The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  Static. We were always. Stuck.

  “I love you,” I said, and, as if the phone knew that these words were not on the approved list, it hissed and burped. “Rose, don’t you know I love you?”

  Another burp. And then the call ended. I was alone again on ten acres of frozen water, listening to birds crying in the empty white sky. Had she heard me?

  It didn’t matter. If she had, she would pretend that she hadn’t. We’d been there before.

  For a minute I thought I might cry, and I wanted the tears to freeze to my eyes and ice them shut. But then I heard a chorus of shouts from the fishing hut.

  “Ya spoymal bol’shooyoo riboo! Ogromnaya riba!” The whole framework seemed to be shaking, the bearskin coming to life as the three Russians danced around inside of it.

  Spinning on the ice, I tried to slide back toward the tent. It seemed to get only further away from me. Careening on shoes never meant for such surfaces, I collapsed inside the tent just in time to see Dr. Ivanych thrusting the enormous spear down into the hole in the ice, which had doubled in size and seemed to have come alive. Water sprayed up in every direction. Pasha had the line tight in both hands; Anton ducked for cover. With a mighty effort, Dr. Ivanych raised the spear from the water, bringing up with it the biggest fish I’d ever seen. Its scales were black and iridescent, and its eyes opaque. The primeval thing thrashed around in the tiny space. Watery, red blood pumped from its side as it struggled to somehow escape its fate. I was in awe of it. I pitied it. In one moment, it had been the elusive monarch of its frigid kingdom, and in the next, it had been yanked upward into the bright and unbreatheable heavens.

  “We’ll feast tonight!” the doctor roared, getting the great, flipping tail above the lip of the hole. With a mighty heave, he launched the fish into an empty corner—only it wasn’t empty. Sitting there on the ice was my yellow hatbox, just inches from the writhing beast, its great gills flapping futilely.

  “Get that! Hatbox! Get it!” Anton snapped. Pasha was closest, but he didn’t seem to understand. “Hatbox, hatbox, hatbox!”

  I ordered my limbs to move but they were frozen. It happened in a split second. The fish’s powerful tail curled away and then snapped backward, slamming into the box. It shot sideways, into the icy hole and down into the depths of Lake Waccabuc.

  And it was gone.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Pasha and the doctor were only mildly confused, but Anton was ashen faced. He knew what was inside. He was one of three people who ever would know.

  “It’s OK,” I stammered, finding my legs again. “It’s OK. Really.”

  Numb, I helped the others lug the dead fish back up to the log cabin. There were other, older drafts. Reworked endings, but none complete. I looked down at the firm, oily tail of the great fish in my hand and felt something strangely like gratitude.

  Anton and I watched as Pasha and the doctor laid the fish out on a long workbench. Working in silence, father and son took turns running the blunt edge of a knife all along its silvery length, scraping away the scales to reveal raw pink flesh beneath.

  “You were hiding,” Anton said finally. “All that research about how paint was mixed in 1860, and where all the horses were bred, and the history of Manhattan contract law, and . . . ” He rolled his eyes like he might be sick.

  “So . . . ?”

  “So you were avoiding the truth,” Anton said. “It was a love story. Hiding in a textbook.”

  I knew he was right. I’d built a three-hundred-page house of cards, a carefully balanced illusion, without an ounce of the truth that would cement it in place.

  Anton seemed apologetic, but I knew he was being honest. This was why we were friends. This was why I cleaned up the wonton soup bowls and recycled the vodka bottles. It wasn’t about having a trunk full of two-thousand-dollar cans of caviar and an apartment with a view of Union Square. It was about having someone who gave it to you straight when you wanted to be lied to. Staring down into the great yellow globe of the fish’s eye, I said a soft, silent thanks. He had freed me from something I’d been unable to escape for more than a year. Maybe it was about time I picked up an honest trade, became a doctor, or a fisherman, or a dishwasher at Silly Nick’s. Anything but a writer.

