Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

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.

Mary 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.