The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  Mitchell is beginning to look upset and I feel a twinge of benevolence.

  “Julian’s very private,” I explain. “We don’t really work well together.”

  Julian’s creative process involves drinking three bottles of wine over the course of an afternoon, stalking about the apartment in his old robe from the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, and smoking while leaning precariously out of our windows, until inspiration, or the urge to nap, strikes. I do all my own writing at the New York Public Library.

  “What do you actually write, then?” Mitchell asks me, pointedly waving a speared chicken-apple sausage in my direction.

  “Short fiction now,” I explain, “though I was working on this novel last year about an apprentice to a gilder in New York in the 1860s who steals—”

  “Wait. Was? What happened?” Mitchell asks. Julian flashes an angry look at Evelyn, who tries to pat her beau on the hand to indicate it’s time to shut up, but he goes right on ahead. “Don’t tell me you gave up! Let me tell you something. Winners never quit. That’s the first piece of advice I talk about in my book.”

  “It’s not that I gave up exactly,” I say coolly. “I lost it.”

  “You lost it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, like under a couch cushion or something?” Mitchell laughs, miming a look underneath his own gargantuan seat. Evelyn kicks him now and looks apologetically at me, but I ignore her. Mitchell—no idea what he’s done wrong—struggles to think of something else to ask.

  “So I’m working primarily on short fiction again,” I say flatly. “Trying to get back to basics.”

  Mitchell smiles as if he understands. “Cool. So are you in the, uhm, ‘Paris magazine,’ then, too?” he interrupts.

  Julian laughs—a hard, cold laugh—and it is just enough to admit something I hadn’t intended to.

  “Actually, I have something coming out next month. In the Vicksburg Review.”

  Julian stops chewing. Evelyn—God, my heart might stop—is beaming.

  “Vicksburg?” Julian asks, as if unfamiliar with the concept.

  “They’re preeminent! You should have told us earlier!” Evelyn says, her hand reaching across the table now, daintily crushing mine. “What’s it about?”

  Julian’s face has darkened, approaching blackened. “Yes, which is it? That little thing from college about subbing in for the Homecoming King or whatever? Or is it that Ibsen story you wrote about—”

  Evelyn gives him a look that could cut diamonds, and even Julian knows to change tacks.

  “—that you did at my reading?”

  He leans on my in a way that makes me itch, but there isn’t time to dwell on it. I think about lying, maybe saying it’s something older, but there’s no way they won’t read it, once it’s out. It’s not like Julian to forget these things.

  “It’s based, you know, quite loosely, with all the names changed and everything, on this road trip that Julian and I took to the lake, upstate, last winter. You remember? When you got really sick?”

  Julian drops his fork on the plate. He actually drops it. The noise reverberates as the guitar player comes off the end of a long solo.

  “You can’t,” he says slowly. “You ab-so-lute-ly can NOT!”

  He yells this final word so loudly that Just Jo skips a beat in “All I Could Do Was Cry,” and some of the old Long Island ladies turn and stare at him with Death’s own eyes.

  Mitchell, all alpha male, slides a meaty paw in between us. “Whoa, fellas,” he says, but Julian slaps his hand away. Well, not so much away, but he does slap it.

  “Mitchell!” Evelyn snaps. “Don’t get in the middle of this. It has nothing to do with you.” He shrinks back—losing two feet in height to the tone of her voice.

  “Didn’t we agree? Didn’t we agree that we, ourselves . . . that is . . . that, that one another . . . well, that it’s off-limits? That it is absolutely OFF-FUCKING-LIMITS?”

  He’s so upset that he’s grabbing for his pack of cigarettes, and when he realizes that he’s still inside he gets even more furious and downs another flute of Champagne. I say nothing. Not that he has never kept a single promise to me in his entire life. Not that I keep trying not to write about him. Not that I always wind up doing it, anyway.

  Finally I say, weakly, “I changed your name and all that. I gave it a kind of Russian theme. After seeing Ev in Three Sisters fifteen times, I think it got under my—”

  “You’re moving out,” he declares smugly, as he sets the empty flute down. “And that’s that. I want nothing to do with you. No more.” He looks down at his plate and flicks a great blob of his eggs at me. The golden yolk runs down my shirt and leaves a forbidding stain.

