Mr. Fox

HIDE, SEEK

Once, in Asyût, east of Cairo, a boy was born to a market trading family fallen on hard times, a family too poor to keep him unless he had somehow been born full-grown and ready to work. The boy’s tiny mother had given birth to five big, healthy, noisy boys before him. But the first thing this particular boy did when he was born was cough quietly, and turn a blind, bewildered glare on his brothers, who elbowed one another and watched him closely. This new boy was far too small. He had to be spanked six times before he proved his lungs to the midwife, and even then, his cry wasn’t lusty enough. He was limp and wouldn’t cling to a finger when it was placed in his palm. He refused his mother’s breast, wrinkling his nose at the knotty brown bud of her nipple with slow bafflement.

Yet his eyes said that he needed something.

The boy’s mother saw into the future. Her mind hunkered down in the midst of her tiredness and spread the dead circle of her nerves until it overlapped into her next life, her next fatigue.The boy’s mother saw that she wouldn’t be able to coax this son, to coddle him, to silently cherish him, to let him fall and find no help, to do all of the things that it would take for this boy to survive into his strength as a man.

(She looked into his eyes — they were like a famine. Seeing them sent hurt and light through her. His eyes kept asking, asking, and she knew that a person could die trying to love him.)

If it hadn’t been certain before, the decision not to keep the boy was now absolute.

“He will not be strong,” the boy’s father winced, when news of the birth was brought to him at his sand-blown stall. “He will not be of use.” He didn’t tell the other men whose threadbare robes jostled his at market because it was not a good thing to have to send a child away.

“He will not be strong,” the midwife said, averting her eyes from the child’s. She left as soon as she could, with promises that she would tell all the doctors she knew about the child, in the hope that they knew of some infertile couple.

Sunset on the outskirts of Asyût brought clarity.

Even from the narrow side streets where damp sand beads and breathes, any window can tell you why they say here the world began with a brother and sister locked in a beautiful circus trick. In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, “This is land,” and point, and “This is sky,” and point, but the eye can’t discover the dividing line. Nut cranes her neck over her long, lithe, blue back to kiss Geb, and Geb cradles her, careful, because she is nothing, less than nothing, but if he should drop her it would be the end of everything. The boy’s mother was comforted by sunset, and she closed the shutters and began preparing her new son’s cot.

The next day’s noon came like a blazing hoop, and the sun spat razor blades through it. People did what they had to to keep from wilting. Slim women waddled; fat women crept close to the ground, barely taking steps. Amongst them came a tall, ramrod-straight woman in pure black; she parted the jostling knots of people in bounding spurts, like a dark thought. She was accompanied by the boy’s midwife.

The woman took the market traders’ son away with her because, she said, she needed a seeker, and this boy was one.

The woman’s voice was soft and you had to listen hard for it, otherwise you thought she was trying to speak to you with her eyes alone. The atmosphere around this woman told of books and fine rugs. The boy’s mother cried and held herself, held her leaking breasts as the woman took her son away. But she didn’t change her mind.

A girl was born in Osogbo, in a small hospital a few feet away from a stone shrine to love. The girl was a heavy baby, with features that were pleasing because they were fluid and made her simple to look at, as if she was carved all of a piece. The girl was very quick learning to walk, to speak in both English and Yoruba, to eat solids, to use her potty, to smile in a certain way that brought maturity down like an axe on her face. At six years old, she prostrated herself before her elders unasked. She clambered over her milestones with unassailable, businesslike calm. No cute lisping, no unusual habits. It took the girl’s parents a long time to realise that their daughter’s docility and sweetness was in fact vacancy, a kind of sleepiness and an instinct for ease that translated itself to her entire body. The girl’s hair grew soft and light so that combs flashed through it without tangling, so that it sat well in plaits. Blemishes fell away from the girl’s skin with simple soap and water. The same question put to this girl two times in a row would yield two different answers, depending on who asked the girl the question, and in what tone. The day that he saw that it was enough, the girl’s father was chauffeuring a sweaty, bearded oil executive to the airport. The girl’s father looked away for a moment from the well-fed face, from the firm, confident mouth of his passenger in the rearview mirror, and saw his daughter following a street vendor home, nodding and smiling in the shade of the bush-lined thoroughfare, a sack of the street vendor’s rice piled across her shoulders with a sturdy, troubling grace. The girl’s father bundled her into the car without ceremony or apology to his passenger, and at home he thrashed her with a walking cane. He held her head down on the kitchen table as he beat her, and his fingers dug into her scalp, but he did not feel her neck tensing against him, and she didn’t make a sound. He kept on hitting her because he wasn’t sure whether she was feeling this or not. The neighbours came en masse, some with their fingers entwined in the fur at the scruff of their goats’ necks, and they remonstrated with him. Women pulled off their head wraps and wrung their hands. “It is too much,” everyone told him. The girl’s father stopped when he was tired of hammering on her bones. He watched her breathing; her shoulder blades rose and fell with her head turned away from him and into the table. When she lifted her head she said unsteadily, “Sorry, Daddy.” Blood welled from the space between her lips.

