Mr. Fox (21 page)

Ordinary life just swerves around him, though, and I run off the sides like an ingredient thrown in too late. I can’t stand the way he talks to me sometimes: very simply, as if to a child. The other day I suddenly realised, mid-conversation, that we two had spoken of nothing that morning but the matter of whether we ought to have calling cards made up for ourselves, to be left for friends who chanced not to be at home when we visited. Are calling cards too old-fashioned, he wondered aloud. And what is the correct design and texture, and should we be Mr. and Mrs. Fox or St. John and Daphne Fox, our names linked in the middle of the card or printed on separate sides of the card. He told me to consult my Emily Post, but I said I didn’t have any of her books. He looked kind of surprised (I have several editions), but I lied because I don’t like him thinking that these are the only things that interest me. The way he talks to me. I thought it was just his manner—I didn’t mind that he never said anything romantic, not even at the very beginning—I was relieved about never having to wonder whether he really meant what he was saying. But now I’m starting to worry that this simplicity is contempt, that he picked me out as someone he could manage. I don’t like to give that thought too much air, though. It’d be hard to go on if I really thought that was true.

I wish there was some level ground I could meet him on. Say he liked baseball, I could educate myself about that quite easily, just hang around while my dad and my brothers are waxing lyrical. That’s easier than books. With books you’ve got to know all about other books that are like the one you’re talking about, and it’s just never-ending, and it’s a pain. But this situation is fifty percent my fault. When I was a lot younger, maybe fourteen or fifteen, I had ideas about the man I wanted. I remember a piano piece my music teacher played as part of a lesson. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard. People talked and passed notes all the way through it, and I wanted to shut them up at any cost, just go around with a handful of screwdrivers, slamming them into people’s temples. I waited until everyone had gone. Then I laid my notebook on top of the piano the music teacher had closed before he’d walked away, and I wrote his name, wrote his name, wrote his name, and underlined each version. I vowed that I wouldn’t have a man unless he was someone I could really be together with, someone capable of being my better self, superior and yet familiar, a man whose thoughts, impressions, and feelings I could inhabit without a glimmer of effort, returning to myself without any kind of wrench. Music. Sometimes it just makes you want to act just anyhow. I wasn’t in love with the music teacher; I wrote his name because it was a man’s name.

I met St. John at Clara Lee’s soiree—she was great friends with my mother, and at that time I had to keep meeting people and meeting people in case one of them was someone I could marry. Clara Lee basically threw this soiree with the almost express purpose of helping me, I mean, helping my mother. So there were ten or eleven clunking bores, two or three very sweet men who didn’t think me sweet, and a couple who obviously had something sort of wrong with them and the something wrong was the reason they were still bachelors. And then there was Mr. Famous Writer, St. John Fox. He must not have had anything else to do that evening. He had a terrible sadness about him. It’s highly irregular for that to be one of the first things you notice about someone. I looked into his eyes and realised, with the greatest consternation, that he was irresistible. He took me out on Sunday afternoons, and it was just calamitous—after about three of those I was done for:

I didn’t want someone I could understand without trying—I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted St. John Fox. It turned out that he felt the same way about me. Then they lived happily ever after. . . .

No. I don’t think I was really that naive, thank God. I know I’ve got to work at this.

He went someplace this afternoon—research, he said. He didn’t say where he’d be, but he did say he’d miss dinner—and I kissed him at the door. I wore a jewelled flower clip in my hair. He gave it to me himself a week ago, but today he said, “That’s pretty,” as if he had never seen it before. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. At least the dropped phone calls have stopped. They stopped once I’d told him about them. The last one was such a heavy call. She didn’t just drop the receiver when I answered. She made a sound.
Pah-ha-ha-ha.
And I recognised it right away. That’s how you cry when you are trying not to cry, and then of course the tears come all the harder. And do you know what I said? “Don’t . . . Oh,
please
don’t.” And she hung up.

Since then I’ve just been waiting for him to leave the house on his own. He told me, “She’s not real”—I just smiled and pretended to see what he meant. He’s been spending a lot of time in his study with the door locked, but I’ve been biding my time. She must have written him a love letter or given him some kind of token. And if he’s been fool enough to hold on to it, then I’m going to find it, and I’m going to force him to drop her in earnest. We’re all better off that way. Things were tough enough without this girl coming between us. And the sound of her crying. Sometimes I try to hear it again. I wonder if it could really have been as bad as it sounded. It made me shudder—my husband is capable of making someone feel like that.

I waited for an hour, to make sure that he was really gone; then I searched his bathroom. An unlikely hiding place, but that could’ve been just his thinking. Then I searched his bedside drawers—nothing. I looked inside all the books in the drawing room, then went to his study again. He made a big show of not locking it before he left, so I’d know he’d forgiven me for kicking his things around a couple of months ago. I’d already searched his study immediately after the heavy phone call, but there might have been something I’d overlooked. I sat down at his desk and looked around, trying to see some secret nook or cranny or a subtle handle I could turn. And as I looked I slowly became aware of a hand creeping across my thigh, the fingers walking down my knee.

I pushed the chair back as far as it would go; the legs made ragged scratches in the carpet because I pushed hard. I don’t know if I screamed—if someone else had been there I would’ve been able to tell, I’d have been able to see them hearing it. But I couldn’t hear anything.

Then I took my hand off my kneecap. My own hand.

I pretended that the past couple of minutes hadn’t happened, and while I was doing that I opened his writing notebook—well, the one that was at the top of a pile of them. He’d just started it—it was empty apart from a table he’d drawn on the first page. I saw the letter
D
and the letter
M,
divided by a diagonal line. And there was talking, faster than I could follow, all in my skull and the bones of my neck, and I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Proof. But I couldn’t understand it yet. I settled down and concentrated.

