The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

2




Pinkerton and McGann

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life . . . For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY



Julian McGann was the only other boy in my freshman Fiction & Poetry class, which met at 8:30 in the morning in a forgotten sub-basement of Abernathy Hall. While the balding Professor Morrissey squawked about Hawthorne and Longfellow over the clanking of Berkshire College’s infamous steam radiators, Julian sat at the far end of the conference table and, twice a week, passed the ungodly early hour watching the leaves pile up against the raised windows. The girls spent the class mostly staring at the brown freckles that bridged Julian’s nose. He always sat up perfectly straight. His reddish hair was a perfectly kept mess. I assumed Julian was a slacker, since he rarely spoke or wrote anything down, and I was certain that he would never be a real writer, like me.

The first story of Julian’s that I ever read was in this class. His slim piece, “The Thirty-Third Winter,” had fluttered weightlessly when passed across our long table, unlike my story, “The Gravity in Durham,” which had thudded meaningfully in front of each student, clocking in at a far more impressive twenty pages. “The Gravity in Durham” was about a rich girl who invites a poor boy, at the eleventh hour, to substitute for the Homecoming king in the town parade, after the real king is hit by a truck. I’d based it on taking Betsy Littleford to her debutante ball, but I’d changed around the names and basic details. Even though I knew no one else at Berkshire College and none of them knew me, I still imagined someone might have read the newspaper stories about Billy’s accident, and they’d then despise me for mining his traumatic brain injuries for literary gold. It seemed wrong, especially when I remembered I was at Berkshire College only due to a generous scholarship from the Briar Creek Country Club, arranged by Mrs. Littleford. She’d never said anything explicitly, but still I had the feeling that it was my silence she was really buying.

Moreover, I didn’t want anyone to know where I was from, exactly. Not that I was embarrassed per se . . . I simply had never been anywhere before where nobody knew me, knew my mother, knew of my father’s absence—knew my life story. The only other time had been when I’d masqueraded as Betsy’s blue-blood date, the Princeton-bound Walter Hartright—that same too-short night when my fictions first earned me a ticket into the inner circle. There, at college, I once again felt as though I’d touched down on another planet, and with each successive day I grew more convinced that I’d suddenly be identified as an alien and sent back from whence I came.

“‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’” Professor Morrissey proclaimed, as I returned my attention to the Emily Dickinson poem we were meant to be scanning. “‘Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise. / As Lightning to the Children eased / With explanation kind / The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—.’”

As the rest of the class picked out tetrameters and iambs and other smart-sounding things, I thought about the Portrait of Colette Marsh back home, dazzling in its slant of light. I thought about the little smudge I’d left behind. Tell the truth, I wrote in large letters at the top of my notebook. But tell it slant. It sounded profound . . . I just didn’t quite know what it actually meant. I raised my hand a nervous fraction, but Morrissey was busy outlining rhyme schemes on the board: A-B-C-B . . . D-E-F-E . . . I looked over at Julian, staring up at the leaves outside with a vaguely amused smile. Did he know what it meant? I was sure that he must. My hand went down again.

After Professor Morrissey ended our class that morning, I walked out across the dew-drenched quad with Shelly, a frail girl whose veil of dark hair seemed to pull her head earthward. She’d read my whole story during class, and as I bought her a cup of burned cafeteria coffee, she let loose a surprising deluge of jumbled compliments. I’d never had anyone read—let alone love—the things I’d written, and perhaps it was the coffee, but I found myself warmed by a gentle, acidic sensation. By evening I had returned the favor and read her workshop piece, plus another of her stories. Both were about death and both involved highly disturbing sex scenes. Shelly invited me to stay over, as her roommate was visiting an out-of-town boyfriend. I passed a nervous hour trying not to crush her in her dark-sheeted bed, under the watchful eyes of a larger-than-life-size poster of Edgar Allan Poe.

In the morning I accidentally woke Shelly as I was reaching my free arm into my backpack on the floor, trying to fish out Julian’s story.

“Sorry,” I said, “I just can’t wait to tear this thing apart. What kind of a title is this? He must have written this an hour before class. It’s not even three pages long.”

But as Shelly settled back to sleep on a dark waterfall of her own hair, I began to read Julian’s story and was soon astounded to find it utterly untearable. Though “The Thirty-Third Winter” was only two and a half pages, it felt epic. It was about a man skinning a hare out on the moors of Ireland while drinking from a bottle of Epiphany whiskey. I’d never read anything better. It made me so deeply ashamed of my own story that I wanted a stiff glass of Epiphany myself. Impossibly, Julian appeared to know more about being thirty-three and skinning hares in Ireland than I did about cleaning restaurant tables and growing up in the American South, which I had actually done.

I left Shelly’s room that morning in a solemn autumn funk, which lingered all through the weekend. It persisted even when, in our next class, Professor Morrissey praised my monstrous story for its fine detail. It wasn’t until Julian spoke up that I felt any better.

“It feels classic but at the same time strangely modern. Like Bach played on an electric violin.”

I had no idea what to make of this, but it was the most he’d ever said at once in our class, so I took it as a double-underlined compliment. He said nothing at all about Shelly’s piece, “If We Were Birds,” a gruesome melodrama about a married couple who accidentally kill their newborn baby when a bout of their depraved sex breaks the crib to splinters. I said I liked that there were yellow squids on the nursery wallpaper and that this might be symbolic of something, though what I couldn’t decide. She still didn’t seem very happy.

