The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (8 page)

“I don’t look like a writer at all,” I lamented, looking at my lightly stained button-down shirt.

“You look more like a waiter,” Shelly teased. I had not even told her that I had worn this same shirt for three long summers, as I served pastries and espressos at Ludwig’s Café to people dressed just like the alumni who were steadily streaming into the reading. Shelly was wearing a simple, slim black dress that almost made me forget about my fear of breaking her.

“Get a load of
this
one,” Shelly said, rolling her eyes at the doorway.

I turned and to my great surprise saw Evelyn enter the room. Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. In the same leopard-skin hat, with the same high cheeks and bored eyes. The noisy chatter of the room seemed to fall away to whispers. My heart pounded thousand-degree blood out through every capillary I possessed. I had begun to forget her, the smell of sunlight in her hair and the taste of sweet tobacco on her lips, but the moment she walked in I could smell and taste nothing else. I shrank down in my seat suddenly, trying not to let Shelly see how red I’d gotten. Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed most assuredly a cut above the rest.

“Are those Julian’s parents?” Shelly asked. The resemblance was undeniable. “And who is that? His sister or something?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’ve never met her.”

She frowned a little, so I clarified, “I mean, I don’t think Julian has a sister.”

Evelyn was schmoozing with some alumni on the other side of the room. I wrapped my elbows around the chair arms and lodged my hands deep into my pockets, fearing my legs might propel myself over to her without warning.

“What’s wrong with you?” Shelly asked.

“Just trying to get comfortable,” I replied with a shrug, keeping my arms where they were.

But just then, Professor Morrissey crossed directly over to us. His owlish face was as darkly lined as it had been on the day of Sokol’s little speech in our class, and he looked me in the eye.

“Do you have a moment? Julian’s asking if he can speak with you privately. We’re having a bit of a dilemma.”

Happy to get away from Shelly and from Evelyn’s line of sight, I followed Morrissey down the hallway to our old classroom. Sokol was standing inside the door of the payphone booth, yelling excitedly in Czech into the receiver.

“Random House bought his novel,” Morrissey explained tersely, as we skirted the exuberant man.

“I thought you’d said they turned it down?”

He expelled a long, wavering sigh. “They had. Until Haslett & Grouse said they wanted it. Then S&S got in. Finally Random wound up paying almost twice as much for it as they would have before.”

Morrissey seemed crankier than I’d ever seen him, so I let it go. From the looks of Sokol staggering down the hall, the man’s success hadn’t stemmed his drunkenness, but he did look much less miserable.

In our old classroom, Julian was sitting at his usual place at the table, staring up at the raised windows again, now half covered with snow.

“I can’t do it,” he said with no trace of hysteria. He said it plain, like a fact. Like the truth.

“What? Read? What’s the big deal? I think your parents are here . . . ”

Julian groaned. “The dean’s probably trying to weasel some sort of
donation
out of them. Christ!”

“Evelyn’s here, too.”

“Fantastic. You can sleep with her
again
, then,” Julian snapped. Professor Morrissey made an awkward noise of surprise, then rapidly apologized and stepped outside.

“I didn’t realize you’d mind,” I said. Though we’d never discussed it explicitly, my understanding had been that Julian was not exactly interested in the opposite sex, much to the disappointment of the girls in our class.

He waved his hand dismissively, as if this were all well beside the point.

“I can’t do it. I can’t read the story,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. Julian’s breath reeked of whiskey, and I wondered if it was Epiphany whiskey, or if there even was such a thing.

“Because,” Julian mumbled, “it’s all true. My great-great-grandfather really
did
steal a lump of gold from this mine in Australia. When I was little, my grandfather told me the story. He showed me the half of the nugget that never got sold. I’ve
seen
it.”

So Julian hadn’t simply pulled this story out of pure imagination. It wasn’t slanted—not even one half of a degree. Somehow this comforted me.

He went on: “It’s like our biggest, darkest family secret. Everything we have today is on account of a low-life thief and murderer.”

This muttered confession caused me an unreasonable amount of joy, for which I immediately felt the blackest kind of guilt. Maybe he wasn’t really better than me; maybe he just had a more sordid history to draw from.

“So why the hell did you write about it?”

He gave me a look, as if to say,
You
know
.

He’d written it for the same reason that I’d written mine. Out of sheer desperation. Out of competition. Each in an effort to top the other, we’d driven ourselves to this. Julian had created an atomic bomb of a story, which, if detonated, would mushroom cloud his parents’ lives and probably his own inheritance. It was the same thing I had done, I’d realized. Made a little bomb all my own.

“Read something else then. Read one of the other ones. They were all good.”

Julian shook his head, starting to pull himself together. “I burned those all weeks ago. You’re going to have to do it. Morrissey said he’ll let you read yours.”

My heart began pounding.

“I can’t,” I said quickly, looking at my toes.

“Why not?” Julian snapped.

Of course I wanted to read it—I wanted to badly. But not with Shelly there. Not with Evelyn there. I’d been in such a rush to finish my story that night that I hadn’t bothered to change anything. There was no thin veil of fiction to save me. Even if I changed the names on the fly, there was the description of my dorm room. And of a girl in a leopard-skin hat. And the title, “The Trouble with Ibsen.” I couldn’t change that. If I read the story, Evelyn would know all the secret things I’d thought about that night. How I was sure that I loved her even though I barely knew her. Plus, I’d shatter Shelly’s glued-together heart in front of her classmates, some alumni, and every professor in our department. It would be the worst thing I’d ever done.

“Why don’t you want to read it? Christ, you didn’t write about
me
, did you?”

