The Painting of Porcupine City (25 page)

“Do you think your pants can come off in the rain?” I said.

“Heh.”

I undid his belt and button and zipper, feeling the soft fuzz of his belly against my knuckles. We threw our soggy clothes around the living room and warmed our skin against each other. The wobbly fold-down legs of the bed thumped the hardwood floor.

“Wait,” I said, twisting out of his cityscape arms. “I almost forgot. I bought us something.”

“Huh?”

“One sec.” I rolled off the sofa-bed, skidded when I stepped on some damp pants, and in my room fought open the sticky bottom drawer. I returned to the living room with a small shrink-wrapped box.

“O que é
isso?
” he said, sitting up, smirk all curious. I jumped onto the bed and placed the box in his hands. “Oh boy. Edible body paints?”

“Isn’t that funny? I was out with Cara helping her buy wedding-night sexy-time stuff and she made me get it.”

“This is
good
. This is perfect.” His grin was huge. He already had the box open. “Lay down.” Like an alchemist he took the squeezey tubes and unscrewed their caps and lined them up side by side on the mattress, the way he did when he was organizing his markers. He ran one of his red fingers back and forth over them, choosing a color.

I smirked and lay down on my back. “What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

He scooted over and kneeled between my spread legs—the little tubes bounced around as he got into position. He was pretty hard already and that made me happy I listened to Cara.

He squirted some blue, ostensibly blueberry, onto his finger. “Ready?”

I nodded and squeezed my eyes shut, feeling ticklish all over in anticipation and then ticklish in a specific place on my belly where his finger dabbed blue onto my skin.

“Don’t move,” he warned, wagging his finger at me, “or you’ll ruin it!”

He waited for me to stop laughing, then applied more paint to my belly, but tentatively, ready to stop to avoid a smear in case I got ticklish again. Whenever I started laughing he told me to stay still, stay still, come on Arrowman, seriously! As punishment for my wiggling he leaned down and put a row of teasing kisses along my penis.

It took a while and while he was painting I began to feel more peaceful than sexy. Content, as though I’d be happy to have this moment stretch to the end of my life. Sometimes watching him, sometimes just feeling him. He worked with concentration; his tongue crept out from the corner of his mouth when he was trying to get something just right; his hair fell back and forth over his eyes. When he was done he sat up and surveyed me, idly licking paint off his fingers.

“How is it? The taste.”

“Tastes like a Fruit Roll-Up,” he said. “Here.” He leaned forward—his penis, soft now from the focus on his painting, slid wonderfully against mine—and pressed his fingers against my waiting tongue. I touched his wrist to hold it there.

“Mmm. It does.” I let go of his hand, licked my lips. I was desperate to pull him down on top of me. “Finished yet?”

“Came out a lot better than I expected,” he said, grin huge. He leaned back onto his heels and stood up, wobbling on the mattress, and gave me his hands to lift me up. “I like it a lot. One of my favorites.”

“I want to see.”

We went in the bathroom and, standing behind me with his chin on my shoulder, he positioned me in front of the full-length mirror.

“Wow. It’s your bridge.” Across my torso from my sternum to my thighs was an abstract rendering of the Zakim Bridge, its two main structures like giant divining rods pointing to my face, cables hanging between them and supporting a highway that ran along my waist like a belt.

He said, smiling, “You make a good wall.” Then he turned me and kissed me, leaving smears of paint on my lips. “I want to sign you now!”

We returned to the sofa-bed and I lay back down, careful not to smudge myself. He looked me over, tapping his chin. He ran his hand up my inner thigh. It tickled.

“How about here?” he said. “I like this place.”

I raised my leg a little. He took the tube of blue paint and squirted what was left into his mouth. He swished it around like mouthwash, mixing it with spit. He spread his fingers evenly on my inner thigh and leaned down, bringing his mouth close to my skin. He blew a hot, fine blend of paint and spit against his fingers, his dedinhos, using them as a stencil against me, so that when he removed them their negative image was left in the blue place on my thigh.

I sat up to have

a look and he was harder than hard and I was too and I was worried he might not want to splatter his masterpiece so soon. But then he pushed me down and did just that.

