I sat at the desk in my bedroom where I’d organized the multiple projects I was immersed in. He hadn’t entered that room while I stayed there, always offering me privacy. But that day he burst in as I was muddling through Warnie’s history book, indexing it with a growing headache.
“Joy!”
I startled and stood. His mere presence in my room brought a warm flush to my thighs and belly.
“What?” I laughed and was conscious of how I appeared: I wore an A-line dress I’d bought in London, sleeveless and dainty. I hadn’t yet brushed my hair, and it fell over my shoulders. I was barefoot.
But he noticed none of this. He held out his hand with a sheaf of handwritten pages. “Will you type these? And then tell me—am I on to something at all?”
He sat on the edge of my bed, unaware of anything but our creative collaboration. I returned my attention to the pages. “Do you want me to type now?”
“First . . . read.”
I sat and began to do just that. Orual, the name he had given Psyche’s ugly older sister, was speaking from her old age, from the knowledge of her imminent demise. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods.
From there the prose and the story unfolded, confounding and enchanting as an original myth, as if he’d spent months on the pages.
Orual was the eldest daughter of the King of Glome. She told of their castle where she and her sister Psyche; their nurse; and the Fox, their beloved tutor, resided. But mostly Orual told the reader of Psyche and her beauty and Orual’s great love for her—blinding love. Orual’s ugliness was described in detail, and the reader discovered that in her old age she wore a veil to cover her face. When I reached the end of the chapter I looked to Jack, who had not looked away.
“I’m envious that you can write this in a night and half a day, and it can hold an entire story in its hints and foreshadowing.”
“I’m not here for praise, Joy. Tell me where it lacks.”
“Let me type it and write notes, not off the cuff.”
“A little off the cuff?” He smiled; he already knew, as I did, that I would never turn away from that smile.
“Okay, on first blush. I need to understand why the Fox loves poetry so much, and I want a hint of who he will become to Orual. He seems integral and interesting. He needs to hint at what is to come.”
“Yes.” Jack took the papers from me and a pencil from my desk, making a mark in scribbled handwriting.
I looked at him. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”
“That it’s a terrible idea to head down this road, to write this book?”
“No. Not that at all. I want to tell you about the day I received your first letter. A winter afternoon in January of 1950. Five years ago now.”
He nodded at me and set the papers to the side, crossed his legs, and leaned on his elbow. “Yes?”
“You’d asked for my history, and I didn’t know where to begin. I spent hours thinking about it and realized that my life had been made of masks, many of them. And I decided that afternoon that I wouldn’t wear any of them with you. I decided that I would show you me. That I would be barefaced. And here—in your story—you have Orual covering her face with a veil.”
He stared at me for so long that I almost wished for Orual’s veil. Then he spoke. “Never hide your face from me. It is precious and dear.”
I smiled. “Sometimes I wish I could, but I cannot.”
“Bareface,” he said. “That should be the title.” He stood and held the pages. “I haven’t been this excited about my work in a very long time. How can I thank you?”
“Get out of here and finish it.”
Or take me in your arms and set me down on that bed and make love to me.
The forbidden thought flew by unspoken. Jack rushed out of the room to return to his true love: the page.
Over weeks, we braided our themes and stories together into this novel—the new myth set in Glome, a fictional Greek town: two sisters, princesses—one beautiful, one ugly. Orual loved her younger sister with a destructive possession and narrated her case to the gods—how she’d only meant to protect and love her sister even as she caused her to lose true love by forcing her to face “reality.” Meanwhile, even as Orual eventually became Queen of Glome, she loved a man she could never have: her loyal advisor Bardia. Although Orual eventually came to self-knowledge, self-love, love for the gods, and reunion with Psyche, much destruction had been wrought along the way.
I saw both Jack and myself in the pages we forged together, but in Orual’s obsessive and possessive love for Psyche I caught more than a glimpse of myself. God, I asked, how much of Jack’s creation was of me?
Finally one night, after the second whiskey, I asked. “Jack, do you think I’m ugly?”
He jolted as if I’d prodded him with electricity. “Whyever would you ask that?”
“You put my words into Orual’s mouth many times. And I’m not a blonde,” I said, a meager attempt at a joke.
“I do not think you’re ugly. You are beautiful. It’s not your countenance in Orual, Joy. And many times I feel I am Orual also.”
“And are you the Fox? Orual loves him, and he’s devoted to her but doesn’t love her the same. Are you . . .”
Jack’s kind expression didn’t change as he spoke. “How can I know what parts of us are threaded through this story? But one thing I do know—this story would not be what it is without you. Its depth and intimacy would not exist without who we are together.”
Much of our friendship and our lives found its way into that novel: my Fairyland and his North, his Island. Our views on longing and need and joy. Our accusations and questions for the gods. Our shared history of mythology and its ability to offer meaning. And for me, the problem of obsessive love. There was a tangled twine ball of us in that myth, unraveling day by day with our discussions and our readings, our bantering and our debate. There were moments in the writing of that novel that we merged into one without ever touching.
