The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  “He’s totally in love with you,” she snapped.

  “That’s absurd,” I said, trying hard not to flush at the suggestion—and it was absurd. About Julian’s preferences in the bedroom I didn’t dare speculate, but I felt certain that his interests in me were as a kindred spirit who shared his deepest obsession. Back home, there’d been no one. Girls could dabble in poetry and keep diaries. But guys were expected to be memorizing sports statistics, not the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. Even my English teachers seemed to hold books several feet from their bodies, as if some contagion might be multiplying within the pages. Julian held books right up close to his face—a habit formed, he explained, in his nearsighted youth—and now, even with contact lenses in, he liked to have the page within a few inches of his eyes. So close that the pages scraped the tip of his nose as he turned them. So close that, when he inhaled sharply at a particularly good turn of phrase, the paper seemed to lift up slightly and tremble before settling back again.

  In class, once Julian knew he had an ally, he talked more often, and together we eviscerated the bland tales of moonlit marriage proposals and drunken deflowerings that our classmates brought in. Morrissey began to call on Julian and me as one person, and often he’d jokingly call us by the names of famous writing duos.

  “Hawthorne? Longfellow? What do you think about all this?” or sometimes, “Emerson? Thoreau? Which of you wants to start?” Once we even scored a “Fitz? Hem?” but most of the time we were “Pinkerton and McGann”—which always got a chuckle as the class thought back on the day of the guest lecturer. I still wondered often what had become of the weeping writer.

  As the weeks went on, Julian and I worked furiously on our contest entries. Julian would invite me over in the afternoons to work, and for hours we would sit there, me scribbling on a yellow legal pad and him hammering on the typewriter, with the humming aerator of his fish tank behind us.

  We had only two rules: one, we would never write anything about each other—that was off-limits—and two, we would not peek at the other’s work until it was finished. The first condition I succeeded in following only because I felt certain that if Julian could be captured in words, I was not yet good enough to do it. But the second condition I violated every chance I got.

  When he got up to go have a cigarette outside, Julian would take his pages with him. But one day I found some old drafts, buried in a drawer, under a collection of playbills from shows that Ev had been in. Julian’s story was called “Polonia,” and the little I got to read involved a Polish family who, due to absurd circumstances involving a sick cow, are forced to move to Wales and take up shoe making. That night I lay awake for hours, just imagining how good the rest of it had to be. Where did he come up with these ideas? As hard as I tried to make up something amazing, I found myself returning to the dry inkpots of estranged redneck families and tedious suburban sprawl. As I lay in bed I repeated to myself, “Tell all the truth. Slant slant slant slant slant.”

  It seemed clear that I’d never get anywhere with something as cliché as a story about a kid whose mother misses his birthday party. I scrapped “The Flight Attendant’s Son,” knowing that if I was going to beat Julian’s imagination, I was going to have to dig deeper, be edgier, and expose even more of myself. “Truth truth truth,” I muttered to myself as the keyboard clicked and clacked. By sundown I was half done with a passable draft of “Just Another Bastard Out of Carolina.”

  Only three days later, when Julian ran downstairs to pick up a new supply of za’atar that had just arrived at the mailroom, I found his old story was missing from the drawer—replaced by something new, titled “A Friend of Bill W.,” about a twelve-year-old boy in an Eastern Orthodox church choir who steals vodka from the deacon’s desk each night and then begins hiding in a confessional so he can attend the AA meetings they hold at the church every Tuesday. A frantic flip to the final pages revealed that the boy is caught guzzling holy wine in the shadow of the icon of Saint Basil and soon thereafter is expelled in disgrace.

  “Son of a bitch,” I groaned as I hid it back away. How did he come up with this stuff? How could I possibly top a story about being excommunicated at age twelve?

  I lamented this injustice to Shelly that night as we watched television in her room.

