I squatted down, rested my butt on the backs of my heels, ran my fingers through the stiff gray sand. “I don’t know why you’re telling me this.” My lips felt cold now without his against them.
“Because I’m sorry, Vince. OK? I’m sorry that I can’t be everything you want me to be for you. It kills me that I can’t. And it kills me too because I feel like I’m missing out on you, on this ready-made happiness that’s just standing there waiting for me. If one tiny switch inside me had flipped the other way twenty-five years ago, I’d be home, with you, and we’d be happy—and everything would be fine.” He lifted his foot, rested it on my thigh for a second and let it slide off, leaving a smeared waffle imprint of sand on my jeans. “Vince, do you know how lucky you are? You have no boundaries. No limits on who you can be with and love.”
“I do have limits. I can’t be with you, Griffin. Your limits are mine.”
“I know.” He said it hard, harsh. “But we’ve tried it now. We’ve tried it. I love you but when I kiss you I feel nothing.”
“How is that possible?”
“It just is, Vince. It’s just the way I’m wired. You need to believe it.”
“I never have. Griff— I always thought that if only I could kiss you or something, everything would fall into place for you.”
“That’s what I was hoping too.”
“OK.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“... OK. I know.”
“So you need to quit pining for me. And I need to quit trying to pine for you. But I know something now: I’m done agonizing about finding this soulmate I’ve been looking so hard for, because you know what? It’s found, Vince. It’s you.”
“Me. And what does that mean for us?”
He was quiet for a little while, watching the waves. Maybe those were tears on his cheeks; maybe it was just the salt air stinging his eyes. “It means we have some adventures ahead of us. It means the post-college void is a lot less scary.”
“OK.”
“It means everyone else can get a second look now that we don’t have to worry about finding the One anymore.”
I stood up, wiped his footprint off my leg. “And you’re OK with that? With everyone else only ever being second place? With marrying someone who only gets the silver medal?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I am. Actually it sounds really nice. It sounds really easy. It’s so much less pressure. Silver can be pretty great,” he added. “Silver is a happy color.”
And with that, he reached out and touched the flaking white paint on the side of the lighthouse, smiled, and started walking in the direction of the car.
As we walked back along the beach the lighthouse light came on behind us, making the sound of a meteor entering the atmosphere. Ahead of us our two long shadows stretched across the sand, intermingling, but never quite becoming one.
We said very little on our drive back from Provincetown, but it was a different, easier silence than a lot of the silences we’d shared in the past. It was there not because we were avoiding something, but rather because we’d said everything there was to say.
He drove slow and looked around, taking in the sites of Cape Cod as they passed by, the clam shacks and mini-golf places, sometimes with a little smile on his face. He looked unburdened now.
Still my lips felt different where his had been and I knew they probably always would. Every so often, when he wasn’t looking, I’d touch them, experimentally, with my fingers, reminding myself of the feel of his mouth against mine, reminding myself that I was now and would forever be a person Griffin Dean had kissed—had wanted to kiss, had cared enough about to kiss. It had not done the things I’d always expected such a kiss would do. It hadn’t changed Griff. But it changed me. It brought with it an end, as well as the knowledge that I was not pitiful; I was not some silly fag pining for an oblivious straightboy all these years. It had been mutual all along. Different, yes, but mutual. That knowledge felt like a gift. Like a deep breath to end years of gasping.
“I’m sure going to be doing a lot of driving in the next week or so,” he said.
“Yeah.” I didn’t like to imagine him on the road again. I wanted time to see what could become of this new us. “You are.”
“I need to get my shit packed tonight.”
“I’ll help you.”
“We’ll get drunk.”
“Deal.”
And
F R I D A Y
Morning light shined in through the gap in my bedroom curtains and around me the edges of the bed loomed empty and cold. I pulled my arms and legs together in the middle under the sheets and blankets and squeezed my eyes shut tight against the growing sunlight, listening to the sounds of Griff moving around my house—savoring them. Every once in a while the front door would open and close.
