The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

4




Anton and I

“What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing.”

—ANTON CHEKHOV, THE CHERRY ORCHARD


Winter winds howled through Union Square and snow piled up in the night; there were no pathways, only the backs of benches and the tops of trash cans. Streetlights bent up like periscopes from beneath the tundra. The tree branches were limned with white, as were the fire escapes and all the little terra-cotta pots out on them. Each pot sheltered a lump of dead earth and the dry husk of plant life within it. From the window of Anton’s apartment, I sipped some of his golden .Zubrówka vodka and watched three figures crossing the park from different angles, heads bent and trudging slowly, carving lines that would not intersect.

Rose lay on an Oriental-blue divan by the fireplace, her hair still pinned up from her rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard earlier that day. The only finished copy of my manuscript lay beside her in a heavy yellow hatbox, which I’d borrowed from Anton as a means of transporting my pages to and from the public library each day. Every few moments, Rose pinched the corner of a new page with two fingers, as if it were a beloved photograph, and lifted it from the box. As she read she rubbed her thumb softly against her latest engagement ring. This one was either from His Royal Highness, Umberto, Prince of Greece and Denmark, or from Phillipos the Fifth, of the former Royal Italian House of Savoy. It got so hard to keep track, and I found it easiest to live with myself when I did not know who her suitors were.

Through the thin paper, an orange glow outlined the shadow of her fingers as they scanned beneath my lines. Her deep brown eyes flitted from side to side; her lips occasionally cracked into a smile that sent my heart thumping, or they crept down into a puzzled frown that twisted my guts until I forced myself to gaze out the window again, hoping she would hurry and deliver me from my misery.

Then the peaceful crackle of the electric fireplace was interrupted by deathly hacking from the neighboring bedroom. Anton hadn’t been well in weeks. He’d wake up at odd hours and bang around the apartment while Rose and I were entangled in my room across the hall. In the morning we’d find burned-down candles, handkerchiefs stained with phlegm and typewriter ink, and discarded containers of wonton soup like artifacts for us to puzzle over.

As Rose got to the last page, I looked out into the snowy darkness again. I could still see the immortal statue of General George Washington on his horse. Before its erection, the square had been a potter’s field and, according to the research I’d done for my novel, only the penniless had been buried there, and they’d hung criminals from the elms. Beneath all that snow and concrete and dead grass and damp earth lay the bodies of some twenty thousand nameless men and women—forgotten before they’d even died.

“Finished,” Rose said, laying the last page on the divan beside her and stretching out like a lioness, satisfied with the day’s kill.

“And?” I asked, reaching for the bottle of to refill my glass. Each bottle was adorned with a little brown bison and contained a single yellow blade of bison grass from the primeval Białowie.za Forest. Technically illegal in the States, the spirit was Anton’s favorite reminder of his homeland.

“And you’re brilliant,” she purred. “It’s absolutely masterful.”

I came over next to her and set my glass down. “You’re not just saying that?”

“Would I lie?” she teased. Behind her dark eyes, folded up inside Rose’s imagination, my characters were still alive, just as I’d described them. She scraped her ring gently against the back of my arm; liquor pulsed in my veins. Her head slowly moved into the orbit of my own. I kept my eyes open so I could see the gentle shake that comes when she’s fighting herself and losing. And then an inhuman rasping sound burst forth from Anton’s room, shattering the moment and all subsequent moments.

The sound grew louder, and soon the door pushed open and Anton half collapsed into the room, his bathrobe opened and his eyes red as beets.

“I’m dying,” he announced.

“Anton, dear, you have the flu,” Rose said for the hundredth time that week. She got up to look after him. She’d been mothering him since long before I knew either of them, since they were thirteen and both sent to live a continent away from their families at St. Alban’s Preparatory School. Quickly I shuffled the remaining pages together and slipped them back into the hatbox before Anton could see them. “Do you want us to order you more wonton soup?”

“Damn the soup!” Anton bellowed, tossing a checkerboard sans pieces over the divan and against the window. “Damn all the soup!”

“He’s delirious,” Rose said, chasing after him to try to tie his robe together.

“Melodramatic, you mean,” I said, and we both knew it was more likely that he was drunk.

Anton seemed to be offended by this. “There isn’t a melodramatic bone in my body,” he coughed. “And you ought to know the difference.” He seemed eager to go on, but he erupted into another coughing fit that he covered only barely with his sleeve. When he pulled the sleeve away, we could both see that it was specked with blood.

“How long have you been coughing up blood?” Rose asked.

Anton lifted one cupped hand high in the air. “It will have blood! They say, blood will have blood!”

“What the hell is he saying?”

“He’s doing Macbeth,” Rose said calmly, finding her phone in a voluminous handbag. “Anton, dear, sit down. I’m going to call your parents.”

“But they’re out on the Crimean Peninsula somewhere,” I said. “We’ve got to call an ambulance. We should have called one a week ago.”

I’d let it slide this long because Anton’s nocturnal schedule wasn’t all that unusual. We had always gone through long stretches when we were each so engrossed in our writing that we barely spoke. I worked best during the harsh light of the morning, when my dreams from the night before still danced in my mind. Anton preferred to wake in blackness from nightmares and push them away slowly with sips of and taps of his Remington hammers on ink-soaked ribbons. Now, I felt that it was little wonder he’d gotten so sick; every day he waged new campaigns in the war against his own body.

Rose ignored me and dialed twelve digits from memory. A moment later she was connected to a palatial mansion on the Sea of Azov that I’d heard about many times but had never seen.

