The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (36 page)

“You should have them carve a statue of you out of tofu!” Jeffrey cries.

The idea seems to delight her. “If I put it over on the throne and snuck off, do you think they’d know the difference?”

Their laughter fills the empty dining hall, and in an instant there are tears in the corners of her eyes. Then she reaches both hands across the table. Jeffrey takes one and I take the other—and her fingers slip around mine as if I had held them only yesterday. “You have to stay here a few more weeks. Please. It’s
just
like the good old days,” she says, smiling as the servers arrive with our food.

And as we drink, and Jeffrey and I entertain Her Majesty with stories about our years apart, it
does
feel as if very little has changed. It’s only when I lean back in my chair and into the dead eyes of the portraits on the wall that I remember that we are not having brunch in some ritzy New York hotel. This is her home now. High up on one wall is an empty space. I can’t help but think that it is waiting for a portrait of her.

• • •

After dinner I am shown to a magnificent guest suite, done up in Far Eastern crimsons and golds. There is a huge canopy bed, a black bearskin rug on the floor, a huge bookshelf filled with leather-bound classics, a wardrobe the size of a New York apartment, and a spacious writing desk in the corner. A Spanish boy named Roberto brings me silk pajamas. The moon is high and full in the sky outside the window, and after the meal and the wine and a few hours with my old love, I am desperate to write. But I check all the drawers in the writing desk and there is no paper. I could ask Jeffrey, but he’s in the neighboring room, and judging from the way things were looking between him and Cyrus as we left dinner, I think that perhaps I will not disturb him. I hear an occasional faint thumping noise that makes me blush. It’s nice having the old Jeffrey back, I think to myself, but I’m worried for him at the same time. Will one bottle of wine lead to twelve? Will the good reviews, already streaming onto the blogosphere, go to his head even more quickly than the wine? And how long until Russell Haslett comes calling?

Just as I’m considering tearing some pages from the back of one of the ancient books on the shelf, I am interrupted by the sound of the door opening.

“Roberto, do you think you could find me something to write on?” I ask.

But it is not the Spanish boy.

The Princess of Luxembourg studies me a moment, her eyes curious, as if surprised to find me where she’d left me. Should I bow? I’m half tempted to curtsy.

“Good evening, Your Majest—” I begin, but before I can get it out she’s rushing toward me. Her hands grip my cheeks firmly, her lips devour mine, and though her golden hair keeps falling in our faces, she does not close her eyes, as if she needs to be sure it’s really me.

“Don’t you
dare
call me that,” she says, holding me tighter.

It’s what I’d dreamed of for nearly a decade, and yet something about her suddenly makes me nervous. I’d imagined myself all this time as some sort of world-weary knight, a lovelorn Lancelot come to free her from this prison. Instead I feel more like a confused Quixote, lost in lovely La Mancha, tilting at the same old windmills. Would that make Jeffrey my Sancho Panza? If anything, I must admit, it’s all the other way around.

“I thought you didn’t even want me to come up to the palace,” I manage.

Her eyes burn at a thousand watts. More. “I’ve told you,” she says. “You always make me forget my lines.”

She kisses me again and the nine interceding years begin to fly away. Yet as they do I find myself grasping at them with both hands. My heart is hummingbird-pounding, and I feel a faint throb in my leg as she pushes me toward the canopy bed—but we don’t even get there—we end up on the floor, and I feel the pricking of the bearskin against my cheek. She’s heavy on top of me and behind those carefully painted lips I feel the faint tensing of her teeth against my tongue. Her hands are on my shoulders, in my shirt, and all I can see is a frenzy of golden hair.

“What’s wrong?” she says, pulling back. The red of her lipstick is all smudged around the edges.

“Nothing,” I say, squirming beneath her.

“Tell me you’re not thinking of someone else?” she teases.

“No! No one! No one!” I insist, but in my head I am thinking,
Outis! Outis!

Her smile hangs white as a pearl necklace, just out of my reach. “I
knew
you wouldn’t forget me.”

We kiss again and I am just about to give up my reservations: her absent husband; Cyrus—who is likely armed and just in the next room; and even Jeffrey, with whom I’ve only just repaired things; but then I hear the thumping noise again, and I falter. Is it coming from Jeffrey’s room? It sounds closer than that.