I should be up, I knew, should be helping him pack his car, but I couldn’t quite get myself out of bed.
I’d barely slept. All through the night I’d been debating in my mind, weighing pros and cons of something I’d felt in the air for days, maybe from the first glimpse of his snowy silhouette coming up my street. I wanted to ask him to stay. To live here. Now that I knew about the silver medal, about the happy color, I thought being roommates again would work. I knew he’d say yes, too, would jump at the chance to stay. And that’s what kept me from asking. If we ever lived together again it needed to be the best option for both of us, not just a defensive huddle against the post-college void. It wasn’t quite time. I knew there were still things he needed to do.
So instead I imagined into the future, to when the time was right, to when the post-college void was conquered. I imagined him affixing a small satellite dish to the sand-colored siding of my house while I watched from the starfish-spotted kiddie pool in the back yard. Is this straight? he would ask, and then with a smirk he would ask what I knew about being straight.
I imagined him painting his bedroom and the paint spilling over into the hall and the living room until my entire house was brightened and made new. The living room would be painted the exhilaration of the year’s first snow, the kitchen the color of high-fiving an old friend.
I imagined him at last unleashing his inheritance and buying Golden Age from Simon when Patti finally convinced him to move to Nantucket. I imagined Griff and me as partners there. There’s enough superheroes in here already, he would say. We need some spaceships!
I imagined him, five summers later, leaving my house to start a family in a nearby house of his own, with the beautiful sister of our young customer Abe.
I imagined him at my wedding, proudly toasting me and my beloved. Afterward he would jump in a pile of snow in his tux and emerge with a snowball, which he’d bite into and chew. I imagined him pressing his cold lips against my cheek. Slushy-flavored kisses for my Vince, he would say. I would laugh and wipe it away and tell him he couldn’t do that anymore, I was a married man now. I can always do that, he would tell me. And of course he’d be right.
I imagined far forward, past weddings and births and anniversaries and funerals. Past failure and success, past happiness and pain, past all the colors of a lifetime, of two lifetimes. I imagined Griff and me as old men, our arthritic fingers hooked through the green links of a fence, watching youthful, middle-aged women play tennis.
All of that would come in time, all of those things, just like how I imagined them. But now—now there was a knock on my bedroom door, and Griff was there.
“Vince?” The door squeaked open a few inches and he peered in. “You awake?”
“Yup.” I leaned up on my elbow. “Just daydreaming.”
He opened the door the rest of the way and leaned in, one hand still on the knob. “I’m about ready to hit the road.” He jerked a thumb behind him.
“Like now?”
“Car’s running.”
“OK. Let me put some clothes on.”
It was cold out, sunny but cold. I blew into my hands and rubbed them together, clamped them unde
r my armpits. Beneath my shoes the purple shells of my driveway crunched amid ice and snow. Griff closed the passenger-side door after stowing his backpack on the front seat. In the back were the boxes of stuff we liberated from Beth’s. Exhaust poured from the humming car like breath.
“It’s freezing out,” I said. “Where’s your jacket?”
“Bah. Too bulky for driving. It’s in there somewhere.” He came around, dragging his hand across the hood. “Can you believe I’m really doing this?”
“Sure I can.”
He had a glad smile. “I’ve wanted to drive cross-country ever since we did that little road trip during college. Almost did it a few times. Now here I am.”
“Now here you are. Actually doing it.”
More serious now, he said, “I’m glad I came, Vince.”
“Me too.”
I grabbed him and hugged him, hard, because I could. There was something about him, some part of him now, that was mine. I could let him be mine, because there was a part of him, however wishful, that wanted it that way too.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached back and pulled a key from his pocket. “Here’s this back.”
“Keep it,” I said, pushing his hand away. “I like to know you have it, for if you ever need it. I expect you to need it.”
“But you might want to give it to Zane.”
“I can make another one for Zane.”
He nodded, smiled, put the key back in his pocket. “So then I’m off.”
