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.
MY DAUGHTER THE RACIST
One morning my daughter woke up and said all in a rush, “Mother, I swear before you and God that from today onwards I am racist.” She’s eight years old. She chopped all her hair off two months ago because she wanted to go around with the local boys and they wouldn’t have her with her long hair. Now she looks like one of them: eyes dazed from looking directly at the sun, teeth shining white in her sunburnt face. She laughs a lot. She plays. “Look at her playing,” my mother says. “Playing in the rubble of what used to be our great country.” My mother exaggerates as often as she can. I’m sure she would like nothing more than to be part of a Greek tragedy. She wouldn’t even want a large part, she’d be perfectly content with a chorus role, warning that fate is coming to make havoc of all things. My mother is a fine woman, allover wrinkles and she always has a clean handkerchief somewhere about her person, but I don’t know what she’s talking about with her rubble this, rubble that — we live in a village, and it’s not bad here. Not peaceful but not bad. In cities it’s worse. In the city centre, where we used to live, a bomb took my husband and turned his face to blood. I was lucky, another widow told me, that there was something left so that I could know of his passing. But I was ungrateful. I spat at that widow. I spat at her in her sorrow. That’s sin. I know that’s sin. But half my life was gone, and it wasn’t easy to look at what was left.