When we finally got to Julian’s story, Professor Morrissey praised it effusively, as did I, as did all the girls except Shelly. Morrissey talked for ten minutes alone about one description of a rock covered in lichen, and by the end I’d have believed that the secrets of the entire universe were contained in that rock. But Julian didn’t say a thing. He didn’t write down our comments. He didn’t even smile.

My first real conversation with Julian didn’t occur until a month later, in mid-November, when Professor Morrissey invited “a dear friend and old classmate” of his, a writer named Jan Sokol, to come in as a guest lecturer. For homework, we had all read his story “The Minimum Wage.” I’d thought it was pretty awful until I realized that it had been published in the New Yorker. I decided I must be missing something, probably because I didn’t know anything about Czech revolutionaries, which it seemed to be about. Sort of.

Sokol, like Morrissey, was in his nebulous forties. Plump and baby faced, with wiry sprays of dark hair, the writer slumped over the edge of the table as he spoke. From my seat near the front, I breathed in the stench of cheap vodka. I checked the time on my wristwatch, even though I knew that our class met at 8:30 in the morning. Sokol leered at several of the girls along the left side of the table as Morrissey introduced him. They seemed utterly repulsed, but I couldn’t help but notice that Shelly was staring at him with curiously wide eyes.

“The university has invited Jan to do a reading here during alumni weekend. And the dean has asked me to hold a contest. The student who submits the best story will read it in front of a gathering of alumni and students in December.”

“That’s the first thing to know about being a writer,” Sokol interrupted in a squeaky, nasal voice. “Nobody actually wants to read anything themselves. They all just want you to read it to them.” This sounded like a joke, though he sounded utterly miserable as he said it. His eyes flitted to my photocopy of his story, which I had out in front of me. Slowly he reached over and grabbed it in a pudgy hand.

“Pinkerton,” he said absently, “may I borrow this?”

I was about to say that my name wasn’t Pinkerton when Sokol rose up out of his seat and studied my photocopy for a moment at arm’s length. His face took on a look of abject desperation.

“For the love of whatever gods you believe in,” he pleaded, “don’t be writers.”

We all looked to Morrissey while this plea echoed through the classroom. Our professor appeared only mildly alarmed. It wasn’t clear if Sokol had anything else to add, but then suddenly he continued.

“You might as well walk across the desert planting apple seeds. Be doctors. Or, if you’re not smart enough to be a doctor, be a security guard. That’s what I do. We make pretty good money. And don’t worry about getting hurt. The chances are ten billion to one that anyone is going to blow up the building you’re in. I guard the Las Olindas Mormon Tabernacle, five nights a week. The worst that happens is that kids come and try to piss on it, and then I get to zap them with a taser. But most nights it’s quiet. Sometimes I just dance down the hall like it’s the darkest nightclub in Warsaw. I get drunk. Later I zap myself, just to see if I can feel it. Or I’ll call a girl over. That’s the real ticket. Happiness! Happiness is making love for as long as you can stand it to the most luminous thing you can find on this rotten corpse of a planet!”

He punctuated this last point by slamming his fist on the table, spilling coffees and scattering pens all along its length. None of us breathed. Even Julian was absolutely alert. I was so sure that it was all simply preamble to some sort of inspirational speech, about how, really, writing was the only thing worth doing at all. But instead he lifted up the copy of his story that he’d taken from me and tore it in two.

“There are enough books in the world,” he concluded mournfully. Then he sat down again, placed his head on the edge of the table, and began to weep. For a few long moments, we all just listened to this gigantic man, sobbing over the chaotic clanking of the radiators.

“Class dismissed,” Professor Morrissey said finally, when it became clear these were not tactical tears. “Boys, would you help me get him to my office?”

The girls erupted into frantic whispers as they grabbed their notebooks and fled, nervously looking over their shoulders to confirm that the man was still there, crying. Only Shelly lingered for a few moments, watching Sokol’s tears soak into a pile of our papers before she skittered away.

Morrissey got the door, while Julian and I got underneath each of the man’s arms, yokelike and heavy, and eased him out of the room and into the hallway.

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked.

“Random House turned down his novel this morning,” Morrissey explained. “He’s been writing it since we met eighteen years ago. I told him to just come in some other time, but he was insistent.”

Eighteen years was longer than I’d been alive. For the first time I began to wonder if this writing thing wasn’t maybe a bad idea. True, Betsy had told me to write her something. The nights I’d spent writing that story, getting lost in my imaginary Durham, were the closest I’d come to reliving that night. Pretending in her presence. Making myself up. But now that the story was finished, it didn’t seem like hardly enough. I felt sure that I could do better, that I could say more. As I helped to carry the weeping Sokol through the hallowed halls of Berkshire College, I could not help but wonder if this was where it all led.

Julian and I got Sokol at last into Morrissey’s tiny office, where he knocked into piles of dusty books and student papers before finally collapsing into an armchair.

“Thank you, Pinkerton,” Sokol sighed, shutting his eyes like an enormous baby getting ready for a nap.

“Thank you both,” Morrissey said with a soft expression that pleaded for us to keep this among ourselves. Julian and I nodded then left, shutting the door behind us.

We made it about ten yards before Julian turned to me and said, “Flip you for it.”

“Flip you for what?”

“The story. Flip you for the story. One of us has to write it. Nobody else in that class is going to, I can tell you that.”

I thought he was kidding, but his hand was rooting through his pockets looking for a coin.

“Heads,” I called.

Julian found a quarter and flipped it off his thumb. He snatched it expertly out of the air and checked it against the back of his hand. Tails.

“Cheers!” he shouted. “Now promise you won’t write about it.”

“I promise,” I said.

At the time I didn’t even know that I was lying.

