The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (7 page)

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 his 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 in
sane
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.”

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.