The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  “Jamar’s mom is hilarious,” he said.

  “What’s she doing?” I dropped a cut flower to the ground.

  “Blessing the cake.” He paused and I like to think he was admiring my ass when I bent over to rake the clippings into a pile. “It’s a giant cake. Thought there weren’t too many people coming?”

  “I think you’re supposed to have leftovers. And then eat a little piece every year or something.”

  “Every year?”

  “Or maybe just the first anniversary? I’m not too up on the minutiae of wedding tradition.”

  “Ever want to be? Up on it, I mean?”

  “Do you mean do I want to get married?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was silent a moment, the kind of silence that’s never more pregnant than the one that follows that question. I made a few snips and stepped back to survey the flowers.

  “Well, if the person I am now were to continue unchanging into the future, then no. I’d never get married. But I do plan on evolving. No one wants to be static. And some small part of me does hope I evolve in that direction, yes.”

  “In the direction of marriage?”

  “Theoretically.”

  He laughed. “You’re such a politician, Arrowman. You should run for office. Don’t worry, I’m not proposing or anything.”

  I smiled and made a few more snips. “Do you see any more dead ones?”

  He pointed, the towel hanging from his colored fingers (he’d used a lot of lime green last night, which had gone well with the yellow shirt he’d chosen earlier but it was too busy with the argyle he wore now). “A couple there. Near the bottom. That you missed.”

  “I see.” I bent down and clipped a flower and sprang back up and heard myself whisper: “Ow.” I looked, almost absentmindedly, in the direction of the sudden pain down by my heel, before grabbing my elbow and jumping, dropping the scissors, running. “Fuck! Bees!”

  There was still one in my pant-leg. And now more were swarming and Mateo was running alongside me thrashing me with the dish towel.

  The guy was laughing.

  As I ran I flailed down and pounded my shin with my fist. I felt a pinch and a poppy crunch that took care of the one in my pants.

  On the porch fifty feet away we stopped and looked, bent over with our hands on our knees.

  “Only twice?” Mateo said.

  “I think so.”

  “Could’ve been worse.”

  “Could’ve.”

  “You’re not allergic?”

  “No.”

  He stood up, tossed the towel back over his shoulder. “I hope Cara and Jamar weren’t too set on that spot by the bush.”

  “Yeah.” I twisted my arm and pulled the skin around to look at the angry red bump on my tricep.

  Jamar’s sixteen-year-old brother,

  Robbie (a.k.a. Robot), wanted to pour gasoline down the bee-hole and torch it.

  “Let’s nuke them,” he said. He looked like a shorter, nerdier version of Jamar at that age. He had big glasses that made his eyes grow to saucers over the idea of blowing something up.

  “Um, no,” Jamar said.

  Robbie frowned.

  “We’ll just move the ceremony,” Cara said. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “But that was such a pretty spot,” her mother said. She looked a lot like Cara, had the same bright hair and slight build. The only difference was that Diane’s face had an anxiety that rarely touched Cara’s.

  “Well Mom, maybe if you go ask the bees nicely, they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Fine, do what you want. We’ll move it.” Diane turned to the sink and started filling a vase. “We’ll do whatever you want.”

  “—I’m telling you, a little gasoline....”

  “Robot, give it up.”

  “Diane,” I said, touching Cara’s mom’s arm to get her attention, “is there something I can get to put on these?”

  “Fletcher, of course.” She dumped some water out of the vase, shifted the flowers around. “Upstairs,” she said, setting the vase on the window sill, “in the bathroom, under the sink, there’s a Tupperware box. Inside that box—a clear Tupperware box—I think there’s some insect-bite cream stuff.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to Mateo. “Come?”

  We went up the stairs. The wall was decorated with family photos that spanned a hundred years. Cara was a baby halfway up. Jamar started appearing near the landing and had a healthy presence at the top.

  “He was cute, huh?” Mateo said.

