The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

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The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good, who are accustomed to doing evil.

—JER. 13:23



This morning his name is Simon. He’s sitting on our couch beside the picture windows, through which comes a golden view of Soho and Tribeca. Simon’s lower half is wrapped in one of my towels, and he is sucking the milk out of a bowl of my Frosted Wheats and watching men’s swimming on my television. They all have the same look each time, the Simons, give or take—the ribbed chests, the high cheekbones, the tidy haircuts. This one has kind of a busted nose—not one of Julian’s finest. Better than last Thursday’s Philip. Or had he also been a Simon? It’s always something like Simon—Trevor, maybe; or Spencer; or Colin. One time we had a Geoff—with a G.

“Name’s Simon,” says Simon. “Have you seen this guy? Phenomenal.”

He gestures to ESPN with my spoon, sending a fine spray of milk off across our suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman. Technically, it is Julian’s suede-upholstered cocktail ottoman, but without me around to sponge up the residue left behind by the many Simons, the ottoman would have gone out with last year’s trash. In which case, he’d have replaced it with a George Bullock octagonal table with inlaid lotus leaves, or something equally absurd.

“What guy?” I ask. Julian likes me to be polite to his overnight guests, although he certainly never is.

“Mitchell King!” Simon shouts through a mouthful of frosted wheat. “PHENOMENAL!”

As he shouts, little flecks of cereal land on Julian’s checkerboard, which he still keeps framed on the wall. I brush them off quickly.

New York Magazine has Mitchell King on its cover this month, all seven feet of him, crossing an Olympic-sized pool in a single stroke. Simon watches as the all-American phenomenon does an underwater turnaround in digitized slow motion. His body curls up like a beige fish and shoots away again.

Suddenly there’s the sound of water from the bathroom; Julian is awake. Simon grins and sets the bowl down on the table, leaving a ring of milk. When he stands up to greet his onetime lover, I can only grin as I lift the bowl and wipe the milk with the edge of my sleeve.

“BONJOUR à toi! Et aussi un matin doré!” Julian strides into the room, arms extended to the sunny Sunday skyline. He wears a stolen hotel bathrobe and his curly hair is matted from sleep; soon he will carefully tousle it with a Venetian cream and claim it looks somehow different. “Ouvrez le fenêtre dont je peux voir mon saint!”

When he spots Simon, however, Julian’s nicotine-scarred lungs deflate.

“Jazz Brunch,” I remind him cheerily, as I make myself scarce. Julian will now eject Simon from the apartment with the cold proficiency of an East Berlin customs agent. Visa expired, this Simon won’t be back in our country again.

Jazz Brunch has been a weekly ritual since Julian and I moved to this Great City in the East, three years ago. Fresh out of college, we were two writers ready for the world to anoint us as its newest young geniuses. Our heads were filled with Fitzgeraldian dreams of rooms in the Biltmore Hotel and of writing our Great American Novels at the cafés along Sixth Avenue, then on to have steaks at Delmonico’s with girls named Honora and Marjorie. In my defense, I’d only ever read about New York. Julian had actually been here before. Still, he acted as if the modern city, with her graffitied subways and omnipresent bodegas, was just some sort of temporary wrinkle in the fabric of civilization. Julian’s parents were currently off in Switzerland somewhere, running McGann International Trading, but part of their diversified portfolio included various rental properties around the island, one of which Julian and I had taken up residence in just off Washington Square Park.

Even this morning, as we stroll toward the arch in two-tone shoes and biscuit tweed, Julian seems startled to find the square crawling with bearded NYU students, propelling themselves about on skateboards, and not a horse-drawn carriage or a top hat in sight, as Henry James had promised.

As she does every Sunday, Evelyn meets us on the corner. This morning she clutches a script in her left hand, which bears the familiar, cragged face of Samuel Beckett. Her right hand holds a lit cigarette and a clump of wildflowers, roots attached.

Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. Even four Anglo-Saxon names cannot contain her. She should be a “the Third” or a “Countess di” something-or-other. My heart has been lost in the frozen tundras of hers ever since Julian first introduced us in our college days, seven years ago. Now the accidental thought of her sends sparks through me like I am one of Henry Adams’s dynamos.