Following this incident, Julian and I stopped for a coffee, and I soon discovered, to my delight, that Julian was not the monastic daydreamer he seemed to be in class. He explained that he simply preferred to write late at night, and on good nights he would get so lost in his writing that he’d suddenly find the sun rising and realize his classes were imminent. After a nap, or some high-test espresso, Julian became a boundless mass of chatty energy.

“That Shelly girl weirds me out,” he told me as we walked out of class one afternoon. Another girl had written a story about watching her mother give birth, called “The Miracle of Life.” Admittedly it had been atrocious, but Shelly had run out of the room, shaking.

“You ought to keep her away from open windows,” Julian advised.

“And babies. Apparently.”

Julian sighed. “The crazy ones are always better in bed, though.”

I reddened at this. “You have no idea,” I lied. Truth be told, we had not managed to get much of anything done in bed, I was so concerned about crushing her.

Fortunately, Julian appeared to be having a brainstorm. “You need to meet my friend Ev, from Choate.”

“No offense, but ‘Ev, from Choate’ is a girl, I hope?”

Julian waved his hand dismissively in the air. “Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. Our families have known each other forever. She’s our age and she’s already practically been nominated for a Tony. She was just in that revival of My Fair Lady with Richard Chamberlain. I’m not even shitting you. The character in your ‘Gravity in Durham’ story reminded me of her. The ‘arctic-souled’ Homecoming Queen, as you put it.”

He explained that Evelyn was strictly a stage actress—film and television being nothing other than opiates for philistinic masses. Then he fumbled with his wallet until he pulled out a crinkled newspaper review for a musical called Samson!, and at the top was a picture of her on stage as Delilah, in sheer crimson silk. Even on smudgy newsprint, she was stunning. Slender and high cheeked, with hair tied up in a perfect knot. I could not look away. Her eyes seemed to bore right into me, and somehow she looked bored herself, by what she found there. Her lips parted, a delicate smile for the camera, but I could see it there beneath—an un-smile that matched the look in her eyes.

“Is she in something now? A show, I mean?” I’d never been to New York City before, and I desperately wanted to change that.

“She just finished something,” Julian said distractedly. “She comes up here sometimes to do things at summer stock.”

“Where does she go to school?”

“She doesn’t!” Julian laughed, as if it were the most brilliant idea ever. “Although between you and me, she turned down full rides at Ivy League schools.”

“Her parents must have been furious,” I said.

Julian laughed again. “Don’t be silly. What does she need to go to Harvard for? She’s already smarter than you or I will ever be, for all the good it’ll do her. I can’t even imagine her there, with all those neo-con banker babies and sons of sports franchise managers.” He shuddered. “On Broadway she’s being taken out by ambassadors and actual Swiss people, for God’s sake. Makes me wonder what the hell I did wrong to wind up here. Speaking of . . . what are you writing for the contest?”

A half hour earlier I’d been considering a change of majors. Now suddenly I wanted nothing more than to win the contest and read my story in front of the deans and all the alumni. More than anything, though, I wanted to read it in front of Julian.

I shrugged and asked, “What are you going to write? The Jan Sokol story? You could call it ‘The Guest Lecturer.’”

He grinned and shook his head. “That’s classified, I’m afraid.”

Promising to show me better pictures of the lovely Evelyn, Julian invited me back to his room. He had a double all to himself, after his roommate had withdrawn in the third week, and it was truly the Shangri-La of dormitories. He’d lofted the two beds, wedged the mattresses on the top, and pushed both desks together to create a massive work space, which was covered in library books and unorganized papers. On the wall, in a frame, was a red-and-black chessboard.

“You play chess?” I asked, hardly surprised.

“Yes, but I much prefer checkers,” he said. “We could play, if I had any damn pieces. I keep meaning to buy some, but the pieces always come with a board, and I’ve already got a board. It’s the oldest game in the world. Did you know that? There are hieroglyphics in Egypt with the scores of checkers games, and in one of the tombs they found a whole set! They think it came over from India. Anyways, I keep the board around because I figure someday I’ll find some pieces. You can’t hang a checkerboard on the wall in act one if no one’s going to play it in act two. Chekhov. Or something like that. Can I get you anything?”

He set some coffee on a Bunsen burner and found some bagels in the back of a minifridge. “Six years at boarding schools and you learn how to maximize your space.” He sprinkled the bagels with a strange spice. “Za’atar. I put it on everything.”

Though I’d never heard of it in my life, I nodded and smiled. “Ah . . . za’atar,” I replied. “My grandmother used to put this on her shredded wheat.”

Julian seemed delighted at the idea, and I was thrilled to have gotten one over on him. He continued eagerly, “Maimonides said it cures parasites and flatulence. With that sort of range, I figure it must be good for everything else in between.”

This seemed to be Julian’s philosophy on life: that no one could ever hope to get the breadth of the whole thing, so he would stick to the extremes and assume the middle was thus covered. He knew everything there was to know about Schopenhauer and Napoléon Bonaparte. He read every gossip rag with a headline about the marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. But he didn’t seem to know normal things, like the difference between Newt Gingrich and Roger Ebert. Each night after we’d hung out for one hour, I’d spend three more at the library, reading up on everything he’d mentioned, even in passing. And in each word and place I sensed an unfolding universe of stories, just waiting for me to make them real.

Shelly hated him, naturally. As often as he invited her to join us over in Shangri-La, she refused to accept. If I even brought him up in her presence, she rolled her eyes until I stopped.

“He’s totally in love with you,” she snapped.

