The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  And for once I thought I knew exactly what was running through Julian’s mind. He was out of his mind, of course. But underneath that was something else. Something I’d never seen before, but that had always been there, whenever he’d looked at me, from the very first day: he pitied me. Not in the same snobby way that he pitied everyone and everything, but because I had no idea who I really was. He’d seen me all along, like a moth fluttering repeatedly against a windowpane. He’d grown attached to me, gotten to know the pattern of my wings against the glass. I’d always been on the other side of it, though. I’d been circling out there for so long that I’d forgotten.

  I thought he would hit me again, or drag me away, but instead he let me go. He just began walking off the other way, toward the blazing, open sands and the red distant hills. Perhaps he wanted some space, or just to lick his wounds. Perhaps something had finally snapped inside him that would not be mended. I didn’t understand exactly. And I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see or speak to Julian again for ten long years.

  I hurried back to Evelyn’s wedding tent.

  When I slipped my head back through the rear flap, I saw that she was not alone anymore. Avinash stood a few feet from her, dressed in magenta silks that leant him no aura of impressiveness at all. A shirtless man, whom I took to be the priest, was chanting and pressing a golden coin onto the untattooed void on Evelyn’s hand. There were no other people in the tent—no relatives or bridesmaids or elephants of any kind. This was the real wedding ceremony; everything that would happen out on the mandap in front of the others was technically just for show.

  Evelyn could not see me. The little picture frame that she had taken from her bag earlier lay beside her makeup tray. I watched as the priest clasped her hand to Avinash’s and began to bind them together, with the gold coin pressed between them. I opened my mouth to speak, but only dry desert air came out.

  There she stood, only a few feet away from me, but she looked like she looked on stage—completely real and yet entirely someone else. I’d never been so close to her while she was in character. When Julian or Avinash or any of the other men—and there had been many—came to see her, they sat in the front row, center. Only my eyes had the capacity to unravel her.

  She gazed into Avinash’s heavily lashed eyes with a serene confidence. It was a gaze of expectations being firmly met. Of plans having at last come to fruition.

  The priest’s voice reached a higher pitch as he knotted their hands together and reached for the fringe of her sari. I watched as he wove these tiny threads to Avinash’s dhoti. She breathed a little deeper, but she wasn’t really nervous. She was only playing the part.

  I said nothing. I did nothing.

  When the priest’s fingers parted from the knot, he concluded his prayer and it was done. Evelyn and Avinash were wed.

  She never saw me. And when she moved away from Avinash, her face did not change at all. This character was permanent now. Evelyn had become someone new. In a few minutes they would go out to the mandap and revolve around the Agni, and they would make their traditional promises to each other in full view of their families and assembled international guests, but it was already done, so I took off to find the car. I couldn’t stand to stay and watch the rest. I knew how it all would go down.

  Up on the mandap, Evelyn and Avinash would place strings of flowers around each other’s necks. They would circle the holy fire seven times and make their seven vows to each other. And as they stared into each other’s eyes, they would come to what was really my favorite part of the whole ceremony, when it came right down to it.

  We are word and meaning, united.

  You are thought and I am sound.

  May the night be honey-sweet for us.

  May the morning be honey-sweet for us.

  May the earth be honey-sweet for us.

  May the heavens be honey-sweet for us.

  May the plants be honey-sweet for us.

  May the sun be all honey for us.

  May the cows yield us honey-sweet milk.

  As the heavens are stable,

  as the earth is stable,

  as the mountains are stable,

  as the whole universe is stable,

  so may our union be permanently settled.

  Whenever I made it back to the hotel, I would throw these details together and finish this article and get very drunk and catch the first flight out in the morning. Most of these holes could be patched together. Everything else was just the Grand Canyon.

  As I drove off along the rim in the Shelby Cobra, I found it easier and easier to remind myself of how incredibly small I was, and how incredibly small everything about me, and my life, and my love, and my world, was, too.

  What Was Found

  6

  A Plagiarist in Dubai

  It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

  —ARAB PROVERB

  Even with the full moon, it’s terribly dark out there tonight, isn’t it? That’s the desert for you. You should try the 51 cocktail here. It’s quite good. Are you in Dubai on business? Honeymooning? Oh, wonderful! I should leave you two alone then. You’re sure? Well, if you insist, then, of course, I’ll join you. Just for one drink—on me. Three 51’s, min fadlik. There we go. So, you two just arrived from—? Oh, lovely. I’m from New York, myself. Pleasure meeting you both. Call me Timothy Wallace. Professor Timothy Wallace, actually.

  How did I wind up in Dubai? Well, it’s certainly an interesting story—one of my better ones. Unless, of course, you want the truth. The truth is only slightly less interesting than the story. But, then again, it’s the truth—so it has that unique quality. Of all the possible stories out there, from the fantastic to the mundane, only one of them qualifies as the truth. It’s OK! You can laugh. I won’t take any offense. Perhaps I’ve had one too many. It’s just, you see, I don’t usually tell the truth, as a rule. But every rule has exceptions. Maybe mine is that I can tell the truth only in strange bars to lovely couples, when the moon is full behind the Burj Al Arab and the night is especially dark. Fortunately for you both, tonight is just such a night. Ah! Here come our drinks.

