyes and watched some birds fly by. He grabbed a twig and broke it into a few pieces and flicked them onto the ground one by one. I watched all this, eating slowly.

  “So nice out, I hate to go back inside,” he said at last.

  “Yeah.”

  Back at my desk I

  banged out a long, frustrated email to Cara and she responded with one surprising word:

  “Hot.”

  That night I made burritos

  and when Jamar showed up Cara and I dumped some of the rice and beans out of ours so there’d be enough left for him to make one. When we were done and rinsing the plates I told them I was going to go do some writing.

  In my room I opened the closet and looked at the shirt with Mateo’s fist-print, which hung from a hanger at the front. I thought of our weird lunch, caught myself sighing, and felt silly. This all was uncharacteristic, a little too Brokeback for comfort. Relax, Fletcher, I told myself. All you want is to bang the guy. It’s familiar territory. What’s unfamiliar is only that you haven’t done it already. I held my fist against the knuckle mark, matching the shape against my skin.

  I imagined Mateo’s greasy fist gripping my—

  Gah, chill out! It was way too hot out to get worked up. At my desk I looked at the paper rolled through my typewriter. I’d written only two sentences on this page—the beginning of a short story much less interesting than Mateo. He permeated my thoughts. The way he had his sleeves turned up. The way he licked mustard off his lips. That heavenly inch of fuzzy shin. Those eyes.

  Thak thak thak.

  I’d slid into the usual position, staring at the inky paper, mind adrift, not-quite-absentmindedly rubbing a boner against the underside of my desk drawer.

  I put my hands on my face and stalked around my room. The luminescent thermometer strip on the side of my fish tank indicated the water was running a six-degree fever. A trio of neons hovered huffing and puffing near the surface. They looked like how I felt. I went to the kitchen and got some ice and dropped four cubes into the water. A fifth cube I pressed against my forehead. Water ran down my nose and cheeks and I licked it off my lips. Then I fell back on my bed. I flat-out needed to get laid. It was the only way to clear my head.

  I didn’t have the energy to arrange a hook-up from scratch, and I hadn’t heard from Alex since bailing on him last weekend—but there were other options. I got my phone and texted a number in my Favorites. An old standby.

  How’re you feeling tonight?

  Five minutes passed. Empty minutes that years ago would’ve made me feel like a sucker, like a desperate horndog hanging on the other guy’s whims. But experience taught me how exhilarating it is to be the receiver of such messages. I was doing him a favor.

  A response came: Have a raid at 10 but can fit u in b4 then.

  A short delay and then: so 2 speak. ;-)

  A knock on my door. “Thanks for the food, Bradford. I’m heading out.”

  “Later Jamar.”

  I worked my thumbs: See you in 20?

  The OK set me in motion. I pulled my shirt up over my nose to make sure my pits were decent, cleared myself for take-off, and went to brush my teeth. I pushed my wallet into my pocket and grabbed my keys off the kitchen table. Cara was stretched out on the couch with a journal open on scribbly pages and a pen wagging between her fingers like a joint. She slid her head over the arm of the couch and looked at me upside down.

  “You leaving too?” she said. “You’re supposed to be writing.”

  “I did write. A text.” I grinned.

  “A booty call?”

  “Perhaps. What are you writing? Journalizing?”

  “My manifestos,” she said.

  “When are you going to let me read them?”

  “Never. You don’t let me read your stuff anymore.”

  “I haven’t written anything worth reading.”

  “Whatever. Write me a story and maybe I’ll let you read a few pages of mine.”

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  “Take it or leave it.” She looked me over, still upside down. “You going out with Sexy New Guy?”

  “If only. No. A consolation prize.”

  “Not the Warcraft kid again, I hope.”

  I laughed.

  “Fletcher!”

  “Don’t look at me like that. He’s convenient!”

  “You use him.”

  “How am I using him? He gets to get lucky without even leaving his apartment!”

  “Ugh. Be safe.”

  “Always.” I leaned down and kissed her upside-down forehead; her hair against my chin made me think of a bearded hipster I used to date named Scotch Tape. “Jamar went home?”

  “Staying at his place tonight. He ran out of clothes here.”

  “If you’re lonely I guess I could stay and chill....”

  She looked at me and then up at the clock. “I’ll see you in an hour, Fletch.” As I was closing the door behind me I heard her mumble, her voice doing the equivalent of an eye-roll, “You and your Warcraft kid.”