“Dobroye ootro, Gospodin Prishibeyev. Eto Rose. Vash syn, Anton, bolyen . . . ” she spoke in flawless Russian. As the one-sided conversation continued, Anton led me in a waltz around the room, pausing only briefly to mist his other sleeve with airborne blood. I wondered how contagious tuberculosis was, or if he might have gotten some kind of STD from one of his gentlemen callers.

Rose looked up, holding her hand over the receiver. “Mr. Prishibeyev says we should take him to see a Dr. Ivanych. He’s a friend of the family’s.”

Anton shouted, “Pasha! Pasha Pasha Pasha!”

I didn’t know what “Pasha” meant, but Dr. Ivan Ivanych’s name I knew from the many bottles of Lotosil, the antidepressant Anton took daily, as well as the various barbiturates and painkillers that hid farther back in Anton’s medicine cabinet.

“Great. Yeah. ‘Pasha,’” I said, coaxing Anton onto the divan to lie down. “I’ll buzz downstairs for a taxi.”

“The doctor is ice fishing at his lake house,” Rose informed me after a bit more Russian dialogue with Mr. Prishibeyev. “Somewhere upstate?”

“Waccabuc!” Anton shouted suddenly.

“He’s delirious,” I said, laying the back of my hand on Anton’s forehead. “Just tell his father we’re taking him to St. Vincent’s.”

“Kak naschyet yesli mi voz’myem yevo v blizhayshooyoo bol’nitsoo?” Rose checked the time and then said to me, “I have rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard in six hours. I can’t go upstate tonight.”

“Nobody can go upstate tonight. None of us has a car, for one thing. For another, there’s two feet of snow on the ground!”

“Waccabuc!”

“What does that mean? Is he saying something in Russian?”

“It’s not Russian,” she said to me. Then to the phone, “Zdyes’ mnogo snyega.”

“His son is coughing up blood,” I continued. “The man is twelve time zones away. Let’s just go to the hospital.”

Rose shot me a tired look and whispered, “He says to take the Jaguar in the garage down the street. It’s for emergencies. He says his son has numerous rare conditions, and if you don’t take Anton to see Dr. Ivan Ivanych at Lake Waccabuc, then he’ll die, and then Mr. Prishibeyev will fly over here and kill you with his bare hands.”

And so it was settled. I got Anton into a too big overcoat and grabbed a mismatched wool cap and scarf for myself. Rose pushed the yellow hatbox full of manuscript pages under my arm. More than anything, what I wanted to do now was read it all again, to relive each and every detail that was now dancing around in her head.

“Masterful,” she said again, as she gave me a quick kiss good-bye.

Then, with Anton leaning heavily on my other arm, he and I trudged out into the worst storm in several years, in search of the parking garage where Anton’s father kept the for-emergencies-only Jaguar. It was times like these, which cropped up more often than they ought to, when I wondered why exactly Anton and I were friends at all.

A sleepy Pakistani attendant unearthed a camel-colored X300 from the bowels of the garage. The man seemed skeptical, double-checking Anton’s crimson Russian passport—his only form of photo ID—and jabbering in Urdu while motioning at the snow at the mouth of the garage. But I tipped him a hundred dollars out of Anton’s wallet, and the attendant reluctantly handed over the keys.

Soon Anton was dozing in the passenger’s seat and I was guiding the Jaguar through a maze of plowed streets, going the wrong way on Sixth Avenue only briefly before finding my way onto West Street. There I found four empty, freshly plowed lanes and the great frozen Hudson to the left. It was a challenge keeping the sports car under thirty miles an hour, and I could only barely see the red lights I was running. A few snowplows passed in the other lane, but otherwise I had the roads almost entirely to myself—a good thing, because I hadn’t driven since high school and was feeling the effects of the .

Fumbling with the radio controls in the dark, I managed to get the tape deck on, but the only music available seemed to be a scratchy recording of Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. I hadn’t suspected Mr. Prishibeyev to be a fan of Broadway musicals.

As we passed the George Washington Bridge, I listened to Tevye sing about tradition—accompanied by Anton’s faint dream humming—and drifted back to thoughts of my novel. Titled Just Before the Gilded Age, it was about a young Southern gilder in the late 1800s in Manhattan who falls in love with the daughter of a railroad tycoon. I was going to dedicate it to Rose, as a wedding present if she gave me no other option.

We were past Fort Tryon Park and rising up out of the city. Soon I found I could not keep my eyes open another second, so I pulled off the highway, under the shelter of an overpass. I checked the time on my watch and decided to skim through the final pages of my novel until I woke up a little.

Monday the 13th. July 1863. Heartsick and thinking only of Colette Marsh, I went uptown to report for the Union draft. Colette would be married in a few days and my own life would be forfeit anyway. Why not go back down South to shoot my own cousins on some muddy battlefield? The Union had claimed victory at Gettysburg after three of the bloodiest days since the Revolution, and President Lincoln had declared every able-bodied man in New York must sign up to step onto the front lines. Fearing the wait would be epic, I clutched a well-worn Wilkie Collins novel as I rounded the corner of Third Avenue. I stepped onto Forty-seventh Street and found the 9th District Offices in flames.

Smoke poured out so thickly that it plunged the block into grayness. Men swarmed all through it, heading in every direction at once. To my left, an Irishman in faded overalls clawed a paving stone out of the street, shouting, “Aileen! I’ll see you again, Aileen!” He reeked of whiskey. It was barely past ten. He pitched the stone up and it arced right into the window of the draft office. The crash was drowned by the roar of the fire, but shattered glass still rained down on our heads as fresh plumes of blackness burst from inside.