  Now, see, I’ve gone and made you a little nervous. That’s good. Will he tell us the truth? Or will it be a lie? How will we be able to tell, one way or the other? If I told you, for instance, that I lived for many years with the international bestselling author Jeffrey Oakes? If I told you that the woman I love is, today, Her Royal Highness, Princess of Luxembourg? No, no. Don’t apologize for laughing. Of course, you wouldn’t believe that. Tricky thing about the truth . . . that it is often stranger than fiction is only the beginning. But, I’m sorry—I’m lecturing already. It’s something of an occupational hazard. You fall a little bit in love with the sound of your own voice. You start chasing little threads and before long you’ve lost the point entirely.

  Now, how did I come to Dubai? Well. I’ll begin at the middle, which is where all good truths begin.

  • • •

  One year ago, in May, I stood in front of a poorly ventilated room in Manhattan, packed with thirty-five jittery students, all just moments away from completing my course on New Journalism. Pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard, I swirled my hands through the dead air, bringing the final, trembling chords of my class to its crescendo. It went a little something like this:

  “A few final thoughts, then, on this, our last day. What is New Journalism? Not quite fiction and not quite reality. We began the semester by looking at Gay Talese’s piece ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.’ Talese followed Sinatra around for three months, trying to get an interview and ended up talking to every person around Sinatra instead. Esquire shelled out five grand to cover his costs, making it one of the most expensive articles ever written at the time. And in the end, he never spoke to Sinatra, not once. But Talese constructed an interview, anyway: he wrote what he knew Sinatra would have said. Now, compare this with what we’ve just read: the work of Stephen Glass, ro
gue fraud reporter of the New Republic, who fabricated not just interviews but facts, and entire people, and the corporation of Jukt Micronics—even inventing the subject of his piece: a young hacker who violated Jukt’s servers, and then conned Jukt into paying him a fortune to protect them against future attacks. Is there a difference? Where is the line? James Frey. Jayson Blair. Kaavya Viswanathan. Blair Hornstine. The countless others out there who have surely gone undiscovered. Ours is a new generation of plagiarists. Armed with Wikipedia and Google, we can manufacture our own truths. What else should we expect in an age when even the real reporters, off in the Middle East, sent back only government-approved messages? Move over Jennings and Murrow. No need for the cold, uninterpreted facts. Make way for Stewart and Colbert! In our era, truthiness is in the dictionary, and Dan Rather got fired for not authenticating the Killian documents. And in his wake we’ve found, twisting and shouting, the Bill O’Reillys and the Chris Matthewses, spinning us sugar-sweet falsehoods. Plagiarism, class, is the new American art form.”

  Just a brief pause for poignancy, and then—“Have a great summer. Leave your final papers by the door.”

  They just eat this shit up. With their little silver spoons, they do. Every year a couple of kids even applaud before rushing out the door. A little irreverence, a little old-fashioned fire and brimstone, and you’ve got them. Back in the sixties, I might have been one of those professors who got everyone to join a cult or march on Washington in protest, but as fun as that may be, it’s not my MO. After I charge their brains with my own brand of skeptical electricity, I unleash them—the New Cynics—upon a world that is slowly and happily critiquing itself to death.

  The truth is that I actually have the greatest respect for those fantastic liars. Someday I’d like to teach a class entirely about them. Late Great American Fakes. My humble thesis will be that America no longer desires the truth, only the reasonable facsimile thereof. Like battered lovers, we’re willing to settle. Our sense of values still holds us to dismiss that which we know, outright, to be blatant lies, but we avoid the truth with equal intensity. We wish to remain in the gray interregnum of half belief, when at all possible.

  But. How I came to Dubai. Yes. Well, that final day of class, after the students had all wandered away, I erased the board and brushed off the chalk dust. Then I threw away the stack of term papers waiting for me by the door, hit the lights, and headed out.

  There, just in the doorway, I collided with Saiyid Ghazali, a particularly bright-eyed student of mine, who always sat in the first row, paying rapt attention to my lectures. Probably as a result of his upbringing, Saiyid was impossibly respectful and polite. Without fail he raised his hand before speaking, and he never spoke without making full eye contact. He never slouched in his chair. His notes were written in neat shorthand, and from what I could tell, as accurate as a court stenographer’s. He’d gotten a perfect score on every quiz, had never missed a single class, and his final paper, had I read it, would surely have been flawless and insightful.

  “Uhm . . . Saiyid. Good to see you.” I wondered if there was any way that through the door he’d seen me dumping the term papers.

  “Professor Wallace,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your class this semester.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “I’m teaching Methods and Practices of Modern Journalism in the fall. It’s past registration, but if you come on the first day, I’d be happy to sign you in.”

  He looked crestfallen. “I am afraid that I will not be able to accept your kind offer. My parents are transferring me to another university next semester.”

  “Your parents are quite smart,” I said. “Truth is, this is not a very good university.”

