Mr. Fox

LIKE THIS

There was a Yoruba woman and there was an Englishman, and. .

That might sound like the beginning of a joke, but those two were seriously in love.

They tried their best with each other, but it just wasn’t any good. I don’t know if you know what a Yoruba woman can be like sometimes. Any house they lived in together burnt down. They fought; their weapons were cakes of soap, suitcases, fists, and hardback encyclopaedias. There were injuries.

The man liked to make things. He took a chisel to stone with kindness and enquiry, as if finding out what else the stone would like to be. But his woman kept him from working — that’s why they were poor. They wondered why things were like that between them when other people loved each other less and had peace. There were days when she’d open her eyes and be him for six hours in a row; she knew all his secrets and nothing he had done seemed wrong to her, she knew how it was, how things had been, she was there. There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.

But who finds happiness interesting?

One day the woman stamped her foot and wished her man dead. So he died. (And now you know what a Yoruba woman can be like sometimes.)

She had a devil of a time getting him back after that one. Books and candles and all the tears she could cry, and yet more — she had to borrow some from friends, and some from trees at dawn. Finally she had to give up all the children she might ever have had. In the dead of night they were scraped under the knife of a witch with a steady hand and a smile. .

It was the most expensive thing she had ever done. Once the woman was barren, her man returned. He wasn’t grateful. He was tired; it hadn’t been easy coming back. He said, Let’s have no more of this. She nodded slowly, saying, I don’t dare go on. She was still weak, and though he was only a little stronger he carried her to the car and sat beside her in there; he spread a map across their knees and told her to choose a place where he could leave her. She would not choose. Paris, then, he said. He remembered a visit he had made there long before he met her. He remembered how the river had charmed him, how it had seemed to talk to the sun and to the city it flowed through, bringing news from the sea rolling in under the bridges. He remembered lion heads carved above great heavy doors, and how in their old age the heads had yawned instead of roaring. He thought that she would like it there, and that she would not be lonely.

He showed her the route that they would take, and they agreed that at any point before Paris she could say “stop” and leave him then. She hadn’t packed any of her belongings. She wore a brown dress, flat brown shoes, and a shabby coat of the same colour. The coat belonged to the man, and he had put a little money in an inside pocket. The woman’s hands spent the entire journey folded on her lap, safe and still. Sometimes she looked out of the car window at the things that passed them by. Sometimes she looked at him. They didn’t really talk. At one point he coughed and said, “Excuse me.”

When they got to Dunkirk she didn’t feel able to say stop, nor could she say it at Lille, or Amiens. She wasn’t particularly worried about where she would go or what she would do. Those things didn’t seem important. Silently, he changed his mind again and again, but at every turn he remembered how she had told him to die.

At Paris, on a tiny street that ran alongside a vast busy one, he let her out of the car, and she was like a moth in her drab dress as she leaned in and told him that she had never meant him harm.

He mumbled that he hoped she would be well.

He drove away and the buildings around her drew closer together. With her eyes she climbed their sepia stonework, the curls and flourishes. There was a ring on her finger; he had given it to her in exchange for their thousandth kiss, and she turned it around and around, trying to find a way out of her skin. I have loved a fool who counted kisses, she thought. The sky passed above like glass. She sat down on the pavement and watched people walking around. There was a café directly opposite her. Couples went in holding hands, and the dust on the windows hid what they did next, where they sat, what they had to drink. A woman came out of the café alone. She was dressed entirely in navy blue. In one perfectly manicured hand she held twelve fountain pens. In the other she held a white cup. She took a seat on the pavement, too.

“Drink this,” said the woman in blue.

“What is it?” asked the woman in brown.

Blue became brisk: “It’ll buck you up. Hurry.”

Listlessly, obediently, Brown drained the little white cup in one gulp. Bitter espresso, that’s all it was.

“Now. Take these.” Blue handed Brown the fountain pens. “You have to go soon. You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

Brown did not feel particularly bucked up. If anything, she felt duller. “Go where? Catch up on what?”

