The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards - By Kristopher Jansma



All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened . . .

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY



Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

—LEO TOLSTOY





If you believe that you are the author of this book, please contact Haslett & Grouse Publishers (New York, New York) at your first convenience.





Author’s Note



The truth is beautiful. Without doubt; and so are lies.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON



I’ve lost every book I’ve ever written. I lost the first one here in Terminal B, where I became a writer, twenty-eight years ago, in the after-school hours and on vacations while I waited for my mother to return from doling out honey-roasted peanuts at eighteen thousand feet.

I used to sit very quietly, at this very table, at Phil’s Coffee Hub, under the watchful eye of Ms. Barlow, or bellied-up to the Formica countertop of W. W. Gould’s Good Eats with Mrs. De Santos, or on a small stool inside the cramped Jewels, Jewels, Jewels! kiosk with Mrs. Nederhoffer. Now these people are all gone and I’m as old as they were then.

It was a wonderful time in my life—before I became a writer. I had an endless supply of books from Mr. Humnor, the great-girthed man who ran Emerson Books, and I spent many happy hours spying on Mr. Bjorn, who ran Ten-Minute Timepiece Repair.

Mr. Bjorn was the only person in Terminal B who wore a full suit, every day, with a real bow tie. His ancient eyes permanently fixed in a squint—the result, I imagined, of studying the tiny gears of wristwatches all day. When he was not seated in his high chair, fixing watches, he stood upright to read the big New York City newspaper. I wanted to be just like him some day.

We first spoke on the day after my eighth birthday. So that I would always know when she would be arriving home again, my mother gave me a gold wristwatch that had been left behind on one of her flights. Its band was twice the diameter of my little wrist, so our first matter of business was to have some links removed by Mr. Bjorn.

When I handed the watch to him, he let loose a fluttery whistle and polished it respectfully to remove the little oily fingerprints I’d already gotten all over it.

“This is quite a watch for a boy your size,” he told me. “What’s your name, son?”

I did not even dare to speak. My mother smiled her wide smile at Mr. Bjorn and, checking her own watch to see how long she had until her next flight, said, “There are no clocks in this place. Have you ever noticed that?”

Mr. Bjorn’s low voice rose sweetly as he spoke to my mother. She had a way of flushing men’s cheeks and causing them to stare at the toes of their shoes.

“Yes, ma’am. They don’t want passengers getting upset that their flights aren’t on time. There is a row of ten clocks over in Terminal A. But not one of them is set to Eastern Standard Time.”

I listened intently, for I had never set foot in Terminal A. My mother never flew internationally and did not know anyone willing to look after me over there. I had dreamed about Terminal A many times. I imagined it to be just the same as Terminal B, but in reverse—a looking-glass terminal, where everyone did everything backward. Or, if it was A, and we were B, perhaps it was the original and we were the copy. Perhaps I was only a reverse version of some other boy whose life was the other way around.

My mother chided Mr. Bjorn for calling her “ma’am” as he slipped the newly shortened watchband around my wrist. Then he handed me the removed links in a little plastic bag. “You save these, son. Take care of a watch like this and it’ll last longer than me or even you.”

My reflection was small in its gleaming curves. “OK,” I said.

After that, once every week or so, I would return to Mr. Bjorn’s shop, and if he was not too busy, he would open the watch for me and inspect the tiny gears inside.

“This is the tourbillion, and that’s the hairspring back there. And this over here is called the escapement.” He gestured to a little anchor-shaped arm that swung like a pendulum, clicking as a tiny-toothed wheel turned beneath it. “That’s what makes that ticking sound you hear.” The little gear struggled against the anchor. After a second it built up enough force to turn one click, swinging the pendulum, and then it stopped again. Struggled, turned, and stopped.

“Each time it goes around a little bit, a second goes away.”

“Where?” I asked, as the pendulum swung again. And again.

He winked at me. “It escapes. That’s why they call it that. Escapement.”

I barely blinked as it swung and swung again. I think I believed that if I watched closely enough, I could figure out where the seconds were headed.

Sometimes I just sat and listened to the watch ticking. Each tick was another second less before my mother returned. Each tick was another second older that I grew. Each tick was another word that I scribbled into the many notebooks that Mr. Humnor gave me.

I wasn’t a writer—not yet, of course—but I wrote. From the days before my feet could touch the linoleum floor beneath my seat, I had been jotting little things down about the odd parade that flowed through Terminal B: pilots, passengers, and the people waiting to greet them. I began doing this so that I could tell my mother about all the things she’d missed while she’d been gone. Every day I saw so many new people, rushing through the terminal to one place or another while I remained still. For all my hours spent in Terminal B, I’d never flown on an airplane—not once. I wondered where all the people kept escaping to, like those little seconds inside my watch. But in between arrivals and departures, I got bored, and sometimes I made people up, to see if my mother could detect the false woman in a pink blazer, with the hamster in her carry-on luggage, among the actual transient citizens of Terminal B.

