The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (31 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Monopoli lives in Boston with his husband,
Chris. His website is www.benmonopoli.com.

THE PAINTING OF PORCUPINE CITY: A NOVEL

by Ben Monopoli

Brazilian graffiti
artist Mateo Amaral is looking for his heaven spot, the one perfect place to
paint. His coworker Fletcher Bradford is looking for a heaven spot of his own,
and his is even more elusive. Out since age 12, Fletcher’s been around more
blocks than Mateo has ever painted. He’s dated all the jerks, all the creeps,
all the losers in between. At 26 he’s decided the only way to meet a nice guy
is just never to give him a chance to prove otherwise. When he’s introduced to
Mateo, Fletcher expects to add another notch to his bedpost. But Mateo is
different—and from him Fletcher will rediscover a long-lost feeling:
surprise. What Fletcher finds in the trunk of Mateo’s car will change his life
in ways he never imagined—and may help him find what he’s always wanted.

From the author of
THE CRANBERRY HUSH comes an epic story spanning years and hemispheres and miles
of painted walls. At times sexy and sweet, gritty and gut-wrenching, THE
PAINTING OF PORCUPINE CITY takes readers along with Mateo and Fletcher on an
adventure through the subways of Boston to the towers of São Paulo. Are you in?

EXCERPT:

P A R T

O N E

Now the new guy held

out his hand. On top of his natural
olivish complexion was a blast of neon green that went from the tips of his
close-cut nails, over the first joints and fuzz of hairs to the second joints,
finally fading to a mist along the back of his hand. His olive skin continued
over his wrist and up underneath the sleeve of his neatly-ironed shirt. The
paint might’ve made another person look grubby but this guy was cute enough to
get away with it. Wavy, unruly hair, dark as a typewriter ribbon. Green eyes
that made you want to put the pedal to the metal.

My heart went pitter-patter. “Welcome aboard,” I told him,
jumping up to shake the neon hand he was offering, my chair spinning behind me.
Welcome aboard
had somehow become my
standard greeting for new coworkers—turnover was high at Cook Medical
Publishing—and over the years it’d taken on a more and more piratey tone.
I was only a few new people away from adding a
Yaarrrr
. “I’m Fletcher Bradford.”

He told me his name was Mateo Amaral. He had a nice
smile—or probably would if he were truly smiling; his face was pasted
with that overwhelmed grin you typically see on these introductory tours. He
also wore a tie, and this broke my heart a little, struck me as precious.
Awh.
A
tie.
New people always wore ties or power pantsuits their first day,
probably expecting/hoping the job they showed up for was as glamorous as it
sounded in the interview.
You poor stud
,
I thought, me in my khakis and iron-scorched button-down.
You poor fuck-stallion with the weird painty hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he told me. His handshake was mediocre
but his skin was surprisingly cool, with none of that typical first-day clamminess—mysteriously
confident, as though the limp grip was all act. After pumping a couple times
his painty hand released mine and returned to his pocket.

At the request of his tour-guide (i.e., the head I.T. guy,
his supervisor) I made brief chatter about my own job, about the office in
general, blah blah, while the new guy glanced around my cube looking
uninterested. Then they left my cube to move on to the next—and as they
left I amended my appraisal of New Guy’s hair and eyes to include his killer ass.
That ass and those pants were perhaps the most successful pairing since Lennon
and McCartney.

I sat back down (the chair was practically still rotating,
that’s how brief that first encounter was) already nursing the seeds of an
office crush.

That was a few days ago, and during that time the new guy
wiped off the grin, ditched the tie, and otherwise blended into the maze of
cubes with a skillfulness rarely seen at Cook, and which I found intriguing but
ultimately disappointing. You hope for shirtless back-flips down the hallway,
and what you get, if you’re lucky, is a glimpse of him around the bend of a
corner once or twice a day. He seemed not to talk to anyone except when it
directly involved work, he arrived very early (or so I heard, not exactly being
an early riser myself), and, on the Friday of his first week, I learned that he
took his lunch standing in the doorway of the break room. Just standing there,
as though he were afraid to enter a space with only one exit.

I wondered what color his hand would be today. Each day the
color changed. Sliding past him to get at the fridge, I stole a glance. Purple.
And today it went all the way to his knuckles, leaving across the back of his
hand a drip that seemed to illustrate a tendon. The sloppiness was so odd in
contrast to his clothes, which looked Banana Republic all the way. They were
sharp and new, the pants as crisp as the shirt—you could slice open your
finger on the creases of his shirtsleeves. Even without the tie he looked too
dressed up for Cook. And yet, this guy who somehow got through the morning
without catching a wrinkle apparently couldn’t be bothered to wash his hands.
It was like he was two different people.

