The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  “Jamar, I know you have a conservative streak in you a secret mile wide, but I’m not marrying you.”

  “It’s the biggest commitment I can make to you and I want to make it. As proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “I don’t know.” He crossed his arms and looked at Caleb. “Here’s how I want this to go. You’re my best friend. You’re also the biological father of my son, as admittedly insane in the membrane as that sounds. OK?”

  “...OK.”

  “Here’s how I want this to go.”

  This had taken a turn for the ridiculous and I no longer felt quite so threatened by the M word. It would be like getting hung up on your fear of heights if someone told you he could help you grow wings.

  “I have a good job,” he said. “I make pretty good money. And there’s the life insurance money too. You have kind of a shitty job—no offense—which you don’t even like. What you’re best at, you can’t devote the proper time to. You should be writing. Full time. Do you disagree?”

  “Well no, not in theory. But I reserve the right to.” I imagined this was what he was like at work, pitching an ad campaign to a skeptical client. All he was missing was some kind of visual aid. Or maybe the visual aid was right here, sleeping in his lap.

  “You quit your job,” he went on, “I pay the rent, et cetera.”

  “Et cetera?”

  “You stay home during the day.”

  “Jamar!” I laughed. “You want me to be a kept boy?”

  “Fuck, Bradford! Christ! What you’ll be—what you can be—is a stay-at-home dad.”

  On the face of it that sounded to me much worse than being a kept boy. I started laughing. This definitely had taken a turn for the ridiculous. Flap flap with those new wings.

  “Jamar, does a stay-at-home dad go out sleeping with a college boy in the off-hours? Does a stay-at-home dad, from time to time, sneak out with a can of spraypaint and commit random acts of vandalism?”

  “You still do that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Hmm.” But then he did something that made my breath stop and my future, until now so uncertain, smooth out as though he had fixed the rabbit-ears on an old, staticky TV: he slowly raised his shoulders, and with them went his eyebrows and the corner of his mouth; a dark wrinkle appeared in the corner of his eye. It was a gesture that said—reluctantly, but it said: Why not?

  He patted the couch cushion like a judge calling for order, though I hadn’t made any noise and was in fact speechless. “If you’ll think about it you’ll see it’s completely logical.”

  Still I stared.

  “See, during the day, you look after Caleb. You know how much he sleeps. You’ll have so much time to work on your books.”

  “He sleeps a lot now. What happens when he’s like two and crawling all over the place 24/7?”

  “Bradford—” He sighed. It was the first hole.

  “Go on,” I said, though. “I’m listening.”

  He regrouped and came slamming back with more enthusiasm than before. “I’m home by 5:30. The evenings will be yours. You can go out and slip it to Mike or whoever as often as you please. You won’t have to stay home and write because you’ll have done it during the day. And I’ll be with Caleb.”

  “Everything you’ve suggested,” I said, “seems part of its own complete puzzle. I don’t see where marriage enters into it.”

  “The reason we should get—hitched—is so you’ll trust me. So you can do this with confidence. It’s my promise to you. It’s to prove I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Jamar, I don’t think you’re going—”

  “And for purely legal stuff like getting you on my health insurance.” He looked at me for a minute, waiting. “Bradford, it could be good. You know it could.”

  “You sound like you’re trying to line up a nanny.”

  “Bradford—” He looked at me deadly serious, and hurt. “I’m trying to line up a family.”

  I felt my throat tighten. Something within me fluttered.

  “But what happens,” I said, “when you find a girl you want to be with? I know that’s not something you want to think about now, and it probably won’t be for a while, but you’re a young guy and it’s going to happen eventually. And you’re already going to be married to your college roommate slash baby-daddy?”

  He sighed. “So we put an expiration date on it.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. How long do you think? What would you be looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Until he starts school?”

  He smiled. “Pre-school or kindergarten?”

  “When do they start kindergarten? Six?”