Everything I write is for her; none of it is ever good enough.

“If it isn’t Jeeves and Wooster. You two are later every week.” She grabs my wrist and checks the time on my gold watch. Then, pretending to scowl, she plants a kiss on each of our cheeks. Her blond hair smells of buttercream and her white skin of lemonade. Her lips brush against my cheek and they feel like the chitinous wings of a dragonfly.

“We were unavoidably detained,” Julian says.

“By a Simon,” I add, with a roll of my eyes. Julian is too busy stealing her cigarette to hear me. He inhales desperately, though he has only just finished one on our way over. Somewhere back inside the park comes the loud clatter of a skateboarder who has just screwed up a trick. Julian mumbles some vague threats about moving to Prague. In truth, he’s been threatening to leave the city for all sorts of reasons, ever since we arrived. But we know he won’t. Not without us.

He jabs the lit end toward the flowers. “Where are those from?”

“I mugged this little orphan boy for them,” she says, inserting two bluebells in my lapel and a prairie aster in Julian’s. She tucks a midsize daisy into her hair and drops the remainder on the sidewalk without a second’s thought.

“Shall we?” she asks, tucking the Beckett away into some heretofore-unseen purse. She extends an unblemished forearm and I hook my elbow around it.

“‘I can’t go on,’” I say, with the dramatic air of quoting things. “‘I’ll go on.’”

Jazz Brunch at the Washington, once held weekly in a lush ballroom to hundreds of Manhattan’s elite, has in recent decades been moved into a small cove on the basement level and done up like a high-class speakeasy. Maybe in Fitzgerald’s time, jazz music was a call to revolution—chaotic, arousing, and ever changeable. It disturbed the natural order; it tore up the old millennium, with its absurd wars and its drudgerous Puritanism; it declared reckless independence once and for all. But in our era of anthemic dance beats, power chords, and casually rhymed profanities, jazz music has become quaint and old-fashioned, appreciated only by those who were born too late—namely, the three of us.

A heavyset black woman croons Etta into a microphone; a guitar player with a beer gut sweats and strums; a little Latino gentleman squeaks along on the trumpet. The tiny crowd, aside from us, all appear to be over fifty; their accents are thick with Long Island and New Jersey. Once upon a time I’d have been counted as one of their numbers, but now they look admiringly at me in the close company of Julian and Evelyn.

“Four, please,” Evelyn instructs the hostess, who is also the only waitress for the room—a brunette ball of curls with a small, golden stud in her left nostril.

“Can’t you count?” Julian says. “We’re three. Every week, we’re three.”

“I’ve asked someone to come and meet us.”

As the waitress leads us to our table, Julian, ever change-averse, begins to complain. “Haven’t we spoken about inviting strangers to brunch? Haven’t we agreed that foreigners must be approved by a majority, not more than two days prior to brunch, so as to allow for proper background checks?”

By “background checks,” he means asking me to perform a Yahoo! search; Julian still types everything on his Remington, not even an electric.

Evelyn presses a slim, sturdy finger into my breastbone. “Well, every time I invite someone, you make him vote against it.”

She slides onto the deep purple, crushed-velvet banquette. High above her is a small opening on the sidewalk level, where light comes down over us, in between the steady passing of disembodied shoes.

I defend myself. “You don’t have to live with him when he doesn’t get his way. And I said that your friend Charity could come. And Rosalyn. And Gwyneth.” I sit across from her, and Julian next to me, as usual.

“Yes and, funny how, afterward you wind up taking them to the zoo or something and then I never hear from them again,” she says with an indecipherable smile.

“I feed them to the leopards,” I say, flashing an arched eyebrow.

