Mr. Fox (5 page)

I telephoned Katherine at the Long Island house. Mitzi answered, and I told her that this was an impromptu French oral examination, to keep Katherine’s skills elastic.

“Bonjour,”
Katherine said, when she came to the phone. She was slightly out of breath—all that tennis.
“Comment ça va?”

“Got a letter from Mr. Fox,” I said.

She laughed, and I heard her clap her hands. “What did he say? Did he sock it to you?”

She stopped laughing as she soaked up the realization that I couldn’t speak. I was in too much of a state.

Once I’d recovered I asked, “Why did you send it, Katherine?”

“I just thought it would be fun.” As she spoke I pictured her standing before me, eyeing me with all the defiance of Lucifer. In a smaller, meeker voice she said, “Stop hating me. . . . Who is he, anyway?”

“Just a man,” I said. In my mind I was already reorganizing the contents of the black folder. I’d kept working on the stories, and they were stronger now, and better; I was sure of it. It was just as well he hadn’t met me at the Mercier.

 

 

On Saturday afternoon I stood paralysed on the pavement outside the restaurant, which had these smart black-andsilver revolving doors; every time someone stepped into them I knew I was meant to take the next empty space and push myself into the lobby. But when I finally did I found that I couldn’t stop pushing at the door until I had spun back out onto the street again. I tried to be firm with myself, but with each glimpse of the restaurant full of marble and women genteelly eating salad, I lost my nerve to join them and ran inside the doors like a rodent in a glass maze. On the corner a man in a suit was standing beside an apple cart. “Apples,” he said. “Getcha apples!” No one was buying, so he began juggling them. “Look what I’ve sunk to,” he sang. “God, I hate these apples. I’d rather starve to death than eat these apples, tra la la.” He was a tenor. Finally he started telling the people passing that he had kids at home. Someone suggested he feed the apples to his kids. He caught my eye. “You’re my witness. When you’re out of work people think they can talk to you anyhow!” I nodded and went back in for another bout with the revolving doors. By now people trying to enter the restaurant from the street were asking me if I was crazy or what; the fifth time I saw the maître d’ frowning menacingly, and the sixth time a woman came to meet me out on the street. She seized my arm as if I was a naughty child about to scamper off somewhere. “That’s enough of that,” she said. “You’ll tire yourself out.”

I coughed out an “Ouch, do you mind?” and hoped the apple seller wasn’t looking. The woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. She wore a brown skirt suit and a tiny brown hat tipped coquettishly over one eye.

“Let go of me,” I said.

When she didn’t, I pleaded, “I’m meeting someone.”

“Who?” she asked.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business—”

She shook me a little. “Mr. Fox’s secretary,” I said. “I’m meeting Mr. Fox’s secretary.”

“Then it’s just as well, isn’t it, that I’m her.”

She released me at last, and we stood nose to nose. I glared, and she just looked back with an air of melancholy.

“You’d better prove it,” I said. For some reason, I’d thought the secretary would be a man.

“You’re . . . Mary Foxe?” she said, looking me over.

“I’m Mary Foxe,” I said.

The woman produced an envelope from her handbag, pulled my letter out of it, and showed me.

 

 

I read, then winced, and returned it to her, apologizing. She said: “Don’t apologise; I think it’s funny.” But she didn’t laugh, or even smile.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

I handed her the black folder full of stories, and I asked her what Mr. Fox was like.

The secretary blinked slowly, thinking. “He’s kind of quiet,” she said.

She wandered away with the folder sticking out of her handbag, leaving me alone on the sidewalk. I watched her, thinking she might suddenly remember something and turn around. Once I was sure that she’d gone, I hailed a cab.

 

 

A week went by; he didn’t write to me. He had my folder and he didn’t write to me. Then three more silent weeks, six, eight. My fingernails crept down into their beds, my eyes grew glassy, I brushed my hair with my back to the mirror. I had no interest in looking at myself; it was the sensation of teeth against my scalp that subdued me.

It was all I could do not to write to him again.

“You should go get your stories back,” Katherine said, when I briefly explained the situation to her. “He’s probably going to steal them or something.”