  “He was. He’s a good-looking guy.”

  “Were you totally in love with him in college?”

  “I’ve never spent much time pining for straightboys. Always had plenty of other dicks in the fire.”

  “You thought I was straight.”

  “I was unsure.”

  “And yet you pined for me.”

  “I sensed the truth. Where’s this bathroom?”

  All the doors of the rooms upstairs were closed, but we found the bathroom after one wrong try that revealed Cara’s old room, full now with dusty exercise equipment and piles of winter clothes. Under the bathroom sink, just as Diane said, was the insect-bite stuff, only it was a spray, not a cream. I sat on the edge of the tub and rolled up my pant-leg.

  “Gimme the stuff,” Mateo said. He sat down on the toilet and took my foot in his lap.

  “Oh woe is me!” I threw my forearm across my brow.

  “Are you ready?” he said. “I am about to apply the medicine. It will hurt. I should find something for you to bite down upon.”

  “Just hurry and spray me with your magic serum, doctor.”

  “Oh god. OK.” Skwwsht. “There. Let it dry. Now give me that arm of yours.” Skwwsht. “OK. You’re done.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Mmhm.” He placed the cap back on the spray, rubbed it with his thumb— “Feels like paint but not,” he mused —and stood up. “But you won’t be good as new until I apply my final secret remedy,” he told me, leaning forward, but before our lips met I fell backward into the tub.

  We waited in the house,

  in the room adjacent to the front door, for the guests to arrange themselves in the getting-married area beneath the branches of an apple tree a safe distance from the killer bees. Yellow and white wildflowers swayed lazily at the edge of the lawn and rays of sun came down through the apple leaves in visible beams.

  At the head of the group, standing under the tree, was the justice of the peace, looking like a younger Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a lacey white collar and black robe that fluttered against the tree trunk at her back.

  Mateo and Robbie were standing awkwardly at the side of the group. Jamar had tasked them with ushing people around the yard. It meant a lot to me that he gave Mateo that duty when there were other guys he knew better. From time to time guests cast glances at the house for signs of the bride.

  Meanwhile the Pachelbel was running out.

  “They’re getting antsy,” I said, letting the curtain fall back.

  Jamar had his arm around Cara. “Think we’ve made them sweat long enough?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Let’s go get married.”

  “So Bradford and I will go first.”

  “Just like we discussed.”

  It was my idea for Cara to be escorted out by the Best Woman. Sandra, Cara’s best female friend, seemed thrilled: both women had been squealing nonstop for the past ten minutes.

  Jamar changed the song to the Bob Dylan they’d chosen. He kissed Cara, and put a peck on Sandra’s cheek.

  “You have the rings, right Bradford?”

  I tapped my pocket. “I have the rings.”

  “All right ladies,” Jamar said, “catch you on the flip.”

  He did a little soft-shoe as we left the living room, but by the time we made it to the door he was more earnest.

  “Thank you for doing this,” he told me, clearing his voice.

  “OK,” I said, wishing i
nstantly and ever after that I’d said something more meaningful.

  But he laughed and opened the door. The air was warm and the sun bright and we were walking. Everyone was watching. I found Mateo’s eyes and locked on. He did look beautiful in that shirt.

  I followed Jamar beneath the tree and stood at his side with my hands clasped in front of me. I felt as though all eyes were on me, even though probably only two actually were.

  And then I realized when the front door opened a second time that there were no eyes on me at all, and none on Jamar. A wedding really is all about the bride, and although the music was Dylan and she wore jeans and her feet were bare in the green, green grass, she looked every bit a bride, the most beautiful one I’d ever seen. My breath caught in my chest and it occurred to me for the first time that I would’ve liked to have walked her down the aisle. Jamar, grinning, stood up straight, to his full height. His head went up into the leaves of the apple tree.