  “You’re nothing but a petty thief!” he shouts. “LIAR! THIEF!”

  The old ladies are getting very upset now. “Young man, would you—”

  “Oh, go back to hell!” he cries. “Or Staten Island. Wherever it is you’re from!”

  Just Jo has stopped, midsong. Amy, the waitress, is coming over, sliding between tables faster than Mitchell could leap off the starting block. “Please!” she squeaks. “Please! Keep your voices down!”

  But Julian is past the point of no return. He overturns his plate. He launches himself out of the chair, shouts that he “will see the manager about this!” and propels himself past the other patrons and out of the room.

  “Dude . . . ” Mitchell says, scooting back from the table. A camera flashes, somewhere. “This is . . . I’m sorry. Those ladies are taking photos. I can’t . . . I mean, my agent says I can’t afford to be in Us Weekly again.”

  “Go, go,” Evelyn says, waving her hand in the air dismissively. He promises to call, and she gives him a look that says he’d be a fool to bother. He seems confused, as if he’s still not entirely sure where he’s gone wrong, and then, because there’s still a camera flashing, he strides off, hands hiding his face as though he were some sort of criminal.

  “Terribly sorry, everyone,” I say to the room. “Just a small misunderstanding.”

  “You know you’ve really done it this time,” Evelyn says softly, as Just Jo begins her song over again.

  “He’ll get over it,” I say.

  Evelyn looks skeptical. True, I’ve never gotten a story about him published before, but I have been down this road with Julian many times. The truth is that without me he has no one—just Evelyn, who gets tired of him without me around, and a long string of wine bottles and a longer string of Simons, each emptier than the last. Without me around he’ll lose what little sanity he has left.

  I go on. “He’ll break into my room now. Read it. Spend half an hour figuring out how to delete the file. But that’s fine, the Vicksburg people already have it.”

  “How many times have I told you to make backups? Don’t you ever learn?”

  This I ignore, because what is there to say? No, I don’t. None of us ever learns.

  “He’ll drink half our Grey Goose and pass out on the bathroom floor. I’ll bring home some Campari tonight and we’ll do our whole Hemingway-and-Fitzgerald routine. Secretly, he’s flattered already. He might even tell me he liked the story.”

  “You’d better hope you’re right. Where else would you go?”

  I shrug. “Will we be seeing Mitchell King again?”

  “No, I don’t think we will.”

  It is always this way with her: she brings them here to us once they begin to bore her, and we devour them. It is all routine.

  Now that it’s actually just us—just Evelyn and I—strangely, I feel that there is nothing left to say. Or, really, that we’ve said all there is to say, too many times before. What is the point of running through these lines one more time?

  She says, “You should start seeing somebody else.”

  And I say, “Is this about money?”

  She: “Don’t be absurd.”

  And I: “You’re the one who’s being absurd.”

  “We can’t keep going on like this.”


  “Then go.”

  We do not move.

  She says, “You know you only think you want me.”

  And I say, “You know you only think you don’t.”

  She sighs. “You’re such a liar.”

  “Quit acting.” I grin.

  Long silence. Thinking that maybe we can get philosophical about Beckett again, I ask, “What time is your audition tomorrow? I’m sure it will go well. Why don’t I come along and then take you out after to celebrate?”

  She sits back. “No. I have to stay focused.”

  And that is that. Alone together, we are worse than worthless.

  Amy comes by with our bill, still terrified I think, that Julian is going to sic the managers on her, though she’s done nothing wrong. The little faux-leather booklet lies between Evelyn and me for a long, cold moment. Ordinarily Julian pays. I reach for my wallet, which we both know is empty. She reaches for her purse.

  “My treat,” she says. “To celebrate. For the story.” She drops two hundreds on the table as if it were nothing. For her, it is.

  It is, in fact, more than I’ll be paid for the story.

  “I’ll get it next time,” I lie. I’ll never get it. We both know it.

