Mr. Fox Read online

  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.

  It was half past eight when I left the bar. The night was very stark, alternate streams of town cars and chequered taxicabs, blaring horns busily staking claims—here is the road and here is the sidewalk. But the road looked so much livelier, what if I tried the road?

  I often think it would be such luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. Others would have to worry for me, about me. There would be some sort of doctor there to tell me: “Don’t worry, Mary, it’s just that you are mad. Now, be quiet and take this pill.” And I would think, So that’s all it is, and I would be so glad. But aloud I would say, “What? I’m perfectly sane! You’re mad. . . .” Only mildly, though; just for show, really.

  November 1st, 1936

  St. John Fox

  177 West 77th Street, Apartment 25

  New York City

  Abominable Mr. Fox,

  Contemptible Mr. Fox,

  Nefarious Mr. Fox,

  Vile Mr. Fox,

  Loathsome Mr. Fox

  Putrid Mr. Fox,

  I closed my thesaurus and pulled the letter out of the typewriter with such haste that it tore; half of it was left in the scroll above the type bar. When I touched the two halves together they didn’t even fit anymore.

  Katherine was on my bed, reading a book I hadn’t set her. She looked up when I crushed the letter to Mr. Fox in my hand—that’s Katherine for you, she’d hardly blinked while I was pounding the typewriter keys, but the moment I quietly made something smaller between my fingers, she was all interest.

  I asked her what she was reading.

  She shrugged. “Some book.”

  “So you’ve already finished reading the books I set you, have you?”

  She turned a page. “Not yet, I’m getting to it.”

  “I shall tell your mother that you’re not applying yourself.”

  Katherine seemed intrigued. I had never threatened her before.

  “You probably should. After all, it’s my education that’s at stake. Maybe I need a new teacher or something. You missing London?”

  I laughed at her indifference, the way she’d spoken without even bothering to inject a nasty insinuating tone into her words.

  “Katherine, I could die horribly here in this chair, and my blood could spray all over the room and cover the pages of that fascinating book you’re reading, and I believe, I really do believe, that you’d just wipe the worst away and keep going.”

  Katherine stretched her legs. “That’s a pretty gruesome thing to say, Mary.” She shook her head. “Pretty gruesome.”

  She left the room, and I picked up the book she’d been reading. On the cover was an illustration of a steamboat. I glanced at the back. Vampires in the Deep South.

  Katherine returned with The Woman in White and settled in the chair before my typewriter. “Happy now?” she asked. I said I was happy. I had gone from standing by my bed to lying on it. I had been quite tired the past few days: sleeping longer than usual, feeling the shock of waking throughout my body, as if I had been flung against a wall. Katherine started typing. I didn’t open my eyes (when had I closed them?), but I said, “Hands off my typewriter, Katherine.”

  She didn’t stop. I hadn’t really expected her to. I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you’re saying, someone who understands exactly what you’re getting at. “Hmm,” the typewriter says. And “Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see.” And sometimes it chuckles. . . .

  When I woke up my bedroom door was closed.

  “Katherine,” I called.

  “What?” she called back. So she had not absconded. I relaxed somewhat. She would not have to be collected from a police station at a quarter to midnight, as she had on the Coles’ London trip. Katherine had given Hester, her previous companion, the slip in Covent Garden in order to engage in a vigorous bout of shoplifting. Having deemed Hester unable to cope with Katherine, the Coles had sacked her, then advertised for an immediate replacement. They hadn’t employed an English companion before and wanted someone well spoken and unapproachable, as if these traits could cow their daughter.

  I looked inside my typewriter. There’s a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

  “I’ve done all my algebra. And I’m on page two hundred and goddamn five of this book you’re making me read,” Katherine announced.

  “Don’t say ‘goddamn,’”I replied. “Walkies now!”

  She barked quite realistically.

  One evening I encountered Mr. Cole alone in the kitchen, bending over the toaster, using it to light his cigar. “Couldn’t find my matches,” he said when he straightened up. I said, “Ah,” and began going away again. My cup of tea could wait. But he reached out—not very far; he is built quite powerfully, and I’m like a doll beside him—and grabbed my hand. He twirled me
around the room, propped me up with my back against the counter, then took a puff on his cigar (he had not troubled himself to put it out the entire time). He leant so close to me that I could very clearly see the roots of hairs that had escaped his razor. I looked at his mouth because I thought he was going to kiss me and I hoped that if I paid attention he would not kiss me. That would have been my first kiss and it would have tasted of ash.