We laughed during it,

something he’d always done and which I was only beginning to get used to. Sex, for me, while never formal, had almost always been serious—but he brought a glee to it that you had to just roll with. When we were done he started cracking up, squirming beneath me, making a squiggly snow-angel in the rumpled white sheets. They were so streaked with paint it looked as though rainbows were pouring out of him.

“What’s so funny?” I put my hands on the mattress just below his armpits and lowered myself onto him, making a jizzy splat when our bellies met.

“
Oof
,” he said.

“I’m tired now.”

“Me too.” He crossed his legs over the backs of mine, ran his foot back and forth against the inside of my thigh, over the place where he’d made his mark. “And hungry. That paint wasn’t very filling.”

“So hungry,” I said into his hair. “I could eat a foot-long sub.”

“I could eat forty-two pancakes.”

“I could eat a turkey.” I felt his hands on my back, fingers tracing my shoulder blades.

“I could eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner.”

“I could eat a cow,” I said.

“I could eat a flock of cows.”

“You mean a herd of cows. A flock of geese.”

“A gaggle of geese.”

“Smarty pants.”

“I’m not wearing any pants.”

“Heh.”

“I could finish that wedding cake.”

“Me too. They’d be pissed though. Want me to make you a sandwich?” I blew raspberries against his stubble.

“Yes please.”

“I must look such a mess now,” I said. “And I don’t know if I can move.” I feigned trying to push myself up. “I think we’re dried together forever.”

“We’ll have to go to work like this,” he said.

“They’d love that. What do you want on your sandwich?”

“What do you have?” His arms crossed again over my back and his legs tightened around my thighs.

“Honey ham. I think some turkey.” I knew we weren’t any closer to getting up.

“I’ll have ham. And cheese?”

“All the cheese you could want.”

“Mayo if you have it.”

“Miracle Whip.”

“That’s fine.”

“Mustard too?”

“Mustard too.”

It was another fifteen minutes before I finally got up to make it. We ate sandwiches paint-splattered on paint-splattered sheets like some kind of performance art piece.

At 4:30 his phone started

squawking. To me it was squawking, but I guess to him it was like a starting whistle.
On your mark. Get set.
I snapped awake and clenched the sheets.
“Wha—!”

He reached for the glowing device and stopped its squawking. “Only my phone,” he whispered. “
Sshh.
” Squinting, he held it up to his face and worked the buttons with his thumbs. I grumbled and buried my face in the back of his head.

“You forgot to turn it off,” I mumbled, his curls sticking to my lips.

He rolled onto his back and my nose settled in his ear. “I didn’t forget.” His tone was normal but the words sounded ominous.

“You’re not going out tonight—are you?” I pulled away—in light of those words it was no longer cutesy that my nose was in his ear.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

I was silent a moment. Why indeed? “It’s our—wedding night.”

He laughed. “Come out with me then.”

“I don’t— I don’t
want
to come out with you. I want to stay in
bed
with you.” I leaned up on an elbow and stared at him, a stare I felt was glarey enough to argue my case. “I want to sleep with my boyfriend through one continuous goddamn night, for once.”

“Hm.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry.” I touched his hand. Never once had I seen it fully clean, and that was starting to bother me. “Can’t we just sleep? You already painted tonight anyway. And almost got caught, if you recall. And you painted on
me
. We were up late.”

“That’s why I gave us extra time to sleep.”

“Teo—” But I could see it was pointless. I rolled over and stared at the wall.

“Are you coming?”

I closed my eyes.

“Fletcher. Are you coming I said?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Fine.”

I opened my eyes. There was something resigned in his voice that made me believe I’d won, and with a quiver of excitement I waited for him to lay back down. Any moment now the bed would squeak under his shifting weight and his stubbly chin would fit itself back into the curve of my neck and shoulder. Any moment.
Any moment.

Instead there was a rustling of clothes, the sound of the bathroom door, the sound of mouthwash swished and spit. After a minute I felt lips on my cheek, and then the sound of clinking cans muffled in a backpack, the sound of a door opening and closing and quiet footsteps growing quieter as they receded down the stairs.

