Phyl had proved herself to be the most loyal and uplifting friend; I wondered how I ever could have thought she’d take any such nonsense from my husband. And Bill had sworn his infidelity was over . . . but for a wife it is never over. Ever.
“Phyl,” I said as the train exhaled coal-tinged smoke and heaved toward Oxford.
“Hmmm?”
“I’m nervous. Isn’t that odd? Why should I be nervous about meeting a man and his friend at a restaurant? I’ve met a hundred writers in my day, and most of them not worthy of the awe I gave them.”
“Because you respect this writer so much. I think you’re quite afraid to meet the real man. Maybe he’s not everything you’ve imagined him to be.”
I laughed, too loudly as always, and two women a row ahead turned with disapproving looks. I offered them my biggest smile. Nothing like a little kindness to kill. “Oh, cookie,” I said to Phyl. “Could you be any more blunt?”
“We might as well face the truth, my dear.” She stretched and closed The Great Divorce, which she’d wanted to skim before meeting Jack. “There’s no real use in pretending you don’t care. Of course the butterflies must be flapping all over your insides.”
I thought for a moment as the landscape flickered by, green and gold. “It’s not losing the respect for him that makes me nervous; there’s no chance of that. It’s the regard he might or might not have for me. You know, my dear, Jews aren’t taken too kindly round these parts. Even ex-Jews. What if this ex-atheist, ex-Communist, Bronx-born woman appalls him?”
“Maybe appalled, but more likely a little enthralled. Like a good book unfolding, you’ll just have to wait and see.”
The checkered fabric-covered seats itched to the touch but I sank back anyway, lifting the shade higher on the window. Green fields passed by, wetlands and rivers, marinas and creeks. It seemed as if we crossed many rivers, although it might have been only one, snaking its way between London and Oxford. High on a knoll we blew by a small town where the chimney pots below looked like headstones. Then we passed through the coal-tinged Industrial Slough and onward through Reading. The rocking sensation of the train left me sleepy as I imagined a few opening lines for the moment I saw Jack.
It’s an honor and a privilege.
You’ve changed my life.
I’ve adored you since halfway through The Great Divorce when you stated, “No people find themselves more absurd than lovers.”
Hi, I’m Joy, and I’m a nervous mess.
But in the end I said none of those things.
CHAPTER 10
I’ll measure my affection by the drachm
“SONNET I,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The brick of the Eastgate Hotel, a grand dame of a structure in Oxford, was the tawny color of my cat’s fur. I was, even after a month, still struck by the solid antiquity in England—the fashion in which structures were built as if they’d known their ethereal beauty would be needed for thousands of years. The windows were inset like sleepy-hooded eyes. The four steps to the front door were wide and curved. To our right was what one might believe was a medieval fortress but was really one of Oxford University’s thirty-four colleges, Merton College, with the long stone wall that followed the curved street as closely as a lover.
“Phyl,” I said, and we paused at the dark wood doorway, “although I miss my collection of poogles, I’m very happy to be here.”
She gave me a calm and knowing look, her blue eyes squinting against the sunlight. “This will be interesting, my friend. Enjoy it.”
I nodded at her and placed my hand over my stomach to settle the nerves. Dabbed my lipstick with a tissue. For years I’d hoped to meet Jack, yet doubted I would, and now I stood on an Oxford sidewalk outside the place he met friends for lunch.
We entered the hotel bar lobby, where he’d said he would be waiting. I called to mind the photographs in which Bill said Jack looked like a kindly old basset hound. In those images, Jack sometimes wore round black-rimmed glasses, and he always appeared in a suit and tie—did he wear these things on a regular day to eat lunch at a hotel? Or would he be in his teaching robes? A pipe between his lips? A cigarette dangling?
My thoughts winged everywhere—caged birds.
