The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  My palms began to sweat, and for the first time the hours of sleeplessness felt caked onto my face. I hadn’t showered. My fingers flew to my lips, sure that some lipstick must still be smudged there. The scent of Evelyn was deep underneath my nails.

  “I’ll just have to go back to my room and print out another,” I lied, hiding the spare copy of “The Trouble with Ibsen” that I’d printed to give to Julian.

  “I was kind of hoping you’d say that,” she said, making a move to follow me there.

  I’d never cheated on anyone before. I felt like slime, but weirdly grown-up slime. Shelly stood there, chewing on the ends of her black hair, dark eyes expectant. Whatever damages had been done to her already—and there must have been some—I knew I did not want to add to them. Nervously, I stared down at my watch.

  “Let’s meet for coffee in an hour? I really need to shower,” I said as means of an apology. And I kissed the straight-cut bangs that hung in her big eyes and rushed off.

  As guilty as I felt, I couldn’t help hoping that Evelyn would still be in my room. But she was already gone, vanished, off reading Ibsen around a table somewhere. Was she thinking about me? Why had I told her I didn’t have any money? But was there something else? The bed was empty except for her lingering smell, powdery and rich like the confections we’d kept behind the counter at Ludwig’s. It was all I could bear not to dive down into it and drift off to sleep. If I never resurfaced, I don’t know that I’d have minded. But I showered, printed out a copy of “Just Another Bastard Out of Carolina” instead of my actual submission, and skimmed Shelly’s story. It was about a single mother, trolling around a bookstore and planning to leave her screaming baby in the True Crime section before driving her car over an embankment. But right at the end, she hears a young poet giving a reading in the café. And his poem sends her wailing baby into a deep, undisturbable sleep, and the mother feels hopeful for the first time in months.

  Silently I reminded myself that Evelyn was not my girlfriend. And that after her audition she’d go back to New York. And Shelly would never have to know.

  • • •

  A few frigid weeks passed and I wondered, each day, when we’d hear about the contest. Julian and I did not speak—I did not know if he was upset about Evelyn, or anxious about the contest, or simply out of his mind. In class he sat, entranced by the snow falling on the windows, and said nothing at all to me or anyone else.

  “Pinkerton? McGann?” Professor Morrissey called to us hopefully, when no one at all reacted to his story about how Hemingway’s wife lost the only copy of his first novel on a Parisian train. We each faked a smile.

  Then suddenly, overnight, Abernathy Hall was covered in flyers with Julian’s picture on them. Shelly and I stumbled across one on our way to class.

  Come see writing contest winner Julian McGann read from his story “Just Before the Gold Rush.” Jan Sokol will also read from his forthcoming novel, Luminous Things. Tonight! Osgood Auditorium!

  Neither of us was surprised to find that Julian had won, though we were a little annoyed that nobody had even bothered to let us losers know that we had lost. Down at the bottom of the flyer were the opening lines of the story, meant to entice us into attending the reading.

  In 1851, on the continent of convicts known then as Australasia, before the gold mines of Kimberley were famous and the population of that island tripled with men searching for New South Wales’s very own El Dorado, young Shamus McGarry, a poor Irishman indentured to the Clarke Mining Corporation, had already spent six dark years sifting infinitesimal specks of gold from the earth. But then came the day that he and his partner stumbled upon a pure nugget the size of a man’s heart. Shamus and this other man instantly turned their pickaxes on one another. By luck or by fate, Shamus’s ax crushed the nameless man’s skull first—or else Shamus would have been the one without a name. He emptied the man’s skull, hid the golden lump inside, and then tore down the surrounding rock. He convinced the foreman that the wall had collapsed. It was easy enough to dig the man up from the grave pit that night. It was easier still to hide the heart-sized nugget inside his mouth and flee West, toward freedom, and fortune.