“How would you know they’re good enough for him to want to steal them?”

“Oh, I know,” Katherine said sagely. “I read ’em. All of them. I especially like the one about the disappearing zoo. That’s the best one.”

I grabbed her before she could escape and, unexpectedly, found myself hugging her. I liked the fluffy weight of her head against my chest. She was just as surprised as I was. I neutralised it by calling her a bloody nosey parker.

“Maybe that goddamn secretary stole the stories,” Katherine suggested.

“I told you not to say that word.”

“Which? Secretary? Stories? Maybe . . . ?”

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

One morning Mitzi said I ought to take a break. That was alarming. I stopped buttering my toast and said, “Why? I’m fine. Thanks all the same, Mrs. Cole, but the weekends are enough for me.” I made a swift analysis of my behaviour of the past two weeks or so. I had not said or done anything particularly strange; I had behaved more or less as I always did.

Mitzi rose from her seat and cupped my face in her flower-scented hands. I was so nervous I could have bitten her. “Honey, no one’s saying you’re not doing a good job. You’re doing a wonderful job. Isn’t she, Katy?”

Katherine said yes and stuck her tongue out at me.

“It’s just that you can’t give your weekends to a soup kitchen and your weekdays to this little fiend of mine and just go on and on without stopping. What if you burned out or something? Honey—I’m telling you, I’d never forgive myself.” She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.

“Your face is all pinched,” Katherine told me helpfully.

So that morning, instead of taking Katherine to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I went to get my stories back.

One hundred and seventy-seven West 77th Street was easy to find. It was a posh apartment block, much like the Coles’ but smaller. More exclusive, I suppose. I entered the building behind a grocery delivery boy who pulled a small township of brown paper bags along on a trolley behind him. The building directory indicated that Mr. Fox, at number 25, was on the fourth floor. As I waited by the lift I caught sight of myself in the polished steel doors. I was grinning. On the fourth floor I approached number 25 casually, as if I might not stop, as if I might well walk past it and continue on down the red carpeted corridor. But I did stop at 25. And I rang the doorbell, and I knocked, hard.

The secretary answered the door. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or powder, and she’d yanked her hair up into a knot on the top of her head. She had a pencil behind each ear and one in her hand. She looked very, very young.

“What can I do for you?” she asked. She didn’t appear to recognise me.

“My name’s Mary Foxe,” I said.

“Mary Foxe,” she said, as if repeating the name would help jog her memory.

“I corresponded with Mr. Fox about some stories of mine. He said he’d read them, but I suppose he’s too busy. I’ve come to take them off his hands.”

She hesitated.
Oh, God.
She’d thrown my stories away. Or there was a mountain of manuscripts somewhere behind her, and she’d never find mine.

“I met you outside Salmagundi on Sixty-first and Lexington a couple of months ago,” I said. “There was a bit of a fuss with some revolving doors.”

Her eyes lit up at last. “Oh, right,” she said. “Right.”

She looked over her shoulder, though no one had spoken. “Be right back.”

She closed the door before I could peer into the flat. It seemed strange to me that Mr. Fox’s secretary should be at his flat—I mean, secretaries belong in offices.

Ten minutes later she opened the door again and handed me my folder. I looked through it quickly—all the stories appeared to be there. The pages were well thumbed, and some parts were underlined.

“He—er—he read them?”

Suddenly I felt as if I could knock this woman down and charge into his study, pull up a chair, and settle down to talk. As if she knew what I was thinking, she took a firmer stance in the doorway. She twirled her pencil between her slim fingers. “Yes. He did.”

I didn’t like the look in her eyes. My throat went dry. “And?”

She shook her head. “You don’t really want to write. . . . What you want is love. Go find yourself a beau. You’re so young, Miss Foxe. Go have a little fun.”

“Did Mr. Fox say that? Or is this coming from you?”

She looked down.

“It’s coming from me,” she told the floor.

“I want to talk to Mr. Fox,” I said.

I stepped towards the secretary, and she held her pencil out at eye level, in an unmistakably threatening gesture. The point was very sharp.

“What did Mr. Fox say?” I said. “Just tell me that and I’ll go.”