  We watched as the doctor set down his blunt knife and picked up a longer, much sharper one. As Pasha held the fish steady, the doctor slit open the great beast’s belly from head to tailfin. Anton and I gasped as its mysterious purple innards spilled out onto the bench. Without even thinking of it, I reached over to hold Anton up, getting there before his knees even began to buckle.

  “Come on,” I suggested. “Let’s go inside and clean off.”

  But though Anton’s face was white as the snow outside, he stayed put. His eyes followed every motion, each slice. As he inhaled the oily stink of the fish, I saw his lips moving slightly, choosing words, testing phrases, timing cadences. He was writing the scene, already. Immediately, I felt my own pulse quickening. I wanted it, too. Here it was—right in front of me, the end of a much better story than the one I had lost. The story of how I’d lost the story.

  That night, we ate more caviar—with blinis this time—and we roasted the fish in Dr. Ivanych’s roaring fireplace. The food and fire and vodka soon warmed me. Anton and Pasha spoke of Mother Russia. The doctor told stories about noble fools he and Mr. Prishibeyev had known in the war. Stories about men of God and beautiful peasant women. Stories about fathers and sons and brothers-in-arms. Deep below the ice, my great, terrible novel was still disintegrating in the darkness. Paintbrushes and lovers and gold, coming apart into words and letters and dots.

  5

  Malice and Desperation in the Grand Canyon

  “By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked—it’s the Grand Canyon.”

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE CRACK-UP

  As soon as I finally decided to break up the wedding, I felt much better. Julian was absolutely right—I’d been down and out the whole trip, and what for? I’d known I was going to do it—all along—and I was feeling lousy only because I thought feeling lousy was the right thing to do. I’d groused through the interminable cab ride to JFK and I’d sulked during the five-hour flight to Vegas—the first flight I’d ever been on in my life, and I had complained all through it, even after Julian so kindly ordered up the second bottle of Clicquot. I was still bitching as I—for the first time in my life—twisted the knob on the side of my gold watch and observed the hours breeze backward. I whined while I rented the car—even after Julian paid to upgrade us to the AC Shelby Cobra—and when we finally checked in to our suite at the Bellagio, I’d been so sullen that Julian had hardly any choice but to leave me behind for the night. He had much to celebrate, what with the sale of his first novel in what all the publishing-industry magazines had called “a major deal.” I was proud of him, and at the same time so jealous I could have killed him—so it was for the best that Julian popped a few sky-blue pills and traipsed off to watch the fountains firing off in their mechanized ballet and the roulette wheels clicking and spinning and the contortionists at Cirque du Soleil twisting inside one another. If the past could be counted on to repeat, I expected to hear Julian returning to his room in under four hours, with some wan, waxed bartender in tow. I’d hear the shaking of more pills out of more bottles, followed by animalistic engagements, which I’d drown out with something on Turner Classic Movies. But until then, I stood out on our balcony, staring down thirty stories into a neon abyss. I wanted very badly to do something I knew was terrible, and only once I’d settled upon simply, really doing it did I feel a great weight lifting off me at last.

  Just one thing still bothered me. I’d been asked to write this article about the wedding for Esquire, seeing as Evelyn had starred in yet another Broadway hit this season and . . . well, all right, truth: technically, Julian had been aske
d to write this article and he said he couldn’t possibly, what with the final edits for his novel due just after the wedding, so he’d handed the assignment off to me.

  Regardless, now that I’d decided to ruin everything, I wondered if they’d actually want that money back. Unless, I decided, why not write about the ruining of it? Why not become part of the story? Why not go full gonzo? “Malice and Desperation in the Grand Canyon.” What a title! They’d love it—surely. Celebrating in advance, I ordered a room service filet mignon and raided the minibar.

  Surely my new story would be more interesting than one about how the Aphrodite-esque Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont, beloved star of Mourning Becomes Electra, wedded the utterly uninteresting Dr. Avinash Singh. The good Dr. Singh was a geologist at UC San Diego, whose life’s single act of spinal fortitude had been to insist to his parents—Indian royalty of one of the former princely states—that his wedding be held at the Grand Canyon, here in America, and not in India as they demanded. Not for its immense grandeur or romantic color upon sunset—but so that he would not have to pause long from his study of the mile-deep chasm and its forty-million-year-old rocks.