“That’s absurd,” I said, trying hard not to flush at the suggestion—and it was absurd. About Julian’s preferences in the bedroom I didn’t dare speculate, but I felt certain that his interests in me were as a kindred spirit who shared his deepest obsession. Back home, there’d been no one. Girls could dabble in poetry and keep diaries. But guys were expected to be memorizing sports statistics, not the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. Even my English teachers seemed to hold books several feet from their bodies, as if some contagion might be multiplying within the pages. Julian held books right up close to his face—a habit formed, he explained, in his nearsighted youth—and now, even with contact lenses in, he liked to have the page within a few inches of his eyes. So close that the pages scraped the tip of his nose as he turned them. So close that, when he inhaled sharply at a particularly good turn of phrase, the paper seemed to lift up slightly and tremble before settling back again.

In class, once Julian knew he had an ally, he talked more often, and together we eviscerated the bland tales of moonlit marriage proposals and drunken deflowerings that our classmates brought in. Morrissey began to call on Julian and me as one person, and often he’d jokingly call us by the names of famous writing duos.

“Hawthorne? Longfellow? What do you think about all this?” or sometimes, “Emerson? Thoreau? Which of you wants to start?” Once we even scored a “Fitz? Hem?” but most of the time we were “Pinkerton and McGann”—which always got a chuckle as the class thought back on the day of the guest lecturer. I still wondered often what had become of the weeping writer.

As the weeks went on, Julian and I worked furiously on our contest entries. Julian would invite me over in the afternoons to work, and for hours we would sit there, me scribbling on a yellow legal pad and him hammering on the typewriter, with the humming aerator of his fish tank behind us.

We had only two rules: one, we would never write anything about each other—that was off-limits—and two, we would not peek at the other’s work until it was finished. The first condition I succeeded in following only because I felt certain that if Julian could be captured in words, I was not yet good enough to do it. But the second condition I violated every chance I got.

When he got up to go have a cigarette outside, Julian would take his pages with him. But one day I found some old drafts, buried in a drawer, under a collection of playbills from shows that Ev had been in. Julian’s story was called “Polonia,” and the little I got to read involved a Polish family who, due to absurd circumstances involving a sick cow, are forced to move to Wales and take up shoe making. That night I lay awake for hours, just imagining how good the rest of it had to be. Where did he come up with these ideas? As hard as I tried to make up something amazing, I found myself returning to the dry inkpots of estranged redneck families and tedious suburban sprawl. As I lay in bed I repeated to myself, “Tell all the truth. Slant slant slant slant slant.”

It seemed clear that I’d never get anywhere with something as cliché as a story about a kid whose mother misses his birthday party. I scrapped “The Flight Attendant’s Son,” knowing that if I was going to beat Julian’s imagination, I was going to have to dig deeper, be edgier, and expose even more of myself. “Truth truth truth,” I muttered to myself as the keyboard clicked and clacked. By sundown I was half done with a passable draft of “Just Another Bastard Out of Carolina.”

Only three days later, when Julian ran downstairs to pick up a new supply of za’atar that had just arrived at the mailroom, I found his old story was missing from the drawer—replaced by something new, titled “A Friend of Bill W.,” about a twelve-year-old boy in an Eastern Orthodox church choir who steals vodka from the deacon’s desk each night and then begins hiding in a confessional so he can attend the AA meetings they hold at the church every Tuesday. A frantic flip to the final pages revealed that the boy is caught guzzling holy wine in the shadow of the icon of Saint Basil and soon thereafter is expelled in disgrace.

“Son of a bitch,” I groaned as I hid it back away. How did he come up with this stuff? How could I possibly top a story about being excommunicated at age twelve?

I lamented this injustice to Shelly that night as we watched television in her room.

“He’s too f*cking interesting. He lived in, like, a dozen countries before he turned ten. His parents own an import/export company that spans the freaking globe. This is the farthest from North Carolina that I’ve ever been. I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve never even been on a plane before.”

“I thought your mother was a flight attendant? Don’t you, like, fly for free?”

“There’s just a discount,” I muttered. Neither of us said anything for a moment. By now she was sick of hearing about Julian and the writing contest, although I knew she was quietly working on her own submission. She left it lying out but I never once thought to steal a look.

“Just make something up,” she sighed. “It’s fiction, for chrissakes.”

But I could not make anything up. In Raleigh I’d hardly been able to keep from drifting off into my imagination—anything to escape the doldrums of school, the tediousness of work, and the quiet of an empty house. But now, suddenly, my imagination seemed to have frozen up, like a used car in the depths of winter. As the deadline for the contest approached, I was so miserable that I began avoiding Julian entirely. It was hard not to notice that he wasn’t banging down my door, either.

The night before the submissions were due, Julian called.

“Did you finish?” he asked. It was the first time we’d spoken in a week.

“Yes,” I said. Both of my stories were as done as they’d ever be. All that remained was to decide which of them was worse than the other.

“Good. Because mine is a disaster and I was hoping you would do me a favor?”

Was he going to ask me to read it? Was this his way of rubbing it in my face? Still, I had been dying to read the finished product, if only to remind myself how it was all really done.

“This will just take an hour, I swear. I’m so close to being done.”

Something in his shaky sound reminded me of Sokol, during his visit to our class. Was Julian hammered? Or just on the brink of exhaustion?

“My friend Ev is here and I absolutely cannot work with her around. Could you, I don’t know, take her around campus or something for an hour?”

My heart stopped beating. And I don’t think it beat again until fifteen minutes later, when I arrived at the door to Julian’s room.