“Can’t we pretend everything is like it used to be?” she asks, perhaps more to herself than to me.

“We wish to remain what we are,” I joke.

She grins. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

She is about to come at me again, but then there is another thump, and this time she hears it, too. She pauses, hands in my hair, nose a millimeter from mine.

“Is that Jeffrey and Cyrus?” she giggles, pretending to be shocked.

“That’s what I
thought
it was,” I say, as I sit up against the bed, pulling slightly away from her so I can hear—brushing her hair from my face. “But doesn’t it sound like it’s coming from in there?”

I nod toward the gigantic wardrobe. In an instant her face goes very pale. She pushes her thumb roughly over my lips, rubbing away the red of her own. Then straightens herself out and checks herself quickly in the mirror above the desk. She locks eyes with herself, and I know that look—she is getting back into character. She crosses swiftly to the wardrobe door and yanks it open.

Inside is a young boy, perhaps eight years old, dressed in golden silk pajamas. His blond hair is slicked to the side, still a little wet from a bath earlier in the night. He wears rather thick glasses and sits cross-legged with a flashlight in one hand and a tattered book in the other.

“Julian!” she scolds. “I’ve told you a hundred times, you can’t be in here!”

He looks up expectantly at her. At his mother. He folds his arms in annoyance and then, he pouts—it’s
her
pout, on
his
face.

“Evie told me I had to go away because she’s getting her hair cut!”

She seems quite alarmed by this. “Evelyn’s getting a—. Who on earth is giving her a
haircut
?”

Julian shrugs. “Ms. Ruby gave her the scissors for her paper dolls.”

Suddenly she’s rushing for the door, wailing, “No, no, no, no—” but then she pauses and turns back to me, a devastated look on her face. “Could you just—? I have to—. Before she cuts her ears off!”

I shoot a winning smile at the young boy in the wardrobe, as if he is my very best friend in the world. He ignores me.

“Go on,” I say, waving my hands at her.

She looks at me one final time, and her eyes are dim now with gratitude and sorrow and grief and relief all at once, and for perhaps the first time since I’ve known her, I am sure that I know what is happening behind them. She rubs a thumb under her lower lip one last time. She goes and I am alone with the boy.

The boy who is her son.

“Mothers,” I sigh conspiratorially from my spot on the floor. “Honestly.”

The boy looks up at me curiously. “Do you have a mother?”

“I do. But she’s not here, though. She’s at home. I mean, where I grew up.”

“Why aren’t you where you grew up?” he asks.

“I went away,” I said. “I got older so I left.”

He seems perplexed by this. “I’m
never
leaving home. I’ll stay here forever.”

I’m about to argue with him until I realize that, perhaps, he’s right. Could a future prince of Luxembourg just pick up and start a new life in Belize or Katmandu?

“Well,” I say, looking around, “at least it’s quite nice here.”

“It’s
boring
here,” he says. “I want to go to Africa!”

“I’ve been to Africa,” I say. His eyes light up but then I add, “They make you take medicine to go there,” and he retches.

“Do you know my mother?”

“She and I are old friends,” I say warmly, trying not to arouse his suspicions about the fact that I am still sitting on the floor where she pushed me down, only minutes before. I wonder what, if anything, the boy could see through the crack in the wardrobe doors. You can see a lot from under closet doors—I remember well enough. You can see a lot of things you shouldn’t. It seems like yesterday that I
was
this boy. But tonight I am the man on the other side of the closet door, and this simply cannot be.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

He holds up his book—a yellow cartoon crane beams up from the cover, the title in indecipherable Luxembourgish.

He holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.

“I can’t,” I say. He looks appalled. “I mean, I can
read
. I just only know English.”

He snorts, as if he can hardly believe anyone wouldn’t know more than that.

“English books are
there,
” he points. I get up and browse the shelf of old books for something the boy’s speed. After thumbing past the philosophy, some Woolf, and a few books about the Harlem Renaissance, I finally pull one out that I think he’ll enjoy. When I hand it to him, he reads the title off slowly.

