Mr. Fox

31 RULES FOR LOVERS (CIRCA 1186)[1]

From The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Cappelanus

1. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.

2. He who is not jealous cannot love.

3. No one can be bound by a double love.

4. It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing.

5. That which a lover takes against the will of his beloved has no relish.

6. Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity.

7. When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.

8. No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons.

9. No one can love unless he is impelled by the persuasion of love.

10. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.

11. It is not proper to love any woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry.

12. A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.

13. When made public love rarely endures.

14. The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.

15. Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.

16. When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates.

17. A new love puts to flight an old one.

18. Good character alone makes any man worthy of love.

19. If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.

20. A man in love is always apprehensive.

21. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.

22. Jealousy, and therefore love, are increased when one suspects his beloved.

23. He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little.

24. Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved.

25. A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.

26. Love can deny nothing to love.

27. A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved.

28. A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved.

29. A man who is vexed by too much passion usually does not love.

30. A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.

31. Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.

That nails it — I like this Cappelanus fellow!—M.F.

Ha, ha, ha. . indeed.—S.J.F.

HMMMMM.—D.F.

I stayed in bed almost all day Monday. To see if St. John would notice, and if he did notice, to see what he would do about it. But he didn’t notice, didn’t even come up to ask me about dinner. Too busy with his book, I guess. It can’t be easy killing people off the way he does, especially since each death has got to be meaningful. I heard him on the radio once, before I even met him — a fan of his called in, oh so earnest, asking him why some character or other had died in such a meaningless way. St. John’s answer: “I was going to say that the meaninglessness of her death has a meaning in itself, but the truth is, I missed that one. So thanks. I’m going to work harder.”

While he worked, he played a symphony I liked — he played it very loudly, but it was good that way, rising through the floorboards and welling up around me. I was lying on music, my arms and legs flopping down over a pillar of the stuff, my back the only straight line in me. If only my old dance teacher could have seen me, she’d have had a fit. I was always the girl who was “just so.” It was the easiest thing in the world back then — if I felt as if taking too deep a breath would make me fall flat on my face, that meant I was “just so.”

There was housework to do, things to dust and scrub and polish and move around and fret over, work that has never been visible to anyone else, and I took great pleasure in not doing any of it. I spent a few hours looking at a book of watercolors that just happened to be lying around, but they began to make me feel weepy. They were so faded, the landscapes, and they reminded me of some I’d started and put up in the glasshouse, half finished, because painting them made me yawn so much, and I didn’t suppose that anyone who came out there for a cocktail on a summer evening would care enough to ask if they were supposed to look like that. They’ve been there two summers and no one’s asked yet.

When it got dark, Mary Foxe came and sat by me with a candle. I’d gone so dead in my senses and my brain that I’d been expecting her, and it was actually nice to have a change. She closed the door so we’d have some privacy. I didn’t protest. “He won’t be coming up,” Mary Foxe said. “He’s probably going to go to sleep in there tonight.”

“Again. I know.”

She was naked, and not a bit self-conscious about it. She didn’t need to be. What I saw by candlelight made me sure that this was really going to happen — St. John Fox had dreamed himself up a nice little companion who wasn’t going to get old, and he was going to drop me and live with her. She looked younger than me, a lot younger than him—

“For God’s sake, put some clothes on, will you,” I told her.

“I don’t know where they’ve gone. I think I’ve annoyed him and he’s trying to punish me. I’m sorry if I’m making you feel uncomfortable. Give me any old thing to wear and I’ll put it on,” she said, in a very simple way. No guile, no false concern, just honesty. I couldn’t really be mad at her when she spoke to me like that.

I got out of bed. “Come on.” We went to my dressing room and I gave her a lilac shirtwaist to put on. I didn’t tell her, but it was my favourite thing to wear. I’d worn it in Buenos Aires on the first day of our honeymoon. There it was all over again, the first day, the first day, the first day, his hand in mine, all that woven into a dress. And there was no denying that Mary Foxe looked as cute as a button in my dress; its shade brought out interesting hues in her hair, or vice versa. I was glad we were the same dress size. It was something of a consolation to know that I’m nowhere near as fat as I sometimes think I am.

