The Painting of Porcupine City (20 page)

“Ever.”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Kids suck.”

“You were a kid once.”

“And I sucked. My dad split and my mom moved to Honduras.”

He scrunched his mouth.

“I just can’t see myself devoting that much time and energy to another human being.”

“Huh.” He rolled off me. “But Jamar’s glad?”

“Jamar’s nervous. But he’ll be glad the moment he realizes his head’s not going to explode. Cara will be—must already be—ecstatic. Motherhood is so up Cara’s alley.” I heard a pattering begin against the windows and felt relieved. Rain didn’t necessarily mean we wouldn’t go out tonight—we’d gone out painting in the rain plenty of times—but when it was raining it was easier to convince him to stay in bed. “How about you? Do you want kids?”

“Would be nice someday,” he said. “Yeah, I think so. Maybe just one so it’s more of a novelty. If you have too many they probably just blend together after a while. Although it would be really hard with my schedule.”

“Yeah.”

“Speaking of.” He leaned up on his elbow. “Damn, is that rain?”

“Yeah. Supposed to be stormy tonight.”

“They were saying it would pass.”

“Yeah. But it’s a good excuse to stay in tonight, though, right?”

His hand had been encircling my bicep and as he stood up he slid it down my arm, our fingers catching briefly and pulling apart as he stepped away. He walked across the creaky floor to the window. A flash of lightning silhouetted him against the glass. I went over and stood beside him. We looked out, caught a glimpse of a shard of lightning bolt in what we could see of the sky above the neighbor’s roof.

“You really want to stay in?” he said.

“I’m not a big fan of the rain.”

“I know.”

I put my arm around his waist and we watched the sky flash and listened to it rumble.

“Do you ever get homesick,” I said, “for Brazil?”

“What brings that up?”

“I don’t know. Family.”

The light coming through the rain-spattered window made globs of light dance across his face.

“Sometimes the saudade does creep up,” he said.

“
Sow-DAH-jee
,” I repeated. “I don’t know that one.”

“Doesn’t really translate. It’s kind of like—nostalgia? But with more need or something.”

“Different from missing?”

“A little.”

“Like longing?”

“Longing is closer. My first paintings are in SP so I’ll always feel connected to it.”

“And your family is there.”

“And my family’s there.”

“That’s a good word, though. I’ll have to remember it. Saudade.”

“What’s your favorite word?” he asked.

“Mine? Boy, I don’t know. I like them all.”

“A man of words like you must have a favorite.”

“I like
razbliuto
. The word itself is kind of clumsy but its meaning gives me a heartache.”

“Awh. What’s it mean?”

“It’s the sentimental feeling you have for someone you once loved but don’t love anymore.”

“Heavy,” he said. “So who makes you feel razbliuto?”

“No one, that’s the thing. Not yet.”

“So Arrowman’s never been in love?” He raised his eyebrows incredulously and drip-lights moved across his forehead and the plastic band in his hair.

“I’ve been in love dozens of times. But never for more than a few minutes.”

“Well when you do fall in love, and then you fall out of love, you’ll be all set with the right word handy and you won’t even need a dictionary.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.”

I woke up a few times during the night and every time I did I thanked the rainstorm for keeping him beside me. Still, I hoped it wasn’t only the rain keeping him there.

Surprised. Noun. The state of

being astonished or amazed. I’d been working on my best surprised face since morning.

“Does this look astonished and amazed?” I asked Mateo, standing in my underwear in front of his armoire mirror. He was sitting on the floor organizing graffiti markers. He organized them not by shade but by width of tip.

“Way too much is going on with your mouth,” he said. “Surprise is in the eyes.”

“How about this?”

“Closer.” He came over and pressed his thumbs upward into my eyebrows. “When they tell you about Fletchinha, don’t put on the look right away. Give them a second of blank stare first. And if you really want to look surprised, pretend like you think they’re joking. Laugh.”

As I sipped at a hard lemonade I recalled his advice, which seemed logical despite his aggressive puppeting of my features. I leaned forward on the couch. Cara was sitting on the coffee table and Jamar towered beside her.