“
Just So Stories
. By Rudard Kippler.”

“Rudyard
Kipling.
” I sit down again on the bearskin rug, closer to the wardrobe. He seems embarrassed to have said it wrong, so I add, “Your English is very good.”

“My mom’s from America,” he explains.

“Is that right?”

He nods and holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.

Taking the book from him, I look up at the open door, hoping maybe his mother will return, but I suspect that she is dealing with Julian’s freshly bald younger sister and has forgotten all about us for the moment. The boy begins to get comfortable, tucking his trusty flashlight into the pocket of his pajamas and arranging some soft extra blankets out on the bottom of the wardrobe. He knows just how he wants to lie on the blankets. I suspect he’s gotten scores of maids and footmen and butlers to read him bedtime stories while his mother has been preoccupied with her royal duties.

I wait for him to settle in. It is important to be comfortable when you’re just a small boy, alone in a big place. He’ll change, but this fact never truly will. He’ll go on, day after day, unsure if he’s all that different from the day before. Later he’ll look back at the things that are happening now and he’ll think they were almost like something he read about. He’ll know they happened to him but they may well have happened to another person, with another name, in some other place, where the clocks are on other times. In the story of tonight he’ll be himself, but costumed in the gentle lies of memory and the soft fictions of yesterdays. Some stories he’ll lose along the way: in truck stops, on old computer drives, in boxes in dank basements. Still, each day he’ll wonder, has he changed and everything else is the same? Or is it exactly the other way around?

Someday he’ll see that he can’t have one without the other. He can’t know he is the same unless everything around him has changed. It’s like black spots on black fur—you can’t see them, but they’re there, all the same.

He’ll think he’s moving in zigzags, getting anywhere but where he meant to go. But there are edges to the board, and someday he will reach one, and it is only then that life will place a true crown onto his head. It’s only then that he’ll be able to turn around and see for the first time a glorious path back from where he came.

“You’re not
reading
,” the boy complains.

“Sorry,” I say, “I thought you weren’t ready.”

“I’m ready,” he insists.

“Oh, this one’s a good one,” I say as I flip a few stories in. I pause, remembering that I read it once, when I was little, at a tiny bookstore in a big airport terminal. I’m delighted to find it hasn’t changed at all—only me. King me.

“You have to say its name,” he demands.

“Its name,” I say, “its name is, ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots.’”

• • •

I left Luxembourg and my apologies, scrawled onto the blank end pages of the Kipling book. I’d come looking for someone I’d made up, a long time ago, and that as fun as it might have been to break character for another night, I owed her more than that—much more. For years we’d had a kind of make-believe love, in its way so much better than the genuine article. She’d called me after good auditions, but never bad ones. I’d seen her break men’s hearts, but I’d never once seen her heartbroken. Our story had been all romanticism, never realism. We’d had affairs, but we’d never once made plans. Now I saw that, even playing the role of the Princess of Luxembourg, she had no fairy-tale life: she had a country to think of, overweight citizens to inspire to exercise, real duties to carry out! A royal life was still a life: soy products to endorse, a husband to miss when he was away, and children getting up to mischief on opposite ends of the palace. Running away from it all for just one night would have made neither of us any happier, in the end. If Jeffrey had proved anything to me, it was that no one could escape forever. Maybe he’d been right, long ago, when he’d told me that I’d never really loved her. Nothing I’d felt for her then even began to match what I felt when she’d looked that child in the eye and had seen her own eyes looking back.

Of course, I didn’t say all that, exactly. Rather, I left my apologies in the form of a story. One that I’d written again and again, about an actress preparing for not merely the role of a lifetime—but a lifetime of a role. A story I’d been unable to finish, until then. When I’d finally finished it, I’d signed my name—my real name—at the bottom, and set the book down beside the sleeping head of her son.

Now, on this airplane, I am writing it all again, while I soar over the great black gap of the ocean, in as straight a line as the curve of the earth will allow. A flight attendant reminds me sweetly to be sure and change the time on my watch. I tell her that I wish I still had a watch. I tell her that I so loved watching its hands winding backward, making time where there was none before, catching seconds from the air and putting them back where they belong.