She sighs and studies the menu, though we all know it by heart. There is very little about Jazz Brunch that we don’t know by heart. By heart, she knows that I will try to make her jealous by going off with her friends. By heart, I know that she brings only the ones she’s bored of, half hoping that I’ll fall for one of them, do myself some good, and put her behind me. By heart, she knows that she’ll call me within an hour of departing brunch and sulk for days if I don’t pick up. Charity, Rosalyn, and Gwyneth each hardly made it to the monkey house before figuring out that my heart was still nestled far away, by her heart. Gwyneth had left me by the exotic birds. Rosalyn hadn’t minded. She’d told me she thought we were “like so completely tragic for each other.” Or had that been Charity, actually? It’s always something like Charity.

“Coffee. Immediately,” Julian instructs our waitress urgently. Frightened, she does a sort of unconscious curtsy and is back with coffee in moments. Julian has his idiosyncrasies, to be sure, but he knows how to get good service.

The singer wraps up “Tell Mama” and we all pause to give brief applause. I feel Evelyn’s foot touching mine beneath the table, and I try to catch her eye, but it is always off somewhere else, by the door.

“Thank you, thank you. My name is Jo, just Jo, and I’m here with the talented—”

But as she moves to introduce her two band members, one of the older women in the room lets loose a guttural noise and a commotion brews. We turn to see what is going on and spot the swimmer Mitchell King, all phenomenal seven feet of him, descending the steps into the room. He passes several blushing senior citizens, then greets Evelyn with an eager kiss. He sits down across from an utterly bewildered Julian, rendered silent for perhaps the first time since we’d moved to New York.

“Mitchell King,” says Mitchell King. “Mighty pleased to meet you both.”

His buttery Southern voice sounds just as it does on ESPN. He extends a hand, larger than a dinner plate, and I have no choice but to shake it. I think I can feel my metacarpals shattering. Julian jumps to summon our waitress again, mostly to avoid shaking hands with this Goliath. “And a pitcher of mimosas, as soon as humanly possible.”

The room begins to settle, like the surface of a lake after a boulder has unexpectedly fallen into it. The jazz singer, Just Jo, takes her boys into “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” and we are left to face the gigantic swimmer.

Fortunately, Julian is highly trained in the art of dismissive small talk. “So nice of you to join us, Mitchell. We were watching you on television just a half hour ago! How did you get here from the pool so quickly?”

“Actually, that was taped last night,” Mitchell explains rather earnestly. “At the World Aquatics Championships in Japan! I just flew back into town this morning. With all those time zones, I get confused myself sometimes! We crossed the International Date Line. Yesterday, for me, it was already today. How insane is that?”

Julian stares, open mouthed, just a moment longer than he should.

“How did you and Evelyn meet?” I ask, figuring that I may as well take my turn.

“I went to see her play. My agent likes to take me out when I’m in town.”

“An agent,” Julian mumbles venomously, but only I can hear him.

“Mitchell went out during intermission and bought me a bouquet of daisies, and then met me by the stage door with them,” Evelyn says, running her hands up and down his hairless forearm, so slowly that each of my own arm hairs feels a pang of jealousy. Evelyn was playing Irina in the hit Off Broadway revival of Three Sisters. I had attended fifteen of the performances, each time leaving a crimson florilegium of roses in her dressing room afterward.

Evelyn always says that when she thinks about me sitting there in the front row she becomes afraid of losing her character. She says it would simply be the end of her. So I never tell her which shows I am coming to, and I sit back beneath the dark underhang of the mezzanine with a set of Julian’s opera glasses and my heirloom roses, and I watch, and I wait.

She’d been impressed by daisies? Seriously?

I fidget with the bluebells she lodged in my lapel. The daisy in her own hair still hangs there, perfectly. Even the laws of gravity must obey Evelyn.

Evelyn has, no doubt, given Mitchell the impression that Julian and I must be impressed, if their relations are to go any further—which is probably why he goes on ad nauseam about his book. It is to be about how athletics showcase the triumph of the human spirit, and the meaning of human perseverance, and sportsmanship and teamwork, and just as Julian and I are getting ready to hang ourselves by our skinny neckties, the waitress finally scurries back with a bucket of Champagne on ice and a pitcher of blood orange juice.