The boy grew up with a hard smile and a complicated manner that was at once condescending and eager. He developed a gait that made him seem arrogant. These were attempts to counteract his eyes and their treacherous tendency to ask. He wasn’t handsome, or talkative, but his adoptive mother made sure that he dressed well, in English tailoring and American denim. And his sadness was luminous. Girls his age gave him kisses and held his hand even when they shied away from other boys. Women offered him honeyed pastries, confidences, concern. He walked the markets and puffed pipe smoke in corner teahouses, breathed in the spice-pod musk of men and took their advice with throwaway thanks.

The woman who had adopted him was a widow, and it was possible that her bereavement had made her mad. The boy’s new home terrified him, because the downstairs was bright and softly pastel-coloured and air-conditioned, but the upstairs was cordoned off. If he looked hard enough, he could make out doors and bare floors, but that was all. At night he slept on a couch beside the woman who had adopted him. The woman herself slept on a boat-shaped chaise longue; it took to her body in a way that he would never see again, let her sleep with grace although her arms and legs were bunched up and her feet were hanging off the end of the couch. It didn’t seem to matter very much that the woman didn’t grow older as he grew older, either, though he suspected that something about the woman herself slowed him down, bathed his thoughts in perfume, set his dreams afloat so that his mind was abuzz with stranger things than her age, or her solitude, or the silent upstairs.

The woman insisted on being called mother.

(Which the boy called her, but with a secret hiss that came from a place inside him that he did not understand — inside his head, her name became motherhhhhhhh, smothered myrrh.)

She was an art collector, but she only collected art that was body pieces, one considered piece at a time, painstaking finds because she was looking for a collection that, when put together in a room, would create the suggestion of a woman, a woman who crammed the room from wall to wall. The boy took telephone calls and messages left for his new mother by her contacts all over the world. He travelled Egypt with her and observed cemetery graffiti as she did, so closely that she almost inhaled it — in hundreds of perfumeries they watched glass blowers torture air between their hands, force it to become solid.

Always, as they travelled, she pointed and asked him, “Do you like that? What do you see there?”

He told her the truth, and she always listened to him. She said that he chose well.

But when they got home, the boy did not ever feel anything in the presence of these well-turned ankles and smooth calves, these arms and shoulders captured in shade and the moment of motion. They were a collection, not a woman.

Then the boy and his mother got a face for their collection. The face was a photograph. The photograph was of a girl who had died with her family one night when her neighbours smashed the door down and took an axe to all those living inside that house. The neighbours did this because a radio broadcast told them to. The radio broadcast advised them not to wait for the evil that lived next door to grow and get the better of them. And so it was done. But after killing the family, the neighbours had not touched anything else in the girl’s house, which is how the boy and his new mother, picking over this room at the end of a series of devastated rooms, found the girl’s picture. At first the boy thought that it would be wrong to take the picture. But it was a picture unlike any other. It had been taken in the backyard of the house, at some point between the sun’s disappearance and the illumination of the moon. The girl’s smile did not seem to correspond to the presence of the camera, or even to a joke told off-camera. Her smile was unnerving because it had no reason. They took the picture home, even though the boy’s new mother complained that it wasn’t art. Then the boy’s new mother asked him what he thought of their almost complete collection, waved her arms at all the fineness and said, “You want someone. Is she here?”

He said, “No.”

