The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

10




King Me

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN



Jeffrey sits in the window wearing a white waffle-woven bathrobe embroidered with the elegant logo of the Hotel Luxembourg. His left hand moves lazily out in the fifth-story air, as if conducting an invisible orchestra. His right hand pinches a cigarette, which he smokes fiercely while staring down at the statue of Grand Duke Guillaume II in the square below. Then Jeffrey looks back into the kitchenette, where I lean over a newspaper written in Luxembourgish, a language I frankly did not even know existed before we arrived.

“It’s just too . . . I mean, honestly. You know what I mean? Does it have to be quite so . . . ? Just look at them all down there . . . ‘Oh . . . I’m blah blah blah. Don’t you think blah blah is so blah?’ ‘Yes, quite blah.’ God! You know what I’m saying?”

He tosses the lit cigarette across the hotel room, and it lands in the large empty fireplace, amid the butts of yesterday’s pack. His right hand traces a route through his gray hairs, down the freckled ridge of his ear, and then along the shoulder slope of robe to his pocket, where he fishes out his aluminum pack of Chancellor Treasurer cigarettes. He is hardly ever without one for more than a minute. He calls it his “sovereign addiction”—the only one remaining after obliterating pills, booze, and sex from his diet.

“What is it about this place? I don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

“You wanted to come,” I remind him. “You could have stayed with Pauline.”

An electric shudder runs through Jeffrey, and I know he is thinking back on the recuperative months we spent at the Oakes Reserve Vineyard in the Loire Valley—being ruthlessly picked over by his mother while doctors from all over Europe hemmed and hawed in the hallway.

“I keep having this nightmare,” he’d confessed as we’d strolled aimlessly down the still-frosted rows of vines. “They cut me up in my sleep and build a new Jeffrey out of aggregate parts. I come out half my size, with one lung, no liver, and a bird heart.”

In truth, they’d stuck him with acupuncture needles and fed him kale. They’d injected him with vitamin C and had him drink a gallon of raw milk daily. With each week that passed, Jeffrey did, indeed, appear a bit smaller and shorter of breath, but his antic scratching and midnight outbursts slowly diminished as well. His eyes no longer danced after things that no one else could see. This is when the gray came into his hair. This is when he began staring at his typewriter, never pressing a key.

I wasn’t surprised that, when my leg was finally fully healed and I told Jeffrey I was going to head into Luxembourg, he had his bags in the back of his father’s Renault before I’d even downloaded the maps. But that was days ago, and by now Jeffrey’s mood has swung right around again.

“I’m just saying,” he gripes, lighting the new cigarette. “Who goes to Luxembourg? Everything about this place . . . is so . . . so perfectly . . . uhm . . . humph.”

That Jeffrey can’t quite put a finger on his issue with Luxembourg cannot, entirely, be blamed on writer’s block. I feel it, too. The trouble with Luxembourg is that you can’t quite figure out what it is trying to be exactly. Everywhere I look there are soaring parapets and medieval coats of arms. There are old men playing checkers on a folding table in the park below us and stone gargoyles on the ramparts above us. But even they seem a bit bored by it all. In Paris you could complain the Eiffel Tower was not as striking as you’d hoped. In Berlin the beer wouldn’t be worth the crowds. In London the fog could be thick but not hiding-Jack-the-Ripper thick. In all these places there were expectations, but in Luxembourg there were none. One might ask how, without any expectations, could anything be a letdown? But that was the thing—there was a delight in being let down that Jeffrey thrived on. Here it all just was, no better or worse than what we’d never imagined. And Jeffrey was floundering like a saltwater fish dropped into a pond. Everything looked right and yet he was steadily suffocating; all the poisons he’d long ago adapted to withstand were suddenly nowhere to be found.

“This is hopeless,” I announce, folding up the newspaper, having scanned each of its pages for any mention of the royal family. Though Luxembourg is smaller than Rhode Island and with half the population, it has been surprisingly difficult to locate one of the duchy’s best-known residents. And then again, she’s everywhere. It was big news when the duke’s fifth son married an American actress—the biggest news in Luxembourg in a decade. After nine years, they still sell DVDs of the ceremony at every newsstand; her face remains printed onto coffee mugs at the tourist gift shops. Down in the lobby of our hotel there is a display filled with plates commemorating the royal wedding. Yet the princess herself has thus far eluded us.

Immediately upon checking in to the hotel, we’d walked down through the sunny Old City to the flamboyantly spired Grand Ducal Palace and introduced ourselves to the guards. They wore olive green coats with red-and-blue braided regalia and snug black berets. With the machine guns strapped across their chests, they vaguely resembled a pair of militant parking attendants.

“Jo!” Jeffrey had said. “Gudde Moien! Ech hu grad een immensen Huttkar!”

The guards had stared at Jeffrey’s head curiously until I discovered in the phrase book that he’d just informed them he’d bought an incredible hat.

“You are tourists?” one had asked.

“Tourists!” Jeffrey had laughed. “Good God, no! We’re actually very old friends of Her Highness, the Princess. If you would just buzz on up and see if she’s available . . . ”

One of the guards had lifted his bulky black walkie-talkie and spoken in clipped Luxembourgish. Jeffrey had appeared satisfied, until seven more parking attendants arrived to remove us.

“You don’t understand! I’ve known her since she was thirteen years old! We went to school together! In America? Ah-MER-Ik-KAH. For chrissakes, this one’s slept with her more times than you all have been invaded by Germany.”

I thanked any and all available gods—including the one who had toppled the Tower of Babel—that this last bit seemed to get lost in translation.

“We demand an audience with the princess!” Jeffrey had insisted angrily.

“You are . . . ”—the guard had begun, communing quickly with his brethren to be sure he had the English correct—“. . . not expected.”

“I’m Jeffrey Oakes!” he had cried as we were escorted away. “I’ve never been expected in my entire life!”

Our attempt to storm the palace had not exactly gone swimmingly.

Finally, Jeffrey slides off the windowsill and announces, “I’m going to shower.”

“You’ve showered twice today,” I say as I move to the corner desk, where I have a stack of hotel stationery and a bundle of pens. “Why don’t you try writing something?”

He laughs until it turns into coughing—fainter, but still with an echo of Iceland. I listen to him bang about inside, under the crackle of the news on Radio Télévision Luxembourg. I sit down to write. Each day I write out all that I’ve already written and try to gain enough momentum to push through.

Her Imperial Majesty Mrs. J---- and the other ladies leave the room and I am alone for the first time since early this morning. It was still dark out, when I first opened my eyes. Those first few seconds, I did not even remember my own name. My whole universe was simply snowflakes falling lightly onto the evergreens, the yellow rock of moon, high above the encroaching clouds. When I was eight, it snowed on Christmas morning while we were in Atlanta with Grandmother. It was the only time I ever heard my mother call anything a miracle.

Seconds passed and I remembered that I was in Chiyoda, in Tokyo, at the Fukiage Palace. That today would be my wedding day. That I was about to marry Haru, my prince. Literally. That my grandmother is dead and that Christmases are over and there are no miracles and that Atlanta is on the other side of this great sphere of rock.

Now, hours later, I am alone, sitting in front of the dressing-table mirror, caking white powder onto my face. The ladies have shown me how to cover my face with the bintsuke-abura, an oily wax mask that holds the powder—used by geishas and Imperial Princesses of the Yamato Dynasty alike for centuries upon centuries. With each dab the excess powder explodes and drifts off slowly through the dead air.

I stop where I’ve been stopping for weeks. I can’t manage another word. I flip through the book on Japan and the copy of An Actor Prepares that I borrowed from the Oakes family library; I push down on the French press that room service has brought me. I pick at the flaking spirals of a croissant; I chew on the only white sliver of fingernail I have left. But I am still stuck. No amount of caffeine seems able to push me past that powder, drifting slowly in the dead air.

What goes on inside her head?

For a while I listen to the quiet of the sleepy medieval city outside. Then, finally hearing the sound of shower water running, I push my chair back and cross to the front hall. There, in the bottom of the hall closet, in the bottom of my heaviest suitcase, I withdraw a wooden box, filled with manuscript pages that do not belong to me.

• • •

After his third shower of the day, I manage to coax Jeffrey down into the neighboring Place d’Armes for a stroll. He’s run low on cigarettes, anyway. Charming blue umbrellas extend out from a few cafés and beer halls, frequented by Luxembourgers at all hours. Rippling in an ever-present breeze, pleasant flags hang along the medieval archways. Men in puffy shirts sell flowers and used books out of wheeled carts, which they push over wobbly cobblestones. One imagines there must be a dedicated Office of Quaintness, dispatching pudgy burghers in velvet tunics all around town to keep covering the bricks with moss.