“Writing,” Blue replied. “You write things. I was never any good at it, but you will be. That’s where you’ll live and work.” And she pointed at the front door of a house a few steps away. The door was painted bright blue, so you couldn’t miss it.

“Er. . What?”

Blue laughed; her laughter was delightful. “Oh. . you’ll see.”

“Who are you?”

“That man who just dropped you off and drove away. . I’m the one who was meant for him,” Blue said calmly. “There was a terrible mistake a few decades ago; there are many cases like ours, and they’re only just being sorted out. From now on, I’m in charge. I’ll take care of everything. All you have to do is go through that door and into your proper place in life. And you will forget him. You will forget today; you will forget everything.”

Brown was astonished, and said nothing.

“Doesn’t that please you?” Blue asked.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Brown. “I don’t want to forget about him. I don’t want my proper place in life. I don’t want to go in at that door. I don’t want—”

“Your heart is broken, poor little fool,” Blue interrupted. “You have no idea what you want.”

“It isn’t broken,” Brown said stubbornly.

Blue spread her hands: “Well. . what do you propose doing instead?”

All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn’t understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it. Sound broke against her eardrums. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t pleasant. Brown looked at Blue carefully. Their skin was more or less the same shade of brown, but after that there were only differences. Blue was much better-looking than Brown was; smaller and tidier-looking, too. There was a sweetness to the corners of Blue’s mouth, and her manner was warm. She would be good to him. Speaking as quickly as she could, Brown told Blue about the man she was meant for — just small details off the top of her head, the things that years boil down to. Blue produced a small book and pencil, nodded, listened, and made notes.

Then Brown went through her new front door with her hands full of fountain pens.

She didn’t look back, so she didn’t see Blue throw the notebook away. She didn’t see the car, returning to the spot where it had left her, inching along as her lover stuck his head out of the window, looking for her. Blue walked over to him, and as the man spoke, Blue tilted her head and listened with an expression of great sympathy. .

Brown walked into her home under a row of crystal chandeliers, their octopus arms outstretched, their hearts layered with old gold. The high ceiling was painted with a map that looked both old and new — it was faded, the paint cracked, but the fade was bright. The map showed that the world had edges you could fall off, into blank white. Here. . be. . dragons.

Upstairs, on a desk by a window, there lay a fountain pen that looked identical to the ones she held. Brown picked up the fountain pen and shook it. The cartridge sounded empty. She wished she’d bought new cartridges instead of new pens; it would have been far more economical. Beside the desk was a wastepaper basket full of crumpled paper. There were more fountain pens in there, too. She didn’t really want to sit down at this desk; it seemed to be a place of nerves and wretchedness. But there was a fresh pad of paper open, and the chair was drawn out, so she sat down. She laid the new pens down one by one. She looked at them, twiddled her thumbs, picked a pen up, put it down, examined the notepad. She was clearly supposed to write something, but not a single idea made itself available to her. Was it meant to be a letter? Or a report? The fact that it was to be handwritten suggested a personal aspect. Her writing was to be addressed to someone in particular. Brown pushed a pen with her fingertip and it rolled against another pen, and all the pens fell off the table. How was she supposed to do this if she didn’t know who she was doing it for? It was ridiculous.

After about twenty minutes, she heard scrabbling at the door and leapt to her feet.

But whoever it was, they weren’t coming into the room, they were just pushing a piece of paper under the door.

It read:

Write the stories.

“Stories?” Brown howled. “What stories?”

She ran through the rooms of her house, looking for the person who had ordered stories. She ran downstairs and watched the street. It could have been anyone. Anyone. How could someone have slipped in and slipped out again without her knowing? Perhaps they’d followed her in. .

Brown returned to the desk and picked the pens up off the floor. She wrote down the words: Once upon a time, and then she stopped. She looked about her. There was something missing. There was something wrong. She found a mirror and turned around in front of it with her arms held out in front of her. She was all there, all in one piece. Then what? What had she lost?

