The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  Moreover, I didn’t want anyone to know where I was from, exactly. Not that I was embarrassed per se . . . I simply had never been anywhere before where nobody knew me, knew my mother, knew of my father’s absence—knew my life story. The only other time had been when I’d masqueraded as Betsy’s blue-blood date, the Princeton-bound Walter Hartright—that same too-short night when my fictions first earned me a ticket into the inner circle. There, at college, I once again felt as though I’d touched down on another planet, and with each successive day I grew more convinced that I’d suddenly be identified as an alien and sent back from whence I came.

  “‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’” Professor Morrissey proclaimed, as I returned my attention to the Emily Dickinson poem we were meant to be scanning. “‘Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise. / As Lightning to the Children eased / With explanation kind / The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—.’”

  As the rest of the class picked out tetrameters and iambs and other smart-sounding things, I thought about the Portrait of Colette Marsh back home, dazzling in its slant of light. I thought about the little smudge I’d left behind. Tell the truth, I wrote in large letters at the top of my notebook. But tell it slant. It sounded profound . . . I just didn’t quite know what it actually meant. I raised my hand a nervous fraction, but Morrissey was busy outlining rhyme schemes on the board: A-B-C-B . . . D-E-F-E . . . I looked over at Julian, staring up at the leaves outside with a vaguely amused smile. Did he know what it meant? I was sure that he must. My hand went down again.

  After Professor Morrissey ended our class that morning, I walked out across the dew-drenched quad with Shelly, a frail girl whose veil of dark hair seemed to pull her head earthward. She’d read my whole story during class, and as I bought her a cup of burned cafeteria coffee, she let loose a surprising deluge of jumbled compliments. I’d never had anyone read—let alone love—the things I’d written, and perhaps it was the coffee, but I found myself warmed by a gentle, acidic sensation. By evening I had returned the favor and read her workshop piece, plus another of her stories. Both were about death and both involved highly disturbing sex scenes. Shelly invited me to stay over, as her roommate was visiting an out-of-town boyfriend. I passed a nervous hour trying not to crush her in her dark-sheeted bed, under the watchful eyes of a larger-than-life-size poster of Edgar Allan Poe.

  In the morning I accidentally woke Shelly as I was reaching my free arm into my backpack on the floor, trying to fish out Julian’s story.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I just can’t wait to tear this thing apart. What kind of a title is this? He must have written this an hour before class. It’s not even three pages long.”

  But as Shelly settled back to sleep on a dark waterfall of her own hair, I began to read Julian’s story and was soon astounded to find it utterly untearable. Though “The Thirty-Third Winter” was only two and a half pages, it felt epic. It was about a man skinning a hare out on the moors of Ireland while drinking from a bottle of Epiphany whiskey. I’d never read anything better. It made me so deeply ashamed of my own story that I wanted a stiff glass of Epiphany myself. Impossibly, Julian appeared to know more about being thirty-three and skinning hares in Ireland than I did about cleaning restaurant tables and growing up in the American South, which I had actually done.

  I left Shelly’s room that morning in a solemn autumn funk, which lingered all through the weekend. It persisted even when, in our next class, Professor Morrissey praised my monstrous story for its fine detail. It wasn’t until Julian spoke up that I felt any better.

  “It feels classic but at the same time strangely modern. Like Bach played on an electric violin.”

  I had no idea what to make of this, but it was the most he’d ever said at once in our class, so I took it as a double-underlined compliment. He said nothing at all about Shelly’s piece, “If We Were Birds,” a gruesome melodrama about a married couple who accidentally kill their newborn baby when a bout of their depraved sex breaks the crib to splinters. I said I liked that there were yellow squids on the nursery wallpaper and that this might be symbolic of something, though what I couldn’t decide. She still didn’t seem very happy.

  When we finally got to Julian’s story, Professor Morrissey praised it effusively, as did I, as did all the girls except Shelly. Morrissey talked for ten minutes alone about one description of a rock covered in lichen, and by the end I’d have believed that the secrets of the entire universe were contained in that rock. But Julian didn’t say a thing. He didn’t write down our comments. He didn’t even smile.

  My first real conversation with Julian didn’t occur until a month later, in mid-November, when Professor Morrissey invited “a dear friend and old classmate” of his, a writer named Jan Sokol, to come in as a guest lecturer. For homework, we had all read his story “The Minimum Wage.” I’d thought it was pretty awful until I realized that it had been published in the New Yorker. I decided I must be missing something, probably because I didn’t know anything about Czech revolutionaries, which it seemed to be about. Sort of.

  Sokol, like Morrissey, was in his nebulous forties. Plump and baby faced, with wiry sprays of dark hair, the writer slumped over the edge of the table as he spoke. From my seat near the front, I breathed in the stench of cheap vodka. I checked the time on my wristwatch, even though I knew that our class met at 8:30 in the morning. Sokol leered at several of the girls along the left side of the table as Morrissey introduced him. They seemed utterly repulsed, but I couldn’t help but notice that Shelly was staring at him with curiously wide eyes.

