Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

She dimpled at me. “Go on,” she said.

“Well. . things went on like that between you and I. . ”

“Went on like what, exactly?”

“I kept hitting you, I guess. I picked up a chair and I backed you up against a wall and started slamming it on either side of your head, just to scare you, at first. ‘Shhh,’ I said. ‘Shhh.’ You got too scared, or not scared enough. You kept putting your hands up to protect your face — I just grabbed your arm and punched you until you were on the floor. I stomped on your hands.”

Mary nodded, as if going over a mental checklist.

“I kicked you in the head.”

She nodded again.

“Then you must have worked out that I kept going for you because you kept moving. So you kept still. I walked away and watched you from across the room, to see what you’d do if I gave you room. You didn’t do anything, just lay there. I walked towards you again and you held your breath. I stayed close and you didn’t exhale.”

“Go on,” Mary said wanly. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I crouched down and I talked to you. Just some things in your ear. No idea what I was saying — nonsense, probably. I was just talking to calm you down. While I was talking I slit your throat. Messily, because I couldn’t walk in a straight line, let alone guide my hand from ear to ear without stopping. It was a real mess. A real mess.”

Mary didn’t shudder or look shocked. She looked polite, if anything. Somewhere between polite and bored.

“It couldn’t have happened. I’d have got the chair for that.” I wasn’t really talking to her — more thinking aloud.

“Yes. You would have. But too late for me. What made you do it?”

“What made me—”

“Yes. Why did you do it?”

“You’re asking me why, in my false memory of our marriage, I killed you?”

“I’m trying to help you think.”

I made a few brief guesses — I was in a killing mood, I was afraid of time, I was fooled by some inexplicable assurance that I was merely dreaming out my revenge, making myself safe for the daylight hours. Love fit in somewhere, I wasn’t sure how — disbelief that it had gone away, trying to force its return, trying to create an emergency that would scare love out of hiding.

“You did it because of love? Because you loved me too much?” she asked jovially. Her merriment was giving me the creeps. The whole conversation was giving me the creeps — talking like this about something that hadn’t really happened. I shouldn’t have started it. She’d seemed so interested, though, and that was rare. Maybe she was trying to be nice in her own way.

Mary pulled the stopper out of the scotch decanter and took a long swallow. “Okay, never mind about love,” she said, wiping her mouth. “You hated me. Because I wouldn’t come back and I was making you hate yourself, making you think there was something wrong with you.”

“No. . I already told you. It was because of the chain on the door.”

“Mr. Fox.” Mary toyed with the cut-glass stopper. “Is this a joke?”

“You found it funny?”

“That you just recounted one of your stories to me as if it was something that you really did?”

“Hm,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll write it down.”

“You already did,” she said, her forehead creased.

I waited blankly while she searched my stack of notebooks and picked up number six. She licked her finger and opened it up near the end. There, in my handwriting, was the tale I had just told her. As soon as I saw it I remembered writing it, and I was flooded with relief. Thank God it wasn’t me. Thank God I wasn’t capable of doing such a thing. It was cold, but I was sweating. When I put the book down I saw that I’d left moist ovals on the paper.

“ Now I’m worried,” Mary said.

Madame de Silentio takes in delinquent ruffians between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and turns them into world-class husbands by the time they are twenty-one. You’re admitted to Madame de Silentio’s Academy if you answer at least eighty-five percent of her entrance exam correctly, and you graduate with a certificate that is respected in every strata of polite society. No one can ever remember any of the questions that were on Madame de Silentio’s entrance exam. I know I can’t — I tried my best to fail the exam. I preferred not to be educated, fearing it wouldn’t suit me. Of course, I know better now. I won’t lie, it took me half a year, but I now realise how lucky I am to have this opportunity to become a man of true worth, to have the man I will be intercept the boy that I was.

What is her secret, you may ask. How did Madame de Silentio attain her ranking amongst the great educators of the modern world? It’s simple. Madame de Silentio knows what’s best for young people. She knows what’s appropriate. She refrains from cluttering our minds with information we don’t need to know. Here at Madame de Silentio’s our textbooks get straight to the point — European history is boiled down to a paragraph, with two sentences each for the histories of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Australasia doesn’t count. Young men at Madame de Silentio’s Academy learn practical skills that set us in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women. Here is a sample of the things we are taught:

Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence.

It says in the prospectus that Madame de Silentio’s students eat, sleep, and breathe good husbandry. That’s true. We’re taught to ask ourselves a certain question when we wake up in the morning and just before we fall asleep: How can I make Her happy? “Her” being the terrible, wonderful goddess that we must simultaneously honour, obey, and rule (she’d like us to rule her sometimes, we’re told) — the future wife. In our Words of Love class we learn all the poems of Pablo Neruda by heart, and also Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields lyrics. Love Letters, a compulsory extracurricular course of study, involves a close reading of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the entire class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanour.

We sleep eight to a dormitory, and our dormitory bedsteads are iron, with shapes from the end of days twisted into the headboards — lions lying alongside lambs, children caressing serpents. Some of the boys sit up in these dormitory beds and scream in the night, but then the matron comes with a cup of warm milk and puts a few drops of her special bittersweet medicine in it, and the screaming boy drinks deep and the trouble goes away. Madame de Silentio understands that becoming a man of true worth is a difficult process. And we understand that once we’re in the Academy we’ve got to stay here for as long as it takes — there’s no recourse to parents or guardians, as they’ve signed their rights to us away in their contract with Madame de Silentio, and it’s our own stupid fault for having been so unmanageable. Eighteen is the age at which any student is free to leave the Academy, but by then we’ve become used to the place. This is no philanthropic institution, mind you — the families of heiresses pay Madame de Silentio considerable sums of money, sums that we students can only guess at and whisper about, to ensure that they get the perfect husband for their precious Elaine, to ensure that their wayward Katherine is settled with the right life partner. The Academy is in many ways a business, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Madame de Silentio has found her niche, and the way of the world is such that if she did not demand recompense for her efforts she would receive none. So, good for Madame de Silentio.