The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  “I suppose I do,” she sang.

  “And I suppose I love you, too,” he replied.

  “You can’t leave me here,” Anton said, looking around at the quaint little nearby shops—the sunny exterior of Paddy’s Funeral Home, the shuttered Yarn Ball, and a busy little diner named Silly Nick’s. To him, these might as well have been the gates to the gulags.

  “I don’t have a license!” Anton added. “I don’t even know how to drive.”

  We slowed to a stop at a red light and watched a family of brightly colored fleece jackets crossing to get breakfast at Silly Nick’s.

  “You keep a Jaguar in a garage and you don’t know how to drive?”

  Anton didn’t seem to understand why this wasn’t logical. “It’s my father’s car.”

  “Which he left here, for you, to use in case of emergencies? With two crates of caviar in the trunk for safekeeping?”

  At the mention of the caviar, Anton’s face lit up, and he suddenly opened his car door and scrambled around to the back.

  “Get back in the damn car!” I shouted.

  The light turned green and I had to set the car in park so I could run out after him. For the second time in an hour, I found myself standing in front of a line of furious drivers, thanks to Anton.

  But Anton was exuberant in front of the open trunk. “I thought I’d lost these! My father was practically going to disinherit me over them.”

  “Where did you think you had lost them?”

  Anton, again, didn’t seem to understand the question. Crates of caviar, in his world, were perfectly capable of falling in and out of existence.

  Before I could stop him, he had grabbed the tire iron and pried a crate open. The cars’ horns behind us were composing a collective atonal symphony. Though I was still stinging from what he’d said about my novel, I couldn’t help but begin laughing at the sight of the stringy Anton, dangling in midair as he tried to use his full weight to open the crate. At least he was earnest about things, even his abject helplessness. He had everything in the world and could do almost nothing for himself.

  Gesturing rudely for the cars to drive around us, I rushed over to lend my weight to Anton’s lever arm. With a great splintering sound, the lid burst off. Inside were stacks and stacks of golden caviar tins, painted with pale blue maps of the Sea of Azov. Anton grabbed two of the pressurized tins with a loud cheer, and we rushed back into the car and got safely over onto the side of the road, across from the train station.

  Scooping out the large, brownish pearls of caviar with our fingers, we sat on the hood of the Jaguar and watched the traffic roll by. For a while I waited for an apology, until I remembered that the word sorry was not in Anton Prishibeyev’s vocabulary.

  “Do you think Silly Nick’s has blinis?” Anton asked, mouth full of fish eggs.

  “No. I do not.”

  “And you people call this the Land of the Free!” he shouted at the commuters.

  “They call this Westchester.”

  Three children leaned out the window of a yellow school bus to point at us. Anton’s hair had bushed out in all directions, and his overcoat, which I had given back to him, was two sizes too big. My wool cap had slid back, and I was wrapped in a large red scarf and my threadbare old blazer. We must have looked like two hobos, perched on the hood of a hundred-thousand-dollar car, sucking fish eggs from our fingertips.

  The chorus of Fiddler rang out, “We know that when good fortune favors two such men, it stands to reason, we deserve it, too!”

  “How much does this stuff cost?” I asked, wishing I had some more to wash it down with.

  “And if our good fortune never comes . . . here’s to whatever comes.”

  “These big tins are about two thousand. Depending on how the ruble is doing.”

  I choked and sputtered, inadvertently spraying fifty dollars’ worth of caviar onto the icy pavement.

  “Ours is osetra caviar,” Anton explained, beginning the inevitable lecture. “Malossal—which means a lightly salty flavor—large, and relatively dark. Darkness is typically a mark of inferiority, but ours contains a particular nuttiness that is unique to this terroir. The Sea of Azov is actually the shallowest sea in the world, and this makes our sturgeons particularly nutty for some reason.”

  “Not just your sturgeons,” I joked. For that I received a flicking of eggs in the face, but I couldn’t resist another: “You know, it’s not at all surprising that you come from the shallowest sea on Earth.”

  Anton leaped from the hood and started to come after me. After a few moments’ chase around the car, soon also speckled with fish eggs, we began shouting along with the tape deck in the car. “Drink, l’chaim, to life!”