  • • •

  Australasia? New South Wales? Gold nuggets hidden in the drained skull of a murdered miner? It seemed patently unfair—just blatant showing off. I was keenly aware of being both outraged and jealous at the same time. Why hadn’t I been able to come up with anything like this? Was this slant? This fantastic impossible dream? Made real with just the right words, with just the right sentences. Was I even capable of it? Or was Julian, as I’d feared, simply imbued with powers I would never possess?

  That night at the reading, I arrived with Shelly, who joined me in laughing at the parade of casual pretension that was settling into the auditorium around us: a white-bearded professor in an off-kilter black beret, a girl with two peacock feathers woven into her hair, a boy in a twenties-era gangster hat toying with a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

  “I don’t look like a writer at all,” I lamented, looking at my lightly stained button-down shirt.

  “You look more like a waiter,” Shelly teased. I had not even told her that I had worn this same shirt for three long summers, as I served pastries and espressos at Ludwig’s Café to people dressed just like the alumni who were steadily streaming into the reading. Shelly was wearing a simple, slim black dress that almost made me forget about my fear of breaking her.

  “Get a load of this one,” Shelly said, rolling her eyes at the doorway.

  I turned and to my great surprise saw Evelyn enter the room. Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. In the same leopard-skin hat, with the same high cheeks and bored eyes. The noisy chatter of the room seemed to fall away to whispers. My heart pounded thousand-degree blood out through every capillary I possessed. I had begun to forget her, the smell of sunlight in her hair and the taste of sweet tobacco on her lips, but the moment she walked in I could smell and taste nothing else. I shrank down in my seat suddenly, trying not to let Shelly see how red I’d gotten. Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed most assuredly a cut above the rest.

  “Are those Julian’s parents?” Shelly asked. The resemblance was undeniable. “And who is that? His sister or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “I’ve never met her.”

  She frowned a little, so I clarified, “I mean, I don’t think Julian has a sister.”

  Evelyn was schmoozing with some alumni on the other side of the room. I wrapped my elbows around the chair arms and lodged my hands deep into my pockets, fearing my legs might propel myself over to her without warning.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Shelly asked.

  “Just trying to get comfortable,” I replied with a shrug, keeping my arms where they were.

  But just then, Professor Morrissey crossed directly over to us. His owlish face was as darkly lined as it had been on the day of Sokol’s little speech in our class, and he looked me in the eye.

  “Do you have a moment? Julian’s asking if he can speak with you privately. We’re having a bit of a dilemma.”

  Happy to get away from Shelly and from Evelyn’s line of sight, I followed Morrissey down the hallway to our old classroom. Sokol was standing inside the door of the payphone booth, yelling excitedly in Czech into the receiver.

  “Random House bought his novel,” Morrissey explained tersely, as we skirted the exuberant man.

  “I thought you’d said they turned it down?”

  He expelled a long, wavering sigh. “They had. Until Haslett & Grouse said they wanted it. Then S&S got in. Finally Random wound up paying almost twice as much for it as they would have before.”

  Morrissey seemed crankier than I’d ever seen him, so I let it go. From the looks of Sokol st
aggering down the hall, the man’s success hadn’t stemmed his drunkenness, but he did look much less miserable.

  In our old classroom, Julian was sitting at his usual place at the table, staring up at the raised windows again, now half covered with snow.

  “I can’t do it,” he said with no trace of hysteria. He said it plain, like a fact. Like the truth.

  “What? Read? What’s the big deal? I think your parents are here . . . ”

  Julian groaned. “The dean’s probably trying to weasel some sort of donation out of them. Christ!”

  “Evelyn’s here, too.”

  “Fantastic. You can sleep with her again, then,” Julian snapped. Professor Morrissey made an awkward noise of surprise, then rapidly apologized and stepped outside.

  “I didn’t realize you’d mind,” I said. Though we’d never discussed it explicitly, my understanding had been that Julian was not exactly interested in the opposite sex, much to the disappointment of the girls in our class.

  He waved his hand dismissively, as if this were all well beside the point.

