The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (3 page)

The following day, every newspaper left behind on the tables at Ludwig’s had run a photo of a grinning Billy at last year’s Homecoming Parade. The reports said he was at Wakefield North Hospital, in and out of consciousness, and the doctors’ prognosis was that he could lose half his IQ and that his motor skills would be greatly reduced, forever.

Even Rodrigo was upset about it. “They ought to throw that
pendejo
in jail,” he snapped at a photo of Mark White that had made the inside page, after the jump. Mark was Suzanne’s older brother, so Rodrigo didn’t like him much to begin with.

The café was closing, and the museum outside was teeming with glitzy people who had come for the Terpsichorean Society’s Annual Debutante Ball. I doubted that Betsy would still be going, but I hurried through my table wiping just in case.

When I next looked up, I noticed that a woman had come into the closed café and was peering at the
Portrait of Colette Marsh
, a small golden nude that hung above the bricked-up fireplace. Most people didn’t notice the painting because it was about the size of a page in a paperback book, but when the light came through, late in the day, it gleamed. I’d passed many wayward hours staring up at this golden woman, filled with as close to a religious feeling as I had ever had. I wondered who Colette Marsh had been, and who had painted the portrait. The tiny plaque said merely that it was from 1863.
ARTIST UNKNOWN
.

“We’re closed for the day, ma’am,” I said to the woman, who wore a long black fur. Her hair was swirled up in a severe blond vortex on the back of her head.

“It’s simply
sickening
,” she muttered as I came closer.

My cheeks flushed as I glanced up at the painting’s golden nipples. “The managers got some complaints. That’s why they moved it so high up.” She did not look away. So I added, “Plus, that’s real gold on there, I guess.”

The woman finally looked at me for the first time since I’d approached. She did not seem all that impressed, and she did not in any way hide this evaluation.

“Clearly. I meant that it is sickening that Genevieve Von Porter would donate it and then allow it to be hung in the coffee shop instead of the museum proper.”

“Oh,” I said, looking back up at the painting again. I’d never thought of it as something anybody owned. “Well. We’re closed anyway, ma’am.”

I gestured at my wristwatch and she seemed to admire it, momentarily. A gift from my mother, and gold as well, it was the nicest thing I owned.

The woman attempted to smile, though her taut face did not allow for much movement. “My name is Cecily Littleford. Are you available this evening to help me with a minor jam?”

Littleford. Betsy’s mother. I stuttered as I pledged I’d do absolutely anything she needed. She handed me a small plastic keycard.

“Take the staff elevator upstairs to Conference Room B. You have twenty minutes to clean up and put on the tuxedo that’s hanging on the door.”

“Excuse me?”

She pinched one of the newspapers between two disdainful fingertips. “My daughter is coming out to polite society this evening and needs an escort. My son Billy is otherwise engaged and my husband is away on business. Betsy mentioned that she knew someone working here at the museum who could wear Billy’s size.” She looked at me again, disparagingly. “Or close enough.”

I could barely speak. Fortunately, Rodrigo rushed over. “He’d be honored, Mrs. Littleford. Could I offer you some tonic water, while he goes to change?”

After Rodrigo ushered her to a clean table below the golden portrait, he pulled me back toward the door. “Don’t screw this up now, Cinderella. Have some goddamn balls. She
asked
for you, you
suertudo
motherfucker.”

Twenty minutes later, when I saw my reflection in the inside of the elevator doors, I did not even recognize myself. Billy’s tuxedo was a little long in the sleeve, but I looked all right. I thought that surely I could impersonate a proper member of the leisure class for two hours. But when the doors parted, and I saw Betsy Littleford standing there, my confidence withered like grass in winter.

The voluminous lower folds of her white dress flowed from the waist like collapsing waves, descending from where the defined V of its northern border intercepted an orbit of tiny pearls. Her hair was down, covering her bare shoulders. A second V was formed by the neat crossing of her gloved hands. A third and final V came in the shape of her sharply plunging eyebrows: already I’d done something wrong.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand and jerking me toward the ballroom’s arched doorway. “They started going in four minutes ago.”