  “See you next Sunday,” she says and kisses me gently on the forehead. Then she taps my bluebells with her finger and I’m left to listen to the end of “At Last,” alone.

  I can’t go on, I think to myself, scraping Julian’s eggs off my shirt. I’ll go on.

  Curly-haired Amy comes back with the change. I siphon off an overapologetic tip and slide it back to her. Her nose stud glints as her round face breaks into a smile. “Thanks so much.”

  She thinks the money is mine and I don’t correct her. In fact, I tuck the ample remainder into my pocket and pour myself the last of the Champagne. As I do, I notice Evelyn hovering by the mirror at the exit, fixing her makeup. Or pretending to.

  “So,” Amy says, beginning to clean up the eggs sans Benedict that Julian has splattered, “how do you know Mitchell King?”

  “Who, Mitch?” I say, fumbling a Savannah accent—I can only fake it now. “Oh, why . . . we went to school together down in North Carolina. Benedictine Academy. Go Cadets.”

  Amy giggles and eyes the bluebells. “I like your little flowers.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, miss. My name’s Simon,” I lie, extending a hand to hers. She grips it, ladylike, and I glance at the mirror before I ask her, “Would you like to come with me to the zoo this afternoon? Have you ever seen the leopards?”

  Note: The following is reprinted with permission from the Vicksburg Review.

  —C.E.E-B.

  4

  Anton and I

  “What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing.”

  —ANTON CHEKHOV, THE CHERRY ORCHARD

  Winter winds howled through Union Square and snow piled up in the night; there were no pathways, only the backs of benches and the tops of trash cans. Streetlights bent up like periscopes from beneath the tundra. The tree branches were limned with white, as were the fire escapes and all the little terra-cotta pots out on them. Each pot sheltered a lump of dead earth and the dry husk of plant life within it. From the window of Anton’s apartment, I sipped some of his golden .Zubrówka vodka and watched three figures crossing the park from different angles, heads bent and trudging slowly, carving lines that would not intersect.

  Rose lay on an Oriental-blue divan by the fireplace, her hair still pinned up from her rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard earlier that day. The only finished copy of my manuscript lay beside her in a heavy yellow hatbox, which I’d borrowed from Anton as a means of transporting my pages to and from the public library each day. Every few moments, Rose pinched the corner of a new page with two fingers, as if it were a beloved photograph, and lifted it from the box. As she read she rubbed her thumb softly against her latest engagement ring. This one was either from His Royal Highness, Umberto, Prince of Greece and Denmark, or from Phillipos the Fifth, of the former Royal Italian House of Savoy. It got so hard to keep track, and I found it easiest to live with myself when I did not know who her suitors were.

  Through the thin paper, an orange glow outlined the shadow of her fingers as they scanned beneath my lines. Her deep brown eyes flitted from side to side; her lips occasionally cracked into a smile that sent my heart thumping, or they crept down into a puzzled frown that twisted my guts until I forced myself to gaze out the window again, hoping she would hurry and deliver me from my misery.

  Then the peaceful crackle of the electric fireplace was interrupted by deathly hacking from the neighboring bedroom. Anton hadn’t been well in weeks. He’d wake up at odd hours and bang around the apartment while Rose and I were entangled in my room across the hall. In the morning we’d find burned-down candles, handkerchiefs stained with phlegm and typewriter ink, and discarded containers of wonton soup like artifacts for us to puzzle over.

  As Rose got to the last page, I looked out into the snowy darkness again. I could still see the immortal statue of General George Washington on his horse. Before its erection, the square had been a potter’s field and, according to the research I’d done for my novel, only the penniless had been buried there, and they’d hung criminals from the elms. Beneath all that snow and concrete and dead grass and damp earth lay the bodies of some twenty thousand nameless men and women—forgotten before they’d even died.

  “Finished,” Rose said, laying the last page on the divan beside her and stretching out like a lioness, satisfied with the day’s kill.

  “And?” I asked, reaching for the bottle of to refill my glass. Each bottle was adorned with a little brown bison and contained a single yellow blade of bison grass from the primeval Białowie.za Forest. Technically illegal in the States, the spirit was Anton’s favorite reminder of his homeland.