“We need a heart,” the boy’s new mother said, and when she looked at him, in that moment, she seemed to him so high. It seemed that her feet connected to the ground only tenuously and it was her shadow that bore her up. The boy thought in that moment that this woman must be beautiful — no, of course she was: fine eyes, wide-curved lips, and cheekbones like slanted hooks. But at the same time he thought that his new mother must be a spider.

What nobody knew about the docile girl from Osogbo was that her heart was too heavy, and that almost from birth she had felt its weight, a gravitational pull that invited her to her grave. Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own. People soon learnt that they could play on her sympathy, and, because she was terrified that one day this unasked-for conscience of hers might kill her, she gave away whatever money she earned, gave away bread and went without. The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not stay with the person she gave it to and snuck back to her heart without a sound. What people didn’t know about this girl was that the ancestral dead kept her company — they came to find her at bathtime and sat four at a time in the bathwater with her, cooing wistfully and using their wasted, insubstantial hands to wash her hair. The girl urged them to take care of their own children, but they refused. Her head lolled at these times, and she was overcome with gratitude. At bedtime the dead took her with them, and in her dreams, she visited their graves.

At first, in rebellion against her heaviness, the girl thought that she needed to be thinner, and she took to reading imported women’s magazines on credit from a bookstall owner. The magazines talked about calories and saving calories and keeping some back so that you could have a glass of wine. One day at the dinner table, the girl asked her mother for an estimate of how many calories there were in the fried stew that bubbled at the bottom of her bowl beneath a layer of eba. There is no Yoruba word for calories, and so her mother just looked at her and said musingly, smilingly, in English, “Calories,” as if she was trying to understand a punch line hidden between the syllables. Then the girl didn’t ask anymore and just sat looking at the food, which was bottomless and made to sink hunger.

The girl decided that she had to hide her heart somewhere until she was big enough to keep hold of its weight. One night the dead helped her, some stroking her hair and soothing her while others hooked their fingers into her and carefully lifted a strand of steam from her chest. The girl took her heart, and that cool night she was frightened even though she walked amidst a crowd of other people’s ancestors. The shrine was a rectangle of stone arches that spoke of other kinds of love — strange, ugly, smoke-and-choking sort of love, carvings of cruel hands that killed candle flames to break refusal in the dark, women thrusting out hard breasts and genitals. Also in the carvings was the kind of love that wakes you up from nightmares. And also there was a sundial of wise children’s faces. The shrine was the kind of place where a Valentine’s heart would have trembled and wilted. With her fingers the girl scratched a place for herself in the north wall and slipped her heart through into the dry moss behind the stone.

And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.

Because he had been told to, the boy looked for hearts. He examined unusual playing cards and alabaster chess pieces and went to London with his new mother to examine posters plastered onto the walls of public transport stations. On the boy’s twenty-first birthday, his new mother took him to the west coast of his continent to view a shrine, a shrine where, one of their contacts had told her, you could hear and feel a heart beating when it grew dark. They stood, amidst a small crowd of other curious people, and waited for sunset, which came with a slow earthquake that sent the ground slipping away, until they realised that the sensation was the legendary heartbeat. The boy, now a man, stood a little apart from his new mother, who listened intently, and the heartbeat said things to them both, things that made the boy smile with all of his soul in his face, things that made the new mother suck in her cheeks and look suddenly pinched and old. They stayed long after everyone had gone, and fell asleep at dawn with their heads laid on rocks converted to pillows with thick shawls.

When the next morning came around, the asking in the man’s eyes was so powerful that no one could look at him without offering, offering, offering.

The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the stones or glass that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways. Other people became closed to the girl, and she enjoyed it this way — at the marketplace she handed over her bread and exacted the correct payment for it with a slight pressure of the hand and an uncaring smile. When the girl moved amongst people, she felt as if she were walking in a public place at an hour of the night when it was too dark to come out, or at noon, when it was too hot to be outside, and all the doors around were closed and barred. The girl felt this solitude to be an adventure. She moved away from her parents and went to live by herself on the ground floor of a tenement, even though this was frowned upon. When she was not working or wandering, she listened to the white noise inside her head, or she sat on her bare floor and listened to people arguing, romancing, accusing, the people all around her, she let their words fall into her body like coins into a bottomless well. Sometimes she thought about her heart, and wondered how it was doing without her. But the girl was never curious enough to go and find out.

Except once, when she almost went back to see.