Not long after receiving the gold watch, I wrote my very first book, a mystery I called The Pink Packet Thieves, twenty-two pages in length, including illustrations. It concerned an unnamed boy detective who is summoned by the Chief of the Airport Police to discover who has been stealing all the pink packets of artificial sweetener from the various restaurants in the terminal. The boy detective cleverly conceals himself in a trash can and lies patiently in wait for the criminal mastermind to appear. All day long, the boy endures the garbage that the travelers are heaping unknowingly onto his head. He is resolute and, indeed, the long wait pays off. By the light of the full moon, the boy detective spots two suspicious figures sneaking around. The boy detective confronts the shadows and discovers they are Xavier and Yvette D’Argent, a wealthy brother and sister who are new in town and who confess that they have been stealing the artificial sweeteners to feed a horrible addiction that they developed during their idle youths in Paris. (I had learned a few things from eavesdropping on Mrs. De Santos, talking about her sons.) In the end, the boy detective is moved by their tale and agrees to keep their secret, in exchange for the return of the sweetener, a promise that the thievery will cease, and assurances that both siblings would consult their parents about treatment options. Just as the story appears to come to a wholesome conclusion, however, the boy detective recalls his earlier sufferings in the trash can. Then, on the next page, he is seen telling the Chief of the Airport Police that he has been unable to find the culprits, and he walks away with the stolen sweetener in a black suitcase. A brief epilogue reveals that the boy detective then sells the pink packets on the black market, retires for good, and that the newly cured Xavier and Yvette become his best friends, now that he is as wealthy as them.

The Pink Packet Thieves was universally adored by the women in the terminal, and for a few days I had my first taste of a writer’s celebrity. But I was not really a writer—not yet. Not even then. Mr. Humnor said that if we made copies and put them up for sale in his shop we could split the profits. For a night or two I dreamed of the hundreds of dollars I would surely make—perhaps even enough so that my mother could retire and we could fly around the country together.

One person hadn’t seen the book yet. That was Mr. Bjorn and there was no one in the concourse whom I wanted to like the book as badly. For days I watched him, waiting for my moment, and finally I walked over, on a slow Tuesday afternoon that summer, to offer him my story. I don’t remember finding it strange that, on this day, he was reading the newspaper in his high chair and not standing.

“You get any bigger yet? You ready to put one of those links back in?”

“I wrote a book,” I said meekly, as I held it out.

“So you have,” he said, squinting down at it for a moment. His hands were shaking and he kept sort of clearing his throat.

“You could read it,” I explained, as I pushed it toward him.

He lifted it up, made a little show of admiring the title and the cover art, and released a familiar fluttery whistle. “I’ll take a look at it as soon as I’m done with my paper. One hour, son. All right?”

I agreed, happy to see him smiling. “A book,” he laughed as he set it down. “Sounds like someone wants to live forever.”

I didn’t know what he meant by this but I didn’t care. I rushed off again through the concourse, giddy with pleasure, and I did not stop running until I reached Emerson Books and snatched three candy bars while Mr. Humnor pretended not to look. I camped out there, beneath the rotating rack of romance novels, watching the little hands on my wristwatch twisting slowly around, the little ticking of the escapement seeming to grow louder and louder.

When an hour had finally passed, I rushed out of the store and followed a crowd of passengers to the other end of the concourse. When I got there I was surprised to see a crowd massed around Mr. Bjorn’s shop. Ms. Barlow and Mrs. De Santos and Mrs. Nederhoffer were all there, but Mr. Bjorn was not. His high chair was on the ground, on its side. His newspaper lay in a heap beside it.

“Old guy’s ticker just stopped,” I heard a rough voice say. It was a policeman—a blue pudgy ball with a buzz cut—and he was holding my book in his hand. And he was laughing. Not like Mr. Humnor laughed. Laughing as though he thought something was awful. And all of my daytime minders were just standing there, letting him laugh.

“Was this the old guy’s?” the officer asked, that horrible smile still on his face.

“No,” said Mrs. Nederhoffer. “It’s just this little boy’s. His mother’s one of the flight attendants, and she leaves him here all day like it’s some sort of day-care center.”

“We all sort of look after him,” Mrs. De Santos chimed in. “Honestly, I live in fear every day that some nut will run off with him.”

Ms. Barlow agreed, loudly, that if one ever did, it wouldn’t be on her chest.

The officer laughed—a hacking, barking sort of laugh. “No father?”

This time the ladies laughed—their cackles were high and excited—as if there were nothing they liked to laugh about more. They all began talking at once, and I heard them say bad words before I could hold my watch up to my ears. Soon I couldn’t hear anything but the ticking. I stood there in a dark forest of strangers’ knees, listening to second after second, escaping. Then with one careless motion, the policeman chucked my book into the nearest trash can. None of the ladies even noticed.

I started running away, back down the concourse. At first I meant to hide back at Mr. Humnor’s, but when I got there it still wasn’t far enough. Leaping down the escalators, the concourse rose up around me, and below were the great snakelike conveyor belts that slowly ferried luggage to waiting crowds. I kept on running, out past the big orange car rental sign and through the revolving glass doors. I ran down the sidewalk past the taxicabs and the luggage collectors in their red caps. I didn’t know where I was going or where I wanted to go. I wanted to go wherever my mother was, or wherever Mr. Bjorn had gone. I wanted to go where all the seconds went.

I stopped when I saw a sign pointing inside again. TERMINAL A it said. Timidly, I went inside and up some more escalators to the concourse level. Finally, I would see it. Terminal A. And maybe I would find Mr. Bjorn, winding all the timepieces backward, with the same serious smile. The little round tables were the same. The linoleum floor was the same. The skylights high above me were the same. But there was no Emerson Books. There was no Phil’s Coffee. There was no W. W. Gould’s, and there was no Ten-Minute Timepiece Repair. There was no Mr. Bjorn.

