The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  Jazz Brunch has been a weekly ritual since Julian and I moved to this Great City in the East, three years ago. Fresh out of college, we were two writers ready for the world to anoint us as its newest young geniuses. Our heads were filled with Fitzgeraldian dreams of rooms in the Biltmore Hotel and of writing our Great American Novels at the cafés along Sixth Avenue, then on to have steaks at Delmonico’s with girls named Honora and Marjorie. In my defense, I’d only ever read about New York. Julian had actually been here before. Still, he acted as if the modern city, with her graffitied subways and omnipresent bodegas, was just some sort of temporary wrinkle in the fabric of civilization. Julian’s parents were currently off in Switzerland somewhere, running McGann International Trading, but part of their diversified portfolio included various rental properties around the island, one of which Julian and I had taken up residence in just off Washington Square Park.

  Even this morning, as we stroll toward the arch in two-tone shoes and biscuit tweed, Julian seems startled to find the square crawling with bearded NYU students, propelling themselves about on skateboards, and not a horse-drawn carriage or a top hat in sight, as Henry James had promised.

  As she does every Sunday, Evelyn meets us on the corner. This morning she clutches a script in her left hand, which bears the familiar, cragged face of Samuel Beckett. Her right hand holds a lit cigarette and a clump of wildflowers, roots attached.

  Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. Even four Anglo-Saxon names cannot contain her. She should be a “the Third” or a “Countess di” something-or-other. My heart has been lost in the frozen tundras of hers ever since Julian first introduced us in our college days, seven years ago. Now the accidental thought of her sends sparks through me like I am one of Henry Adams’s dynamos.

  Everything I write is for her; none of it is ever good enough.

  “If it isn’t Jeeves and Wooster. You two are later every week.” She grabs my wrist and checks the time on my gold watch. Then, pretending to scowl, she plants a kiss on each of our cheeks. Her blond hair smells of buttercream and her white skin of lemonade. Her lips brush against my cheek and they feel like the chitinous wings of a dragonfly.

  “We were unavoidably detained,” Julian says.

  “By a Simon,” I add, with a roll of my eyes. Julian is too busy stealing her cigarette to hear me. He inhales desperately, though he has only just finished one on our way over. Somewhere back inside the park comes the loud clatter of a skateboarder who has just screwed up a trick. Julian mumbles some vague threats about moving to Prague. In truth, he’s been threatening to leave the city for all sorts of reasons, ever since we arrived. But we know he won’t. Not without us.

  He jabs the lit end toward the flowers. “Where are those from?”

  “I mugged this little orphan boy for them,” she says, inserting two bluebells in my lapel and a prairie aster in Julian’s. She tucks a midsize daisy into her hair and drops the remainder on the sidewalk without a second’s thought.

  “Shall we?” she asks, tucking the Beckett away into some heretofore-unseen purse. She extends an unblemished forearm and I hook my elbow around it.

  “‘I can’t go on,’” I say, with the dramatic air of quoting things. “‘I’ll go on.’”

  Jazz Brunch at the Washington, once held weekly in a lush ballroom to hundreds of Manhattan’s elite, has in recent decades been moved into a small cove on the basement level and done up like a high-class speakeasy. Maybe in Fitzgerald’s time, jazz music was a call to revolution—chaotic, arousing, and ever changeable. It disturbed the natural order; it tore up the old millennium, with its absurd wars and its drudgerous Puritanism; it declared reckless independence once and for all. But in our era of anthemic dance beats, power chords, and casually rhymed profanities, jazz music has become quaint and old-fashioned, appreciated only by those who were born too late—namely, the three of us.

  A heavyset black woman croons Etta into a microphone; a guitar player with a beer gut sweats and strums; a little Latino gentleman squeaks along on the trumpet. The tiny crowd, aside from us, all appear to be over fifty; their accents are thick with Long Island and New Jersey. Once upon a time I’d have been counted as one of their numbers, but now they look admiringly at me in the close company of Julian and Evelyn.

  “Four, please,” Evelyn instructs the hostess, who is also the only waitress for the room—a brunette ball of curls with a small, golden stud in her left nostril.

  “Can’t you count?” Julian says. “We’re three. Every week, we’re three.”