The travel sites all describe Luxembourg as a fairy tale come to life, but it feels less like a Grimm land of trolls and big bad wolves, and more like Disneyland Paris. Luxembourg is the wealthiest country in all of Europe, and the Old City is overrun by the tax-sheltered children of eBay and Skype executives, moving in Pied Piper phalanxes with their phones out and thumbs flying—casting spells out into the ethernet. Jeffrey and I dodge them as they trample by in their hiply untied sneakers, their ironic and yet inaccurate THIS IS NOT A T-SHIRT T-shirts. They buzz like flies around the McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut, although we have learned in time that they favor the Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant. Meanwhile, their fathers bark madly on Bluetooths at Brasserie Plëss and stuff themselves full of Grillwurscht sausages and plum quetschentaarts at La Cristallerie. Which fairy tale these characters feature in I cannot recall.

Jeffrey lingers a moment by some men playing checkers. He pretends to be fiddling with his watch and not examining the boards, but I can see his eyes jumping along with a red checker in zigzags, all the way across the board to the edge.

“Schachmatt!” one old man says smugly. Jeffrey smiles as the other spits on the ground and neatly places a second piece atop the first, transforming it into a king.

“You used to have a board but no pieces,” I remind Jeffrey.

“I played when I was a kid,” he answers. I wait for him to go on. “Of course, chess is supposed to be the better game, but I always found it too . . . ”

He trails off, searching for the right finish.

“Want to play a round?” I ask, taking a seat at an empty table. Jeffrey tries to pretend he’s not interested.

“There aren’t any pieces,” he complains.

“Here,” I say, reaching over to a neighboring café table and grabbing a little bowl full of sugar packets. “You can be the white packets and I’ll be the pink.”

Jeffrey snorts, even as he sits down and begins to fluidly set up the board. “Supposed to be red and black pieces. That’s why I liked it as a kid. Chess was all black and white. I always got stuck being the bad guys. I’m going to cream you, by the way.”

I smile and, as promised, he proceeds to cream me. He guides his packets in effortless slanted motions, crossing the board with ease and then, once his packets had been kinged, bringing them zigzagging back across the board again.

“It’s oddly democratic,” Jeffrey continues. “No bishops and pawns and knights, with elite abilities to move this way or that. In checkers it’s only by cunningly avoiding capture—by hopping all the way across the board into enemy territory—that you can gain any real advantage. And all it is—here’s the brilliant bit—all being kinged is, really, is gaining the ability to reverse course. To go against the tide, as it were, back to where you’ve begun. See?”

I nod, just happy to see him finishing his thoughts. We play one game and then another, and as we begin the third we both become aware of a cinnamon-skinned man watching us from a nearby park bench. He wears dark shades and a black suit and sips from a soup bowl of green bouneschlupp. He is the only gentleman of color in the Place d’Armes, but what truly makes him conspicuous is his hair, which puffs out in a seventies-style Afro.

“Check out Mr. Black Panther,” I say.

“Think he’s an assassin?” Jeffrey teases.

“If he is, which one of us is he after?” I muse.

“Depends. Just what have you been up to these past ten years?” Jeffrey eyes me evenly as he captures my final packet and effectively ends the third game.

“Let’s go,” he says. “This guy weirds me out.”

We move off toward the nearby flea market and Jeffrey seems a half ounce lighter. We peruse old coffeepots and empty picture frames. He dawdles for a bit by a used-book cart while I buy a collectible royal wedding stamp bearing a good likeness of the princess. She has her cascade of hair pinned up, which sets off her high cheekbones even more. But what, I wonder, is going on between them? I gaze into her stipple-inked eyes and try to hear the voices inside her head.

Jeffrey and I sit down on the edge of a large marble fountain, and I try to remember sitting beside her on a fountain years ago, running lines. ‘Love. What an idea!’ Now you say, ‘You don’t love him, then?’ and I’ll say, ‘But I won’t hear of any sort of unfaithfulness!’ Remember that.

“‘This fountain commemorates Luxembourg’s two national poets—Lentz and Dicks,’” Jeffrey reads. “That had to be a tough name to get through school with.”

I scowl slightly as Jeffrey reads on. “Mr. Lentz wrote the national motto. ‘Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sin’ . . . ‘We wish to remain what we are.’”

It really explains this strange place, I think, as Jeffrey considers the fountain. The gargoyles, the old men, the cobblestones. Maybe it’s trying with all its might not to change in any way. Maybe Luxembourg is stuck, just like us.

“You really think you’ve changed that much?” I ask.

Jeffrey stares down at the rippling fountain water and runs his hand through the gray streaks above his ear again. “Most days I hardly recognize myself.”

He watches the flecks of ash from his cigarette fall off and drift down to the water. I am about to accuse him of being melodramatic when a sudden slant of light catches my attention. I look up and see, not far away, that the young woman working at the used-book cart is standing with her sleek cellular phone aimed right at us. She grins and lifts a book off the stack in front of her. Näischt Helleges the title reads, and beneath it is a familiar black-and-white photograph.

“Well,” I say to Jeffrey, “somebody recognizes you.”

• • •

Jeffrey refuses to go back to the hotel even after I remind him that we’ve checked in as Timothy Wallace and Anton Prishibeyev. “They’ll know we’re staying there!” he shouts, and when I try to ask him who “they” are exactly, he rushes off in the other direction, fleeing the park and leading us southward through town, dodging up and down alleys and over bridges, all the way to the Place de la Constitution at the edge of the Old City. But the area around the monument is packed with sightseeing buses and camera-clutching tourists. Panicking, Jeffrey bolts down a set of stairs and descends into the deep and verdant Petrusse Valley.

These stairs take us all the way to the bottom of the chasm, which circles the ancient fortress walls of the Old City, which had kept Luxembourg snug and secure for nearly ten centuries before tanks and planes had come along and ruined all the fun. Down here, Jeffrey rushes along a jogging path until he reaches a little raised outpost—a forward fortification of some kind, now topped with empty park benches.

Wheezing, Jeffrey slumps against the balustrade and looks hatefully out at the wide Petrusse Valley beyond. It’s only then that he notices that there are hundreds of pigeons, fat and gray, swarming beneath the benches, feasting on gingerbread crumbs. Jeffrey covers his mouth as he staggers upwind, nervous about the molted feathers that hang in the air. I want to rush over and pull him back, but I stay by the edge, looking up at the Place de la Constitution above us. In its center is a great obelisk that commemorates the Luxembourgers who died in the Great War. At the very top of the monument is a gilded statue of a woman, hovering angelically with a wreath in her hands. From down in the valley, it looks as though she’s floating in thin air.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s just go back to the hotel. So you have a fan! It’s not exactly the end of the world.”

Jeffrey just shakes his head. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there when things got really bad. That Haslett a*shole kept on calling, and then Iowa, and whenever I went out, there’d be someone just staring at me. It was like I could see my words there in their heads. Crawling there on the undersides of their foreheads. It was like they thought I knew something. And they always ask me, Is it true? Is it true? Did it really happen? And then . . . What’s next? What are you working on now? All of these . . . these . . . these—”

“Expectations?” I finish for him.

He nods and I can hear the crinkle of the aluminum beneath his seeking fingers. When he finally gets a cigarette out, it shakes in his hand so badly that he drops it. I pick it up for him, blowing on it to get the Luxembourg off. He throws it back to the ground again.

“Where the hell did you go?” he demands.

I chew my lip and finally say, “I wish I hadn’t.”

Jeffrey takes another cigarette out and this time hands me the lighter. Then he leans in and I shield the flame.

So then I tell him where I went. I tell him about New York and Timothy Wallace and Dubai. Jeffrey laughs, hardly able to believe me—except that he saw the passport I used to check in to the hotel. I tell him about meeting Tina, his old junior editor, on the train in Sri Lanka, and I’m surprised at myself—how sad it still makes me to talk about her. I tell him about the way the Tamil boy read Nothing Sacred until they tore him from it. He stops fidgeting at this—to hear that his life preserver buoyed someone else, some total stranger, a world away and mixed up in a war started by this boy’s grandparents before he or I or Jeffrey was ever born. Last, I tell him about Jeremiah and the biography I never finished, and here he becomes furious, as I knew he would, but he can’t walk away without knowing the end. As I take him through it—my double, the leopard, the writers’ colony—his fury fades to anger, and then to mere annoyance. When I finish, he peers up at the golden lady and then out at the flock of pigeons, which continues to cruise, like one creature with a thousand legs, all around the park benches. I play awkwardly with the lighter. Jeffrey does not seem agitated anymore but it is hard to tell. His is still a mind I cannot see into.