We were consumed and distracted by Orual and Psyche—we talked about them even as we picked apples or walked to Oxford or sat in the garden. Over dinner or beers it was Orual, the Fox, and Psyche who joined us.
“All I’ve ever read or done has led to this novel,” he told me as we walked through Oxford, untangling how Psyche would be removed from the tree in the forest where she’d been bound and sacrificed.
“I feel the same, Jack. Although I’m not writing it, I feel the same.” I paused and touched his arm. “As it’s always been—we use stories to make sense of the world.”
He’d stopped right there in front of the bookshop and faced me with his lopsided fisherman’s hat and his red cheeks, with his great admiration. The cobblestone streets were wet with rain, small puddles rippling in the dip of the road. A priest on a bicycle rode by, ringing the small bell on his handlebars and waving to us both. Jack paid him no mind but spoke right to me.
“You are writing it, Joy. I’m putting the words on paper and so are you with every word you speak, every question you ask, every thought you offer, every page you edit. We are writing it.”
“What will we call it?” I asked. “Still Bareface?”
“Yes.” He was resolute in this title and smiled when he said it. “Because eventually for love to be true, we must show our real faces.”
“What is it in the end, what is it that must happen at the end of the story? The shattering of Orual’s self-centeredness?”
Jack nodded. “The journey from possessive love to wholesome love.” Jack looked off as if not speaking to me at all, as if Orual herself stood behind us and slowly lifted her veil. “From the profane to the divine: union with the divine through love.”
“Yes,” I said in agreement that went far beyond the words he spoke.
The book eventually came to be titled Till We Have Faces. It braided our spiritual journeys together like two stories from the same Father, parallel and mystical, infused with nature’s divine abilit
y to change us.
Through the process of its writing we had become as bound together as any man and woman.
Only one step remained, and it was not my step to take.
CHAPTER 44
Love me or love me not, the leaves will fall
And we shall walk them down. I have my joys
“SONNET XLI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
June 1955
Jack took only three months to finish that novel, his greatest in my not very humble opinion.
Alone in my bedroom on Avoco Road, I typed the final pages on a June afternoon. With birdsong outside the summer window, and my boys calling out in a game they played with neighborhood children, I read the end of Jack’s novel, our quarrel with the gods and love and obsession. My fingers were set on the keys when my breath caught under my ribs, and my heart paused as I read the last line of the novel.
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.
Questions that die away.
Answers I sought.
Questions that haunt.
All my life I’d been searching outside myself for the answer to this one inquiry: do you love me?
Seeking, always seeking. Always scrambling. Always losing. This, I’d thought more times than I could count, this is the answer and this is the mask and this is the way. I had done the same to Jack—I had made him the answer.
I’d wanted him to answer a question that only God himself could.
I’d heard Jack say more than once, in a pub or at lunch or in front of the fireplace with Warnie, the way out of the petty self almost always “requires the seeing of deception.” What Jack called deception was what I called illusion.
It was as clear as if someone had walked into the room and ripped the veil off my soul, forcing me to stare into its darker depths. Much of what I’d done—mistakes, poems, manipulations, success and books and sex—had been done merely to get love. To get it. To answer my question: do you love me? Even as I gave love, was I trying just to gain it? Had it really taken the fictional Orual to show me the truth?
In my bedroom, I fell to my knees on the hard floor and rested my head on the edge of the mattress, pressing my face into the softness.
The face I already possessed before I was born was who I was in God all along, before anything went right or went wrong, before I did anything right or wrong, that was the face of my true self. My “bareface.”
From that moment on, the love affair I would develop would be with my soul. He was already part of me; that much was clear. And now this would be where I would go for love—to the God in me. No more begging or pursuing or needing. It was my false self that was connected to the painful and demanding heart grasping at the world, leading me to despair. Same as Orual. Same as Psyche. Same as all of humanity.
Possibly it was only a myth, Jack’s myth, that could have obliterated the false belief that I must pursue love in the outside world—in success, in acclaim, in performance, in a man.
The Truth: I was beloved of God.
Finally I could stop trying to force someone or something else to fill that role.
The pain of shattered illusion swept through me like glass blown through a room after a bomb.
All had been turned around. No longer was the question Why doesn’t Jack love me the way I want him to? But now Why must I demand that he love me the way I want him to?
I was already loved. That was the answer to any question I held out to the world.
“Mommy?” Davy’s voice called out from the hallway. “Where are you?”
I wiped at my face, realizing it was wet with tears. Love overwhelmed me—a sweeping wind of complete acceptance. I stumbled to my feet and threw open the door to pull my son into a big hug.
“I love you, Douglas Gresham,” I said.
He laughed and pushed me away. “Have you gone loony?” He squinted. “Are you crying?”
“Sometimes we cry when we’re happy,” I said and tousled his hair as love pulsed around me. A sense of calm so pervasive I didn’t recognize the stillness inside. It might pass—the need and fear might rise again as old and familiar comforts. But deep down, I knew the Truth now.
“I do not cry when I’m happy,” he said with that big Douglas smile. “I just wanted to know what’s for lunch.”