  “I’ve asked someone to come and meet us.”

  As the waitress leads us to our table, Julian, ever change-averse, begins to complain. “Haven’t we spoken about inviting strangers to brunch? Haven’t we agreed that foreigners must be approved by a majority, not more than two days prior to brunch, so as to allow for proper background checks?”

  By “background checks,” he means asking me to perform a Yahoo! search; Julian still types everything on his Remington, not even an electric.

  Evelyn presses a slim, sturdy finger into my breastbone. “Well, every time I invite someone, you make him vote against it.”

  She slides onto the deep purple, crushed-velvet banquette. High above her is a small opening on the sidewalk level, where light comes down over us, in between the steady passing of disembodied shoes.

  I defend myself. “You don’t have to live with him when he doesn’t get his way. And I said that your friend Charity could come. And Rosalyn. And Gwyneth.” I sit across from her, and Julian next to me, as usual.

  “Yes and, funny how, afterward you wind up taking them to the zoo or something and then I never hear from them again,” she says with an indecipherable smile.

  “I feed them to the leopards,” I say, flashing an arched eyebrow.

  She sighs and studies the menu, though we all know it by heart. There is very little about Jazz Brunch that we don’t know by heart. By heart, she knows that I will try to make her jealous by going off with her friends. By heart, I know that she brings only the ones she’s bored of, half hoping that I’ll fall for one of them, do myself some good, and put her behind me. By heart, she knows that she’ll call me within an hour of departing brunch and sulk for days if I don’t pick up. Charity, Rosalyn, and Gwyneth each hardly made it to the monkey house before figuring out that my heart was still nestled far away, by her heart. Gwyneth had left me by the exotic birds. Rosalyn hadn’t minded. She’d told me she thought we were “like so completely tragic for each other.” Or had that been Charity, actually? It’s always something like Charity.

  “Coffee. Immediately,” Julian instructs our waitress urgently. Frightened, she does a sort of unconscious curtsy and is back with coffee in moments. Julian has his idiosyncrasies, to be sure, but he knows how to get good service.

  The singer wraps up “Tell Mama” and we all pause to give brief applause. I feel Evelyn’s foot touching mine beneath the table, and I try to catch her eye, but it is always off somewhere else, by the door.

  “Thank you, thank you. My name is Jo, just Jo, and I’m here with the talented—”

  But as she moves to introduce her two band members, one of the older women in the room lets loose a guttural noise and a commotion brews. We turn to see what is going on and spot the swimmer Mitchell King, all phenomenal seven feet of him, descending the steps into the room. He passes several blushing senior citizens, then greets Evelyn with an eager kiss. He sits down across from an utterly bewildered Julian, rendered silent for perhaps the first time since we’d moved to New York.

  “Mitchell King,” says Mitchell King. “Mighty pleased to meet you both.”

  His buttery Southern voice sounds just as it does on ESPN. He extends a hand, larger than a dinner plate, and I have no choice but to shake it. I think I can feel my metacarpals shattering. Julian jumps to summon our waitress again, mostly to avoid shaking hands with this Goliath. “And a pitcher of mimosas, as soon as humanly possible.”

  The room begins to set
tle, like the surface of a lake after a boulder has unexpectedly fallen into it. The jazz singer, Just Jo, takes her boys into “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” and we are left to face the gigantic swimmer.

  Fortunately, Julian is highly trained in the art of dismissive small talk. “So nice of you to join us, Mitchell. We were watching you on television just a half hour ago! How did you get here from the pool so quickly?”

  “Actually, that was taped last night,” Mitchell explains rather earnestly. “At the World Aquatics Championships in Japan! I just flew back into town this morning. With all those time zones, I get confused myself sometimes! We crossed the International Date Line. Yesterday, for me, it was already today. How insane is that?”

  Julian stares, open mouthed, just a moment longer than he should.

  “How did you and Evelyn meet?” I ask, figuring that I may as well take my turn.

  “I went to see her play. My agent likes to take me out when I’m in town.”

  “An agent,” Julian mumbles venomously, but only I can hear him.