  “Five, I think.”

  “Kindergarten, I guess.”

  “Five years.”

  “And then what?” I said. “We get divorced?”

  “I guess so.”

  “How do you think that would make him feel?” I said, nodding down at the kid sleeping in Jamar’s leg-hammock. “Wouldn’t it be as unsettling for him as if we’d really been together? It would require the same explanations and the same reassurances about the family not breaking up. No. We can’t make a family with an expiration date on it, Jamar.”

  “So we eliminate the expiration. We make it permanent.”

  I flopped against the other arm of the couch and picked up the remote, lowered the volume. I still didn’t know why he’d turned it up—perhaps to keep his weird proposal from echoing. I looked at him. He was fixing Caleb’s sock.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you, Jamar?”

  “I’m not not scared.”

  “You don’t want to screw him up.”

  “No. That’s something I definitely don’t want to do.”

  “Neither do I. So. You really think this is the best thing for him?”

  He nodded.

  “And you think Cara would want this?”

  “Don’t you?”

  We were quiet for a while and then I said, “Let me think on it, huh?”

  “Yeah, Bradford. Yeah. Take your time.”

  I got up and went in my room, closed the door, feeling, for the first time, guilty about leaving Caleb with Jamar every night.

  I took off my clothes and got into bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep. The question on my mind was not whether I would marry Jamar—it seemed to me very clear already that I would do that. The question was what to do about Mateo. A story, Mateo and I had both agreed, did not have to be factual to be true. Cara’s journal entry told a story, and that story, though unfactual, was true. And the truth of it was this: Cara’s love for me resulted in Caleb.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  Boston City Hall is widely

  recognized as the ugliest building on planet Earth. It’s a massive, labyrinthine structure made entirely of concrete, even the offices and hallways inside. It resembles a cross between an M.C. Escher painting and a parking garage someone slapped local government into. Down into the bowels of this building we descended via narrow escalator—Jamar, Caleb and I—and we got at the end of the line at the Registry Division.

  It was a place I never expected to be and Jamar never expected to be again. Three other couples, three opposite-sex pairs, were ahead of us, waiting for marriage licenses.

  Jamar was fidgeting. Whenever I looked at him he was looking at Caleb, who squirmed in the kid-pack that hung on Jamar’s chest.

  “You OK?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “If only Cara could see this, huh?”

  He smiled.

  Before long we were second. The first couple in line, having filled out their paperwork and raised their right hands, smiled big, over-welcoming smiles at us and at the little boy on their way out.

  “They want to show they’re cool with the—same-sexers,” I whispered to Jamar when they’d passed—careful, for his sake, not to call us gay.

  “Huh?”

  I realized he hadn’t even noti
ced them. “The big smiles? You must get the white people who’re overly friendly to show they’re not racist, right? Gays get the same thing from people who want to make sure we don’t think they’re homophobes.”

  Jamar looked back at the people going up the escalator and then glanced at the window ahead of us. “Oh. Yeah.”

  “We don’t have to do this,” I told him.

  “I know, Bradford. I want to. I promised.”

  Still, he was looking ashy. I looked down at his hand, which was cupping Caleb’s butt under the kid-pack, and saw it shaking—and I noticed for the first time that he was still wearing his wedding ring, the one Cara had given him beneath the apple tree last September. That was when I knew for sure this shouldn’t be done. Since the partnership of Bradford & Andrews would never involve sex or romance or many of the other things that knit a marriage, it would have to depend even more on the things all good partnerships share: loyalty, compassion, the occasional willingness to take a bullet for the other person. I’d been willing to walk up to that window for Jamar—more than willing, I wanted to—but I was willing to walk away from it for him too. To be the one to bail.

  When the couple in front of us cleared out and there was nothing between us and the clerk with the long, cherry-red nails, I slipped out of line and slunk over to a concrete bench near the bottom of the escalator. Jamar stared at the empty space between him and the window and then turned and followed me. He sat down hard on the bench and sighed.

