Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

  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.