The Painting of Porcupine City (46 page)

For most of the week

it was just me and Vinicius. He took off work at the phone stand and we spent the days walking around the city. He showed me Mateo’s São Paulo Facts. He showed me photos from when Mateo was a boy, pictures from Framingham and then, when Mateo was a little older, from São Paulo. He showed me some of Mateo’s things and his old school books, and suggested I help myself to these. I took the dog-eared Clarice Lispector book Mateo had once mentioned, though it was a long time before I could read the words.

And finally Vinicius brought me

to the top of the Oliveira Bridge. Mateo had given him the key and he came up here from time to time, sometimes with Tiago, sometimes to make up with Aline, once or twice to get in trouble with Aline, but most often by himself. We slid aside the rumbling door and sat down.

Looking out at the looming, colorful city, I wondered why Boston. Why was Mateo drawn so much to Boston? It was the one thing I wasn’t willing to take a guess at—it seemed beyond knowing, something where fiction may have been far from fact. What did Boston have that São Paulo, in all its immensity, did not? It wasn’t me, as Tiago thought. It wasn’t the chance to be a king, like Vinicius thought. Perhaps it was simply the place that called him home. And maybe these days I could relate to that. Maybe. Maybe yes.

Vinicius was sitting beside me, his knees drawn up and his hands clasped against his shins.

“I want to tell you the real reason I came to meet you,” I said to him in English and he looked at me, perhaps catching every second word. “I think I know enough words to tell you, Vini, but I don’t know nearly enough to explain it.”

He pursed his lips. “Um segredo?”
A secret?

“Sim,” I said. “Um grande segredo.”

He put his hand on my shoulder for encouragement and I told him, in halting Portuguese, the simple truth. I had nowhere near enough words for an explanation of it, even though he clearly was waiting for one.

“How?” he said finally.

I thought, trying to find the right words. «A lot of people,» I told him, «loved each other in a lot of different ways. So Caleb.» It was a simple explanation but it was perhaps the best one.

«An accident,» he said.

«A good accident. A happy accident.»

Always when I imagined telling him, which I’d done daily for the better part of a year, I would tell him and without hesitation he would jump up, dance a samba or something, heels slapping the floor. That was the Vini Mateo had told me about and the one I had gotten to know over the computer. I would swipe a tear or two from my eyes and he would grab my hand and pull me up with him and show me how to dance and I would dance. And, feeling for the first time my favorite word, I would think of Mateo. That’s how I imagined this ending.

But instead Vini slowly stood up. Wind through the open doorway rushed between us and flapped his hair against his cheeks. He wasn’t dancing, merely looking out. Above the favelas that sprawled over the land like rigid flora, the Moon was low and bright in a halo of yellow haze. I wondered if Vini was looking, as I always did when I looked at the Moon, for the sudden, wondrous appearance of one of Mateo’s paintings across the face of it, big and eternal as the Sea of Tranquility. But, as always, the Moon was a blank wall, a blank page, blank save for the tiny cluster of footprints that had been there since 1969.

And that’s a fact.

E P I L O G U E

Facts and Fiction

There are a lot of names

for that day, none of which are very creative. But if you think about it, names for this kind of thing rarely are. When the Japanese attacked Hawaii, it was known simply as “Pearl Harbor.” When Neil Armstrong made his famous first step, it was simply “the Moon landing.” The day all the Facts appeared in Boston, most people call “Paint Day”—which sounds to me like one of the made-up holidays they’re always celebrating at Caleb’s school. The more skeptical among us refer to it simply as “the event.” None of them know what to make of it, still, though by now it’s a simple fact of city life. At first they thought some electrical currents during the blackout—either resulting from the blackout or caused by whatever caused the blackout—had reacted with a chemical in a particular brand of paint to melt off whatever other layers had accumulated on top of it. Perhaps that was how so many paintings overcame so many gray squares that day. That or else it was a gigantic publicity stunt by Krylon. Those theories quickly fell apart when it was discovered that the Facts could not be removed or ever painted over again. People fought against them with chemicals and sand-blasters but it was useless. Specialists were brought in to figure out what they were, research teams flocked to investigate—but it wasn’t anything magical, wasn’t any kind of new molecule or space-age technology. It wasn’t even all the same. Some was latex. Most was various brands of aerosol spraypaint. It was just paint. Very persistent paint. They shrugged and went away and searched for other things to explain.