  “I just can’t do this, you know?” I told him, just as he was beginning to speak. “I’m sorry, Jamar, but I can’t do it. Too many gay people have worked too hard and wanted this too badly for too long for me to come along and marry my roommate for insurance benefits.”

  But he seemed barely to hear me. He was looking at Caleb. “I can’t do this either, Bradford,” he said. “I thought I could but I can’t. I don’t ever want to be married again.”

  “I miss her too.” I sat down.

  “Damn it,” he said, squeezing his hands in his lap. Caleb was reaching up at his chin but he didn’t seem to notice. “I feel like I’ve already broken my promise to you.”

  I looked around the big concrete space, trying to get my bearings or at least spot a sign, but this place was not only ugly but poorly labeled too.

  “Look, Jamar, there’s something else we can do. Something that’s way more right for us.”

  “What?”

  “It’s called a domestic partnership. Have you heard of it? All it means is that we depend on each other. It’s exactly what we’re going to have.”

  The little office was in a different part of the dank labyrinth that is City Hall, but we found it eventually and filled out some paperwork with ceremonious signatures, standing tall, because this had a weight for us both. When we left City Hall we left as a weird little family, with a certificate stamped with the Bostonia seal, as proof. We stood on the wide brick plaza looking at it, then Jamar slid it back into its envelope and tucked the envelope in the kid-pack, for Caleb to hold.

  I pressed the ribbed switch

  and the oil-smelling typewriter stopped humming. Cara had given me this typewriter some time after Porcupine City, when I was trying to start a second book but kept getting mired in false starts and derivatives of the first. She’d gotten it at a thrift store in Jamaica Plain for $8—it was worth at least twice that, haha. I’d cleaned it up, scraped gunk out of the letters with the end of a paperclip, and scoured the Internet for new ribbon. I hadn’t expected to actually use the thing, if only because it was so young-writer cliché, but the clacking sounded nice and the pace was closer to my thoughts, and I got a pretty decent short story out of it right away.

  I cranked out tonight’s product and put it face-down on top of some other pages in the manuscript box.

  I turned in my chair, leaned forward, rested elbows on knees, looked at my feet. Yawned. Got up.

  Jamar’s door moved open when I knocked. He was lying on his bed with his legs hanging off.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  He put his hands against the foot of the bed and pulled himself up to a sitting position. His back was slouched. “Laying.”

  “He sleeping?”

  “Sounds like.”

  “Wanna do something?”

  “Eh. I’m feeling sort of tired.”

  “Oh come on, big boy, you’re not going to leave me alone on our honeymoon night, are you?”

  He smirked and perhaps blushed, it was hard to tell with Jamar.

  “What do you say I break out the Scrabble?”

  “Bradford, I’ve learned never to play a copyeditor in Scrabble.”

  “Hmm. Good point. How about a video game? Can I interest you in a little Guitar Hero?”

  He was going to say no but then he said, “Ha. Sure. Set it up.”

  “Sweet.”

  “You want some tea or something?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “I think I’ll have some tea,” he said, and I stepped aside to let him out.

  Giving my two-week notice

  was difficult because I didn’t know exactly what to tell the people at Cook. Just what was I doing next? Even I wasn’t sure. I ended up telling them all different things, variations on possible futures. To my boss Janice I said there’d been renewed interest in my book and I was leaving to become a full-time writer. I told Porn Randy I had a new job selling bear-skin rugs (he obviously got the reference and quickly changed the subject). Only Babette was given most of the truth. It wasn’t a very talkative workplace and I had little fear these stories would ever interact. And if they did I’d be long gone by then, content to be thought of as nuts.

  The end made me introspective,

  though, as endings tend to do. My cubicle had always been pretty bare, and only now that it was time to clear it did that make me sad. I took down what little there was—a Christmas card from Babette from two years ago, a sympathy card from more recently, a couple of thank-you notes push-pinned to the wall—wishing there was more. Four years here and I suddenly wished there was more to show for it.