Finally, I sat down on the ground under a long row of clocks. There were ten of them—each exactly the same except for a little sign that said the name of a place. Some of these places I’d read about, like Paris, where Xavier and Yvette had come from. And some I’d heard of, like Mexico City, where Mrs. De Santos was born. These were places that were very far away, I knew. And they all had different times from the time on my watch. In Mexico City, it was still an hour earlier. If I were there, I figured, and it was an hour earlier, then Mr. Bjorn would still be around.

I sat there listening to the clocks’ little ticking noises. Inside each were little gears like the ones inside my watch, struggling and turning. I listened to the seconds escaping. And I knew then that each second was just escaping to a different clock, somewhere even farther away, and that the seconds just went on and on escaping like that, forever.

• • •

So. That is the story of how I lost my very first book. I’ve lost three others since—a novel, a novella, and a biography. The first is disintegrating steadily at the bottom of a black lake. The second is in the hands of a woman whom I love and will never see again. The third is in a dusty African landfill, wrapped in the bloody tatters of my tweed coat, my gold watch still in the pocket.

Only fragments remain, which I’ve carried with me around the world and back again. Sitting here in Terminal B, setting them beside one another, I’ve been trying to get them to add up to something true. I’m staring at the margins between them—just an inch on each side—but the distance may as well be the Grand Canyon. Yet I feel certain that somewhere in this empty space, between my lies and fictions, is the truth.

It occurs to me, as I finish writing this, that perhaps these surviving pieces aren’t so different from those clocks in Terminal A. In each of them you can see what the time would be, but only somewhere else. Between them all, you can, if you wish, determine what time it is here.

• • •

These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.





What Was Lost





1




The Debutante

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS



The autumn of my sixteenth birthday, I worked after school and on Sundays, serving apfelstrudel and einspänners at Ludwig’s Café in the Raleigh Museum of Art. Sundays were the best days for tips, because all the patrons getting out of church were feeling simultaneously undercaffeinated and overcharitable. Before the bells were done ringing, all the most affluent ladies in North Raleigh were rushing over from Methodist Saints United, wearing hats that my buddy Rodrigo said ought to be in the abstract art exhibits. But the real reason I looked forward to Sundays was that the Terpsichorean Society held its debutante classes in the event space across the hall, and while the well-heeled mothers lost track of time gossiping at Ludwig’s beneath the golden Portrait of Colette Marsh, Rodrigo and I would go back to the storeroom window and stare at the debutantes.

After their class ended, the debutantes would line up in the narrow space between the café’s dumpsters, where their mothers couldn’t see them, and pass Camels carefully, so as not to fleck ash on their white rehearsal dresses. When they saw us looking they tossed cigarette butts at the window, but they couldn’t do anything too loudly or they’d risk blowing their cover. It was the end of 1993, and we knew we’d become adults inside of a new century—and there these girls were, being trained for the last one. Mostly they ignored us until Rodrigo tapped on the window to warn them that the mothers were calling for their checks and that they had better hurry back inside.

Some Sundays Rodrigo just looked and some Sundays he called out to Suzanne White, the tall girl from our school whom he swore he would marry. Together, he claimed, they would breed a superior race of half–Puerto Rican/half–Southern Belle babies. For my part, I slunk down, hoping that none of them would see me in my feathered cap and olive lederhosen, and pretending that I just happened to be passing my break reading The Woman in White near the window.

“We were supposed to read that for school or something?” Rodrigo would ask.

“Extra credit,” I’d lie.

The truth was that I liked to read—especially old books about eccentric heiresses and menacing counts and guys with names like Sir Percival Glyde, but I’d learned long ago that this was a preference best kept to myself.

“What is wrong with you?” Rodrigo would ask. “Don’t you want to look at these fine ladies?” He gave his cap a stylish slant and let one suspender fall off his shoulder, as if he wore this sort of thing especially for them.

“Sure,” I’d say, “I just don’t want them to look at me.”

“Well, how are they ever going to talk to you unless they know you’re looking?”

“I don’t want them to talk to me. They don’t want to talk to me. They don’t even want to talk to you.”

Rodrigo’s eyes would bug as if I’d just tried to convince him that the sun would burn out tomorrow. “Hell yes they want to talk to me.”

“We clean tables at an Austrian coffeehouse, in a city whose residents generally think Austria is where kangaroos come from. Come on. Your mother is a housekeeper and your father mows lawns.”

“My mom runs a cleaning service. My dad owns a landscaping company. We’re entrepreneurs, jerk.”

“But they’re debutantes,” I’d remind him. “They’re going to go to Princeton and Duke and marry inbred trust-funders with yachts who play polo and shoot skeet.”

“That’s pretty funny, coming from Mr. Ten-Under-Par.”

Rodrigo liked to tease me for playing golf on the high school team. In truth, being on the team did my reputation more harm than good. I loved to play, but the other boys on the team all hated me, because I was better than them and because my mother was a flight attendant and didn’t belong to the Briar Creek Country Club like their mothers did. My father was a man she’d met seventeen years ago, during a layover in Newark. Together they’d gotten swept up in the heady, romantic winter of 1976.

“So, they marry Mr. Trust Fund,” Rodrigo would say, cracking open the window so the girls could hear. “But they’ll be home all day making sweet, sweet love to me!”