Then, finally, he says, “I’ll flip you for it.”

“Not a chance,” I reply.

High above, on the wall, a little train chuffs over to the park, carrying three cars filled with bored tourists. Jeffrey angles his face away from them but stays put, even as several of them snap photos of the little outpost and the two of us amid the pigeons.

Then out of nowhere, he says, “She’s going to be at the Philharmonie Luxembourg tonight for their opening.”

My hand spasms and drops the lighter. It hits the rocky path under our feet and makes a noise that reverberates loudly out into the whole valley. With one tremendous flapping, the pigeons launch from the benches and take to the sky, up alongside the golden lady.

“How do you know that?”

“It was on the television while you were writing.”

“It said she was going to be at the opening?”

“No, but she’ll be there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” he grins, “they’re doing Hedda.”

And with that he starts to walk back toward the stairs that lead up the fortification and out of the valley. It takes me a minute to catch up. I have to remember how walking works. I think I might throw up. It’s been nearly ten years, during which I’ve tried being someone else, and traveled the world, and lost the love of a good woman, and nearly died, and—for all of this—I would have expected to have gotten somewhere. But here I am, half sick again, and getting nowhere.

• • •

The Philharmonie Luxembourg is shaped like an enormous white teardrop. In this quaint fairy-tale land, it is menacingly modern—like an alien craft that has landed on the mountainside, overlooking all the castles and cathedrals. The opening night is sold out, and Jeffrey and I are only barely able to beg our way into two standing-room tickets, at the back of the Grand Auditorium. For once I am grateful that Jeffrey never journeys anywhere without two sets of black-tie apparel—the second not for me, technically, but a backup, in case there should be stains. We stand among the decked-out citizens of Luxembourg, and I feel as if I’ve returned to Dubai. Gone are the lederhosen and funny hats; here we swim through a sea of tuxedos and top hats, with more cummerbunds than a junior prom, and the women drag silken fishtails behind them and wear roses in their hair. As I scan the crowd for the princess, I feel like a waiter in borrowed clothes, crashing someone else’s party. Again.

“Dier dierft hei nët fëmmen!” snaps a woman waving an enormous Chinese fan at Jeffrey. He is attempting, once again, to light a cigarette.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I hiss.

Jeffrey is about to protest when suddenly the crowd turns and their heads sweep up toward the box seats where two of the military parking valets have just stepped out from behind the curtained entrance. They mechanically scour the perimeter and one speaks into his sleeve, and the princess steps into view. She wears a golden gown that radiates as she waves perfunctorily at the crowd below. And there it is—unchanged from years ago—that bored look in her eyes. She smiles, and for a moment I feel a shock of static electricity as her eyes pass over the spot where I am standing. There’s no way that she can make me out in the crowd, and yet, for an instant I see her eyes flicker in surprise. I think it is impossible that she can have spotted us, until I turn to Jeffrey and see him waving madly up at the box, lit cigarette in his mouth.

“What?” he grins, enjoying a puff, as ladies in fox stoles push away angrily.

But before I can say or do anything, the space between us is suddenly invaded by a smooth, dark hand, which clips Jeffrey’s cigarette between its thumb and forefinger and—with frightening precision—crushes it, lit, in the palm. When I turn, we are both looking straight into the face of the Black Panther.

“I’m going to have to ask you to respect the rules of this establishment,” he says in perfect English. “Or you are more than welcome to leave it.”

Everything, from his gleaming patent leather shoes to the glint in his eyes, is no-nonsense. The stage lights begin to rise behind the neat circumference of his Afro.

Jeffrey gives the briefest pout before saying, “That’s understood,” and I want to ask him what he’s even doing here, but the Black Panther steps back into the crowd. I look up, one last time, desperately, toward the box where the princess is sitting, but now her eyes are fixed on the stage. If she did see us, there is no sign of it now. There is a brief flutter of applause as the curtain rises and the set is revealed.

Two actors step out onto a wide stage. It is all done up like a respectable drawing room, with a huge fireplace and a gleaming piano and a portrait of a frightening old general on the wall. One of the women bends before a closed door, to listen.

“Menger Meenung no hunn si sech nach net geréiert,” she stage whispers.

Jeffrey and I exchange a brief look. It had not occurred to either of us that the play, like the newspapers and the books and the television, would be in Luxembourgish.

“Madam, ech hunn lech et jo gesot,” the other replies. “Denkt drunn wéi spéit d’Dampschëff zerekkoum gëschter owend . . .”

Jeffrey makes a jerking motion with his head in the direction of the exit, but as we begin to shuffle toward it, we notice that the Black Panther is positioned squarely by the doors. He gives us another cool stare and, to my surprise, Jeffrey shrinks back again. I’ve never seen him this submissive before, not even in the presence of his mother. He seems downright shy.

“We’ve already paid for it,” he murmurs. “I think I’ve read this one before, anyways. This is the one where the lady winds up miserable at the end, right?”

I stifle a snicker.

A minute or two later there is polite applause from the crowd as the actress playing Hedda finally steps from the wings. She is a tall, fierce-looking blonde, and from way in the back I can make out her bored expression as she gazes out over the fine drawing room—its many luxuries no comfort to her. She’s not bad, but she’s a faker. I can tell she’s only acting bored. Really, she’s thrilled. It’s opening night! Why shouldn’t she be? Because my Hedda isn’t. I look up at the box seats, and wonder, what must it be like for her? To sit there and watch someone playing a role that she has been before. Is she thinking about that other stage, half a world away, where she spoke these same lines but in English, and made these same gestures, and paced these same steps? She sits up stiffly, as if she’s staring at a mirror, not recognizing her own reflection.

• • •

After the show I stay up all night. On my stack of hotel stationery I write out everything I’ve written before, and this time, when I get to the line about the powder falling in the dead air, I keep going. My pen scratches long trenches into the heavy white pages. It digs through so firmly that on the next page I am crisscrossing the ghostly grooves made by its predecessor. My pen spikes and falls like staccato bursts of gunfire. On a grand stage inside my own head, I can see everything. The princess at her dressing table. The mother-in-law hovering nearby. The cherry blossoms falling outside the window. The cool, gray steel of the morning air, ominous, and testing. It comes so quickly that my greatest challenge is to keep up. Her thoughts become my thoughts. The only interruptions come from the next room, where, from time to time, Jeffrey bangs on the wall and shouts that I’d “better stop all my incessant scratching,” but this only makes me increase the tempo. May it drive him mad. May it drive him back to the page again.

There is a photograph on the table in front of me to show me how my face is supposed to look. Mrs. J---- wants the servants to do it for me. “That’s tradition,” she’d said. I told her I put my own makeup on. For a thousand nights, under a thousand lights, on dozens of stages. For Beckett and for Shakespeare and for Miller and for Simon and for Stoppard and for Mamet and for Ives: I do it myself.

“It’s part of my process,” I explained to Mrs. J----. She’s not an unintelligent woman by any means—being an Imperial Princess and all—but she knows nothing about Stanislavsky. “Bring yourself to the part of taking hold of a role, as if it were your own life. Speak for your character in your own person. When you sense this real kinship to your part, your newly created being will become soul of your soul, flesh of your flesh.” I’ve thought of these words many times before, in many dressing rooms, but never have they felt truer to me than on this day. Today I take the role that I will play for the rest of my life. Today I step out in front of the last audience I will ever entertain. I will quicken their breaths. I will make their hearts swell, and break.

Painted on the walls of the dressing room are pink vistas of koi ponds and cherry blossoms and the barren face of Mount Fuji. Next to the table there’s an enormous window, from waist to twenty-foot ceiling, and outside of it the snow is falling much harder than it had this morning. The protesters don’t seem to mind. The Japanese are stoic that way. There are maybe two hundred of them out there, just beyond the walls to the palace grounds, waving signs I cannot read. One or two have my face on them, though. The ministers all said there wouldn’t be a strong showing—a dozen at most. “We Japanese are not like you Americans, in this way,” one said. “We do not get so . . . ‘rile up’ like you.” But when an American stage actress marries into the Imperial Family tree—even a limb as puny and removed from the Chrysanthemum Throne as Haru’s—it seems to rile them plenty.