  “Mitchell went out during intermission and bought me a bouquet of daisies, and then met me by the stage door with them,” Evelyn says, running her hands up and down his hairless forearm, so slowly that each of my own arm hairs feels a pang of jealousy. Evelyn was playing Irina in the hit Off Broadway revival of Three Sisters. I had attended fifteen of the performances, each time leaving a crimson florilegium of roses in her dressing room afterward.

  Evelyn always says that when she thinks about me sitting there in the front row she becomes afraid of losing her character. She says it would simply be the end of her. So I never tell her which shows I am coming to, and I sit back beneath the dark underhang of the mezzanine with a set of Julian’s opera glasses and my heirloom roses, and I watch, and I wait.

  She’d been impressed by daisies? Seriously?

  I fidget with the bluebells she lodged in my lapel. The daisy in her own hair still hangs there, perfectly. Even the laws of gravity must obey Evelyn.

  Evelyn has, no doubt, given Mitchell the impression that Julian and I must be impressed, if their relations are to go any further—which is probably why he goes on ad nauseam about his book. It is to be about how athletics showcase the triumph of the human spirit, and the meaning of human perseverance, and sportsmanship and teamwork, and just as Julian and I are getting ready to hang ourselves by our skinny neckties, the waitress finally scurries back with a bucket of Champagne on ice and a pitcher of blood orange juice.

  Julian is set to launch into his complex brunch order—which always involves wheat toast without crusts and the salmon eggs Benedict but without the Benedict—only Mitchell holds out a gargantuan hand before Julian can begin.

  “Ladies first,” he says, gesturing to Evelyn.

  Julian looks as if he might chew Mitchell’s chiseled face off. This is not the usual order of things. There is a pause. He downs his mimosa in a single gulp and sulks.

  Evelyn orders “the Caesar salad with smoked trout. Fish cold, please,” and then Julian jumps right back in with his elaborate demands. Feeling shaky, I opt for the steak and eggs, “but bloody,” thinking I might up my iron intake. Mitchell orders a granola and yogurt to start, and then pecan pancakes, with a ham omelet, making sure this comes with greens and home fries, and then sides of chicken-apple sausage and cheddar biscuits.

  “Got this Parkinson’s charity meet tomorrow. Carbs and protein. Carbs and protein. ‘The Mitchell King Diet.’ That’s going to be my next book.” He winks, like he’s letting us in on some sort of insider-trading deal.

  Sensing that Julian is gearing up for some epic rant, Evelyn quickly turns to me. “So, Mitchell is from the Raleigh area.”

  “Go Green Jackets,” I say weakly. As much as it pains me to engage Evelyn’s new boyfriend in conversation, it is nothing compared with the pain I’d feel chatting about my blue-collar childhood in front of Julian, who smirks continually.

  “No!” Mitchell cries. “Go Crusaders! Don’t tell me you were a Cracker?”

  Just Jo is belting out a nice rendition of “Little Boy Blue,” which allows me to mumble surreptitiously to Julian while Mitchell regales Evelyn with Southern high school football lore.

  “He’s about as cultured as a mole creature. He’ll probably be on about NASCAR next. Evelyn’s smarter than this. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Julian sighs knowingly. “Avez vous vu la grandeur de ses mains . . . have you seen the size of his hands?” He and Evelyn have always had disturbingly similar taste in men.

  We clap politely and drink. Mitchell’s granola and yogurt arrive, the mixing of which occupies him long enough for Evelyn to pay attention to us again.

  “You two are the worst kinds of snobs,” she whispers, under cover of the trumpet singing a double-high C. “Don’t think that I can’t read your awful little lips. Even in French.”

  At the same time I can tell that she is not surprised. Not even really upset. She knew that it would remind us that she has a full life outside our little vicious circle. At the same time she also knew that if she brought this Aquaman to Jazz Brunch, we’d put him through the ringer.

  “Evelyn tells me you guys are writers,” says Mitchell cheerfully. “What all do you write?”

  Julian jumps on the chance to tinker with Mitchell’s head. “I’m working on a novel right now. It’s essentially an homage to the deconstructed romans à clef of the late 1700s. Intertextually, I think it will be a smashing success, so long as the readers can be trusted to accept the basic premise that the entire thing takes place in a remote outpost in the Andromeda Galaxy, thirty thousand years ago.”

