Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

  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.

  SOME FOXES

  I

  The little girl feared the fox cub, and the fox cub felt exactly the same way about her.

  The woods went on for many miles, and a few foxes lived at the heart of it and didn’t encounter people if they could help it. Yet the girl and the fox cub had been pointed out to each other—the girl’s mother had used a picture book, and the fox cub’s mother had brought him to peer in at a window once, when everyone in the girl’s house was sound asleep—and each had been told: That is your enemy.

  They grew up a bit. He learnt things, and so did she. They didn’t unlearn their fear of each other.

  The girl was pretty, though . . . and stubborn and strange.

  And the young fox was curious and courageous and clever. . . .

  It was only natural that they would find each other.

  The young girl was in love with mystery and secret knowledge. She learnt the names of demons, and summoned them. They never materialised. She didn’t take offence. Sh
e wouldn’t have bothered, either, if she were them. The girl lived with her mother and her elder sister at the mouth of the woods, only a few steps away from town—less than ten steps, probably. Still, they didn’t get many visitors. In the evenings the elder sister studied and studied, but our girl set up lanterns in her room and performed puppet shows with marionettes she had made herself. During his long illness the girl’s father had shown her how to make puppets. Then he’d died. “Come away from the window,” the elder sister would say, sharply, whenever she saw what the girl was doing. “Don’t draw attention to us. Who knows what’s watching from the woods.”

  But their mother intervened and told the elder girl to leave the younger be.

  Our girl sang songs to accompany her performances, and the puppets cast shadows on the leaves and the grass outside her window. Our young fox observed all this from a distance; he stood stock-still, his narrow eyes just a faint shimmer amongst the shrubs. He heard the singing. The sound meant nothing to him, though it did not displease him. The fox knew about fox business. By now his mother had moved on somewhere, and he didn’t much miss her. His paws were swift, and he wouldn’t let his eyes confuse his mind, so he was good at catching rabbits and squirrels. He slept late and woke early and travelled the whole wood wide, tasting the weather. He knew where the bees went to make their wild honey. He saw when cuckoos visited the nests and knew which birds were going to get a nasty shock come hatching time, and he waited for the spoils. The fox fought no one; he took things easy. When it was time to run away, he ran. But not this time.

  What can it mean for a fox to approach a girl? Foxes are solitary. A fox that seeks out human company is planning evil. Or it has something the matter with it. Rabies, or something worse. The fox watched the girl at play, and he didn’t understand what she was doing—it certainly wasn’t fox business. Still, it interested him, and he gazed and gazed at her as she sat surrounded by all that greedy, dangerous fire that she kept in jars. He gazed and gazed though it served no purpose to do so, gazed without feeling satisfied and with the sensation of a deep scratch in his side (this was an awareness of time and its disappointments, the certainty that the girl would put out the lamps before he had looked his fill). And it was through observing the girl at play that our fox learnt to recognise beauty elsewhere in the wood. Whenever he became caught up in useless looking, he knew. Moonlight on the water brought rapture. Think of a fox, dipping his paws in silver, muzzle dripping. He didn’t want to drink the water, only to touch it while it looked like that. Another fox came by and laughed at him. But our fox didn’t care.

  As for the girl, she looked into the darkness of the woods, and she saw very little. Occasional motion, perhaps, but nothing definite. Our girl developed a distaste for fact. She stopped going to school. Her mother kept a shop in town, selling food, books, toys, linens, and anything else she could think of, and she did very well out of it. The girl joined her mother at the shop counter. She refused to sell people things she didn’t think they needed, and argued with them until they saw her point. The elder sister grew more wan and studious, folding herself into her textbooks because she didn’t like to live in the mouth of the woods, where things she couldn’t see crept and shuddered at all hours of the day and fell deathly still when she turned to look at them. The elder sister wanted to get away and go to a city, and be unknown and kick up her heels and have fun. All in time. She needed to get top marks first, and go away on a scholarship. “What’s to become of you?” the elder sister asked the younger, who shrugged and laughed and looked out the window and dreamed.

  Have you forgotten our fox?

  The one who now had an eye for beauty, and an inclination to set it apart from other things . . .

  The fox wished to thank the girl.

  (The fox wished to know the girl.)

  It took him a long time to make his mind up. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t have a fever and he slept well and his appetite was fine, so he thought he must be well and that everything was all right, and that maybe just this once the things the elder foxes had said were wrong.

  So the fox brought the girl berries. Plump, rust-red berries wrapped in the largest, greenest leaf he could find. He left the leaf out overnight first, so that it sparkled with dew. How to give them to her?

