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.