Did I look all right? Beautiful but smart? Kind but intelligent? I’d never admired my looks, per se, except for one very lovely photograph on the back of Weeping Bay. And every time I tried to reproduce that exact pose, I came up short and disappointed. I fiddled with my strand of pearls and glanced around the bar. It was full at lunch hour: men in three-piece suits and ties, women in pearls and hats no different from what I wore. The room was a haze of chintz and velvet, low lighting from lamps at dark wood side tables. The walls were covered in green damask wallpaper, the ceiling with dark wood gables thick as railroad ties. It was all very stately and noble, which caused me to stand taller, shift my shoulders back.
My gaze roamed the room until I found him.
Jack.
There he was, animated, in deep conversation with the man across from him. His smile was kind and curved as he listened.
I took stock of him as if I had eternity to stare without his noticing.
His hairline had receded, and what dark hair remained on top was slicked back with comb marks. His smile sparked with life. His eyes were shadowed by his sloping eyelids beneath rimless glasses, as if he’d just woken and was happy to have done so. He sat casually, with one corduroy-clad leg over the other.
There was something lit up about him, the way the landscape of his face was animated beneath his strong eyebrows. His lips and mouth were full. These attributes—his mind, which I knew in letters, and now the light of his spirit—combined into a singular word: beautiful. The birds in my mind moved to my chest, fluttering there in anticipation.
And then, as if someone placed a hand over his mouth, he stopped midlaugh. He looked to me as if my stare had tapped him on the shoulder.
Our gazes caught and stayed. He grinned, as did I.
I gathered myself and ambled toward him, came to a stop in front of the couch as he stood. Those brown eyes of his, they were sparkling as if lit.
“Well, well. My pen-friend Joy is finally in England.” His voice was a song: part Irish brogue, part English. He wasn’t quite as tall as I’d expected, perhaps five foot ten at the most, yet his charisma stretched to the beams overhead. He wore a ragged tweed jacket with brown leather patches on the elbows and a white-buttoned shirt with a bright-blue tie.
“And you,” I said with a jittery smile, “must be my very famous friend, Jack Lewis.”
He bellowed with laughter and thrust out his hand to take mine in a rigorous shake. “Famous? Infamous perhaps, in very small circles.”
My voice sounded breathy and silly. I lowered it. “I’m really happy to see you. After all these years of friendship and an entire month here in England, finally we meet face-to-face.” I held to his hand and we smiled at each other. For what was most likely only a few seconds, time paused. He let go of my hand as Phyl stepped closer. “Oh! I’ve forgotten myself! Please meet my friend Phyl Williams.”
The man next to Jack lifted his eyebrows, and at once I knew what I’d done wrong—I’d spoken loudly in my New York accent.
Jack shook Phyl’s hand and in that brogue stated, “George, may I introduce you to Joy Gresham and her friend from London, Phyl.”
George nodded once at each of us and Jack explained. “George is a dear friend who was once a student of mine at Magdalen.”
I glanced at George. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you.” I held out my hand and he shook it without a word. Nervous, I pressed my lips together, hoping the lipstick was still there and hadn’t bled into the small creases around my mouth.
“Come,” Jack said, “let’s sit down. They’ve sorted a table for us.”
The four of us wound our way to the low-lit dining room table reserved in the middle of the restaurant, where four cut-glass tumblers sparkling with amber liquid waited.
We settled in, shook open the napkins on our laps, as I quickly assessed George. He possessed a long face like a horse with a deeply etched forehead, a road map to years of furrowed brow. Large ears perched as if tilting toward his eyes, and his long nose ended in a rounded bulb from which he seemed to look down at me as he caught my eye. I looked away.
“Sherry,” Jack said and raised his glass. “Welcome to Oxford.”
We all lifted our glasses and together took a sip. “Hmmm,” I said, “Lovely. In America we would’ve started with hard liquor and moved to wine and we’d be drunk before the meal even began.” I shook my head. “Then I’d have felt the particular hell of a hangover before the food was gone. But everything here is very . . . civilized.”
