The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  “Time for the waltz,” Betsy said, suddenly removing her napkin from her lap.

  “Waltz? Like, the waltz waltz?” I mumbled, struggling to stand on my suddenly shaky legs. Rodrigo was trying to help Suzanne get Mark to his feet, and no one was looking at us. I leaned in as close as I dared. “I don’t know how.”

  “The boys are all disasters. Just try to look like you’re leading.”

  So we stepped out onto the dance floor with the others, and the girls prodded their partners so as to form a wide circle. The stiff-looking Mr. Isherwood made some sort of announcement regarding the sponsored charity, and then there was a crash of music and Betsy beckoned with her right hand for me to extend my left. I did so, shifting all my weight onto my right foot as she took it. She then drew herself in against me, slightly to my right, so that just half of her pressed up against just half of me. I half passed out.

  Betsy guided my right hand to the smooth skin below her shoulder blade, and placed her right hand into my left and held it out high, opposite my neck. Then, through what I can only assume was girl sorcery, she began to move her feet in such a way that my feet knew just where to go.

  “One, two, three,” she whispered into my ear. “Forward, side, together.” And we began to revolve around the floor, like a clock’s hands in reverse, spinning around our own axis like two sides of one moon.

  “I had no idea you were an actor,” she said. “How unexpected.”

  “Oh, no. I just made all that up,” I said quickly. “About me and Billy.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Very funny.”

  But her amusement was silent. Just between us.

  “It’s very hard to tell with you,” I said.

  I smiled. She didn’t. We waltzed.

  “Did you know,” she said drily, “that the waltz was originally a peasant dance? And that Viennese nobles initially were shocked by the indecency of dancing so closely?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “You should try taking debutante classes. For a year. And I’ll peek out of a kitchen window and watch you every Sunday.”

  Before I could decide if she was joking or upset, the song came to its end and she began to pull away from me. “Thanks for filling in. Walter.”

  The mothers were all on their feet as we came back to the table. Mark White, somewhat dizzier from all the waltzing, was vomiting semi-raw tuna and well-massaged cow meat all over the table, along with about a quart of Jack Daniel’s.

  “He’s hardly slept since Billy’s accident,” Mrs. White apologized before the flow had even ceased. “It wasn’t your fault, dear . . . ”

  Suzanne was anxiously trying to get Mark to the bathroom, but the large boy had gone limp, and she could barely lift him. Before I knew it, Rodrigo was on the scene.

  “Please,” he said sweetly, “allow me to assist you, ma’am.” Suzanne looked at him—possibly for the first time realizing that he was the same boy whom she’d seen leering at her out of the kitchen window—and then without a word slid aside so that Rodrigo could get Mark to his feet and then to the bathroom.

  Understandably, the whole incident had put everybody off, and Mrs. Littleford, sensing that the evening would go only downhill from here, tapped Betsy on the hand and said, “Come, dear. Visiting hours will be over at ten. We’re expected back.”

  “Walter and I need to say good-bye to the Von Porters,” Betsy said, her face showing nothing—no resignation, no urgency.

  “So,” I said, thinking, So that was it then, as we walked away, in the direction of the Von Porters. But as soon as she had escaped her mother’s sight, Betsy began to move quickly toward a set of double doors that led to the sculpture garden. Before I knew it, we were outside. Thick clouds had moved in from the south, covering the full moon like a wash of ink.

  “We spent the whole morning at the hospital,” she complained.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Not too good,” she said. “He’s got this big hole in the side of his head.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little surprised by her even tone. Was she mad at me? Did she know that I had been, at least indirectly, responsible for Billy’s current state?

  “That was a joke,” she explained, her blue eyes dancing like fireflies in the dark.

  “Sure,” I said. Mystified, I continued to follow her down the gravel paths of the sculpture garden.

  “Want to hear something else funny?” We stepped gingerly over little artificial streams, jumping from rock to rock with our shoes in our hands like children. “Well, something that I think is very funny?”

  “All right.”

