The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (11 page)

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
.