Mr. Fox (25 page)

Daphne must have had a look on her face that made him stop talking. Neither of them said anything for quite a while.

“She went insane because of him,” Daphne said. “I think that’s happening to me.”

The swing creaked again. I looked out from behind the hedge; I had to see what they were doing. If they saw me, they saw me. But if I saw that he had his arms around her, or even just his hand on her arm, I was going to bust his head open. The conversation itself didn’t matter. She was drunk. And he—I knew what he was doing with apparent idleness: using his halting, mysterious European accent to feed her a story that he knew she’d like because she could place herself in it, be the victim, be the heroine. I withdrew before either of them saw me.

“You don’t have to go insane,” Pizarsky told Daphne. “It doesn’t have to go like that.”

“What shall I do, then? What shall I do?” She didn’t sound as if she was especially interested in the answer to her question.

Her arms were bare and freckled, her eyes were closed, her head was resting against the back of the swing. Mine. I wanted to lift her up into my arms and carry her around with me, our bodies together, my neck her neck, her hands my hands. He wasn’t touching her, he wasn’t even sitting close to her, and I could see only the back of his head. But he was very still, hardly seemed to be breathing, and he was looking at her. That was bad.

“Daphne—what’s going on?” he asked eventually. “What’s wrong?”

“I wish I could tell you,” she said.

“You can. You can tell me anything.” He waited, but she didn’t say anything. “Maybe some other time. I think you should know, though, that there are other ways—apart from going crazy. Do you know the story of Mr. Fox?”

“No.” Her voice was languid, reluctant. “What happens in that one?”

“The usual—wooing, seduction, then the discovery of a chopped-up predecessor. But this is an English fairy tale, you see. So the heroine, Lady Mary—”

“Lady Mary?” Daphne asked. I didn’t need to look to know that she’d sat up.

Mary Foxe put a soft hand on my shoulder. “Come away, Mr. Fox,” she whispered. I shrugged her off. She was wearing what Daphne called her signature scent. I disapproved—and not just because the scent costs enough per ounce for me to momentarily consider asking the shopgirl to leave the price tag on so Daphne can realise how spoilt she is. Mary was Mary; she’s been with me a long time—maybe even before I’d gone to France. She’s handled a sickle at haymaking time, stacked and tromped the hay, helped me feed it to the cows and horses. She’s stood dressed top to toe in mud, and she’s braced herself against the barn beams when she’s been too tired to stand. Mary Foxe shouldn’t have anything to do with bottled fragrances.

“That farm stuff was before my time,” Mary said. “Come away with me, Mr. Fox.” There was a hard smile on her face. “You said that Mrs. Fox couldn’t stop us, remember?”

Suddenly I was getting to be a little tired of Mary Foxe.

“Drop it,” I said to her. “Just be quiet. In fact—you can’t speak. You’ve just lost your voice, Mary. You’re real hoarse today.” And I closed her voice up in my hand.

Mary’s lips shaped words, a fast and furious stream of them, but none of them sounded. She clasped her throat, horrified. She’d been forgetting who was boss.

Undo this,
she mimed, furiously.

In time,
I mimed back.

But the damage was done. I’d addressed her too loudly; Daphne and Pizarsky had heard me, and they’d stopped talking. I couldn’t stay where I was a second longer. I strode round the corner and stepped up onto the porch, car key dangling from my hand. “Hi, there, D. Afternoon, Pizarsky. Thanks for bringing her home. Had a nice time at—?”

“The Wainwrights’,” they supplied quickly. Oh, sure. The Wainwrights’.

Daphne got up and went into the house without kissing Pizarsky good-bye. It bugged me that she didn’t kiss him good-bye, as if now even a simple kiss on the cheek could mean something between them. Pizarsky’s leave-taking was good, quiet, neither hurried nor labored—good in that I didn’t really even have to say anything to him, or look his way. I thought that if our eyes met I’d have to take a swing at him.

Daphne went upstairs but not into our room. She went into one of the spare bedrooms and put her flowers on the bedside table. I followed her in; the predominant smell was mothballs. We haven’t had an overnight guest for a long time.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Daphne said. She fluffed the pillows, pushed all the blankets onto the floor, and jumped onto the bed.

“Like the flowers?” She flung out an arm in their direction.

“They’re okay,” I said.

“First prize for this afternoon’s croquet. Pizarsky won them, but he doesn’t care about flowers, so he let me have them.”

“Good of him.”

“I’m hot,” she said. “Could you bring me some ice?”

“Just ice?”

“Just ice . . .”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Look at it. Feel cool. God, St. John. Does it matter what I do with the ice?”

“I’ll get it in a second. What’s going on? Why are you taking a nap in here? Don’t you like your bed anymore?”

“Oh—don’t let’s fight,” she said. My right hand was still closed up tight, to keep Mary quiet, and Daphne looked at that hand for a couple of seconds, then at my face. I guess she thought I was making a fist at her.

I wanted to ask her if she meant to spend the night here as well, but I didn’t want her to say yes. It could be that she was in some kind of mood and just wanted a nap and my question might force her to adopt a stance. She does that, I’ve noticed; she lashes out when she thinks she’s been given a cue.

“Is it okay if I host a luncheon for some underprivileged inner-city girls next Wednesday? Not too many, five or so.”

