I heard voices as I headed from my driveway to the front porch. Daphne and a man. She was laughing. She sounded drunk. It was only three o’clock. I slowed my steps with a corner still to turn; hedges, luckily, so they couldn’t see me. I heard the porch swing creak — the two of them were sitting on it. It was John Pizarsky she was with, and they were talking about fairy tales, of all things. D. had a pair of scissors, and a vaseful of water, and was arranging some flowers — whether she’d bought them or he’d given them to her, I was sure the flower arranging was unnecessary — she always did it, stem by stem, even when presented with a bunch of flowers that already looked all right.
“Why have husbands got to keep themselves all locked up, that’s what I want to know,” Daphne complained.
“Not all of them do,” Pizarsky told her. He wasn’t drunk at all. I didn’t like that — those two sat together, his voice measured and sober, and her saying just anything that occurred to her. He was going to remember the entire conversation, and she would remember a quarter of it at the very most. Unfortunate.
“Oh, it’s only the cold ones that do it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know about cold, Daphne. . ”
“No, you don’t know about cold. Because you’re not cold, are you, J.P.?”
He didn’t answer. Too busy trying to think of some phrase that would make her see him as ardent, I’ll bet.
“You’re not Bluebeard? Or Reynardine?” I caught flashes of Daphne through the brambles; she was examining her arrangement of the flowers from a number of angles. She didn’t ask his advice, and I was glad she didn’t. She always asked my advice — not that I ever give a response she can make use of.
“Nor Fitcher, no.”
“Fitcher?”
Just what I was wondering. Pizarsky seemed to know his stuff, though. He’d told me himself that he’d been studying for a doctorate in anthropology until his father had demanded he help steer the family’s jewellery business. A diamond mine in Africa and a gold mine in Nevada. Opal fields in Australia, and more. I don’t like to think about how rich Pizarsky is. He doesn’t seem to like thinking about it, either. It’s awkward that he has so much. What’s left for him to want?
He told my wife a bizarre story. It started out almost too screwed up to even be a fairy tale. It was all about a magician called Fitcher who went around with a basket, begging for food. And any woman who pitied him and gave him food was compelled to jump into his basket and go home with him and be his wife.
“Yes,” Daphne said, laying down her scissors. “I felt so sorry for him at first. . All I wanted to do was make him happy. . ”
“Yes, well, Fitcher did this with three sisters in a row. He set each of them the don’t-look-in-the-locked-room test — the first two sisters failed, of course. The only way for Fitcher’s final wife, the third sister, to survive her danger was by becoming insane. If you think about it, it was inevitable. That woman went through a lot. She found her sisters all chopped up and sunk in blood, and she collected the parts and she joined them up. Only a very, very young child would think of a solution like that, and only an insane person would actually try it. It worked, though; they came back to life, and she sent them home. On a clear afternoon in an empty house she covered herself in honey and rolled around in a barrel’s worth of feathers, and a skeleton sat by in a chair the whole time; it was meant to take her place, and she didn’t hesitate or falter because she’d gone nuts. She was scared right out of her mind. She had to be — to rescue herself. So she quit working to make sense of things — we don’t always realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building our thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance. She cut it out and just kept moving. She was nobody, she was nowhere, doing nothing, but doing it as hard and fast as she could. And once she was fully covered with honey and feathers she walked out into broad daylight and used the only words she hadn’t forgotten: I’m a bird; I’m Fitcher’s bird. If she’d ever been anyone other than Fitcher’s bird, she didn’t know a thing about it. What did she look like, all sticky with quills? What did her eyes say? Did she even understand the words she was saying? Never mind; her mouth said: I’m a bird, I’m Fitcher’s bird. And nobody who heard her could doubt her. She met the bad magician; she met Fitcher himself, on her way home. I’m a bird, she told him. He didn’t recognize her. I mean, she was gone. He looked into her eyes and there was no woman there. And he never caught her again.”
Daphne must have had a look on her face that made him stop talking. Neither of them said anything for quite a while.
“She went insane because of him,” Daphne said. “I think that’s happening to me.”
The swing creaked again. I looked out from behind the hedge; I had to see what they were doing. If they saw me, they saw me. But if I saw that he had his arms around her, or even just his hand on her arm, I was going to bust his head open. The conversation itself didn’t matter. She was drunk. And he — I knew what he was doing with apparent idleness: using his halting, mysterious European accent to feed her a story that he knew she’d like because she could place herself in it, be the victim, be the heroine. I withdrew before either of them saw me.
“You don’t have to go insane,” Pizarsky told Daphne. “It doesn’t have to go like that.”
“What shall I do, then? What shall I do?” She didn’t sound as if she was especially interested in the answer to her question.
Her arms were bare and freckled, her eyes were closed, her head was resting against the back of the swing. Mine. I wanted to lift her up into my arms and carry her around with me, our bodies together, my neck her neck, her hands my hands. He wasn’t touching her, he wasn’t even sitting close to her, and I could see only the back of his head. But he was very still, hardly seemed to be breathing, and he was looking at her. That was bad.
“Daphne — what’s going on?” he asked eventually. “What’s wrong?”
“I wish I could tell you,” she said.
“You can. You can tell me anything.” He waited, but she didn’t say anything. “Maybe some other time. I think you should know, though, that there are other ways — apart from going crazy. Do you know the story of Mr. Fox?”
“No.” Her voice was languid, reluctant. “What happens in that one?”
“The usual — wooing, seduction, then the discovery of a chopped-up predecessor. But this is an English fairy tale, you see. So the heroine, Lady Mary—”
“Lady Mary?” Daphne asked. I didn’t need to look to know that she’d sat up.
Mary Foxe put a soft hand on my shoulder. “Come away, Mr. Fox,” she whispered. I shrugged her off. She was wearing what Daphne called her signature scent. I disapproved — and not just because the scent costs enough per ounce for me to momentarily consider asking the shopgirl to leave the price tag on so Daphne can realise how spoilt she is. Mary was Mary; she’s been with me a long time — maybe even before I’d gone to France. She’s handled a sickle at haymaking time, stacked and tromped the hay, helped me feed it to the cows and horses. She’s stood dressed top to toe in mud, and she’s braced herself against the barn beams when she’s been too tired to stand. Mary Foxe shouldn’t have anything to do with bottled fragrances.
“That farm stuff was before my time,” Mary said. “Come away with me, Mr. Fox.” There was a hard smile on her face. “You said that Mrs. Fox couldn’t stop us, remember?”