  “He’s too fucking interesting. He lived in, like, a dozen countries before he turned ten. His parents own an import/export company that spans the freaking globe. This is the farthest from North Carolina that I’ve ever been. I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve never even been on a plane before.”

  “I thought your mother was a flight attendant? Don’t you, like, fly for free?”

  “There’s just a discount,” I muttered. Neither of us said anything for a moment. By now she was sick of hearing about Julian and the writing contest, although I knew she was quietly working on her own submission. She left it lying out but I never once thought to steal a look.

  “Just make something up,” she sighed. “It’s fiction, for chrissakes.”

  But I could not make anything up. In Raleigh I’d hardly been able to keep from drifting off into my imagination—anything to escape the doldrums of school, the tediousness of work, and the quiet of an empty house. But now, suddenly, my imagination seemed to have frozen up, like a used car in the depths of winter. As the deadline for the contest approached, I was so miserable that I began avoiding Julian entirely. It was hard not to notice that he wasn’t banging down my door, either.

  The night before the submissions were due, Julian called.

  “Did you finish?” he asked. It was the first time we’d spoken in a week.

  “Yes,” I said. Both of my stories were as done as they’d ever be. All that remained was to decide which of them was worse than the other.

  “Good. Because mine is a disaster and I was hoping you would do me a favor?”

  Was he going to ask me to read it? Was this his way of rubbing it in my face? Still, I had been dying to read the finished product, if only to remind myself how it was all really done.

  “This will just take an hour, I swear. I’m so close to being done.”

  Something in his shaky sound reminded me of Sokol, during his visit to our class. Was Julian hammered? Or just on the brink of exhaustion?

  “My friend Ev is here and I absolutely cannot work with her around. Could you, I don’t know, take her around campus or something for an hour?”

  My heart stopped beating. And I don’t think it beat again until fifteen minutes later, when I arrived at the door to Julian’s room.

  He came to the door wearing only a hotel dressing robe, a week’s growth of beard on his face, and three days’ rings of red under his eyes. The room was a disaster, with old coffee on the Bunsen burner and the checkerboard hanging crookedly. Julian barely acknowledged my arrival, aside from turning back to fold down the page that had been jutting halfway up from his typewriter, as if my superhuman eyes might be able to catch a word or two from the door. What I could read were the golden-inlaid titles of a few enormous library books, stacked beside the machine: The Demise of the British World Order, Convicts of Kimberley, and one bizarrely titled Windradyne of the Wiradjuri. Just as I noticed a large map of Australia folded open on the desk, my line of sight was cut off by a high-cheeked girl, her face framed by a cascade of golden hair, on top of which sat a small pillbox hat made of leopard skin.

  “He’s un-believable,” she announced, rolling her eyes back at Julian. Her eyes were bored; they bore right through me.

  “You’re, uhm, Evelyn?” I stammered, trying to sound cool as she shut the door behind her.

  “Call me Ev,” she said, with the same smile as in the picture. There, but masking something. “Julian told me your name is Pinkerton? I thought you’d be British.”

  I got the clear sense that she was disappointed I wasn’t. According to Julian, she spent all her time hobnobbing with ambassadors and Swiss people. How could I hope to impress her?

  “He�
�s just joking. It’s sort of funny, actually,” I said, and quickly began telling her the story of the guest lecturer.

  It was snowing outside, but she wanted to smoke, so we ventured off into the cold night together. Originally I thought we might stop at the library for some coffee, but instead we just walked in circles for an hour, and then two—trading more stories. Occasionally I’d stop to point out one of the older, impressive brick-and-marble buildings, but I got the sense she’d seen plenty of far older and more impressive ones before. Her tone of voice seemed to say: Oh, is this what you call a fountain? Is this what you’d call a college? Is Julian what you’d call a writer? Of the gently falling snow she said, with heavy sarcasm, “When I was eight years old it snowed once in Atlanta over Christmas, and my grandmother called it a miracle.” She looked at everything like it was a sad, small version of something better she’d seen somewhere else. It was how she looked at me.