Except once, when she woke up one morning convinced that she was in love. All over her, her skin felt softer even than her breath, and her eyes felt wider, clearer, dreamy, lashed and lidded with an unknown stuff that had drawn a man in. For a week, she washed and dried and rubbed cream into her body with a special, happy care, and she realised that she was preparing her body for caresses. She found a taste for cold things that released their sweetness slowly — ice cream that slid down her throat before she could taste it, tinned peaches in chill syrup.

But there was no heart there in her chest.

When the girl remembered this, she forced herself to eat a bite of mashed plantain, and the first swallow was hard. But after that, life stepped straight again.

The man’s new mother told him, “That heart, that heart in the shrine, it’s the heart that we must take for my collection.” And then the art collection, the beautiful woman, the new mother’s obsession, would be complete. “If only we can locate the heart and take it with us,” the man’s new mother said, watching her new son closely.

The heart had told him, it had called to him, Come. Take from me, I am inexhaustible.

But the man said nothing.

“I know that you know where that heart is,” the man’s new mother said, and she bared teeth as sharp as daggers. “You are a seeker, you find things. Bring it to me.”

The man told his new mother to give him five days. He ground valerian root into her tea to make her sleep, and the new mother slept with a beauty like rose and earth, and her bitterness was a weed whose roots were scourged by her sleep, and so her bitterness fell away.

The man moved the collection, in carefully packaged batches, to the Osogbo shrine. It was a cry to the owner of the heart, this offering; he would not take the heart from the walls of the shrine until she came. He looked at all the love carved into the stone, and it was a lot of love, and he believed that it must be enough; he had to believe that it was enough. He arranged the fragmented woman as best he could, and sometimes he felt as if unseen hands helped him, propped a canvas in such a way that the light enhanced it. The man was desperate now, and he asked the heart to call to its owner, for she was the strength that he had somehow been born separately from.

The heart called.

The heart called.

The man called.

The gathered woman, scattered across sculptures and glass and photographs and scraps of paper, the gathered woman became complete and almost breathed.

Almost.

The man waited for five days. He thought that he must surely die under the sun and the pain of this disaster. But he didn’t die, because the shrine stones protected him.

When on the sixth day the man saw that the heart’s owner did not come, he left that place.

I don’t think my husband likes me. And I don’t know how to make him. I try talking to him about books, and when he replies he won’t look me in the eye, and sometimes his voice is muffled, suppressing a coughing fit. . or laughter. I think it’s important to be able to laugh at yourself — I hate people who are always offended. But when you’ve got to be prepared to laugh at yourself every single time you open your mouth. . well, that’s just depressing. I asked Greta for advice and she gave this tiny scream, as if she’d just heard the funniest words ever uttered, and she said, “Oh, did you marry him for the intellectual conversation? You didn’t even finish college, Daphne.”

I took her point, even though it was unfair of her to bring that up. College was a near-fatal bore. I had some really serious nosebleeds just at the thought of going to lectures. Gush, gush, gush, and afterwards I had to sit still for a couple of hours on account of having lost a lot of blood — doctor’s orders. Philosophy! I must have been crazy. I only did it because they told me at school that I was smart, and gave us all these thrilling speeches about the privileges and responsibilities of women in higher education. I can learn things all right; I don’t deny that I can learn things. But I can only learn them when it isn’t important. If someone tells me something and then says, “Well, you’d better remember that, because in three months’ time I’m going to make a decision about you based on whether you’ve remembered or not,” then it’s all over and there’s nothing I can do about it. Pops says he loves me just the way I am, but not everyone in the world is like my father. Maman, for example. A difficult and dissatisfied woman. She made me learn flower arranging and how to walk properly — books on my head, the whole bit. These things ruined me for life. Now it sets my teeth on edge when I see flowers carelessly flung into a vase, and I’m forever looking at other women in the street and thinking, Sloppy. . sloppy. And I know I shouldn’t care, and I want to poke myself in the eye for caring, but I care anyway, so thanks for that, Maman. I guess most mothers are difficult and dissatisfied, though. I haven’t heard of any easygoing ones, unless they’re dead and everyone’s being nice about them. But even then they don’t say, “She was real easygoing,” they talk about her sacrifice and how she had time to get involved in everyone’s business. Anyway. My mind is wandering. I know that’s because I’m thinking crazy thoughts and I don’t want to be thinking them. I liked St. John because he’s different from the boys I grew up with. Nothing like John Pizarsky or Sam Lomax; they just shamble around like they always did, only in nice clothes they buy for themselves now. I can’t take them seriously. Now, St. John could have been born into his elegance. It’s a dangerous kind of elegance — he doesn’t raise his voice, he lowers it. Sometimes he says something funny, and when I laugh he looks at me and asks what I’m laughing at, as if he’d genuinely like to know. And he’s a solitary type. . But when he comes back from wherever he’s gone he can look so glad to see me. .