He came to the door wearing only a hotel dressing robe, a week’s growth of beard on his face, and three days’ rings of red under his eyes. The room was a disaster, with old coffee on the Bunsen burner and the checkerboard hanging crookedly. Julian barely acknowledged my arrival, aside from turning back to fold down the page that had been jutting halfway up from his typewriter, as if my superhuman eyes might be able to catch a word or two from the door. What I could read were the golden-inlaid titles of a few enormous library books, stacked beside the machine: The Demise of the British World Order, Convicts of Kimberley, and one bizarrely titled Windradyne of the Wiradjuri. Just as I noticed a large map of Australia folded open on the desk, my line of sight was cut off by a high-cheeked girl, her face framed by a cascade of golden hair, on top of which sat a small pillbox hat made of leopard skin.

“He’s un-believable,” she announced, rolling her eyes back at Julian. Her eyes were bored; they bore right through me.

“You’re, uhm, Evelyn?” I stammered, trying to sound cool as she shut the door behind her.

“Call me Ev,” she said, with the same smile as in the picture. There, but masking something. “Julian told me your name is Pinkerton? I thought you’d be British.”

I got the clear sense that she was disappointed I wasn’t. According to Julian, she spent all her time hobnobbing with ambassadors and Swiss people. How could I hope to impress her?

“He’s just joking. It’s sort of funny, actually,” I said, and quickly began telling her the story of the guest lecturer.

It was snowing outside, but she wanted to smoke, so we ventured off into the cold night together. Originally I thought we might stop at the library for some coffee, but instead we just walked in circles for an hour, and then two—trading more stories. Occasionally I’d stop to point out one of the older, impressive brick-and-marble buildings, but I got the sense she’d seen plenty of far older and more impressive ones before. Her tone of voice seemed to say: Oh, is this what you call a fountain? Is this what you’d call a college? Is Julian what you’d call a writer? Of the gently falling snow she said, with heavy sarcasm, “When I was eight years old it snowed once in Atlanta over Christmas, and my grandmother called it a miracle.” She looked at everything like it was a sad, small version of something better she’d seen somewhere else. It was how she looked at me.

The only thing she seemed to admire was my gold wristwatch. At first I thought she was worried about the time, but soon I saw that it was, in fact, because it was clearly nicer than anything else I was wearing. And yet she remained politely attentive as I spun out story after story—the neurons in my brain firing double time, trying to think of something that might astound her. I told her all about my drab little town, and my drab little mother, and my drab little after-school job. After a while I couldn’t stand to hear her pretend to be interested anymore, so finally I asked her how she and Julian had become friends.

She composed herself before speaking, as if she were auditioning for a part.

“Julian cried for three days straight after his parents dropped him off. Hand to God—three days. This is when we were thirteen. It was the middle of the semester, and rumor had it that he’d been thrown out of two schools already, all for crying and refusing to eat, and eventually his parents would come and take him away and try another school.”

“Seriously? Julian?” I said, as we came to rest finally at the edge of a fountain that had been shut off for the winter.

Evelyn sat down softly on the dry edge and straightened her hat. I was close enough that I could see it was made of real leopard skin. “He’d stay in bed until someone kicked him out, sit there at breakfast just crying, not eating, and then go to class and sniffle the whole way through. The other boys were all picking on him and making it worse. The teachers didn’t even try to stop them, really. They all figured that if the boys made life hard enough for Julian, he’d stop crying. But he was stubborn. That’s why I decided I liked him.”

She took out another cigarette without offering one to me. I watched closely as she pursed her lips to it, leaving a rippled ring of crimson behind on the paper.

“Well, the only decent thing to do was to adopt him myself. We girls weren’t allowed to sit with the boys at lunch and dinner, but I snuck over to him afterward and I said, ‘You think if you keep on crying, your parents will come back?’ and he told me to . . . well . . . I shouldn’t repeat it.”

“Of course,” I said.

“So I told him I’d be his new mother, if he’d only just shut up and stop crying. And he did. And we’ve been close ever since.” Evelyn paused, as if to take her customary bow, and then added, “A few nights like tonight as no exception.”

We sat a little longer while she finished her cigarette, and I wondered what else exactly guys like me were supposed to say to glamorous actresses who had gone to prep schools and wore leopard-skin hats.

“I shouldn’t smoke,” she sighed. “I have a table reading tomorrow.”

“For a play?”

She nodded. “A production of Hedda Gabler. It’s got a great director, but he wants to do this modern interpretation with all young people. My agent tells me I should be glad about that, because otherwise I couldn’t be in it, but still. Ugh. And it’s Ibsen. Just once I wish he’d have written a play where the woman isn’t miserable or dead at the end.”

I nodded and said, “That’s the trouble with Ibsen,” as if I’d known it all along. She stared at me for a moment and I felt my mind erase itself.

“But I do love Hedda,” she sighed. “Do you know Hedda?” she asked, as if Hedda were a friend of hers and Julian’s.

“We’ve never been formally introduced or anything,” I replied with a grin.

She smiled slyly and smoked some more.

“She marries this writer, because she thinks he’ll be successful, but then this other writer, whom she really loved all along, seduces this other woman, and she inspires him to write this masterful book and, well, Hedda gets jealous and destroys him, his book, and herself, eventually.”

“She sounds charming,” I joked, but Evelyn was not laughing. She pushed away from me, and I felt the whole world grow colder. Flakes of snow fell from the golden streams of her hair and sank, lost, into the shadows of the dry fountain.

“She’s a genius! Married to an idiot. In love with another idiot who isn’t half good enough for her. All her life she’s done everything expected of her, and yet she’s got nothing. No power, no future, no hope.” She adjusted her pillbox hat a little with one hand. “People just think she’s this vicious gold digger. I mean, she’s vicious all right. That’s why she’s so much fun to play. But it wasn’t money she married for.”