Brown wrote down a list of things that had been stolen from her, things she had lost, both replaceable and irreplaceable. Umbrellas, gloves. Expensive tubes of mascara. Cheques. Earrings: one out of virtually every pair she had ever owned until she had had to leave off wearing earrings altogether. Several jackets, left at cafés and parties. A diary, once — a year’s thinking. What else. . a television and a cat, from the time she had lived by herself and left her front door unlocked one day. The thief had left a ransom note for the cat; she’d considered responding to it but hadn’t.

Another piece of paper came in under the door: WRITE THE STORIES.

This time Brown didn’t bother searching for the person who wanted stories. She would not be toyed with, and she would not obey. Instead she went out into the city, to look for what she had lost. There was no guarantee that she would recognise it even if she found it, but trying felt better than sitting at that strange and awful desk. Everything seemed like a clue. The glances of strangers, the first letter of every street sign she passed — she tacked them together and created the name of a street that was impossible to reach. She didn’t give up. She went looking every day.

And every day there was a note or two. Write the stories. And sometimes there was money, so that she could eat.

People began to call her Madame la Folle. One day she passed a man who stood playing his guitar on a corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, his back to the churchyard railings, and she realised he was singing about her — Madame la Folle with your money falling out of your pockets, trampling your own bread underfoot, leaving a trail of letters you meant to post. . What else have you lost?

The list in her notepad grew and grew. As she read it she turned a ring round and round her finger. It was made of cheap brass, and it was slightly misshapen, as if unable to withstand the heat of her body. She could not recall exactly how she had come by the ring, or when she had first put it on. She pulled the ring off her finger and felt pain, which surprised her. She looked up at the map on the ceiling, inspecting continents through the brass circle she held in her hand. Seen through the ring, the borders of each country throbbed and blurred.

“Where are you?” she murmured. “Where are you?” She wanted the question removed from her with forceps at white heat, leaving a clean cavity behind. Then, perhaps, she would be able to perform her task. She was beginning to feel that she owed it to whoever was keeping her alive.

There were moments in which Brown forgot her search. She came across a flock of red balloons once, tied to railings, and since no one was watching she popped them, one by one, with her sharp fingernails. And she enjoyed avoiding light. It made her feel triumphant. She made nighttime trips to Sacré-Cœur, darting around the glare of the floodlights that the boats flung out as they passed along the riverbank. When she reached the basilica she crept down its steps and jumped high where the bottom step sat directly on the hill. She jumped as high as she could and she closed her eyes and made believe that she had fallen into the city’s arms. Madame la Folle.

Blue’s man kept her waiting while he tried to get Brown back. He put up posters with photographs of Brown all around Paris, asking if anyone had seen her. But the wind blew the posters away into the Seine, or he saw people take the posters down and make off with them — a different person each time, and he would give chase, shouting out for an explanation. But no one explained, and no one helped him. He knew it was all coincidence — he told himself it was coincidence, because it was horrifying to think that, having made a decision, he was now being actively prevented from changing it. Blue was by his side at all times, and she was devoted and affectionate. Instead of asking annoying questions while he was working, she attended to her own affairs. Brown began to seem like a strange dream he had had. She would never come back, and it was perverse to chase her like this. Blue. . Blue was no trouble at all. So he turned to her.

It didn’t work. He kept it up for a couple of years, saying, “Yes, I’m very lucky,” to anyone who complimented him on his improved circumstances. But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt arranged. Blue was a stranger, and she never became a friend. One evening the man stood by the fireplace in their living room, looking at a photograph in a magazine. It accompanied an article about Blue and himself, a profile of them as an artisan couple. The man tried to read the article as if he were someone else, someone who didn’t know them. The couple in the photograph complemented each other beautifully: her glossy head on his shoulder, his arm tucked around her with his cuff drawn up over his fingers, so he held her through the linen of his sleeve. That was how precious she was to him — she couldn’t be touched with a naked hand. He built dollhouses, and she peopled them with dolls. Film stars and sports stars bought them for their children. The couple in the photograph hoped for children of their own soon. Quoting a poet, the artisan man said that their love was a lifelong love, a love for all the lives they might ever have had. He read that again. Had he really said that? He repeated the words aloud. Then he threw the magazine onto the fire and didn’t stay to watch it burn.