“A picnic,” I said. “Let’s take a picnic to the park. Go get your brother, and let’s get outside and enjoy the sunshine.”
He ran off calling his brother’s name, and I stood in the hallway of my rented rooms and smiled. I had it all, everything I craved, and I hadn’t even known.
It had not taken a man’s body to finally open me to true love, but a man’s myth and God’s unwavering tenderness.
CHAPTER 45
Love universal is love spread too thin
To keep a mortal warm
“SONNET XVIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
In that summer of 1955, barely did I register what went on in America anymore: there was Elvis and the civil rights uprisings. There was talk of the US sending troops to Vietnam, and Senator McCarthy finally ending his hunt for Communists. Meanwhile in England, Winston Churchill had resigned in April; Tollers’s The Lord of the Rings had been released and was making the huge splash it was meant to make. Yet I was immersed in the Middle-earth of the Kilns, as if nothing else were happening. The soil felt as I did—ready for more and more of what had already been born.
My writing was also fertile. I’d sold a proposed new work about the seven deadly sins called The Seven Deadlies to Stoddard and Houghton—telling them that the virtues become deadly when they become self-righteous. I had the idea to write of a protagonist who was a modern Pharisee, an intellectual prig who presented himself at heaven’s gate for admission.
None of it felt like work: the correspondence I helped Jack with every morning, the editing and indexing for Warnie, and typing for them both. I’d also finally sold pages of Queen Cinderella under the title The King’s Governess. And the English version of Smoke on the Mountain was actually selling copies (probably due to Jack’s name on the cover). Jack had adjusted to Cambridge, and the free time, more than he’d had at Oxford, allowed his writing to flow.
We gloried in the summer weather. We swam in the Thames at Godstow, slightly snockered and accompanied by a swan. Even the half-mile walk to and from the grocery could not tamp down my happiness. Jack paid the food bills, and I cooked for all of us; it felt surreal and dreamy.
We’d come to be dear friends with Jack’s pal Austin Farrer, whom he introduced to me as “one of my co-debaters in the Socratic Club, and the Warden at Keble College.” But of course, as with anyone, Austin was more than his introduction; he was a dear friend to Jack, and his wife, Kay, was a mystery writer. We hit it off over our very first whiskey, and now she paid me to type the handwritten pages for her novels. We lingered long hours over finished dinners and empty glasses with Austin and Kay.
One black and loathsome cloud rested over all this beauty, one I’d kept from Jack: the British Office was niggling around on renewing my paperwork. If they didn’t agree to renew, I would have to return to America. The only way to stay was if I married a citizen. I needed to find a lawyer, write a letter, something, anything. I could not return to the States. I wouldn’t. I would do whatever needed to be done.
For me, bad news always seemed to arrive in the middle of the most tranquil moments.
“Mummy,” Douglas had asked in his thoroughly English accent only an hour before, “what is that?” He poked with his muddy shoe at my satchel on the floor where the certified letter poked up, its official document obvious among the typed pages and scribbled notes.
I shoved it deeper into the bag. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied. Just the British government informing me that my work visa was over, and unless I was married to a citizen it was back to Dante’s Inferno with me.
I was deep into typing the final edited pages of Bareface in Jack’s Kilns study one August after
noon, still not having told him. Outside my sons were laughing, and the merriness swooped to the open window like a bird. They were helping Paxford clear the garden for more summer planting, setting netting over the tomato plants.
In a repeat of last year, Warnie was again too sick with the drink to journey to Ireland with Jack. I’d encouraged Warnie to go to AA. It had been one of our very few disagreements, a lengthy and heated discussion by the pond. In the end, he agreed to go to a hygienic bastille in Dumfries, Scotland, but no AA.
Again it was the four of us at the Kilns for summer break—Jack, Davy, Douglas, and I.
I took that contemptible letter from my bag just as the ringing phone in Jack’s house startled me with its coarse sound. I answered. “Mr. Lewis’s residence.”
“I’m calling for a Miss Davidman,” the voice replied in a crisp English accent.
“Speaking.” I stood to look out the window and watched Davy run off to the pond.
“This is Dutton Publishing. Please hold for the production manager for Surprised by Joy. Mr. Lewis has told us to direct all questions about production to you.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll hold.”
Jack’s voice rose to the window. “Get cleaned up, Davy. It’s the most dreaded time of the day.”
Latin tutoring.
Davy’s polite voice responded with words I didn’t understand, and Douglas called that he was off to fish.
“Miss Davidman?”
“Yes?” I returned my attention to the phone.
“We have a question about page 32, where Mr. Lewis discusses his boarding school.”
I spent a half hour or more on the phone answering production questions before I rose to fetch the laundry from the line in the backyard. Jack and Davy toiled over Latin in Jack’s office, and I ambled outside. Sunshine had dried the clothes, and I took them down, burying my face in one of Douglas’s shirts, inhaling the sweet smell of summer and my son.
“Mommy?” Douglas bounded from around the bend, a fish flopped over and dead in his hand. “Will you give this perch to Mrs. Miller? Please? I’m going to Oxford with the boys.”
Becoming Mrs. Lewis Page 31