Under
D
he had written:

Under
M
he had written:

I sat with my head in my hands, shaking. Because the situation was so much worse than I’d thought. My husband was trying to choose between me, his wife, and someone he had made up. And I, the real woman, the wife, had nothing on the made-up girl. We each had five points in our favour. That son of a bitch.

I hate him, I hate him, oh, God, I hate him.

I was holding my stomach. I felt sick because I had been a fool, I’d been foolish. I’d stopped using the Lysol after we made love. I wanted to run upstairs and fix that right away, but then I thought,
It might be too late.
I could already be pregnant. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I thought if I gave him a child—

But he’s been making lists. I’m pretty sure I could have him certified insane. But then she’d win, wouldn’t she, this Mary? It’d be the two of them together in the ward. Unbelievable. Horrible and unbelievable. I had to laugh. There’s no one I can tell, not even Greta. There’s nothing I can do about this. I measured my waist with my hands. He must have imagined her smaller about the waist than me. How much smaller . . . I pulled my hands in tight, tighter, this much smaller, this much. She was taking my breath. Taller than I am, or shorter? Taller. So she could look down on him. He seemed to like her looking down on him. I hunched over the desk with my hands in fists, and my wedding ring swung from the chain around my neck.

“But it’s not fair,” I said. “You don’t really exist. He could take a fall, or hit his head, and whatever part of his brain you belong to, that could suddenly shut you out. You’re just a thought. You don’t need him.” The sounds I’d heard down the telephone, the awful sobbing, those sounds were pouring out of me now. So many crazy thoughts kept coming: Maybe I could make him take a fall—not a serious one, but it might shake him up, and she’d be gone. Or I could ask him, tell him, to stop, just stop, do whatever was necessary; he could kill her or something—what did that even mean, to kill someone imaginary—why, it was nothing at all. He could do it. He should do it, for me.

I had to get out of his study, go get the Lysol, do something, before I started kicking his things around again. That was no way to win him over. I could see him adding to Mary’s side of the list in his cheery handwriting, all apples and vowels:
She doesn’t trash my study.
I stood up. And then I sat down again, staring at the floor. I stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down. There was something on the floor. A shadow that stood while I sat. Long and slanted and blacker than I knew black could be. It crept, too. Towards me. “Oh, my God.” I held my hands out. “No!”

The shadow stopped. What would have been its hair fanned what would have been its face in long wings. The shadow seemed . . . hesitant. I didn’t move. The shadow didn’t move.

“Mrs. Fox?” it asked.

Its voice was faint but present. Not inside my head, I heard it with my ears.

“Did you hear me?” The voice was even fainter the second time. If I ignored it, it would disappear. But I couldn’t ignore it. I looked at the ownerless shadow on the floor and I saw something that was trying to take form, and I felt bad for it. I felt sorry for it.

“If you can hear me, why won’t you speak? Do you know who I am?” I really had to strain to hear the last few words.

“You’re—Mary,” I said, as loudly as I could.

And she stood up. I mean—she stood
up
from the carpet in a whirl of cold air, and there was skin and flesh on her, and she was naked for almost a second, and then she turned, and she was clothed. I screamed—that time I know for sure I screamed, because she looked so alarmed, and screamed a little herself.

“You’re real,” I said. I don’t know why it came out sounding accusing; I just wanted to establish the facts.

She held her arms up to the light and looked at them exultingly, as if she’d crafted them herself. They were nice arms. Nicer than mine, that was for sure.

“Stay back,” I said, when she took another step in my direction. “Stay back.” I picked up St. John’s stapler. It was a big stapler, about the size of a human head. If I had to, I’d staple her head.

“Okay, okay,” she said, wide-eyed. She must not have wanted anything to ruin all that peachy skin. He’d said she was British, but her accent was just as New England as mine—maybe even more so.

The doorbell rang, and she scattered. That’s the closest word to what happened to her when the doorbell rang. I want to say “shattered,” but it wasn’t as sudden as all that.

It was John Pizarsky at the door. Before I let him in I looked hopefully through the spyhole for Greta. Maybe I could tell her after all. What else are friends for?

I could tell her: St. John’s in a bad way. He says he’s fine and he acts as if he’s fine, but he’s in a bad way. I don’t blame him for not being able to tell; he doesn’t do sane work for a living. And I have been sleeping with him, eating with him; we took a bath together last Tuesday—so I’m in a bad way, too. I’ve seen and heard a woman he made up. I know what this is called—a folie à deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together. It was such a strong delusion, though. Like being on some kind of drug. Nobody warned me how easily my brain could warp a sunny morning so fast that I couldn’t find the beginning of the interlude. One moment I was alone, the next . . . I was still alone, I guess, and making the air talk to me.

Those opium eaters . . . Coleridge could have said something; he could have let the people know that it could happen this way, without warning. De Quincey could have found a moment to mention this, for God’s sake.

Greta wasn’t with J.P., but I opened the door anyway. I had to have company. If I didn’t have company now, right now, I didn’t know what would happen or what I would do.

“What the hell took you so long?” J.P. asked.

“St. John’s out,” I said. “And I don’t have a number you can reach him on. So beat it.”

(Please stay.)

J.P. stood on the doorstep, looking at me. He looked until I twitched my nose, thinking I had something on my face.

“Say . . . did you ever play croquet?” he asked, finally.

“Never,” I said. “Come inside and tell me about it.” He stepped back onto the driveway.

“Get your coat,” he said. “Come outside and play it.”

I had my coat on before J.P, or anyone, could say “knife.”