Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

The only thing she seemed to admire was my gold wristwatch. At first I thought she was worried about the time, but soon I saw that it was, in fact, because it was clearly nicer than anything else I was wearing. And yet she remained politely attentive as I spun out story after story — the neurons in my brain firing double time, trying to think of something that might astound her. I told her all about my drab little town, and my drab little mother, and my drab little after-school job. After a while I couldn’t stand to hear her pretend to be interested anymore, so finally I asked her how she and Julian had become friends.

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.”