The Painting of Porcupine City (27 page)

I breathed in deep and let it out, pulled the blanket back up and rolled onto my side, facing the middle of the bed. He got up to clean up and then got back in. His skin was chilly but warmed quickly.

“Did you get that office email?” he said, his voice in that place between normal and whisper. He smoothed back his hair and I could smell the remains of deodorant under his arm. “The one about the holiday party?”

“Sure.”

“We’re supposed to bring a grab gift? Have you done this before?”

“The past couple years I bought books I wanted and then grabbed them myself.”

He smirked and was quiet a minute. “Think I’ll try to skip it.”

“Don’t skip it, it’s fine. I’ll be there.”

“We’ll see.”

Quiet settled in around us. He put his hand on my hip and nudged me, which I knew meant he wanted me to roll over so he could spoon me. I did. His São Paulo arm came around and then his thumb went back and forth in my chest hair.

“We haven’t talked about Christmas,” I whispered. “Do you have plans?”

“Not really,” he said against my head.

“You’re not going to SP?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Oh, I was thinking you’d go.”

He turned his face so he could speak. “When I go home in the here-winter I don’t go for Christmas, I go for Carnival.”

“Ah.”

“Usually I just kick it with Marjorie and Phoebe in the morning and do whatever when they take off for grandma’s.”

“I was thinking about going to Honduras to see my mom.”

“Getting pretty late to just be thinking.”

“I was only thinking. I always tell her I’ll think about it. Then I chill with Cara and Jamar. Either we go to her parents’ or his. I kind of just tag along. I always feel welcome enough. But this year I’d rather just be here with you.”

“Good.”

I liked the feel of his breath on the back of my neck and the way he squeezed my feet between his. I closed my eyes. I was content being with him in-here, and there were so many out-there things this closeness could undo.

The door squeaked open,

breaking the spell of the dozey morning, and Phoebe entered like a drill sergeant. She said, “Mateo!”

If I’d had time to decide what to do, I likely would’ve drawn the covers slowly up over my head and pretended not to be there—but the surprise made me sit up quick and then, upon seeing who was at the open door, gather the blankets up against my chest.

Mateo sat up too but his nakedness under the covers prevented him from leaving the bed. So we were forced to continue to be in it together. “What is it, Miss?”

Phoebe’s scrunched mouth, a sign that she was processing, suggested she hadn’t expected to find me here. She looked at us for a minute with concentration, then her face relaxed and she walked quietly across the room and sat down on the foot of the bed.

“Guess what Mateo?” she said. She didn’t acknowledge me.

“What’s up?”

She put her hand to the side of her mouth to impart a great secret, but did not whisper. “I’m going to Sunfield.” She laughed.

“You got a place?”

She nodded. “A lady is moving. They said Phoebe we want you here right now!”

“That’s very exciting!” He put out his hand to shake, and she clutched it and pressed it to her shoulder in a sort of hand-hug.

“I told them my friend Mateo is going to visit me all the time!”

“Totally. Of course I will. We’ll have to celebrate. I was just talking to Fletcher about some things, so why don’t I see you downstairs in a little bit?”

“OK.” She started sidling off the bed. “And you can bring your friend,” she said with a glance at me.

“That’ll be fun. Can you close the door when you go?”

She nodded and did, and we were alone again. Her footsteps were heavy on the stairs.

I flopped back on my pillow. “Jesus Christ. Has she ever done that before?”

“Nah. It was good news. She just wanted to share.”

“It’s lucky we weren’t screwing, Mateo. Can you even imagine?”

“Relax, Arrowman. It was fine. All we were doing was sleeping and that’s all she saw.”

“Naked.” I lifted the covers.

“She couldn’t see that.”

“I’m so not used to kids.”

“She’s not a kid. She’s almost the same age as us.”

“You know what I mean. What’s—what did she say? Sunfield?”

“It’s that place I was telling you about before. This is good news. They’ve been waiting literally years for a room to open up.”

“She’ll live there?”

“Yup.”

“For how long?”

“Long as she likes, I guess.”

“So she’s moving out?”

“She’s getting her own place.”

“So it’s just going to be you and Marjorie?”

“Unless you want her room.” He nudged my hip.