  “He woke up while I was there this morning. He had this breathing tube in, so he couldn’t speak until they pulled it out. And then his mouth was real dry, but he kept trying to say something. He pulled me in real close, because he can hardly even whisper, and, you’ll never guess what he said.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “He goes, ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t know who I was. So I say, ‘I’m Betsy. Your sister.’ And he goes, ‘Betsy, I’m gay. I’m gay, Betsy. I’m gay.’”

  I nearly slipped off the rocks and into the water.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said, ‘Yeah, I know, Billy. I know.’ Like I didn’t see him making out with our neighbor Roger when we were in the eighth grade? But he couldn’t remember.”

  “Jesus,” I mumbled. I couldn’t quite believe it. And yet, while I couldn’t quite tell how Betsy felt about it, I sort of admired Billy all the more.

  Betsy went on. “He didn’t remember who I was. But he remembered that. And my mother is standing there bawling—pretending she didn’t hear what he said—and I’m standing there thinking, Huh. He finally comes out on the day of my coming out.”

  And there it was—another distinct un-laugh—and then, still barefoot, Betsy began to run across a long green field, empty except for us. I was surprised at how fast she was able to run in her gown. I could not see the museum at all anymore, just neat curves of trees along the sloping grass. Betsy kept on running. Not until we came to the top of the hill and I saw a little oasis of sand in the distance did I realize we’d come onto the Briar Creek Golf Course. She slowed down at last, as we crossed onto the eighth hole and sat down on the edge of the bunker.

  “So this is where it happened?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. The spot where Billy had fallen had been smoothed out into a neat spiral. Not a single bloody grain of sand remained evident in the trap.

  Nervous, I took my hand and pressed it on top of hers. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying. It didn’t seem as if there could be anything worth saying.

  “You don’t seem that upset,” I said finally.

  “It’s all just so . . . ” she began, and then stopped. “Unexpected.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean . . . my family, we—well, they—see to it that nothing unexpected ever happens. No grade lower than an A-minus. No winter we don’t spend in Colorado. No summer we don’t go to the Outer Banks. My mother will host the Spring Leukemia Fund-raiser, and my father will say he’ll be home for our birthdays, only something will come up and he’ll send a savings bond instead.”

  Though I’d have preferred a father who sent excuses and treasuries to not having one at all, I said, “That’s awful.”

  “It’s not. It’s just expected. How can it be awful if it’s expected?”

  “I guess.”

  “Two days ago, Billy was going to go to Chapel Hill, like my father, and then Wharton, Stern, or Harvard, and then take over my father’s company someday. Everyone sitting in that ballroom knows that was the plan. Just like they all know that I was going to go to a liberal arts college and read some Emily Dickinson and talk about slants of light, join Alpha Gamma Pi, and then get a degree I’d never use because I’d be married to an econ major I met in my first semester. Then while he’d be at business school—Wharton, Stern,
or Harvard—I’d start popping out babies and choosing window treatments. The expected treatments. The expected babies.”

  She looked up at the wide black sky.

  “But now?” I asked.

  “Now Billy’s not going to be the next Littleford to go to Chapel Hill. He’ll be lucky if he can go to the bathroom. He’s not going to go to Wharton, or run the company. He can’t count to ten.”

  “It’s terrible,” I said.

  “It is terrible,” she agreed.

  “So? Now you’ll go to Chapel Hill and Wharton and run the company? Is that what you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to do . . . ”—she turned her head to look at me—“. . . What. Ever. I. Want.” She relished each syllable. The corners of her lips were just barely curling. Then she lay her head down on my shoulder.

  “Billy told me once you snuck out here at night to practice.”

  Face turning a deep red, I asked, “How did he know that?”

  She shrugged. “You’re the best player on the team, and the only one whose dad doesn’t drag him out here every Saturday. Billy’s not an idiot. Well. He wasn’t an idiot.”

  “Was that another joke?”

  “Walter. What kind of monster do you take me for?” she said, batting her eyelashes.

  I had to do it: “How come you never smile?” I asked.