Red velvet curtains covered the high windows that normally illuminated the rotunda. Tall Roman columns supported a great glass dome, through which the moon could be seen, full and yellow and high above us. Briefly I felt as though I were being led into the Coliseum to be fed to the lions. The room swarmed with older women in scarves and slinky evening gowns, and distinguished men in finely tailored tuxedos. The debutantes were there—perhaps twenty girls—all the ones we’d seen out by the dumpsters in their rehearsal garb. Now they wore the full regalia—white gloves, floor-length dresses, and pearls that had belonged to their mothers’ mothers. They stood in a line, arm in arm with fathers or brothers; the only guy I recognized was Mark, who was escorting Suzanne and looking more than a little pale.

A man at a podium called the girls’ names aloud, one at a time, and with each presentation, he announced the name of her escort. Each girl then stepped out into a spotlight, curtsied politely, and smiled. Next she took her escort by the hand and moved on, to allow the next young pair to take its place. Betsy’s face remained in total lockdown, but I wondered if I would finally see her smile tonight.

“Sorry about your brother,” I whispered weakly.

Betsy’s face did not change even slightly. Her eyes stared off at nothing at all. Soon a harried little man rushed over to us with Mrs. Littleford in tow.

“He’s right here. I told you,” Mrs. Littleford said. “Just have Mr. Isherwood say, ‘Presenting Elizabeth Littleford, escorted by . . . ’”

Mrs. Littleford looked blankly at me. She did not know my name. “He’s an old friend of Billy’s, this is . . . ” And again she trailed off.

Betsy’s crescent lips began to form my name, but before she could speak it, I blurted out another name instead.

“Walter,” I lied, thinking of the detective in my Wilkie Collins book. “Walter Hartright.”

Instantly I regretted not saying “Sir Percival Glyde,” but the harried man was already scribbling down “Walter Hartright.” The name seemed more plausible for a resident of suburban Raleigh, and the twentieth century, anyway.

Betsy’s eyes bulged, ever so slightly, and her lips eased gently back into place. There was no smile, and no laugh. Just an odd blankness. She wasn’t angry—that much I could see. She was amused, I was sure. Only, rather than smile, she somehow
un
-smiled. Then I saw it at last: Betsy’s smile was the absence of smiling.

As the man ran off to give the speaker my fake name, Betsy pushed her mother’s hand aside and said, “Walter. When did you and Billy become such good friends again?”

“Acting class in fifth grade,” I lied. “Billy was Vladimir in our production of
Waiting for Godot
and I was Estragon.” It worked. Betsy un-smiled again. Her mother seemed puzzled but Betsy stepped in suddenly.

“You were in Switzerland with Grandma.”

And before Mrs. Littleford could question this, the couple ahead of us stepped away, and Betsy dragged me into the light. The audience assumed a solemn silence.

“May I present Miss Elizabeth Littleford,” Mr. Isherwood said, “escorted by a close friend of her brother’s, Mr. Walter Hartright.”

The applause was sudden and electrifying. Betsy curtsied elegantly but did not smile. Not even a little. She took my hand in her gloved one and led me out of the light.

After a hundred hands had been shaken and a hundred platitudes exchanged, Betsy drew me to a table, where we sat side by side in front of gold-inlaid plates and silently consumed Niçoise salads and wagyu steaks while the adults talked of Morningstar ratings, Croatian catamaran chartering, and hunting tundra swans. I watched Betsy closely out of the corner of my eye, making sure I lifted the same utensils when she did. To my fascination, I found this new role was an easier fit than I’d expected. I was like one of the people I’d made up in Terminal B—blending naturally right in with all those around me. Plus, it seemed that no one really expected much from the escorts, anyway. While the girls got a year of debutante training, the boys seemed to be winging it. I did a damn sight better than Mark White, for instance, who sat across from me, using only one fork and dribbling sauce conspicuously down his shirt front.

He acknowledged my existence but once, when Mrs. Littleford asked me to tell everyone about Billy’s early acting career and addressed me as Walter. Suzanne firmly squeezed Mark’s hand as he began to correct her, and he winced in confusion. Before dessert was even served, Mark had vanished to the men’s room three times, returning slightly clumsier after each visit. I didn’t blame him—the conversation kept spiraling back to Billy, no matter how much Mrs. Littleford and the others tried to avoid the subject.

“Early decision notices will come in soon,” Suzanne’s mother said. “Walter, where have you applied?”