Ordinary life just swerves around him, though, and I run off the sides like an ingredient thrown in too late. I can’t stand the way he talks to me sometimes: very simply, as if to a child. The other day I suddenly realised, mid-conversation, that we two had spoken of nothing that morning but the matter of whether we ought to have calling cards made up for ourselves, to be left for friends who chanced not to be at home when we visited. Are calling cards too old-fashioned, he wondered aloud. And what is the correct design and texture, and should we be Mr. and Mrs. Fox or St. John and Daphne Fox, our names linked in the middle of the card or printed on separate sides of the card. He told me to consult my Emily Post, but I said I didn’t have any of her books. He looked kind of surprised (I have several editions), but I lied because I don’t like him thinking that these are the only things that interest me. The way he talks to me. I thought it was just his manner — I didn’t mind that he never said anything romantic, not even at the very beginning — I was relieved about never having to wonder whether he really meant what he was saying. But now I’m starting to worry that this simplicity is contempt, that he picked me out as someone he could manage. I don’t like to give that thought too much air, though. It’d be hard to go on if I really thought that was true.

I wish there was some level ground I could meet him on. Say he liked baseball, I could educate myself about that quite easily, just hang around while my dad and my brothers are waxing lyrical. That’s easier than books. With books you’ve got to know all about other books that are like the one you’re talking about, and it’s just never-ending, and it’s a pain. But this situation is fifty percent my fault. When I was a lot younger, maybe fourteen or fifteen, I had ideas about the man I wanted. I remember a piano piece my music teacher played as part of a lesson. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard. People talked and passed notes all the way through it, and I wanted to shut them up at any cost, just go around with a handful of screwdrivers, slamming them into people’s temples. I waited until everyone had gone. Then I laid my notebook on top of the piano the music teacher had closed before he’d walked away, and I wrote his name, wrote his name, wrote his name, and underlined each version. I vowed that I wouldn’t have a man unless he was someone I could really be together with, someone capable of being my better self, superior and yet familiar, a man whose thoughts, impressions, and feelings I could inhabit without a glimmer of effort, returning to myself without any kind of wrench. Music. Sometimes it just makes you want to act just anyhow. I wasn’t in love with the music teacher; I wrote his name because it was a man’s name.

I met St. John at Clara Lee’s soiree — she was great friends with my mother, and at that time I had to keep meeting people and meeting people in case one of them was someone I could marry. Clara Lee basically threw this soiree with the almost express purpose of helping me, I mean, helping my mother. So there were ten or eleven clunking bores, two or three very sweet men who didn’t think me sweet, and a couple who obviously had something sort of wrong with them and the something wrong was the reason they were still bachelors. And then there was Mr. Famous Writer, St. John Fox. He must not have had anything else to do that evening. He had a terrible sadness about him. It’s highly irregular for that to be one of the first things you notice about someone. I looked into his eyes and realised, with the greatest consternation, that he was irresistible. He took me out on Sunday afternoons, and it was just calamitous — after about three of those I was done for:

So the simple maid

Went half the night repeating, “Must I die?”

And now to right she turned, and now to left,

And found no ease in turning or in rest;

And “Him or death,” she muttered, “death or him”. .

I didn’t want someone I could understand without trying — I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted St. John Fox. It turned out that he felt the same way about me. Then they lived happily ever after. .

No. I don’t think I was really that naive, thank God. I know I’ve got to work at this.

He went someplace this afternoon — research, he said. He didn’t say where he’d be, but he did say he’d miss dinner — and I kissed him at the door. I wore a jewelled flower clip in my hair. He gave it to me himself a week ago, but today he said, “That’s pretty,” as if he had never seen it before. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. At least the dropped phone calls have stopped. They stopped once I’d told him about them. The last one was such a heavy call. She didn’t just drop the receiver when I answered. She made a sound. Pah-ha-ha-ha. And I recognised it right away. That’s how you cry when you are trying not to cry, and then of course the tears come all the harder. And do you know what I said? “Don’t. . Oh, please don’t.” And she hung up.