A rock flew past my ear with a hollow whistle and then I heard it thwack into something behind me. Terrified, I spun, just in time to catch the falling body of a policeman whose club had been raised to split my head open mere seconds before. The front of his uniform was the color of cherry juice and his face nothing but a pulpy hollow. I let him fall, and I screamed, and I ran for my life—thirty-three blocks without stopping—until I arrived at Tammany Hall.

I charged through the main doors, anxious to warn the others about the riot. But before I could, Colette Marsh appeared around the corner. Breathless, I stopped, almost forgetting why I’d come, and what I’d seen.

Colette was of “the Railroad Marshes” of Georgia, and heiress to a fortune larger than I could begin to imagine. Her impending wedding to Bertram Vanderbilt was the talk of the Hall, where I, and my fellow apprentices, scrambled daily, making preparations for the big event.

Many times, I had tried capturing her with my crude charcoals and my penny paints. All this failed. Only when I layered thin leaves of gold onto the columns of the hall had I ever felt near to capturing the deep hue of her Southern sun-kissed hair. Only when I delicately painted golden highlights onto the murals of the Revolution in the Great Room—glinting medals on uniforms and in the sunlight behind a musket blast—had I ever come close to the electric spark behind her eyes. But Chausser only kept a single day’s supply of gold paint on the premises at a time, locked in a back cabinet, and he weighed our jars at the end of the day to be sure none had been wasted. A single drop was worth more than I’d be paid in a week, but I had become so meticulous with my brush that I could conceal a few drips of gold each week, and with these precious drops I had painted a single portrait of Colette on the blank back page of my book.

“D’you happen to have a match?” she asked, approaching me lazily, and withdrew a cigarette holder made of purest bone.

Of course I did. I bought seven matches each week, at the tobacconist’s down the block from my boardinghouse, even though I had no money to buy tobacco. A Hungarian man there dipped a bundle of pine sticks into a great vat while I watched. He brought the sticks out with beads of lead and gum arabic and white phosphorus on the tips, exotic and potent substances that were befitting only of Colette Marsh.

And so I took out a match then, as I did each time she asked me, and struck it against the buckle of my belt. The little stick sizzled into white flames while I lifted it to the slim line of bone and paper and tobacco that led directly to her perfect lips. She inhaled with ladylike deliberation.

Then her eyes widened, and—bliss! Her hand reached to my face. “Is that blood on your cheek?” The policeman’s blood stained the white lace of her gloves. Her eyes flicked down to my Wilkie Collins novel. “The other men are always reading the newspaper. Not you.”

“No, ma’am,” I said, pulling the novel out to show her. “This one’s called ‘No Name.’ It’s not quite as good as ‘The Woman in White.’”

“That’s my favorite,” she said, plucking the book from my hands and turning it over in her own. I was so surprised to still be speaking to her that I completely forgot about what I’d painted on the blank page in the back—at least until she paused there, the blood-stained tip of her glove resting on a golden portrait of herself.

“Oh. That’s just . . . ”—I grabbed for the book—“. . . a sketch. Of a woman. I knew back home.”

But the verisimilitude was too great. Either my imaginary Southern woman was her identical twin, or that was a portrait of her. With no further word at all, Colette closed the book, tucked it into the folds of her flowing yellow dress, and left me standing there in the echoing hall. Far away, a clerk was rushing in the other entrance, shouting that the Colored Orphanage on Forty-fourth Street had just been set on fire.

Later I listened to the booming voice of Boss Tweed, discussing with the others how to best protect Tammany. Still I couldn’t think of anything but Colette as I gilded the arrows of fat-faced cherubs, drawn and ready to pierce the hearts of men like me. The riots continued on and off for days. I was reassigned to touch up the ceiling in the room where Colette’s wedding reception was to be held. Below, the little tables were laid out with gold-rimmed china teacups. Once or twice I dared to peek down from my perch and I caught sight of Colette, bobbing below, like a star fallen from my ceiling and submerged in the sea.

The Vanderbilts saw no need to cancel the wedding just because of the riots. The fires didn’t dare spread their way downtown; even the smoke seemed to always blow in the other direction. When, the day before the wedding, a servant clumsily slammed a vat of tomato soup into one of the Grecian frescoes in an adjacent portico, the Vanderbilts demanded even that tiny crack be repaired. Chausser sent me in to be sure it was done right. In the cracked fresco, Leander, the young Greek, swam across a turbulent river toward his forbidden love, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, who kept a light on in her tower so that he could find her. It was as I limned the rays of this light that I first heard Colette’s whispering.

“You’re in there, aren’t you?”

Jerking back from the wall, I looked all around me, but Colette was nowhere. And then I saw the shadow that had come over the crack in the wall. I bent down to peer through it. On the other side, out in the main hall, was a luminous blue eye. From where I stood, it seemed almost a part of the deep sea that Leander swam through.

“It’s masterful,” she whispered, holding her sweet lips to the thin fissure. “In your book. The painting, I mean.”

“It’s just a silly sketch,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Please—”

“I’d love to see what you can do with more time,” she whispered.

Before I could respond, one of the Vanderbilt daughters shouted Colette’s name, and she rushed away. I watched through the gap in the wall as Colette looked back over her pure white shoulder, just once, at me.

The next thing I knew, I was shivering in the pale light of early morning and Anton was awake.

“What happened?” I asked, snapping forward sharply into the leather-wrapped steering wheel. My eyes were so glazed over that I could barely see.