I did the math. I’ll be fourteenth in line for the throne. If my husband were killed, and all his brothers and sisters were killed, and all their children and all their children’s children all suddenly met some horrible end, then I’d be the Empress of Japan. Perhaps the protestors think I’m going to pick them all off, one by one, like Richard III, but somehow I don’t think that’s the play that I’m in.

The ladies were whispering about the protestors when they left. “Watashi hasorerani bomu ganaikotowo nozomu!” one of them quietly spoke, releasing a flighty, nervous giggle. I don’t know much Japanese yet—but I know “bomu” means “bomb.”

After the months of classes I’ve taken, I remember mostly the words that they’ve taken from English. As I apply my lipstick, I rehearse the handful I know.

“Konpyuu-ta . . . computer. Terebijyon . . . television. Atommikku . . . atomic. Bomu . . . bomb.”

I’m not exactly a hit at parties, yet. But, I’m still learning my lines.

The lips are the most important. The lipstick goes on like oil paint, with a tiny brush of horse’s hair—plucked one at a time from the tail of a steed descended from the horses of Samurai warriors, I’m told. Another brush applies red, and then a black one to outline my eyes, and soon, looking into the mirror, I no longer see myself.

Mrs. Haru J---- looks back at me. An Imperial Princess. Actual royalty. A woman worth a considerable sum. A woman with servants, and a horse-drawn carriage, and a private chef, and a private jet with its own private chef. A woman reviled, and not just by two hundred freezing protestors, but by an entire archipelago of citizens.

Back home they think I am simply marrying for money. Tabloids speculate. Reviewers and critics gurgle in their delight as it drowns them. Who does she think she is? This is not how things are done. How could this woman, whom they’ve loved so from their front-row seats, whose heart they’ve watched beating faster as she kisses sweating, rakish men that they’ve dreamed of being loved by, too—how could she leave and marry some stiff-backed alien? But Haru loves me, just as he loves the roaring passions of the stage precisely because he has never quite experienced them in his Imperial lifetime.

And this, I also understand. I only ever have, once, myself.

Here, though, love has not yet conquered all. Traditions are still important; marriages still arranged. But Haru tells me that the younger generation loves America, and they all want to be Jay-Z and to be in love and drink whiskey and eat bacon cheeseburgers. Atommikku Bomu. Now they sell T-shirts with mushroom clouds on them. I see one out there, in the crowd of protesters now.

Where are the critics when you need them?

I’ve gotten bad press before. Lifeless. Mechanical. Heartless. You shake it off. You prepare for the next role of a lifetime. Mrs. Haru J----, Imperial Princess of Japan. All my life I have only ever been trying to be anyone other than who I am. But each role ends. I can only be Ranevskaya, or Lady Macbeth, or Miss Julie for a few hours before the mystery and elegance slide away and I am only myself again.

There are twice as many people outside now. Why do I keep scanning their tiny faces—half hidden behind scarves? He is not out there.

Stanislavsky suggests using “affective memories”—meaning that the actress should try to recall times when she felt as the character does—to better re-create that emotion upon the stage. And so I think about him—as I do each night before I take the stage. Each night I try to imagine what it was that he wanted from me. What it was that he felt. Some sort of peace. Something I’ve never really felt, myself—except on stage. Maybe on a Christmas morning, twenty years ago. Maybe in those moments before the day begins, when I haven’t yet remembered who I am.

Outside there is a loud cheer. The Imperial Guards are skirting the perimeter. There are cameras and lights now—the cyborg arms of television crews, coming to record this moment, when the people of an island nation are taking a stand. They are angry because their world keeps on shrinking, bound up in fiber-optic nooses, and the more things change, the more they all become the same. In Tokyo as in Manhattan. In Kumasi as in Dubai. In Colombo as in Williamstown. To them I am a corruption. A toxic invader into a once-sacred bloodline. They see it plainly enough— this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a cancer.

Careful not to crease the folds of my white shiromuku wedding robes, I sit again and reach into my bag. From inside a silk-lined cavity I withdraw

I wake in the morning to find my face plastered to the paper on my desk. I peel this off and bits of words stick to my cheek. I stopped midsentence, it appears. And as I stumble to the sink to wash my face I realize that I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I had intended her to withdraw. I sit staring at the half-finished line for hours, until I hear the sound of the shower going in the next room.

Out of habit, I wander past the closet where I’ve hidden Jeffrey’s manuscript, and, as he sings French opera in the shower, I extract a few pages and read on from where I left off the day before. I’m nearly finished. While it remains devoid of all periods, c’s, q’s, w’s, and z’s, and it is definitely gibberish, I cannot get past the feeling that it is distinctly Jeffrey’s gibberish. Am I crazy? Or, mixed into this mountain of verbiage, are there specks of gold?

It has crossed my mind, of course, to sell it—surely some collector would pay handsomely for an unfinished manuscript of Jeffrey Oakes’s. It has even crossed my mind to keep it for myself. If I could sift out the gold inside, could I then claim it as my own? But now another idea crosses my mind. I slip the pages back into the wine box where I’ve kept them and put the box into my suitcase and the suitcase back into the closet. Then I lift another sheet of stationery off the top of the pile and write “Jeffrey—Be right back. I’ll get cigarettes. Don’t worry.”

Out the lobby, past the souvenir plates, I head into the Place d’Armes once more. The old men are back at their checkers. One shouts, “Schach matt!” at the other. Out of the corner of my eye I see the Black Panther and again it seems as though he is also watching me. But I make my way to the used-book cart, where the girl we saw the other day is reading from the Luxembourgish edition of Nothing Sacred.

“Do you speak English?” I ask.

“Englesch?” she replies, shaking her head—no.

“Jeffrey Oakes,” I say, pointing to the book.

She nods and grins. “Frënd?” she asks, pointing to me.

“Yes, friend,” I say. “Old friend.” I think about adding “Only friend” but she won’t understand me, anyway. She’s hyperventilating, and though I’ve never really seen anyone swoon before, I’m pretty sure this is what she is doing.

“Léift?” she asks, pointing to me. She puts her hands over her heart and then puts one onto the book. But I do not understand. “Léift! Léift! Léift!” she keeps crying.

“Love?” I say, pointing at the book. “Yes! Léift! Multo . . . grande léift!”

Immediately she proceeds to gush in a torrent of Luxembourgish. She shows me her phone, and the photo of Jeffrey that she took. She’s posted it to a website called The Oakes Literary Society International, or TOLSI, for short, and there are 3,479 replies. From “hottentot19” and “GurlyGurl” and “WildeOne” and “echolalia” and “MrSmudgyMan.” They demand that she find out where he’s staying. What he’s doing. If he’s crazy. Some squeal in abbreviations. Some, more erudite, quote his passages. The critics are immediately fired upon by the loyalists. Some girl posts a photo of a tattoo she’s gotten on the small of her back that’s etched with NOTHING SACRED. It’s the ninth circle of Jeffrey’s Inferno, on a four-inch touch screen with 4G speed.

I clap my hands and turn to the girl. “You can meet him. Sunday night.”

“Sonndes?” she confirms. “Owes?”

“Sunday. Night. Tell everyone. Sonndes owes,” I say, waving my hands out toward the world and then miming typing onto a phone with my thumbs.

“Wou?” she asks, looking about, her fingers already flying over the tiny keys.

“There,” I say, pointing toward the palace. “There.”

• • •

As I enter our suite, the smell of smoke tickles my nostrils and reminds me that I haven’t bought Jeffrey cigarettes as I had promised. But it isn’t tobacco I smell burning. When I push open the door I see Jeffrey, standing in his bathrobe, in front of the roaring fireplace. It takes a moment to connect the open closet door to the open suitcase on the floor to the open wine box on the counter. To the stack of paper in Jeffrey’s arms.

“I thought I’d left a few cigarettes in your suitcase!” he screams, throwing two or three more pages into the fire. “This is supposed to be buried under an avalanche. Blown out of the f*cking tower by the Arctic winds and scattered halfway to Greenland by now! Humpback whales should be picking it out of their . . . their . . . those things with the . . . Christ!” He hurls furious fistfuls of pages into the fire, stopping only when the flames surge up so high that they consume the bottom of the mantel.

“Baleens!” I shout, trying to wrench the papers away from him.

“Yes!” he cries, as he kicks me back. “Thank you! Baleens! F*cking Moby Dick should be flossing with this . . . this . . . travesty!”