“No!” I assured him. “I wrote about Evelyn.”

Julian’s drawn face suddenly cracked into a smile. “Well,” he said. “Very nice.”

Morrissey peeked in. “Boys? I need someone. Now.”

Julian looked at me—waiting, to see if I was willing to do what he could not. Without his parents, Julian would have practically nothing. I had practically nothing already, yet I’d never done anything truly cruel before. Sleeping with Evelyn had been wrong, of course, but it had seemed like a victimless crime. It wouldn’t be so victimless if I stood up there now and detailed that crime to the well-dressed and waiting crowd. And to Shelly. I studied Julian’s face—annoyed but resigned. He could afford to wait for the next contest, or the next—but I knew that I might never again get this chance.

So I nodded. Julian’s smile widened, and I took a few deep breaths while Morrissey retrieved a copy of my story from his office and got Sokol off the phone.

From the side doorway I looked out into the crowd as Morrissey urged the attendees to take their seats. Shelly sat there quietly chewing on her hair, wondering when I’d be back. She had no idea what was about to happen. As if that wasn’t enough to make me sick, Evelyn was now sitting just three rows ahead of her, looking quite bored. As Sokol came to the podium, to wild applause, I studied the man’s face carefully. The hugeness of his self-satisfaction was all but blinding. The sacrifice of eighteen years of his life had just been validated. The crowd adored him and all he’d done.

“I’m sorry to say that our contest winner, Julian McGann, has unfortunately become ill and will not be able to read his story, ‘Just Before the Gold Rush,’ tonight. Instead, we have another story called . . .
uhm
. . . ‘The Trouble with Ibsen.’”

I looked out at the darkened audience and caught Evelyn’s gaze. She looked back at me, and her eyes, for the first time since we’d met, suddenly widened. She was not bored now. Then, with one smooth movement, she slipped the hat off her head and tucked it into her purse. Then she looked up, almost eagerly. We weren’t running lines anymore. Something vicious and fun was about to take place. Something unexpected was about to happen, for a change.

“Yes, sorry, that’s ‘The Trouble with Ibsen,’ written by the runner-up in our contest! Ladies and gentlemen, if I may introduce . . . ”

And as he extended his arm and looked warmly toward the door, I saw him falter. The smug, serene confidence on his face crumbled, and, for a moment, I could see the same man who had wept in front of our entire classroom. A deadening silence followed. He glanced at me and then back out at the audience, sure they could see what a fool he really was.

He did not know my name.

Clearing his throat, he spoke slowly. “The one. The only. Pinkerton!”

Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the door. There was more applause as I walked straight to the podium. My heart was pounding in terror.
Tell all the Truth?
I looked out at the waiting crowd, at Evelyn, and Shelly, at everyone. Julian watched me from the shadow in the wings. A spotlight shone down on me from somewhere way up in the blackness above. In my hand I held my little rolled-up paper bomb, the words still hidden safely inside.

I took another slow breath, carefully unfurled the paper, and pressed it firmly against the lectern. I prepared to lay waste to everything in my path.

3

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good, who are accustomed to doing evil.

—JER. 13:23

This morning his name is Simon. He’s sitting on our couch beside the picture windows, through which comes a golden view of Soho and Tribeca. Simon’s lower half is wrapped in one of
my
towels, and he is sucking the milk out of a bowl of
my
Frosted Wheats and watching men’s swimming on
my
television. They all have the same look each time, the Simons, give or take—the ribbed chests, the high cheekbones, the tidy haircuts. This one has kind of a busted nose—not one of Julian’s finest. Better than last Thursday’s Philip. Or had he also been a Simon? It’s always something
like
Simon—Trevor, maybe; or Spencer; or Colin. One time we had a Geoff—with a
G
.

“Name’s Simon,” says Simon. “Have you seen this guy?
Phenomenal.
”

He gestures to ESPN with my spoon, sending a fine spray of milk off across our suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman. Technically, it is
Julian’s
suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman, but without me around to sponge up the residue left behind by the many Simons, the ottoman would have gone out with last year’s trash. In which case, he’d have replaced it with a George Bullock octagonal table with inlaid lotus leaves, or something equally absurd.

“What guy?” I ask. Julian likes me to be polite to his overnight guests, although he certainly never is.

“Mitchell King!” Simon shouts through a mouthful of frosted wheat.
“PHENOMENAL!”

As he shouts, little flecks of cereal land on Julian’s checkerboard, which he still keeps framed on the wall. I brush them off quickly.

New York
Magazine
has Mitchell King on its cover this month, all seven feet of him, crossing an Olympic-sized pool in a single stroke. Simon watches as the all-American
phenomenon
does an underwater turnaround in digitized slow motion. His body curls up like a beige fish and shoots away again.

Suddenly there’s the sound of water from the bathroom; Julian is awake. Simon grins and sets the bowl down on the table, leaving a ring of milk. When he stands up to greet his onetime lover, I can only grin as I lift the bowl and wipe the milk with the edge of my sleeve.

“BONJOUR à toi! Et aussi un matin doré!”
Julian strides into the room, arms extended to the sunny Sunday skyline. He wears a stolen hotel bathrobe and his curly hair is matted from sleep; soon he will carefully tousle it with a Venetian cream and claim it looks somehow different.
“Ouvrez le fenêtre dont je peux voir mon saint!”

When he spots Simon, however, Julian’s nicotine-scarred lungs deflate.

“Jazz Brunch,” I remind him cheerily, as I make myself scarce. Julian will now eject Simon from the apartment with the cold proficiency of an East Berlin customs agent. Visa expired, this Simon won’t be back in our country again.

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.