“You’re off. Do you know where you’re headed?”
“I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I told him. “Write me?”
“Of course.”
“Maybe I’ll start saving up for a computer. So we can do email.”
“Haha! Vince! You’re evolving.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up.” He pulled open the door and stood with one leg in the car. He was looking at my house.
“Hey Griff?” When he looked over I straightened up a little, looked down at my hands; it felt like I should’ve been holding a pair of folded glasses—a disguise I no longer needed. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
“Sure.”
“When you kissed me? It was the best I’ve ever had.”
He blushed a little and looked down at the car seat.
“And I’ll never forget it.”
He nodded, pursed his lips. “You don’t have to forget it. You also don’t have to wonder anymore. Neither do I.”
I knew now that at the lighthouse we went as far as we could ever go, Griff and me. Like a pendulum, we’d been to both extremes, from years of nothing to sixteen seconds of everything. And now we were coming back to the middle, at last finding the place where we hung without force.
He got in the car and closed the door. The window went down. “I used up the last of the milk this morning.”
“I’ll get more.”
He winked. The window went up.
He backed out of my driveway onto the narrow street, waved at me, and drove away.
I stood watching the empty street for a while, until I became aware that it had been too long, and then I went and sat down on the porch.
And in my arms and my chest I could still feel Griff against me.
Could still feel his arms, which were thinner than I’d expected they would feel; could still feel his shoulder blades, which were sharper—he was in fact skinnier than I always imagined him. In reality he smelled like deodorant and Johnson’s baby shampoo and jeans that needed a wash. In real life his cheeks were rough, his hair soft. That’s what he felt like—that’s what he was. The final hug lasted. I could remember. And maybe remembering was letting go.
I sat for a while longer until something in the yard caught my eye, something that had been buried by the storm and now was emerging. It was blue and shiny—my Shuster mug. I walked over and picked it up, then went back in the house to call Zane.
E P I L O G U E
Five months later
Zane smelled good, warm and like sleep, and when at last I pulled myself out of bed, I stood beside it for a minute, watching him sleep in the silver morning light. Watching him sleep was like watching Griff pump gasoline, like watching Melanie brush her teeth.
Often when I was with Zane I thought of Melanie, of her painting in my room, of her lilac smell and the freckles across her chest. I thought of Andy too, of the way he laughed that night in the tent, wrapping his sleeping bag around his dripping body to keep Farley away. And of course I thought of Griff, of those mornings last winter when I woke up with him beside me, his joshua tree moving with his breath. I have learned, though, that memories aren’t things that have to pile up and overwhelm you. They’re just colors, like Griff’s colors, that shade all the new things you feel.
Zane opened his eyes, closed them again. I pulled on a t-shirt and stepped into some flip-flops.
According to the radio it was supposed to hit ninety today. The sun was bright already—it streamed into the kitchen and lit up the hall and it sparkled against the shiny aluminum frame of a backpack that lay on my living room floor.
When I saw it I gasped and I turned on my heels, nearly tripping out of my flip-flops, and went to the spare bedroom, which I discovered was no longer spare, and which I knew then would not be spare again for years to come. Griff was on the bed he’d bought during the winter, on top of the covers, face-down and fully clothed, as though he’d come out of the sky and crash-landed here.
“What!” I exclaimed.
He rolled over, rubbed his eyes, groaned, shaded them from the golden sunlight that flooded through the window. Then he grinned. “I would’ve called first,” he said, “if you had a phone.”
“I have a phone,” I said, and tackled him.
SPECIAL THANKS
To Chris, my love, for being my gold. To Maggie Locher for her endless encouragement and for letting me ramble to her about Vince and Griff for the past million years. To Tom Hardej for his editorial prowess and for slaying the dragon that was this book’s synopsis. To Heather Allison, of course. To Aaron Tieger for his support. To my brother Jake for his graphic design advice. To all my awesome readers for all their wonderful messages. And most of all to my parents for, among other things, sending me to Emerson, where all the magic happened.
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.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 25