“It wasn’t?”

She snorted and somehow even this seemed poised. “She was the daughter of a great general, and as a girl, when they rode up the street together, everyone in the town would come out to see them pass by. That’s all she actually wanted, I think. Just to be seen for all that she really was.”

She looked defiantly at me and took a long, triumphant pull on her cigarette.

“That’s the last thing I’d want,” I muttered. It was the truth, and the only thing I could think of to say.

She coughed a little, and there was a glimmer of surprise in her eyes, though the boredom had not left them.

“At least I’ll never be married for my money,” I joked.

She did not laugh. “What’s wrong with money?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. I just don’t have any.”

She was still not laughing. “My mother married for money. So did her mother. So did Julian’s mother, for that matter. You think any woman who considers money is a gold digger? Because let me tell you. It’s always at least a consideration.”

I thought about my own mother, and the many men she’d hoped, in my lifetime, would carry us up and out of Raleigh. Two or three pilots. The man who’d owned a racetrack, Dan. Or had Dan been the guy with the beautiful boat we never saw? Had she loved either of them? Any of them? I had to admit to myself, I’d always hoped she hadn’t. I liked to believe she loved only my father, the man she’d met in Newark, and that she looked down for him whenever she flew over the Garden State.

“Maybe money could be a part of it,” I conceded. “So long as there’s love, too.”

“‘Love,’” she said, softly, in someone else’s voice. “‘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.’ And then you say . . . ”

“What’s happening?” I laughed.

“We’re running lines,” she said, finally smiling. “You’re Eilert Løvberg.”

“Which one is he?” I asked. “The first idiot or the other idiot?”

She tipped her head back and let loose a hard laugh, though I still could not decide if it was really genuine. Then she bent her head down against my shoulder suddenly and snuffed her cigarette out on the cement lip of the fountain. Her hat rubbed against my cheek and I was so startled that I almost missed what she said next.

“You know, Julian asked me to spy on you. Find out what you were writing for this contest tomorrow.”

Julian was nervous about what I had written?

“He said he read your story, while you were in the bathroom or something. The one about the flight attendant’s kid? And that it was so good he started his over. And then he saw you’d started yours over, and so he started his over again. I swear, I love him, but he’s completely insane sometimes.”

“Well, you can tell him I’ve got nothing,” I said moodily. “Tell him to get a good night’s sleep because both of my stories suck and I can’t write another word.”

Evelyn clicked her tongue twice and suddenly lifted her head up. “Don’t make me adopt you, too, now. In my line of work we call that melodrama,” she whispered. “All you need is a little inspiration.”

And then she kissed me, and I could feel the wet pulp of tobacco and the crimson of her lips coming off on mine.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She smiled and kissed me again.

And I thought about what Sokol had said: that happiness was making love for as long as you could stand it to the most luminous thing you could find on this rotten corpse of a planet. And, afterward, I thought he might be right. And so she did not go back to Julian’s room that night to report back on my writer’s block. And so, all morning as she slept in my bed, I furiously tapped away at the keys of my computer. Just two pages at first. Truth. And then five. Forget this slant business. And then twelve. Tell all the truth. And then a title. “The Trouble with Ibsen.” And then it was done.

Later that morning, Julian and I turned in our stories at the end of Morrissey’s class without a single word to each other. He looked as though he’d gone ten rounds with a gorilla and decided to wear part of its pelt on his chin as a trophy. There were rings around the rings around his eyes. He grunted at me, as if to acknowledge that it was over, and staggered off to sleep for as long as humanly possible. He never even asked me where Evelyn had gone, which was probably for the best, because Shelly was, at that very moment, turning in her own story, which she’d titled “Just Like Starting Over.”

“I printed one for you, too,” she said, offering me the copy and giving my hand a squeeze—surprising both in its affection and strength. “I knew you could do it. I can’t wait to read yours.”

My palms began to sweat, and for the first time the hours of sleeplessness felt caked onto my face. I hadn’t showered. My fingers flew to my lips, sure that some lipstick must still be smudged there. The scent of Evelyn was deep underneath my nails.

“I’ll just have to go back to my room and print out another,” I lied, hiding the spare copy of “The Trouble with Ibsen” that I’d printed to give to Julian.

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that,” she said, making a move to follow me there.

I’d never cheated on anyone before. I felt like slime, but weirdly grown-up slime. Shelly stood there, chewing on the ends of her black hair, dark eyes expectant. Whatever damages had been done to her already—and there must have been some—I knew I did not want to add to them. Nervously, I stared down at my watch.

“Let’s meet for coffee in an hour? I really need to shower,” I said as means of an apology. And I kissed the straight-cut bangs that hung in her big eyes and rushed off.

As guilty as I felt, I couldn’t help hoping that Evelyn would still be in my room. But she was already gone, vanished, off reading Ibsen around a table somewhere. Was she thinking about me? Why had I told her I didn’t have any money? But was there something else? The bed was empty except for her lingering smell, powdery and rich like the confections we’d kept behind the counter at Ludwig’s. It was all I could bear not to dive down into it and drift off to sleep. If I never resurfaced, I don’t know that I’d have minded. But I showered, printed out a copy of “Just Another Bastard Out of Carolina” instead of my actual submission, and skimmed Shelly’s story. It was about a single mother, trolling around a bookstore and planning to leave her screaming baby in the True Crime section before driving her car over an embankment. But right at the end, she hears a young poet giving a reading in the café. And his poem sends her wailing baby into a deep, undisturbable sleep, and the mother feels hopeful for the first time in months.

