The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (32 page)

“Jo!”
Jeffrey had said.
“Gudde Moien! Ech hu grad een immensen Huttkar!”

The guards had stared at Jeffrey’s head curiously until I discovered in the phrase book that he’d just informed them he’d bought an incredible hat.

“You are tourists?” one had asked.

“Tourists!” Jeffrey had laughed. “Good God, no! We’re actually very old friends of Her Highness, the Princess. If you would just buzz on up and see if she’s available . . . ”

One of the guards had lifted his bulky black walkie-talkie and spoken in clipped Luxembourgish. Jeffrey had appeared satisfied, until seven more parking attendants arrived to remove us.

“You don’t understand! I’ve known her since she was thirteen years old! We went to school together! In America?
Ah-MER-Ik-KAH
. For chrissakes,
this
one’s slept with her more times than
you
all have been invaded by Germany.”

I thanked any and all available gods—including the one who had toppled the Tower of Babel—that this last bit seemed to get lost in translation.

“We demand an audience with the princess!” Jeffrey had insisted angrily.

“You are . . . ”—the guard had begun, communing quickly with his brethren to be sure he had the English correct—“. . . not expected.”

“I’m Jeffrey Oakes!” he had cried as we were escorted away. “I’ve never been expected in my entire life!”

Our attempt to storm the palace had not exactly gone swimmingly.

Finally, Jeffrey slides off the windowsill and announces, “I’m going to shower.”

“You’ve showered twice today,” I say as I move to the corner desk, where I have a stack of hotel stationery and a bundle of pens. “Why don’t you try writing something?”

He laughs until it turns into coughing—fainter, but still with an echo of Iceland. I listen to him bang about inside, under the crackle of the news on Radio Télévision Luxembourg. I sit down to write. Each day I write out all that I’ve already written and try to gain enough momentum to push through.

Her Imperial Majesty Mrs. J---- and the other ladies leave the room and I am alone for the first time since early this morning. It was still dark out, when I first opened my eyes. Those first few seconds, I did not even remember my own name. My whole universe was simply snowflakes falling lightly onto the evergreens, the yellow rock of moon, high above the encroaching clouds. When I was eight, it snowed on Christmas morning while we were in Atlanta with Grandmother. It was the only time I ever heard my mother call anything a miracle.

Seconds passed and I remembered that I was in Chiyoda, in Tokyo, at the Fukiage
Palace. That today would be my wedding day. That I was about to marry Haru, my prince. Literally. That my grandmother is dead and that Christmases are over and there are no miracles and that Atlanta is on the other side of this great sphere of rock.

Now, hours later, I am alone, sitting in front of the dressing-table mirror, caking white powder onto my face. The ladies have shown me how to cover my face with the
bintsuke-abura
, an oily wax mask that holds the powder—used by geishas and Imperial Princesses of the Yamato Dynasty alike for centuries upon centuries. With each dab the excess powder explodes and drifts off slowly through the dead air.

I stop where I’ve been stopping for weeks. I can’t manage another word. I flip through the book on Japan and the copy of
An Actor Prepares
that I borrowed from the Oakes family library; I push down on the French press that room service has brought me. I pick at the flaking spirals of a croissant; I chew on the only white sliver of fingernail I have left. But I am still stuck. No amount of caffeine seems able to push me past that powder, drifting slowly in the dead air.

What goes on inside her head?

For a while I listen to the quiet of the sleepy medieval city outside. Then, finally hearing the sound of shower water running, I push my chair back and cross to the front hall. There, in the bottom of the hall closet, in the bottom of my heaviest suitcase, I withdraw a wooden box, filled with manuscript pages that do not belong to me.

• • •

After his third shower of the day, I manage to coax Jeffrey down into the neighboring Place d’Armes for a stroll. He’s run low on cigarettes, anyway. Charming blue umbrellas extend out from a few cafés and beer halls, frequented by Luxembourgers at all hours. Rippling in an ever-present breeze, pleasant flags hang along the medieval archways. Men in puffy shirts sell flowers and used books out of wheeled carts, which they push over wobbly cobblestones. One imagines there must be a dedicated Office of Quaintness, dispatching pudgy burghers in velvet tunics all around town to keep covering the bricks with moss.

The travel sites all describe Luxembourg as a fairy tale come to life, but it feels less like a Grimm land of trolls and big bad wolves, and more like Disneyland Paris. Luxembourg is the wealthiest country in all of Europe, and the Old City is overrun by the tax-sheltered children of eBay and Skype executives, moving in Pied Piper phalanxes with their phones out and thumbs flying—casting spells out into the ethernet. Jeffrey and I dodge them as they trample by in their hiply untied sneakers, their ironic and yet inaccurate
THIS IS NOT A T-SHIRT
T-shirts. They buzz like flies around the McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut, although we have learned in time that they favor the Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant. Meanwhile, their fathers bark madly on Bluetooths at Brasserie Plëss and stuff themselves full of Grillwurscht sausages and plum
quetschentaarts
at La Cristallerie. Which fairy tale these characters feature in I cannot recall.

Jeffrey lingers a moment by some men playing checkers. He pretends to be fiddling with his watch and
not
examining the boards, but I can see his eyes jumping along with a red checker in zigzags, all the way across the board to the edge.

“Schachmatt!”
one old man says smugly. Jeffrey smiles as the other spits on the ground and neatly places a second piece atop the first, transforming it into a king.

“You used to have a board but no pieces,” I remind Jeffrey.

“I played when I was a kid,” he answers. I wait for him to go on. “Of course, chess is supposed to be the better game, but I always found it too . . . ”

He trails off, searching for the right finish.

“Want to play a round?” I ask, taking a seat at an empty table. Jeffrey tries to pretend he’s not interested.