  “The university has invited Jan to do a reading here during alumni weekend. And the dean has asked me to hold a contest. The student who submits the best story will read it in front of a gathering of alumni and students in December.”

  “That’s the first thing to know about being a writer,” Sokol interrupted in a squeaky, nasal voice. “Nobody actually wants to read anything themselves. They all just want you to read it to them.” This sounded like a joke, though he sounded utterly miserable as he said it. His eyes flitted to my photocopy of his story, which I had out in front of me. Slowly he reached over and grabbed it in a pudgy hand.

  “Pinkerton,” he said absently, “may I borrow this?”

  I was about to say that my name wasn’t Pinkerton when Sokol rose up out of his seat and studied my photocopy for a moment at arm’s length. His face took on a look of abject desperation.

  “For the love of whatever gods you believe in,” he pleaded, “don’t be writers.”

  We all looked to Morrissey while this plea echoed through the classroom. Our professor appeared only mildly alarmed. It wasn’t clear if Sokol had anything else to add, but then suddenly he continued.

  “You might as well walk across the desert planting apple seeds. Be doctors. Or, if you’re not smart enough to be a doctor, be a security guard. That’s what I do. We make pretty good money. And don’t worry about getting hurt. The chances are ten billion to one that anyone is going to blow up the building you’re in. I guard the Las Olindas Mormon Tabernacle, five nights a week. The worst that happens is that kids come and try to piss on it, and then I get to zap them with a taser. But most nights it’s quiet. Sometimes I just dance down the hall like it’s the darkest nightclub in Warsaw. I get drunk. Later I zap myself, just to see if I can feel it. Or I’ll call a girl over. That’s the real ticket. Happiness! Happiness is making love for as long as you can stand it to the most luminous thing you can find on this rotten corpse of a planet!”

  He punctuated this last point by slamming his fist on the table, spilling coffees and scattering pens all along its length. None of us breathed. Even Julian was absolutely alert. I was so sure that it was all simply preamble to some sort of inspirational speech, about how, really, writing was the only thing worth doing at all. But instead he lifted up the copy of his story that he’d taken from me and tore it in two.

  “
There are enough books in the world,” he concluded mournfully. Then he sat down again, placed his head on the edge of the table, and began to weep. For a few long moments, we all just listened to this gigantic man, sobbing over the chaotic clanking of the radiators.

  “Class dismissed,” Professor Morrissey said finally, when it became clear these were not tactical tears. “Boys, would you help me get him to my office?”

  The girls erupted into frantic whispers as they grabbed their notebooks and fled, nervously looking over their shoulders to confirm that the man was still there, crying. Only Shelly lingered for a few moments, watching Sokol’s tears soak into a pile of our papers before she skittered away.

  Morrissey got the door, while Julian and I got underneath each of the man’s arms, yokelike and heavy, and eased him out of the room and into the hallway.

  “Is he going to be all right?” I asked.

  “Random House turned down his novel this morning,” Morrissey explained. “He’s been writing it since we met eighteen years ago. I told him to just come in some other time, but he was insistent.”

  Eighteen years was longer than I’d been alive. For the first time I began to wonder if this writing thing wasn’t maybe a bad idea. True, Betsy had told me to write her something. The nights I’d spent writing that story, getting lost in my imaginary Durham, were the closest I’d come to reliving that night. Pretending in her presence. Making myself up. But now that the story was finished, it didn’t seem like hardly enough. I felt sure that I could do better, that I could say more. As I helped to carry the weeping Sokol through the hallowed halls of Berkshire College, I could not help but wonder if this was where it all led.

  Julian and I got Sokol at last into Morrissey’s tiny office, where he knocked into piles of dusty books and student papers before finally collapsing into an armchair.

  “Thank you, Pinkerton,” Sokol sighed, shutting his eyes like an enormous baby getting ready for a nap.

  “Thank you both,” Morrissey said with a soft expression that pleaded for us to keep this among ourselves. Julian and I nodded then left, shutting the door behind us.

  We made it about ten yards before Julian turned to me and said, “Flip you for it.”

  “Flip you for what?”

  “The story. Flip you for the story. One of us has to write it. Nobody else in that class is going to, I can tell you that.”

  I thought he was kidding, but his hand was rooting through his pockets looking for a coin.

  “Heads,” I called.

  Julian found a quarter and flipped it off his thumb. He snatched it expertly out of the air and checked it against the back of his hand. Tails.

  “Cheers!” he shouted. “Now promise you won’t write about it.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  At the time I didn’t even know that I was lying.

  Following this incident, Julian and I stopped for a coffee, and I soon discovered, to my delight, that Julian was not the monastic daydreamer he seemed to be in class. He explained that he simply preferred to write late at night, and on good nights he would get so lost in his writing that he’d suddenly find the sun rising and realize his classes were imminent. After a nap, or some high-test espresso, Julian became a boundless mass of chatty energy.

  “That Shelly girl weirds me out,” he told me as we walked out of class one afternoon. Another girl had written a story about watching her mother give birth, called “The Miracle of Life.” Admittedly it had been atrocious, but Shelly had run out of the room, shaking.