  Avinash and Evelyn planned all the usual trappings of an Indian wedding: the groom would ride an elephant along the rim of the canyon and they would exchange vows before the Agni, the Sacred Fire. I’d packed three of the New York Public Library’s finest books on the subject of the traditional Hindu wedding, or Vivaah, and two more on the mighty Grand Canyon itself—all for research purposes. Whether or not I ruined the wedding, I had always fully intended to write the hell out of the event.

  Giving Evelyn away would be Mr. Demont (accompanied by his fourth and third wives) and Evelyn’s mother, the first former Mrs. Demont. Also in attendance: the bride’s childhood friend, Julian McGann, presumed heir to McGann International Trading, whose as yet untitled but already acclaimed novel would be out next summer; joined by his roommate, Some Nobody, the writer of this article, who slept with the bride-to-be on six of the seven nights prior to the wedding. (It would have been seven of seven, too, if Julian hadn’t dragged me out to Vegas early, in a clumsy attempt to put some distance between me and Evelyn.) The bride, incidentally, couldn’t have given two shits about rocks, however old they might well be, and suffered from bouts of intense vertigo that once kept her from climbing the stairs at Lincoln Center, and, so, naturally she had privately expressed some reservations about being married on the edge of the deepest chasm in the country. I considered all this as I ate my steak—every bloody bit of it—and concluded that it seemed barely avoidable that I should stop the wedding. Satisfied, I settled in to sleep.

  • • •

  Julian had not yet returned, to my great relief. That night I dreamed about Evelyn’s hands. Like the last time we slept together they were covered in henna for the haath pila karna ritual, a deep sienna except for a single empty circle on her right hand. I kissed this spot in my dream, as I had done in waking. Then I saw a magnificent elephant towering over us. On his back rode a man in a turban whose face was covered in flowers. He shrieked and lowered a wickedly curved sword toward us. Evelyn’s mehndi-tattooed hands flew up to cover my eyes and then suddenly I was awake and the phone was ringing: the front desk, extending an invitation to please join Julian McGann and his wife, Bethany, for breakfast.

  I laughed and took this to mean that Julian, and his sense of humor, had forgiven me for my grumpy trespasses of the previous twenty-four hours and that, over caviar-freckled blinis, we would soon be back on track again. However, when I stepped into the dining room to find Julian sharing still more Clicquot with a lithe young woman in a white satin dress, I suddenly wondered if it wasn’t a joke after all.

  “Buongiorno, amico mio! Meet my wife, Bethany Szabó . . . erh . . . McGann!”

  The gorgeous dark-haired woman hugged me with two smooth arms, allowing her jawbreaker-sized diamond ring to linger in my sight line as we parted.

  “Have a glass,” she purred, pouring out the last of the Champagne and beckoning for another bottle. I downed my glass without hesitation and looked at Julian for some indication that he was playing some kind of elaborate prank. But he was absorbed in a Blue Period canvas on the wall—a drab, flattened beggar who seemed not quite in keeping with the flash and glamour of the rest of the restaurant.

  “This is a surprise,” I said, smiling sweetly at Bethany. “Do you and Julian know each other from school or something?”

  She cackled. “No, he won me. Last night in a game of craps.”

  “Who had you before?” I asked, but Julian interrupted.

  “I was up by nearly four, then down six. Now I’m back up—only down two—but I think, if I hurry, I can get in another hour. Maybe two more.” If he was speaking in increments of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands I did not want to know.

  He was twitchy—grabbing at the elbow fabric of his rumpled suit jacket and lifting his glass as if to drink and then setting it down again without taking it to his lips.

  “We’ve got to hit the road if we’re getting to the wedding. The Grand Canyon’s five hours away, at least,” I said.