She didn’t answer, and I said, “Are you Mr. Fox?”

She laughed. “No.”

“You are, aren’t you? You’re Mr. Fox—” I caught sight of a bare passageway, a telephone on a stand, the receiver off the hook—I heard no dial tone. “You’re him.”

She frowned. “I’m not.”

“What did he say, then?”

“Wait.”

The door closed again. When it opened, the secretary was holding a lit taper. The flame cast her eyes into shadow.

“He said . . .” She paused, and sighed. “He said I should do this.”

She touched the taper to the black folder, and it caught fire. She blew the taper out before the flame struck her fingers. But I didn’t let the folder go. The leather cover burned with a harsh sound like someone trying to hold back a cry between their teeth. Still I held the folder. I felt the skin on my fingers shrink. I watched words turn amber and float away.

I liked these stories. Katherine liked them. I’d worked hard on them.

There was so much smoke in my eyes.

But I held on.

 

M
ary Foxe had known that it was more than a matter of snapping her fingers and having Mr. Fox change his ways—she’d known it would be difficult, but this was beyond all her expectations. She’d been asleep for days, in a four-poster bed in a dark blue room. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Her brain ached most of all. She’d felt terrible burning his stories, which she’d actually thought were rather good. She couldn’t have let Mr. Fox get away with beheading her, though. That was exactly the kind of behaviour she had set out to discourage. She was aware of a large clock ticking outside the bedroom door, but it didn’t wake her up. Mary was busy having a very long dream.

In her dream, she was a spinster. Fastidious, polite, and thirty-eight years old. Her features were plain and unremarkable—they had always been plain and unremarkable. She had been a dutiful daughter when her parents were alive, and now Dream-Mary lived in the attic of the house her parents had left her. The remainder of the house she had hoped to let to a family—but no family liked the idea of living there with her up in the attic like that. So Mary let the house below to a solicitor named Pizarsky. He was out all day—that was good. He was punctual with his rent—also good. In the evenings, however, he hosted parties that were exclusively attended by attractive young ladies who giggled for hours on end. That was tiresome.

Mary and Mr. Pizarsky kept their exchanges as brief as possible.

“Morning, Miss F.”

“Good morning, Mr. Pizarsky.”

“Here’s the rent, Miss F.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pizarsky.”

“Off home for Christmas now, Miss F.”

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Pizarsky.”

On Valentine’s Day, Dream-Mary bought herself a single red rose, then immediately ran back into the shop, confused and embarrassed, to return it.

Most days Dream-Mary stayed at her desk until sunset, working in the special quiet of the otherwise empty house, the settling of floorboards and the ticking of clocks. She wrote romance novels under the pen name Wendy Darling. Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty. They were in great demand, Mary’s novels. They were read-them-once-and-throw-them-away sort of books, really. And Mary had seen people doing just that, throwing her novels away, or very deliberately leaving them behind on park benches and bus seats once they had finished. She tried not to let it get her down. She didn’t like to brood. She kept a framed photograph of her parents on her desk, to remind herself of their story, which amazed her. They had fallen in love and kept it up far into old age; that was all. Her father was the hero in every story she wrote, and her mother was the heroine. They had been gone five years, but she brought them together again and again, thirty-five lines of cream-coloured foolscap folio at a time. And they never tired of finding each other, even when she was reduced, in the final chapters, to typing with just one finger, her little finger, jabbing out words until her hand curled up and could do no more. She completed a novel every other month and took August and December off.

It was Dream-Mary’s custom to read the local newspaper as she ate her evening meal in the dining corner of her attic. She read it thoroughly, without omitting a single paragraph or page. It was much more difficult to be alarmed by the events of a day that was almost over. After that she would go for a walk, to keep fit. And upon her return to her attic she would say a few phrases aloud, experimenting with a friendly tone of voice. She didn’t often socialise, but it was important to keep her hand in. She rehearsed small talk about the weather, and about children and the cost of living. From Mr. Pizarsky’s party below, a gramophone puffed jazz up at her like smoke rings until she stopped trying. She put on her nightgown, did her stretching exercises, applied cold cream to her face, and went to bed. Her days were pleasant and her mood was even.