Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  “Perhaps it’s a lifetime’s work.” He covered his face with both hands and then peeked around them to make me laugh.

  “What do you see?” I braved the question.

  “A brilliant mind,” he said with force and slapped his hand on the table. “Take a gander around, Joy. There’s none like yours. Maybe some men can’t admire you for your manly virtues the way I can. Your intelligence and forthrightness.”

  His words were concrete on my chest. “My manly virtues?” Tears sprang to my eyes, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. “Jack, how would you like me to extol you for your womanly virtues?”

  His face fell, his jowls seeming to settle farther over his tight collar. He removed his spectacles and rubbed his forehead. “It’s not exactly what I meant. I can be a bumbling fool.”

  “You can’t see me as a woman, can you?”

  “It’s not so easy as that, or as simple, Joy. The book I’m working on . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “It’s always the work with us.” I took a deep breath and softened it. “Don’t talk about your work. Tell me how you feel. Even in Screwtape Letters you didn’t include emotions—just will, intellect, and fantasy. What are your feelings?”

  He bent his head, considering. “Like you, I find my way through such things on paper. But how I feel is that there are four kinds of love. And you and I are the luckiest kind.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Philia.”

  “From storge to philia—we are indeed blessed.” Then with a great laugh he leaned forward conspiratorially, as if we were in on the same joke. “And no matter my feelings, Joy, you are married.” He paused before adding with a smile. “And I prefer blondes anyway.”

  It was a joke meant to soften the blow, but it did not. “I don’t believe you always know your effect on others.” I settled back in my chair. “Or maybe you don’t want others to affect you as you keep up that armor of words and wit.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Did you know that Vogue magazine called you the most powerful force in Oxford? They wrote of your huge following and your large crowds. And you sit here and act as if your words have no impact.”

  “I don’t read Vogue.” He tried to smile. “And I don’t intend to be callous, Joy. I was aiming for levity and missed by a few miles.”

  I was saved from further humiliation as Warnie returned to our table. I attempted to be light and playful. Finally the night grew darker, and I said, “I have an early train. Here we must say bye for now.”

  The three of us stood, and Warnie made me promise to return. Jack strolled outside with me. Facing each other in the darkened night, he slid his hand into his coat and withdrew a book.

  “I have something for your boys.” He held out to me a first edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I signed it to Davy and Douglas.”

  I eased the book from his hand and clasped it against my chest as if it were a warm ember. “Jack, this is such a generous gift. They will adore it. I’ve read it to them more times than can be counted, and I know that Douglas especially wanders into the woods and hopes to find Narnia.”

  “Then maybe he will find it,” Jack said.

  A light rain began; the mist glazed my cheeks with a chill that would settle into my bones until I crawled into bed with the hot water bottle. “When I think of Oxford, I shall remember so much, Jack. But the rain will always be a part of it.” I stuffed the book into my bag, protecting it.

  “Remember Oxford? As if you won’t return?”

  I wiped the wetness from my face and manufactured a smile, hiding the sadness of leaving.

  “You must come back,” he said. “Warnie and I insist. We’d like you to join us for the Christmas holidays, if you don’t mind staying in a bachelor’s home with rattling pipes and inadequate heating. But we do have a roaring fire and books to your heart’s content, and Oxford at Christmas is quite charming.” Jack opened a black umbrella and held it over me as the rain quickened. “Or will you have sailed back across the pond by then?”

  “I’m waiting on a late royalty check from Macmillan, and then I’ll book my ticket. Soon, I think.” I hoped the word royalty disguised the embarrassment in my voice, but I didn’t think I could ever fool this man. I never wanted pity from anyone, and definitely not from him. I would sleep on Phyl’s kitchen floor before I allowed pity to come between us.

  “Then Christmas it is,” he said. “Now get on out of this dodgy rain or you’ll catch your death before your journey to Edinburgh. We’ll make arrangements as the time draws closer.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s send our critiques and pages back and forth. Between now and then we shall get as much work done as we can so we may enjoy the holidays.” I held my arms around myself in the same way I’d have held him if I could.

