The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  The autumn of my sixteenth birthday, I worked after school and on Sundays, serving apfelstrudel and einspänners at Ludwig’s Café in the Raleigh Museum of Art. Sundays were the best days for tips, because all the patrons getting out of church were feeling simultaneously undercaffeinated and overcharitable. Before the bells were done ringing, all the most affluent ladies in North Raleigh were rushing over from Methodist Saints United, wearing hats that my buddy Rodrigo said ought to be in the abstract art exhibits. But the real reason I looked forward to Sundays was that the Terpsichorean Society held its debutante classes in the event space across the hall, and while the well-heeled mothers lost track of time gossiping at Ludwig’s beneath the golden Portrait of Colette Marsh, Rodrigo and I would go back to the storeroom window and stare at the debutantes.

  After their class ended, the debutantes would line up in the narrow space between the café’s dumpsters, where their mothers couldn’t see them, and pass Camels carefully, so as not to fleck ash on their white rehearsal dresses. When they saw us looking they tossed cigarette butts at the window, but they couldn’t do anything too loudly or they’d risk blowing their cover. It was the end of 1993, and we knew we’d become adults inside of a new century—and there these girls were, being trained for the last one. Mostly they ignored us until Rodrigo tapped on the window to warn them that the mothers were calling for their checks and that they had better hurry back inside.

  Some Sundays Rodrigo just looked and some Sundays he called out to Suzanne White, the tall girl from our school whom he swore he would marry. Together, he claimed, they would breed a superior race of half–Puerto Rican/half–Southern Belle babies. For my part, I slunk down, hoping that none of them would see me in my feathered cap and olive lederhosen, and pretending that I just happened to be passing my break reading The Woman in White near the window.

  “We were supposed to read that for school or something?” Rodrigo would ask.

  “Extra credit,” I’d lie.

  The truth was that I liked to read—especially old books about eccentric heiresses and menacing counts and guys with names like Sir Percival Glyde, but I’d learned long ago that this was a preference best kept to myself.

  “What is wrong with you?” Rodrigo would ask. “Don’t you want to look at these fine ladies?” He gave his cap a stylish slant and let one suspender fall off his shoulder, as if he wore this sort of thing especially for them.

  “Sure,” I’d say, “I just don’t want them to look at me.”

  “Well, how are they ever going to talk to you unless they know you’re looking?”

  “I don’t want them to talk to me. They don’t want to talk to me. They don’t even want to talk to you.”

  Rodrigo’s eyes would bug as if I’d just tried to convince him that the sun would burn out tomorrow. “Hell yes they want to talk to me.”

  “We clean tables at an Austrian coffeehouse, in a city whose residents generally think Austria is where kangaroos come from. Come on. Your mother is a housekeeper and your father mows lawns.”

  “My mom runs a cleaning service. My dad owns a landscaping company. We’re entrepreneurs, jerk.”

  “But they’re debutantes,” I’d remind him. “They’re going to go to Princeton and Duke and marry inbred trust-funders with yachts who play polo and shoot skeet.”

  “That’s pretty funny, coming from Mr. Ten-Under-Par.”

  Rodrigo liked to tease me for playing golf on the high school team. In truth, being on the team did my reputation more harm than good. I loved to play, but the other boys on the team all hated me, because I was better than them and because my mother was a flight attendant and didn’t belong to the Briar Creek Country Club like their mothers did. My father was a man she’d met seventeen years ago, during a layover in Newark. Together they’d gotten swept up in the heady, romantic winter of 1976.

  “So, they marry Mr. Trust Fund,” Rodrigo would say, cracking open the window so the girls could hear. “But they’ll be home all day making sweet, sweet love to me!”

  Suzanne would glare, and as the other girls pretended to be shocked, she’d flip her perfectly manicured middle finger straight up in the air, and smile.

  Meanwhile, I’d angle one of the silver baking trays toward the window so that I could catch the reflection of Betsy Littleford, the only other girl there from our school. A silent blonde with ice blue eyes, Betsy Littleford never smiled. Not as far as I could remember. Not even all the way back to the fifth grade when I’d first seen her.