Back and forth, tick

and tock, cold and hot. A can, a blanket. A hoodie, bare skin. Angst, contentment. One minute I had him in my arms and the next, on the other side of his alarm clock’s ear-splitting blare, all I had was a backpack.

From under the dank, dark

overpass where we were painting on a Saturday night—or, rather, where Mateo was painting—I could see Christmas lights glittering in a few of the windows in the buildings that lined Commonwealth Ave. They looked pretty and warm and I imagined I smelled sugar cookies baking inside.

Twenty feet away, against one of the overpass’s concrete support columns, a bum slept on a bed of cardboard, mummified in a cocoon of gray shipping blankets he probably ganked from the back of a U-Haul. He’d already peered out once to check us out before withdrawing back under the blankets. I kept an eye on him. Like so many things that are harmless in daylight—coatracks dangling hoodies, the shadows of tree branches—hobos seemed more threatening at night.

Mateo, in just a thick hooded sweatshirt, added some finishing touches to the Izzie, or Fact, or whatever you call them, while I sat on a concrete block shivering, shoes scuffing back and forth on the stiff dirt. His backpack sat between my feet and I rubbed the zipper teeth to make sure my fingers still had feeling.

“What do you think?” he said finally, stepping away from the wall, flicking wet paint off the back of his hand.

I gave it a glance. GIVE IS GET. The letters had bells and ornaments hanging from them, a Christmas theme—but when I thought of Christmas I didn’t think of overpasses.

“Looks good,” I told him. “I like it. Want your camera?”

“Hey. You barely looked.”

“I looked. I’ve been watching. It’s nice.”

He frowned and took the camera, and when my hand was empty I pulled it back into my sleeve. Next time I’d wear gloves, even if he said gloves were too restricting. When he turned around with the photo I was already wearing the backpack and starting down the little slope back to the sidewalk. I gave the sleeping bum a parting glance to make sure he wasn’t going to chase after us with the jagged edge of a soup can or something.

“Hold up,” Mateo told me, and when I stopped he unzipped the backpack and put the camera inside—a new camera he didn’t like as well; his old one got broken during the incident at the post office.

“Are we good for tonight?” I said.

“We can be. Feeling tired?”

“A little.” My hat was pulled down to my eyebrows and my nose wouldn’t stop running.

“OK. We’ll go home now.”

“My place or yours?”

“Let’s go to mine.” He put his arm around me and pulled me against him. Even though smiling cracked my chapped lips, I couldn’t help it.

Tick and tock. Cold and hot, so hot.

We did Christmas.

I strategically forgot about an invitation from Alex to his and Jimmy’s Christmas Eve bash, reason being that a meet-and-greet with Jimmy Perino wouldn’t be the best thing in the world for me. Instead Mateo brought me to Mass at a church I never knew he dipped into from time to time. In the cavernous, candle-lit place we sat on the benches and I whispered, “You’re really Catholic, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I just like the windows,” he said, pointing to the stained glass. “They’re like graffiti.”

I got him a digital camera, which I thought would be easier for him to carry around than that bulky Polaroid but which I don’t think he ever used. Also a pair of fingerless gloves, which he did use. I braced myself to receive from him some kind of graffiti paraphernalia—a black book, an array of markers—but in what turned out to be a disappointing realization that he understood I wasn’t exactly into that, he gave me a box of fancy stationery and a giftcard to Urban Outfitters. I looked at the giftcard and suddenly felt as though our relationship was running on fumes.

We did New Year’s.

We didn’t go out, the city too crowded to be painted on unseen. Instead we watched Times Square on TV with Jamar and Cara and threw handfuls of foil confetti at each other when the ball fell.

And then January began chugging

along. The most striking measure of the passing winter was Cara, literally—the growth of her middle. It started slow and then, suddenly, every time I saw her she was like ten sizes bigger.

“I’m a whale,” she announced in early February, on the evening after her baby shower. Her eighty aunts had swarmed her that afternoon and now the living room was strewn with boxes of stuff bearing pictures of cartoon animals and giggling infants. She slid farther down on the couch. “I feel like a whale. I look like a whale. My bulk extends through all these products.”

“You don’t look like a whale,” I told her.