  Once the knot was tied

  and hugs were exchanged and pictures-pictures-pictures were taken and we’d all gathered in the crowded kitchen, at the behest of Cara and Jamar, I raised the glass I’d already emptied a few times during the lengthy photo shoot.

  “Cara and Jammies tell me that as Best Man it’s my duty to say a few words. Although why they had to choose this particular moment to cling to tradition,” I pointed to Cara’s bare feet, “is uncertain. I offered to write them a letter but they said that’s no good. So I’ll do my best.

  “I first met Jamar Andrews when we were teenagers, when we were freshmen at Shuster College in the great city of Boston. We were roommates, two-thirds of a triple. And before I’d even known him a month, it’s safe to say that Jamar saved my life. That third roommate was so obnoxious I would’ve thrown myself out the tenth-story window if not for Jamar’s radiant sanity.”

  There were some chuckles, and Jamar nodded to confirm.

  “We weren’t especially close at that time, Jamar and me, even though we roomed together again our sophomore year. To be honest he was a little too conservative for my taste. A little too old-fashioned. But he welcomed me, silly homo that I was, even if he did cover his ears and say la la la when I tried to tell him how this or that date had gone. He lightened up, though.” I looked up at him. “Maybe it was because I kept trying to put the moves on him. Ha ha. But fear not, Cara,” and here I turned to her, “he never bit that fruit. So to speak. Which is not to say that over the years I haven’t kept trying. And now that we’re going to be living together again....”

  Some nervous glances. I felt Mateo’s fingers slip into my belt, as though to hold me from going over the edge.

  “I’m kidding, I promise. But anyway. Jamar’s lightening up, his relaxing, wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about Shuster or age or the anything-goes attitude of the big city. It coincided with the year this woman came into his life.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “She taught him to chill out, to smell the flowers and to walk barefoot. And he kept her grounded. They made each other into people I’m proud to know, people I really love, people who are my best friends. What else can I say about these two? They balance each other. They belong together. They always have, even when things were hard. They’re yin and yang. And they’re going to make lovely, lovely parents. I just hope by then they’ve found their own apartment.”

  We all drank and Mateo, at last, exhaled.

  We walked around to the

  back of the house, Mateo and I, in the shade away from the people and I wiped white frosting off my mouth.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to say anything lewd, did you?”

  “Of course not,” he said, a twinge of sarcasm riding shotgun on his accent.

  Beside the breezeway staircase was a wide patch of shade. I sat down in the grass with my back against the house’s cool concrete foundation. He joined me, stretching out his legs. He slipped off his flip-flops and rubbed his feet in the grass.

  “Remind me how long they’ll be away?”

  “Two whole weeks,” I said.

  “That sounds nice.”

  “It sounds great.”

  I picked a long blade of grass and put it between my lips and let it bob there like a lollypop stick. Music was coming from the house, and voices and laughter floated through the open windows, but it seemed far away. I lay down and put my head on his thigh, slipped a hand down to his ankle and fingered the black band there, and closed my eyes. It was nice here. The blade of grass drooped back and tickled my nose.

  It wasn’t something I noticed but from the moment we sat down he must’ve been admiring how clean and smooth and blank was the wall of concrete behind us. Without disturbing me he slipped his fingers into his pocket, withdrew a marker, popped the cap. On the concrete he began drawing two interlocking wedding rings, each about three inches tall.

  I opened my eyes and scratched my nose and saw what he was doing. By then he was writing words too. “Hey!”

  “What?” he said, like a little kid caught.

  “Are you drawing on their house?”

  “Yeah.”

  The matter-of-factness was dumbfounding to me and the little-kid routine wasn’t cute. “It’s not permanent, is it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course it is or of course it’s not?”

  A pause. “Of course it is.”

  I sat up. “Wait a minute. What? You’re drawing on someone’s house?”

  “It’s a wedding gift.”

  “But how do you know they even want it there?”

  He frowned. “How do you know they’ll want what you give them?”

  “They can return what I give them.”