Two years after Paint Day, Boston’s Department of Tourism launched a nationwide campaign celebrating the Massachusetts capital as “the Painted City.” While somewhat controversial at first, that small action gave people permission to begin thinking of the paintings not as a pest but as a beloved celebrity. Street vendors began hawking t-shirts emblazoned with some of the most popular Facts. There are tours you can take. They’re a part of Boston now—the Red Sox, the Freedom Trail, and the Facts.

Nobody calls it Beantown anymore. Or Porcupine City, for that matter.

Some people think the Facts have religious significance, that the paintings have a collective meaning beyond each piece, that their presence in Boston is evidence of... you name it. A guy with a website painstakingly marked on a satellite map of the city the location of every single known Fact. That map has become like an ink-blot test or tea leaves in the bottom of a cup: everyone has their own theory about what shape this guy’s pushpins make. An animal rights group bought a giant pop-up ad on the
Globe
website making its case that the shape advocated veganism. For his part, this website guy sees it as a signal, literally a bulls-eye, which he speculates will mark a landing pad for extraterrestrial visitors. I like that one. There are a thousand other theories. Some are better than others. You can see whatever you want. You might see a horse with an elephant trunk. Me, I see Mateo. On every street, around every corner, on every wall. Everywhere. Always.

My publisher wants more sex.

“Don’t we all, Lou,” I say with a smirk. Lou is the woman behind the desk, my literary agent. We’re in a cramped office in her South End condo. I lean forward. “I’ve been married three years, you know.
Don’t we all.
”

She laughs. “Well. They’re willing to pay for it.”

“Touché. But I think there’s enough.”

“In a gay book there’s never enough. You know that.”

“Maybe they just don’t recognize the sex scenes because I haven’t likened genitals to any variety of fruit or vegetable.”

Lou smirks. “So it’s a no?”

“This one’s dedicated to my son. I don’t want it reading like a porno.”

“How is Caleb, anyway?” Lou says. “School going well?”

I lean forward a little more and smile. “School’s going lovely. And no changing the subject.”

“Right.”

“There’s already a blowjob. Heck, there’s
two
blowjobs.” I put my hand against my mouth and whisper, “I even threw in a rimjob—much to Ollie’s chagrin.”

“All right, I’ll tell them we talked about it.” She jots something on a yellow legal pad and then taps the pen on the desk. “But you know, Fletcher, you’re not exactly Updike. They want to publish but we don’t have a super-ton of leverage here.”

“If I were Updike I’d have spent more time contemplating anuses.”

“The man was weirdly fixated on bums, wasn’t he?”

I lean back in the chair. “I won’t get weird about it. Plane tickets to São Paulo don’t pay for themselves. If they want more sex I’ll take another look at it—but I’m too in love with these characters to make them skeezy.”

“Good enough.” She smiles.

“And anyway, I don’t want to be Updike, I want to be Steinbeck.”

She laughs at our joke. “I’ll let them know.”

“So that’s it? They’re good to go otherwise?” I drum my fingers on her desk.

“Well, also....”

“What?”

“The ending.”

“Oh boy.”

“The other books in the
Surfboy Forever
series were realistic, and then this. They want to know what happens to Govinda.”

“What happens? He catches the perfect wave. His heaven wave. It says so right in the book.”

“Yes, but afterward. The salt, the water. Jones finds Govinda’s swimsuit and his surfboard. And then—?”

I shrug. “All I can say is the ending’s based on a true story.”

“A factual story?”

I don’t answer. She stares at me, a small smirk on her lips. I drop my eyes and examine my folded hands. There’s a flake of blue stuck under my fingernail.

“Turn around,” I say finally. “Look out the window.” When she obliges, I add, “What do you see?”

“Hm. A car with a parking ticket. A mailman.”