  “I can’t do it. I can’t read the story,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. Julian’s breath reeked of whiskey, and I wondered if it was Epiphany whiskey, or if there even was such a thing.

  “Because,” Julian mumbled, “it’s all true. My great-great-grandfather really did steal a lump of gold from this mine in Australia. When I was little, my grandfather told me the story. He showed me the half of the nugget that never got sold. I’ve seen it.”

  So Julian hadn’t simply pulled this story out of pure imagination. It wasn’t slanted—not even one half of a degree. Somehow this comforted me.

  He went on: “It’s like our biggest, darkest family secret. Everything we have today is on account of a low-life thief and murderer.”

  This muttered confession caused me an unreasonable amount of joy, for which I immediately felt the blackest kind of guilt. Maybe he wasn’t really better than me; maybe he just had a more sordid history to draw from.

  “So why the hell did you write about it?”

  He gave me a look, as if to say, You know.

  He’d written it for the same reason that I’d written mine. Out of sheer desperation. Out of competition. Each in an effort to top the other, we’d driven ourselves to this. Julian had created an atomic bomb of a story, which, if detonated, would mushroom cloud his parents’ lives and probably his own inheritance. It was the same thing I had done, I’d realized. Made a little bomb all my own.

  “Read something else then. Read one of the other ones. They were all good.”

  Julian shook his head, starting to pull himself together. “I burned those all weeks ago. You’re going to have to do it. Morrissey said he’ll let you read yours.”

  My heart began pounding.

  “I can’t,” I said quickly, looking at my toes.

  “Why not?” Julian snapped.

  Of course I wanted to read it—I wanted to badly. But not with Shelly there. Not with Evelyn there. I’d been in such a rush to finish my story that night that I hadn’t bothered to change anything. There was no thin veil of fiction to save me. Even if I changed the names on the fly, there was the description of my dorm room. And of a girl in a leopard-skin hat. And the title, “The Trouble with Ibsen.” I couldn’t change that. If I read the story, Evelyn would know all the secret things I’d thought about that night. How I was sure that I loved her even though I barely knew her. Plus, I’d shatter Shelly’s glued-together heart in front of her classmates, some alumni, and every professor in our department. It would be the worst thing I’d ever done.

  “Why don’t you want to read it? Christ, you didn’t write about me, did you?”

  “No!” I assured him. “I wrote about Evelyn.”

  Julian’s drawn face suddenly cracked into a smile. “Well,” he said. “Very nice.”

  Morrissey peeked in. “Boys? I need someone. Now.”

  Julian looked at me—waiting, to see if I was willing to do what he could not. Without his parents, Julian would have practically nothing. I had practically nothing already, yet I’d never done anything truly cruel before. Sleeping with Evelyn had been wrong, of course, but it had seemed like a victimless crime. It wouldn’t be so victimless if I stood up there now and detailed that crime to the well-dressed and waiting crowd. And to Shelly. I studied Julian’s face—annoyed but resigned. He could afford to wait for the next contest, or the next—but I knew that I might never again get this chance.

  So I nodded. Julian’s smile widened, and I took a few deep breaths while Morrissey retrieved a copy of my story from his office and got Sokol off the phone.

  From the side doorway I looked out into the crowd as Morrissey urged the attendees to take their seats. Shelly sat there quietly chewing on her hair, wondering when I’d be back. She had no idea what was about to happen. As if that wasn’t enough to make me sick, Evelyn was now sitting just three rows ahead of her, looking quite bored. As Sokol came to the podium, to wild applause, I studied the man’s face carefully. The hugeness of his self-satisfaction was all but blinding. The sacrifice of eighteen years of his life had just been validated. The crowd adored him and all he’d done.

  “I’m sorry to say that our contest winner, Julian McGann, has unfortunately become ill and will not be able to read his story, ‘Just Before the Gold Rush,’ tonight. Instead, we have another story called . . . uhm . . . ‘The Trouble with Ibsen.’”