With that he trips on the edge of the rug and the rest of the pages mushroom up into the air before sinking down. Jeffrey sits up in the middle of the paper sea, his pages settling like cresting waves that threaten to drown him. He just sits there, as if to let them. Wading in, I sit down beside him and help him to catch his breath.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’ve lost too many books of my own. I just needed to save it.”

“It’s all just f*cking nonsense,” he sobs.

“It’s not,” I insist. “Not all of it. There’s something in here. Something incredible. For the first hundred pages or so I couldn’t see it. But then I started to notice certain things—repeating. There’s a boy, right? A boy, and he’s very gifted at . . . I don’t know, there aren’t any c’s, but you call it—” I riffle through pages, but to find one in the midst of all this would be like reaching into the ocean and grabbing out a fish. If it isn’t ash already. I try to remember it, exactly. “A . . . a . . . ‘game of slanted moves’ . . . ‘the oldest game that journeyed from the East, played in the shade of sphinxes . . . ’” Jeffrey listens, breathing heavily. And then—a snow-in-Atlanta miracle—I lay my hand on the page I am searching for. “Here! Here here here! ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak’—you meant black, right? And ‘not-blak’ is white, but there were no c or w keys—you’re talking about checkers, and chess, right? . . . ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak, for what in this sphere of land and sea is ever all blak or all not, but all is either the dark, dark death or the bold blushing of blood, blue through the skin but underneath it is red, all red, all of ours red, even the bluest blue blood is red, from George to Ferdinand to Louis to Tutankhamen to Buddha to Genghis and every Emperor from the Land of the Rising Sun have been red, red blooded, and all eventually taken by the blak, yes they all played the game, all made their slanted moves over the board, they hopped their rounds, they took them, they arrived at the farthest edge and said, in a thousand tongues, they said, unendingly,

King Me!

Rey Me!

Roy de Moi!





“You wrote that last part in by hand—how do you know these things? . . . ‘And this, this is the phrase on the lips of the boy as he takes the last round of the man his father has hired to train him . . . ’ I mean, it’s checkers! Yeah? It’s all about this boy who plays checkers and . . . well, help me find the next part, why don’t you? It’s got to be here somewhere . . . ”

Jeffrey’s gone quiet. The fire has died down a bit. The pages lie flat now, all around us, a still white pond. I pick up one page, and then another, and try fitting them together. I wait for Jeffrey to tell me that I’ve gone mad—that he never so much as thought of a single checker in all the time he was in Iceland. But then, slowly, Jeffrey lifts one page and holds it up against the light from the fireplace. He turns it this way, and that, as if not sure which end is up. Then he takes up another and, scanning the end of the first, matches it to the top of the second, and holds them together between his fingertips.

“Page numbers, page numbers,” he mutters. “My kingdom for f*cking page numbers.”

• • •

It takes nearly every available hour between that one and Sunday, but we’re not much for sleeping. At first we take breaks only for room service and so Jeffrey can smoke in the window and watch the men playing checkers. The Black Panther barely ever leaves the Place Guillaume II. At all hours we see him there, looking up at us. Watching. Jeffrey makes faces at him from the safety of the room, but only because he has me to send for more cigarettes. But by the third day, Jeffrey has stopped doing even this. His sovereign addiction is replaced by his very first—the steady rush of pen against paper.

We work in tandem, communicating in inks: mine, red cross-outs, circles, exclamation points, and question marks; his, black insertions, deletions, refusals, and acquiescences. Occasionally there is a great laugh from one end of the room or the other, or else a swift intaking of breath. Not only is it pleasant to work with Jeffrey for a change, but playing editor makes me think of Tina. Late one night I catch my reflection in the window, going line by line over a fresh page, and for a moment I am she, reading something of my own.

Jeffrey’s thousand pages are steadily milled down to five hundred, which we sift through further, until we have it at just under three hundred.

The Sunday-morning church bells have long since rung and the sun is coasting down. Jeffrey takes one last shower, and we tie each other’s bow ties, and he puts the finalized pages back into the wine box again, and tucks this lighter parcel squarely beneath his arm. Then we head out into the dusk together.

There is a small crowd waiting over in the Place d’Armes. Just a little congregation around the used-book cart, where readers from all over have come to meet the girl who broke the news of Jeffrey’s return, and, while they are at it, pick up a paperback or two for the journey home. I spot a pair of aged hippies with white ponytails and circled spectacles discussing a volume of Hemingway with a thin man in a gray suit. A squat, wild-maned lion of a man studies Chekhov through the bottom of his beer mug. Three girls who look as though they might have been classmates of Carsten Chanel’s compare translations of The Metamorphosis and laugh as if to wake the dead. Jeffrey’s whole self tenses as they come into view, but he keeps walking steadily, even as they all look up with one expectant face.

“Am I naked?” Jeffrey asks. “Why are they looking at me like I’m naked?”

“I’d probably have mentioned something earlier if you were,” I say.

“Probably?” he snaps.

But on we go, past the crowd at the book cart, even when they bring up their phones and hold them out at arm’s length like so many Yorick’s skulls. Jeffrey flinches a bit when the flashes go off but never breaks stride. We march down one of the cobblestone avenues to the palace, where dozens and dozens of the paramilitary parking squad are keeping their eyes on the assembled mass. I think we’ve about doubled the population of the Old City. There must be a few hundred of them—Oakes fans from all corners of the European Union. Perhaps there are Chunnel-borne Brits out there; perhaps the sons of sons of Soviets. Perhaps some TOLSI-ites have trekked in from even farther away. And there are so many phones pointed our way, taking pictures and videos—capturing this moment for all time and for all people in all places. I wonder if Einar will watch, or simon/, or whoever is doing simon/’s homework for him these days. Everywhere there are copies of Nothing Sacred, and the air is filled with a tremendous cheering. Still, Jeffrey looks humbler than I have ever seen him. As we move toward the front of the crowd, I find myself searching for a large hat, a burst of gingery hair, a dress fifty years out of fashion—but she will not have come, not all this way. But is she, maybe, at a computer a world away, watching this unfolding in a choppy, pixilated stream?

What I do see, as Jeffrey moves into position under a quaint streetlamp, is a window up in the palace, with warm light spilling out. Silhouetted there is a woman in a wide-shouldered gown, guarded on one side by a slim black man with a bulb of dark hair, speaking into his sleeve.

“It’s the Black Panther,” I say to Jeffrey. “He’s with her.”

But Jeffrey is not listening to me. He is quite busy extracting pages from the wine box. He places the box on one end and then steps onto it. All the blood in his cheeks has drained elsewhere. But he stares into the crowd, facing the thing he’s been afraid of since I’ve known him. Perhaps longer than that even. Perhaps even longer than the shadow in the window has known him.

“So sorry to keep everyone waiting,” he says softly. The words catch the stone walls of the palace and they echo, and in an instant everyone is laughing. Is it my imagination or is he blushing? “This is from a work very very much in progress—”

Whatever else he says is lost in a volcanic eruption of applause. His eyes flit over the crowd, from one curious face to the next. There is a glint in his eyes that I recognize. He has them entirely under his spell now, and he’s wondering why he ever waited this long. He clears his throat, turns back and winks at me, and then announces,

“This is called ‘King Me.’”

• • •

He reads for nearly an hour. After he’s through, there is a thunderous ovation, and then a somewhat-tidy receiving line that I do my best to help corral. I stand by Jeffrey’s side but I don’t have to step in even once. He sits on the wooden box as if it were his own tiny throne. He entertains each audience seeker with wit and patience. Two more hours rush by and then, out of nowhere, the Black Panther appears at the head of the line.

“Her Majesty, the Princess, requests the pleasure of your company.”

Jeffrey stands and faces the man, appearing to consider the offer.

“It’s about time,” he says finally.

But the Black Panther holds a hand in my direction.

“Not you.”

I feel my throat go dry. I look up at the window but the light is out. She is gone.

“Specifically?” I manage to get out. “I mean, did she say she didn’t want me to come up or did she just not say, because she may have assumed that—”

But Jeffrey cuts me off. “Hold on there, Black Panther–man. He comes, too.”

The Black Panther looks Jeffrey squarely in the eye. “You would refuse a request from Her Royal Highness?”

Jeffrey snorts. “I’ll refuse it and then I’ll say she’s got an ice-pop for a heart—it makes no difference to me.”

The Black Panther snarls, and then when Jeffrey moves to leave, he gives in.

“Come this way,” he says to us both.