  No sixteen-by-twenty boxes for me. Not even metaphorically. I’d invested very little in this job, had only ever seen it as a way to pay the bills, had only ever been waiting for 5:00. And that always seemed fine, as far as I’d considered it, which hadn’t ever been very far.

  At least I wouldn’t have to deal with these mojo-killing fluorescent lights anymore.

  I emailed myself some files I wanted to keep, mostly snippets of unfinished stories, and then began cleaning off my computer. Scanning through my archived emails, I came across the first one I’d gotten from Mateo, back when he was still New Guy, asking me to lunch. That was barely a year ago but seemed so much more distant, given all that’d happened. Mateo’s Cook email address didn’t even exist anymore.

  At 4:00 I went to H.R. for my exit interview, where I handed over my office key, was given some COBRA literature on continuing my health insurance (weird to think I was covered through Jamar now), and was told I had about $3,000 in a Cook pension account or something that I’d receive with my final paycheck.

  I shook H.R. Allison’s hand. “Take care,” she said, and she told me to let her know if there were any problems with my paycheck. I told her I definitely would—it would be my last one for the foreseeable future. Would I be getting an allowance now? How much had Jamar really meant by et cetera? Maybe I’d have to look for some freelancing.

  When I got back to my desk I found my phone showing a missed call. I didn’t recognize the number. There was a voicemail to go with it.

  “Fletcher, it’s your, um, old boyfriend,” the voice said. A touch of accent. My heart pounded. “Sorry to call while you’re at work, but yours is the only number I know by heart now that Marjorie is moved. And I’m only allowed one call. So you can probably guess where I am. And what happened. I’ll tell you where I am. I have it written down.” He shuffled something and told me he was at the Newton Polic
e Department, and he gave me the street address. “They don’t know who I am. I mean I gave them my name, but they don’t know who I am. So it’s going to be minor. But I’m scared. And I’d like it if you’d come. Sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long. Will you come?” He told me the address again and then someone said something to him and he hung up.

  And that is why I

  rushed out forty-five minutes early on my last day at Cook. At least it spared me the handshakes and the nostalgic departure, which probably would’ve felt forced and false anyway. I was a little ahead of rush hour but I-95 was still a bitch, and in the slow-moving traffic I had time to pick out a total of four Facts just from the view from my car. He really had been everywhere; it was a wonder he hadn’t been caught sooner. It had only ever been a matter of time, I think even he knew that, so what worried me was not how or why but why now? I hadn’t seen him since he came to my house in that snowstorm, but then I’d been afraid. He’d seemed one step away from this ever since he got fired. Maybe even before that.

  I was used to being surrounded by cruisers, but not the police car variety, haha. I laughed too loud at my own joke, realized I was trying to distract myself. What would he look like? What was going to happen? Would he have to go to jail?

  If that girl Pell Mel got six months in prison for writing graffiti at Back Bay Station, what the hell would Mateo get? Mateo tagged Back Bay as a warm-up on his way to wherever he was actually headed. I knew he could be looking at serious time. It was scary, the idea of him in prison. But another part of me thought it might be good for him—an addict going to rehab.

  I pulled into a space, walked slowly across the lot, held open the door for a woman and her kid, followed them inside.

  I’d never been inside any kind of police building before and I was expecting the Big House. I was expecting a rat-infested dungeon, a Turkish prison like in Midnight Express. But in fact it looked a lot like the RMV and I tried to pretend I was just there to renew my license. Not that it put me at ease, but it could’ve been worse.

  The woman in front of me with the kid walked up to a counter and gave a name. She seemed to know what she was doing—even the kid gave off the uninterested air of someone for whom this place was old news. I looked down at my shoes to avoid making eye contact with criminals and by the time it was my turn at the counter I was shivering.