Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“That’s why we got the Shelby Cobra. We’ll be there in four.”

“I’ll go and find myself something to wear,” Bethany announced suddenly, pushing back from the table as the waiter arrived with the new bottle of Champagne.

“You’re— She’s coming?” I asked Julian.

“That’s the idea,” Julian said. Bethany smiled, as if this were a great compliment. He kissed her awkwardly and said, “Buy yourself something lovely, my love. Charge it to our room.”

As she slipped away to the shopping area, I repeated, “Well, this is a surprise,” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Julian had brought boys back to our apartment of every size, shape, color, and creed, but I’d never once seen a girl tiptoeing out of his room in the morning.

Julian said nothing else and drank no more of the Champagne. Was he pleased with himself? Was he waiting for me to ask him why he would do such a thing — or if he was at all serious?

Somewhere, once, I read that the only mind a writer can’t see into is the mind of a better writer. When I watched Julian watching the world, I was always reminded of this.

After breakfast, Julian returned to the casino floor and put his money down on the first table he found — something involving Chinese tiles and ten-sided dice — and before the hour was up he had won back his two (thousand) and made two more — which I had hoped was enough to cover the chiffon monstrosity that Bethany emerged in, twenty minutes later. We cashed the chips and checked out of our room.

Being far soberer than Mrs. McGann, I at least got to drive the Shelby Cobra again. The car was built for two, so Bethany squeezed herself onto Julian’s lap, a position he seemed extremely uncomfortable with until he took three red pills from his bag. Then he loosened up instantly. As Bethany scanned the radio stations for atrocious pop music, I drove us first along the unlit-neon corridors that led out of Las Vegas, and then past the billboards along the highway heading south. I kept checking my watch as we went along, but in the Shelby Cobra time seemed to stand still. Soon the billboards were replaced by scraggly pines, and then these were gone, leaving nothing but flat red earth — dry as far as the eye could see. With less fear of running into passing troopers, Julian dipped into his medicine chest more liberally and soon was wrestling the radio tuner away from Bethany.

“Synth and drivel!” he shouted. “I demand Bach ! I demand the Magnificat ! Look at all this fucking flatness ! Barren as the Martian plains. Driver! Take me to Olympus Mons!”

“Tutto pronto, signor!” I barked as Julian located something from Tosca that must have been classical enough for his current mood.

“So how did they meet ?” Bethany asked me. It took me a moment to realize that she was referring to Evelyn and Avinash.

“He came to see her doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ,” I shouted over a soaring tenor. “He was in town for the American Geological Society’s annual conference. Presenting a paper on some fancy rocks he found.”

Julian interjected in a robotic monotone, “Dr. Avinash Singh’s research centers on the so-called two-billion-year-old Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the canyon and its relationship to the Brahma and Rama Schists. His paper concludes with a suggestion of how the younger Zoroaster Granite came to be stratigraphically lower than the older Vishnu Schist.”

Bethany blinked and said, “Well, that all sounds very interesting.”

“Believe me, even if you understood it, it wouldn’t be,” Julian said.

Glad to have Julian’s support, in a sense, I continued: “Supposedly, Avinash was so moved by her performance that he insisted on coming backstage afterward and asking her out to dinner.”

“Unfortunately he was so nervous about it all that he threw up halfway through the soup course,” Julian added.

“That is so romantic,” Bethany giggled. I begged to differ, but considering that her engagement had involved a pair of dice and a high-stakes wager, perhaps it was all relative.

“Pull over!” Julian shouted. “I must make number one!”

I pulled over the Shelby Cobra and while Julian ducked behind some boulders to relieve himself, Bethany stretched out on the leather seat and helped herself to some of the contents of Julian’s pill bottles. Dedicated as I was to Evelyn, it was still hard not to notice Bethany’s ample décolletage as she fumbled with his overnight bag.

“What’s this?” she asked, pulling out a sheaf of typewritten pages, covered in editorial pencil marks.

“Julian’s novel,” I replied.

“He’s a writer ?” she said, clutching her throat as if the pills she’d swallowed might come back up. “I thought he was rich .”

“Well,” I said. “He’s a very good writer. But that’s not why he’s rich.”

She skimmed the first few lines, and the look on her face did not improve. I reached over and pushed the papers down below the edge of the door so Julian couldn’t see them as he returned.

“He’ll go berserk if he thinks anyone’s been reading it,” I said.

“Well, isn’t that the whole point ?” Bethany asked.

“It isn’t done yet. He’s a perfectionist.”

The truth was that he’d never let me read a page of it, and he’d been working on it for as long as we’d known each other. Even now that it had a publisher and the advance check had been cashed, he wouldn’t let me see it. I strongly suspected that his increasing mania over the past few weeks was a result of realizing that, now that it was slated to be published — now that he no longer even technically owned it — that soon people would actually be reading it.

“Well, you’ve read it,” Bethany said.

“I haven’t,” I lied.

I had. I had read every draft. I had read it while Julian was occupied by alcoholic stupors and off on pharmaceutical benders. I had read it again just the night before, while I’d been moping about whether to break up Evelyn’s wedding. The book was good. In fact, it was extremely good.

“But I’m sure it’s good,” I added hastily.

“You’re lying,” she smiled. “The only person you can’t lie to is a better liar.”

“I’ve heard that,” I admitted with a grin, as she shoved the book back into the bag while we waited for Julian.

“Can I ask you something?” she said finally. From the look on her face I could tell what she wanted to know. She kept glancing at Julian behind the rocks, then down at the radio, still quietly playing its opera. “Is he… uhm …?”

“Indeed,” I said. “I’m assuming he didn’t exactly consummate the marriage?”

She giggled and leaned in secretively. “It’s all a joke. We’re not really married. He just wants everyone to think he is. We’re going to have a terrific fight at the wedding reception and call the whole thing off.”

I began laughing as I grabbed her hand and held her ring up to the light.

“Cubic zirconia,” she giggled.

“So, what? Is he paying you?”

She nodded mischievously. “I’ve had stranger requests.”

“So you’re a… uhm …?” I asked. Now it was my turn to be too embarrassed to finish my question.

“Escort,” she said cheerfully. We both turned, silently, to see what had become of Julian. He was still behind the rocks — either making quite a number one or having moved on to orders of greater magnitude.

It wasn’t unlike Julian to try to upstage the most grandiose wedding I’d ever heard of. Not that I wasn’t hoping to upstage it myself. Still, I wondered. Was this Julian’s lunacy, ever-increasing? First there’d been the incident with the hummingbird feeder, which he’d hung out of our twelfth-story window and watched for days, though no bird ever came, humming or otherwise. Then there’d been the episode at Petrossian with the high-heeled shoes and all the oyster shells. And last week, there’d been the disappearance of Mrs. Menick’s always-barking shih tzu puppy. There’d been the scratch marks on Julian’s left arm. And then a cabbie had found “Shihtzy” a day or two later, outside Hempstead, Long Island. The dog was doing just fine now, except that she had yet to emit even a single bark or whimper since her disappearance.