  Soon full, Anton curled up in his seat and closed his eyes. He was out like a light. Cursing myself a little for letting him off the hook so easily, I reached back into the hatbox, eager to finish rereading my novel’s “terrible” ending.

  Though I had hardly slept in a week, that night I could not stop dreaming up ways to somehow steal Colette away. She loved me, I was sure of it, but I had no money, no status. I could never offer her the life that she expected. But without her, what was the point? Why go on gilding until the riots ended? I’d be shipped off to the front lines and made to shoot my fellow men, lest they shoot me. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I dressed and stowed my few favorite camel-hair brushes away, along with my bundle of matches. From a hiding place behind my headboard, I took out a gold watch that had been handed down to me by my mother—one of the only things of hers that I owned. Then, like Leander, I crept out of the boardinghouse and traversed the dark night, steering occasionally away from the light of arsonists’ torches. Soon I came to Tammany Hall, slipped past a dozing night watchman, and silently snuck to the back room, where Chausser kept the next day’s supply of gold paint in the locked cabinet.

  I plied the soft pine matchsticks into the keyhole, pressing gingerly against the tumblers, until the thing, at last, popped open. Inside, I found a jar still sealed with heavy beeswax. Holding it up to the moonlight, I studied its liquid glimmering and wondered how much I might be able to get for it out West. We could flee into the unexplored territories. Out where there was no draft, where I was not poor and she was not rich. Out where our love could begin. Suddenly drowsy with these dreams, I crept back into the portico. There, staring at the moonlight glinting off Hero’s light, I slipped into deep blue sleep.

  I woke to the sound of resounding cheers from the Hall. Immediately, my heart seized, as I wiped dreams from my eyes. Surely I had not slept through the wedding! I checked the time on my watch and, cursing my sleepless week, pressed one eye to the crack in the wall. There, on a dais, was a gray-haired minister, and in front of him, Bertram Vanderbilt, in a high top hat and woolen tails, his leather boots gleaming with fresh polish. I did not see Colette anywhere, but then the music swelled and people began turning toward the entrance. Without a second thought, I grabbed the golden paint from the floor of the portico and rushed out through the doorway.

  No one noticed me. Every rich, joyful eye was fixed on the rear doors where Colette was entering, gowned in the most beautiful white lace and silk—her golden hair cascading in curls across those sun-kissed shoulders. The crème de la crème of Manhattan was there—every Vanderbilt from the commodore on down, Boss Tweed, and even the mayor himself. Every eye was on her. But her eyes were on mine. She froze, there, in the petal-strewn aisle, quickly grabbing the arm of her father—the handlebar-mustachioed railroad tycoon Nathaniel Marsh. The old millionaire turned slowly to follow his daughter’s gaze to the painter’s apprentice coming out of the portico. Others began to turn in their seats. I shouted something—Colette’s name, I think—but with all the blood in my ears it sounded like gibberish. Half sure that someone, some Vanderbilt son, would rise up and fire a bullet through my breast then and there, I waited to die.

  Then Colette let go of her father’s arm and rushed back down the aisle. My heart leaping,
I flew to meet her there. There was no time to clutch at each other, nor even to kiss. In her brilliant eyes, I could see only delirious happiness.

  Bursting from Tammany Hall, we shouted like small children. Colette kicked off her stiff shoes and she ran barefoot with me into the sooty streets. Ash floated everywhere. Somewhere behind us, we could hear the noise of wedding guests rising to their feet in the echoing chamber, and shouting out in confusion. But we did not care. We did not look back. Faster and faster we ran. In another moment, as we approached the square, I began to hear gunshots, and I was sure that we would be killed by the Vanderbilts at any moment. Valiantly, I would perish in the arms of my true love. And she would leap in front of the bullets that followed and take her own life, and we would walk arm in arm through the meadows of the afterlife, together eternally.

  But the bullets were not coming from behind us. Up ahead, Union Square was thick with the smoke of musket fire. Colette and I stopped short as we saw hell’s own horror in front of us. The rioters were making their last stand. Soldiers and citizens alike were rampaging through the lines. The sun was blotted out completely. A black-coated fireman with no legs cried on the cobblestones, ten feet away. Flames consumed the square from the inside out. Charred black corpses hung from nooses in the trees—now blacker still. And there were no golden rays of light glinting in the musket fire. And there were no golden medals on the uniforms of the valiantly slaughtered. And there were no golden wings of angels hovering above.