  The only thing she seemed to admire was my gold wristwatch. At first I thought she was worried about the time, but soon I saw that it was, in fact, because it was clearly nicer than anything else I was wearing. And yet she remained politely attentive as I spun out story after story—the neurons in my brain firing double time, trying to think of something that might astound her. I told her all about my drab little town, and my drab little mother, and my drab little after-school job. After a while I couldn’t stand to hear her pretend to be interested anymore, so finally I asked her how she and Julian had become friends.

  She composed herself before speaking, as if she were auditioning for a part.

  “Julian cried for three days straight after his parents dropped him off. Hand to God—three days. This is when we were thirteen. It was the middle of the semester, and rumor had it that he’d been thrown out of two schools already, all for crying and refusing to eat, and eventually his parents would come and take him away and try another school.”

  “Seriously? Julian?” I said, as we came to rest finally at the edge of a fountain that had been shut off for the winter.

  Evelyn sat down softly on the dry edge and straightened her hat. I was close enough that I could see it was made of real leopard skin. “He’d stay in bed until someone kicked him out, sit there at breakfast just crying, not eating, and then go to class and sniffle the whole way through. The other boys were all picking on him and making it worse. The teachers didn’t even try to stop them, really. They all figured that if the boys made life hard enough for Julian, he’d stop crying. But he was stubborn. That’s why I decided I liked him.”

  She took out another cigarette without offering one to me. I watched closely as she pursed her lips to it, leaving a rippled ring of crimson behind on the paper.

  “Well, the only decent thing to do was to adopt him myself. We girls weren’t allowed to sit with the boys at lunch and dinner, but I snuck over to him afterward and I said, ‘You think if you keep on crying, your parents will come back?’ and he told me to . . . well . . . I shouldn’t repeat it.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “So I told him I’d be his new mother, if he’d only just shut up and stop crying. And he did. And we’ve been close ever since.” Evelyn paused, as if to take her customary bow, and then added, “A few nights like tonight as no exception.”

  We sat a little longer while she finished her cigarette, and I wondered what else exactly guys like me were supposed to say to glamorous actresses who had gone to prep schools and wore leopard-skin hats.

  “I shouldn’t smoke,” she sighed. “I have a table reading tomorrow.”

  “For a play?”

  She nodded. “A production of Hedda Gabler. It’s got a great director, but he wants to do this modern interpretation with all young people. My agent tells me I should be glad about that, because otherwise I couldn’t be in it, but still. Ugh. And it’s Ibsen. Just once I wish he’d have written a play where the woman isn’t miserable or dead at the end.”

  I nodded and said, “That’s the trouble with Ibsen,” as if I’d known it all along. She stared at me for a moment and I felt my mind erase itself.

  “But I do love Hedda,” she sighed. “Do you know Hedda?” she asked, as if Hedda were a friend of hers and Julian’s.

  “We’ve never been formally introduced or anything,” I replied with a grin.

  She smiled slyly and smoked some more.

  “She marries this writer, because she thinks he’ll be successful, but then this other writer, whom she really loved all along, seduces this other woman, and she inspires him to write this masterful book and, well, Hedda gets jealous and destroys him, his book, and herself, eventually.”

  “She sounds charming,” I joked, but Evelyn was not laughing. She pushed away from me, and I felt the whole world grow colder. Flakes of snow fell from the golden streams of her hair and sank, lost, into the shadows of the dry fountain.

  “She’s a genius! Married to an idiot. In love with another idiot who isn’t half good enough for her. All her life she’s done everything expected of her, and yet she’s got nothing. No power, no future, no hope.” She adjusted her pillbox hat a little with one hand. “People just think she’s this vicious gold digger. I mean, she’s vicious all right. That’s why she’s so much fun to play. But it wasn’t money she married for.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  She snorted and somehow even this seemed poised. “She was the daughter of a great general, and as a girl, when they rode up the street together, everyone in the town would come out to see them pass by. That’s all she actually wanted, I think. Just to be seen for all that she really was.”