Silently I reminded myself that Evelyn was not my girlfriend. And that after her audition she’d go back to New York. And Shelly would never have to know.

• • •

A few frigid weeks passed and I wondered, each day, when we’d hear about the contest. Julian and I did not speak—I did not know if he was upset about Evelyn, or anxious about the contest, or simply out of his mind. In class he sat, entranced by the snow falling on the windows, and said nothing at all to me or anyone else.

“Pinkerton? McGann?” Professor Morrissey called to us hopefully, when no one at all reacted to his story about how Hemingway’s wife lost the only copy of his first novel on a Parisian train. We each faked a smile.

Then suddenly, overnight, Abernathy Hall was covered in flyers with Julian’s picture on them. Shelly and I stumbled across one on our way to class.



Come see writing contest winner Julian McGann read from his story “Just Before the Gold Rush.” Jan Sokol will also read from his forthcoming novel, Luminous Things. Tonight! Osgood Auditorium!



Neither of us was surprised to find that Julian had won, though we were a little annoyed that nobody had even bothered to let us losers know that we had lost. Down at the bottom of the flyer were the opening lines of the story, meant to entice us into attending the reading.

In 1851, on the continent of convicts known then as Australasia, before the gold mines of Kimberley were famous and the population of that island tripled with men searching for New South Wales’s very own El Dorado, young Shamus McGarry, a poor Irishman indentured to the Clarke Mining Corporation, had already spent six dark years sifting infinitesimal specks of gold from the earth. But then came the day that he and his partner stumbled upon a pure nugget the size of a man’s heart. Shamus and this other man instantly turned their pickaxes on one another. By luck or by fate, Shamus’s ax crushed the nameless man’s skull first—or else Shamus would have been the one without a name. He emptied the man’s skull, hid the golden lump inside, and then tore down the surrounding rock. He convinced the foreman that the wall had collapsed. It was easy enough to dig the man up from the grave pit that night. It was easier still to hide the heart-sized nugget inside his mouth and flee West, toward freedom, and fortune.

• • •

Australasia? New South Wales? Gold nuggets hidden in the drained skull of a murdered miner? It seemed patently unfair—just blatant showing off. I was keenly aware of being both outraged and jealous at the same time. Why hadn’t I been able to come up with anything like this? Was this slant? This fantastic impossible dream? Made real with just the right words, with just the right sentences. Was I even capable of it? Or was Julian, as I’d feared, simply imbued with powers I would never possess?

That night at the reading, I arrived with Shelly, who joined me in laughing at the parade of casual pretension that was settling into the auditorium around us: a white-bearded professor in an off-kilter black beret, a girl with two peacock feathers woven into her hair, a boy in a twenties-era gangster hat toying with a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

“I don’t look like a writer at all,” I lamented, looking at my lightly stained button-down shirt.

“You look more like a waiter,” Shelly teased. I had not even told her that I had worn this same shirt for three long summers, as I served pastries and espressos at Ludwig’s Café to people dressed just like the alumni who were steadily streaming into the reading. Shelly was wearing a simple, slim black dress that almost made me forget about my fear of breaking her.

“Get a load of this one,” Shelly said, rolling her eyes at the doorway.

I turned and to my great surprise saw Evelyn enter the room. Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. In the same leopard-skin hat, with the same high cheeks and bored eyes. The noisy chatter of the room seemed to fall away to whispers. My heart pounded thousand-degree blood out through every capillary I possessed. I had begun to forget her, the smell of sunlight in her hair and the taste of sweet tobacco on her lips, but the moment she walked in I could smell and taste nothing else. I shrank down in my seat suddenly, trying not to let Shelly see how red I’d gotten. Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed most assuredly a cut above the rest.

“Are those Julian’s parents?” Shelly asked. The resemblance was undeniable. “And who is that? His sister or something?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’ve never met her.”

She frowned a little, so I clarified, “I mean, I don’t think Julian has a sister.”

Evelyn was schmoozing with some alumni on the other side of the room. I wrapped my elbows around the chair arms and lodged my hands deep into my pockets, fearing my legs might propel myself over to her without warning.

“What’s wrong with you?” Shelly asked.

“Just trying to get comfortable,” I replied with a shrug, keeping my arms where they were.

But just then, Professor Morrissey crossed directly over to us. His owlish face was as darkly lined as it had been on the day of Sokol’s little speech in our class, and he looked me in the eye.

“Do you have a moment? Julian’s asking if he can speak with you privately. We’re having a bit of a dilemma.”

Happy to get away from Shelly and from Evelyn’s line of sight, I followed Morrissey down the hallway to our old classroom. Sokol was standing inside the door of the payphone booth, yelling excitedly in Czech into the receiver.

“Random House bought his novel,” Morrissey explained tersely, as we skirted the exuberant man.

“I thought you’d said they turned it down?”

He expelled a long, wavering sigh. “They had. Until Haslett & Grouse said they wanted it. Then S&S got in. Finally Random wound up paying almost twice as much for it as they would have before.”

Morrissey seemed crankier than I’d ever seen him, so I let it go. From the looks of Sokol staggering down the hall, the man’s success hadn’t stemmed his drunkenness, but he did look much less miserable.

In our old classroom, Julian was sitting at his usual place at the table, staring up at the raised windows again, now half covered with snow.

“I can’t do it,” he said with no trace of hysteria. He said it plain, like a fact. Like the truth.

“What? Read? What’s the big deal? I think your parents are here . . . ”

Julian groaned. “The dean’s probably trying to weasel some sort of donation out of them. Christ!”

“Evelyn’s here, too.”

