Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Wait. Was? What happened?” Mitchell asks. Julian flashes an angry look at Evelyn, who tries to pat her beau on the hand to indicate it’s time to shut up, but he goes right on ahead. “Don’t tell me you gave up! Let me tell you something. Winners never quit . That’s the first piece of advice I talk about in my book.”

“It’s not that I gave up exactly,” I say coolly. “I lost it.”

“You lost it?”

“Yes.”

“What, like under a couch cushion or something?” Mitchell laughs, miming a look underneath his own gargantuan seat. Evelyn kicks him now and looks apologetically at me, but I ignore her. Mitchell — no idea what he’s done wrong — struggles to think of something else to ask.

“So I’m working primarily on short fiction again,” I say flatly. “Trying to get back to basics.”

Mitchell smiles as if he understands. “Cool. So are you in the, uhm , ‘Paris magazine,’ then, too?” he interrupts.

Julian laughs — a hard, cold laugh — and it is just enough to admit something I hadn’t intended to.

“Actually, I have something coming out next month. In the Vicksburg Review .”

Julian stops chewing. Evelyn — God, my heart might stop — is beaming.

“Vicksburg?” Julian asks, as if unfamiliar with the concept.

“They’re preeminent ! You should have told us earlier!” Evelyn says, her hand reaching across the table now, daintily crushing mine. “What’s it about?”

Julian’s face has darkened, approaching blackened. “Yes, which is it? That little thing from college about subbing in for the Homecoming King or whatever? Or is it that Ibsen story you wrote about—”

Evelyn gives him a look that could cut diamonds, and even Julian knows to change tacks.

“—that you did at my reading?”

He leans on my in a way that makes me itch, but there isn’t time to dwell on it. I think about lying, maybe saying it’s something older, but there’s no way they won’t read it, once it’s out. It’s not like Julian to forget these things.

“It’s based, you know, quite loosely, with all the names changed and everything, on this road trip that Julian and I took to the lake, upstate, last winter. You remember? When you got really sick?”

Julian drops his fork on the plate. He actually drops it. The noise reverberates as the guitar player comes off the end of a long solo.

“You can’t,” he says slowly. “You ab-so-lute-ly can NOT! ”

He yells this final word so loudly that Just Jo skips a beat in “All I Could Do Was Cry,” and some of the old Long Island ladies turn and stare at him with Death’s own eyes.

Mitchell, all alpha male, slides a meaty paw in between us. “Whoa, fellas,” he says, but Julian slaps his hand away. Well, not so much away , but he does slap it.

“Mitchell!” Evelyn snaps. “Don’t get in the middle of this. It has nothing to do with you.” He shrinks back — losing two feet in height to the tone of her voice.

“Didn’t we agree ? Didn’t we agree that we, ourselves… that is… that, that one another … well, that it’s off-limits? That it is absolutely OFF-FUCKING-LIMITS?”

He’s so upset that he’s grabbing for his pack of cigarettes, and when he realizes that he’s still inside he gets even more furious and downs another flute of Champagne. I say nothing. Not that he has never kept a single promise to me in his entire life. Not that I keep trying not to write about him. Not that I always wind up doing it, anyway.

Finally I say, weakly, “I changed your name and all that. I gave it a kind of Russian theme. After seeing Ev in Three Sisters fifteen times, I think it got under my—”

“You’re moving out,” he declares smugly, as he sets the empty flute down. “And that’s that. I want nothing to do with you. No more.” He looks down at his plate and flicks a great blob of his eggs at me. The golden yolk runs down my shirt and leaves a forbidding stain.

“You’re nothing but a petty thief!” he shouts. “LIAR! THIEF!”

The old ladies are getting very upset now. “Young man, would you—”

“Oh, go back to hell!” he cries. “Or Staten Island. Wherever it is you’re from!”

Just Jo has stopped, midsong. Amy, the waitress, is coming over, sliding between tables faster than Mitchell could leap off the starting block. “Please!” she squeaks. “Please! Keep your voices down!”

But Julian is past the point of no return. He overturns his plate. He launches himself out of the chair, shouts that he “will see the manager about this!” and propels himself past the other patrons and out of the room.

“Dude… ” Mitchell says, scooting back from the table. A camera flashes, somewhere. “This is… I’m sorry. Those ladies are taking photos. I can’t… I mean, my agent says I can’t afford to be in Us Weekly again.”

“Go, go,” Evelyn says, waving her hand in the air dismissively. He promises to call, and she gives him a look that says he’d be a fool to bother. He seems confused, as if he’s still not entirely sure where he’s gone wrong, and then, because there’s still a camera flashing, he strides off, hands hiding his face as though he were some sort of criminal.

“Terribly sorry, everyone,” I say to the room. “Just a small misunderstanding.”

“You know you’ve really done it this time,” Evelyn says softly, as Just Jo begins her song over again.

“He’ll get over it,” I say.

Evelyn looks skeptical. True, I’ve never gotten a story about him published before, but I have been down this road with Julian many times. The truth is that without me he has no one — just Evelyn, who gets tired of him without me around, and a long string of wine bottles and a longer string of Simons, each emptier than the last. Without me around he’ll lose what little sanity he has left.

I go on. “He’ll break into my room now. Read it. Spend half an hour figuring out how to delete the file. But that’s fine, the Vicksburg people already have it.”

“How many times have I told you to make backups? Don’t you ever learn?”

This I ignore, because what is there to say? No, I don’t. None of us ever learns.

“He’ll drink half our Grey Goose and pass out on the bathroom floor. I’ll bring home some Campari tonight and we’ll do our whole Hemingway-and-Fitzgerald routine. Secretly, he’s flattered already. He might even tell me he liked the story.”

“You’d better hope you’re right. Where else would you go?”

I shrug. “Will we be seeing Mitchell King again?”

“No, I don’t think we will.”

It is always this way with her: she brings them here to us once they begin to bore her, and we devour them. It is all routine.

Now that it’s actually just us — just Evelyn and I — strangely, I feel that there is nothing left to say. Or, really, that we’ve said all there is to say, too many times before. What is the point of running through these lines one more time?

She says, “You should start seeing somebody else.”

And I say, “Is this about money?”

She: “Don’t be absurd.”

And I: “You’re the one who’s being absurd.”

“We can’t keep going on like this.”

“Then go.”

We do not move.

She says, “You know you only think you want me.”

And I say, “You know you only think you don’t.”

She sighs. “You’re such a liar.”

“Quit acting.” I grin.

Long silence. Thinking that maybe we can get philosophical about Beckett again, I ask, “What time is your audition tomorrow? I’m sure it will go well. Why don’t I come along and then take you out after to celebrate?”