  He watched and waited. The evening puppet shows had become less frequent; this was because the girl was becoming interested in young men and had begun dressing up to go out to dances with her sister. Their mother had previously refused to let the elder sister go alone. “Young men are animals,” she said. So there were dances, and blushes, and letters written and exchanged, and sighs of longing and—the woods didn’t seem quite as real to the girl anymore. They were just some trees behind her house. A great number of trees, to be sure, but only trees. Men were interesting. They were new puzzles to work at, at least. And if she solved one of them she won a new life, and a new surname, and a companion who wouldn’t tell her off for buying too many music scorebooks and new hats. These days the girl tended to put on a puppet show only when she’d fallen out with a suitor. Then a richly gowned female puppet berated a threadbare male puppet for half an hour at a time.

  The fox didn’t like the new tone that the puppet shows had taken. Something about it . . . Anyway, here were the berries, and there was the girl and the lantern light. The time was right. He leapt up onto the windowsill with the leaf in his mouth, dropped it, and retreated, farther than a stone’s throw but not so far that they were unable to see each other.

  The young woman saw a streak of grey, saw a tail brush the windowpane, saw a green parcel fall. And her puppets fell from her hands with a clatter and lay on the ground with their knees bent as if they meant to spring up again on their own. The lantern flickered. The girl saw a fox a little way down the corridor of trees. The creature was watching her. She moved to the right and its gaze moved to the right. She moved to the left, far left, almost out of the window’s frame, and the fox’s head moved with her. It appeared to be smiling, but that was just a meaningless expression created by the look of its muzzle. There was an unfaltering clarity to the animal’s gaze: thought without emotion. And yet. The fox was quivering. It had brought her something and it had stayed to see what she would do, and it was quivering. So the girl didn’t draw the curtain, and she didn’t turn away. She opened the window and slowly, very slowly, closed her hand around the bulky leaf. The fox did not approach—if anything, it drew farther back. The girl opened the leaf. Berries, but they looked more like jewels. She tasted one, and it was delicious. She ate another and another, and she beckoned the fox. “Come here, come here,” she said in a syrupy voice she used with very small children. The fox did not approach. The fox looked desperately from the girl’s eyes to her berry-stained mouth. She didn’t like the gift. She was angry. What was she saying, what was she saying. . . .

  “Won’t you come closer? You’re the one who sought me out, you know,” the girl said crossly, in her own voice.

  The fox had had enough for one night, and fled.

  Now the girl wished to thank the fox.

  (The girl wished to know the fox.)

  She wrapped herself in a shawl, took a lantern in her hand, and slipped out of the house, thinking that she would follow the fox to its den and see how it lived. Our girl raised her lantern as she followed the paths between the trees. She ducked under the bigger branches, but the smaller ones raked her hair; she gasped at first, but then the pull became so frequent that it was caressing, a ceiling of hands. She stepped across shallow, pebbled brooks. Her skirt dragged in the water—the hem would be ruined, she thought, distantly. The fox was nowhere to be seen. The girl stopped beside a fallen log and swung her lantern around behind her, trying to remember the direction she had come from. She couldn’t remember. She was lost, and she didn’t know what to do. She sat down on the log and cried. Unfortunate girl—her tears were beautiful. From his hiding place, the fox watched her weep. All he could think was that she was doi
ng something with her eyes, something that shone. He watched her until she fell asleep, and he kept watch over her while she slept.

  This happened in winter. There was ice in the earth. When the sun was down, skin and clothing were of no use outside. You needed fur, or feathers, or you needed to be indoors. The girl caught a chill. A bad chill. Her breath cracked in her chest; she took a fever because her body needed the warmth. Her teeth chattered. She reminded the fox of leaves blown in the wind. When she woke up, she was weak, and, much to the delight of the fox, she lay on her log and wept again. Without knowing it she had walked a long, long way into the wood. Sunrise dazed the redwoods—birches wept, and so did the girl. Eventually she chose a direction and began to walk—the fox followed her, wondering where she was going. Home—her home—was the other way. Discreetly, he rattled some branches. She noticed him, and then he ran, too fast for her to catch him but slow enough for her to keep up. The girl could hardly believe that she was following a fox again—it could be taking her anywhere. To her death in a deep pool, to a shallow pit crammed with tiny bones. Perhaps it didn’t even mean for her to follow it, perhaps it was just bounding along, enjoying its morning. The fox never looked back at her. A different fox?