Julian is set to launch into his complex brunch order—which always involves wheat toast without crusts and the salmon eggs Benedict but without the Benedict—only Mitchell holds out a gargantuan hand before Julian can begin.

“Ladies first,” he says, gesturing to Evelyn.

Julian looks as if he might chew Mitchell’s chiseled face off. This is not the usual order of things. There is a pause. He downs his mimosa in a single gulp and sulks.

Evelyn orders “the Caesar salad with smoked trout. Fish cold, please,” and then Julian jumps right back in with his elaborate demands. Feeling shaky, I opt for the steak and eggs, “but bloody,” thinking I might up my iron intake. Mitchell orders a granola and yogurt to start, and then pecan pancakes, with a ham omelet, making sure this comes with greens and home fries, and then sides of chicken-apple sausage and cheddar biscuits.

“Got this Parkinson’s charity meet tomorrow. Carbs and protein. Carbs and protein. ‘The Mitchell King Diet.’ That’s going to be my next book.” He winks, like he’s letting us in on some sort of insider-trading deal.

Sensing that Julian is gearing up for some epic rant, Evelyn quickly turns to me. “So, Mitchell is from the Raleigh area.”

“Go Green Jackets,” I say weakly. As much as it pains me to engage Evelyn’s new boyfriend in conversation, it is nothing compared with the pain I’d feel chatting about my blue-collar childhood in front of Julian, who smirks continually.

“No!” Mitchell cries. “Go Crusaders! Don’t tell me you were a Cracker?”

Just Jo is belting out a nice rendition of “Little Boy Blue,” which allows me to mumble surreptitiously to Julian while Mitchell regales Evelyn with Southern high school football lore.

“He’s about as cultured as a mole creature. He’ll probably be on about NASCAR next. Evelyn’s smarter than this. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Julian sighs knowingly. “Avez vous vu la grandeur de ses mains . . . have you seen the size of his hands?” He and Evelyn have always had disturbingly similar taste in men.

We clap politely and drink. Mitchell’s granola and yogurt arrive, the mixing of which occupies him long enough for Evelyn to pay attention to us again.

“You two are the worst kinds of snobs,” she whispers, under cover of the trumpet singing a double-high C. “Don’t think that I can’t read your awful little lips. Even in French.”

At the same time I can tell that she is not surprised. Not even really upset. She knew that it would remind us that she has a full life outside our little vicious circle. At the same time she also knew that if she brought this Aquaman to Jazz Brunch, we’d put him through the ringer.

“Evelyn tells me you guys are writers,” says Mitchell cheerfully. “What all do you write?”

Julian jumps on the chance to tinker with Mitchell’s head. “I’m working on a novel right now. It’s essentially an homage to the deconstructed romans à clef of the late 1700s. Intertextually, I think it will be a smashing success, so long as the readers can be trusted to accept the basic premise that the entire thing takes place in a remote outpost in the Andromeda Galaxy, thirty thousand years ago.”

Mitchell cannot think of a single thing to say to this. Of course, Julian is not writing about the Andromeda Galaxy—although he won’t say what his novel is actually about, not even to me.

“Julian has had a story in the Paris Review,” Evelyn explains to Mitchell patiently.

“I have to say . . . I don’t really like Paris! I spent a week there once for an invitational,” he says, as if anyone cared. “Sure, it’s nicer than New York, no offense, but it’s no Savannah.” He looks at me as though he expects me to agree, which I most certainly will not.

Before Julian can inform him that since 1973 the Paris Review has been published right here in—yes, offense—New York City, I intercede.

“Mitch, how come we didn’t see you in Sydney last summer?”

Mitchell’s mouth stops chewing, and I half wonder if one of his ham-sized hands is about to grab me around the neck. But he forces a thin smile.

If he hadn’t seen it before, he does now. He’s at brunch with a pair of wild animals. And we are out for blood.

I know the story already. Everybody does. Two weeks before the Olympics, Mitchell King was caught in a hotel room with half an ounce of blow. By the time the charges had been dropped, he’d been left behind in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I’ve made a couple of mistakes,” he says tersely. “Spent some time getting to know myself a little better. Consulted with my priest—”

“Now tell us a little bit about that,” Julian urges. “What do they tell you to do? Kneel down and say Hail Marys? Self-flagellation with rosary beads? Details, please. I’m doing research for my book.”