Mary Foxe sat in the chair at my dressing table and I stood beside the chair and she stared at me and I stared at her. It was just interesting to see what St. John wanted in a woman. Her hair hung over her shoulder in a wispy plait, clumsily done. Someone should show her how to plait her hair. I wondered what would become of me. I didn’t see him turning me out, not exactly — but I might be too proud to stay. He’d make me some sort of allowance, I suppose. I couldn’t go back to my parents, though. Pops would forbid Maman from giving me a piece of her mind, and she wouldn’t — not while he was there. But she’d give me that resigned look—Messed up again, Daphne? Just what I expected. The look I got when I quit college, only ten times worse. I should fight this, make some kind of threat. Greta would fight like a hellcat. Twice now, some girl has tried to get Pizarsky to fall in love with her, and each time Greta’s seen the girl off. She’s not above fighting for her man. How do you threaten someone like Mary Foxe, though?

“I’ve never seen you this close up,” Mary Foxe said. “I like looking at your face; it’s a good face.”

I couldn’t help laughing at her formality. I wanted to say I thought the same about her, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Greta would have risen up in my mind like a ghoul, sneering. That’s right, pay her compliments while she replaces you. I was always weak in the head — that must be it. I can’t seem to care anymore about what I’m supposed to do. This is not a typical scenario.

“What are you thinking about, Mrs. Fox?” Mary Foxe asked.

I laughed again.

“You’re thinking of something funny?”

“He said you were British.”

“Mrs. Fox,” she said. “I think I’m more like you than not.”

“How can you know that?” Anger began to kick in. “How can you know that?”

Mary Foxe looked up at me with big, thoughtful eyes. “I’m glad there isn’t a stapler around.”

Abruptly, I asked her if she knew whether I was pregnant. I’d cancelled my appointment with the doctor. It’d be a bad scene if I was pregnant and a bad scene if I wasn’t.

“You don’t look pregnant,” Mary Foxe said.

“Do you mean you don’t know? If you don’t, just say so.”

“I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. How could I know that? I’m not a doctor.”

“I thought you were. . magical or something. Like a spirit.”

She opened her eyes very wide, wondering at me. “No, I don’t think I am.”

“Okay. Not magical and not a doctor. Got it.”

She was really too amusing. Now that I’d asked if she was magical, I could see her wondering whether she might be magical, after all. What was this, me finding myself wanting to look out for this girl, thing, whatever she was?

“What do you want, Mary Foxe? My husband?”

“I believe in him,” she said slowly. I wondered if she’d ever told him that, and if so, what he had to say about it. Someone you made up turns around and tells you they believe in you — what response could you possibly make? The scenario is just plain weird. And really kind of impertinent on her part, too. If it happened to me I think I’d be speechless for the rest of my life.

“I love him,” she added. That simple tone again; she thought this was something that was all right to say to me.

“That’s nice. So do I.” We sized each other up again.

“Mrs. Fox.” Mary put a hand on my arm, and we jumped away from each other in a hurry. The static, the awful static of her touch, it was exactly the way I imagined I’d feel if I ever brushed against an electric fence. My knees knocked together in a frenzy.

“That caused an unpleasant sensation and I won’t do it again,” said the little comedian across the room.

“Good. Well, you were about to say something. Go on.”

“I wondered if you had eaten today.”

“No, I haven’t. What’s it to you?”

“I wondered — I wondered if we could go out to dinner together. Someplace fancy. And if I could wear a nice hat.”

She wondered if we could go someplace fancy for dinner and whether she might wear a nice hat. One of mine, I suppose, since there weren’t any other hats to hand. For all her shapeliness, this wasn’t a woman I was dealing with. This wasn’t the M. I’d pictured when I’d looked over that list of things in her favour. She seemed a girl barely in her teens, mentally speaking. What if I worked on her a little, taught her a difficult attitude and sent her back to her master with it?

“I know a place,” I said. “Let me just get dressed.”

She turned her back while I dressed. Then we tried all my hats on and I got caught up in the excitement of taking someone new — a brand-new person, almost — out to do something new. She got the giggles and so did I, so loudly that I thought St. John was going to hear from all the way downstairs and come up to see what was going on. He didn’t. She decided on a hat. Then changed her mind. And changed her mind and changed her mind. Very indecisive about hats, that Mary Foxe. Maybe she’d tire of St. John and slope off somewhere. Maybe she’d vanish the moment I set foot in the restaurant and asked for a table for two. How foolish I’d look. But I was prepared to risk it. I wanted to see a smile on her face — some people make you want to see them smiling. And I like a project. I do like to have a project.