“What’s this all about, guys?” I said. “Should I be worried?” I put the bottle to my lips. I was weighing the idea of performing a full-on spit-take when the moment came. If I did I’d definitely get lemonade on the TV, and possibly on Jamar’s Playstation. A paperback of Cara’s was sitting on the coffee table in front of me and was sure to get sprayed. Was the slapstick worth the clean-up? Possibly—

“We’re getting married,” Cara blurted. She looked up at Jamar. He gave her a little noogie.

I looked at them—up and down, up and down—and then became aware of lemonade dribbling down my chin. “You’re— Really? Married?”

Jamar sat down beside me. “Bet you weren’t expecting
that
, Bradford.”

Cara’s face was a freeze-frame of expectation. She held her clasped hands against her chin. Then she leaned forward and wiped the lemonade off mine with a motherly stroke of her thumb.

“I think— Wow, that’s so exciting! A wedding! What, uh, brings that on?”

Jamar smirked.

Cara said, “Fletcher, we’ve been together since sophomore year of
college
.”

“Oh, of course.”

“But we’ve had a push, yeah.”

“A push?”

“More like a kick,” Jamar said.

“A kick?”

“Not yet!” Cara said. “More like the promise of a kick.” She took my hand, the one not clutching the bottle, and put it on her flat, firm belly. “There’ll be kicks by Christmas.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, certain Mateo would judge my surprised face convincing.

“You’re going to be Uncle Fletcher,” Cara said, springing forward to hug me.

She was excited—they both

were—and deeply nervous too. The two competing and complimentary emotions rose and fell like a stock-market ticker over the remaining weeks of August.

Jamar wanted the wedding before the end of summer so Cara wouldn’t be showing in the photos.

“There’s something tacky about a bride with a belly, isn’t there?” he said to me. I told him I’d never, ever thought about it. “I just don’t want it to seem like we’re doing this just because of the baby,” he added.

Meanwhile the quickie wedding was the only point Cara conceded. She vetoed the idea of a minister and a church in favor of a justice of the peace and something outdoors. She nixed all formal attire.

“I want to get married barefoot. In jeans.” She and Jamar were discussing the details in her bedroom as I snuck through the kitchen. I heard him groan as I looked around for my keys.

“And we’ll get a golf-cart for the JP to ride in,” he was saying, “so she can do the ceremony while you’re like skipping through the meadow while doves sprinkle flower petals on you.”

I made it out of the apartment, quietly closing the door behind me. Their deliberations were going to culminate in either a ball-bust or a fuck sesh, and I didn’t want to be there to overhear either one.

“Young love,” Mateo said as he slipped off his backpack and opened the zipper. I dug around inside and retrieved a can of pink.

“So Jamar’s moving in,” I said. “Did I tell you about that?”

“Oh. No. All this news!”

“His lease is up on fifteenth and the wedding is the week after. September’s going to be a whirlwind month.”

“Sounds like it.” He made a big arc with green and closed it off on the other side with blue. I’d given up trying to figure out what he was painting as he was painting it. The images were never clear until he applied the finishing touches. “At least we’ll have your place to ourselves when they’re on their honeymoon.”

“Heh. That’s true. We will.”

A week to ourselves was something I could get excited about. Jamar’s decision to move in laid to rest a less comfortable idea, one that had been sizzling on the edge of my consciousness: that if, after the wedding,
Cara
were the one to move out, I’d be faced with the question of whether Mateo should be invited to move in.

He dropped the green and blue cans in his backpack and made some marks in yellow. “How do you feel about Jamar moving in? Will your place be cramped and stuff?”

“You mean because he’s a giant?”

“Haha. I mean with three people.”

“It’ll be fine. I lived with Jamar in closer quarters than this.”

“Tell me.”

“We were roomies in college. In the dorm. Our freshman and sophomore years.”

“Just two years?”

“He and Cara got a place off-campus after that.”

“Ah.” He stepped back from his piece and looked and then shook up the yellow and started spraying again. “So they left you.”

“They didn’t
leave
me. They got together.”

“So then how did you end up living with Cara and he didn’t?”

“That’s a long story,” I said. When it was mentioned, which was rare, it was known among us simply as
that year
. It began a few months after we graduated.