Jack laughed, and George gave me the furrowed brow look. I smiled my best smile. “Mr. Sayer, Jack says you were a former student of his? What do you do now?”
“I teach at Malvern.”
“Oh, lucky you. This city of Oxford,” I said. “It makes me wonder how different my life would have been if I had spent it in a place like this with men like you two.”
“I daresay your life is much better spent around men other than us.” George lifted his glass. “Boring as we can be.”
“But the intellectual life here—what, nine hundred years old?” I leaned forward. “How stimulating.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “It can be, but then again it is also quite boorish at times, the tedium of teaching and grading and lecturing.”
“Well, I would have liked to give it a shot.”
Then Phyl told some joke lost to me in time, and we began to talk in circles and with laughter. We ate salmon mousse as light as whipped cream, and I lost track of the wine refills. Gaiety increased exponentially with the wine, and jokes were told badly and histories regaled with embellishment. We talked about the new queen’s upcoming coronation, of the tea rationing. The long lunch felt but five minutes. Often Jack and I caught each other’s eye and smiled, but shyly. We knew each other as well as any friends—he’d heard my secrets and my fears—and yet it was just now that our eyes could catch as our minds already had.
“How did you come upon our friend’s work?” George finally asked as trifle was delivered for dessert.
“Like Jack, I was surprised by God. Both of us midlife converts.” I smiled at Jack and then looked back to George. “When I was eight years old I read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and marched right into the family room to announce to my Jewish parents that I was an atheist.”
George flinched. I saw it, and knew it was the word Jewish. Brits could claim they weren’t anti-Semitic, just as white Americans could claim they weren’t racist as they segregated their schools and neighborhoods.
“We’ve been writing about our spiritual journeys,” Jack said to George and then turned to me. “And you have brought to my attention holes and missing links in some of my arguments. I must say I have rarely met such a worthy adversary.”
Adversary? I wanted to be anything but.
George cleared his throat. “Well, do tell us what you think of England, Mrs. Gresham. You’ve been here a month now?”
“Well, I have fallen in love, Mr. Sayer. In mad, passionate love.” The heat of a blush filled my face and neck. I reached my hand to my décolletage, grabbed onto the pearls I’d strung there that very morning thinking they looked elegant, and took in a long breath. “It is England I’m talking about, of course!”
George nodded, patting his lips with a napkin.
I continued as I often did when nervous, words pouring out. “I love everything about it. I’ve practically walked my legs off. I’m enamored with the golden light. And how can air be softer here? I have no idea, but it is! The kindness of strangers is unparalled. And oh, the pubs.” I exhaled. “I adore the pubs. The dark warmth of them, the murmur of conversation, the music played by a man with a fiddle tucked away in a corner.”
George burst out in hearty laughter. “You obviously haven’t yet seen the bloody English fog. Just you wait; we’ll see if you’re still romanticizing our country then. Which, by the way, is jolly fine by me.”
Jack lifted his glass. “When I first saw Oxford I wrote to my father and told him it was a place beyond my wildest imaginings, a place of the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I’m quite envious of your view of Oxford today. There’s only that one first time.”
We all fell silent and finished our desserts slowly, as if not one of us desired the parting that would naturally follow. I felt bereft by Jack’s absence, even though it was merely an idea and had not yet happened.
Then he stood, wiped crumbs from his jacket, and smiled. “Why, let’s walk to Magdalen and I’ll show you around a bit, if you have the time.”
If I have the time . . .
CHAPTER 11
Between two rivers, in the wistful weather,
Sky changing, tree undressing, summer failing
“SONNET VI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
September in Oxford is a glory of color and silken air, of golden hues and ivy-covered hope. It was like being transported to the land of a fairy tale you’d forgotten you read.
I ambled next to Jack as he swung his walking stick with each step, his fisherman’s hat settled crooked on his head. We crossed High Street for my first view of Magdalen College, which rested regally on the River Cherwell. I stopped midstep. “Stunning!” I stared at the college’s stone tower with six spires reaching toward the bluest sky. A great fortress of walls and doors surrounded the limestone buildings. It was a painting, a diorama from a fantasy movie, the architecture medieval and mystical.