“Apparently,” Anton said drily, “you tried to kidnap me and steal my father’s car but fell asleep in the middle of the getaway.”

“You were dying. Coughing up blood and—”

Anton protested, even as he let out another long hacking cough. “I’m from Russia. This is my natural state of being. What? You think I have tuberculosis? Consumption? Like some character in this terrible thing?”

Suddenly my eyes focused on the pile of papers on his lap, and I twisted around to find the yellow hatbox, violated on the backseat.

“Who said you could read that?” I grabbed the pilfered pages away from him. I felt my heart pounding harder: back in our college days, Anton had written a story not entirely unlike this one, about his great-great-grandfather, and for months now I’d feared his reaction when he realized I was, somewhat, stealing his story. He seemed, if anything, amused—hardly what I’d been expecting.

“I wake up next to your snoring body, in a car with a dead battery, in the middle of nowhere. What else am I supposed to do to pass the time?”

“Dead battery?”

“Yes. I know Fiddler is enchanting, but perhaps you could have turned it off before you tucked in for the night?”

Anxious to escape him, I shoved my door open and stepped out onto the side of the road. We were on the side of the Saw Mill Parkway. The snow had stopped, at least, and I waved at some approaching cars, hoping to find someone with jumper cables.

Anton got out of the car. “Aren’t there perfectly good hospitals in Manhattan?”

“That’s what I said, but Rose called your dad and he said you had some rare—”

“Preposterous!” he shouted.

“—condition and that we had to go see Dr. Ivanych at his lake house. And I thought you were, you know, dying, so it seemed like we’d better get on it.”

Six cars sped past before a rusted blue Suburban slowed to stop, blocking half the neighboring lane. A large gentleman with a raccoon’s beard leaned through his passenger’s-side window.

“You got cables?” he asked.

I looked hopefully at Anton, who shrugged—possibly not even sure what jumper cables were. “We don’t know,” I admitted.

The raccoon man seemed to consider leaving us there, but it was clear that he thought a fine piece of British engineering didn’t deserve to be stuck in Yonkers with two idiots like us.

“She’s a beaut,” the man said. “Pop the hood and check your trunk for cables.”

Anton fumbled about in the front, looking for a latch for the hood. I popped the trunk, where I found two huge crates marked heavily in Cyrillic. The only English I could find was on the Customs declaration, which read PRISHIBEYEV CAVIAR—SEA OF AZOV. Beside these was a complete roadside-safety kit, thankfully including jumper cables.

I delivered these to the raccoon man. Anton was searching for his cell phone, which was ringing—the aria that ends the first act of Eugene Onegin. Suddenly I realized the phone was in the pocket of his coat, which I was wearing.

“I’ll get it,” I said. “You start your car.”

I answered the phone as Westchesterians honked and flipped me the bird as I nervously flailed at the traffic to go around us.

“Where are you?” Rose asked, her voice warming me deep down to my toes.

“We’re coming back. Anton is back to his usual, charming self again.”

Had he really called my novel terrible?

“Anton’s father keeps calling me for updates. You’d better take him the rest of the way up there.” Through the phone I could hear Rose instruct a taxi driver to head up Madison Avenue to avoid construction.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“The Tea Room,” she said after a pause. “I’m meeting someone.”

“I thought you had a rehearsal?”

Rose mumbled something to someone else in the cab with her, and somehow I just knew that she was with her prince.

“It’s been canceled, because of all the snow,” she lied. If the cabs were running then the show, as it were, would be going on. And she would never miss a rehearsal, which could only mean there never had been one scheduled at all. She’d lied to get me out of town. I felt sick.

There was a shout, either of pain or panic, and the roar of the Jaguar’s engine, followed by the booming bass of Tevye at the end of “Sunrise, Sunset.”

“Got to go,” I said quickly. I heard her hesitate, as if there were something else that she’d just been about to say, but then she said, simply, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

Anton was trying to tip the raccoon man when I came running back up to the car.

“Let’s go,” I barked at him. “Before somebody takes a shot at us.”

And so we eased out into the honking river of cars and headed up the highway again. As we drove in silence, I imagined pulling a U-turn through a break in the divider and heading back down to the Russian Tea Room to duel with whichever prince it was. Maybe it would move Rose to stay with me. Maybe I’d get shot and my novel would be published posthumously to great acclaim. Either way, it didn’t sound like a bad plan, compared with sitting next to Anton another minute.

“It’s nice to get out into the country for a change,” Anton said, reclining a little in his seat. I ignored him. Anton pretended he didn’t care what was bothering me for about five minutes, at which point he simply couldn’t resist anymore.

“Troubles with Rose?” he mocked. “Is the Prince of Dullsylvania back in town?”

Though I was sorely tempted to sink into a long, disparaging discussion of Rose’s latest fiancé, a subject which Anton never tired of, I ignored the jab.

“Rose is fine. She loved my book, by the way.”

“Oh, is that your problem? Of course she loved it. It’s practically about her.”

Another long and stony silence, as I sped through the thin traffic, angrier and angrier, toward the nearest exit.

“I never meant you couldn’t fix it,” he said finally. “You’ve got a perfectly serviceable first draft.”

“You said it was terrible. And it’s my sixth draft.”

Anton reached back for the hatbox. “Well, I only got through part of it. Let me take another look.”

“Leave it!” I shouted. As we came into some small town, I suddenly wondered why I was even still driving. For weeks I’d barely heard from Anton, only finding little messes around the apartment in the morning and hearing death rattles through the walls, and here I was, motoring him up to the Siberian wastelands of Westchester to see some quack, right after he had insulted a year’s worth of my work.