I could still remember the

sound of Cara’s voice when she called me on what turned out to be the first day of
that year
. There was fear and worry in it, but it was most of all the voice of someone who believes she’s been left out of the loop.

“Fletcher,” she said, and that was all. Like she was waiting for me to fill in the rest.

“Yeah Cara? What’s up? I’m kind of on my way to meet somebody.” Tonight’s somebody was a Boston College tennis player.

“Do you know anything about what’s going on?”

“What do you mean? What’s—? Are you all right?”

“I mean about what’s up with Jamar’s stuff being gone.”

That was the moment I knew, with a sigh, that there wouldn’t be any love-serving-anything in my immediate future. I stopped walking, leaned against a parking meter, flicked a cigarette into the gutter.

“Cara. What do you mean,
gone?
”

“
Gone.
I got home from work and there was barely any sign Jamar ever lived here. At first I thought we got robbed. Stuff was missing. I went back out to the stairs and started digging in my bag for my phone to call the police. I mean, his Playstation— You look around and stuff’s just missing. But then I realized there was no mess. Nothing spilled over. No drawers hanging open. A burglar would leave a mess, wouldn’t he? But there’s no mess.”

“Nothing?”

“Fletcher— He left. Left me.”

“Cara, that’s—” I was going to say ridiculous, but it wasn’t. It may even have been likely, now that I thought about it. Jamar got hit especially hard by all the
rest of your life
bullshit that accompanies graduation. He’d been freaking out at regular intervals. About finding a job. About whether Cara was really the woman for him. About—just freaking out. But we all were. I had paper cuts on my thumbs from wrestling with pages of
Porcupine City
. “Have you tried calling him?”

“It sends me to voicemail. Like it’s either busy or he’s ending the call.”

Some lady needed to get at the meter so I started walking, feeling nervous. There was no anger in Cara’s voice, just confusion, and that’s what made me nervous, and the more nervous I was, the angrier I got at Jamar. If Cara had been angry too, well, anger is its own damage control. Anger would’ve contained within it motivation and strength. But she was hurt. Hurt needed help. I resented the hell out of Jamar for saddling me with the responsibility of cleaning up his mess.

“Do you want me to come over?”

“You don’t have to,” she said, meaning yes. “But could you try calling him?”

“Yeah.” I turned and started walking back to the T. I’d worn good underwear and everything.

I wasn’t able to get Jamar on the phone, and after a day I gave up trying. Because a letter, probably mailed on his way out from the box a block down the street, arrived from him, telling everyone everything they needed to know.

“A letter, so dramatic,” Mateo said, popping the cap off a can of black, shaking it up. “What did it say?”

“
I love you, yada yada, I got a job in Denver.
I love the guy, but it was a wussy letter. Whatever.”

“So you moved in with her.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“That was nice of you.”

“She wouldn’t have been able to pay the rent by herself. What was I supposed to do, let her go homeless?”

“Um. She could’ve gotten another roommate.”

“Yeah, well, we did what we thought was best.”

“Where’d you live before that?”

“I had a bachelor pad. A little studio in the Fenway.”

“It’s convenient your lease ran out at that same time.”

“It didn’t. I had to break it.”

“Oooh.” He was smiling. “That was a pretty big sacrifice.”

“What’s the smile? You think I was secretly in love with Cara and jumped at the first chance I got to shack up with her?”

“That’s not what I think,” he said, still grinning. “I think you jumped because you were lonely.”

“Whatever.”

“But Jamar came back, obviously.”
Clack clack. Ffssshhttt.
He highlighted in white a black pupil on a yellow face.

“Like a year later. I barely remember that time because I was still so embroiled in my book. But uh—yeah, apparently he was only in Denver for six months, bailed on that too, moved back to Boston. It was another six months before he got back in touch with her. I remember, he came to the apartment—which had been his and Cara’s and was now mine and Cara’s. I saw him out on the front steps looking like he was working up the courage to ring the buzzer. And he had flowers. A big thing of wildflowers. Sunflowers and stuff. Cara likes those. And I took the flowers away from him and threw them in the yard. ‘This is not a
flowers
situation,’ I told him. ‘Flowers are for when you forget her fucking birthday.’”