I sat up, wide awake.

He didn’t feel guilty, exactly—

he felt that I should be used to this by now, and he wasn’t going to make any apologies to anyone about doing what he did. Least of all to me, his boyfriend, his almost-crew, who should be totally supportive of this part of his life, who should give him the benefit of every doubt on this topic. But he did wonder whether tonight was a night he should’ve stayed in bed. He could’ve pretended it was raining....

No. There was work to be done, paint to unleash, words to write.

With his hood up and his thumbs hooked through the straps of his backpack he walked a half-mile from my apartment to an area where the city was almost rural, to a bridge that went over a gulley and a stream. He’d started a Fact months ago on the concrete wall abutting the stream and he was surprised to find it still there. It must’ve rained shortly after he stopped working last time because the paint was bent into drips and cut with clear lines as though someone had squirted thinner at it. He tried to remember if the rain was what stopped his work last time. Really this should just be whitewashed and put out of its misery, but he had no rollers on him and anyway was in the mood to try to salvage
some
thing tonight.

He shook his can. I was not, he was beginning to admit to himself, exactly into graffiti. At least not as into it as I’d been in the beginning. In the beginning he and graffiti had been entwined, an indivisible, exciting new package, but that was no longer the case. Now he was
the boyfriend
, linked, partnered, to graffiti on one side and to me on the other. It was a love triangle.

Love?

A
fssshht
of spraying paint not his own interrupted his thoughts and he looked up, startled, thinking at first, and hoping, that I’d followed him, that the sprayer was me. Someone was reaching over the overhang of the bridge and painting upside down with light-colored paint on the green-painted steel. In the dark he could see only the can and a shadowy arm but he could tell by the letterforms that it wasn’t me.

The guy then spotted him too and Mateo lifted his chin and the guy gave a little nod and finished his tag.

Mateo tried to work out from the angle whether the guy could’ve been able to see what he was painting. He decided he probably couldn’t, but nevertheless considered his options. He ended up walking casually six feet closer to the bridge, leaving this ever-in-progress Fact alone, and whipped out a decoy DEDINHOS in fast, tight letterforms.

While he was doing this the guy on the bridge disappeared, and Mateo felt relieved. But a minute later he heard him behind him, coming down the slope, pea-stones skittering ahead of him and plunking into the stream.

“Yo,” said the guy. Rather, the kid—he was young. Celtics sweatshirt and flashy sneakers.

Mateo lowered his can and took a breath. He nodded and looked up at the kid’s work and back at the kid. “You write MAKO?”

The kid nodded. “Yeah.” He examined Mateo’s decoy. “You write DEDINHOS?” Mateo said yeah and the kid said, “I seen your tags around. What’s a dedinho anyway?”

“Just my name,” Mateo said. “Cousin stuck it to me.”

“For real.”

The wind moved the trees and the light and shadows changed and the kid noticed the other piece. “Holy shit, that yours?”

“Huh?”

“Do
you
do the Izzies?”

“The what? Oh—I fucking wish. No.” He swiped his hand over an old part of the Fact to demonstrate that the paint was long dry. “I just write DEDINHOS. Just DEDINHOS.” He prayed the kid wouldn’t step closer and find that some parts were still wet.

“Oh.” Mako looked a little disappointed.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Ever seen the guy?”

“No. Actually, from the rumors I hear, it’s a girl.”

The kid laughed and Mateo wondered why. “Right. I hear talk he ain’t even human, though.”

“What is he then?”

“Fuck if I know. Fuck if I know how he gets all those places all those times. Not human is a good guess. People say he’s a shapeshifter or some shit. So when he’s handling his business and a cop comes by, dude just morphs into a trashcan or some shit till the coast is clear.”

Mateo hadn’t heard that one. “That’s what they say, huh?”

“For real.”

“What do you say?”

“I
don’t
say. Mako is silent on the matter. Mako observes. For all I know dude’s shapeshifted into that fucking tree right there. I do not speak ill of the Izzies.” The reverence in the kid’s voice was both chilling and thrilling.