  “And you’re brilliant,” she purred. “It’s absolutely masterful.”

  I came over next to her and set my glass down. “You’re not just saying that?”

  “Would I lie?” she teased. Behind her dark eyes, folded up inside Rose’s imagination, my characters were still alive, just as I’d described them. She scraped her ring gently against the back of my arm; liquor pulsed in my veins. Her head slowly moved into the orbit of my own. I kept my eyes open so I could see the gentle shake that comes when she’s fighting herself and losing. And then an inhuman rasping sound burst forth from Anton’s room, shattering the moment and all subsequent moments.

  The sound grew louder, and soon the door pushed open and Anton half collapsed into the room, his bathrobe opened and his eyes red as beets.

  “I’m dying,” he announced.

  “Anton, dear, you have the flu,” Rose said for the hundredth time that week. She got up to look after him. She’d been mothering him since long before I knew either of them, since they were thirteen and both sent to live a continent away from their families at St. Alban’s Preparatory School. Quickly I shuffled the remaining pages together and slipped them back into the hatbox before Anton could see them. “Do you want us to order you more wonton soup?”

  “Damn the soup!” Anton bellowed, tossing a checkerboard sans pieces over the divan and against the window. “Damn all the soup!”

  “He’s delirious,” Rose said, chasing after him to try to tie his robe together.

  “Melodramatic, you mean,” I said, and we both knew it was more likely that he was drunk.

  Anton seemed to be offended by this. “There isn’t a melodramatic bone in my body,” he coughed. “And you ought to know the difference.” He seemed eager to go on, but he erupted into another coughing fit that he covered only barely with his sleeve. When he pulled the sleeve away, we could both see that it was specked with blood.

  “How long have you been coughing up blood?” Rose asked.

  Anton lifted one cupped hand high in the air. “It will have blood! They say, blood will have blood!”

  “Wh
at the hell is he saying?”

  “He’s doing Macbeth,” Rose said calmly, finding her phone in a voluminous handbag. “Anton, dear, sit down. I’m going to call your parents.”

  “But they’re out on the Crimean Peninsula somewhere,” I said. “We’ve got to call an ambulance. We should have called one a week ago.”

  I’d let it slide this long because Anton’s nocturnal schedule wasn’t all that unusual. We had always gone through long stretches when we were each so engrossed in our writing that we barely spoke. I worked best during the harsh light of the morning, when my dreams from the night before still danced in my mind. Anton preferred to wake in blackness from nightmares and push them away slowly with sips of and taps of his Remington hammers on ink-soaked ribbons. Now, I felt that it was little wonder he’d gotten so sick; every day he waged new campaigns in the war against his own body.

  Rose ignored me and dialed twelve digits from memory. A moment later she was connected to a palatial mansion on the Sea of Azov that I’d heard about many times but had never seen.

  “Dobroye ootro, Gospodin Prishibeyev. Eto Rose. Vash syn, Anton, bolyen . . . ” she spoke in flawless Russian. As the one-sided conversation continued, Anton led me in a waltz around the room, pausing only briefly to mist his other sleeve with airborne blood. I wondered how contagious tuberculosis was, or if he might have gotten some kind of STD from one of his gentlemen callers.

  Rose looked up, holding her hand over the receiver. “Mr. Prishibeyev says we should take him to see a Dr. Ivanych. He’s a friend of the family’s.”

  Anton shouted, “Pasha! Pasha Pasha Pasha!”

  I didn’t know what “Pasha” meant, but Dr. Ivan Ivanych’s name I knew from the many bottles of Lotosil, the antidepressant Anton took daily, as well as the various barbiturates and painkillers that hid farther back in Anton’s medicine cabinet.

  “Great. Yeah. ‘Pasha,’” I said, coaxing Anton onto the divan to lie down. “I’ll buzz downstairs for a taxi.”

  “The doctor is ice fishing at his lake house,” Rose informed me after a bit more Russian dialogue with Mr. Prishibeyev. “Somewhere upstate?”