Since then I’ve just been waiting for him to leave the house on his own. He told me, “She’s not real”—I just smiled and pretended to see what he meant. He’s been spending a lot of time in his study with the door locked, but I’ve been biding my time. She must have written him a love letter or given him some kind of token. And if he’s been fool enough to hold on to it, then I’m going to find it, and I’m going to force him to drop her in earnest. We’re all better off that way. Things were tough enough without this girl coming between us. And the sound of her crying. Sometimes I try to hear it again. I wonder if it could really have been as bad as it sounded. It made me shudder — my husband is capable of making someone feel like that.

I waited for an hour, to make sure that he was really gone; then I searched his bathroom. An unlikely hiding place, but that could’ve been just his thinking. Then I searched his bedside drawers — nothing. I looked inside all the books in the drawing room, then went to his study again. He made a big show of not locking it before he left, so I’d know he’d forgiven me for kicking his things around a couple of months ago. I’d already searched his study immediately after the heavy phone call, but there might have been something I’d overlooked. I sat down at his desk and looked around, trying to see some secret nook or cranny or a subtle handle I could turn. And as I looked I slowly became aware of a hand creeping across my thigh, the fingers walking down my knee.

I pushed the chair back as far as it would go; the legs made ragged scratches in the carpet because I pushed hard. I don’t know if I screamed — if someone else had been there I would’ve been able to tell, I’d have been able to see them hearing it. But I couldn’t hear anything.

Then I took my hand off my kneecap. My own hand.

Stupid Daphne. Is it any wonder he feels contempt. .

I pretended that the past couple of minutes hadn’t happened, and while I was doing that I opened his writing notebook — well, the one that was at the top of a pile of them. He’d just started it — it was empty apart from a table he’d drawn on the first page. I saw the letter D and the letter M, divided by a diagonal line. And there was talking, faster than I could follow, all in my skull and the bones of my neck, and I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Proof. But I couldn’t understand it yet. I settled down and concentrated.

Under D he had written:

Is real. Is unpredictable. Is lovely to hold.

Loves me (says M). Doesn’t know me.

Under M he had written:

Is so many things (too many things?). Is unpredictable. Is lovely to behold. Disapproves of me; wants more, better. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about me.

I sat with my head in my hands, shaking. Because the situation was so much worse than I’d thought. My husband was trying to choose between me, his wife, and someone he had made up. And I, the real woman, the wife, had nothing on the made-up girl. We each had five points in our favour. That son of a bitch.

I hate him, I hate him, oh, God, I hate him.

I was holding my stomach. I felt sick because I had been a fool, I’d been foolish. I’d stopped using the Lysol after we made love. I wanted to run upstairs and fix that right away, but then I thought, It might be too late. I could already be pregnant. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I thought if I gave him a child—

But he’s been making lists. I’m pretty sure I could have him certified insane. But then she’d win, wouldn’t she, this Mary? It’d be the two of them together in the ward. Unbelievable. Horrible and unbelievable. I had to laugh. There’s no one I can tell, not even Greta. There’s nothing I can do about this. I measured my waist with my hands. He must have imagined her smaller about the waist than me. How much smaller. . I pulled my hands in tight, tighter, this much smaller, this much. She was taking my breath. Taller than I am, or shorter? Taller. So she could look down on him. He seemed to like her looking down on him. I hunched over the desk with my hands in fists, and my wedding ring swung from the chain around my neck.

“But it’s not fair,” I said. “You don’t really exist. He could take a fall, or hit his head, and whatever part of his brain you belong to, that could suddenly shut you out. You’re just a thought. You don’t need him.” The sounds I’d heard down the telephone, the awful sobbing, those sounds were pouring out of me now. So many crazy thoughts kept coming: Maybe I could make him take a fall — not a serious one, but it might shake him up, and she’d be gone. Or I could ask him, tell him, to stop, just stop, do whatever was necessary; he could kill her or something — what did that even mean, to kill someone imaginary — why, it was nothing at all. He could do it. He should do it, for me.