  Mitchell cannot think of a single thing to say to this. Of course, Julian is not writing about the Andromeda Galaxy—although he won’t say what his novel is actually about, not even to me.

  “Julian has had a story in the Paris Review,” Evelyn explains to Mitchell patiently.

  “I have to say . . . I don’t really like Paris! I spent a week there once for an invitational,” he says, as if anyone cared. “Sure, it’s nicer than New York, no offense, but it’s no Savannah.” He looks at me as though he expects me to agree, which I most certainly will not.

  Before Julian can inform him that since 1973 the Paris Review has been published right here in—yes, offense—New York City, I intercede.

  “Mitch, how come we didn’t see you in Sydney last summer?”

  Mitchell’s mouth stops chewing, and I half wonder if one of his ham-sized hands is about to grab me around the neck. But he forces a thin smile.

  If he hadn’t seen it before, he does now. He’s at brunch with a pair of wild animals. And we are out for blood.

  I know the story already. Everybody does. Two weeks before the Olympics, Mitchell King was caught in a hotel room with half an ounce of blow. By the time the charges had been dropped, he’d been left behind in the Northern Hemisphere.

  “I’ve made a couple of mistakes,” he says tersely. “Spent some time getting to know myself a little better. Consulted with my priest—”

  “Now tell us a little bit about that,” Julian urges. “What do they tell you to do? Kneel down and say Hail Marys? Self-flagellation with rosary beads? Details, please. I’m doing research for my book.”

  “What would Catholics be doing in the Andromeda Galaxy, twenty-eight thousand years before the birth of Christ?” I wonder loudly, but Julian kicks me under the table with a bruising saddle shoe.

  “Wormhole,” he says snappily. I don’t know if he is referring to his book or to me. We are drinking the Champagne straight up now.

  The rest of Mitchell’s food arrives, our waitress wilting under the weight of it.

  After the food has been laid out, she says, “You’re Mitchell King,” dabbing sweat from the nape of her neck. Her tiny golden nose stud catches the light.

  “Please,” Julian sighs. “We’re just trying to enjoy our meal.”

  “No,” Mitchell says firmly, giving Julian a stern
look. “I’m happy to meet a fan.”

  Evelyn is looking on with cool detachment as the brunette twirls a finger in a curl by her left ear while Mitchell signs her order pad. “Amy?” he asks. “With an A?”

  As I ponder any other ways one might spell the name Amy, I take a bite of my bloody steak and eye Amy’s twirling finger. “Quite fetching,” I mumble to Julian, loud enough for Evelyn to hear. Little flickers of lightning flash behind the grays of her eyes.

  “So what’s with the Beckett?” I ask lightly. My positive charge catches her burgeoning negative one, and there is a spark of electricity that recalls many mistakes of nighttimes past, which we never speak of during the day.

  “I have an audition tomorrow for a new adaptation of The Unnameable.”

  Just Jo erupts into a sweet and sultry “I Found a Love,” and for a moment, Mitchell and Julian temporarily exiled from my periphery, I feel as if Evelyn and I were sitting alone. She gushes something about “the Theatre of the Absurd” and I’m arguing against “this idea of the destitution of modern man, as if we were ever better than this,” even as she’s trying to agree with me because it is “absolutely just so brave, ultimately, and all the while just devastatingly tragic and—” And then there’s this prolonged instant in which I know that she is mine—that her mind loves my mind—and all my masks and all her costumes are off, and the great green curtains are drawn back, and it’s the real Evelyn and me, just as plain as the noon sun coming in above us.

  “So,” Mitchell interrupts, staring at me as if he cannot even remember my name. “Did you and Julian ever write anything together?”

  I laugh but not half as loud as Julian does. “Oh, yes,” he says drolly, spinning the little purple prairie aster around in his buttonhole like a clown. “We’ve got a four-picture deal with Paramount. I do all the action sequences and he handles the jokes.”

  Mitchell lights up. “A movie? Bad ass! I’m a bit of a film buff myself. Have you guys seen the new Jurassic Park film? This third one was absolutely the best.”

  “Honey,” Evelyn condescends, “they’re joking.”