  I looked into Colette’s eyes. In the face of this carnage she seemed like someone else entirely, for whom my love was unfamiliar. The golden paint still rested in the crook of my arm. Colette looked back at the hall and then, scared, almost reluctant, she tugged at my elbow. The look on her face was clear. We’d come too far to go back.

  When Anton woke up we left the little town in our dust and traveled east on Cross River Road, through thickets of trees, past snow-covered barns and frozen lakes. Maybe it was just the caviar, but there really was something restorative about the countryside. And though our teeth were chattering, we powered the windows down and hummed along to “Matchmaker” as we zigzagged across the iced-over back roads. As we passed through a sleepy, nameless town that had not yet dug itself out of the snow, I looked over my shoulder at the hatbox.

  “So. Did it remind you of anything?” I ventured, thinking of a story he’d written ages ago, back in college.

  “It’s clearly about you and Rose,” he said, “I told you.”

  “No,” I said, “I meant—did it remind you of anything of yours?”

  Anton’s face betrayed a small but earnest smile. “Maybe,” he said. “Something terrible, which I scrapped completely, as I recall.”

  Was it my imagination, or did he seem—strangely—proud of me for having had the nerve to steal it?

  “So do you think it’s fixable?”

  “It’s fixable,” Anton said gingerly. “I just don’t know if you want to fix it.”

  “Of course I want to fix it—” I began to shout. I’d worked on the damn thing for more than a year. I’d spent months thumbing through metric tons of library books about the Draft Riots and biographies of the great gilders and genealogies of Southern railroad families. I’d lost hours of sleep over each of its three hundred pages. But as I tried to muster my outrage, I felt these arguments simply evaporating in my windpipe. Before I could explain the strange, sinking feeling to myself, Anton suddenly began shouting.

  “This is it right here!”

  He was pointing wildly at a snow-covered sign for South Shore Drive. Just in time, I swung the wheel and we skidded around the icy corner, onto a little winding dirt road that led us over the crest of a hill. At the bottom sat a small boxy log cabin, its only frill a stovepipe chimney and, behind it, the frozen lake.

  An apple-cheeked boy, about our age, was shoveling snow off the walkway.

  “Dr. Ivanych, I presume?” I wondered aloud.

  “Don’t be silly. That’s Pasha, Ivan’s son,” Anton said, waving with the goofiest grin I’d ever seen. “We were kids together.”

  Then I remembered Anton’s ramblings the night before, when he had shouted “Pasha.” I’d assumed it was simply his delirium, but maybe this guy, not the painkillers, was why Anton had been so eager to see the good doctor. Pasha was sandy-haired and strapping. Anton had the door half open before we slid to a stop, and a moment later I found myself watching them in the warmest of embraces.

  “Shto sloocheelos s’ tvoyeemee volosami?” Anton cried.

  “Ty tochno takzhe vyglyadeesh!” Pasha replied with a laugh.

  I lingered getting the parking brake on. They seemed as though they wanted a moment—and as I rewrapped my scarf, my eyes fell on the yellow hatbox. Anton’s comment was still swirling around in my head, and I wanted to dig inside the box and pull out pages at random, scanning them for glints of literary gold so I could prove to him that it was certainly worth fixing. Angrily I grabbed the hatbox on my way out of the car and kept it tucked under my arm.

  “This is my oldest friend!” Anton cried, smiling at Pasha. “The best cormorant catcher in Belosaraiskaya Kosa!”

  I shook Pasha’s hand and introduced myself. I could just picture them as pale boys, chasing each other up the pebbly shores of a frozen Cyrillic Sea.

  “How . . . is your trip?” he asked, fumbling with the words. “You . . . slip-slide?”

  He mimed twisting an out-of-control steering wheel and I laughed—it certainly had been a slip-slide of a trip.

  “Pasha lives in Russia with his mother most of the time,” Anton explained. “His father’s English is a little better.”

