Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Got this Parkinson’s charity meet tomorrow. Carbs and protein. Carbs and protein. ‘The Mitchell King Diet.’ That’s going to be my next book.” He winks, like he’s letting us in on some sort of insider-trading deal.

Sensing that Julian is gearing up for some epic rant, Evelyn quickly turns to me. “So, Mitchell is from the Raleigh area.”

“Go Green Jackets,” I say weakly. As much as it pains me to engage Evelyn’s new boyfriend in conversation, it is nothing compared with the pain I’d feel chatting about my blue-collar childhood in front of Julian, who smirks continually.

“No!” Mitchell cries. “Go Crusaders ! Don’t tell me you were a Cracker?”

Just Jo is belting out a nice rendition of “Little Boy Blue,” which allows me to mumble surreptitiously to Julian while Mitchell regales Evelyn with Southern high school football lore.

“He’s about as cultured as a mole creature. He’ll probably be on about NASCAR next. Evelyn’s smarter than this. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Julian sighs knowingly. “ Avez vous vu la grandeur de ses mains … have you seen the size of his hands?” He and Evelyn have always had disturbingly similar taste in men.

We clap politely and drink. Mitchell’s granola and yogurt arrive, the mixing of which occupies him long enough for Evelyn to pay attention to us again.

“You two are the worst kinds of snobs,” she whispers, under cover of the trumpet singing a double-high C. “Don’t think that I can’t read your awful little lips. Even in French.”

At the same time I can tell that she is not surprised. Not even really upset. She knew that it would remind us that she has a full life outside our little vicious circle. At the same time she also knew that if she brought this Aquaman to Jazz Brunch, we’d put him through the ringer.

“Evelyn tells me you guys are writers,” says Mitchell cheerfully. “What all do you write?”

Julian jumps on the chance to tinker with Mitchell’s head. “I’m working on a novel right now. It’s essentially an homage to the deconstructed romans à clef of the late 1700s. Intertextually, I think it will be a smashing success, so long as the readers can be trusted to accept the basic premise that the entire thing takes place in a remote outpost in the Andromeda Galaxy, thirty thousand years ago.”

Mitchell cannot think of a single thing to say to this. Of course, Julian is not writing about the Andromeda Galaxy — although he won’t say what his novel is actually about, not even to me.

“Julian has had a story in the Paris Review ,” Evelyn explains to Mitchell patiently.

“I have to say… I don’t really like Paris! I spent a week there once for an invitational,” he says, as if anyone cared. “Sure, it’s nicer than New York, no offense, but it’s no Savannah.” He looks at me as though he expects me to agree, which I most certainly will not.

Before Julian can inform him that since 1973 the Paris Review has been published right here in — yes, offense — New York City, I intercede.

“Mitch, how come we didn’t see you in Sydney last summer?”

Mitchell’s mouth stops chewing, and I half wonder if one of his ham-sized hands is about to grab me around the neck. But he forces a thin smile.

If he hadn’t seen it before, he does now. He’s at brunch with a pair of wild animals. And we are out for blood.

I know the story already. Everybody does. Two weeks before the Olympics, Mitchell King was caught in a hotel room with half an ounce of blow. By the time the charges had been dropped, he’d been left behind in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I’ve made a couple of mistakes,” he says tersely. “Spent some time getting to know myself a little better. Consulted with my priest—”

“Now tell us a little bit about that,” Julian urges. “What do they tell you to do? Kneel down and say Hail Marys? Self-flagellation with rosary beads? Details, please. I’m doing research for my book.”

“What would Catholics be doing in the Andromeda Galaxy, twenty-eight thousand years before the birth of Christ?” I wonder loudly, but Julian kicks me under the table with a bruising saddle shoe.

“Wormhole,” he says snappily. I don’t know if he is referring to his book or to me. We are drinking the Champagne straight up now.

The rest of Mitchell’s food arrives, our waitress wilting under the weight of it.

After the food has been laid out, she says, “You’re Mitchell King,” dabbing sweat from the nape of her neck. Her tiny golden nose stud catches the light.

“Please,” Julian sighs. “We’re just trying to enjoy our meal.”

“No,” Mitchell says firmly, giving Julian a stern look. “I’m happy to meet a fan.”

Evelyn is looking on with cool detachment as the brunette twirls a finger in a curl by her left ear while Mitchell signs her order pad. “Amy?” he asks. “With an A ?”

As I ponder any other ways one might spell the name Amy, I take a bite of my bloody steak and eye Amy’s twirling finger. “Quite fetching,” I mumble to Julian, loud enough for Evelyn to hear. Little flickers of lightning flash behind the grays of her eyes.

“So what’s with the Beckett?” I ask lightly. My positive charge catches her burgeoning negative one, and there is a spark of electricity that recalls many mistakes of nighttimes past, which we never speak of during the day.

“I have an audition tomorrow for a new adaptation of The Unnameable .”

Just Jo erupts into a sweet and sultry “I Found a Love,” and for a moment, Mitchell and Julian temporarily exiled from my periphery, I feel as if Evelyn and I were sitting alone. She gushes something about “the Theatre of the Absurd” and I’m arguing against “this idea of the destitution of modern man, as if we were ever better than this,” even as she’s trying to agree with me because it is “absolutely just so brave , ultimately, and all the while just deva stat ingly tragic and—” And then there’s this prolonged instant in which I know that she is mine — that her mind loves my mind — and all my masks and all her costumes are off, and the great green curtains are drawn back, and it’s the real Evelyn and me, just as plain as the noon sun coming in above us.

“So,” Mitchell interrupts, staring at me as if he cannot even remember my name. “Did you and Julian ever write anything together?”

I laugh but not half as loud as Julian does. “Oh, yes,” he says drolly, spinning the little purple prairie aster around in his buttonhole like a clown. “We’ve got a four-picture deal with Paramount. I do all the action sequences and he handles the jokes.”

Mitchell lights up. “A movie? Bad ass ! I’m a bit of a film buff myself. Have you guys seen the new Jurassic Park film? This third one was absolutely the best.”

“Honey,” Evelyn condescends, “they’re joking.”

Mitchell is beginning to look upset and I feel a twinge of benevolence.

“Julian’s very private,” I explain. “We don’t really work well together.”

Julian’s creative process involves drinking three bottles of wine over the course of an afternoon, stalking about the apartment in his old robe from the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, and smoking while leaning precariously out of our windows, until inspiration, or the urge to nap, strikes. I do all my own writing at the New York Public Library.

“What do you actually write, then?” Mitchell asks me, pointedly waving a speared chicken-apple sausage in my direction.

“Short fiction now,” I explain, “though I was working on this novel last year about an apprentice to a gilder in New York in the 1860s who steals—”