  “You ought to keep her away from open windows,” Julian advised.

  “And babies. Apparently.”

  Julian sighed. “The crazy ones are always better in bed, though.”

  I reddened at this. “You have no idea,” I lied. Truth be told, we had not managed to get much of anything done in bed, I was so concerned about crushing her.

  Fortunately, Julian appeared to be having a brainstorm. “You need to meet my friend Ev, from Choate.”

  “No offense, but ‘Ev, from Choate’ is a girl, I hope?”

  Julian waved his hand dismissively in the air. “Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. Our families have known each other forever. She’s our age and she’s already practically been nominated for a Tony. She was just in that revival of My Fair Lady with Richard Chamberlain. I’m not even shitting you. The character in your ‘Gravity in Durham’ story reminded me of her. The ‘arctic-souled’ Homecoming Queen, as you put it.”

  He explained that Evelyn was strictly a stage actress—film and television being nothing other than opiates for philistinic masses. Then he fumbled with his wallet until he pulled out a crinkled newspaper review for a musical called Samson!, and at the top was a picture of her on stage as Delilah, in sheer crimson silk. Even on smudgy newsprint, she was stunning. Slender and high cheeked, with hair tied up in a perfect knot. I could not look away. Her eyes seemed to bore right into me, and somehow she looked bored herself, by what she found there. Her lips parted, a delicate smile for the camera, but I could see it there beneath—an un-smile that matched the look in her eyes.

  “Is she in something now? A show, I mean?” I’d never been to New York City before, and I desperately wanted to change that.

  “She just finished something,” Julian said distractedly. “She comes up here sometimes to do things at summer stock.”

  “Where does she go to school?”

  “She doesn’t!” Julian laughed, as if it were the most brilliant idea ever. “Although between you and me, she turned down full rides at Ivy League schools.”

  “Her parents must have been furious,” I said.

  Julian laughed again. “Don’t be silly. What does she need to go to Harvard for? She’s already smarter than you or I will ever be, for all the good it’ll do her. I can’t even imagine her there, with all those neo-con banker babies and sons of sports franchise managers.” He shuddered. “On Broadway she’s being taken out by ambassadors and actual Swiss people, for God’s sake. Makes me wonder what the hell I did wrong to wind up here. Speaking of . . . what are you writing for the contest?”

  A half hour earlier I’d been considering a change of majors. Now suddenly I wanted nothing more than to win the contest and read my story in front of the deans and all the alumni. More than anything, though, I wanted to read it in front of Julian.

  I shrugged and asked, “What are you going to write? The Jan Sokol story? You could call it ‘The Guest Lecturer.’”

  He grinned and shook his head. “That’s classified, I’m afraid.”

  Promising to show me better pictures of the lovely Evelyn, Julian invited me back to his room. He had a double all to himself, after his roommate had withdrawn in the third week, and it was truly the Shangri-La of dormitories. He’d lofted the two beds, wedged the mattresses on the top, and pushed both desks together to create a massive work space, which was covered in library books and unorganized papers. On the wall, in a frame, was a red-and-black chessboard.

  “You play chess?” I asked, hardly surprised.

  “Yes, but I much prefer checkers,” he said. “We could play, if I had any damn pieces. I keep meaning to buy some, but the pieces always come with a board, and I’ve already got a board. It’s the oldest game in the world. Did you know that? There are hieroglyphics in Egypt with the scores of checkers games, and in one of the tombs they found a whole set! They think it came over from India. Anyways, I keep the board around because I figure someday I’ll find some pieces. You can’t hang a checkerboard on the wall in act one if no one’s going to play it in act two. Chekhov. Or something like that. Can I get you anything?”

  He set some coffee on a Bunsen burner and found some bagels in the back of a minifridge. “Six years at boarding schools and you learn how to maximize your space.” He sprinkled the bagels with a strange spice. “Za’atar. I put it on everything.”

  Though I’d never heard of it in my life, I nodded and smiled. “Ah . . . za’atar,” I replied. “My grandmother used t
o put this on her shredded wheat.”

  Julian seemed delighted at the idea, and I was thrilled to have gotten one over on him. He continued eagerly, “Maimonides said it cures parasites and flatulence. With that sort of range, I figure it must be good for everything else in between.”

  This seemed to be Julian’s philosophy on life: that no one could ever hope to get the breadth of the whole thing, so he would stick to the extremes and assume the middle was thus covered. He knew everything there was to know about Schopenhauer and Napoléon Bonaparte. He read every gossip rag with a headline about the marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. But he didn’t seem to know normal things, like the difference between Newt Gingrich and Roger Ebert. Each night after we’d hung out for one hour, I’d spend three more at the library, reading up on everything he’d mentioned, even in passing. And in each word and place I sensed an unfolding universe of stories, just waiting for me to make them real.

  Shelly hated him, naturally. As often as he invited her to join us over in Shangri-La, she refused to accept. If I even brought him up in her presence, she rolled her eyes until I stopped.