“We wish to remain what we are,” I joke.
She grins. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”
She is about to come at me again, but then there is another thump, and this time she hears it, too. She pauses, hands in my hair, nose a millimeter from mine.
“Is that Jeffrey and Cyrus?” she giggles, pretending to be shocked.
“That’s what I thought it was,” I say, as I sit up against the bed, pulling slightly away from her so I can hear—brushing her hair from my face. “But doesn’t it sound like it’s coming from in there?”
I nod toward the gigantic wardrobe. In an instant her face goes very pale. She pushes her thumb roughly over my lips, rubbing away the red of her own. Then straightens herself out and checks herself quickly in the mirror above the desk. She locks eyes with herself, and I know that look—she is getting back into character. She crosses swiftly to the wardrobe door and yanks it open.
Inside is a young boy, perhaps eight years old, dressed in golden silk pajamas. His blond hair is slicked to the side, still a little wet from a bath earlier in the night. He wears rather thick glasses and sits cross-legged with a flashlight in one hand and a tattered book in the other.
“Julian!” she scolds. “I’ve told you a hundred times, you can’t be in here!”
He looks up expectantly at her. At his mother. He folds his arms in annoyance and then, he pouts—it’s her pout, on his face.
“Evie told me I had to go away because she’s getting her hair cut!”
She seems quite alarmed by this. “Evelyn’s getting a—. Who on earth is giving her a haircut?”
Julian shrugs. “Ms. Ruby gave her the scissors for her paper dolls.”
Suddenly she’s rushing for the door, wailing, “No, no, no, no—” but then she pauses and turns back to me, a devastated look on her face. “Could you just—? I have to—. Before she cuts her ears off!”
I shoot a winning smile at the young boy in the wardrobe, as if he is my very best friend in the world. He ignores me.
“Go on,” I say, waving my hands at her.
She looks at me one final time, and her eyes are dim now with gratitude and sorrow and grief and relief all at once, and for perhaps the first time since I’ve known her, I am sure that I know what is happening behind them. She rubs a thumb under her lower lip one last time. She goes and I am alone with the boy.
The boy who is her son.
“Mothers,” I sigh conspiratorially from my spot on the floor. “Honestly.”
The boy looks up at me curiously. “Do you have a mother?”
“I do. But she’s not here, though. She’s at home. I mean, where I grew up.”
“Why aren’t you where you grew up?” he asks.
“I went away,” I said. “I got older so I left.”
He seems perplexed by this. “I’m never leaving home. I’ll stay here forever.”
I’m about to argue with him until I realize that, perhaps, he’s right. Could a future prince of Luxembourg just pick up and start a new life in Belize or Katmandu?
“Well,” I say, looking around, “at least it’s quite nice here.”
“It’s boring here,” he says. “I want to go to Africa!”
“I’ve been to Africa,” I say. His eyes light up but then I add, “They make you take medicine to go there,” and he retches.
“Do you know my mother?”
“She and I are old friends,” I say warmly, trying not to arouse his suspicions about the fact that I am still sitting on the floor where she pushed me down, only minutes before. I wonder what, if anything, the boy could see through the crack in the wardrobe doors. You can see a lot from under closet doors—I remember well enough. You can see a lot of things you shouldn’t. It seems like yesterday that I was this boy. But tonight I am the man on the other side of the closet door, and this simply cannot be.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
He holds up his book—a yellow cartoon crane beams up from the cover, the title in indecipherable Luxembourgish.
He holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.
“I can’t,” I say. He looks appalled. “I mean, I can read. I just only know English.”
He snorts, as if he can hardly believe anyone wouldn’t know more than that.
“English books are there,” he points. I get up and browse the shelf of old books for something the boy’s speed. After thumbing past the philosophy, some Woolf, and a few books about the Harlem Renaissance, I finally pull one out that I think he’ll enjoy. When I hand it to him, he reads the title off slowly.
“Just So Stories. By Rudard Kippler.”
“Rudyard Kipling.” I sit down again on the bearskin rug, closer to the wardrobe. He seems embarrassed to have said it wrong, so I add, “Your English is very good.”
“My mom’s from America,” he explains.
“Is that right?”
He nods and holds the book open in my face. “Read it,” he commands.
Taking the book from him, I look up at the open door, hoping maybe his mother will return, but I suspect that she is dealing with Julian’s freshly bald younger sister and has forgotten all about us for the moment. The boy begins to get comfortable, tucking his trusty flashlight into the pocket of his pajamas and arranging some soft extra blankets out on the bottom of the wardrobe. He knows just how he wants to lie on the blankets. I suspect he’s gotten scores of maids and footmen and butlers to read him bedtime stories while his mother has been preoccupied with her royal duties.
I wait for him to settle in. It is important to be comfortable when you’re just a small boy, alone in a big place. He’ll change, but this fact never truly will. He’ll go on, day after day, unsure if he’s all that different from the day before. Later he’ll look back at the things that are happening now and he’ll think they were almost like something he read about. He’ll know they happened to him but they may well have happened to another person, with another name, in some other place, where the clocks are on other times. In the story of tonight he’ll be himself, but costumed in the gentle lies of memory and the soft fictions of yesterdays. Some stories he’ll lose along the way: in truck stops, on old computer drives, in boxes in dank basements. Still, each day he’ll wonder, has he changed and everything else is the same? Or is it exactly the other way around?