“Screw this,” I said, seeing a sign for the train station up ahead. “I’m going to go back into the city.” I checked the time on my watch and figured that if I caught a train in the next half hour, I’d be back in time to make it to the Russian Tea Room. I wondered if it was still considered regicide if the prince in question had already been deposed. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be stuck in a car with Anton a minute longer, listening to Tevye asking Golde “Do You Love Me?”

“I suppose I do,” she sang.

“And I suppose I love you, too,” he replied.

“You can’t leave me here,” Anton said, looking around at the quaint little nearby shops—the sunny exterior of Paddy’s Funeral Home, the shuttered Yarn Ball, and a busy little diner named Silly Nick’s. To him, these might as well have been the gates to the gulags.

“I don’t have a license!” Anton added. “I don’t even know how to drive.”

We slowed to a stop at a red light and watched a family of brightly colored fleece jackets crossing to get breakfast at Silly Nick’s.

“You keep a Jaguar in a garage and you don’t know how to drive?”

Anton didn’t seem to understand why this wasn’t logical. “It’s my father’s car.”

“Which he left here, for you, to use in case of emergencies? With two crates of caviar in the trunk for safekeeping?”

At the mention of the caviar, Anton’s face lit up, and he suddenly opened his car door and scrambled around to the back.

“Get back in the damn car!” I shouted.

The light turned green and I had to set the car in park so I could run out after him. For the second time in an hour, I found myself standing in front of a line of furious drivers, thanks to Anton.

But Anton was exuberant in front of the open trunk. “I thought I’d lost these! My father was practically going to disinherit me over them.”

“Where did you think you had lost them?”

Anton, again, didn’t seem to understand the question. Crates of caviar, in his world, were perfectly capable of falling in and out of existence.

Before I could stop him, he had grabbed the tire iron and pried a crate open. The cars’ horns behind us were composing a collective atonal symphony. Though I was still stinging from what he’d said about my novel, I couldn’t help but begin laughing at the sight of the stringy Anton, dangling in midair as he tried to use his full weight to open the crate. At least he was earnest about things, even his abject helplessness. He had everything in the world and could do almost nothing for himself.

Gesturing rudely for the cars to drive around us, I rushed over to lend my weight to Anton’s lever arm. With a great splintering sound, the lid burst off. Inside were stacks and stacks of golden caviar tins, painted with pale blue maps of the Sea of Azov. Anton grabbed two of the pressurized tins with a loud cheer, and we rushed back into the car and got safely over onto the side of the road, across from the train station.

Scooping out the large, brownish pearls of caviar with our fingers, we sat on the hood of the Jaguar and watched the traffic roll by. For a while I waited for an apology, until I remembered that the word sorry was not in Anton Prishibeyev’s vocabulary.

“Do you think Silly Nick’s has blinis?” Anton asked, mouth full of fish eggs.

“No. I do not.”

“And you people call this the Land of the Free!” he shouted at the commuters.

“They call this Westchester.”

Three children leaned out the window of a yellow school bus to point at us. Anton’s hair had bushed out in all directions, and his overcoat, which I had given back to him, was two sizes too big. My wool cap had slid back, and I was wrapped in a large red scarf and my threadbare old blazer. We must have looked like two hobos, perched on the hood of a hundred-thousand-dollar car, sucking fish eggs from our fingertips.

The chorus of Fiddler rang out, “We know that when good fortune favors two such men, it stands to reason, we deserve it, too!”

“How much does this stuff cost?” I asked, wishing I had some more to wash it down with.

“And if our good fortune never comes . . . here’s to whatever comes.”

“These big tins are about two thousand. Depending on how the ruble is doing.”

I choked and sputtered, inadvertently spraying fifty dollars’ worth of caviar onto the icy pavement.

“Ours is osetra caviar,” Anton explained, beginning the inevitable lecture. “Malossal—which means a lightly salty flavor—large, and relatively dark. Darkness is typically a mark of inferiority, but ours contains a particular nuttiness that is unique to this terroir. The Sea of Azov is actually the shallowest sea in the world, and this makes our sturgeons particularly nutty for some reason.”

“Not just your sturgeons,” I joked. For that I received a flicking of eggs in the face, but I couldn’t resist another: “You know, it’s not at all surprising that you come from the shallowest sea on Earth.”

Anton leaped from the hood and started to come after me. After a few moments’ chase around the car, soon also speckled with fish eggs, we began shouting along with the tape deck in the car. “Drink, l’chaim, to life!”

Soon full, Anton curled up in his seat and closed his eyes. He was out like a light. Cursing myself a little for letting him off the hook so easily, I reached back into the hatbox, eager to finish rereading my novel’s “terrible” ending.

Though I had hardly slept in a week, that night I could not stop dreaming up ways to somehow steal Colette away. She loved me, I was sure of it, but I had no money, no status. I could never offer her the life that she expected. But without her, what was the point? Why go on gilding until the riots ended? I’d be shipped off to the front lines and made to shoot my fellow men, lest they shoot me. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I dressed and stowed my few favorite camel-hair brushes away, along with my bundle of matches. From a hiding place behind my headboard, I took out a gold watch that had been handed down to me by my mother—one of the only things of hers that I owned. Then, like Leander, I crept out of the boardinghouse and traversed the dark night, steering occasionally away from the light of arsonists’ torches. Soon I came to Tammany Hall, slipped past a dozing night watchman, and silently snuck to the back room, where Chausser kept the next day’s supply of gold paint in the locked cabinet.