Suzanne would glare, and as the other girls pretended to be shocked, she’d flip her perfectly manicured middle finger straight up in the air, and smile.

Meanwhile, I’d angle one of the silver baking trays toward the window so that I could catch the reflection of Betsy Littleford, the only other girl there from our school. A silent blonde with ice blue eyes, Betsy Littleford never smiled. Not as far as I could remember. Not even all the way back to the fifth grade when I’d first seen her.

“That’s funny,” she’d say flatly whenever some teacher tried to coax even the slightest giggle from her with a joke in class. “That’s really very funny.”

Rodrigo called her “Stepford Betsy” and liked to theorize that inside she was just all Disney animatronics. He loudly speculated about someday finding out for himself, but I dreamed of simply someday making her smile. Just once.

And I’d never have done it if her brother hadn’t gotten his skull caved in during our match against Asheville late that fall.

It started on the seventh hole, when Mark White had sliced a shot deep into the woods, and both teams wound up shivering for ten minutes in the chilly November air, watching the golden leaves spiraling down from the trees, until the judges went in after him and caught him sipping a little airport bottle of vodka. Our team took a double penalty and Coach Holland angrily sent White to clean everyone’s clubs. When I, then, had the audacity to hit a beautiful two-hundred-and-ten-yard drive on the eighth hole, Mark dumped my golf clubs into a water hazard “by accident.” I didn’t really care. The other boys had Titleists and Mizunos; mine were just an odd mix of yard-sale finds, half rusted already at purchase. But while I quietly fished them out, the real trouble began.

Billy Littleford, our captain, enjoyed putting his friends in their places, especially Mark. Everyone in our school adored Billy—even me. In movies, the king of the school was always a tyrant, taking lunch money and breaking hearts with reckless abandon. But our king, Billy, was as kind as he was suave. He didn’t stand for anyone picking on either the quiet kids, like me, or the loudmouths like Rodrigo. Once, when I was short a dollar at the front of an impatient lunch line, and in front of everyone was about to put my burrito back under the warming lamps, Billy Littleford strolled up suddenly to spot me a five. “Thanks for getting me those cigarettes before the game on Saturday,” he said earnestly, though I’d done no such thing and he did not smoke. “I’ll pay you the rest by tomorrow, I promise.”

If Billy ruled our school, he did so benevolently, and for this he was beloved by teachers and classmates alike. Hence, Billy was forever able to charm his way out of whatever trouble he got himself into. That afternoon on the golf course, he’d seen Mark dump my clubs in the water. He waited until Mark was hovering near a sand trap, and then Billy tackled Mark headfirst into the sand, kissing him, deeply on the mouth.

“Oh, Mark, you’re such a stud!” he shouted. Both teams erupted in laughter.

When Mark began pushing him away, Billy clutched at his broken heart. “But Mark!” he cried. “You said we could finally tell people!” As Billy minced around in fake tears, even some of the judges were laughing.

Mark spat sand out and wiped at his eyes. Half blind, he grabbed a rake from the edge of the trap. We were supposed to use these rakes to smooth out the sand, like they were little Zen gardens; Mark tried to use his to smooth out Billy’s face. Billy dodged the swinging rake and began to bob and weave around the course like a cartoon boxer. Grinning boyishly at the laughing Asheville players, Billy did not realize he was weaving directly into the backswing of their teammate, who was warming up for the ninth hole. The boy from Asheville brought his 3-iron out of the swing, clean through an imaginary ball, and straight back down into the side of Billy’s head.

The following day, every newspaper left behind on the tables at Ludwig’s had run a photo of a grinning Billy at last year’s Homecoming Parade. The reports said he was at Wakefield North Hospital, in and out of consciousness, and the doctors’ prognosis was that he could lose half his IQ and that his motor skills would be greatly reduced, forever.

Even Rodrigo was upset about it. “They ought to throw that pendejo in jail,” he snapped at a photo of Mark White that had made the inside page, after the jump. Mark was Suzanne’s older brother, so Rodrigo didn’t like him much to begin with.

The café was closing, and the museum outside was teeming with glitzy people who had come for the Terpsichorean Society’s Annual Debutante Ball. I doubted that Betsy would still be going, but I hurried through my table wiping just in case.

When I next looked up, I noticed that a woman had come into the closed café and was peering at the Portrait of Colette Marsh, a small golden nude that hung above the bricked-up fireplace. Most people didn’t notice the painting because it was about the size of a page in a paperback book, but when the light came through, late in the day, it gleamed. I’d passed many wayward hours staring up at this golden woman, filled with as close to a religious feeling as I had ever had. I wondered who Colette Marsh had been, and who had painted the portrait. The tiny plaque said merely that it was from 1863. ARTIST UNKNOWN.

“We’re closed for the day, ma’am,” I said to the woman, who wore a long black fur. Her hair was swirled up in a severe blond vortex on the back of her head.

“It’s simply sickening,” she muttered as I came closer.

My cheeks flushed as I glanced up at the painting’s golden nipples. “The managers got some complaints. That’s why they moved it so high up.” She did not look away. So I added, “Plus, that’s real gold on there, I guess.”

The woman finally looked at me for the first time since I’d approached. She did not seem all that impressed, and she did not in any way hide this evaluation.

“Clearly. I meant that it is sickening that Genevieve Von Porter would donate it and then allow it to be hung in the coffee shop instead of the museum proper.”