“From this angle there’s at least two paintings visible.”

“OK, sure, two of the paintings too.”

“Not even five years and you already don’t see them anymore?”

“Fletcher.” She can tell I’m lecturing. I tend to lecture on this topic, obliquely, careful never to reveal what I know—which I’m sure is perceived as obnoxious.

“What are they? The paintings.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “
No one
knows.”

“We live in a world where those paintings somehow exist, and they can’t accept what happens to my surfer boy?”

She’s looking at me again.

I put my hands on the desk and stand up, just enough to see past her out the window. Down on the street are the two paintings I knew were there. One of them had been finished in my presence—it was a stripe of green that went across his fingers that night.

“I’ll add more sex,” I say to Lou. “The ending stays.”

I stop at the supermarket

on my way home—it seems like I’m always buying groceries—and in the produce section a woman with basket in hand is picking out summer squash.

I reach for the broccoli and we see each other and pass between us what I’m sure is vague but mutual recognition. I know I know her but I don’t know from where. I smile. She puts a squash in a clear plastic bag, twists it and drops it in her basket. She’s turning and then I guess it hits her—she tilts her head and smiles and says, “Mateo’s friend.”

And then I remember her too. Of course. His landlady. She’s wearing a floral cotton skirt with a purple streak on the thigh, as if from a stray magic marker. “Right.”

“Peter?”

“Fletcher.”

“Fletcher. That’s right. How are you?”

“Good, good. And you?”

“Just buying our dinner.” I wonder who she means by
our
, if she means Phoebe or if she’s met someone.

She looks about to turn away but stops, and for a moment words catch on our lips but we don’t say them.

“Well, nice seeing you,” she tells me.

“You too.”

She walks past the deli and I keep glancing at her as I pick out vegetables. She’s looking at the baked stuff. I pick up a box of blueberries for Caleb—I heard they’re some kind of miracle food and he won’t get within five feet of that shitty-tasting noni juice we brought home after visiting my mom in Honduras. But I keep my eye on Marjorie. Only after she’s disappeared around the corner do I regret not hugging her. I leave my cart to follow and then stop and pull it behind me, wheels squeaking as I catch up.

“Marjorie—?”

She turns, a box of breadcrumbs in each hand as though she’s weighing them.

“Do you—” I stop, feeling bad for indulging in doubt. “Have you ever heard from him?”

She knows who I mean, of course. “No,” she tells me. She smiles but looks sad. Just by asking her the question I’ve told her something too. “I was going to ask you.”

“Not for years.” I shake my head. “No. Not since Paint Day. He left me a voicemail that day, but—nothing since.”

“No clues?”

I shake my head.

“At first I was sure he went back to Brazil,” she tells me. She places one box in her basket and returns the other to the shelf. “But then his mother called me looking, and I learned he hadn’t. Still, I like to imagine he found his way back there eventually.”

“He didn’t go back to Brazil,” I say, though immediately I regret it. She closes her eyes and smiles a little smile that chastises me for cheating her of her illusion. “I’ve kept up with them,” I add. “I’ve gotten pretty close with them, actually. I’ve been down there with my son.”

“Then where?” she says. “Another city, maybe?”

I smile. “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”

“Well,” she says, “if he comes back, we’ll know. There’ll be signs.” She winks.

I still feel the inclination to hug her, but I don’t. “It was nice seeing you.”

“And you.”

“Hey,” I say, “do you know what happened with his trial? I always wondered, and he never told his family about it.”

“With Sunfield?”

“Yeah. From that time he was arrested.”

“There was no trial,” she says. “Sunfield dropped the charges in exchange for him whitewashing the one on the outside and then doing murals in each of the girls’ bedrooms.”

“Really?”

“Of course, the one on the side of the building came back.”

“They still can’t get rid of them, can they?”

She laughs. “No. Facts are stubborn things.”

Her use of the word
Facts
startles me—it’s something I thought only I knew. Maybe she and Mateo were closer than he let on.

“Do you think, um— Could I buy you a coffee some time or something? I’d love to hear about, you know,
him
. If you’re ever in the mood to talk about him.”