I smirked. Yes, I wanted both of him. Preferably at the same
time. It was good to have a crush at work—made the day pass
quicker—but it was rare. The execs who did the hiring usually had lousy
taste.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey.”

He was an inch or so shorter than me, slim but not skinny.
His hair hung in loose waves against his collar and against his eyebrows, the
kind of hair you have to restrain yourself from grabbing to twirl with your
fingers. The kind you want to find strands of on your pillow.

I opened the freezer and took out a box of Eggos with my
name on it (literally), dropped two frozen discs into the toaster and pushed
them down. I imagined grabbing the sink hose and soaking his hair and that
crisp shirt—he probably had the perfect amount of chest hair under there.
Instead I looked up at the TV suspended from the ceiling in the corner. ESPN
was on but the volume was muted.

“Like baseball?” I asked.

“More of a soccer guy.”

“Me too,” I said, though I didn’t add that it was because
the guys in soccer are better looking.

When the TV faded to black right before a commercial I could
see him in the reflection. He looked out of place in the harsh fluorescent
light. In this light his face looked somehow naked, too vulnerable and exposed,
his eyes not quite nervous, but alert. His eyebrows were thick and dark, the
same color as his hair and his longish sideburns. It was the kind of face that
needed a make-up of shadows to really come alive. To pop. New Guy was a night
owl, I could tell.

The toaster popped-up my waffles and I squirted syrup across
them and sat down at the little round table in the center of the room.

I thought I saw him glance at my brunch, but I wasn’t sure,
but I said anyway, by way of explanation (and small talk), “I never get up
early enough for breakfast.”

He nodded and took a bite of his sandwich, which looked like
turkey or chicken. An open Tupperware sat on the counter by his elbow.

“Friday at last,” I said, trying again at conversation. “Any
big plans for the weekend? Weather looks to be a total scorcher.”

He was still standing in the doorway and it was making me
uncomfortable. His shoulder was against the wall, his legs were crossed
casually at the ankles—the heel of his shiny wing-tips was on the hallway
carpet, the toe on the lunch-room tile. He lifted his sandwich to his mouth and
took another bite. Yes, purple today. Yesterday they’d been red, looking
alarmingly like he’d been bleeding. Red yesterday, purple today—whatever
New Guy did in the space between work hours, I guessed last night he did it
with blue. Wednesday I hadn’t seen him at all, but Tuesday they’d been orange.
And then, of course, the famous neon green of his first day. He was a walking
art project.

“No? No plans?”

“Huh? Oh. Not really, nope.” He looked from the TV to me and
back again. I decided he was either lying or playing coy. “Just, you know,
being breezy.”

“Breezy.” I repeated it to see if there was meaning in the
sound. “You mean like blowing on the breeze?”

“Sure,” he said, with an ambiguous curve of the mouth that
you might call a smirk if you were feeling generous. He had an accent, too,
slight and nearly lost amid the intrigue of his hand, but undeniable
nonetheless. South American, maybe. Venezuela or one of those. It could even be
some kind of Mediterranean. Sicily? I’d already perused a map for country
names, but the zilch I could glean from an accent and a simple outline of
national borders wasn’t the point. It wasn’t about geography, it was an
imagination exercise. I was building his character. I had a lot of free time at
work.

“Blowin’ on the
breeeeze
,”
I warbled, as though it were a chorus to an indie rock song. I looked up at the
TV for a minute. Chewed some waffle. Looked over at him and nodded at one of
the empty chairs. “Sit down if you want.” I wished he would because frankly he
was making me nervous standing there.

“S’OK,” he said, but it was, judging by the quick shrug of
his shoulders, a no. He continued to lean in the doorway eating his sandwich,
watching the muted TV. When he was done he clapped crumbs off his painty hands,
wiped his mouth with a napkin, squeezed the cover back onto his Tupperware, and
turned around. As he was leaving he said, “Enjoy your breakfast.” It sounded
like
brefess
—like how kids say
it.

As I watched him go I felt my face pop like a spring with
pent-up curiosity.

Nothing had happened and yet when he left the lights seemed
harsher, the air staler, as though his presence had charged the atmosphere,
made it seem less like work and more like possibility. But any office crush of
mine would have to do better than possibility. I wanted action....