  “That’s why we got the Shelby Cobra. We’ll be there in four.”

  “I’ll go and find myself something to wear,” Bethany announced suddenly, pushing back from the table as the waiter arrived with the new bottle of Champagne.

  “You’re— She’s coming?” I asked Julian.

  “That’s the idea,” Julian said. Bethany smiled, as if this were a great compliment. He kissed her awkwardly and said, “Buy yourself something lovely, my love. Charge it to our room.”

  As she slipped away to the shopping area, I repeated, “Well, this is a surprise,” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Julian had brought boys back to our apartment of every size, shape, color, and creed, but I’d never once seen a girl tiptoeing out of his room in the morning.

  Julian said nothing else and drank no more of the Champagne. Was he pleased with himself? Was he waiting for me to ask him why he would do such a thing—or if he was at all serious?

  Somewhere, once, I read that the only mind a writer can’t see into is the mind of a better writer. When I watched Julian watching the world, I was always reminded of this.

  After breakfast, Julian returned to the casino floor and put his money down on the first table he found—something involving Chinese tiles and ten-sided dice—and before the hour was up he had won back his two (thousand) and made two more—which I had hoped was enough to cover the chiffon monstrosity that Bethany emerged in, twenty minutes later. We cashed the chips and checked out of our room.

  Being far soberer than Mrs. McGann, I at least got to drive the Shelby Cobra again. The car was built for two, so Bethany squeezed herself onto Julian’s lap, a position he seemed extremely uncomfortable with until he took three red pills from his bag. Then he loosened up instantly. As Bethany scanned the radio stations for atrocious pop music, I drove us first along the unlit-neon corridors that led out of Las Vegas, and then past the billboards along the highway heading south. I kept checking my watch as we went along, but in the Shelby Cobra time seemed to stand still. Soon the billboards were replaced by scraggly pines, and then these were gone, leaving nothing but flat red earth—dry as far as the eye could see. With less fear of running into passing troopers, Julian dipped into his medicine chest more liberally and soon was wrestling the radio tuner away from Bethany.

  “Synth and drivel!” he shouted. “I demand Bach! I demand the Magnificat! Look at all this fucking flatness! Barren as the Martian plains. Driver! Take me to Olympus Mons!”

  “Tutto pronto, signor!” I barked as Julian located something from Tosca that must have been classical enough for his current mood.

  “So how did they meet?” Bethany asked me. It took me a moment to realize that she was referring to Evelyn and Avinash.

  “He came to see her doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” I shouted over a soaring tenor. “He was in town for the Am
erican Geological Society’s annual conference. Presenting a paper on some fancy rocks he found.”

  Julian interjected in a robotic monotone, “Dr. Avinash Singh’s research centers on the so-called two-billion-year-old Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the canyon and its relationship to the Brahma and Rama Schists. His paper concludes with a suggestion of how the younger Zoroaster Granite came to be stratigraphically lower than the older Vishnu Schist.”

  Bethany blinked and said, “Well, that all sounds very interesting.”

  “Believe me, even if you understood it, it wouldn’t be,” Julian said.

  Glad to have Julian’s support, in a sense, I continued: “Supposedly, Avinash was so moved by her performance that he insisted on coming backstage afterward and asking her out to dinner.”

  “Unfortunately he was so nervous about it all that he threw up halfway through the soup course,” Julian added.

  “That is so romantic,” Bethany giggled. I begged to differ, but considering that her engagement had involved a pair of dice and a high-stakes wager, perhaps it was all relative.

  “Pull over!” Julian shouted. “I must make number one!”

  I pulled over the Shelby Cobra and while Julian ducked behind some boulders to relieve himself, Bethany stretched out on the leather seat and helped herself to some of the contents of Julian’s pill bottles. Dedicated as I was to Evelyn, it was still hard not to notice Bethany’s ample décolletage as she fumbled with his overnight bag.

  “What’s this?” she asked, pulling out a sheaf of typewritten pages, covered in editorial pencil marks.