“I just thought it would be fun.” As she spoke I pictured her standing before me, eyeing me with all the defiance of Lucifer. In a smaller, meeker voice she said, “Stop hating me. . Who is he, anyway?”
“Just a man,” I said. In my mind I was already reorganizing the contents of the black folder. I’d kept working on the stories, and they were stronger now, and better; I was sure of it. It was just as well he hadn’t met me at the Mercier.
On Saturday afternoon I stood paralysed on the pavement outside the restaurant, which had these smart black-andsilver revolving doors; every time someone stepped into them I knew I was meant to take the next empty space and push myself into the lobby. But when I finally did I found that I couldn’t stop pushing at the door until I had spun back out onto the street again. I tried to be firm with myself, but with each glimpse of the restaurant full of marble and women genteelly eating salad, I lost my nerve to join them and ran inside the doors like a rodent in a glass maze. On the corner a man in a suit was standing beside an apple cart. “Apples,” he said. “Getcha apples!” No one was buying, so he began juggling them. “Look what I’ve sunk to,” he sang. “God, I hate these apples. I’d rather starve to death than eat these apples, tra la la.” He was a tenor. Finally he started telling the people passing that he had kids at home. Someone suggested he feed the apples to his kids. He caught my eye. “You’re my witness. When you’re out of work people think they can talk to you anyhow!” I nodded and went back in for another bout with the revolving doors. By now people trying to enter the restaurant from the street were asking me if I was crazy or what; the fifth time I saw the maître d’ frowning menacingly, and the sixth time a woman came to meet me out on the street. She seized my arm as if I was a naughty child about to scamper off somewhere. “That’s enough of that,” she said. “You’ll tire yourself out.”
I coughed out an “Ouch, do you mind?” and hoped the apple seller wasn’t looking. The woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. She wore a brown skirt suit and a tiny brown hat tipped coquettishly over one eye.
“Let go of me,” I said.
When she didn’t, I pleaded, “I’m meeting someone.”
“Who?” she asked.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business—”
She shook me a little. “Mr. Fox’s secretary,” I said. “I’m meeting Mr. Fox’s secretary.”
“Then it’s just as well, isn’t it, that I’m her.”
She released me at last, and we stood nose to nose. I glared, and she just looked back with an air of melancholy.
“You’d better prove it,” I said. For some reason, I’d thought the secretary would be a man.
“You’re. . Mary Foxe?” she said, looking me over.
“I’m Mary Foxe,” I said.
The woman produced an envelope from her handbag, pulled my letter out of it, and showed me.
Abominable Mr. Fox,
I read, then winced, and returned it to her, apologizing. She said: “Don’t apologise; I think it’s funny.” But she didn’t laugh, or even smile.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said.
I handed her the black folder full of stories, and I asked her what Mr. Fox was like.
The secretary blinked slowly, thinking. “He’s kind of quiet,” she said.
She wandered away with the folder sticking out of her handbag, leaving me alone on the sidewalk. I watched her, thinking she might suddenly remember something and turn around. Once I was sure that she’d gone, I hailed a cab.
A week went by; he didn’t write to me. He had my folder and he didn’t write to me. Then three more silent weeks, six, eight. My fingernails crept down into their beds, my eyes grew glassy, I brushed my hair with my back to the mirror. I had no interest in looking at myself; it was the sensation of teeth against my scalp that subdued me.
It was all I could do not to write to him again.
“You should go get your stories back,” Katherine said, when I briefly explained the situation to her. “He’s probably going to steal them or something.”
“How would you know they’re good enough for him to want to steal them?”
“Oh, I know,” Katherine said sagely. “I read ’em. All of them. I especially like the one about the disappearing zoo. That’s the best one.”
I grabbed her before she could escape and, unexpectedly, found myself hugging her. I liked the fluffy weight of her head against my chest. She was just as surprised as I was. I neutralised it by calling her a bloody nosey parker.
“Maybe that goddamn secretary stole the stories,” Katherine suggested.
“I told you not to say that word.”
“Which? Secretary? Stories? Maybe. .?”
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
One morning Mitzi said I ought to take a break. That was alarming. I stopped buttering my toast and said, “Why? I’m fine. Thanks all the same, Mrs. Cole, but the weekends are enough for me.” I made a swift analysis of my behaviour of the past two weeks or so. I had not said or done anything particularly strange; I had behaved more or less as I always did.
Mitzi rose from her seat and cupped my face in her flower-scented hands. I was so nervous I could have bitten her. “Honey, no one’s saying you’re not doing a good job. You’re doing a wonderful job. Isn’t she, Katy?”
Katherine said yes and stuck her tongue out at me.
“It’s just that you can’t give your weekends to a soup kitchen and your weekdays to this little fiend of mine and just go on and on without stopping. What if you burned out or something? Honey — I’m telling you, I’d never forgive myself.” She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.
“Your face is all pinched,” Katherine told me helpfully.
So that morning, instead of taking Katherine to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I went to get my stories back.
One hundred and seventy-seven West 77th Street was easy to find. It was a posh apartment block, much like the Coles’ but smaller. More exclusive, I suppose. I entered the building behind a grocery delivery boy who pulled a small township of brown paper bags along on a trolley behind him. The building directory indicated that Mr. Fox, at number 25, was on the fourth floor. As I waited by the lift I caught sight of myself in the polished steel doors. I was grinning. On the fourth floor I approached number 25 casually, as if I might not stop, as if I might well walk past it and continue on down the red carpeted corridor. But I did stop at 25. And I rang the doorbell, and I knocked, hard.
The secretary answered the door. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or powder, and she’d yanked her hair up into a knot on the top of her head. She had a pencil behind each ear and one in her hand. She looked very, very young.
“What can I do for you?” she asked. She didn’t appear to recognise me.
“My name’s Mary Foxe,” I said.
“Mary Foxe,” she said, as if repeating the name would help jog her memory.
“I corresponded with Mr. Fox about some stories of mine. He said he’d read them, but I suppose he’s too busy. I’ve come to take them off his hands.”
She hesitated. Oh, God. She’d thrown my stories away. Or there was a mountain of manuscripts somewhere behind her, and she’d never find mine.
“I met you outside Salmagundi on Sixty-first and Lexington a couple of months ago,” I said. “There was a bit of a fuss with some revolving doors.”
Her eyes lit up at last. “Oh, right,” she said. “Right.”
She looked over her shoulder, though no one had spoken. “Be right back.”
She closed the door before I could peer into the flat. It seemed strange to me that Mr. Fox’s secretary should be at his flat — I mean, secretaries belong in offices.