“Oh,” I said, looking back up at the painting again. I’d never thought of it as something anybody owned. “Well. We’re closed anyway, ma’am.”

I gestured at my wristwatch and she seemed to admire it, momentarily. A gift from my mother, and gold as well, it was the nicest thing I owned.

The woman attempted to smile, though her taut face did not allow for much movement. “My name is Cecily Littleford. Are you available this evening to help me with a minor jam?”

Littleford. Betsy’s mother. I stuttered as I pledged I’d do absolutely anything she needed. She handed me a small plastic keycard.

“Take the staff elevator upstairs to Conference Room B. You have twenty minutes to clean up and put on the tuxedo that’s hanging on the door.”

“Excuse me?”

She pinched one of the newspapers between two disdainful fingertips. “My daughter is coming out to polite society this evening and needs an escort. My son Billy is otherwise engaged and my husband is away on business. Betsy mentioned that she knew someone working here at the museum who could wear Billy’s size.” She looked at me again, disparagingly. “Or close enough.”

I could barely speak. Fortunately, Rodrigo rushed over. “He’d be honored, Mrs. Littleford. Could I offer you some tonic water, while he goes to change?”

After Rodrigo ushered her to a clean table below the golden portrait, he pulled me back toward the door. “Don’t screw this up now, Cinderella. Have some goddamn balls. She asked for you, you suertudo motherf*cker.”

Twenty minutes later, when I saw my reflection in the inside of the elevator doors, I did not even recognize myself. Billy’s tuxedo was a little long in the sleeve, but I looked all right. I thought that surely I could impersonate a proper member of the leisure class for two hours. But when the doors parted, and I saw Betsy Littleford standing there, my confidence withered like grass in winter.

The voluminous lower folds of her white dress flowed from the waist like collapsing waves, descending from where the defined V of its northern border intercepted an orbit of tiny pearls. Her hair was down, covering her bare shoulders. A second V was formed by the neat crossing of her gloved hands. A third and final V came in the shape of her sharply plunging eyebrows: already I’d done something wrong.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand and jerking me toward the ballroom’s arched doorway. “They started going in four minutes ago.”

Red velvet curtains covered the high windows that normally illuminated the rotunda. Tall Roman columns supported a great glass dome, through which the moon could be seen, full and yellow and high above us. Briefly I felt as though I were being led into the Coliseum to be fed to the lions. The room swarmed with older women in scarves and slinky evening gowns, and distinguished men in finely tailored tuxedos. The debutantes were there—perhaps twenty girls—all the ones we’d seen out by the dumpsters in their rehearsal garb. Now they wore the full regalia—white gloves, floor-length dresses, and pearls that had belonged to their mothers’ mothers. They stood in a line, arm in arm with fathers or brothers; the only guy I recognized was Mark, who was escorting Suzanne and looking more than a little pale.

A man at a podium called the girls’ names aloud, one at a time, and with each presentation, he announced the name of her escort. Each girl then stepped out into a spotlight, curtsied politely, and smiled. Next she took her escort by the hand and moved on, to allow the next young pair to take its place. Betsy’s face remained in total lockdown, but I wondered if I would finally see her smile tonight.

“Sorry about your brother,” I whispered weakly.

Betsy’s face did not change even slightly. Her eyes stared off at nothing at all. Soon a harried little man rushed over to us with Mrs. Littleford in tow.

“He’s right here. I told you,” Mrs. Littleford said. “Just have Mr. Isherwood say, ‘Presenting Elizabeth Littleford, escorted by . . . ’”

Mrs. Littleford looked blankly at me. She did not know my name. “He’s an old friend of Billy’s, this is . . . ” And again she trailed off.

Betsy’s crescent lips began to form my name, but before she could speak it, I blurted out another name instead.

“Walter,” I lied, thinking of the detective in my Wilkie Collins book. “Walter Hartright.”

Instantly I regretted not saying “Sir Percival Glyde,” but the harried man was already scribbling down “Walter Hartright.” The name seemed more plausible for a resident of suburban Raleigh, and the twentieth century, anyway.

Betsy’s eyes bulged, ever so slightly, and her lips eased gently back into place. There was no smile, and no laugh. Just an odd blankness. She wasn’t angry—that much I could see. She was amused, I was sure. Only, rather than smile, she somehow un-smiled. Then I saw it at last: Betsy’s smile was the absence of smiling.

As the man ran off to give the speaker my fake name, Betsy pushed her mother’s hand aside and said, “Walter. When did you and Billy become such good friends again?”

“Acting class in fifth grade,” I lied. “Billy was Vladimir in our production of Waiting for Godot and I was Estragon.” It worked. Betsy un-smiled again. Her mother seemed puzzled but Betsy stepped in suddenly.

“You were in Switzerland with Grandma.”

And before Mrs. Littleford could question this, the couple ahead of us stepped away, and Betsy dragged me into the light. The audience assumed a solemn silence.

“May I present Miss Elizabeth Littleford,” Mr. Isherwood said, “escorted by a close friend of her brother’s, Mr. Walter Hartright.”

The applause was sudden and electrifying. Betsy curtsied elegantly but did not smile. Not even a little. She took my hand in her gloved one and led me out of the light.

