Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“What’s wrong?” she says, pulling back. The red of her lipstick is all smudged around the edges.

“Nothing,” I say, squirming beneath her.

“Tell me you’re not thinking of someone else?” she teases.

“No! No one! No one!” I insist, but in my head I am thinking, Outis! Outis!

Her smile hangs white as a pearl necklace, just out of my reach. “I knew you wouldn’t forget me.”

We kiss again and I am just about to give up my reservations: her absent husband; Cyrus — who is likely armed and just in the next room; and even Jeffrey, with whom I’ve only just repaired things; but then I hear the thumping noise again, and I falter. Is it coming from Jeffrey’s room? It sounds closer than that.

“Can’t we pretend everything is like it used to be?” she asks, perhaps more to herself than to me.

“We wish to remain what we are,” I joke.

She grins. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

She is about to come at me again, but then there is another thump, and this time she hears it, too. She pauses, hands in my hair, nose a millimeter from mine.

“Is that Jeffrey and Cyrus?” she giggles, pretending to be shocked.

“That’s what I thought it was,” I say, as I sit up against the bed, pulling slightly away from her so I can hear — brushing her hair from my face. “But doesn’t it sound like it’s coming from in there?”

I nod toward the gigantic wardrobe. In an instant her face goes very pale. She pushes her thumb roughly over my lips, rubbing away the red of her own. Then straightens herself out and checks herself quickly in the mirror above the desk. She locks eyes with herself, and I know that look — she is getting back into character. She crosses swiftly to the wardrobe door and yanks it open.

Inside is a young boy, perhaps eight years old, dressed in golden silk pajamas. His blond hair is slicked to the side, still a little wet from a bath earlier in the night. He wears rather thick glasses and sits cross-legged with a flashlight in one hand and a tattered book in the other.

“Julian!” she scolds. “I’ve told you a hundred times, you can’t be in here!”

He looks up expectantly at her. At his mother. He folds his arms in annoyance and then, he pouts — it’s her pout, on his face.

“Evie told me I had to go away because she’s getting her hair cut!”

She seems quite alarmed by this. “Evelyn’s getting a—. Who on earth is giving her a haircut ?”

Julian shrugs. “Ms. Ruby gave her the scissors for her paper dolls.”

Suddenly she’s rushing for the door, wailing, “No, no, no, no—” but then she pauses and turns back to me, a devastated look on her face. “Could you just—? I have to—. Before she cuts her ears off!”

I shoot a winning smile at the young boy in the wardrobe, as if he is my very best friend in the world. He ignores me.

“Go on,” I say, waving my hands at her.

She looks at me one final time, and her eyes are dim now with gratitude and sorrow and grief and relief all at once, and for perhaps the first time since I’ve known her, I am sure that I know what is happening behind them. She rubs a thumb under her lower lip one last time. She goes and I am alone with the boy.

The boy who is her son.

“Mothers,” I sigh conspiratorially from my spot on the floor. “Honestly.”

The boy looks up at me curiously. “Do you have a mother?”

“I do. But she’s not here, though. She’s at home. I mean, where I grew up.”

“Why aren’t you where you grew up?” he asks.

“I went away,” I said. “I got older so I left.”

He seems perplexed by this. “I’m never leaving home. I’ll stay here forever.”

I’m about to argue with him until I realize that, perhaps, he’s right. Could a future prince of Luxembourg just pick up and start a new life in Belize or Katmandu?

“Well,” I say, looking around, “at least it’s quite nice here.”

“It’s boring here,” he says. “I want to go to Africa!”

“I’ve been to Africa,” I say. His eyes light up but then I add, “They make you take medicine to go there,” and he retches.

“Do you know my mother?”

“She and I are old friends,” I say warmly, trying not to arouse his suspicions about the fact that I am still sitting on the floor where she pushed me down, only minutes before. I wonder what, if anything, the boy could see through the crack in the wardrobe doors. You can see a lot from under closet doors — I remember well enough. You can see a lot of things you shouldn’t. It seems like yesterday that I was this boy. But tonight I am the man on the other side of the closet door, and this simply cannot be.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

He holds up his book — a yellow cartoon crane beams up from the cover, the title in indecipherable Luxembourgish.

He holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.

“I can’t,” I say. He looks appalled. “I mean, I can read . I just only know English.”

He snorts, as if he can hardly believe anyone wouldn’t know more than that.

“English books are there, ” he points. I get up and browse the shelf of old books for something the boy’s speed. After thumbing past the philosophy, some Woolf, and a few books about the Harlem Renaissance, I finally pull one out that I think he’ll enjoy. When I hand it to him, he reads the title off slowly.

“ Just So Stories . By Rudard Kippler.”

“Rudyard Kipling. ” I sit down again on the bearskin rug, closer to the wardrobe. He seems embarrassed to have said it wrong, so I add, “Your English is very good.”

“My mom’s from America,” he explains.

“Is that right?”

He nods and holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.

Taking the book from him, I look up at the open door, hoping maybe his mother will return, but I suspect that she is dealing with Julian’s freshly bald younger sister and has forgotten all about us for the moment. The boy begins to get comfortable, tucking his trusty flashlight into the pocket of his pajamas and arranging some soft extra blankets out on the bottom of the wardrobe. He knows just how he wants to lie on the blankets. I suspect he’s gotten scores of maids and footmen and butlers to read him bedtime stories while his mother has been preoccupied with her royal duties.

I wait for him to settle in. It is important to be comfortable when you’re just a small boy, alone in a big place. He’ll change, but this fact never truly will. He’ll go on, day after day, unsure if he’s all that different from the day before. Later he’ll look back at the things that are happening now and he’ll think they were almost like something he read about. He’ll know they happened to him but they may well have happened to another person, with another name, in some other place, where the clocks are on other times. In the story of tonight he’ll be himself, but costumed in the gentle lies of memory and the soft fictions of yesterdays. Some stories he’ll lose along the way: in truck stops, on old computer drives, in boxes in dank basements. Still, each day he’ll wonder, has he changed and everything else is the same? Or is it exactly the other way around?

Someday he’ll see that he can’t have one without the other. He can’t know he is the same unless everything around him has changed. It’s like black spots on black fur — you can’t see them, but they’re there, all the same.

He’ll think he’s moving in zigzags, getting anywhere but where he meant to go. But there are edges to the board, and someday he will reach one, and it is only then that life will place a true crown onto his head. It’s only then that he’ll be able to turn around and see for the first time a glorious path back from where he came.