When he was eight years old Roy had a dream in which his mother, who in real life had already been married three times, came home one day with a leopard and told Roy that the leopard was her new husband. The leopard was very big and he was not tawny but black with even darker spots that could be seen only if a person looked closely at his skin.
“How could you marry a leopard, Mom?” Roy asked. “I didn’t know that human beings and animals could marry each other.”
In the dream Roy’s mother did not answer his question. The following morning when he told her his dream she laughed and said, “I may have married a leopard when I was younger, before you were born. I can’t remember, my memory’s not so good about those things.”
“You’d remember if you married a leopard.”
“Did I have him on a leash?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Figures.” she said.
Walking to school Roy told his friend Jimmy Boyle about his dream and Jimmy said, “Nobody would ever pick on a kid if they knew his old man was a leopard.”
Roy did not like the men his mother married. His real father had died when Roy was three years old, so he had not really known him, but Roy convinced himself that these other husbands were different. Maybe, he thought, the leopard in the dream was how he wanted his real father to have been, powerful and beautiful, someone who would always be there to protect him.
A few days later Roy’s mother’s friend Kay, who wore a lot of make-up and whose bright red lipstick was always slightly smeared, said to him, “Kitty told me you had a dream that she’d married a wild beast.”
“A leopard,” said Roy.
“It was a symbol,” Kay said.
“What’s that?”
“Something that represents something else, like a desire or a feeling you didn’t know you had. I’ve got lots of repressed desires. My doctor says it’s why my skin breaks out.”
“Don’t confuse him, Kay,” said Roy’s mother.
Kay was holding a lit cigarette in her right hand; she ran the fingers of her left hand through Roy’s hair.
“Your father had thick dark hair like yours,” she said.
Roy saw an old black and white movie on TV in which a black leopard escapes from a zoo and turns into a woman who gets hit by a car and dies but before she does she turns back into a leopard. He told Jimmy Boyle about it and Jimmy asked him if he ever had the dream again about his mother marrying a leopard.
Roy shook his head. “No, it probably got run over, too.”
A few months later Roy overheard his mother telling someone on the telephone that Kay had divorced her husband and married one of his mother’s ex-husbands, but that had not worked out so Kay was going to divorce him, too. Not long after this Roy came home and found Kay and his mother sitting in the livingroom drinking highballs, smoking cigarettes and talking.
“Hello, Roy,” said Kay, “how nice to see you. What are you doing with yourself these days? “
“Playing baseball and going to school. What are you doing?”
Kay puffed on her cigarette. Her lipstick was smeared more than usual.
“Waiting for you to grow up,” she said.