And that is that. We are whisked through a side door by the armed guards and shepherded down along a long, dark corridor.

“What is this? Huh? Hello? Mr. Black Panther? Are you taking us to the dungeon?” Jeffrey shouts.

“To say ‘Black Panther’ is redundant,” the man informs us suddenly with the thinnest glimpse of a smile. “All panthers are black. A panther is not its own breed but a name common to all large jungle cats that have a dominant pigment that overrides the natural undercoat of the animal. In America, you’ve typically got black cougars. In Latin America, we have black jaguars. In Asia or Africa, a panther is a black leopard. From a distance they appear to be all black, and yet—if you’ve got the nerve to get a close look—you can see that they actually still have their normal markings. Their spots. They’re just not visible against a background that is also black.”

Jeffrey is speechless, which, from the satisfied look on the man’s face, seems to have been the object of the lesson. It doesn’t last long.

“Well, thank you, Jack Hanna,” he says finally.

At last, we reach a door and the Panther motions for us to go through. He looks sweetly at Jeffrey, much less so at me, as we proceed.

We emerge into a great hall lined with tapestries and suits of armor and flowing banners bearing coats of arms. A dozen servants are lined up to greet us, all dressed impeccably. At the far end stands our old friend, and she looks not a day older than when I saw her last. She smiles and, to the shock of her servants, runs over to us so quickly that she seems to nearly trip on her long golden gown. Before I know quite what to say, her arms are around us both, and there is the most incredible charge in me as her lips press firmly onto first my cheek, and then Jeffrey’s.

“That was fantastic,” she cries, any semblance of royal propriety quite out the window, and then her eyes have locked steady onto mine. “And it was you, too, wasn’t it? Of course, it was. Stay here, until it’s completely finished. You must be starved. The chef will whip something up for you.”

Jeffrey strides after her toward the dining room as if he’s lived here his entire life. To an apple-cheeked maid he says, “Yes, I’d like two slices of wheat toast. Crusts removed. Then two poached eggs with smoked salmon. No sauce. And he’ll have—”

Jeffrey is gesturing in my direction. “Oh. Uhm. Steak, then. Bloody.”

The princess adds, “Just have Marcel throw something together for me.”

She takes us into a grand dining room, where a long table is covered in tomorrow’s fine breakfast china. On the walls hang gigantic portraits of the former dukes and duchesses of Luxembourg, milky skinned and red nosed, always looking just a bit malnourished, as if they’d left sitting for the portrait off until they were actually on their deathbeds. At the head of the table is a massive golden throne, cushioned in red velvet. I expect that the princess will sit there, but she takes a seat to one side. The Panther sits behind her, and Jeffrey and I sit across. Wine is poured and Jeffrey chugs a glass down triumphantly before I can remind him he’s stopped drinking.

“Where’s the head honcho?” he asks, thumbing his finger at the throne.

The Black Panther speaks cordially to Jeffrey, “The duke is with his three sons in Argentina.”

“Argentina!” I say. “What’s in Argentina?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” she replies sweetly. “This country’s getting a bit small for us. We’re thinking of invading the Falklands. Do you think anyone will mind?”

She raises her eyebrows devilishly at me, and while Jeffrey bursts into laughter, I feel my heart begin to flutter.

“Nothing wrong with Argentina. Some of us might like to be in Argentina,” the Panther says, making eyes at Jeffrey, which, surprisingly, Jeffrey makes right back.

“Don’t pout now,” she says, giving his hand a light smack. “Cyrus was left behind to guard me.”

“Seems some rather disreputable foreigners had taken up residence in the Hotel Luxembourg,” he said, eyeing me. “Do you believe that?”

“Is that right?” I cough. “Well. Foreigners. Good for trade, I expect.”

“Only if you count sales of luxury cigarettes and fire repairs to hotel rooms.”

Jeffrey tips back his empty wineglass and taps it with one finger. “We bought some theater tickets! And a lot of room service. And judging from the crowd tonight I’d say there can’t be a vacant hotel room for miles!”

Cyrus grins wolfishly, and, if I’m not mistaken, there is, again, the briefest lingering in his looking at Jeffrey.

“So,” I say, desperate for any reason to look in the princess’s direction. “Is that why you didn’t go to Argentina? These, uhm, ‘disreputable foreigners’?”

Her eyes glint like the light on the rim of her wineglass as she drinks from it. “They don’t have much need for me when it comes to things like that. Negotiating trade agreements. Four percent this for two percent that. Amortized over six years. Steel for soybeans. Very dull stuff.”

Cyrus smiles. “Her Majesty is in charge of the Get Fit Luxembourg! initiative.”

She punches the air gently, as if quite gung ho about it, and then she and Jeffrey explode into laughter.

“You know what they’re making out of soybeans now? Lemonade! And tuna fish! Out of beans! The other day I met three men who use it to make synthetic peanut butter. Isn’t it just as easy to grow peanuts? I asked them. Apparently not. That’s what it all is now. Everything reinvented! Nothing genuine. Next thing you know they’ll be injecting pregnant women with it so the children can breast-feed soy milk! This is how I’ll be remembered. ‘The Synthetic Princess!’”

“You should have them carve a statue of you out of tofu!” Jeffrey cries.

The idea seems to delight her. “If I put it over on the throne and snuck off, do you think they’d know the difference?”

Their laughter fills the empty dining hall, and in an instant there are tears in the corners of her eyes. Then she reaches both hands across the table. Jeffrey takes one and I take the other—and her fingers slip around mine as if I had held them only yesterday. “You have to stay here a few more weeks. Please. It’s just like the good old days,” she says, smiling as the servers arrive with our food.

And as we drink, and Jeffrey and I entertain Her Majesty with stories about our years apart, it does feel as if very little has changed. It’s only when I lean back in my chair and into the dead eyes of the portraits on the wall that I remember that we are not having brunch in some ritzy New York hotel. This is her home now. High up on one wall is an empty space. I can’t help but think that it is waiting for a portrait of her.

• • •

After dinner I am shown to a magnificent guest suite, done up in Far Eastern crimsons and golds. There is a huge canopy bed, a black bearskin rug on the floor, a huge bookshelf filled with leather-bound classics, a wardrobe the size of a New York apartment, and a spacious writing desk in the corner. A Spanish boy named Roberto brings me silk pajamas. The moon is high and full in the sky outside the window, and after the meal and the wine and a few hours with my old love, I am desperate to write. But I check all the drawers in the writing desk and there is no paper. I could ask Jeffrey, but he’s in the neighboring room, and judging from the way things were looking between him and Cyrus as we left dinner, I think that perhaps I will not disturb him. I hear an occasional faint thumping noise that makes me blush. It’s nice having the old Jeffrey back, I think to myself, but I’m worried for him at the same time. Will one bottle of wine lead to twelve? Will the good reviews, already streaming onto the blogosphere, go to his head even more quickly than the wine? And how long until Russell Haslett comes calling?

Just as I’m considering tearing some pages from the back of one of the ancient books on the shelf, I am interrupted by the sound of the door opening.

“Roberto, do you think you could find me something to write on?” I ask.

But it is not the Spanish boy.

The Princess of Luxembourg studies me a moment, her eyes curious, as if surprised to find me where she’d left me. Should I bow? I’m half tempted to curtsy.

“Good evening, Your Majest—” I begin, but before I can get it out she’s rushing toward me. Her hands grip my cheeks firmly, her lips devour mine, and though her golden hair keeps falling in our faces, she does not close her eyes, as if she needs to be sure it’s really me.

“Don’t you dare call me that,” she says, holding me tighter.

It’s what I’d dreamed of for nearly a decade, and yet something about her suddenly makes me nervous. I’d imagined myself all this time as some sort of world-weary knight, a lovelorn Lancelot come to free her from this prison. Instead I feel more like a confused Quixote, lost in lovely La Mancha, tilting at the same old windmills. Would that make Jeffrey my Sancho Panza? If anything, I must admit, it’s all the other way around.

“I thought you didn’t even want me to come up to the palace,” I manage.

Her eyes burn at a thousand watts. More. “I’ve told you,” she says. “You always make me forget my lines.”

She kisses me again and the nine interceding years begin to fly away. Yet as they do I find myself grasping at them with both hands. My heart is hummingbird-pounding, and I feel a faint throb in my leg as she pushes me toward the canopy bed—but we don’t even get there—we end up on the floor, and I feel the pricking of the bearskin against my cheek. She’s heavy on top of me and behind those carefully painted lips I feel the faint tensing of her teeth against my tongue. Her hands are on my shoulders, in my shirt, and all I can see is a frenzy of golden hair.

