Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

I always understood that it was a story, like all her other ones, the fairy tales she told. I’ve taken no harm from its not coming true. I don’t expect it to come true.

I spent Sunday morning typing fresh copies of the three stories I meant to give to Mr. Fox. Usually I make plenty of mistakes, and I waste quite a lot of paper that way. But this time mistakes were minimal — adrenaline lent me precision. I played “Mama Loves Papa” over and over on Katherine’s gramophone, which she’d placed in my room before leaving for Long Island with her parents. All three had left wearing starched tennis whites; they planned to take turns playing doubles on their tennis court, to help Mr. Cole forget the hassle of his working week. I haven’t been to the Long Island house, but I’ve seen photographs, and I hope the Coles never think to ask me along. Besides the tennis court they have a swimming pool and a topiary maze. Also a cook. What would I do in such a place? Die, I expect. Some Depression the Coles are having.

Mitzi occasionally asks me how I spend my weekends, and I tell her I volunteer at a soup kitchen on Times Square.

When I’d finished typing, I slid the pages into a black folder and put the folder in my satchel. My stomach sprang up my throat and I tried to be sick in the bathroom but had no such luck. I lay on my bed with The Count of Monte Cristo, rereading his astounding escape from the Château d’If. Good for you, Count of Monte Cristo. Your escape is one in the eye for jailers everywhere. I’ve given up trying to position my bed in such a way that the sky can be seen from the bedroom window — there just isn’t any sky in this part of Manhattan. On sunny days clouds are reflected in the plate glass halfway up the tallest buildings, but that’s the best this place can do.

It’s odd the way I keep to my bedroom even when the apartment is empty; more so when it is empty, actually. I can’t explain it — it’s not an attachment to the room itself, not anything to do with a sense of security or ownership. Not timidity, not disorientation. Maybe the Coles chose me for this very reason; they looked at me and thought, This girl is no threat to our home, to our cut crystal and heirloom silver, our framed landscapes and lace, oh, our lace. She’s English, but she’s not hoity-toity. She knows her place, she sure does know her place. There’s something ghostlike about this girl. . she will appear at certain times and in certain places, and at other times she will recede into a disinterested dark. Mary “Ghost” Foxe.

I would be at the bar before he arrived, I decided. To spy him before he spied me. I would sit close to the door with a glass of wine, drinking it slowly with my eyes half closed. Then, at seven p.m., I would look up and examine all those gathered around me. It would be like the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, all possible culprits together in a locked room.

At three minutes after seven I would stride over to the man whose appearance was the least remarkable and say, “Mind if I join you, Mr. Fox,” without a question mark. We would talk for one hour; I would hand over the stories and be back by eight-ten, eight-thirty at the latest. The Coles would be home at nine.

I chose to make my entrance at half past six. His inviting me for seven made it unlikely he would arrive before six-thirty himself. Unless seven represented the latter half of the “hour or two” he passed at the bar, in which case he would be already seated, ice cubes melting into his whisky. None of the characters in any of his stories drink whisky — they drink everything under the sun but that, I’ve noticed — so whisky is probably a drink Mr. Fox reserves for himself. He’d wait until ice and alcohol had merged completely before taking his first sip. Whilst waiting he’d. . what? Did he really go to the bar of the Mercier Hotel alone most Sundays, or did he have a drinking buddy named something like Sal, flat-headed sleepy-blinking Sal, a sports journalist whose lethargy concealed an encyclopaedic knowledge of every professional boxing statistic since the sport began? Good old Sal, uncomplicated company. Or perhaps Mr. Fox liked to drink with admirers of his books, young newspapermen with rolled-up shirtsleeves, smartly dressed girls who typed rejection letters on behalf of various publishers and literary agencies. He probably liked actresses. He hadn’t yet been married to or linked to an actress, only writers, but maybe a Broadway starlet was in the cards, an antidote to his run of bad luck. If I found Mr. Fox sitting at the bar with a simpering actress, I wouldn’t bother speaking to him, I’d leave immediately.

At ten minutes to six I walked into Katherine’s room and opened her wardrobe, which was so tidy it looked empty. I took her green skirt off a hanger and put it on; it fitted well. Next I went into Mitzi’s room. The clock chimed six and hammered out “Für Elise.” I sat at the dressing table in Katherine’s skirt and my own black brassiere (twenty minutes left — it would take me ten minutes to walk down to the Mercier) and used everything in sight. I powdered my face, rouged my cheeks, painted my eyelashes, combed my eyebrows. When I finished, I washed my face clean, because the results were exactly as I had expected and I looked ghastly. With three minutes remaining, I buttoned up Katherine’s silk blouse, turned the gramophone off, and left.

The lift attendant asked if I was going on a date. I ignored him. It’s quite an experience, ignoring the speech of someone you’re sharing a lift with. I suppose it should be done only when one has absolutely nothing to say. He tugged his cap and said, “Well, la-di-da and good evening to you, too,” when I got out at the ground floor.

Inside, the Mercier was all brass and mahogany and polished rosewood. Red velvet, too, and perfume soaked so deep in tar that it smelt dirty, a nice sort of dirty. I took a cramped corner table that a couple had just vacated. They looked happy together, walked out with their coat collars turned up and their fingertips just touching. I put my wineglass down between their empty glasses and asked the waitress not to clear them away. From the bar’s vast marble crest to the bank of tables and chairs that surrounded it, hardly anyone sat alone. There were a few more couples but mainly mixed groups of five, six, seven, the women sipping at cocktails with prettily wrinkled noses, the men using their cigars and whisky tumblers to emphasise the points they were making.

At twenty minutes to seven someone said, “Hi, there.”

I looked up at a man with a beer glass in his hand. His hair was slicked across his head with each strand distinct, like the markings on a leaf. He grinned.

“All on your lonesome?”

“Are you Mr. Fox?”

He winked and drew out the chair opposite me. “Sure, I’m him. I’ve been looking at you, and—”

I dropped my satchel onto the chair before he could sit down. “I’m waiting for someone.”

The man moved on without argument, took a seat at the bar, swivelled his stool to face my table, and smiled at me whenever I looked his way. I couldn’t help looking every now and again, for comparison’s sake. I began to feel certain that the man at the bar was Mr. Fox after all. His eyes were quite beady, there was too much white to them and they sat too close together, but his smile was pleasant, soothing, despite them.

At ten minutes past seven a waitress came over with another glass of wine for me. “Gentleman at the bar’s taken a shine to you. Sends this with his compliments. Says his name’s Jack.”

I nodded and let her put the glass down before me. I didn’t drink from it. It sat there, buying me time to wait here alone in this place. I looked into the wine and felt myself drowning in it. Mr. Fox didn’t come, he didn’t come, he didn’t.