“What would Catholics be doing in the Andromeda Galaxy, twenty-eight thousand years before the birth of Christ?” I wonder loudly, but Julian kicks me under the table with a bruising saddle shoe.

“Wormhole,” he says snappily. I don’t know if he is referring to his book or to me. We are drinking the Champagne straight up now.

The rest of Mitchell’s food arrives, our waitress wilting under the weight of it.

After the food has been laid out, she says, “You’re Mitchell King,” dabbing sweat from the nape of her neck. Her tiny golden nose stud catches the light.

“Please,” Julian sighs. “We’re just trying to enjoy our meal.”

“No,” Mitchell says firmly, giving Julian a stern look. “I’m happy to meet a fan.”

Evelyn is looking on with cool detachment as the brunette twirls a finger in a curl by her left ear while Mitchell signs her order pad. “Amy?” he asks. “With an A?”

As I ponder any other ways one might spell the name Amy, I take a bite of my bloody steak and eye Amy’s twirling finger. “Quite fetching,” I mumble to Julian, loud enough for Evelyn to hear. Little flickers of lightning flash behind the grays of her eyes.

“So what’s with the Beckett?” I ask lightly. My positive charge catches her burgeoning negative one, and there is a spark of electricity that recalls many mistakes of nighttimes past, which we never speak of during the day.

“I have an audition tomorrow for a new adaptation of The Unnameable.”

Just Jo erupts into a sweet and sultry “I Found a Love,” and for a moment, Mitchell and Julian temporarily exiled from my periphery, I feel as if Evelyn and I were sitting alone. She gushes something about “the Theatre of the Absurd” and I’m arguing against “this idea of the destitution of modern man, as if we were ever better than this,” even as she’s trying to agree with me because it is “absolutely just so brave, ultimately, and all the while just devastatingly tragic and—” And then there’s this prolonged instant in which I know that she is mine—that her mind loves my mind—and all my masks and all her costumes are off, and the great green curtains are drawn back, and it’s the real Evelyn and me, just as plain as the noon sun coming in above us.

“So,” Mitchell interrupts, staring at me as if he cannot even remember my name. “Did you and Julian ever write anything together?”

I laugh but not half as loud as Julian does. “Oh, yes,” he says drolly, spinning the little purple prairie aster around in his buttonhole like a clown. “We’ve got a four-picture deal with Paramount. I do all the action sequences and he handles the jokes.”

Mitchell lights up. “A movie? Bad ass! I’m a bit of a film buff myself. Have you guys seen the new Jurassic Park film? This third one was absolutely the best.”

“Honey,” Evelyn condescends, “they’re joking.”

Mitchell is beginning to look upset and I feel a twinge of benevolence.

“Julian’s very private,” I explain. “We don’t really work well together.”

Julian’s creative process involves drinking three bottles of wine over the course of an afternoon, stalking about the apartment in his old robe from the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, and smoking while leaning precariously out of our windows, until inspiration, or the urge to nap, strikes. I do all my own writing at the New York Public Library.

“What do you actually write, then?” Mitchell asks me, pointedly waving a speared chicken-apple sausage in my direction.

“Short fiction now,” I explain, “though I was working on this novel last year about an apprentice to a gilder in New York in the 1860s who steals—”

“Wait. Was? What happened?” Mitchell asks. Julian flashes an angry look at Evelyn, who tries to pat her beau on the hand to indicate it’s time to shut up, but he goes right on ahead. “Don’t tell me you gave up! Let me tell you something. Winners never quit. That’s the first piece of advice I talk about in my book.”

“It’s not that I gave up exactly,” I say coolly. “I lost it.”

“You lost it?”

“Yes.”

“What, like under a couch cushion or something?” Mitchell laughs, miming a look underneath his own gargantuan seat. Evelyn kicks him now and looks apologetically at me, but I ignore her. Mitchell—no idea what he’s done wrong—struggles to think of something else to ask.