Someday he’ll see that he can’t have one without the other. He can’t know he is the same unless everything around him has changed. It’s like black spots on black fur—you can’t see them, but they’re there, all the same.
He’ll think he’s moving in zigzags, getting anywhere but where he meant to go. But there are edges to the board, and someday he will reach one, and it is only then that life will place a true crown onto his head. It’s only then that he’ll be able to turn around and see for the first time a glorious path back from where he came.
“You’re not reading,” the boy complains.
“Sorry,” I say, “I thought you weren’t ready.”
“I’m ready,” he insists.
“Oh, this one’s a good one,” I say as I flip a few stories in. I pause, remembering that I read it once, when I was little, at a tiny bookstore in a big airport terminal. I’m delighted to find it hasn’t changed at all—only me. King me.
“You have to say its name,” he demands.
“Its name,” I say, “its name is, ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots.’”
• • •
I left Luxembourg and my apologies, scrawled onto the blank end pages of the Kipling book. I’d come looking for someone I’d made up, a long time ago, and that as fun as it might have been to break character for another night, I owed her more than that—much more. For years we’d had a kind of make-believe love, in its way so much better than the genuine article. She’d called me after good auditions, but never bad ones. I’d seen her break men’s hearts, but I’d never once seen her heartbroken. Our story had been all romanticism, never realism. We’d had affairs, but
we’d never once made plans. Now I saw that, even playing the role of the Princess of Luxembourg, she had no fairy-tale life: she had a country to think of, overweight citizens to inspire to exercise, real duties to carry out! A royal life was still a life: soy products to endorse, a husband to miss when he was away, and children getting up to mischief on opposite ends of the palace. Running away from it all for just one night would have made neither of us any happier, in the end. If Jeffrey had proved anything to me, it was that no one could escape forever. Maybe he’d been right, long ago, when he’d told me that I’d never really loved her. Nothing I’d felt for her then even began to match what I felt when she’d looked that child in the eye and had seen her own eyes looking back.
Of course, I didn’t say all that, exactly. Rather, I left my apologies in the form of a story. One that I’d written again and again, about an actress preparing for not merely the role of a lifetime—but a lifetime of a role. A story I’d been unable to finish, until then. When I’d finally finished it, I’d signed my name—my real name—at the bottom, and set the book down beside the sleeping head of her son.
Now, on this airplane, I am writing it all again, while I soar over the great black gap of the ocean, in as straight a line as the curve of the earth will allow. A flight attendant reminds me sweetly to be sure and change the time on my watch. I tell her that I wish I still had a watch. I tell her that I so loved watching its hands winding backward, making time where there was none before, catching seconds from the air and putting them back where they belong.
The sun is rising fast in the east behind us, but we are faster. Everything stays dark, as if the night itself were trying to take longer, so I can finish. I write until the instructions come to put my table in the upright position. Then, as we descend, I keep on going, pressing hard against the back of the seat in front of me. Just before our wheels touch the ground, I, at last, am finished.
Careful not to crease the folds of my white shiromuku wedding robes, I sit down again and reach into my bag one last time. From inside a silk-lined cavity I withdraw a small painting, about the size of a page in a book, of a woman rendered entirely in gold. The fluid lines, the precise strokes, can only have been painted by someone imbued with a great and unabating passion. In the glint of the woman’s breasts I can trace the serene gaze of its unknown artist. And just to the left of this there is a small smudge—a faint oily spot left behind by the pressing of a single finger.
It took me some time to find the portrait, on loan to a private collection at a North Carolina art museum. When the owners noticed the finger smudge, they were aghast, and offered to lower the price or have it professionally restored. But I would not allow it. I want the smudge, I’d said. Get rid of everything else if you want. It’s the smudge I want.
I stare at this single, oily spot as I have every night before going on stage. And after a few moments I am prepared. I rise from my seat by the dressing mirrors and adjust my wedding robes one last time. I pass through the doors of the dressing room and I am on a stage. The curtain has fallen and I can hear the roar of the crowd building, steadily, like a madness. The snow is still drifting down in the dark space before me. Up in the catwalks, some stagehands scurry with last-minute tasks. I am my role. The curtain stirs gently in the draft. And when it goes up, I will feel that one face—those two eyes—that gaze I must avoid all night. But I will feel those eyes watching, every moment, knowing I can never look back into them, because they would undo me.
The wait is over now. The curtain begins to rise.
Terminus
“Lowly faithful, banish fear, / Right onward drive unharmed; / The port, well worth the cruise, is near / And every wave is charmed.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “TERMINUS”
Here again, she tells herself. She reaches the top of the escalator, yanking her suitcase by its taped handle to keep it from catching in the mechanism. The sides of her case are freshly smudged with red sub-Saharan dust. This same dust is caught in the lengths of her auburn hair and pressed into the pale swirls of her fingertips. Just as it had been the last time she’d passed through this very same airport terminal. Here again, she tells herself, and again empty-handed.
