Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

  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.

  THE TRAINING AT MADAME DE SILENTIO’S

  Madame de Silentio takes in delinquent ruffians between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and turns them into world-class husbands by the time they are twenty-one. You’re admitted to Madame de Silentio’s Academy if you answer at least eighty-five percent of her entrance exam correctly, and you graduate with a certificate that is respected in every strata of polite society. No one can ever remember any of the questions that were on Madame de Silentio’s entrance exam. I know I can’t—I tried my best to fail the exam. I preferred not to be educated, fearing it wouldn’t suit me. Of course, I know better now. I won’t lie, it took me half a year, but I now realise how lucky I am to have this opportunity to become a man of true worth, to have the man I will be intercept the boy that I was.

  What is her secret, you may ask. How did Madame de Silentio attain her ranking amongst the great educators of the modern world? It’s simple. Madame de Silentio knows what’s best for young people. She knows what’s appropriate. She refrains from cluttering our minds with information we don’t need to know. Here at Madame de Silentio’s our textbooks get straight to the point—European history is boiled down to a paragraph, with two sentences each for the histories of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Australasia doesn’t count. Young men at Madame de Silentio’s Academy learn practical skills that set us in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women. Here is a sample of the things we are taught:

  Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence.

  It says in the prospectus that Madame de Silentio’s students eat, sleep, and breathe good husbandry. That’s true. We’re taught to ask ourselves a certain question when we wake up in the morning and just before we fall asleep: How can I make Her happy? “Her” being the terrible, wonderful goddess that we must simultaneously honour, obey, and rule (she’d like us to rule her sometimes, we’re told)—the future wife. In our Words of Love class we learn all the poems of Pablo Neruda by heart, and also Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields lyrics. Love Letters, a compulsory extracurricular course of study, involves a close reading of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the entire class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanour.

  We sleep eight to a dormitory, and our dormitory bedsteads are iron, with shapes from the end of days twisted into the headboards—lions lying alongside lambs, children caressing serpents. Some of the boys sit up in these dormitory beds and scream in the night, but then the matron comes with a cup of warm milk and puts a few drops of her special bittersweet medicine in it, and the screaming boy drinks deep and the trouble goes away. Madame de Silentio understands that becoming a man of true worth is a difficult process. And we understand that once we’re in the Academy we’ve got to stay here for as long as it takes—there’s no recourse to parents or guardians, as they’ve signed their rights to us away in their contract with Madame de Silentio, and it’s our own stupid fault for having been so unmanageable. Eighteen is the age at which any student is free to leave the Academy, but by then we’ve become used to the place. This is no philanthropic institution, mind you—the families of heiresses pay Madame de Silentio considerable sums of money, sums that we students can only guess at and whisper about, to ensure that they get the perfect husband for their precious Elaine, to ensure that their wayward Katherine is settled with the right life partner. The Academy is in many ways a business, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Madame de Silentio has found her niche, and the way of the world is such that if she did not demand recompense for her efforts she would receive none. So, good for Madame de Silentio.

  Having recently been made Head Prefect, it’s my duty to write a new chapter of the handbook that each new pupil is given on his first day, that awful first day when you just think you’re not going to be able to stand it. I take this responsibility very seriously, just as seriously as I take keeping the juniors in order and being a good ambassador for the Academy when we have to leave the grounds to round up the runaways. I’ve consulted the annals of school history, and I found mention of an act of disobedience committed by two moderately promising students—it happened twenty-five years ag
o, and the consequences were quite grave. I conducted interviews with Madame de Silentio herself, and with those teachers who remembered what had happened, and I’ve pieced together a narrative that I’d like to try out on you. I think it makes an invaluable cautionary tale for any new boy who is thinking of defying our headmistress.

  Charles Wolfe and Charlie Wulf met in their second year of studies at Madame de Silentio’s, when they were assigned neighbouring beds in the same dormitory. Charlie, at seventeen, was Charles’s elder by a year. By all accounts the boys took notice of the fact that they essentially had the same name. In diaries, and in correspondence intercepted by staff, each boy declared that there must be meaning in the similarity between their names. They felt they were brothers. Interesting, because they were very different.

  Photographs reveal Charlie Wulf to have been a bit of a pretty boy. Eyes like great big puddles, Byronic waves of hair, the spare frame of a longtime drug addict—before joining the student body he had been forcibly and abruptly weaned off opium in our soundproof music room, which was placed off-limits for three weeks. It seems favouritism brought Charlie to the Academy. I refer to the letter written to Madame de Silentio a full year before he was admitted, in which his mother and father, taking turns to write a word each, explain that in the silence of the heart every parent chooses a favourite. In Mr. and Mrs. Wulf’s case they chose the same one, much to the jealousy and rage of their other nine children. Siblings always detect these things, but without proof there’s not a lot they can do. Charlie seemed to have been born an escapist; at the age of seven, having complained of a boredom that made him “feel sick in his tummy,” he broke into his father’s liquor cabinet and drank himself into a state of catalepsy. By the age of fifteen he was seeking oblivion in opium dens, and since his wealthy parents made him a separate allowance twice the size of that allotted to each of his siblings, Charlie was able to buy almost as much oblivion as he desired, running through a month’s allowance in less than a week and beatifically starving until the time came for the next installment. The letter from Mr. and Mrs. Wulf also lists certain diseases Charlie had contracted and been treated for, ending with a deadly scare that was the last straw. He’d been sent to rehabilitation clinics and boot camps, and each time he had escaped with the aid of his captors. Mr. and Mrs. Wulf believed Madame de Silentio’s Academy was the only institution without a trace of indulgence at its heart, and therefore the Academy was the only place that could clean their son up. They would give custody of their son over to Madame de Silentio if it would save his life. Charlie’s life shall be saved, Madame de Silentio assured them. Better than that—his life shall be made useful. Charlie Wulf was weak of character, consistently receiving D grades or lower for his Decisive Thinking. He was also a cheat when it came to exams, and a plagiarist when it came to essays—he was punished for the latter two faults twenty-seven times in his first year alone. These faults aside, he was well liked for his easy manner and the way he successfully avoided snitching on others, even when it was easier, perhaps even advantageous, to do so.