“Fine by me. Got your underprivileged inner-city-girl bait? Want me to drive you down to the city so you can catch them?”

“Be serious. I want to join Bea Wainwright’s Culture Club, and the luncheon is kind of an audition for me.”

“That’s fine. Just don’t let them into my study. I mean it—that’s off-limits.”

“Of course.”

She stood up before I could go and get that ice she’d asked for. “I’ll get it myself, okay?” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed my forehead. Quite sadly, I thought.

On my study desk I found a brand-new notebook open on my desk, neatly placed in the centre. There was a list written on the first page. I looked at the list for a minute or two. Points in favour of “D.” and “M.” It was almost my handwriting, so close that for a second it seemed to me that I’d made the list and forgotten about it. But I hadn’t written it. These weren’t even thoughts I recognised.

So Mary was writing things down now.

I looked up and she was laughing. Soundlessly, of course. She was even more appealing as a mute. Like an image my eye was chasing through one of those flip books—she wasn’t moving, I was. I beckoned her.

“You wrote this,” I said. Mary came closer, gesturing helplessly towards her mouth.

“Just nod or shake your head,” I said. “You wrote this, didn’t you?”

She folded her arms.

“Did Daphne see this?”

No visible response. I closed the notebook and laid my fist on top of it. It was starting to ache, vaguely, but with a throbbing that promised to get stronger.

“This is childish, Mary. Don’t do anything like this again.”

She curtseyed wickedly, and left me.

I tore the list out of the notebook and ripped it to shreds—I needed both hands for that. Even if Daphne had found the list and taken any notice of it, she must know that I couldn’t write a thing like this in earnest and leave it somewhere she’d find it. But Daphne knew something, or thought she knew something. That tiny kiss on my forehead—why had she given me that? It stayed with me unbearably, like ashes at the start of Lent, the slap on the hand I got whenever I went to brush them away as a kid.

I must have been twenty-five years old when I realised Christ never came back from the dead. Some people would say it wasn’t a big deal, it was just that I wised up. But I’m talking about something I’d always believed until then. I damn near knocked myself flat with these new thoughts. I mean, the resurrection could be true—it could be, I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure. But it probably isn’t true. So that means Christ was killed and that was the end for him. He’d gotten mixed up with some pretty intense people in his lifetime, though, and those people thought he was too important to let go. And they made themselves important with this idea that their friend couldn’t be killed, told everyone all about it. And hundreds died because they believed Christ couldn’t be killed, and thousands more suffered, I mean, the martyrs, think of all the martyrs, and—I was walking down a street in Salzburg, eating an apple, when these thoughts came to me, and I just kept right on chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing, since it was something to do.

Love. I’m not capable of it, can’t even approach it from the side, let alone head-on. Nor am I alone in this—everyone is like this, the liars. Singing songs and painting pictures and telling each other stories about love and its mysteries and its marvelous properties, myths to keep morale up—maybe one day it’ll materialize. But I can say it ten times a day, a hundred times, “I love you,” to anyone and anything, to a woman, to a pair of pruning shears. I’ve said it without meaning it at all, taken love’s name in vain and gone dismally unpunished. Love will never be real, or if it is, it has no power. No power. There’s only covetousness, and if what we covet can’t be won with gentle words—and often it can’t—then there is force. Those boys at the bar downtown, coming round talking idly about more ideas to die for. Something terrible’s coming, and everyone in the world is working to bring it on. They won’t rest until they’ve brought it on. Mary, come back—distract me. No, stay away, you’re the problem.

From
The Art of Courtly Love
by Andreas Cappelanus

 

That nails it—I like this Cappelanus fellow!—M.F.

 

Ha, ha, ha . . . indeed.—S.J.F.

 

HMMMMM.—D.F.

 

I
stayed in bed almost all day Monday. To see if St. John would notice, and if he did notice, to see what he would do about it. But he didn’t notice, didn’t even come up to ask me about dinner. Too busy with his book, I guess. It can’t be easy killing people off the way he does, especially since each death has got to be meaningful. I heard him on the radio once, before I even met him—a fan of his called in, oh so earnest, asking him why some character or other had died in such a meaningless way. St. John’s answer: “I was going to say that the meaninglessness of her death has a meaning in itself, but the truth is, I missed that one. So thanks. I’m going to work harder.”

While he worked, he played a symphony I liked—he played it very loudly, but it was good that way, rising through the floorboards and welling up around me. I was lying on music, my arms and legs flopping down over a pillar of the stuff, my back the only straight line in me. If only my old dance teacher could have seen me, she’d have had a fit. I was always the girl who was “just so.” It was the easiest thing in the world back then—if I felt as if taking too deep a breath would make me fall flat on my face, that meant I was “just so.”

There was housework to do, things to dust and scrub and polish and move around and fret over, work that has never been visible to anyone else, and I took great pleasure in not doing any of it. I spent a few hours looking at a book of watercolors that just happened to be lying around, but they began to make me feel weepy. They were so faded, the landscapes, and they reminded me of some I’d started and put up in the glasshouse, half finished, because painting them made me yawn so much, and I didn’t suppose that anyone who came out there for a cocktail on a summer evening would care enough to ask if they were supposed to look like that. They’ve been there two summers and no one’s asked yet.