  “Papa is on the ice,” Pasha interrupted, stabbing at the air, which was heavy with our misted breath. He motioned for us to follow him. Trudging through knee-high snow, I kept the hatbox under my arm as Anton and Pasha bantered in rapid-fire Russian, their guttural laughs echoing through the woods as we came down to the lake. About fifty yards out was a small hut, made from the lashed-together limbs of trees and covered in what appeared to be bearskins.

  Pasha and Anton trudged onto the ice without so much as a pause to check its thickness. “Don’t be a pansy, now,” Anton teased. Cursing at him and clutching the hatbox like a life preserver, I held my breath and stepped onto the ice. It held.

  “You stay?” Pasha asked eagerly as we treaded out to the bearskin hut. “If Papa catch a fish, we have some dinner?”

  Anton looked back at me eagerly. I bit my lip and smiled, hoping we might be able to discuss an exit strategy later. My mind wandered to Rose and the Tea Room, but it was too late to interfere with that now. How could I get her to see the truth? She wasn’t in love with Prince Philippos, or Umberto, or whomever. I’d seen her losing her usual composure on the divan in the warmth of the fire—she loved me.

  At last we arrived at the fishing hut. Pasha held back one great flank of bearskin and revealed the inside, lit with a dangling brass lantern and lined with great barbed hooks and augers of all sizes. And seated in the center was the wooly Russian himself. At long last, Dr. Ivanych.

  “Zdravstvooytye, doktor!” Anton cried, racing around a wide hole in the ice to embrace the elderly man. Pasha stood behind his father’s folding chair, and Anton crouched beside them. Immediately the three of them launched into an intense debate in Russian. The good doctor listened to Anton’s descriptions of his illness while tending to a line that dropped straight down into an icy hole, nearly two feet in diameter. Pasha bent down occasionally to chop at the constantly refreezing ice with a little chisel.

  As they jabbered on, the doctor suddenly reached into his things and produced a bottle of , with the familiar golden bison label. He waved it in the air like a murder weapon.

  “Kak ti syebya choostvooyesh? How much have you been drinking?”

  Anton blushed and squirmed as he mumbled his reply. I have no idea how much he confessed to drinking, but if our recycling bin was any indication, Anton was burning through s
everal liters of each week—and he only drank more of it when he got sick, as he claimed that it fortified him against disease and had antibacterial properties.

  “The buffalo grass in this contains a natural toxin called coumarin,” the doctor barked, “which is why it is banned by the FDA! Of course, it’s not enough to make you sick unless you’re drinking ten liters a week!”

  Mute with astonishment, Anton stared at the tiny bison design on the bottle like Caesar examining Brutus’s knife.

  I set the hatbox down on the ice and reached for Anton’s phone again. “Guess I should go tell Rose to set the apartment up for detox again.”

  Anton scowled and Pasha began teasing him in Russian. Soon they began to jab at each like little children.

  I ducked out of the fishing hut and stepped back onto the glacial lake. A few birds were rustling on the far end, and some smoke drifted from a distant chimney. The winter was dead silent. The cell phone barely got any reception, but after a few tries I managed to get a static-filled call through to Rose.

  “Anton . . . darling . . . there?” she sounded very far away. Static burst on the line.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Anton’s going to be fine. Dr. Ivanych cracked the case. He’s been poisoning himself with all that Polish vodka.”

  More static. I could not tell if Rose had heard me, so I went on. “Too bad. He was almost the first person to ever die of homesickness.” Was she laughing on the other end?

  “How’s the prince?” I asked stiffly, after a moment. More static.

  More static. “. . . he’s well . . . look let’s not . . . right now” and more static.

  Suddenly it seemed that my whole life was static. Years of garbled nothingness, sitting at a library carrel, letting my imagination do the living. Static. She and I looking after Anton together, but whenever things got hard she went off on auditions. She went off with her princes. And Anton and I would drink and drown our weary ears with fizzing gin and tonics and crackling cubes of ice. Her fiancés were called on and called off like extras in a crowd scene. She and I would drink until our minds snowed over; TV sets tuned to channels that never came in. Static. I’d thought that maybe once she read the novel I’d written for her . . . But no, it was all wrong. Anton was right. Masterful, she’d said, just like Colette in my story. But then, what had I expected? That was the line I’d written, and she always stuck to the script.