  She looked defiantly at me and took a long, triumphant pull on her cigarette.

  “That’s the last thing I’d want,” I muttered. It was the truth, and the only thing I could think of to say.

  She coughed a little, and there was a glimmer of surprise in her eyes, though the boredom had not left them.

  “At least I’ll never be married for my money,” I joked.

  She did not laugh. “What’s wrong with money?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. I just don’t have any.”

  She was still not laughing. “My mother married for money. So did her mother. So did Julian’s mother, for that matter. You think any woman who considers money is a gold digger? Because let me tell you. It’s always at least a consideration.”

  I thought about my own mother, and the many men she’d hoped, in my lifetime, would carry us up and out of Raleigh. Two or three pilots. The man who’d owned a racetrack, Dan. Or had Dan been the guy with the beautiful boat we never saw? Had she loved either of them? Any of them? I had to admit to myself, I’d always hoped she hadn’t. I liked to believe she loved only my father, the man she’d met in Newark, and that she looked down for him whenever she flew over the Garden State.

  “Maybe money could be a part of it,” I conceded. “So long as there’s love, too.”

  “‘Love,’” she said, softly, in someone else’s voice. “‘What an idea!’ Now you say, ‘You don’t love him, then?’ and I’ll say, ‘But I won’t hear of any sort of unfaithfulness! Remember that.’ And then you say . . . ”

  “What’s happening?” I laughed.

  “We’re running lines,” she said, finally smiling. “You’re Eilert Løvberg.”

  “Which one is he?” I asked. “The first idiot or the other idiot?”

  She tipped her head back and let loose a hard laugh, though I still could not decide if it was really genuine. Then she bent her head down against my shoulder suddenly and snuffed her cigarette out on the cement lip of the fountain. Her hat rubbed against my cheek and I was so startled that I almost missed what she said next.

  “You know, Julian asked me to spy on you. Find out what you were writing for this contest tomorrow.”

  Julian was nervous about what I had written?

  “He said he read your story, while you were in the bathroom or something. The one about the flight attendant’s kid? And that it was so good he started hi
s over. And then he saw you’d started yours over, and so he started his over again. I swear, I love him, but he’s completely insane sometimes.”

  “Well, you can tell him I’ve got nothing,” I said moodily. “Tell him to get a good night’s sleep because both of my stories suck and I can’t write another word.”

  Evelyn clicked her tongue twice and suddenly lifted her head up. “Don’t make me adopt you, too, now. In my line of work we call that melodrama,” she whispered. “All you need is a little inspiration.”

  And then she kissed me, and I could feel the wet pulp of tobacco and the crimson of her lips coming off on mine.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled and kissed me again.

  And I thought about what Sokol had said: that happiness was making love for as long as you could stand it to the most luminous thing you could find on this rotten corpse of a planet. And, afterward, I thought he might be right. And so she did not go back to Julian’s room that night to report back on my writer’s block. And so, all morning as she slept in my bed, I furiously tapped away at the keys of my computer. Just two pages at first. Truth. And then five. Forget this slant business. And then twelve. Tell all the truth. And then a title. “The Trouble with Ibsen.” And then it was done.

  Later that morning, Julian and I turned in our stories at the end of Morrissey’s class without a single word to each other. He looked as though he’d gone ten rounds with a gorilla and decided to wear part of its pelt on his chin as a trophy. There were rings around the rings around his eyes. He grunted at me, as if to acknowledge that it was over, and staggered off to sleep for as long as humanly possible. He never even asked me where Evelyn had gone, which was probably for the best, because Shelly was, at that very moment, turning in her own story, which she’d titled “Just Like Starting Over.”

  “I printed one for you, too,” she said, offering me the copy and giving my hand a squeeze—surprising both in its affection and strength. “I knew you could do it. I can’t wait to read yours.”