I plied the soft pine matchsticks into the keyhole, pressing gingerly against the tumblers, until the thing, at last, popped open. Inside, I found a jar still sealed with heavy beeswax. Holding it up to the moonlight, I studied its liquid glimmering and wondered how much I might be able to get for it out West. We could flee into the unexplored territories. Out where there was no draft, where I was not poor and she was not rich. Out where our love could begin. Suddenly drowsy with these dreams, I crept back into the portico. There, staring at the moonlight glinting off Hero’s light, I slipped into deep blue sleep.

I woke to the sound of resounding cheers from the Hall. Immediately, my heart seized, as I wiped dreams from my eyes. Surely I had not slept through the wedding! I checked the time on my watch and, cursing my sleepless week, pressed one eye to the crack in the wall. There, on a dais, was a gray-haired minister, and in front of him, Bertram Vanderbilt, in a high top hat and woolen tails, his leather boots gleaming with fresh polish. I did not see Colette anywhere, but then the music swelled and people began turning toward the entrance. Without a second thought, I grabbed the golden paint from the floor of the portico and rushed out through the doorway.

No one noticed me. Every rich, joyful eye was fixed on the rear doors where Colette was entering, gowned in the most beautiful white lace and silk—her golden hair cascading in curls across those sun-kissed shoulders. The crème de la crème of Manhattan was there—every Vanderbilt from the commodore on down, Boss Tweed, and even the mayor himself. Every eye was on her. But her eyes were on mine. She froze, there, in the petal-strewn aisle, quickly grabbing the arm of her father—the handlebar-mustachioed railroad tycoon Nathaniel Marsh. The old millionaire turned slowly to follow his daughter’s gaze to the painter’s apprentice coming out of the portico. Others began to turn in their seats. I shouted something—Colette’s name, I think—but with all the blood in my ears it sounded like gibberish. Half sure that someone, some Vanderbilt son, would rise up and fire a bullet through my breast then and there, I waited to die.

Then Colette let go of her father’s arm and rushed back down the aisle. My heart leaping, I flew to meet her there. There was no time to clutch at each other, nor even to kiss. In her brilliant eyes, I could see only delirious happiness.

Bursting from Tammany Hall, we shouted like small children. Colette kicked off her stiff shoes and she ran barefoot with me into the sooty streets. Ash floated everywhere. Somewhere behind us, we could hear the noise of wedding guests rising to their feet in the echoing chamber, and shouting out in confusion. But we did not care. We did not look back. Faster and faster we ran. In another moment, as we approached the square, I began to hear gunshots, and I was sure that we would be killed by the Vanderbilts at any moment. Valiantly, I would perish in the arms of my true love. And she would leap in front of the bullets that followed and take her own life, and we would walk arm in arm through the meadows of the afterlife, together eternally.

But the bullets were not coming from behind us. Up ahead, Union Square was thick with the smoke of musket fire. Colette and I stopped short as we saw hell’s own horror in front of us. The rioters were making their last stand. Soldiers and citizens alike were rampaging through the lines. The sun was blotted out completely. A black-coated fireman with no legs cried on the cobblestones, ten feet away. Flames consumed the square from the inside out. Charred black corpses hung from nooses in the trees—now blacker still. And there were no golden rays of light glinting in the musket fire. And there were no golden medals on the uniforms of the valiantly slaughtered. And there were no golden wings of angels hovering above.

I looked into Colette’s eyes. In the face of this carnage she seemed like someone else entirely, for whom my love was unfamiliar. The golden paint still rested in the crook of my arm. Colette looked back at the hall and then, scared, almost reluctant, she tugged at my elbow. The look on her face was clear. We’d come too far to go back.

When Anton woke up we left the little town in our dust and traveled east on Cross River Road, through thickets of trees, past snow-covered barns and frozen lakes. Maybe it was just the caviar, but there really was something restorative about the countryside. And though our teeth were chattering, we powered the windows down and hummed along to “Matchmaker” as we zigzagged across the iced-over back roads. As we passed through a sleepy, nameless town that had not yet dug itself out of the snow, I looked over my shoulder at the hatbox.

“So. Did it remind you of anything?” I ventured, thinking of a story he’d written ages ago, back in college.

“It’s clearly about you and Rose,” he said, “I told you.”

“No,” I said, “I meant—did it remind you of anything of yours?”

Anton’s face betrayed a small but earnest smile. “Maybe,” he said. “Something terrible, which I scrapped completely, as I recall.”

Was it my imagination, or did he seem—strangely—proud of me for having had the nerve to steal it?

“So do you think it’s fixable?”

“It’s fixable,” Anton said gingerly. “I just don’t know if you want to fix it.”

“Of course I want to fix it—” I began to shout. I’d worked on the damn thing for more than a year. I’d spent months thumbing through metric tons of library books about the Draft Riots and biographies of the great gilders and genealogies of Southern railroad families. I’d lost hours of sleep over each of its three hundred pages. But as I tried to muster my outrage, I felt these arguments simply evaporating in my windpipe. Before I could explain the strange, sinking feeling to myself, Anton suddenly began shouting.

“This is it right here!”

He was pointing wildly at a snow-covered sign for South Shore Drive. Just in time, I swung the wheel and we skidded around the icy corner, onto a little winding dirt road that led us over the crest of a hill. At the bottom sat a small boxy log cabin, its only frill a stovepipe chimney and, behind it, the frozen lake.

An apple-cheeked boy, about our age, was shoveling snow off the walkway.

“Dr. Ivanych, I presume?” I wondered aloud.