  “So you want me to stop.”

  “Yes! Jesus Christ, Mateo. My mind is boggled right now. You’re drawing on someone’s house!”

  “So you want me to stop now.” Under the rings, which looked, I had to admit, remarkably three-dimensional, was the word CONGRATU.

  I groaned. “You can’t turn the U into an S, can you?”

  He scrunched his lips. “Not without making it look like a fuck-up.”

  “What’s worse? Having your house graffitied or having the guy fuck up while he’s doing it?”

  “What’s worst is not having him do it at all.”

  “Jeez, Mateo, just finish the goddamn thing and let’s get out of here before someone sees.” I stood up and looked around—we were the only people in the backyard, for now.

  While I looked fruitlessly around the yard for something we could drag up against the foundation, he added LATIONS and then started in on the date. When he was done he pressed the cap back on the marker.

  “I think it looks nice,” he said. “You act like I was drawing a swastika or something.”

  “The point isn’t what you drew. The point is that you drew. You can’t just draw on other people’s property.”

  He looked at me, dumbfounded. “Newsflash, Arrowman: that’s what I do.”

  “Would you draw on their car? Would you draw on their face?”

  “If I could get them to hold still.”

  “Man.”

  “This is news to you why? Far as I remember, we’ve sunk a bunch of hours into doing this very thing.”

  I sighed. He was right, but that had never felt like this. “You think this will be well received?”

  “Sure. What do you think they’ll do, be all like screw this person for celebrating the wedding of our daughter?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “You know how when parents mark their kids’ heights on the kitchen wall or on bedroom doors or whatever? Know what that is? That’s family graffiti. They could record the numbers in a notebook just fine but they don’t, do they. They write it on the wall and it has more meaning that way. They look back on that stuff twenty, fifty years later and coo about it, and when they finally move out it’s the hardest thing to leave behind. Family graffiti. That’s all this is.”

  “It’s not t
he same.”

  “You’re sexy when you’re being so anti-art, Arrowman.”

  For the first time, the nickname bristled. “I’m not anti-art. I just respect other people’s property.”

  “Property. Pfft. It’s all up for grabs.”

  He was still sitting in the grass and he reached up and pulled at my pocket. I sat down. We sat for a minute together. I stretched out my legs and smoothed my pants and nudged his foot with my shoe.

  “You’re a communist,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I need more cake. Coming with me?”

  “Harrumph.”

  “Awwh.” He brushed his lips against my cheek as he stood up. He wiped grass off his butt and squeaked back into his flip-flops.

  “Hey, do you always have a marker in your pocket?” I asked.

  “Lot of the time.”

  “Oh. And here I thought you were always just happy to see me.”

  Everyone had cake or the

  remnants of cake on plates in their hands, but the cake itself was still about three-quarters full. I forked a pre-cut slice onto Mateo’s plate.

  “Would you...?” said a guest, one of Cara’s aunts, holding out her plate at me when she saw me serving Mateo. “Not too big now, just another taste.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be spending an extra hour on the treadmill tonight as it is.” She looked over at Cara, who was dancing with Jamar to a slower, sweeter song than the one that was actually playing. “I used to have her figure, a thousand years ago.”

  “Easy come, easy go,” I said, sliding a fat piece of cake onto her plate.

  “Thank you. You’re the Best Man,” she said, and to me it felt like getting recognized, a life experience Porcupine City had only once provided. “That was some speech.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.” Mateo snickered behind his fork.

  “You’ve known our Cara a long time, have you?”

  “Since college. Yeah. A thousand years of our own.”

  She nodded, sunk the fork in her cake.

  “And now she’s going to be—” I was thinking of the baby but caught myself, realizing I didn’t know how public that information was yet. Auntie raised her eyebrows, waiting for the rest. “Married and stuff,” I continued. She seemed suspicious. “Uh. Have you met Mateo, my—” And again I stopped, which felt like I was only making things worse.