Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

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:

So the simple maid

Went half the night repeating, “Must I die?”

And now to right she turned, and now to left,

And found no ease in turning or in rest;

And “Him or death,” she muttered, “death or him”. .

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.

Stupid Daphne. Is it any wonder he feels contempt. .

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:

Is real. Is unpredictable. Is lovely to hold.

Loves me (says M). Doesn’t know me.

Under M he had written:

Is so many things (too many things?). Is unpredictable. Is lovely to behold. Disapproves of me; wants more, better. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about me.

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!”