  “That’s funny,” she’d say flatly whenever some teacher tried to coax even the slightest giggle from her with a joke in class. “That’s really very funny.”

  Rodrigo called her “Stepford Betsy” and liked to theorize that inside she was just all Disney animatronics. He loudly speculated about someday finding out for himself, but I dreamed of simply someday making her smile. Just once.

  And I’d never have done it if her brother hadn’t gotten his skull caved in during our match against Asheville late that fall.

  It started on the seventh hole, when Mark White had sliced a shot deep into the woods, and both teams wound up shivering for ten minutes in the chilly November air, watching the golden leaves spiraling down from the trees, until the judges went in after him and caught him sipping a little airport bottle of vodka. Our team took a double penalty and Coach Holland angrily sent White to clean everyone’s clubs. When I, then, had the audacity to hit a beautiful two-hundred-and-ten-yard drive on the eighth hole, Mark dumped my golf clubs into a water hazard “by accident.” I didn’t really care. The other boys had Titleists and Mizunos; mine were just an odd mix of yard-sale finds, half rusted already at purchase. But while I quietly fished them out, the real trouble began.

  Billy Littleford, our captain, enjoyed putting his friends in their places, especially Mark. Everyone in our school adored Billy—even me. In movies, the king of the school was always a tyrant, taking lunch money and breaking hearts with reckless abandon. But our king, Billy, was as kind as he was suave. He didn’t stand for anyone picking on either the quiet kids, like me, or the loudmouths like Rodrigo. Once, when I was short a dollar at the front of an impatient lunch line, and in front of everyone was about to put my burrito back under the warming lamps, Billy Littleford strolled up suddenly to spot me a five. “Thanks for getting me those cigarettes before the game on Saturday,” he said earnestly, though I’d done no such thing and he did not smoke. “I’ll pay you the rest by tomorrow, I promise.”

  If Billy ruled our school, he did so benevolently, and for this he was beloved by teachers and classmates alike. Hence, Billy was forever able to charm his way out of whatever trouble he got himself into. That afternoon on the golf course, he’d seen Mark dump my clubs in the water. He waited until Mark was hovering near a sand trap, and then Billy tackled Mark headfirst into the sand, kissing him, deeply on the mouth.

  “Oh, Mark, you’re such a stud!” he shouted. Both teams erupted in laughter.

  When Mark began pushing him away, Billy clutched at his broken heart. “But Mark!” he cried. “You said we could finally tell people!” As Billy minced around in fake tears, even some of the judges were laughing.

  Mark spat sand out and wiped at his eyes. Half blind, he grabbed a rake from the edge of the trap. We were supposed to use these rakes to smooth out the sand, like they were little Zen gardens; Mark tried to use his to smooth out Billy’s face. Billy dodged the swinging rake and began to bob and weave around the course like a cartoon boxer. Grinning boyishly at the laughing Asheville players, Billy did not realize he was weaving directly into the backswing of their teammate, who was warming up for the ninth hole. The boy from Asheville brought his 3-iron out of the swing, clean through an imaginary ball, and straight back down into the side of Billy’s head.

  The following day, every newspaper left behind on the tables at Ludwig’s had run a photo of a grinning Billy at last year’s Homecoming Parade. The reports said he was at Wakefield North Hospital, in and o
ut of consciousness, and the doctors’ prognosis was that he could lose half his IQ and that his motor skills would be greatly reduced, forever.

  Even Rodrigo was upset about it. “They ought to throw that pendejo in jail,” he snapped at a photo of Mark White that had made the inside page, after the jump. Mark was Suzanne’s older brother, so Rodrigo didn’t like him much to begin with.

  The café was closing, and the museum outside was teeming with glitzy people who had come for the Terpsichorean Society’s Annual Debutante Ball. I doubted that Betsy would still be going, but I hurried through my table wiping just in case.

  When I next looked up, I noticed that a woman had come into the closed café and was peering at the Portrait of Colette Marsh, a small golden nude that hung above the bricked-up fireplace. Most people didn’t notice the painting because it was about the size of a page in a paperback book, but when the light came through, late in the day, it gleamed. I’d passed many wayward hours staring up at this golden woman, filled with as close to a religious feeling as I had ever had. I wondered who Colette Marsh had been, and who had painted the portrait. The tiny plaque said merely that it was from 1863. ARTIST UNKNOWN.