“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.

“You’re not reading,” the boy complains.

“Sorry,” I say, “I thought you weren’t ready.”

“I’m ready,” he insists.

“Oh, this one’s a good one,” I say as I flip a few stories in. I pause, remembering that I read it once, when I was little, at a tiny bookstore in a big airport terminal. I’m delighted to find it hasn’t changed at all—only me. King me.

“You have to say its name,” he demands.

“Its name,” I say, “its name is, ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots.’”

• • •

I left Luxembourg and my apologies, scrawled onto the blank end pages of the Kipling book. I’d come looking for someone I’d made up, a long time ago, and that as fun as it might have been to break character for another night, I owed her more than that—much more. For years we’d had a kind of make-believe love, in its way so much better than the genuine article. She’d called me after good auditions, but never bad ones. I’d seen her break men’s hearts, but I’d never once seen her heartbroken. Our story had been all romanticism, never realism. We’d had affairs, but we’d never once made plans. Now I saw that, even playing the role of the Princess of Luxembourg, she had no fairy-tale life: she had a country to think of, overweight citizens to inspire to exercise, real duties to carry out! A royal life was still a life: soy products to endorse, a husband to miss when he was away, and children getting up to mischief on opposite ends of the palace. Running away from it all for just one night would have made neither of us any happier, in the end. If Jeffrey had proved anything to me, it was that no one could escape forever. Maybe he’d been right, long ago, when he’d told me that I’d never really loved her. Nothing I’d felt for her then even began to match what I felt when she’d looked that child in the eye and had seen her own eyes looking back.

Of course, I didn’t say all that, exactly. Rather, I left my apologies in the form of a story. One that I’d written again and again, about an actress preparing for not merely the role of a lifetime—but a lifetime of a role. A story I’d been unable to finish, until then. When I’d finally finished it, I’d signed my name—my real name—at the bottom, and set the book down beside the sleeping head of her son.

Now, on this airplane, I am writing it all again, while I soar over the great black gap of the ocean, in as straight a line as the curve of the earth will allow. A flight attendant reminds me sweetly to be sure and change the time on my watch. I tell her that I wish I still had a watch. I tell her that I so loved watching its hands winding backward, making time where there was none before, catching seconds from the air and putting them back where they belong.

The sun is rising fast in the east behind us, but we are faster. Everything stays dark, as if the night itself were trying to take longer, so I can finish. I write until the instructions come to put my table in the upright position. Then, as we descend, I keep on going, pressing hard against the back of the seat in front of me. Just before our wheels touch the ground, I, at last, am finished.

Careful not to crease the folds of my white shiromuku wedding robes, I sit down again and reach into my bag one last time. From inside a silk-lined cavity I withdraw a small painting, about the size of a page in a book, of a woman rendered entirely in gold. The fluid lines, the precise strokes, can only have been painted by someone imbued with a great and unabating passion. In the glint of the woman’s breasts I can trace the serene gaze of its unknown artist. And just to the left of this there is a small smudge—a faint oily spot left behind by the pressing of a single finger.

It took me some time to find the portrait, on loan to a private collection at a North Carolina art museum. When the owners noticed the finger smudge, they were aghast, and offered to lower the price or have it professionally restored. But I would not allow it. I want the smudge, I’d said. Get rid of everything else if you want. It’s the smudge I want.

I stare at this single, oily spot as I have every night before going on stage. And after a few moments I am prepared. I rise from my seat by the dressing mirrors and adjust my wedding robes one last time. I pass through the doors of the dressing room and I am on a stage. The curtain has fallen and I can hear the roar of the crowd building, steadily, like a madness. The snow is still drifting down in the dark space before me. Up in the catwalks, some stagehands scurry with last-minute tasks. I am my role. The curtain stirs gently in the draft. And when it goes up, I will feel that one face—those two eyes—that gaze I must avoid all night. But I will feel those eyes watching, every moment, knowing I can never look back into them, because they would undo me.

The wait is over now. The curtain begins to rise.





Terminus



“Lowly faithful, banish fear, / Right onward drive unharmed; / The port, well worth the cruise, is near / And every wave is charmed.”

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “TERMINUS”



Here again, she tells herself. She reaches the top of the escalator, yanking her suitcase by its taped handle to keep it from catching in the mechanism. The sides of her case are freshly smudged with red sub-Saharan dust. This same dust is caught in the lengths of her auburn hair and pressed into the pale swirls of her fingertips. Just as it had been the last time she’d passed through this very same airport terminal. Here again, she tells herself, and again empty-handed.

Through a barrage of static, the speakers above her head announce, “Boarding will . . . in just a moment for . . . two thirty-seven to New York City.”

She peers quickly around Terminal B for a clock but cannot locate one anywhere. She certainly does not notice him, over at the farthest table—the man fussing about with stacks of pages: dividing them into parts, ordering, reordering, deleting, stetting. Hesitatingly he scribbles question marks onto the wide, clean margins, branding them with each of his infinite doubts. She doesn’t see how aggravated and nervous he is, or how completely exhausted. Everything that was inside of him has been emptied except the overwhelming fear that what’s been emptied is nothing special. He thought that he would be much surer by this point. He knows that there is so much missing—so much that he’s lost and will never be able to find. He worries that perhaps they are all the wrong words. He thinks that perhaps they are all in the wrong order. He wonders if perhaps those who read them won’t be able to see all that they should.

But really he is lying only to himself, again. Really, his fear is just the opposite. Really, he’s worried that maybe they will see—all the terrible things that he has done and has been. He’s thinks that he has changed his spots—he’s sure he has—but now everything is in there: the lies he’s told and the truths he’s invented.

But she doesn’t notice him. She’s still pacing up and down the terminal, looking for a clock, but there are none to be found. Not near the Emerson Books. Not across the corridor by Phil’s Coffee Hub, or W. W. Gould’s Good Eats, or the Jewels, Jewels, Jewels! kiosk. She knows only that it is far too early in the morning, but that to her it feels like the depth of night. She hates taking the red-eye back to the city. She hates arriving into its jubilant, awakening arms feeling so deeply burned out. She continues, legs cramped and stiff, the little wheel on her bag squealing incessantly.

The bag’s wheel had a bad encounter with a busted step at the old man’s house—the axis knocked a few degrees off balance when she was racing inside to try to catch the end of his estate auction. She’d been so sad to hear he’d passed. She’d never even gotten to meet the great Jeremiah; she’d never been allowed. And after so much anticipation, she’d shown up very, very late. Kojo’s rusted Hyundai had blown a tire, hours earlier, and she had been forced to wait out there in the miserable heat while he walked to the nearest village to scrounge up a replacement. By the time she’d gotten inside the old man’s house, nearly everything had already been sold. She’d soon spotted an editor from Sandford Books, locking up a briefcase filled with yellowed pages. Early stories? Diaries? Letters? She still doesn’t know. Like the rest of the world, she will have to wait and wonder and see.

She continues to scour the walls of Terminal B—she thinks, What sort of backwoods airport has no goddamn clocks? There had been ten of them, all in a shiny row, back in the far-nicer Terminal A. You’ll be back in true civilization soon, she reminds herself. But then a second thought hits her. By lunchtime you’ll be sitting in Haslett’s office, trying to explain how you—the only one who had been out to the damned Oakes Mines & Estate before—got scooped for the literary find of the decade. She dreams about rolling herself a perfect little cigarette, but she does not want to go back outside and risk missing her flight. People are already piling up at the gate, though the attendants are not letting anyone board yet. She thinks she might have a tall glass of gin instead, with parasite-free ice cubes in it. It’s early, sure, but she is still on Africa time.

She stops in her tracks and reaches for the side pocket of her purse. From inside it she removes a watch. It is bright gold and quite elegant—but far too big for her wrist. It belonged to the man who broke her heart. She’d found it deep in the pocket of his jacket, which had been auctioned at the estate sale; she’d gotten it for practically nothing. She checks the watch and sees that she has at least twenty minutes before her flight should leave. Just then, a modest sign halfway across the terminal catches her eye. TEN-MINUTE TIMEPIECE REPAIR. Ten minutes to get the watch taken in, she thinks, ten minutes to get my drink. Wristwatch in hand, she moves swiftly toward the kiosk—closer and closer. She startles a slim man behind the counter. He sits on a high chair, reading a newspaper.

“I’ll need some links removed from this, please,” she says.