  I looked out at the darkened audience and caught Evelyn’s gaze. She looked back at me, and her eyes, for the first time since we’d met, suddenly widened. She was not bored now. Then, with one smooth movement, she slipped the hat off her head and tucked it into her purse. Then she looked up, almost eagerly. We weren’t running lines anymore. Something vicious and fun was about to take place. Something unexpected was about to happen, for a change.

  “Yes, sorry, that’s ‘The Trouble with Ibsen,’ written by the runner-up in our contest! Ladies and gentlemen, if I may introduce . . . ”

  And as he extended his arm and looked warmly toward the door, I saw him falter. The smug, serene confidence on his face crumbled, and, for a moment, I could see the same man who had wept in front of our entire classroom. A deadening silence followed. He glanced at me and then back out at the audience, sure they could see what a fool he really was.

  He did not know my name.

  Clearing his throat, he spoke slowly. “The one. The only. Pinkerton!”

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the door. There was more applause as I walked straight to the podium. My heart was pounding in terror. Tell all the Truth? I looked out at the waiting crowd, at Evelyn, and Shelly, at everyone. Julian watched me from the shadow in the wings. A spotlight shone down on me from somewhere way up in the blackness above. In my hand I held my little rolled-up paper bomb, the words still hidden safely inside.

  I took another slow breath, carefully unfurled the paper, and pressed it firmly against the lectern. I prepared to lay waste to everything in my path.

  3

  The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

  Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good, who are accustomed to doing evil.

  —JER. 13:23

  This morning his name is Simon. He’s sitting on our couch beside the picture windows, through which comes a golden view of Soho and Tribeca. Simon’s lower half is wrapped in one of my towels, and he is sucking the milk out of a bowl of my Frosted Wheats and watching men’s swimming on my television. They all have the same look each time, the Simons, give or take—the ribbed chests, the high cheekbones, the tidy haircuts. This one has kind of a busted nose—not one of Julian’s finest. Better than last Thursday’s Philip. Or had he also been a Simon? It’s always something like Simon—Trevor, maybe; or Spencer; or Colin. One time we had a Geoff—with a G.

  “Name’s Simon,” says Simon. “Have you seen this guy? Phenomenal.”

 
He gestures to ESPN with my spoon, sending a fine spray of milk off across our suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman. Technically, it is Julian’s suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman, but without me around to sponge up the residue left behind by the many Simons, the ottoman would have gone out with last year’s trash. In which case, he’d have replaced it with a George Bullock octagonal table with inlaid lotus leaves, or something equally absurd.

  “What guy?” I ask. Julian likes me to be polite to his overnight guests, although he certainly never is.

  “Mitchell King!” Simon shouts through a mouthful of frosted wheat. “PHENOMENAL!”

  As he shouts, little flecks of cereal land on Julian’s checkerboard, which he still keeps framed on the wall. I brush them off quickly.

  New York Magazine has Mitchell King on its cover this month, all seven feet of him, crossing an Olympic-sized pool in a single stroke. Simon watches as the all-American phenomenon does an underwater turnaround in digitized slow motion. His body curls up like a beige fish and shoots away again.

  Suddenly there’s the sound of water from the bathroom; Julian is awake. Simon grins and sets the bowl down on the table, leaving a ring of milk. When he stands up to greet his onetime lover, I can only grin as I lift the bowl and wipe the milk with the edge of my sleeve.

  “BONJOUR à toi! Et aussi un matin doré!” Julian strides into the room, arms extended to the sunny Sunday skyline. He wears a stolen hotel bathrobe and his curly hair is matted from sleep; soon he will carefully tousle it with a Venetian cream and claim it looks somehow different. “Ouvrez le fenêtre dont je peux voir mon saint!”

  When he spots Simon, however, Julian’s nicotine-scarred lungs deflate.

  “Jazz Brunch,” I remind him cheerily, as I make myself scarce. Julian will now eject Simon from the apartment with the cold proficiency of an East Berlin customs agent. Visa expired, this Simon won’t be back in our country again.