Through a barrage of static, the speakers above her head announce, “Boarding will . . . in just a moment for . . . two thirty-seven to New York City.”
She peers quickly around Terminal B for a clock but cannot locate one anywhere. She certainly does not notice him, over at the farthest table—the man fussing about with stacks of pages: dividing them into parts, ordering, reordering, deleting, stetting. Hesitatingly he scribbles question marks onto the wide, clean margins, branding them with each of his infinite doubts. She doesn’t see how aggravated and nervous he is, or how completely exhausted. Everything that was inside of him has been emptied except the overwhelming fear that what’s been emptied is nothing special. He thought that he would be much surer by this point. He knows that there is so much missing—so much that he’s lost and will never be able to find. He worries that perhaps they are all the wrong words. He thinks that perhaps they are all in the wrong order. He wonders if perhaps those who read them won’t be able to see all that they should.
But really he is lying only to himself, again. Really, his fear is just the opposite. Really, he’s worried that maybe they will see—all the terrible things that he has done and has been. He’s thinks that he has changed his spots—he’s sure he has—but now everything is in there: the lies he’s told and the truths he’s invented.
But she doesn’t notice him. She’s still pacing up and down the terminal, looking for a clock, but there are none to be found. Not near the Emerson Books. Not across the corridor by Phil’s Coffee Hub, or W. W. Gould’s Good Eats, or the Jewels, Jewels, Jewels! kiosk. She knows only that it is far too early in the morning, but that to her it feels like the depth of night. She hates taking the red-eye back to the city. She hates arriving into its jubilant, awakening arms feeling so deeply burned out. She continues, legs cramped and stiff, the little wheel on her bag squealing incessantly.
The bag’s wheel had a bad encounter with a busted step at the old man’s house—the axis knocked a few degrees off balance when she was racing inside to try to catch the end of his estate auction. She’d been so sad to hear he’d passed. She’d never even gotten to meet the great Jeremiah; she’d never been allowed. And after so much anticipation, she’d shown up very, very late. Kojo’s rusted Hyundai had blown a tire, hours earlier, and she had been forced to wait out there in the miserable heat while he walked to the nearest village to scrounge up a replacement. By the time she’d gotten inside the old man’s house, nearly everything had already been sold. She’d soon spotted an editor from Sandford Books, locking up a briefcase filled with yellowed pages. Early stories? Diaries? Letters? She still doesn’t know. Like the rest of the world, she will have to wait and wonder and see.
She continues to scour the walls of Terminal B—she thinks, What sort of backwoods airport has no goddamn clocks? There had been ten of them, all in a shiny row, back in the far-nicer Terminal A. You’ll be back in true civilization soon, she reminds herself. But then a second thought hits her. By lunchtime you’ll be sitting in Haslett’s office, trying to explain how you—the only one who had been out to the damned Oakes Mines & Estate before—got scooped for the literary find of the decade. She dreams about rolling herself a perfect little cigarette, but she does not want to go back outside and risk missing her flight. People are already piling up at the gate, though the attendants are not letting anyone board yet. She thinks she might have a tall glass of gin instead, with parasite-free ice cubes in it. It’s early, sure, but she is still on Africa time.
She stops in her tracks and reaches for the side pocket of her purse. From inside it she removes a watch. It is bright gold and quite elegant—but far too big for her wrist. It belonged to the man who broke her heart. She’d found it deep in the pocket of his jacket, which had been auctioned at the estate sale; she’d go
tten it for practically nothing. She checks the watch and sees that she has at least twenty minutes before her flight should leave. Just then, a modest sign halfway across the terminal catches her eye. TEN-MINUTE TIMEPIECE REPAIR. Ten minutes to get the watch taken in, she thinks, ten minutes to get my drink. Wristwatch in hand, she moves swiftly toward the kiosk—closer and closer. She startles a slim man behind the counter. He sits on a high chair, reading a newspaper.
“I’ll need some links removed from this, please,” she says.
The static comes on again. “. . . flight two thirty-seven to New York . . . now begin boarding.”
The slim man sets the newspaper down and, with a genial smile, turns the watch twice in his hands. “They sure don’t make them like this anymore.”
She does not particularly care. She is staring across the way, at the disorganized line of passengers beginning to move, then over at a turquoise blue gin bottle, which glints behind the bar at W. W. Gould’s. If she would just look ten degrees further to her left she would see him, lifting the pages up by their edges and hefting them lightly in his fingertips as if, by weight alone, he can estimate their value. Like so many a long-gone prospector he is worried that what remains after his patient sifting may not be enough. But its millesimal fineness cannot be weighed, only determined beneath a careful squint through an eyepiece. He thumbs through the pages. What percentage of its parts is pure?
She looks back at the watch man, holding the timepiece up close to his work lamp and studying it under his extendable magnifying glass for a moment.
“You from around here?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “I’m an editor in New York City.”
He gives the requisite impressed look. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”
She certainly does not feel like explaining the whole sordid story to an oddball watch repairman in the middle of a tiny, time-forgotten airport.
“Could we just hurry this along? I have a plane to catch.”
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