  “We’re closed for the day, ma’am,” I said to the woman, who wore a long black fur. Her hair was swirled up in a severe blond vortex on the back of her head.

  “It’s simply sickening,” she muttered as I came closer.

  My cheeks flushed as I glanced up at the painting’s golden nipples. “The managers got some complaints. That’s why they moved it so high up.” She did not look away. So I added, “Plus, that’s real gold on there, I guess.”

  The woman finally looked at me for the first time since I’d approached. She did not seem all that impressed, and she did not in any way hide this evaluation.

  “Clearly. I meant that it is sickening that Genevieve Von Porter would donate it and then allow it to be hung in the coffee shop instead of the museum proper.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking back up at the painting again. I’d never thought of it as something anybody owned. “Well. We’re closed anyway, ma’am.”

  I gestured at my wristwatch and she seemed to admire it, momentarily. A gift from my mother, and gold as well, it was the nicest thing I owned.

  The woman attempted to smile, though her taut face did not allow for much movement. “My name is Cecily Littleford. Are you available this evening to help me with a minor jam?”

  Littleford. Betsy’s mother. I stuttered as I pledged I’d do absolutely anything she needed. She handed me a small plastic keycard.

  “Take the staff elevator upstairs to Conference Room B. You have twenty minutes to clean up and put on the tuxedo that’s hanging on the door.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She pinched one of the newspapers between two disdainful fingertips. “My daughter is coming out to polite society this evening and needs an escort. My son Billy is otherwise engaged and my husband is away on business. Betsy mentioned that she knew someone working here at the museum who could wear Billy’s size.” She looked at me again, disparagingly. “Or close enough.”

  I could barely speak. Fortunately, Rodrigo rushed over. “He’d be honored, Mrs. Littleford. Could I offer you some tonic water, while he goes to change?”

  After Rodrigo ushered her to a clean table below the golden portrait, he pulled me back toward the door. “Don’t screw this up now, Cinderella. Have some goddamn balls. She asked for you, you suertudo motherfucker.”

  Twenty minutes later, when I saw my reflection in the inside of the elevator doors, I did not even recognize myself. Billy’s tuxedo was a little long in the sleeve, but I looked all right. I thought that surely I could impersonate a proper member of the leisure class for two hours. But when the doors parted, and I saw Betsy Littleford standing there, my confidence withered like grass in winter.

  The voluminous lower folds of her white dress flowed from the waist like collapsing waves, descending from where the defined V of its northern border intercepted an orbit of tiny pearls. Her hair was down, covering her bare shoulders. A second V was formed by the neat crossing of her gloved hands. A third and final V came in the shape of her sharply plunging eyebrows: already I’d done something wrong.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand and jerking me toward the ballroom’s arched doorway. “They started going in four minutes ago.”

  Red velvet curtains covered the high windows that normally illuminated the rotunda. Tall Roman columns supported a great glass dome, through which the moon could be seen, full and yellow and high above us. Briefly I felt as though I were being led into the Coliseum to be fed to the lions. The room swarmed with older women in scarves and slinky evening gowns, and distinguished men in finely tailored tuxedos. The debutantes were there—perhaps twenty girls—all the ones we’d seen out by the dumpsters in their rehearsal garb. Now they wore the full regalia—white gloves, floor-length dresses, and pearls that had belonged to their mothers’ mothers. They stood in a line, arm in arm with fathers or brothers; the only guy I recognized was Mark, who was escorting Suzanne and looking more than a little pale.

  A man at a podium called the girls’ names aloud, one at a time, and with each presentation, he announced the name of her escort. Each girl then stepped out into a spotlight, curtsied politely, and smiled. Next she took her escort by the hand and moved on, to allow the next young pair to take its place. Betsy’s face remained in total lockdown, but I wondered if I would finally see her smile tonight.

  “Sorry about your brother,” I whispered weakly.

  Betsy’s face did not change even slightly. Her eyes stared off at nothing at all. Soon a harried little man rushed over to us with Mrs. Littleford in tow.