“Fantastic. You can sleep with her again, then,” Julian snapped. Professor Morrissey made an awkward noise of surprise, then rapidly apologized and stepped outside.

“I didn’t realize you’d mind,” I said. Though we’d never discussed it explicitly, my understanding had been that Julian was not exactly interested in the opposite sex, much to the disappointment of the girls in our class.

He waved his hand dismissively, as if this were all well beside the point.

“I can’t do it. I can’t read the story,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. Julian’s breath reeked of whiskey, and I wondered if it was Epiphany whiskey, or if there even was such a thing.

“Because,” Julian mumbled, “it’s all true. My great-great-grandfather really did steal a lump of gold from this mine in Australia. When I was little, my grandfather told me the story. He showed me the half of the nugget that never got sold. I’ve seen it.”

So Julian hadn’t simply pulled this story out of pure imagination. It wasn’t slanted—not even one half of a degree. Somehow this comforted me.

He went on: “It’s like our biggest, darkest family secret. Everything we have today is on account of a low-life thief and murderer.”

This muttered confession caused me an unreasonable amount of joy, for which I immediately felt the blackest kind of guilt. Maybe he wasn’t really better than me; maybe he just had a more sordid history to draw from.

“So why the hell did you write about it?”

He gave me a look, as if to say, You know.

He’d written it for the same reason that I’d written mine. Out of sheer desperation. Out of competition. Each in an effort to top the other, we’d driven ourselves to this. Julian had created an atomic bomb of a story, which, if detonated, would mushroom cloud his parents’ lives and probably his own inheritance. It was the same thing I had done, I’d realized. Made a little bomb all my own.

“Read something else then. Read one of the other ones. They were all good.”

Julian shook his head, starting to pull himself together. “I burned those all weeks ago. You’re going to have to do it. Morrissey said he’ll let you read yours.”

My heart began pounding.

“I can’t,” I said quickly, looking at my toes.

“Why not?” Julian snapped.

Of course I wanted to read it—I wanted to badly. But not with Shelly there. Not with Evelyn there. I’d been in such a rush to finish my story that night that I hadn’t bothered to change anything. There was no thin veil of fiction to save me. Even if I changed the names on the fly, there was the description of my dorm room. And of a girl in a leopard-skin hat. And the title, “The Trouble with Ibsen.” I couldn’t change that. If I read the story, Evelyn would know all the secret things I’d thought about that night. How I was sure that I loved her even though I barely knew her. Plus, I’d shatter Shelly’s glued-together heart in front of her classmates, some alumni, and every professor in our department. It would be the worst thing I’d ever done.

“Why don’t you want to read it? Christ, you didn’t write about me, did you?”

“No!” I assured him. “I wrote about Evelyn.”

Julian’s drawn face suddenly cracked into a smile. “Well,” he said. “Very nice.”

Morrissey peeked in. “Boys? I need someone. Now.”

Julian looked at me—waiting, to see if I was willing to do what he could not. Without his parents, Julian would have practically nothing. I had practically nothing already, yet I’d never done anything truly cruel before. Sleeping with Evelyn had been wrong, of course, but it had seemed like a victimless crime. It wouldn’t be so victimless if I stood up there now and detailed that crime to the well-dressed and waiting crowd. And to Shelly. I studied Julian’s face—annoyed but resigned. He could afford to wait for the next contest, or the next—but I knew that I might never again get this chance.

So I nodded. Julian’s smile widened, and I took a few deep breaths while Morrissey retrieved a copy of my story from his office and got Sokol off the phone.

From the side doorway I looked out into the crowd as Morrissey urged the attendees to take their seats. Shelly sat there quietly chewing on her hair, wondering when I’d be back. She had no idea what was about to happen. As if that wasn’t enough to make me sick, Evelyn was now sitting just three rows ahead of her, looking quite bored. As Sokol came to the podium, to wild applause, I studied the man’s face carefully. The hugeness of his self-satisfaction was all but blinding. The sacrifice of eighteen years of his life had just been validated. The crowd adored him and all he’d done.

“I’m sorry to say that our contest winner, Julian McGann, has unfortunately become ill and will not be able to read his story, ‘Just Before the Gold Rush,’ tonight. Instead, we have another story called . . . uhm . . . ‘The Trouble with Ibsen.’”

I looked out at the darkened audience and caught Evelyn’s gaze. She looked back at me, and her eyes, for the first time since we’d met, suddenly widened. She was not bored now. Then, with one smooth movement, she slipped the hat off her head and tucked it into her purse. Then she looked up, almost eagerly. We weren’t running lines anymore. Something vicious and fun was about to take place. Something unexpected was about to happen, for a change.

“Yes, sorry, that’s ‘The Trouble with Ibsen,’ written by the runner-up in our contest! Ladies and gentlemen, if I may introduce . . . ”

And as he extended his arm and looked warmly toward the door, I saw him falter. The smug, serene confidence on his face crumbled, and, for a moment, I could see the same man who had wept in front of our entire classroom. A deadening silence followed. He glanced at me and then back out at the audience, sure they could see what a fool he really was.

He did not know my name.

Clearing his throat, he spoke slowly. “The one. The only. Pinkerton!”

Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the door. There was more applause as I walked straight to the podium. My heart was pounding in terror. Tell all the Truth? I looked out at the waiting crowd, at Evelyn, and Shelly, at everyone. Julian watched me from the shadow in the wings. A spotlight shone down on me from somewhere way up in the blackness above. In my hand I held my little rolled-up paper bomb, the words still hidden safely inside.

I took another slow breath, carefully unfurled the paper, and pressed it firmly against the lectern. I prepared to lay waste to everything in my path.