“Don’t be silly. That’s Pasha, Ivan’s son,” Anton said, waving with the goofiest grin I’d ever seen. “We were kids together.”

Then I remembered Anton’s ramblings the night before, when he had shouted “Pasha.” I’d assumed it was simply his delirium, but maybe this guy, not the painkillers, was why Anton had been so eager to see the good doctor. Pasha was sandy-haired and strapping. Anton had the door half open before we slid to a stop, and a moment later I found myself watching them in the warmest of embraces.

“Shto sloocheelos s’ tvoyeemee volosami?” Anton cried.

“Ty tochno takzhe vyglyadeesh!” Pasha replied with a laugh.

I lingered getting the parking brake on. They seemed as though they wanted a moment—and as I rewrapped my scarf, my eyes fell on the yellow hatbox. Anton’s comment was still swirling around in my head, and I wanted to dig inside the box and pull out pages at random, scanning them for glints of literary gold so I could prove to him that it was certainly worth fixing. Angrily I grabbed the hatbox on my way out of the car and kept it tucked under my arm.

“This is my oldest friend!” Anton cried, smiling at Pasha. “The best cormorant catcher in Belosaraiskaya Kosa!”

I shook Pasha’s hand and introduced myself. I could just picture them as pale boys, chasing each other up the pebbly shores of a frozen Cyrillic Sea.

“How . . . is your trip?” he asked, fumbling with the words. “You . . . slip-slide?”

He mimed twisting an out-of-control steering wheel and I laughed—it certainly had been a slip-slide of a trip.

“Pasha lives in Russia with his mother most of the time,” Anton explained. “His father’s English is a little better.”

“Papa is on the ice,” Pasha interrupted, stabbing at the air, which was heavy with our misted breath. He motioned for us to follow him. Trudging through knee-high snow, I kept the hatbox under my arm as Anton and Pasha bantered in rapid-fire Russian, their guttural laughs echoing through the woods as we came down to the lake. About fifty yards out was a small hut, made from the lashed-together limbs of trees and covered in what appeared to be bearskins.

Pasha and Anton trudged onto the ice without so much as a pause to check its thickness. “Don’t be a pansy, now,” Anton teased. Cursing at him and clutching the hatbox like a life preserver, I held my breath and stepped onto the ice. It held.

“You stay?” Pasha asked eagerly as we treaded out to the bearskin hut. “If Papa catch a fish, we have some dinner?”

Anton looked back at me eagerly. I bit my lip and smiled, hoping we might be able to discuss an exit strategy later. My mind wandered to Rose and the Tea Room, but it was too late to interfere with that now. How could I get her to see the truth? She wasn’t in love with Prince Philippos, or Umberto, or whomever. I’d seen her losing her usual composure on the divan in the warmth of the fire—she loved me.

At last we arrived at the fishing hut. Pasha held back one great flank of bearskin and revealed the inside, lit with a dangling brass lantern and lined with great barbed hooks and augers of all sizes. And seated in the center was the wooly Russian himself. At long last, Dr. Ivanych.

“Zdravstvooytye, doktor!” Anton cried, racing around a wide hole in the ice to embrace the elderly man. Pasha stood behind his father’s folding chair, and Anton crouched beside them. Immediately the three of them launched into an intense debate in Russian. The good doctor listened to Anton’s descriptions of his illness while tending to a line that dropped straight down into an icy hole, nearly two feet in diameter. Pasha bent down occasionally to chop at the constantly refreezing ice with a little chisel.

As they jabbered on, the doctor suddenly reached into his things and produced a bottle of , with the familiar golden bison label. He waved it in the air like a murder weapon.

“Kak ti syebya choostvooyesh? How much have you been drinking?”

Anton blushed and squirmed as he mumbled his reply. I have no idea how much he confessed to drinking, but if our recycling bin was any indication, Anton was burning through several liters of each week—and he only drank more of it when he got sick, as he claimed that it fortified him against disease and had antibacterial properties.

“The buffalo grass in this contains a natural toxin called coumarin,” the doctor barked, “which is why it is banned by the FDA! Of course, it’s not enough to make you sick unless you’re drinking ten liters a week!”

Mute with astonishment, Anton stared at the tiny bison design on the bottle like Caesar examining Brutus’s knife.

I set the hatbox down on the ice and reached for Anton’s phone again. “Guess I should go tell Rose to set the apartment up for detox again.”

Anton scowled and Pasha began teasing him in Russian. Soon they began to jab at each like little children.

I ducked out of the fishing hut and stepped back onto the glacial lake. A few birds were rustling on the far end, and some smoke drifted from a distant chimney. The winter was dead silent. The cell phone barely got any reception, but after a few tries I managed to get a static-filled call through to Rose.

“Anton . . . darling . . . there?” she sounded very far away. Static burst on the line.

“It’s me,” I said. “Anton’s going to be fine. Dr. Ivanych cracked the case. He’s been poisoning himself with all that Polish vodka.”

More static. I could not tell if Rose had heard me, so I went on. “Too bad. He was almost the first person to ever die of homesickness.” Was she laughing on the other end?

“How’s the prince?” I asked stiffly, after a moment. More static.

More static. “. . . he’s well . . . look let’s not . . . right now” and more static.