The static comes on again. “. . . flight two thirty-seven to New York . . . now begin boarding.”

The slim man sets the newspaper down and, with a genial smile, turns the watch twice in his hands. “They sure don’t make them like this anymore.”

She does not particularly care. She is staring across the way, at the disorganized line of passengers beginning to move, then over at a turquoise blue gin bottle, which glints behind the bar at W. W. Gould’s. If she would just look ten degrees further to her left she would see him, lifting the pages up by their edges and hefting them lightly in his fingertips as if, by weight alone, he can estimate their value. Like so many a long-gone prospector he is worried that what remains after his patient sifting may not be enough. But its millesimal fineness cannot be weighed, only determined beneath a careful squint through an eyepiece. He thumbs through the pages. What percentage of its parts is pure?

She looks back at the watch man, holding the timepiece up close to his work lamp and studying it under his extendable magnifying glass for a moment.

“You from around here?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I’m an editor in New York City.”

He gives the requisite impressed look. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”

She certainly does not feel like explaining the whole sordid story to an oddball watch repairman in the middle of a tiny, time-forgotten airport.

“Could we just hurry this along? I have a plane to catch.”

The man smiles and swiftly begins his work. She watches out of the corner of her eye as, to his credit, his delicate fingers wield the tools of his trade with precision. As the watch man works away she wonders that there are still people in this world who learn a skill from their fathers and then apply it, day in and day out. If Mr. Haslett fires her, she decides, she’ll go back to Chicago and make her father teach her how to be an electrician. Wouldn’t there be something satisfying in that? Tearing open walls and tracing lines of copper and plastic from switch to bulb? People need lights. People always need light. She could bring light to the world. Plus she thought it might be nice to be in a union. Gripe about taxes, worry over pensions—that sort of thing.

Then, suddenly—finally—the thumbing of pages stops. The uncapped pen falls from his paralyzed fingers and leaves a jagged squiggle on the title page. He has noticed her, at last. There, fifty yards away from him, is the woman he left in Africa many months ago. With the same luggage. Talking to the man at Ten-Minute Timepiece Repair—of all places to have stopped!—and they are examining his watch.

The sheer coincidental madness of it all sends a primeval panic up his spine and he lurches back, looking for some way to escape. But wait! he tells himself. No more running away. We’ve put that all behind us now. We’ve changed our spots, haven’t we? He doesn’t even know why he’s referring to himself in the plural—the “royal” we—he doesn’t know it is because he’s speaking to the pages now, too.

Just as the woman is about to apologize for having been so short with the watch man, she hears the rough vibrations of his chair being pushed backward against the linoleum. She squints toward the origin of the noise—the small round table beside W. W. Gould’s. Early morning sunlight blinds her, but through its golden shining she can just make out the man whom she has hated, and loved. A man whose real name she doesn’t even know. He looks once into her green eyes and then, with a smile so faint she nearly misses it, he glances down at the table. At the pages. Then, before she can even react, he rushes away. He has a slight limp, but he is quick as a jungle cat. As the man steps onto the escalators, he looks back over his shoulder—just for a moment, directly at her, and again at the pages—and then he is gone.

She twists and takes a quick step, as if she might rush after him, but then she remembers the watch. She remembers the gin. And her flight.

She tells herself that it is obviously just the jet lag, playing tricks. Must be his dopplegänger, she jokes to herself. Why would he leave all his papers behind like that?

“. . . all rows, all rows . . . flight two thirty-seven . . . ”

The slim repairman slips the watch onto her narrow, pale wrist. It fits perfectly and she smiles appreciatively. Then he hands her a small plastic bag containing the links that he’s removed. She fumbles in her purse to find dollars amid all the cedis she’d forgotten to exchange back in Terminal A. What on earth can I do with those now? she thinks. Then, as she turns to leave—as she begins to move toward the abandoned pages—the young man jabs his thin, pink fingertip at a small mark on the golden edge of the watch. “That’s our stamp right there.”

“You stamped it?” she asks, studying the near-microscopic insignia.

He shakes his head. “Was stamped already. You must have had work done on it here once before.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” she says, thinking, I have just ten minutes.

The man shrugs. “Bring it back anytime. If your wrist ever gets any bigger.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” she says. Then, at last, she tugs her broken suitcase behind her over to the bar at W. W. Gould’s. She is so close now.

It takes only a minute to get the bartender’s attention, and another two for him to pour the drink. As she pays, she watches the line of passengers moving slowly through her gate. The watch feels heavy and good on her wrist. It says she has eight minutes left, so she sits down at the closest table and drains the glass in four long, slow gulps. She shuts her eyes and breathes out deeply. She thinks that now she will be able to sleep on the way back to the city, and that her impending execution in the Haslett & Grouse offices will not sting quite so badly. She thinks maybe she can run over to Emerson Books and find some sort of For Dummies Guide to Electrical Wiring. She’d at least like to have something to read—

And then her eyes fall onto an untidy stack of papers at the next table. Now that she has a better view, she knows exactly what it is. She knows a manuscript when she sees one. Manuscripts are her roommates and best friends. They live on the floors of her apartment and the spare chairs of her office. Stacks and stacks of stories and words.

She looks around but there is no one else sitting anywhere nearby.

It sits patiently on the table. It is all it can do. She checks her watch again. Slowly she stands up and, still starting, checks the watch—her watch—again.

This is where that man was sitting, she thinks. The one who just bolted out of here. The one who looked just like—

Reaching over, she picks it up by one corner and looks around her. No one takes any notice of her at all. Tentatively she studies the title page. “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.” There is no author’s name—no address or phone number—no e-mail. But she knows that title. She’s seen it before.

“. . . two thirty-seven to New York is now . . . ”

She reaches into her bag and pulls out another stack of pages. These, she stole them from the luggage of the man who owned the watch. Before she left Africa the first time. She’s carried them around ever since, and has read them so often that she could recite them by heart. She sets the stolen pages down beside the ones she’s just found. They seem to be about the same height. The same consistency. She lifts away the title page and places it gently on the table beside her glass of ice. She begins to read the Author’s Note and as she does the world of Terminal B falls silently away around her: her flight, her gin glass, the watch repairman. The only noise she can hear is the faint ticking of the watch. She lifts each page up to the shortening light; her hand leaves faint red smudges on their margins. Steadily, she runs her finger beneath the opening line and begins reading: I’ve lost every book I’ve ever written. I lost the first one here in Terminal B, where I . . .





Acknowledgments



This book would not exist today if not for the generosity, time, and faith of practically everyone I know. Most especially I’d like to thank my wife, Leah Miller, who has been my secret weapon for twelve years and counting. Immense thanks to Chelsea Lindman, Maggie Riggs, Clare Ferraro, Timothy Lane, Hal Fessenden, Paul Buckley, Alison Forner, Alissa Amell, Elaine Broeder, Lindsay Prevette, Carolyn Coleburn, Nancy Sheppard, and everyone else at Viking/Penguin and the Nicholas Ellison Agency who believed that this novel could be turned into a book.

Many thanks to my parents, Deborah and Dennis Jansma, who sent me to summer writing camps and at least two universities so I could learn how to do this. Thanks as well to Oma, Jonathan, Jennifer, Dennis Miller, Susan Braunhut, Theodore Fetter, and all the rest of my family.

I’m lucky to have had many great readers along the way, including Elizabeth Perrella, Andy Dodds, Neil Bardhan, Robin Ganek, Rachel Panny, Kara Levy, John Proctor, and David Hellman. Thanks to Jordan Dollak for composing all the music in my podcasts out of the goodness of his heart, and to the brilliant photographer Michael Levy, who makes me look good. Thanks also to the many people who checked my facts and translations: Hanna Miller, Emily Ethridge, Natalya Minkovsky, Sadena Thevarajah, Kelly Johnston, Jennifer Breithoff, and Chantal Flammang at the Luxembourg City Tourist Office, and of course the tireless and thorough John Jusino. I’m grateful to Martin Marks and Ariel S. Winter for inspiring me since day one of freshman year and to The Doug for keeping me honest for just as long.

This book is what it is today because of the generous people at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the New York Public Library, and, especially, B Cup Café. Great thanks to my colleagues at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase, including Andrew Bodenrader, Jeff Bens, Catherine Lewis, and Monica Ferrell.

Absolutely none of this would have happened if not for Mrs. Inglis, my seventh grade writing teacher at Oak Hill Academy, who gave me my first C on a paper, because she knew I could do better if I tried.