I had to get out of his study, go get the Lysol, do something, before I started kicking his things around again. That was no way to win him over. I could see him adding to Mary’s side of the list in his cheery handwriting, all apples and vowels: She doesn’t trash my study. I stood up. And then I sat down again, staring at the floor. I stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down. There was something on the floor. A shadow that stood while I sat. Long and slanted and blacker than I knew black could be. It crept, too. Towards me. “Oh, my God.” I held my hands out. “No!”

The shadow stopped. What would have been its hair fanned what would have been its face in long wings. The shadow seemed. . hesitant. I didn’t move. The shadow didn’t move.

“Mrs. Fox?” it asked.

Its voice was faint but present. Not inside my head, I heard it with my ears.

“Did you hear me?” The voice was even fainter the second time. If I ignored it, it would disappear. But I couldn’t ignore it. I looked at the ownerless shadow on the floor and I saw something that was trying to take form, and I felt bad for it. I felt sorry for it.

“If you can hear me, why won’t you speak? Do you know who I am?” I really had to strain to hear the last few words.

“You’re — Mary,” I said, as loudly as I could.

And she stood up. I mean — she stood up from the carpet in a whirl of cold air, and there was skin and flesh on her, and she was naked for almost a second, and then she turned, and she was clothed. I screamed — that time I know for sure I screamed, because she looked so alarmed, and screamed a little herself.

“You’re real,” I said. I don’t know why it came out sounding accusing; I just wanted to establish the facts.

She held her arms up to the light and looked at them exultingly, as if she’d crafted them herself. They were nice arms. Nicer than mine, that was for sure.

“Stay back,” I said, when she took another step in my direction. “Stay back.” I picked up St. John’s stapler. It was a big stapler, about the size of a human head. If I had to, I’d staple her head.

“Okay, okay,” she said, wide-eyed. She must not have wanted anything to ruin all that peachy skin. He’d said she was British, but her accent was just as New England as mine — maybe even more so.

The doorbell rang, and she scattered. That’s the closest word to what happened to her when the doorbell rang. I want to say “shattered,” but it wasn’t as sudden as all that.

It was John Pizarsky at the door. Before I let him in I looked hopefully through the spyhole for Greta. Maybe I could tell her after all. What else are friends for?

I could tell her: St. John’s in a bad way. He says he’s fine and he acts as if he’s fine, but he’s in a bad way. I don’t blame him for not being able to tell; he doesn’t do sane work for a living. And I have been sleeping with him, eating with him; we took a bath together last Tuesday — so I’m in a bad way, too. I’ve seen and heard a woman he made up. I know what this is called — a folie à deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together. It was such a strong delusion, though. Like being on some kind of drug. Nobody warned me how easily my brain could warp a sunny morning so fast that I couldn’t find the beginning of the interlude. One moment I was alone, the next. . I was still alone, I guess, and making the air talk to me.

Those opium eaters. . Coleridge could have said something; he could have let the people know that it could happen this way, without warning. De Quincey could have found a moment to mention this, for God’s sake.

Greta wasn’t with J.P., but I opened the door anyway. I had to have company. If I didn’t have company now, right now, I didn’t know what would happen or what I would do.

“What the hell took you so long?” J.P. asked.

“St. John’s out,” I said. “And I don’t have a number you can reach him on. So beat it.”

(Please stay.)

J.P. stood on the doorstep, looking at me. He looked until I twitched my nose, thinking I had something on my face.

“Say. . did you ever play croquet?” he asked, finally.

“Never,” I said. “Come inside and tell me about it.” He stepped back onto the driveway.

“Get your coat,” he said. “Come outside and play it.”

I had my coat on before J.P, or anyone, could say “knife.”

It turned out to be the nicest afternoon I’d had in a long time. Greta was at some luncheon or other, so it was just me, J.P., Tom Wainwright, and his wife, Bea, who’s just the right side of chatty and very nice, never has a bad word to say about anybody. So relaxing — we played on the Wainwrights’ front lawn. I was terrible at croquet, kept forgetting the rules even though J.P. tried to help and whispered them in my ear. But Tom and Bea just turned a blind eye when I did my worst. And there was sunshine, and cucumber sandwiches, and champagne, and I swung up high on it, higher than heaven, and forgot all about what was waiting for me at home.