After a hundred hands had been shaken and a hundred platitudes exchanged, Betsy drew me to a table, where we sat side by side in front of gold-inlaid plates and silently consumed Niçoise salads and wagyu steaks while the adults talked of Morningstar ratings, Croatian catamaran chartering, and hunting tundra swans. I watched Betsy closely out of the corner of my eye, making sure I lifted the same utensils when she did. To my fascination, I found this new role was an easier fit than I’d expected. I was like one of the people I’d made up in Terminal B—blending naturally right in with all those around me. Plus, it seemed that no one really expected much from the escorts, anyway. While the girls got a year of debutante training, the boys seemed to be winging it. I did a damn sight better than Mark White, for instance, who sat across from me, using only one fork and dribbling sauce conspicuously down his shirt front.

He acknowledged my existence but once, when Mrs. Littleford asked me to tell everyone about Billy’s early acting career and addressed me as Walter. Suzanne firmly squeezed Mark’s hand as he began to correct her, and he winced in confusion. Before dessert was even served, Mark had vanished to the men’s room three times, returning slightly clumsier after each visit. I didn’t blame him—the conversation kept spiraling back to Billy, no matter how much Mrs. Littleford and the others tried to avoid the subject.

“Early decision notices will come in soon,” Suzanne’s mother said. “Walter, where have you applied?”

“Princeton,” I answered quickly. Everyone smiled, except Betsy, who un-smiled.

Walter’s bright future at Princeton grew to involve a position on the golf team and an old friend who’d promised to take me sailing on the Delaware. And then, of course, there’d be writing classes with prizewinning authors. The mothers all approved. I was so engrossed in it all that it wasn’t until my water glass was being refilled for the third time that I recognized Rodrigo holding the Waterford pitcher, wearing a staff uniform.

“Mr. Hartright?” he asked, smirking somewhat. “May I refresh your glass?”

I shifted down in my seat as he poured. Suddenly I felt sure that everyone knew I was full of it—that clearly, none of these rich people believed that I was really some well-to-do son of a paper manufacturer. Just as they didn’t believe that Mark was in any way sober, or that Betsy Littleford’s father was really away on business, or that her brother was sure to recover in a few weeks.

“Time for the waltz,” Betsy said, suddenly removing her napkin from her lap.

“Waltz? Like, the waltz waltz?” I mumbled, struggling to stand on my suddenly shaky legs. Rodrigo was trying to help Suzanne get Mark to his feet, and no one was looking at us. I leaned in as close as I dared. “I don’t know how.”

“The boys are all disasters. Just try to look like you’re leading.”

So we stepped out onto the dance floor with the others, and the girls prodded their partners so as to form a wide circle. The stiff-looking Mr. Isherwood made some sort of announcement regarding the sponsored charity, and then there was a crash of music and Betsy beckoned with her right hand for me to extend my left. I did so, shifting all my weight onto my right foot as she took it. She then drew herself in against me, slightly to my right, so that just half of her pressed up against just half of me. I half passed out.

Betsy guided my right hand to the smooth skin below her shoulder blade, and placed her right hand into my left and held it out high, opposite my neck. Then, through what I can only assume was girl sorcery, she began to move her feet in such a way that my feet knew just where to go.

“One, two, three,” she whispered into my ear. “Forward, side, together.” And we began to revolve around the floor, like a clock’s hands in reverse, spinning around our own axis like two sides of one moon.

“I had no idea you were an actor,” she said. “How unexpected.”

“Oh, no. I just made all that up,” I said quickly. “About me and Billy.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Very funny.”

But her amusement was silent. Just between us.

“It’s very hard to tell with you,” I said.

I smiled. She didn’t. We waltzed.

“Did you know,” she said drily, “that the waltz was originally a peasant dance? And that Viennese nobles initially were shocked by the indecency of dancing so closely?”

“I did not know that.”

“You should try taking debutante classes. For a year. And I’ll peek out of a kitchen window and watch you every Sunday.”

Before I could decide if she was joking or upset, the song came to its end and she began to pull away from me. “Thanks for filling in. Walter.”

The mothers were all on their feet as we came back to the table. Mark White, somewhat dizzier from all the waltzing, was vomiting semi-raw tuna and well-massaged cow meat all over the table, along with about a quart of Jack Daniel’s.

“He’s hardly slept since Billy’s accident,” Mrs. White apologized before the flow had even ceased. “It wasn’t your fault, dear . . . ”

Suzanne was anxiously trying to get Mark to the bathroom, but the large boy had gone limp, and she could barely lift him. Before I knew it, Rodrigo was on the scene.

“Please,” he said sweetly, “allow me to assist you, ma’am.” Suzanne looked at him—possibly for the first time realizing that he was the same boy whom she’d seen leering at her out of the kitchen window—and then without a word slid aside so that Rodrigo could get Mark to his feet and then to the bathroom.

Understandably, the whole incident had put everybody off, and Mrs. Littleford, sensing that the evening would go only downhill from here, tapped Betsy on the hand and said, “Come, dear. Visiting hours will be over at ten. We’re expected back.”

“Walter and I need to say good-bye to the Von Porters,” Betsy said, her face showing nothing—no resignation, no urgency.

“So,” I said, thinking, So that was it then, as we walked away, in the direction of the Von Porters. But as soon as she had escaped her mother’s sight, Betsy began to move quickly toward a set of double doors that led to the sculpture garden. Before I knew it, we were outside. Thick clouds had moved in from the south, covering the full moon like a wash of ink.

“We spent the whole morning at the hospital,” she complained.

“How’s he doing?”

“Not too good,” she said. “He’s got this big hole in the side of his head.”