Blue was in her studio, making eyes for her dolls, letting a single drop of dye fall from a pipette into each glass ball, watching it until it soaked through. She didn’t greet him — she was lost in detail. He picked up a brown eye and was impressed, as always. The dye floated in the centre of the sphere, surrounded by clarity.

He handed the doll’s eye back to his wife, a woman his friends gazed at with awe and admiration, a woman whose flaws were far outbalanced by her virtues, and he told her: “Leave me.”

She looked up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Go,” he said. “Leave me. Please.”

“For how long?”

He turned away, so as not to have to look at her shock, so as not to have to watch her patience take form. He knew that he was bringing ruin upon himself.

“You’re talking nonsense,” she said to his back. “We work well together. We have a life together.”

“I know,” he said. “But if you don’t leave, I will.”

“Is this about. . her?” She didn’t ask angrily. She sounded. . curious, wistful. “Still? After all this time?”

“No,” he lied.

“I don’t understand you. Her love was bad. You told me so yourself.”

When he turned to face her he saw that she had picked up her pipette and returned to work. Drop after immaculate drop.

“Whatever you’re feeling now, it will fade. I’m not leaving. And neither are you,” she said.

“I see,” he said. And he nodded. He went to his own studio, where he fell into a stupor he couldn’t wake up from.

Brown thought she might be grieving for someone who had died. She walked around Père Lachaise looking for a name that meant something to her alone. The cemetery watchmen pitied her. When she hid in the cemetery just before closing time, the watchmen all looked the other way. She was harmless. And perhaps the additional hours would help her find the right tomb at last. She passed the first few hours of the night surrounded by tall, green fragrance. Lavender buds tickled her arms and back as she went up and down the tree-lined paths, looking at names carved in stone. Her hands were tucked into her sleeves in case of stinging nettles, so her torchlight kept faltering. Dormice shook the lavender with their paws and tails, caught Brown’s reflection in the dark shine of their eyes and ran away with it. White-flowered shrubs thickened around her and so did sleep; it directed her limbs. Lie down now, sleep said sweetly. Lie down. These are the secret hours of the day, the time that owls and bats take to themselves. The stars change places now; let them. You lie down.

She stopped walking when she saw the name Étienne Geoffroy for the fourth time. The cemetery was smaller than she had thought it was. Or there were parts of it that couldn’t be brought to light, not by her torch, not even by the moon. She came to a path that divided into two, and she shone her torch to the left, then to the right—

She saw a man. He was standing on the other side of the path, half hidden by a sapling. For a fraction of a second, less than that, she saw him. He darted out of sight; the rattling of branches deafened her. Her throat froze. Move, she told herself. You must move. But if I take the wrong path — if I go deeper in—

She listened for some sign, tried to find out where he was, but there was so much calling amongst the tombstones, croaking and chattering and echoes. I must move. I must move. After the first step the rest were easy, the way was sure, left, right, left right, and she fell down and cut her hands on stones because she heard him calling her. “Madame la Folle! Madame la Folle? A word in your ear, if you please. Just a moment of your time. .” She had lost her torch. A loud cracking sound nearby — him? Where was he? Everywhere. His voice was behind her, ahead of her, above, below. She rolled into a ball against the exposed roots of a tree for a moment. Then she raised herself up onto her knees and crawled, slowly, slowly, so slowly, cover me, leaves, cover me, earth, don’t let him find me.