  My Warcraft kid was a

  college junior named Mike Stepp, who lived in a studio apartment in the Back Bay with a turtle named Agamemnon and a huge-ass computer (two monitors, tower the size of an armoire) that seemed to wrap around Mike like some kind of life-sustaining medical equipment. Although the padded captain’s chair in front of said computer bore a permanent imprint of his ass, it was a good ass attached to a nice body, and Mike was cute all around. Tallish and lean, shaggy brown hair he was always swinging away from his blue eyes. And, most important in this kind of relationship, chill.

  We met online a year ago, went out a few times, stayed in a bunch of times. I liked him. It’d been years since I expected anything to go anywhere, though, so I was hardly surprised when I felt him start to wiggle.

  “Dating is so much work,” he told me one night when we were standing outside his apartment after splitting a pizza in Harvard Square. He pursed his lips and swung his hair away from his eyes with a flick of his head. “Not that you aren’t cool.”

  I smiled. I hadn’t thought we were dating. Cute that he had.

  “Between school work and work and my dailies,” he went on. “You know.” He looked apologetic.

  “Busy schedule.”

  “Yeah.... So.”

  “So I’m getting the heave-ho.”

  He shrugged.

  “No problem. It happens. So I’ll see you around.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned down the stairs. Once upon a time this all would’ve made me sad, would’ve felt like another false start, another loss. Now I was already thinking about who I could call.

  “Well, I was wondering, though,” Mike continued, leaning against the chipped black railing, “we get along well enough. Maybe we can still hang out every once in a while? Not dating exactly, but....”

  I turned on the sidewalk and looked up. “Friends?”

  “Sure, but more like....”

  I smirked when I realized he was angling for what, in my opinion, we already had. Kiddo was looking for benefits. “Pals?” I teased, making him earn it.

  “Oh, I don’t know!” He looked down at his shoes with an exasperated smile.

  “Oh oh oh,” I said, rolling my finger in the air. I started back up the stairs. “You want us to be sex buddies!”

  He gulped and grinned. “That’s as good a word as any, I suppose.” His eyes started to cross as I got closer.

  “High five!” In a jocky, yeah-dude kind of way I smacked my hand against his. I could tell he was practically blowing his load.

  “So you’d, uh, be cool with that?” he said.

  “I’m open to whatever.”

  “Sweet.” A giant grin.

  “So text me, we’ll work it out.”

  “Yup. OK.” He licked his suddenly dried-out lips. “
Would you, maybe, uh, care to step upstairs and take this arrangement for a bit of a—test flight?”

  “Haha. Well.” I wanted to, of course (little Mike wasn’t the only one practically blowing it), but now was the time to establish things, to seize the upper hand. “I can’t tonight. I really have to be getting home and—help Cara—with—groceries.”

  “Oh. That sucks.”

  “I know.”

  He swallowed hard and gaped a little, the corners of his lips dry and his eyes big. Jeez, the poor kid. I felt for him. I wondered if it was really necessary to be the first person to reject the other. Experience taught me it was. It was a power-grab, sure, but it had a way of making things easier down the road. It was a good precedent to have rejected; it was a good fact to have in your pocket. “Text me soon, though,” I said. “We’ll get together.”

  I waved and he waved and I walked up the street, feeling his eyes on me until I turned the corner. He was obviously going to scramble upstairs and rub one out ASAP, which probably meant the call wouldn’t come tomorrow. I expected to hear from him on the second or third day. It was the second.

  Knowing what I knew now—that Mike was a gamer but not a player of games—I would’ve gone for it that first night. There was no tug-of-war in our arrangement. No power trips. That’s why I’d kept it going for so long. It was convenient when I was too lazy to get anything else started. For the first few months the arrangement was a novelty for Mike and he called me a lot, and I, even when I didn’t really need it, got a kick out of obliging. But as with most things the novelty did wear off, and the booty-call aspect wore off almost completely. At this point we tended to hang out, get dinner, go shopping, whatever, and then fall into the sack almost as an afterthought. Over the last six months it had practically turned into dating. It was averaging once or twice a month at the moment.

  I texted: I’m parking.

  When I got to the front of his building I buzzed and he buzzed me in. The building smelled of Pine-Sol and old carpets. I went up the stairs—four flights in an old brownstone lit by funky chandeliers—and arrived panting at his door. I was regular enough to let myself in. The apartment was cool, almost cold. He had a big, rumbling a.c. to offset the heat his monster computer churned out.