After about twenty minutes of hat changing, I’d insisted she stick with the black cloche hat she had on. She pinned on a brooch of mine and moved this way and that so it glinted at her in the mirror, eager magpie of a girl. We rang for a taxi, and I let her give our address — she recited it carefully, and looked so excited. She waited out on the porch, hopping, though she said she’d try to be patient, and I knocked at the door of St. John’s study.

“Daphne?” he called out. But not at first. He had begun to say “Mary” and stopped himself. I went in, stayed near the door. He dropped his pen and stood up, strangely gallant. What for? It was only me.

“You’re really something, you know that?” I told him. That wasn’t what I’d meant to say, it just came out. It was the audacity of what he was doing, and the fact that I couldn’t fathom how the hell he was doing it.

“Well, so are you,” he said, and looked admiring, turning his reply into a comment on the way I looked tonight. Our exchanges always seem to turn into whatever he wants them to. I don’t think any woman can get the better of him. Keep things brief, Daphne, keep things brief, and you’ll get out with your head still on your shoulders. This man is a deadly foe.

“I just wanted to say I’m going out to dinner at the Chop House.”

“Great. We haven’t been there in a while, have we? Let me just finish my sentence, and—”

“Oh, no, you take as long as you need. I’m going with Greta.”

“Oh, then don’t worry about my dinner, I don’t need feeding at all. I get by on liquor and flattering notices in the newspapers,” he said evenly. A dark man, my St. John, tall and broad-shouldered and full of force he doesn’t exert. I’m only just starting to see him clearly.

“Stop it. She asked me centuries ago.”

He inclined his head to show that he had heard. He mumbled something. Against my better judgment, I asked him what he’d said.

“Just Greta?”

“What do you mean, ‘Just Greta’?”

St. John sat down again, scanning the page he’d just been working on. As he read he began to look baffled, as if someone else had snuck in and scrambled his sentences while he’d been talking to me. “Wondered if she’d make Pizarsky tag along, that’s all.” He attacked his page with short, exasperated scratches of his pen, crossing out. He didn’t seem to like a single word he saw.

“Oh, J.P. — such a funny little man, isn’t he?” I said. “So short and squat. And I hardly know what he’s talking about half the time.” St. John didn’t stop crossing things out, but his lips twitched; I think he was happy I’d said that. But I felt terribly guilty, because that isn’t what I think about John Pizarsky at all. I honestly think he rescued me yesterday, and showed a sweet side I didn’t know he had. And while it’s true I’m not quite sure what he meant to tell me, it helped. It did help, and I’m grateful to him. I’d let J.P. down; I knew it in the pit of my stomach, but I told myself he’d never know that I’d talked about him like that. I’d make it up to him. I’d read that book he lent me six months ago, and I’d discuss it with him and pretend it had changed my life.

That thing he’d told me about Lady Mary conquering Mr. Fox just by telling him what she’d seen in his house. . telling him right to his face in front of all the guests at that ghastly betrothal breakfast. And all Mr. Fox could do was stand there denying it, his denials getting weaker and weaker as her story got more detailed. I know what you’re doing — I know what you are. She had power after that, the knowing and the telling — power to walk away, or stay, save his life, order his death. I don’t know what I’d have done in her place. It’s easier to picture Greta in that kind of situation — Greta would’ve blackmailed him, for sure. Just for fun, and pocket change.

Mary caused quite a stir at dinner, and I was glad to be there. She was a little sad to have to take the hat off indoors, but she ate and drank and touched the knives and forks and spoons and her wineglass with such delight, you couldn’t help but watch her. And she watched everyone, and told me what she thought of them. A group of four men moved tables so that they were in our line of vision, and whenever Mary looked over at them they toasted her. She got quite mischievous about it, and made them drop their cutlery at least ten times as they scrambled to lift their glasses. “It’s kind of like a jack-in-the-box,” she said. She was blushing because of all the attention, her cheeks a gorgeous shade of pink, and I said, quoting something I’d read, “Modesty is more effective than the most expensive rouge.” Then I realised I hadn’t read it anywhere and I’d just made it up. “Modesty is more effective than the most expensive rouge,” I said again.