Hands plunged through the leaves, seized her wrists and dragged her up. She screamed then. She screamed and screamed, first at the sky, which was whirling like water; then she was screaming into a hand clapped over her mouth. She looked into eyes too wide to be sane. He released her once she was quiet. A man with a shock of white hair and a face painted like a harlequin’s, dead white with black diamonds around his eyes. His features were very hard. Skeletal.

“Why won’t you just write the stories?” he said. “You’ve been asked nicely.”

Fear pressed her tongue against her gums.

“Fear not, Madame,” the man told her. “I am Reynardine. And I can get you whatever your heart desires.” He sat down upon a tombstone and patted the space beside him. What could she do? She joined him.

“The stories are for you?”

He shook his head. “One moment.” He cleared his throat and his gaze grew shadowy, as if something dark had spilt into him. When he next spoke, it was with an accent that was familiar to her but in a voice that was not. It was deep — more a vibration that came through the ground than a voice.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

“Can you see us?” And for a moment she saw and felt them all, crowding her. Faces she recognised from family photo albums, some she had never seen before, old ones leaning on walking sticks. They were all familiar. They all knew her, and she knew them. Then they relented and faded away.

“We’re here,” they said, through Reynardine’s lips.

“What do you want?”

“You are Yoruba.”

“Am I?”

“So you think your accent fools us. . ”

“But I can’t even speak Yoruba!”

“That doesn’t fool us, either.”

“All right,” she said. “I know. But look — I’m in Paris at the moment.”

“Don’t interrupt,” they said. “You might want to get away from us. You might feel that we crowd too close, that we want too much. But we like you. We think you’re spirited. And we’re trying to listen.”

“To what?”

“To what you won’t tell us. We want your stories.”

“I don’t have any. I don’t know what to write.”

“Tell the stories. Tell them to us. We want to know all the ways you’re still like us, and all the ways you’ve changed. Talk to us. We’re from a different place and time. . ”

“I’m not lying to you,” she said, shaking her head. “I really can’t do it.”

“You can and you must,” they snapped. “Those stories belong to us. It doesn’t matter what language they’re in, or what they’re about; they belong to us. And we gave them to you without looking at them first. So now it’s time to see what we’ve done.”

After a long moment, the harlequin returned to himself and began speaking reasonably. They weren’t asking for very much, were they? he asked. Just a few words on paper, anything she liked, anything that came to mind, nothing that anyone else need ever read. It didn’t even have to be good.

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn’t mind.

“What’s your part in this?” Brown demanded.

“Favours are a useful currency,” said Reynardine.

“You’re working for them because favours are a useful currency?”

Reynardine yawned clownishly and rubbed his eyes. Black paint came away on his knuckles. “I work for myself,” he muttered. “I’m freelance.”

Brown looked down at her hands. She had never been good at anything. There had never been any work that she’d been able to make her own. She raised a hand to the moonlight, and the brass ring winked at her.

“I want what I lost,” she said.

“You should do this just because they asked you to. You came from these people. You owe them everything,” Reynardine pointed out.

Politely, she disagreed. She was vastly outnumbered, she knew that, but that didn’t mean she would budge. There’s a reason the Yoruba were famed as warriors.

Reynardine was amused.

“Do this and I’ll restore what you lost,” he said. Brown was suspicious. “How? Why?”

Reynardine stood and looked down at her. His gaze was very wild indeed; it seemed to have no focus. She came very close to flinching.

“How?” she asked again. “Why?”

Reynardine made some answer, but it was muffled because he was walking into the ground; the earth covered his head.

Brown worked for days. She didn’t know how many days — afterwards she would only ever be able to recall that time as a pause between two breaths she took. In between she ran through the twelve fountain pens. More appeared. She ran through blocks of paper, and more was provided. Occasionally she would feel a hand, a hand that was not her own, passing over her hair, as if blessing her. The words didn’t come easily. She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another.

She’d thought she didn’t have any stories, but in fact she had too many.