“My first view of it stunned me the same,” Jack said. “It still does. It’s just as beautiful as you draw close. Come.”
“You know,” I said, “after the bustle of London and the bombed-out spaces, this feels pristine and untouched.”
A wistful expression passed over Jack’s face, but then he turned to me and nodded. “Yes, we were spared the bombs—Hitler planned on making Oxford his own and he wanted to save it. We’d watch the planes head here and then veer to the left or right using the river as their guide.”
I glanced up as if the planes were whirring overhead. “I’m so glad to be here.”
“I’m quite happy you made the journey.” He smiled at me.
Phyl and George walked ahead and through the great wooden door of Magdalen, leaving Jack and me alone. The yellow leaves formed a plush carpet under our feet while a few still clung to the trees by their fragile stems. Gravestones were as common along the sidewalks as benches or stone walls.
We ambled; I was in no great rush. We passed the gray weathered wooden doors to Magdalen, as grand as the castle doors I’d seen at Buckingham, and Jack motioned for us to first walk across a stone bridge. Halfway across he paused and we stood together, leaning against the ancient wall and absorbing the sight of the River Cherwell. We stood, our shoulders only a breath apart, as a line about rivers from Shakespeare’s King John came to me. “‘Trust not those cunning waters of his eyes, For villainy is not without such rheum.’”
With a sudden laugh Jack lifted his face to the sun and finished. “‘And he, long traded in it, makes it seem like rivers of remorse and innocency.’”
Our eyes met, widened, and together we said, “King John.”
Jack removed a case from his pocket and took out a cigarette, striking the match hard against the flint in a swift movement. He set the fire against the end and puffed until it was lit. This was all done slowly, carefully, as if he had all the world’s time to complete this singular act on a stone bridge over a river. Below, punts were crowded against the banks, lashed together and held tight, waiting to be chosen. The willow trees swept downward as if to stroke the river, their branches waving with a breeze.
I broke the silence. “This river,” I said. “It’s very much like life.”
“How so?” Jack turned to lean against the stone parapet, taking a long drag of his cigarette.
Well, that w
ould teach me to speak without thinking. “The water flowing,” I said decidedly. “It reaches its end at the sea no matter what.”
He considered this. “I believe life is more like a tree. Each branch differentiating as it grows. Each an individual choice.”
“Jack.” I pointed at the river flowing beneath us. “That is the river of life. It’s bound by its edges but still it is free. Do you sometimes debate for fun?” I asked with a laugh. “Just to see if I can keep up with you?”
“Ah, no—I am quite sure you can keep up with me. But the river, as beautiful a metaphor as it is, isn’t right for our choices in life. We don’t all meet in the same place, as rivers do.”
His eyes were deep and rich brown, and I wondered what they saw in me—he knew how to hold kind attention, a presence.
“Choice.” I bent over and picked up a handful of leaves, let them fall through my fingers. “What if we choose wrongly? Do we burn in an everlasting hell? You believe this?” I tossed a leaf at him. “As you wrote in The Great Divorce? You can’t take any souvenir of what you love with you?”
He laughed. “I have enjoyed our correspondence, yet it is even better to be chatting with you.”
“Yes.” I took in a long breath and stated the truth. “Through the years my sluggish heart began to beat again with words, our words, and the very power of them.”
Jack smiled as that golden English sunlight crested from behind a pleated cloud, resting gently on his face as if the light desired to touch him. For just a moment, no longer or shorter than the one on my knees in my sons’ nursery, my body felt untethered from the earth, as if we were merely a dream fragment. My heartbeat fluttered in my wrists, in my chest, in my belly. A warm flush, timid but sure, flooded me.
Oh, Joy, be very, very careful.
Becoming Mrs. Lewis Page 8