“Hey, you should put that in your book,” Mary said, with a smile of approval. Two couples St. John and I knew, the Comyns and the Nesbits, came over to say hello and get an eyeful. I introduced Mary to them as “a second cousin of St. John’s’,” which seemed to satisfy them, and they shook hands with her without any difficulty, though I was very worried that there would be. Mrs. Nesbit is the yelling kind, and alarming her in any way is a surefire route to notoriety. The Nesbits and the Comyns were as nosey as they could be in a few brief minutes, and Mary told them she’d just come out of finishing school in Boston. She was a fluent liar, and really warm with it, really personal. If I hadn’t seen her come to life before my very eyes I’d have believed her.

“You must come to dinner next week,” Mrs. Nesbit said, before they left the restaurant. And Mary said she’d absolutely adore to. I began to foresee a disgustingly sociable future, then tried to see the three of us out for the evening; Mary, St. John, and I, and that jarred me out of my speculation.

“Mary. . what was that about a book? What do you mean, my book?”

Mary poured us both more wine, fixed me with a suddenly keen gaze. “Aren’t you going to write one?”

I’d won a couple of prizes for essays and things at school, and a prize for a short story. But that was all so long ago. And it wasn’t hard to shine at that sort of thing at my school; no one really studied hard because it was so unnecessary when you were going to marry well. Even so, maybe I would try. It could well go the way of the watercolor paintings, and the clay pottery, and the botany. But there would be many lonely hours ahead for me, and I thought it would be good to give them purpose.

“Did you put something in my wine, Mary? I’m just wondering how I’m keeping my temper. You just swan in, take my husband with one hand and offer me a hobby with the other. . ”

Mary’s hand hovered over mine. “We’re going to be all right.” She flexed her fingers, closed her eyes ecstatically, and breathed in and out. It was embarrassing, and I told her to stop making herself conspicuous.

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.

I had a lot of questions for her. Whether she and St. John could read each other’s thoughts, what her first memory was, things like that. The first thing she remembered was a shilling with King George of England’s head on it. It had been very well taken care of, polished and kept clean, and it shone in St. John’s dirty hand down where he crouched in the trench. He’d swapped something for it — she couldn’t remember what he’d swapped, but she knew he’d wanted the shilling because it was bright. She told me about the first job St. John took after the war. He’d been a bill collector, but he doesn’t say much about those times. It was fascinating listening to her.

“He was one of the best,” Mary said, wolfing steak down as if she’d heard there was going to be a shortage. “He hounded debtors door to door, plucking away the false names and new addresses they tried to hide behind. He developed a method. Firstly, he paid no visible attention to the poverty or misery of the people on his list. Secondly, once he caught up with them he’d only ever say one sentence, demanding what was owed. That was it, his method. He repeated that one sentence over and over without changing the formulation of it, until he was paid. You should have seen him, Mrs. Fox. He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he’d get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he’d just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts. His collection rate was outstanding. It doesn’t take much to horrify people who are already frightened.”

She frowned. “He was good at being a bill collector but it wasn’t good for him. For days at a time he hardly talked to anyone but me. And sometimes at the end of his workday he’d walk into walls and closed doors. He saw them up ahead but he just didn’t stop walking.”

I asked her about the first story he wrote, and she told me about the crummy boardinghouse he was living in back then, just a bed, a desk, a chair, and a few easels, which he placed open books on, to look at. Art monographs and cookbooks, poetry, a guide to etiquette, a dictionary, a Bible. He’d get back from work and walk from easel to easel, picking up fleeting impressions. Mary turned the pages for him. Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion — but in the MIND. Next: And what if excess of love / Bewildered them until they died? And: A woman is always consumed with jealousy over another woman’s beauty, and she loses all pleasure in what she has. . After that: Be careful that the cheese does not burn, and let it be equally melted. Then he’d spend the night bent over his notebook, writing in zigzags, his pace irregular.

She was very reluctant to answer my other questions, about the war, and I thought it must be because of terrible things he’d done, or because he’d been a coward. But she said it wasn’t that. “If I answered the questions you’re asking me,” she said, “you’d wish I hadn’t told you, because you wouldn’t know what to say. I think he worries that people sneer at him for coming back safe and sound, or think that he must have been taken captive and put to work tending enemy vegetable patches. But just trust me. Mr. Fox was decent in those times. He did what he could, and he was as decent and as brave as he could be.”