She put down things she didn’t know she knew. She wrote about a girl who babysat herself while both her parents worked and worked for not enough pay. The girl didn’t answer the door or the telephone because no one was meant to know she babysat herself, and besides, it might be the Home Office, and then they’d all be deported. So that she would not be scared, she pretended she was a spy and wrote secret spy notes on pink paper. She posted the spy notes out of the living-room window; she sent them spinning down onto the heads of passersby, who picked them up and didn’t understand them. They’d look up, but the girl had disappeared from the window — no one was supposed to know she was there.

Brown wrote about another girl who lived in a city that men were forbidden to enter. This girl knew nothing but the city and the stern stretch of coast that surrounded it, and she thought that men were just a funny story, and she didn’t expect that she was missing much.

She wrote about an Okitipupa village boy who was nobody’s boy, and earned money for himself by taking care of other children. She wrote about the afternoon nobody’s boy returned to the village in despair, having mislaid four of his ten charges and roped the remaining six boys to his waist with a long piece of scarlet rope and a great many strong knots. He had spent two hours looking for those four boys, and was just on his way to the first of the boys’ parents to confess what had happened when, in a moment like a nightmare, the missing boys jumped up from the shallow pits they’d been lying in, boy after boy shaking the earth with unearthly cries.

There was more, much more, and she put it all down, though she didn’t see what good it could do. She put it all down for the ones who had said, Tell us.

Here are your stories, then. Have them back.

Reynardine came then, and he smiled at her, and he took all her stories away.

What did Reynardine leave behind?

A man she knew.

He slumped against the wall of her room, with his legs stuck out in front of him. His eyes were open, but when she spoke to him, he didn’t look at her. He didn’t breathe. His heart didn’t beat. His lips were blue. Brown lay down with him, and she tried to give him breath, and she asked him if he was dead.

“I don’t know,” Reynardine answered from the doorway. “Probably.”

And Brown turned to him and cried out: “Reynardine! Reynardine! What have you brought me?”

Reynardine tutted. “I brought you what you lost.”

“But he’s still lost! You tricked me.”

“Listen,” said Reynardine. “Have you considered joining him?”

Brown sat listening, thinking. She held her man’s hand, and she didn’t feel able to let go just then.

“I dare you,” Reynardine said, “to be lost together.”

She wasn’t as worried as she could have been. She had recently been visited by people long deceased. They had seemed well enough, and had even been so bold as to make demands of her. She accepted the dare.

Reynardine snapped his fingers, and she stopped living.

Stiffly entwined in each other’s arms, the two lovers were moved to Père Lachaise sans coffins, and at dead of night. Reynardine took care of that. He was owed favours and he made the arrangements. It’s said that Reynardine is monstrously cruel, but sometimes, to a woman who takes him at his word, he can show kindness.

The first moment in the tomb was the most forbidding. The silence, the stillness, the dark.

Then they realised: They were together, and there was no one else. She felt his lips tremble against her forehead. After that he became courageous and brought his arms down around her. He kissed her closed eyelids and he kissed her mouth and he kissed handfuls of her hair and he kissed her elbows. She placed her brass ring on the palm of his hand and closed his fingers around it. He opened his hand and the ring was gone. It had not fallen, unless it had fallen through him, and if so, it had left no mark. No more counting kisses.

Reynardine had thrown a candle and a box of matches in with them. They didn’t need the candle. . In the darkness they learnt to waltz. Then they lit the candle anyway — why not? And they let its flame warm their stone house for a little while as they danced on behind their locked door.

