“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 lea
ve 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.’”
“Dramatic.”
“Well, it was. Plus I was well into my celibacy experiment at that point, and not exactly a happy camper. And by then, after living with her for a year and barely hearing from him, I was totally Team Cara, you know?”
“Makes sense.”
“She even had a new boyfriend by then. Kind of a douche. Great ass, though.”
“Heh.”
“Anyway, yeah, so she took Jamar back but they’ve always had separate apartments since then. Jamar’s not a bad guy. He’s my best friend. He was just scared. We all were, facing that post-college void, you know? I had Porcupine City, Cara immediately swan-dove into grad school, and Jamar ran away to Colorado. It was a crazy time.”
“Sounds it.”
“What was your first year post-college like?”
“Hmm. When was that?” He fished around in his head for the year and when he came up with it, one year later than mine, he said, “I did the front doors of the library and all the lampposts along the lagoon in the Public Garden.”
“That wasn’t exactly—”
He laughed. “I know what you meant. I went to SP after graduation, thought seriously about staying. I know what you meant.”
“You thought about staying?”
“Yeah.”
“What made you want to stay?”
“I don’t know. The weather,” he said, so I didn’t press it.
Clack clack. Ffssshhttt. Some wavy, purple hair formed across the top of the yellow head.
“It feels a little funny to have Jamar moving back in,” I went on. “I guess because for him it’s a step forward—he’ll be moving in with his wife, you know? And their baby. Man, their baby. And for me it’s like moving back in with my college roommate again after I’ve been graduated five—six years.”
“Houses are just trappings. Do you feel like you’re moving backward if you put on a t-shirt you happened to wear in college? Every time you put down a word, that’s the important progress, Arrowman. That’s how you measure.”
“I love when you get all mystical on me.”
He smirked. “Nothing mystical about it.” He shook his can, shook it near my ear, the clack clack loud and familiar. “It’s the most tangible thing there is.” He held his right hand near the bottom of his piece, splayed his fingers, and dragged a blast of paint across them, leaving in negative their print on the wall. Fffssshht.
In typical Jamar fashion
his apartment was stacked neatly with square boxes arranged in towers of varying height like some kind of life-size board game. He was over at my place so often, it was months since I’d been here. The place looked smaller with the walls bare and the carpets rolled up. I wiped sweat off my face with my shirt and bent down for another box. His apartment was on the second floor so the walk down wasn’t bad, but it was hot out.
N
ormally I would’ve put up a stink, even just for show, about having to help him move in this kind of weather, but a couple of days earlier he asked me two questions: (1) would I be his Best Man, and (2) would I help him move. Once I was buttered up by the first, no way could I say no to the second. Clever guy.
Outside on the street his dad’s big diesel pick-up, borrowed for the day to do the move in, was parked in a space reserved earlier with a laundry hamper and a desk chair.
“So you’re really not giving me much time to plan your bachelor party,” I told him, wiping my forehead and waiting for him to stow his boxes with the others in the back of the truck.
“You’re such a comedian, Bradford. You agreed.”
“You’re really not going to let me do anything? No strippers at all? No donkeys?”
“No strippers, no barnyard animals.” We went back inside and the stairwell, beneficiary of the drafts from a.c.’ed apartments, was like heaven. “We’ll go out for a beer somewhere.”
I followed him into the apartment, sighed, grabbed another box extra hot from sitting in the sun. “Are you sure? I was looking forward to seeing some boobs.”
“Try the mirror,” he said.
“Hahaha. Wait—what? What do you mean by that?”
We did another few trips down to the truck and then, sticky with sweat, I hit up his kitchen to splash cold water on my face.
“I hope it’s not this hot for the wedding,” he said, plucking at his shirt.
“Me too, I don’t want my boutonniere wilting.”
“Heh.”
“I also hope it’s not this hot that day I agreed to help you move tons of heavy shit out of your apartment. Oh wait. That’s today.” I squeegeed slick water off my cheeks. “Speaking of which, I’m not sure how much more we can fit in the truck. Or at our place, for that matter.”
He stood looking around, hands on hips. “Don’t worry, anything that’s not in a box isn’t going.”
“Oh. Really? Not even the futon? I was thinking we’d have to do a second trip.”
“No. No, just one. You’re off the hook. But if you know anyone who’d want the futon, tell me. I have a couple of guys from work coming tonight for the dresser.”
“Homos?”
“No.”
“Wait, so no Leaning Tower of CDisa?!” I went over and touched the tall CD organizer, wobbling to and fro on its bent metal leg. It was legendary.
The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 16