We changed the subject. Mary told me she had been doing some reading of her own. Hedda Gabler and The Three Musketeers, so far. “The women in these books are killers!” she said, her voice escalating with each word so that by the time she reached the last one the diners around us were looking around for the killers.

“Did you think they couldn’t be?” I told her about one of my favourite villainesses, a flame-haired woman named Lydia Gwilt, who died changing her ways.

“Of course she did,” Mary said, frowning. “This is worse than I thought. If you make the women wicked, then killing them off becomes a moral imperative.”

My first thought was, But they’re not real, and my second thought was, Under absolutely no circumstances can you say that; you’ll hurt her feelings. So I devised a title for the book I was going to write—Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters, and she cheered up at the assurance that everyone would survive.

She wanted to experience things; she had a list. She planned to attend a big band concert, and she planned to walk through a field of yellow rapeseed, and she planned to get an injection, and anything else I might recommend. She promised me she’d settle down soon, and I found myself telling her to take her time. Growing up, I was glad to be the only girl, with big brothers who teased me and acted with unerring instinct to keep the heartbreakers away from me. But it might have been nice to have had a little sister, and to have helped her out from time to time, with advice, and chaperoning, etc.

Mary said she was going to sleep in St. John’s lighthouse, on Cloud Island. I told her I wouldn’t hear of it, I wouldn’t sleep for thinking of her all alone in that weird old place. But she’d already stolen the keys from him, and she said she thought it was nice out there. She said she liked to look at the sea, that it made her sing. “The first time Charlotte Brontë saw the sea — she was about seventeen or eighteen, I think — she was utterly overcome. . ” she told me. She didn’t seem to notice she’d slipped into a British accent, and I didn’t point it out to her, I just listened. “. . After all those years on the moors. She’d imagined what the sea was like, over and over, of course — how could she not — but when she saw it, it was more than she’d imagined. Didn’t someone write that nothing’s greater than the imagination? I think that’s nonsense, don’t you?”

She said all this to me in the back of the taxi that was taking us home. She was sort of panting, then she was out-andout sobbing, and to hell with the static, I held her and smoothed her hair and pushed the dimple in her cheek until she was able to smile. “You’re very kind,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just taken such a lot for me to get here.” I saw what she meant. All I could do to help was treat her as if she was ordinary.

Still — I had to know. I mean, it was a hell of a thing. “How did you get — here, Mary?”

“We were fooling around with stories. We put ourselves in them,” she said flatly, as if she didn’t even believe herself. Too much awe. Like someone explaining a house fire that burnt down their whole block: “We were playing around with matches and gasoline.”

“What — where are these stories? Can I read them?”

She leaned forward and told the taxi driver to drop us off by the dock at Cloud Cove.

I told her that the last boat must have gone an hour ago. I told her to come back with me. I told her that St. John would have to know what was going on sometime. That she was real now, that she ate steak and talked to the neighbors and was probably going to have everyone in town, men, women, children, trying to get next to her before the week was out.

“I’ll swim over,” she said. “I like having a secret from him. I’ll be all right, honestly. Come and see me tomorrow, and you’ll see I’m perfectly cosy out there.”

I looked back as the taxi drove away from the dock — she fiddled with her hair, seemed to be tying the lighthouse keys into a tight knot in her hair. That would be hard work to comb out in the morning. She peeled off my shirtwaist, my favourite lilac shirtwaist, discarded it, and dived into the water. The taxi driver saw her, too. He raised his eyebrows but not too high. He was a taxi driver. He’d seen a lot of things. “Well, it is summer. And she’s from out of town.” That’s all he said.

St. John came out of his study as soon as I opened the front door. Very quietly, he told me that Greta had phoned for me.

“Oh — what did she say?” I asked. Then I remembered that I was supposed to have been at dinner with her. And I shivered, a chill in my back that made me feel as if I was falling even though I stood quite still. He shivered, too. Much more noticeably, as if tugged by strings.

“She said she’d call back tomorrow.”

“Okay.” I switched a lamp on. It was frightening to be with him in the dark, seeing him shiver like that and listening to him speak so impassively. When I saw his expression I wanted to switch the lamp back off again. Anger. It was etched all over his face, the lines drawing up into a snarl.

“Why did you lie?”

I looked at him and didn’t say anything. He took a step backwards, and I don’t know how I didn’t scream — he seemed to be readying himself to spring at me.