  “‘Smile.’” She repeated my word flatly. “That’s what they told me in every debutante class. For a year of Sundays. ‘Smile, Betsy! Smile! It’s your job to put everyone else at ease. Make them feel welcome.’” She shrugged, her bare shoulder nudging into mine. “My dad’s been on ‘a business trip in Dubai’ since I was ten; my mom’s miserable; my brother’s gay, and now brain damaged to boot. Put yourself at ease. Make yourself feel welcome. I’ll smile when there’s something worth smiling about.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, trying hard not to laugh.

  “Billy liked you,” she said after a minute. “I mean likes you. I mean, if he remembers who you are anymore, he probably still likes you. I think of all the guys he knew, Billy would have wanted me to go with you. When I told him you and that Spanish kid had been spying on us, he said that sounded just like you.”

  “Spying . . . ”—I paused—“. . . with the utmost respect.”

  She studied me a moment, and it seemed as though she were about to kiss me. Or, possibly, devour me. It turns out I was right on both counts. First she kissed me, and then came the devouring—the devouring of any hope I ever had of forgetting her, or that night, or Billy, or any of it.

  • • •

  Later we lay on the fairway watching the airplanes line up for landing. It was still cloudy and there were no stars, only airplanes. They were efficient machines—tons of perfectly sculpted steel and wire, each containing three hundred people, or more, a thousand feet up in the air, moving hundreds of miles an hour. But from where we lay it was impossible to believe: they seemed to just hover there, blinking lazily, like fireflies.

  “Do you like me?” she asked.

  “I sort of thought that was obvious,” I said.

  “No, I mean, me,” she said. “This me.”

  And she did seem like somebody else, suddenly. Her tough, sweet front was gone. Her teeth were chattering, faintly.

  “I do,” I said. I thought about Rodrigo’s theory that she was a robot, through and through. “I’d always hoped, I guess, that this was what you were like. On the inside.”

  She said nothing, but the faint chatter of her teeth began to get louder. “Let’s go back,” I said finally.

  “I don’t want to go back. If I go back, they’ll drag me out to the hospital.”

  “I’ll hide you in the café. I can make you a Viennese hot chocolate.”

  “Vell, can ve keep talkink about mein pater, Herr Freud?”

  “Vhat better place?” I replied, scratching my imaginary goatee. “Ve’ve even got a little couch you can lie on.”

  Her eyebrows lifted and her cheeks quaked, but she covered the erupting laugh by kissing me again.

  We gathered up our things and walked down off the bunker. We crossed to the stream and stepped over the rocks that led into the sculpture garden. I climbed up on the dumpsters behind Ludwig’s and squeezed through the back window, so that I could unlock the side door for Betsy. And I was so deliriously happy that I did not even notice the two bodies entangled on the couch in the front, until I’d invited Betsy to sit on it.

  “Well hello, Suzanne,” Betsy said flatly.

  The half-naked girl scrambled to her feet and, glaring furtively at Betsy, yanked her dress up and extracted herself from the still-amorous Rodrigo.

  “Get off me!” Suzanne shouted, as if he had been the one holding her down. Then, avoiding Betsy’s eye, Suzanne rushed away to the lobby doors, as Rodrigo went after her, calling out in Spanish.

  When the door shut, Betsy and I just stood there, unsure of how to proceed.

  “He’s a really nice guy,” I said lamely.

  “Oh,” Betsy said. “Yes, I’m sure they’re going to have quite a future together.”

  This stung, and she could tell—though I wasn’t entirely sure that she minded. Immediately, I wondered what our future would look like. Would we go on dates? Would I have to explain, eventually, to her mother that my name was not really Walter Hartright? That I had not even applied to Princeton?

  “You said something about hot chocolate? Earlier?”

  Eager to dismiss this line of thought, I went to the back and with the greatest possible care, made her a perfect hot chocolate. When I came out again I found her standing on top of one of the tables, looking at the golden portrait.

  “Careful!” I whispered.

  She did not seem even slightly concerned, and with her perfect posture I imagined that she could have done jumping jacks up there without falling.

  “Come up,” she said, reaching down a hand for me.