Mary Foxe saved my life once. She has a vested interest, of course — if I go, she goes. But she didn’t do it as if she had a vested interest. She did it as if she cared. It was nine, maybe ten, years ago. Before Daphne. I was working late at night, trying to get something down about a boy at war; he’d signed up to be a hero and had all sorts of ideas about standing aloof from both his equals and his superiors. I couldn’t yet tell whether this kid’s stupid ideas were going to get him killed, or whether he was simply going to be slapped down and made useful in some minor way. It was not a story about me — in France I learnt to do exactly what I was told. I’m talking about the Marne — frontal assaults; don’t blink, don’t think, just do. I looked around my study and everything was just too damn cosy. The anodyne calm. The gentle, sputtering dance of the fire, and the books that towered all around me, their spines turned out. I couldn’t write down the echo of an exploded shell. I couldn’t smear the smell of the trench across the page. I couldn’t do this thing so that anyone could see what I meant. The things that had happened — things I laughed at when they crossed my mind — you can’t hold on to them too long, unless you want to go crazy. The dead don’t trouble me — dead is dead. It’s the ones who took impact and lived. Joe Persano: Shrapnel put his left eye out, and he refuses to wear an eye patch; a glass eye rolls slightly in the crumpled hole left for it. Tom Franklin has no hands. Ivor Ross’s right trouser leg is empty and half his mouth is puckered up for a sour, perpetual kiss. And here I am, whole. It got so I had a pistol to my head, there in my cosy study, and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d taken it out of my desk drawer myself. I must have been holding it, but there was no feeling in my fingers; the gun seemed to be floating, held up by Joe’s ill will, Tom’s, and Ivor’s. The gun’s nozzle pushed at my skin, as if trying to find the correct part of my skull to nestle against. Death like the insect, menacing the tree. .

“Shhh,” said Mary Foxe. She reached over my shoulder, prised my fingers loose one by one, and took the gun. Then she stuck a pipe in my mouth. I watched tobacco trickle into the bowl. I watched her hand, tamping the tobacco down. Tap, tap, tap, and the pipe moved between my clenched teeth. Tap and pour, tap and pour. She lit a match, and I watched the flame circle the bowl once, twice, three times, before it took and a mist rose.

“I know you think you’re going mad,” she said. “But you’re not. Don’t be perverse. Celebrate.”

She poured some scotch from the decanter on my windowsill and pushed the glass towards me. Between that and the pipe my sense of perspective began to return. I opened the desk drawer and the gun was in there, looking innocent, as if it hadn’t had an outing this evening, or ever.

Mary sat down and set the decanter at her feet. “Say something, you,” she said warningly.

“Mary,” I said. “I seem to have a memory — false, I hope — of you being my wife at some point.”

Mary stirred in her seat. “Oh, yes?”

“Yes. My loving wife. I did all I could for you. But you weren’t happy. You said I didn’t listen to you and that I treated you like a child. You moved out of the nice house I was working overtime to pay for, the house I bought because you said you liked it. I waited a week — everyone told me to give it time, that you’d come to your senses. I was always home on time, and never ran around on you. On weekends I drove you all over town like I was your chauffeur, took you to see the friends you wanted to see. I took you to the opera on your birthday, for crying out loud. I hadn’t put a foot wrong. But you didn’t come back. Your friends had lent you money and you’d moved into some tiny one-room apartment. I found that out by visiting a friend of mine who was married to a friend of yours. He said he didn’t want to get involved because his wife would raise hell for him if she ever found out he’d told me. So I turned on the waterworks. It shocked him so much he told me where you were and said he hoped I got you and my manhood back. . ”

I stopped for a while, because it was strange. The more I said, the clearer the memory became. I didn’t think I was going to be able to say any more — I just wanted to watch the thing play out in my head. Mary poured me some more scotch. That helped.