“Are you going to tell me who you were with?”

I don’t think I could have managed a single word, even if I’d wanted to. I knew it looked bad. And it was going to look even worse if I told him whom I’d really been with. It would look like mockery, throwing something he’d told me back in his face.

“I think I’m going to knock you down,” he said. “If you just keep standing there like that I’m really just going to knock you down. Go — upstairs, to hell, get a room somewhere with your damn Pizarsky, just get out of here.”

That stunned me; I don’t know why I laugh when I’m hurt. “Oh, Pizarsky! Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you could put another plus in Mary’s column—‘Doesn’t run around with John Pizarsky.’”

I turned towards the front door — but where, as a rational adult, did I mean to go? Did I mean to swim over to the island, as Mary had? Burst in on Greta and J.P., or the Wainwrights? I slid past him and went up to the spare room. I dragged a chest of drawers over to the door; it was just the right height for me to lodge a corner of it under the door handle, which turned ten minutes later, to no avail. Then he must have rammed a shoulder against the door — it shuddered, and my heart hammered in my ears. He did that just once, without saying a word. Then he went away.

I sat up late, late, looking out over our garden. There was lightning, and rain battered the ground, and I thought of Mary Foxe, miles away, watching the storm through the lighthouse window. I thought of the things she knew about St. John. I saw a shiny shilling and a dark-haired young man with eyes like stains on glass. Alone in a big city, walking into walls. Everyone hurts themselves in the city; then they just pick themselves up so as not to get in anyone else’s way. And then he went home, to company devised for him alone; he went home to a girl who wasn’t there. I envied Mary for being what she was, for being so close to him; I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I’d break something inside me.

The night changed me. I built a scene in my head, better than that line I’d come up with about modesty and rouge. I pictured a woman alone at her dressing table, getting ready to go onstage. She’s exotic-looking — maybe dark-skinned, maybe an Indian — she’s had hecklers before, guys saying really filthy things, and now she’s really going at it with the makeup, just plastering it on, drama around the eyes, making herself look like a woman from another world so the audience will just sit there with their mouths open and let her sing her song and get out of there in peace. And while she’s getting ready this woman is talking to someone sat behind a screen — I’m not sure who that someone is yet. Anyway, the woman at the dressing table — her heart’s breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off. She’s saying, “Let me tell you something, kid. Love is like a magic carpet with a mind of its own. You step on that carpet and it takes you places — marvelous places, odd places, terrifying places, places you’d never have been able to reach on foot. Yeah, love’s a real adventure! But you go where the carpet goes; after you’ve stepped onto it you don’t get to choose a goddamned thing. Well. . there’d better be a market for magic carpets. ’Cause from tonight, mine’s for sale.”

And that’s how I plan to begin Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters. I think I’ll cut the part about the magic carpet being for sale, though. It might come off as tacky.

I moved the dresser away from the door at about four in the morning. I had to go to the bathroom. Then I went into our bedroom, mine and St. John’s. He wasn’t there. I went downstairs and found him in his study, asleep at his desk, drooling a little on some newly written pages so that the ink ran. I pulled the pages out from under his arms and put them aside without looking at them. He woke up, but he didn’t open his eyes. “I can explain about dinner,” I said. “In the morning. Just come out to Cloud Island with me, and I’ll show you.” He made no answer, and I pinched him. He opened his eyes, then, and gave me a sulky look.

“How’s the book going?”

He winced.

“Will you read me some? Please?”

“It’s not ready.”

“Just a little.”

He read a couple of pages aloud, very quickly. Then he saw that I wanted to hear more and he slowed down. He writes beautifully but without hope. Odd that he could be responsible for a little dancing cinder like Mary. He reached a particularly stressful part of a chapter and I came to crisis and said, “Oh, Lord,” before I could check myself. He looked up from the page. “Bad things are going to happen, D.”

“To the two of us?” I held out my hand to him. He took it and touched his lips to my wrist. Pins and needles, as if all my blood was rushing back into me.

“Yes, to the two of us. It’s inevitable.”

“But good things are going to happen, too.” He opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, closed his mouth. “Were you going to say I sound like Mary?”

“Or Mary sounds like you. . ”

I came to him without substance, and six years later I’m still the same. Sometimes I say terrible things to him because I don’t want him to know I’m sad; sometimes I fly off the handle to hide the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And other times — too often, maybe — I don’t dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone. I’m too stupid for him.