“Oh,” I said, a little surprised by her even tone. Was she mad at me? Did she know that I had been, at least indirectly, responsible for Billy’s current state?

“That was a joke,” she explained, her blue eyes dancing like fireflies in the dark.

“Sure,” I said. Mystified, I continued to follow her down the gravel paths of the sculpture garden.

“Want to hear something else funny?” We stepped gingerly over little artificial streams, jumping from rock to rock with our shoes in our hands like children. “Well, something that I think is very funny?”

“All right.”

“He woke up while I was there this morning. He had this breathing tube in, so he couldn’t speak until they pulled it out. And then his mouth was real dry, but he kept trying to say something. He pulled me in real close, because he can hardly even whisper, and, you’ll never guess what he said.”

“What?” I asked.

“He goes, ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t know who I was. So I say, ‘I’m Betsy. Your sister.’ And he goes, ‘Betsy, I’m gay. I’m gay, Betsy. I’m gay.’”

I nearly slipped off the rocks and into the water.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know, Billy. I know.’ Like I didn’t see him making out with our neighbor Roger when we were in the eighth grade? But he couldn’t remember.”

“Jesus,” I mumbled. I couldn’t quite believe it. And yet, while I couldn’t quite tell how Betsy felt about it, I sort of admired Billy all the more.

Betsy went on. “He didn’t remember who I was. But he remembered that. And my mother is standing there bawling—pretending she didn’t hear what he said—and I’m standing there thinking, Huh. He finally comes out on the day of my coming out.”

And there it was—another distinct un-laugh—and then, still barefoot, Betsy began to run across a long green field, empty except for us. I was surprised at how fast she was able to run in her gown. I could not see the museum at all anymore, just neat curves of trees along the sloping grass. Betsy kept on running. Not until we came to the top of the hill and I saw a little oasis of sand in the distance did I realize we’d come onto the Briar Creek Golf Course. She slowed down at last, as we crossed onto the eighth hole and sat down on the edge of the bunker.

“So this is where it happened?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said. The spot where Billy had fallen had been smoothed out into a neat spiral. Not a single bloody grain of sand remained evident in the trap.

Nervous, I took my hand and pressed it on top of hers. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying. It didn’t seem as if there could be anything worth saying.

“You don’t seem that upset,” I said finally.

“It’s all just so . . . ” she began, and then stopped. “Unexpected.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean . . . my family, we—well, they—see to it that nothing unexpected ever happens. No grade lower than an A-minus. No winter we don’t spend in Colorado. No summer we don’t go to the Outer Banks. My mother will host the Spring Leukemia Fund-raiser, and my father will say he’ll be home for our birthdays, only something will come up and he’ll send a savings bond instead.”

Though I’d have preferred a father who sent excuses and treasuries to not having one at all, I said, “That’s awful.”

“It’s not. It’s just expected. How can it be awful if it’s expected?”

“I guess.”

“Two days ago, Billy was going to go to Chapel Hill, like my father, and then Wharton, Stern, or Harvard, and then take over my father’s company someday. Everyone sitting in that ballroom knows that was the plan. Just like they all know that I was going to go to a liberal arts college and read some Emily Dickinson and talk about slants of light, join Alpha Gamma Pi, and then get a degree I’d never use because I’d be married to an econ major I met in my first semester. Then while he’d be at business school—Wharton, Stern, or Harvard—I’d start popping out babies and choosing window treatments. The expected treatments. The expected babies.”

She looked up at the wide black sky.

“But now?” I asked.

“Now Billy’s not going to be the next Littleford to go to Chapel Hill. He’ll be lucky if he can go to the bathroom. He’s not going to go to Wharton, or run the company. He can’t count to ten.”

“It’s terrible,” I said.

“It is terrible,” she agreed.

“So? Now you’ll go to Chapel Hill and Wharton and run the company? Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to do . . . ”—she turned her head to look at me—“. . . What. Ever. I. Want.” She relished each syllable. The corners of her lips were just barely curling. Then she lay her head down on my shoulder.

“Billy told me once you snuck out here at night to practice.”

Face turning a deep red, I asked, “How did he know that?”

She shrugged. “You’re the best player on the team, and the only one whose dad doesn’t drag him out here every Saturday. Billy’s not an idiot. Well. He wasn’t an idiot.”

“Was that another joke?”

“Walter. What kind of monster do you take me for?” she said, batting her eyelashes.

I had to do it: “How come you never smile?” I asked.

“‘Smile.’” She repeated my word flatly. “That’s what they told me in every debutante class. For a year of Sundays. ‘Smile, Betsy! Smile! It’s your job to put everyone else at ease. Make them feel welcome.’” She shrugged, her bare shoulder nudging into mine. “My dad’s been on ‘a business trip in Dubai’ since I was ten; my mom’s miserable; my brother’s gay, and now brain damaged to boot. Put yourself at ease. Make yourself feel welcome. I’ll smile when there’s something worth smiling about.”

“Fair enough,” I said, trying hard not to laugh.

“Billy liked you,” she said after a minute. “I mean likes you. I mean, if he remembers who you are anymore, he probably still likes you. I think of all the guys he knew, Billy would have wanted me to go with you. When I told him you and that Spanish kid had been spying on us, he said that sounded just like you.”

“Spying . . . ”—I paused—“. . . with the utmost respect.”