“There aren’t any pieces,” he complains.

“Here,” I say, reaching over to a neighboring café table and grabbing a little bowl full of sugar packets. “You can be the white packets and I’ll be the pink.”

Jeffrey snorts, even as he sits down and begins to fluidly set up the board. “Supposed to be red and black pieces. That’s why I liked it as a kid. Chess was all black and white. I always got stuck being the bad guys. I’m going to cream you, by the way.”

I smile and, as promised, he proceeds to cream me. He guides his packets in effortless slanted motions, crossing the board with ease and then, once his packets had been kinged, bringing them zigzagging back across the board again.

“It’s oddly democratic,” Jeffrey continues. “No bishops and pawns and knights, with elite abilities to move this way or that. In checkers it’s only by cunningly avoiding capture—by hopping all the way across the board into enemy territory—that you can gain any real advantage. And all it is—here’s the brilliant bit—all being kinged is, really, is gaining the ability to reverse course. To go against the tide, as it were, back to where you’ve begun. See?”

I nod, just happy to see him finishing his thoughts. We play one game and then another, and as we begin the third we both become aware of a cinnamon-skinned man watching us from a nearby park bench. He wears dark shades and a black suit and sips from a soup bowl of green
bouneschlupp.
He is the only gentleman of color in the Place d’Armes, but what truly makes him conspicuous is his hair, which puffs out in a seventies-style Afro.

“Check out Mr. Black Panther,” I say.

“Think he’s an assassin?” Jeffrey teases.

“If he is, which one of us is he after?” I muse.

“Depends. Just what have you been up to these past ten years?” Jeffrey eyes me evenly as he captures my final packet and effectively ends the third game.

“Let’s go,” he says. “This guy weirds me
out.
”

We move off toward the nearby flea market and Jeffrey seems a half ounce lighter. We peruse old coffeepots and empty picture frames. He dawdles for a bit by a used-book cart while I buy a collectible royal wedding stamp bearing a good likeness of the princess. She has her cascade of hair pinned up, which sets off her high cheekbones even more. But what, I wonder, is going on between them? I gaze into her stipple-inked eyes and try to hear the voices inside her head.

Jeffrey and I sit down on the edge of a large marble fountain, and I try to remember sitting beside her on a fountain years ago, running lines.
‘Love
.
What an idea!’
Now you say,
‘You don’t love him, then?’
and I’ll say,
‘But I won’t hear of any sort of unfaithfulness!’
Remember that.

“‘This fountain commemorates Luxembourg’s two national poets—Lentz and Dicks,’” Jeffrey reads. “That had to be a tough name to get through school with.”

I scowl slightly as Jeffrey reads on. “Mr. Lentz wrote the national motto.
‘Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sin’
. . . ‘We wish to remain what we are.’”

It really explains this strange place, I think, as Jeffrey considers the fountain. The gargoyles, the old men, the cobblestones. Maybe it’s trying with all its might not to change in any way. Maybe Luxembourg is stuck, just like us.

“You really think you’ve changed that much?” I ask.

Jeffrey stares down at the rippling fountain water and runs his hand through the gray streaks above his ear again. “Most days I hardly recognize myself.”

He watches the flecks of ash from his cigarette fall off and drift down to the water. I am about to accuse him of being melodramatic when a sudden slant of light catches my attention. I look up and see, not far away, that the young woman working at the used-book cart is standing with her sleek cellular phone aimed right at us. She grins and lifts a book off the stack in front of her.
Näischt Helleges
the title reads, and beneath it is a familiar black-and-white photograph.

“Well,” I say to Jeffrey, “
somebody
recognizes you.”

• • •

Jeffrey refuses to go back to the hotel even after I remind him that we’ve checked in as Timothy Wallace and Anton Prishibeyev. “They’ll know we’re staying there!” he shouts, and when I try to ask him who “they” are exactly, he rushes off in the other direction, fleeing the park and leading us southward through town, dodging up and down alleys and over bridges, all the way to the Place de la Constitution at the edge of the Old City. But the area around the monument is packed with sightseeing buses and camera-clutching tourists. Panicking, Jeffrey bolts down a set of stairs and descends into the deep and verdant Petrusse Valley.

These stairs take us all the way to the bottom of the chasm, which circles the ancient fortress walls of the Old City, which had kept Luxembourg snug and secure for nearly ten centuries before tanks and planes had come along and ruined all the fun. Down here, Jeffrey rushes along a jogging path until he reaches a little raised outpost—a forward fortification of some kind, now topped with empty park benches.

Wheezing, Jeffrey slumps against the balustrade and looks hatefully out at the wide Petrusse Valley beyond. It’s only then that he notices that there are hundreds of pigeons, fat and gray, swarming beneath the benches, feasting on gingerbread crumbs. Jeffrey covers his mouth as he staggers upwind, nervous about the molted feathers that hang in the air. I want to rush over and pull him back, but I stay by the edge, looking up at the Place de la Constitution above us. In its center is a great obelisk that commemorates the Luxembourgers who died in the Great War. At the very top of the monument is a gilded statue of a woman, hovering angelically with a wreath in her hands. From down in the valley, it looks as though she’s floating in thin air.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s just go back to the hotel. So you have a fan! It’s not exactly the end of the world.”

Jeffrey just shakes his head. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there when things got really bad. That Haslett asshole kept on calling, and then Iowa, and whenever I went out, there’d be someone just
staring
at me. It was like I could
see
my words there in their heads.
Crawling
there on the undersides of their foreheads. It was like they thought I
knew
something. And they always ask me,
Is it true? Is it true? Did it really happen?
And then . . .
What’s next? What are you working on now?
All of these . . . these . . . these—”