“So I’m working primarily on short fiction again,” I say flatly. “Trying to get back to basics.”

Mitchell smiles as if he understands. “Cool. So are you in the, uhm, ‘Paris magazine,’ then, too?” he interrupts.

Julian laughs—a hard, cold laugh—and it is just enough to admit something I hadn’t intended to.

“Actually, I have something coming out next month. In the Vicksburg Review.”

Julian stops chewing. Evelyn—God, my heart might stop—is beaming.

“Vicksburg?” Julian asks, as if unfamiliar with the concept.

“They’re preeminent! You should have told us earlier!” Evelyn says, her hand reaching across the table now, daintily crushing mine. “What’s it about?”

Julian’s face has darkened, approaching blackened. “Yes, which is it? That little thing from college about subbing in for the Homecoming King or whatever? Or is it that Ibsen story you wrote about—”

Evelyn gives him a look that could cut diamonds, and even Julian knows to change tacks.

“—that you did at my reading?”

He leans on my in a way that makes me itch, but there isn’t time to dwell on it. I think about lying, maybe saying it’s something older, but there’s no way they won’t read it, once it’s out. It’s not like Julian to forget these things.

“It’s based, you know, quite loosely, with all the names changed and everything, on this road trip that Julian and I took to the lake, upstate, last winter. You remember? When you got really sick?”

Julian drops his fork on the plate. He actually drops it. The noise reverberates as the guitar player comes off the end of a long solo.

“You can’t,” he says slowly. “You ab-so-lute-ly can NOT!”

He yells this final word so loudly that Just Jo skips a beat in “All I Could Do Was Cry,” and some of the old Long Island ladies turn and stare at him with Death’s own eyes.

Mitchell, all alpha male, slides a meaty paw in between us. “Whoa, fellas,” he says, but Julian slaps his hand away. Well, not so much away, but he does slap it.

“Mitchell!” Evelyn snaps. “Don’t get in the middle of this. It has nothing to do with you.” He shrinks back—losing two feet in height to the tone of her voice.

“Didn’t we agree? Didn’t we agree that we, ourselves . . . that is . . . that, that one another . . . well, that it’s off-limits? That it is absolutely OFF-F*ckING-LIMITS?”

He’s so upset that he’s grabbing for his pack of cigarettes, and when he realizes that he’s still inside he gets even more furious and downs another flute of Champagne. I say nothing. Not that he has never kept a single promise to me in his entire life. Not that I keep trying not to write about him. Not that I always wind up doing it, anyway.

Finally I say, weakly, “I changed your name and all that. I gave it a kind of Russian theme. After seeing Ev in Three Sisters fifteen times, I think it got under my—”

“You’re moving out,” he declares smugly, as he sets the empty flute down. “And that’s that. I want nothing to do with you. No more.” He looks down at his plate and flicks a great blob of his eggs at me. The golden yolk runs down my shirt and leaves a forbidding stain.

“You’re nothing but a petty thief!” he shouts. “LIAR! THIEF!”

The old ladies are getting very upset now. “Young man, would you—”

“Oh, go back to hell!” he cries. “Or Staten Island. Wherever it is you’re from!”

Just Jo has stopped, midsong. Amy, the waitress, is coming over, sliding between tables faster than Mitchell could leap off the starting block. “Please!” she squeaks. “Please! Keep your voices down!”

But Julian is past the point of no return. He overturns his plate. He launches himself out of the chair, shouts that he “will see the manager about this!” and propels himself past the other patrons and out of the room.

“Dude . . . ” Mitchell says, scooting back from the table. A camera flashes, somewhere. “This is . . . I’m sorry. Those ladies are taking photos. I can’t . . . I mean, my agent says I can’t afford to be in Us Weekly again.”

“Go, go,” Evelyn says, waving her hand in the air dismissively. He promises to call, and she gives him a look that says he’d be a fool to bother. He seems confused, as if he’s still not entirely sure where he’s gone wrong, and then, because there’s still a camera flashing, he strides off, hands hiding his face as though he were some sort of criminal.