  “Yes, we will. We have much to look forward to, and I do have a lecture in London in November. So I shall see you soon. London is not far away, you know. Give us a bell when you return.” He handed me the umbrella and tipped his hat. “Cheerio and take this with you.”

  I started to step away, shifting the umbrella to protect my face from the rain. “Oh, Jack. Wait.”

  He’d already placed his hand on the brass door handle of the pub.

  “I almost forgot.” I reached into my bag and plucked out the folded paper. “The sestina I promised you.”

  He took the paper from me and raised his eyes to mine. “Wonderful.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  CHAPTER 17

  I just wanted to see what would happen if . . .

  “APOLOGETIC BALLADE BY A WHITE WITCH,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  The train to Worcester pitched forward and my suitcase flew from my hands, sliding down the aisle. I didn’t want to leave Oxford, and yet the train was moving me away. In other heartrending times in my life, I’d used writing as an escape, and I was hoping to do the same again. I was restless and it felt an awful lot like panic. But what was I afraid of? I had no idea.

  Or perhaps I did know my fear: that I’d never know real love.

  Must I settle for the trouble that was mine? A life of disappointment and anger, alcohol and despair with Bill.

  After stashing my valise under a seat, I walked to the dining car and ordered a gin. A tall woman came and sat next to me, and she was elegant in the way I would never be, like Renee.

  “Hello,” she said and settled into her seat, crossed her legs daintily. “Are you headed to Edinburgh also?” She swung her fashionable bob of shiny hair.

  “Worcester and then Edinburgh,” I said. “I’ve never been to either.”

  “Oh, you’ll be charmed, unless you stay too long,” she said with a laugh. “You know, like a man you think you love until you have to live with him.”

  I joined her laughter and then added, “Love. It’s never what we believe, is it?” I sounded like a bitter old woman at the end of her affairs.

  “Never,” she said. “But isn’t it great fun—the falling into it?”

  And it all spilled out. “I feel as if I’m falling in love. And I mustn’t.” I felt the weariness bearing down on me, the way it arrived, bone deep. I pushed my drink away and thought I might sleep for the entire train ride and forget everything.

  “Oh, I’m always in love,” she said with a gay sound as tinkling as ice falling from the trees. “Well, where are you from? It sounds like maybe New York.”

  “Yes.” I was conscious again of my difference. I would never be like these cultured women with their painted nails and English accents and tiny waists.

  A gray-haired man in a suit who smelled of too much cologne sidled to the bar and greeted her. She smiled at him in that secret way women know, and he ordered her a drink. I rose from the barstool, feeling quite awkward, and returned to my seat to collapse. I had just told a stranger that I was falling in love, as if I’d had to say it out loud to know it. I closed my eyes, but sleep was as elusive as Jack himself.

  Sun
light poured through the square window as the train skated along the tracks, the scenery a blur of every green. I took out a pad of paper. Who else could I possibly confide in?

  The page. It was always the page.

  If I looked backward at my loves, perhaps I could rearrange the now, summon the ghosts to this train compartment and reconcile them so they could no longer influence my future. I didn’t want to ruin this friendship with Jack. I needed to go back, start at the beginning of my ash pile of love affairs.

  As far as other men, they had paid me no mind until college—my sicknesses, awkwardness, and absences in high school hadn’t led to a social life of any kind. And whom did I choose to first seduce? I was young, only sixteen, and it was my married English professor in college. Dark curly hair, a deep voice that resonated in my chest as we talked about books and history. His eyes so piercing blue they seemed painted on. I’d thought in those days that sex would be enough—that conquering him would satisfy me. But it was never enough. The quick ducking into small rooms, the furtive glances and our bodies coming together in frantic need—remembering it now was shameful. His body had seemed the answer to all my questions and needs. How could I hold Bill’s indiscretions in high-horse judgment when I had done no differently? There had been a wife at home. I’d known that and yet I’d grasped at him all the same, my desire fierce, disguised as love.