  He didn’t kiss me, but he put his hand on my breast. He continued to smoke whilst squeezing my breast through my brassiere and dress. I know I should have felt angry or violated, and I did try to, but his expression was distracted, as if he was doodling on a pad whilst mulling over another thing. Mainly I felt very confused. He had been looking at my forehead, but as he squeezed for the third time, he looked into my eyes. And let go immediately. “Places to go, people to see, Mary.” He walked backwards to the door, removing his cigar from his mouth for long enough to place a finger over his lips and wink. I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

  Mr. Cole was at home when Katherine and I returned from our walk, sitting in an armchair with Mitzi on his lap. Mitzi opened her arms to Katherine, inviting her to join the tableau. Katherine regarded her parents with frozen eyes and swerved around them, opting for the dining room, where a coloured maid in a white cap stood beside a stacked trolley, covering the table with trays full of vol-au-vents that no one would eat.

  “How much time do I have to get away before the ladies descend?” Mr. Cole asked. He seemed genuinely worried. Mitzi squeezed his neck and cooed that he was a grumpy bear, wasn’t he, wasn’t he.

  Mitzi hosted her women’s club only once a month, so it was tolerable. The wives of her husband’s colleagues would gather at the Coles’ apartment and fill it with cigarette smoke. Nothing was consumed but cocktails and crudités; everyone was trying to reduce. They’d go around in a circle, these women, each telling the others what she’d been reading, what she’d seen at the theatre or at the pictures, which art exhibition was most divine. Katherine and I would barricade ourselves into my room or hers, with a chair against the door in case Mitzi had too much to drink and was suddenly possessed with a desire to display her offspring. We sprawled in a nest of our own laps and legs, reading and crunching animal crackers. Katherine swore she wouldn’t have anything to do with any goddamn women’s club when she grew up. My only reply was, “Don’t say ‘goddamn.’” Sooner or later Katherine will be expected to contribute to her mother’s gatherings, and having endured it once, the next time will be easier, and so on until this brief moment when Katherine and I are in perfect agreement is lost, and it’ll be strange to both of us to remember that we ever understood each other. Katherine is completely different from me, and it’s more than just the fact that her father’s money will erode her until she is no longer abrasive to the rest of her social set, until she is able to mingle and marry amongst them quite contentedly. It’s also that she’s already very pretty. A little long in the nose, but on the whole, very pretty. After a while it will seem odd that she has these looks and makes no attempt to use them. Why doesn’t she smile and bat her eyelashes, the way her mother must have practically from birth? I wanted to tell her. Don’t look at people so strongly, Katherine Cole. Let your gaze swoon a little. Don’t speak so firmly; falter. Lisp, even. Your failure to do these things made me mistake you for someone like me.

  “Katherine is improving in English literature,” I told her parents, because I felt I should say something. Then I hurried to my room. Katherine joined me when the clock struck seven. And there we stayed, safe from the clinking of glasses and the lilting sound of civilised conversation. Katherine had been teaching herself how to read Tarot, and she told my fortune, laying down card after card, telling me what each one was supposed to predict. They were all bad cards. A heart spiked with sword blades, a lightning-struck tower, a demon holding a man and a woman on the same chain, a hooded figure walking away from cups that lay empty on the ground. She was taken aback; she reshuffled the cards. “Let’s start again,” she said.

  “Let’s not,” I said. “That’s cheating.” We put on shoes and coats and slid past the lounge and out the front door. In the garden at the side of the building, we knelt by the pond and fed the koi. There had been more rain earlier in the evening, so we turned up plenty of their favourite food without much effort. The fish surged to the surface of the water and ate the earthworms live from our fingers. Lamps lit the rosebushes as bright as day and sirens sounded and resounded, their screams strangely pure, choral. I had been all over this city on my own, looked down from its heights, looked up from its swarming pavements—I’d spoken to no one; everyone passed me by at a clip. It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.

  Once Katherine was asleep I read and marked her illustrated history project on the Church of England. I had to give her a C because she spoilt an otherwise thoughtful piece by suddenly concluding that the Church of England was Anne Boleyn’s “fault.” A Church is not the “fault” of anybody. Next, I set about preparing a lesson on stars, galaxies, and planets, poring over fat books I had withdrawn from the public library on Katherine’s ticket. There was so much information. I had to select things that would interest her, place them strategically alongside the things that were bound to bore her, the figures and units of measurement, in such a way as to disarm her objections to the important facts. I didn’t finish until one a.m., and by then it was too late to reach for my typewriter and add to the other pages I had been accumulating. So I sat beside the typewriter in the dark, and I pretended that I was working at it; then I pretended that all the work was finished, and I touched the keys that would make the page say

  THE END THE END THE END

  November 9th, 1936

  Mary Foxe

  85 East 65th Street, Apartment 11

  New York City

  Mary,

  Many thanks for your letter of November 1st. Here is what I propose: to have my secretary wait for you this Saturday at one p.m., in order to collect the pages you want me to look at, and to buy you a consolatory lunch if you’re hungry. Salmagundi, on Lexington and 61st, is a personal favourite of mine—if you object to the time, place, date, or all three, then please say so by return. Otherwise, save your stationery.

  Yours most chastened,

  The abominable, contemptible, vile, execrable, etc.,

  Mr. Fox

  177 West 77th Street,

  Apartment 25

  New York City

  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.”