The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel

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The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Page 24

by Kristopher Jansma


  “You can’t smoke in here,” I hiss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I stifle a snicker.

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Where are the critics when you need them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you speak English?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sonndes?” she confirms. “Owes?”

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

  “Yes!” he cries, as he kicks me back. “Thank you! Baleens! Fucking Moby Dick should be flossing with this . . . this . . . travesty!”
>
  With that he trips on the edge of the rug and the rest of the pages mushroom up into the air before sinking down. Jeffrey sits up in the middle of the paper sea, his pages settling like cresting waves that threaten to drown him. He just sits there, as if to let them. Wading in, I sit down beside him and help him to catch his breath.

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

  “It’s all just fucking nonsense,” he sobs.

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

 

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