Suddenly it seemed that my whole life was static. Years of garbled nothingness, sitting at a library carrel, letting my imagination do the living. Static. She and I looking after Anton together, but whenever things got hard she went off on auditions. She went off with her princes. And Anton and I would drink and drown our weary ears with fizzing gin and tonics and crackling cubes of ice. Her fiancés were called on and called off like extras in a crowd scene. She and I would drink until our minds snowed over; TV sets tuned to channels that never came in. Static. I’d thought that maybe once she read the novel I’d written for her . . . But no, it was all wrong. Anton was right. Masterful, she’d said, just like Colette in my story. But then, what had I expected? That was the line I’d written, and she always stuck to the script.

Static. We were always. Stuck.

“I love you,” I said, and, as if the phone knew that these words were not on the approved list, it hissed and burped. “Rose, don’t you know I love you?”

Another burp. And then the call ended. I was alone again on ten acres of frozen water, listening to birds crying in the empty white sky. Had she heard me?

It didn’t matter. If she had, she would pretend that she hadn’t. We’d been there before.

For a minute I thought I might cry, and I wanted the tears to freeze to my eyes and ice them shut. But then I heard a chorus of shouts from the fishing hut.

“Ya spoymal bol’shooyoo riboo! Ogromnaya riba!” The whole framework seemed to be shaking, the bearskin coming to life as the three Russians danced around inside of it.

Spinning on the ice, I tried to slide back toward the tent. It seemed to get only further away from me. Careening on shoes never meant for such surfaces, I collapsed inside the tent just in time to see Dr. Ivanych thrusting the enormous spear down into the hole in the ice, which had doubled in size and seemed to have come alive. Water sprayed up in every direction. Pasha had the line tight in both hands; Anton ducked for cover. With a mighty effort, Dr. Ivanych raised the spear from the water, bringing up with it the biggest fish I’d ever seen. Its scales were black and iridescent, and its eyes opaque. The primeval thing thrashed around in the tiny space. Watery, red blood pumped from its side as it struggled to somehow escape its fate. I was in awe of it. I pitied it. In one moment, it had been the elusive monarch of its frigid kingdom, and in the next, it had been yanked upward into the bright and unbreatheable heavens.

“We’ll feast tonight!” the doctor roared, getting the great, flipping tail above the lip of the hole. With a mighty heave, he launched the fish into an empty corner—only it wasn’t empty. Sitting there on the ice was my yellow hatbox, just inches from the writhing beast, its great gills flapping futilely.

“Get that! Hatbox! Get it!” Anton snapped. Pasha was closest, but he didn’t seem to understand. “Hatbox, hatbox, hatbox!”

I ordered my limbs to move but they were frozen. It happened in a split second. The fish’s powerful tail curled away and then snapped backward, slamming into the box. It shot sideways, into the icy hole and down into the depths of Lake Waccabuc.

And it was gone.

For a moment, no one spoke. Pasha and the doctor were only mildly confused, but Anton was ashen faced. He knew what was inside. He was one of three people who ever would know.

“It’s OK,” I stammered, finding my legs again. “It’s OK. Really.”

Numb, I helped the others lug the dead fish back up to the log cabin. There were other, older drafts. Reworked endings, but none complete. I looked down at the firm, oily tail of the great fish in my hand and felt something strangely like gratitude.

Anton and I watched as Pasha and the doctor laid the fish out on a long workbench. Working in silence, father and son took turns running the blunt edge of a knife all along its silvery length, scraping away the scales to reveal raw pink flesh beneath.

“You were hiding,” Anton said finally. “All that research about how paint was mixed in 1860, and where all the horses were bred, and the history of Manhattan contract law, and . . . ” He rolled his eyes like he might be sick.

“So . . . ?”

“So you were avoiding the truth,” Anton said. “It was a love story. Hiding in a textbook.”

I knew he was right. I’d built a three-hundred-page house of cards, a carefully balanced illusion, without an ounce of the truth that would cement it in place.

Anton seemed apologetic, but I knew he was being honest. This was why we were friends. This was why I cleaned up the wonton soup bowls and recycled the vodka bottles. It wasn’t about having a trunk full of two-thousand-dollar cans of caviar and an apartment with a view of Union Square. It was about having someone who gave it to you straight when you wanted to be lied to. Staring down into the great yellow globe of the fish’s eye, I said a soft, silent thanks. He had freed me from something I’d been unable to escape for more than a year. Maybe it was about time I picked up an honest trade, became a doctor, or a fisherman, or a dishwasher at Silly Nick’s. Anything but a writer.

We watched as the doctor set down his blunt knife and picked up a longer, much sharper one. As Pasha held the fish steady, the doctor slit open the great beast’s belly from head to tailfin. Anton and I gasped as its mysterious purple innards spilled out onto the bench. Without even thinking of it, I reached over to hold Anton up, getting there before his knees even began to buckle.

“Come on,” I suggested. “Let’s go inside and clean off.”

But though Anton’s face was white as the snow outside, he stayed put. His eyes followed every motion, each slice. As he inhaled the oily stink of the fish, I saw his lips moving slightly, choosing words, testing phrases, timing cadences. He was writing the scene, already. Immediately, I felt my own pulse quickening. I wanted it, too. Here it was—right in front of me, the end of a much better story than the one I had lost. The story of how I’d lost the story.

That night, we ate more caviar—with blinis this time—and we roasted the fish in Dr. Ivanych’s roaring fireplace. The food and fire and vodka soon warmed me. Anton and Pasha spoke of Mother Russia. The doctor told stories about noble fools he and Mr. Prishibeyev had known in the war. Stories about men of God and beautiful peasant women. Stories about fathers and sons and brothers-in-arms. Deep below the ice, my great, terrible novel was still disintegrating in the darkness. Paintbrushes and lovers and gold, coming apart into words and letters and dots.