  “He’s right here. I told you,” Mrs. Littleford said. “Just have Mr. Isherwood say, ‘Presenting Elizabeth Littleford, escorted by . . . ’”

  Mrs. Littleford looked blankly at me. She did not know my name. “He’s an old friend of Billy’s, this is . . . ” And again she trailed off.

  Betsy’s crescent lips began to form my name, but before she could speak it, I blurted out another name instead.

  “Walter,” I lied, thinking of the detective in my Wilkie Collins book. “Walter Hartright.”

  Instantly I regretted not saying “Sir Percival Glyde,” but the harried man was already scribbling down “Walter Hartright.” The name seemed more plausible for a resident of suburban Raleigh, and the twentieth century, anyway.

  Betsy’s eyes bulged, ever so slightly, and her lips eased gently back into place. There was no smile, and no laugh. Just an odd blankness. She wasn’t angry—that much I could see. She was amused, I was sure. Only, rather than smile, she somehow un-smiled. Then I saw it at last: Betsy’s smile was the absence of smiling.

  As the man ran off to give the speaker my fake name, Betsy pushed her mother’s hand aside and said, “Walter. When did you and Billy become such good friends again?”

  “Acting class in fifth grade,” I lied. “Billy was Vladimir in our production of Waiting for Godot and I was Estragon.” It worked. Betsy un-smiled again. Her mother seemed puzzled but Betsy stepped in suddenly.

  “You were in Switzerland with Grandma.”

  And before Mrs. Littleford could question this, the couple ahead of us stepped away, and Betsy dragged me into the light. The audience assumed a solemn silence.

  “May I present Miss Elizabeth Littleford,” Mr. Isherwood said, “escorted by a close friend of her brother’s, Mr. Walter Hartright.”

  The applause was sudden and electrifying. Betsy curtsied elegantly but did not smile. Not even a little. She took my hand in her gloved one and led me out of the light.

  After a hundred hands had been shaken and a hundred platitudes exchanged, Betsy drew me to a table, where we sat side by side in front of gold-inlaid plates and silently consumed Niçoise salads and wagyu steaks while the adults talked of Morningstar ratings, Croatian catamaran chartering, and hunting tundra swans. I watched Betsy closely out of the
corner of my eye, making sure I lifted the same utensils when she did. To my fascination, I found this new role was an easier fit than I’d expected. I was like one of the people I’d made up in Terminal B—blending naturally right in with all those around me. Plus, it seemed that no one really expected much from the escorts, anyway. While the girls got a year of debutante training, the boys seemed to be winging it. I did a damn sight better than Mark White, for instance, who sat across from me, using only one fork and dribbling sauce conspicuously down his shirt front.

  He acknowledged my existence but once, when Mrs. Littleford asked me to tell everyone about Billy’s early acting career and addressed me as Walter. Suzanne firmly squeezed Mark’s hand as he began to correct her, and he winced in confusion. Before dessert was even served, Mark had vanished to the men’s room three times, returning slightly clumsier after each visit. I didn’t blame him—the conversation kept spiraling back to Billy, no matter how much Mrs. Littleford and the others tried to avoid the subject.

  “Early decision notices will come in soon,” Suzanne’s mother said. “Walter, where have you applied?”

  “Princeton,” I answered quickly. Everyone smiled, except Betsy, who un-smiled.

  Walter’s bright future at Princeton grew to involve a position on the golf team and an old friend who’d promised to take me sailing on the Delaware. And then, of course, there’d be writing classes with prizewinning authors. The mothers all approved. I was so engrossed in it all that it wasn’t until my water glass was being refilled for the third time that I recognized Rodrigo holding the Waterford pitcher, wearing a staff uniform.

  “Mr. Hartright?” he asked, smirking somewhat. “May I refresh your glass?”

  I shifted down in my seat as he poured. Suddenly I felt sure that everyone knew I was full of it—that clearly, none of these rich people believed that I was really some well-to-do son of a paper manufacturer. Just as they didn’t believe that Mark was in any way sober, or that Betsy Littleford’s father was really away on business, or that her brother was sure to recover in a few weeks.