“Terribly sorry, everyone,” I say to the room. “Just a small misunderstanding.”

“You know you’ve really done it this time,” Evelyn says softly, as Just Jo begins her song over again.

“He’ll get over it,” I say.

Evelyn looks skeptical. True, I’ve never gotten a story about him published before, but I have been down this road with Julian many times. The truth is that without me he has no one—just Evelyn, who gets tired of him without me around, and a long string of wine bottles and a longer string of Simons, each emptier than the last. Without me around he’ll lose what little sanity he has left.

I go on. “He’ll break into my room now. Read it. Spend half an hour figuring out how to delete the file. But that’s fine, the Vicksburg people already have it.”

“How many times have I told you to make backups? Don’t you ever learn?”

This I ignore, because what is there to say? No, I don’t. None of us ever learns.

“He’ll drink half our Grey Goose and pass out on the bathroom floor. I’ll bring home some Campari tonight and we’ll do our whole Hemingway-and-Fitzgerald routine. Secretly, he’s flattered already. He might even tell me he liked the story.”

“You’d better hope you’re right. Where else would you go?”

I shrug. “Will we be seeing Mitchell King again?”

“No, I don’t think we will.”

It is always this way with her: she brings them here to us once they begin to bore her, and we devour them. It is all routine.

Now that it’s actually just us—just Evelyn and I—strangely, I feel that there is nothing left to say. Or, really, that we’ve said all there is to say, too many times before. What is the point of running through these lines one more time?

She says, “You should start seeing somebody else.”

And I say, “Is this about money?”

She: “Don’t be absurd.”

And I: “You’re the one who’s being absurd.”

“We can’t keep going on like this.”

“Then go.”

We do not move.

She says, “You know you only think you want me.”

And I say, “You know you only think you don’t.”

She sighs. “You’re such a liar.”

“Quit acting.” I grin.

Long silence. Thinking that maybe we can get philosophical about Beckett again, I ask, “What time is your audition tomorrow? I’m sure it will go well. Why don’t I come along and then take you out after to celebrate?”

She sits back. “No. I have to stay focused.”

And that is that. Alone together, we are worse than worthless.

Amy comes by with our bill, still terrified I think, that Julian is going to sic the managers on her, though she’s done nothing wrong. The little faux-leather booklet lies between Evelyn and me for a long, cold moment. Ordinarily Julian pays. I reach for my wallet, which we both know is empty. She reaches for her purse.

“My treat,” she says. “To celebrate. For the story.” She drops two hundreds on the table as if it were nothing. For her, it is.

It is, in fact, more than I’ll be paid for the story.

“I’ll get it next time,” I lie. I’ll never get it. We both know it.

“See you next Sunday,” she says and kisses me gently on the forehead. Then she taps my bluebells with her finger and I’m left to listen to the end of “At Last,” alone.

I can’t go on, I think to myself, scraping Julian’s eggs off my shirt. I’ll go on.

Curly-haired Amy comes back with the change. I siphon off an overapologetic tip and slide it back to her. Her nose stud glints as her round face breaks into a smile. “Thanks so much.”

She thinks the money is mine and I don’t correct her. In fact, I tuck the ample remainder into my pocket and pour myself the last of the Champagne. As I do, I notice Evelyn hovering by the mirror at the exit, fixing her makeup. Or pretending to.

“So,” Amy says, beginning to clean up the eggs sans Benedict that Julian has splattered, “how do you know Mitchell King?”

“Who, Mitch?” I say, fumbling a Savannah accent—I can only fake it now. “Oh, why . . . we went to school together down in North Carolina. Benedictine Academy. Go Cadets.”

Amy giggles and eyes the bluebells. “I like your little flowers.”

“Why, thank you kindly, miss. My name’s Simon,” I lie, extending a hand to hers. She grips it, ladylike, and I glance at the mirror before I ask her, “Would you like to come with me to the zoo this afternoon? Have you ever seen the leopards?”





Note: The following is reprinted with permission from the Vicksburg Review.

—C.E.E-B.