  This remark received a few stares from passing students and one elderly professor, who knew I was right. The older ones have been around long enough to remember when our city-funded university was still a pioneer of urban schooling, instead of a cesspool that hands out degrees like lollipops at a barber’s.

  “Every year,” I explained, “our standards decline, our attrition rate rises, faculty retire and are replaced by adjuncts, and all the while our class sizes swell with ill-prepared students with no idea why they’re here. It’s no surprise. It’s America. Even our little public institution is a business. We soak the FAFSA money out of the freshmen, knowing they’ll drop out after a semester and return to their dead-end jobs. Then we funnel everything to the graduate school, where the students actually accomplish things that make the university look good—because most of them were properly educated elsewhere, and the cycle continues.”

  “You are very wise,” Saiyid said, nodding. “I shall miss you greatly next semester.”

  Saiyid was certainly smart enough to join the ranks at NYU or Columbia—more advanced practitioners of these same shell games—but I didn’t get to ask where he was bound, because just then, the chair of our department came marching down the hallway.

  “Professor Wallace?” he called down the corridor as soon as he’d spotted me. I pretended not to have heard him—the chair and I had never officially met. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how he knew my name. Then I realized that I was still lingering in the doorway of my assigned classroom, still wearing my checked-tweed blazer.

  “Professor Wallace?” he called again. “May I have a word?”

  My first impulse was to pretend to be another professor, or a student—just overdressed for the final day of school—but Saiyid, at that moment, pressed his hands together in gratitude and said loudly, “Excuse me. You must be busy. Have a wonderful summer, Professor Wallace.”

  There was no way out. The chair continued his advance—staring directly at me. I looked at my watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to run to a meeting with another student,” I said.

  “Oh, this should just take a second,” he said with a nasty little smile.

  I was trapped in a badly tiled hallway with buzzing fluorescent lighting, about to face up to my crimes.

  For the problem, you see, is that I am not really Professor Timothy Wallace.

  You see? I told you. It’s much better told from the middle. That’s Storytelling 101—not that I’ve ever taught such a class, though I think you’ll agree I’d be quite good at it—no, but I’ve certainly taken my fair share of such classes. Before I became Professor Timothy Wallace, you see, I was something of a writer myself. Now, for the beginning part.

  The real Timothy Wallace was a Scotsman I met at a writing course at the Gotham Workshop—Narrative for Fiction and Non was that professor’s clever little title. I’d have called it something more like, Stories: Straight and Slanted, but I digress. Tim was, then, an eager young journalism student who sat beside me at the great round workshop table where our works were weekly eviscerated. He wrote with great passion about the city’s crumbling public school system—about boys named Deshawn and girls named Jessina who kept their feet up to avoid the roaches in their classrooms and who sheltered their heads daily from falling chunks of plaster as they filed up and down institutional stairwells into hallways funneling five times the number of students anticipated by the architects of days past.

  I admired Tim’s sense of civic responsibility. At first I suspected his outrage for the underprivileged was just a way of getting bleeding-heart publishers to print his work, but soon I saw that he genuinely cared for these children. He was certainly very different from any writer I’d been friends with previously.

  The children wrote him letters, and he spent Saturdays with them at the park. He was a good person, in other words, and being around him made me feel like a good person too, even as I was furiously rewriting old stories about all the not good people I’d known and loved, before. Egotistical and insane writers. Self-absorbed socialites with emotional distance issues. The very people who had chewed me up and spit me out. I dreamed of tying it all together into a novella that could encapsulate an article I’d written for Esquire (though they’d refused to print it), as well as m
y only published story—“Anton and I”—a chilly little work of fiction that had received little fanfare and vanished with even less. The larger novella that I envisioned followed a young man from Raleigh who sells his soul to become a writer; moves to Manhattan with his college roommate, Julian; and proceeds to lose everything—his epic first novel is lost in a lake; Evelyn, his one true love, marries an Indian prince; and he and Julian get in a fistfight on the rim of the Grand Canyon; etcetera, etcetera.

  One evening, after a particularly brutal disembowelment of Tim’s piece, “No Number-Two Pencil Left Behind,” about the suspicious relationship between the standardized-testing industry and the Bush administration, he and I went out to the Lion’s Head Tavern on Amsterdam. There we often acerbically discussed the latest flashes in the pan while we pretended to be great writers ourselves—like Norman Mailer or Lanford Wilson—even though their Lion’s Head had been in the Village and closed for years.

  “I thought it was very well written,” I told him. “I liked Deshawn’s line about how the tests were like evolution, like survival of the fittest, except the people who survived were just the ones who cheated the best.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tim moaned into his beer. “I can write it as well as I want, but without hard evidence from former Department of Education people, it all may as well be fiction.” He paused a moment and then added, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said, getting up to order a fourth round. From the bar I could see that poor Tim was truly crushed. When he thought I wasn’t looking he took out a small photograph of Jessina that he kept in his wallet—taken on the steps of the New York Public Library, while she chased pigeons at the bases of the great stone lions. He’d taken her there on a Sunday, after her family had finished church. He told me she’d read for four and a half hours without stopping. At home she had no books. The ones that Tim gave her, Jessina’s mother kept throwing away; I’d never understood why.