“I went round at dusk. I was drunk as drunk — that was my preparation for the possibility that there might be another guy there with you. I knocked on your door — I knocked with my head and my elbows, like I was trying to dance with the door. Amazingly, you opened the door, with this resigned look on your face that said you’d been expecting me. I said: Honey, and something else, something like Honey, look at me, can’t you see how it is? Come home. And you looked kind of sorry for me. But I saw that you had a chain on the door, and you kept it on even when you saw that I was just a wreck, and begging. When I saw that you had that chain on, I knew I was going to hurt you. I was going to get in there and hurt you. It was kind of like caging up an animal — something — the bars, the boundaries hard and cold like that — it just makes the animal as mad as hell, even if it was just a fluffy little lapdog before. It becomes another thing altogether. I stood up straight and I lowered my voice and, I don’t know how, because I was out of my skull drunk and could barely move my tongue, I began to talk to you as if I was sober and possessed of reason. I spoke warmly and with understanding and had some soothing response to every objection you made to letting me in. You let me in, and I almost fell in through the door, but I told myself keep it together, keep it together, you still love her. There was no one else there; you were all alone. I was so glad. I was so glad. I tried to hold you, to get a kiss from you. And you said, St. John, you’re hurting me. I only wanted to kiss you — how could that be hurting you? But you kept saying that I should ‘stop it.’ I’d slapped you a few times by then. Trying to make you quiet.”

She dimpled at me. “Go on,” she said.

“Well. . things went on like that between you and I. . ”

“Went on like what, exactly?”

“I kept hitting you, I guess. I picked up a chair and I backed you up against a wall and started slamming it on either side of your head, just to scare you, at first. ‘Shhh,’ I said. ‘Shhh.’ You got too scared, or not scared enough. You kept putting your hands up to protect your face — I just grabbed your arm and punched you until you were on the floor. I stomped on your hands.”

Mary nodded, as if going over a mental checklist.

“I kicked you in the head.”

She nodded again.

“Then you must have worked out that I kept going for you because you kept moving. So you kept still. I walked away and watched you from across the room, to see what you’d do if I gave you room. You didn’t do anything, just lay there. I walked towards you again and you held your breath. I stayed close and you didn’t exhale.”

“Go on,” Mary said wanly. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I crouched down and I talked to you. Just some things in your ear. No idea what I was saying — nonsense, probably. I was just talking to calm you down. While I was talking I slit your throat. Messily, because I couldn’t walk in a straight line, let alone guide my hand from ear to ear without stopping. It was a real mess. A real mess.”

Mary didn’t shudder or look shocked. She looked polite, if anything. Somewhere between polite and bored.

“It couldn’t have happened. I’d have got the chair for that.” I wasn’t really talking to her — more thinking aloud.

“Yes. You would have. But too late for me. What made you do it?”

“What made me—”

“Yes. Why did you do it?”

“You’re asking me why, in my false memory of our marriage, I killed you?”

“I’m trying to help you think.”

I made a few brief guesses — I was in a killing mood, I was afraid of time, I was fooled by some inexplicable assurance that I was merely dreaming out my revenge, making myself safe for the daylight hours. Love fit in somewhere, I wasn’t sure how — disbelief that it had gone away, trying to force its return, trying to create an emergency that would scare love out of hiding.

“You did it because of love? Because you loved me too much?” she asked jovially. Her merriment was giving me the creeps. The whole conversation was giving me the creeps — talking like this about something that hadn’t really happened. I shouldn’t have started it. She’d seemed so interested, though, and that was rare. Maybe she was trying to be nice in her own way.

Mary pulled the stopper out of the scotch decanter and took a long swallow. “Okay, never mind about love,” she said, wiping her mouth. “You hated me. Because I wouldn’t come back and I was making you hate yourself, making you think there was something wrong with you.”

“No. . I already told you. It was because of the chain on the door.”

“Mr. Fox.” Mary toyed with the cut-glass stopper. “Is this a joke?”

“You found it funny?”

“That you just recounted one of your stories to me as if it was something that you really did?”

“Hm,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll write it down.”

“You already did,” she said, her forehead creased.

I waited blankly while she searched my stack of notebooks and picked up number six. She licked her finger and opened it up near the end. There, in my handwriting, was the tale I had just told her. As soon as I saw it I remembered writing it, and I was flooded with relief. Thank God it wasn’t me. Thank God I wasn’t capable of doing such a thing. It was cold, but I was sweating. When I put the book down I saw that I’d left moist ovals on the paper.

“Now I’m worried,” Mary said.