Have you ever heard a note in someone’s voice that said “This is the end”? I heard it in the next words he said to me, and I stopped listening. Have you ever wanted to try and cross an ending with some colossal revelation—“There’s something I never told you. I’m a princess from the kingdom atop Mount Qaf,” for example—“My family live in eternal youth, and if you abide with me, you will, too. I kept this secret from you to see if you would cherish me for who I am.” Have you ever wished, wished, wished. .

My head got so heavy, it sank down onto my chest. So say whatever it is you think you’ve got to say, St. John. That you’re not in love with me. That you need to be alone. Say it. I’m not going to like it, no, I won’t like it at all. But I’ll be all right.

I told him that I loved him. I’ve never, ever, said that to him before, because I just didn’t know how he’d take it. I love you. I mouthed the words because there didn’t seem any point in interrupting him just then. I don’t know if he saw. I hope he did, because I don’t believe it’s the sort of thing a woman can tell a man more than, say, three times in their life together. It’s only really appropriate in the event of a life-threatening emergency, “I love you.” It means a different thing to us than it means to them. God knows what it means to them. God knows what it means to us.

“. . start again, D. Let’s start all over again,” my husband said. He rested his hands on my shoulders for a moment, then took them away. “Can we?”

Start again? Nice in theory, but what was he really trying to say? How far back would we have to fall? All that undoing. .

Show you’re game, Daphne.

“Sure,” I said. I held out my hand. “Shake on it.”

We shook hands. He held on to my hand; his grip was tight, and our palms were sweaty. I looked up at him, he looked down at me, and I had absolutely no idea what was on his mind just then. I decided to wait. But after a few more speechless seconds I figured he must not know what to say next. Maybe he was scared of saying the wrong thing.

So I took the initiative. I broke the handshake and introduced myself. I said I was glad to meet him, and I asked him what his name was. I heard myself, all bubbles and sparkle. I’d had to drop my gaze to be able to pull off the playful act, though, and I felt him looking at me, still looking. I heard him stifle a yawn. Then he lifted my chin with his thumb; his lips grazed my cheek; my spine melted down my back; he murmured, “Okay, but I was wondering if we couldn’t go a little faster than that—”

I slid my hands up under his shirt, my fingers spread across the bareness of his chest, shaking as I felt the depth of the breaths he took. It felt nice, of course, but really I was just stalling him, trying to think of a way to give in without letting him think he could always get his own way. I needed some phrase that was simultaneously encouraging and disparaging.

“Well?” he said, and he was so close, smiling just a little, his lips not quite touching mine. I just couldn’t find that phrase I wanted, so I gave his nose a good, hard tweak — all the better for being sudden. He gave a pretty satisfying squawk after that, so I kissed him.

And, laughing a little, he kissed me back. He kissed me like ice cream, like a jazz waltz, the rough, gentle way the sea washed sand off my skin on the hottest day of the year. And the whole time there was that little laugh between us, sweet and silly.

We rode the ferry across to the lighthouse in the morning, having slept too late to walk across. Mary Foxe wasn’t there. But she’d left us a note on the kitchen table, with the keys to the lighthouse on top of it.

Gone travelling! To Mexico via Mississippi. Met a beachcomber who said he’d take me as far as Virginia — not bad, huh? Don’t know how long I’ll be gone.

Mrs. Fox — I’ll send you a forwarding address when I know it, so you can send me pages of Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters — don’t forget to write it. And don’t talk yourself out of it — you can do it, and it’s going to be really good. (Maybe I am slightly magical after all.)

Mr. Fox — don’t worry. I’ll come back to you. Maybe you’ll be nicer to me once you’ve missed me a little. And hey, now you can do whatever you want. For a while.

I’m dying to know what it’ll be like when I come home — the three of us(!). I almost wish I was there and back again already. .

Take care of each other,

okay?

M.F.

We’d found my shirtwaist by the dock, just where she’d left it, crumpled and ruined by the rain, so I could only hope she had some clothes on.

St. John read the note over and over, his lips moving silently. He looked both stricken and relieved. I suspected that in the next few minutes he was going to start quizzing me pretty hard.

As for me, I’d noticed just how similar Mary’s handwriting was to St. John’s and was thinking that perhaps a break from Mary Foxe wasn’t such a bad idea after all.