“I’m a whale in a Shuster College t-shirt.” It was Jamar’s—it fit her like a dress.

“Shush, you’re not a whale. You’re barely a bottlenose dolphin.”

“I’m a whale with a bottlenose dolphin inside me.”

“Heh.”

Jamar came out of the kitchen with an industrial-size bag of M&Ms—a gift from perhaps the most practical aunt—and offered it to Cara, who plucked at the sides, growling, and then handed it back for him to open. He did and she sank her hand in.

“She says she’s a whale,” I told him, jamming my hand in the bag after Cara had withdrawn a fistful of candy.

“I heard.” Jamar lifted her legs and sat down on the end of the sofa, replacing her feet on his lap. He lay his hand on her belly and gave it a squeeze. “Nope, not quite ripe yet.”

“It’s probably not a good idea to refer to your kid as a sea mammal, though,” I said. “He might get the wrong idea and start growing flippers.”

“Flipper baby,” Jamar said.

“Heh.”

“The Penguin.”

“Haha. If your unborn child was a member of Batman’s rogues gallery, which supervillain would he be?”

“I keep telling her we need to start picking out names,” Jamar said to me but really to Cara.

“Well I’ll tell you one thing, ya jerks,” she said, “he’s not going to be named
The Penguin
.” She frowned, cupped her belly in her hands and whispered, “Listen to those creeps calling you a rogue. You’re not a rogue, are you? Here, have some more chocolate.” She tossed back a handful of M&Ms and chewed. To us she said, “I told you we can’t know the name until we see his face. Or her face.”

“You should at least have a pool of options ready,” I said. “You know what? Hold on.” Naming characters was one of my favorite parts of writing stories, and I wasn’t about to let slip the chance to influence the name of a real live human being. I went to my room and perused my bookshelves. Grabbed some Tolstoy, some Salinger, a few others, and—what the hell—the Bible. I dumped the books on the coffee table.

“What are these?” Cara said.

“Let’s pick a name.” I stood up in front of the TV. “Zooey,” I suggested, holding up a book. “Used here for a boy, but in modern times has been adapted for use by girls. Unique, playful, looks wonderful on a lunchbox
and
a business card.”

“Ew. Zooey. No.” Cara scrunched her face, crunched some candy. “Although maybe we could add Zoë to the girl-pool?”

Jamar said, “Doesn’t Zoë have one of those things over the E?”

“An umlaut,” I said.

“Right. No kid of mine is having an umlaut.” He grabbed a handful of M&Ms. “What else you got?”

“Vladimir?”

“No.”

“Petunia?”

“Next.”

“Charley. With a Y. For boy or girl.”

“A Y? No.”

“Piscine Molitor?”

“Piscine?”

“I hereby decree, Bradford, that you’re never allowed to have kids.”

“Jamar Jr.,” I said to win back his good graces.

“Hey, I kind of like that.”

“You would,” Cara said.

“You could call him JJ.”

“Hear that, Car? We could call him JJ.”

“No.”

“Hey, aren’t you going to Mateo’s tonight?”

“He’s got some thing at work and I’m chilling with my peeps tonight. How about Seymour?”

Later that evening I looked

long and hard at my phone after it chimed: a text from Mike. I hadn’t heard from him much since last summer when I told him about Mateo and had to decline his request for a pre-vacation hook-up, but he still, from time to time, made himself known.

I made Level 90 today!

It wasn’t what you’d call a come-on, but it was hard not to take even the blandest message as a form of invitation—even if it conveyed nothing more than that he still existed, and, by implication, still had a bed and a body. And it was getting harder to ignore the invitation and offer a neutral response. All the sexy/cheesy possibilities flashed through my mind.
That sounds like cause for celebration.
Or,
You deserve a reward.
All the things that in the past—before I had a boyfriend—would’ve set a visit in motion.

Lately I’d been craving him. Mike. In particular I couldn’t stop thinking about a yellow thread from a pull in his bottom sheet: I remembered the thread curling up and licking his ribs before rolling back and getting rolled onto. I looked long and hard at his text and thought I’d just about die if I never saw that yellow thread again.

Congrats
, I texted back. The bare minimum, stripped even of an exclamation point.