“Princeton,” I answered quickly. Everyone smiled, except Betsy, who un-smiled.

Walter’s bright future at Princeton grew to involve a position on the golf team and an old friend who’d promised to take me sailing on the Delaware. And then, of course, there’d be writing classes with prizewinning authors. The mothers all approved. I was so engrossed in it all that it wasn’t until my water glass was being refilled for the third time that I recognized Rodrigo holding the Waterford pitcher, wearing a staff uniform.

“Mr. Hartright?” he asked, smirking somewhat. “May I refresh your glass?”

I shifted down in my seat as he poured. Suddenly I felt sure that everyone knew I was full of it—that clearly, none of these rich people believed that I was really some well-to-do son of a paper manufacturer. Just as they didn’t believe that Mark was in any way sober, or that Betsy Littleford’s father was really away on business, or that her brother was sure to recover in a few weeks.

“Time for the waltz,” Betsy said, suddenly removing her napkin from her lap.

“Waltz? Like,
the waltz
waltz?” I mumbled, struggling to stand on my suddenly shaky legs. Rodrigo was trying to help Suzanne get Mark to his feet, and no one was looking at us. I leaned in as close as I dared. “I don’t know
how
.”

“The boys are
all
disasters. Just try to look like you’re leading.”

So we stepped out onto the dance floor with the others, and the girls prodded their partners so as to form a wide circle. The stiff-looking Mr. Isherwood made some sort of announcement regarding the sponsored charity, and then there was a crash of music and Betsy beckoned with her right hand for me to extend my left. I did so, shifting all my weight onto my right foot as she took it. She then drew herself in against me, slightly to my right, so that just half of her pressed up against just half of me. I half passed out.

Betsy guided my right hand to the smooth skin below her shoulder blade, and placed her right hand into my left and held it out high, opposite my neck. Then, through what I can only assume was girl sorcery, she began to move her feet in such a way that my feet knew just where to go.

“One, two, three,” she whispered into my ear. “Forward, side, together.” And we began to revolve around the floor, like a clock’s hands in reverse, spinning around our own axis like two sides of one moon.

“I had no idea you were an actor,” she said. “How unexpected.”

“Oh, no. I just made all that up,” I said quickly. “About me and Billy.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Very funny.”

But her amusement was silent. Just between us.

“It’s very hard to tell with you,” I said.

I smiled. She didn’t. We waltzed.

“Did
you
know,” she said drily, “that the waltz was originally a peasant dance? And that Viennese nobles initially were
shocked
by the indecency of dancing so closely?”

“I did
not
know that.”

“You should try taking debutante classes. For a
year
. And I’ll peek out of a kitchen window and watch
you
every Sunday.”

Before I could decide if she was joking or upset, the song came to its end and she began to pull away from me. “Thanks for filling in.
Walter
.”

The mothers were all on their feet as we came back to the table. Mark White, somewhat dizzier from all the waltzing, was vomiting semi-raw tuna and well-massaged cow meat all over the table, along with about a quart of Jack Daniel’s.

“He’s hardly slept since Billy’s accident,” Mrs. White apologized before the flow had even ceased. “It wasn’t your
fault
, dear . . . ”

Suzanne was anxiously trying to get Mark to the bathroom, but the large boy had gone limp, and she could barely lift him. Before I knew it, Rodrigo was on the scene.

“Please,” he said sweetly, “allow me to assist you, ma’am.” Suzanne looked at him—possibly for the first time realizing that he was the same boy whom she’d seen leering at her out of the kitchen window—and then without a word slid aside so that Rodrigo could get Mark to his feet and then to the bathroom.

Understandably, the whole incident had put everybody off, and Mrs. Littleford, sensing that the evening would go only downhill from here, tapped Betsy on the hand and said, “Come, dear. Visiting hours will be over at ten. We’re expected back.”

“Walter and I need to say good-bye to the Von Porters,” Betsy said, her face showing nothing—no resignation, no urgency.

“So,” I said, thinking,
So that was it then
, as we walked away, in the direction of the Von Porters. But as soon as she had escaped her mother’s sight, Betsy began to move quickly toward a set of double doors that led to the sculpture garden. Before I knew it, we were outside. Thick clouds had moved in from the south, covering the full moon like a wash of ink.