  “That table’s going to break.”

  “In case you were wondering,” she said, “the time to lose your nerve would have been before you jumped me out on the golf course.”

  “I jumped you?” I began to protest, but saw that this wouldn’t help my case. I set the hot chocolate down and, slowly, carefully, got onto the table with her. She seemed distant again. Back to being the way she was before.

  “You seem different now,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged and looked at the painting impassively. “Because I don’t like me, that way.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered.

  From where we stood, the golden woman was just out of arm’s reach.

  “That’s real gold,” I informed her.

  “No kidding.” She didn’t appear so impressed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off it either. “Touch it.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “That’ll leave my fingerprints.”

  “On something beautiful. Something that will stay beautiful forever.”

  Slowly I reached out and pressed a finger to the painting. It crunched, just slightly, under the pressure of my fingertip. When I pulled away I saw a soft circular shadow where I’d touched it, just to the left of the woman’s face. My finger faintly glittered with flecks of gold. It had come off so easily.

  We stared at it for another moment. Then she said, “Write me something.”

  “I’m not really a writer,” I explained. The last thing I’d written that wasn’t for school had been illustrated, badly, and I’d been about eight years old.

  “Yes, you are,” she said simply. “You’ve been making stuff up since you first opened your mouth. And you’ve been loving it. So just write it all down. Write about tonight. Quick. Before you forget anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, turning away from the painting at last. “You could get hit in the head with a golf club tomorrow, and then it would all be gone forever.”


  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “Not that ridiculous. Apparently.”

  Standing there in the silent café, I wanted to tell her that if I got hit in the head and lost every brain cell but one, that brain cell would be the one that remembered that night. But, of course, I couldn’t think of words that good, just then. So I said nothing. And silence said what my words couldn’t.

  “All right. I’ll do it. If you want,” I finally managed.

  The corners of her mouth began to shake. She bit her lower lip. Her nostrils swelled slightly as she breathed in, sharply. And then, at last, a strange and slow smile spread across her face.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because,” she said. And for a moment I thought that’d be it. But then she finished: “You’ll never forget me.”

  Then she kissed me one more time and stepped down off the table. Before I could say anything, she walked out of the café, toward her mother and her ball and her world, and I remained there in mine, sitting on the table looking up at the tiny smudge we’d made.

  2

  Pinkerton and McGann

  Writing, at its best, is a lonely life . . . For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Julian McGann was the only other boy in my freshman Fiction & Poetry class, which met at 8:30 in the morning in a forgotten sub-basement of Abernathy Hall. While the balding Professor Morrissey squawked about Hawthorne and Longfellow over the clanking of Berkshire College’s infamous steam radiators, Julian sat at the far end of the conference table and, twice a week, passed the ungodly early hour watching the leaves pile up against the raised windows. The girls spent the class mostly staring at the brown freckles that bridged Julian’s nose. He always sat up perfectly straight. His reddish hair was a perfectly kept mess. I assumed Julian was a slacker, since he rarely spoke or wrote anything down, and I was certain that he would never be a real writer, like me.

  The first story of Julian’s that I ever read was in this class. His slim piece, “The Thirty-Third Winter,” had fluttered weightlessly when passed across our long table, unlike my story, “The Gravity in Durham,” which had thudded meaningfully in front of each student, clocking in at a far more impressive twenty pages. “The Gravity in Durham” was about a rich girl who invites a poor boy, at the eleventh hour, to substitute for the Homecoming king in the town parade, after the real king is hit by a truck. I’d based it on taking Betsy Littleford to her debutante ball, but I’d changed around the names and basic details. Even though I knew no one else at Berkshire College and none of them knew me, I still imagined someone might have read the newspaper stories about Billy’s accident, and they’d then despise me for mining his traumatic brain injuries for literary gold. It seemed wrong, especially when I remembered I was at Berkshire College only due to a generous scholarship from the Briar Creek Country Club, arranged by Mrs. Littleford. She’d never said anything explicitly, but still I had the feeling that it was my silence she was really buying.