She studied me a moment, and it seemed as though she were about to kiss me. Or, possibly, devour me. It turns out I was right on both counts. First she kissed me, and then came the devouring—the devouring of any hope I ever had of forgetting her, or that night, or Billy, or any of it.

• • •

Later we lay on the fairway watching the airplanes line up for landing. It was still cloudy and there were no stars, only airplanes. They were efficient machines—tons of perfectly sculpted steel and wire, each containing three hundred people, or more, a thousand feet up in the air, moving hundreds of miles an hour. But from where we lay it was impossible to believe: they seemed to just hover there, blinking lazily, like fireflies.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“I sort of thought that was obvious,” I said.

“No, I mean, me,” she said. “This me.”

And she did seem like somebody else, suddenly. Her tough, sweet front was gone. Her teeth were chattering, faintly.

“I do,” I said. I thought about Rodrigo’s theory that she was a robot, through and through. “I’d always hoped, I guess, that this was what you were like. On the inside.”

She said nothing, but the faint chatter of her teeth began to get louder. “Let’s go back,” I said finally.

“I don’t want to go back. If I go back, they’ll drag me out to the hospital.”

“I’ll hide you in the café. I can make you a Viennese hot chocolate.”

“Vell, can ve keep talkink about mein pater, Herr Freud?”

“Vhat better place?” I replied, scratching my imaginary goatee. “Ve’ve even got a little couch you can lie on.”

Her eyebrows lifted and her cheeks quaked, but she covered the erupting laugh by kissing me again.

We gathered up our things and walked down off the bunker. We crossed to the stream and stepped over the rocks that led into the sculpture garden. I climbed up on the dumpsters behind Ludwig’s and squeezed through the back window, so that I could unlock the side door for Betsy. And I was so deliriously happy that I did not even notice the two bodies entangled on the couch in the front, until I’d invited Betsy to sit on it.

“Well hello, Suzanne,” Betsy said flatly.

The half-naked girl scrambled to her feet and, glaring furtively at Betsy, yanked her dress up and extracted herself from the still-amorous Rodrigo.

“Get off me!” Suzanne shouted, as if he had been the one holding her down. Then, avoiding Betsy’s eye, Suzanne rushed away to the lobby doors, as Rodrigo went after her, calling out in Spanish.

When the door shut, Betsy and I just stood there, unsure of how to proceed.

“He’s a really nice guy,” I said lamely.

“Oh,” Betsy said. “Yes, I’m sure they’re going to have quite a future together.”

This stung, and she could tell—though I wasn’t entirely sure that she minded. Immediately, I wondered what our future would look like. Would we go on dates? Would I have to explain, eventually, to her mother that my name was not really Walter Hartright? That I had not even applied to Princeton?

“You said something about hot chocolate? Earlier?”

Eager to dismiss this line of thought, I went to the back and with the greatest possible care, made her a perfect hot chocolate. When I came out again I found her standing on top of one of the tables, looking at the golden portrait.

“Careful!” I whispered.

She did not seem even slightly concerned, and with her perfect posture I imagined that she could have done jumping jacks up there without falling.

“Come up,” she said, reaching down a hand for me.

“That table’s going to break.”

“In case you were wondering,” she said, “the time to lose your nerve would have been before you jumped me out on the golf course.”

“I jumped you?” I began to protest, but saw that this wouldn’t help my case. I set the hot chocolate down and, slowly, carefully, got onto the table with her. She seemed distant again. Back to being the way she was before.

“You seem different now,” I said.

“I am.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and looked at the painting impassively. “Because I don’t like me, that way.”

“I do,” I said.

“I know,” she answered.

From where we stood, the golden woman was just out of arm’s reach.

“That’s real gold,” I informed her.

“No kidding.” She didn’t appear so impressed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off it either. “Touch it.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “That’ll leave my fingerprints.”

“On something beautiful. Something that will stay beautiful forever.”

Slowly I reached out and pressed a finger to the painting. It crunched, just slightly, under the pressure of my fingertip. When I pulled away I saw a soft circular shadow where I’d touched it, just to the left of the woman’s face. My finger faintly glittered with flecks of gold. It had come off so easily.

We stared at it for another moment. Then she said, “Write me something.”

“I’m not really a writer,” I explained. The last thing I’d written that wasn’t for school had been illustrated, badly, and I’d been about eight years old.

“Yes, you are,” she said simply. “You’ve been making stuff up since you first opened your mouth. And you’ve been loving it. So just write it all down. Write about tonight. Quick. Before you forget anything.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, turning away from the painting at last. “You could get hit in the head with a golf club tomorrow, and then it would all be gone forever.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“Not that ridiculous. Apparently.”

Standing there in the silent café, I wanted to tell her that if I got hit in the head and lost every brain cell but one, that brain cell would be the one that remembered that night. But, of course, I couldn’t think of words that good, just then. So I said nothing. And silence said what my words couldn’t.

“All right. I’ll do it. If you want,” I finally managed.

The corners of her mouth began to shake. She bit her lower lip. Her nostrils swelled slightly as she breathed in, sharply. And then, at last, a strange and slow smile spread across her face.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because,” she said. And for a moment I thought that’d be it. But then she finished: “You’ll never forget me.”

Then she kissed me one more time and stepped down off the table. Before I could say anything, she walked out of the café, toward her mother and her ball and her world, and I remained there in mine, sitting on the table looking up at the tiny smudge we’d made.