  For it wasn’t love; it was obsession. The compulsion to own him along with a clawing need to prove I was worthy of such notice. I’d wanted him to sacrifice his life, his wife, to be with me—proof that he loved me. I was as much acting against my father as I was for myself.

  Then the next love—a writer at MacDowell Colony. Four summers I’d spent there, the balm of my early writing years. I’d found another writer; he too was older. And I had pursued him as if he were a savior of my own making, proving a fool of myself as I banged on his door in the starry night or waited outside his cottage to see if he’d emerge, seeking me. Was that love? Or avoidance of my own work with obsession? I’d tangled him together with MacDowell, confused the feelings for the place with my feelings for him.

  I’d sought lovers to still the spinning sadness inside. I’d sought lovers to quell my pain. I’d sought lovers to fix what could not be fixed. Even when I found solace in another body, even when I’d conquered, still my soul cried out in loneliness. It was never enough to fill me. And still I’d pursued men with embarrassing voracity.

  Then there was the movie star—the worst of all embarrassments. Oh, it had been anything but love during those lonely, miserable months in California, trying to be someone I could never be. How I’d pursued him, even as he ran. When he was cast in a show and moved to New York, I stalked him, once even boarding the train he took home to his family merely to catch a glimpse of him.

  Obsession and possession again confused with love.

  Then, of course, there was my husband. How desperately I’d been trying to verify my worthiness to him, and how long he’d been telling me I wasn’t worthy. I never would be. And still I tried, over and over, expectantly, as if I were bringing Father my report card.

  All of my loves had been lost causes, and yet some wrecked part of me kept reaching for more.

  My pattern of pining came into view as if I’d stared at the stars until the astrological signs were clear as drawings. My design needed men who could not and would not have me, especially older men.

  Who was this needy false self who believed that a man could fix the gaping wound inside my soul? What terrible dance was this? This fox-trot of straining with the inevitable result of failing? Was Jack just another man who couldn’t love me no matter how charming, smart, or witty I was?

  I had to stop caring or I had to stop trying. I could never stay Bill’s drinking or his rages or his affairs. I could be near perfect and still it wouldn’t stop. But could I love him as he was? Just exactly as he was? Was acceptance the answer?

  This I knew—I could not take this decayed form of loving to Jack. I would indulge in our philia without the push for more.

  God was now meant to be my primary relationship. On my knees that night in my children’s nursery, I’d promised him so. But there I was, repeating a prototype that had begun the day I wanted my father’s love and didn’t attain it.

  Perform, Joy. Do better. Be smarter.

  As the years passed, those commands had changed. Now it was Seduce.

  Anything for love.

  With Britain’s countryside flashing by the windows, my mislaid lovers hovered like a banshee warning of death. How could I ache for something I knew nothing of but only read about in stories?

  What a fool I was.

  Throughout these doomed affairs, I’d poured my brokenness into poetry—from passionate to melancholy to possessive; it had become the vessel holding all need and unmet desire.

  I felt empty as any woman who takes stock and sees the futility of chasing love she can never catch.

  CHAPTER 18

  Instead you put my hunger on a ration

  Of charitable words, and bade me live

  “SONNET XXVII,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  Cold bit to the core of me, soaking through my coat and boots. Northern England was a land of moors and limestone, stone abodes and quaint churches, a place where kings rose and fell. I wanted to engross myself in 1651, in the catastrophes of King Charles II instead of my own, so there I stood on Powick Bridge overlooking the muddy and sluggish water of the River Teme. This was the location where my king had wanted to avenge his father’s execution, and at first he’d watched the battle from the safety of Worcester tower before running into battle with his men. His Royalists lost this last battle in the English Civil War, and Charles eluded capture to escape and hide in Normandy. I stood on the bridge of his failure, with the imagined smell of musket smoke, the thud of running feet, and the stomping of horses’ hooves.

  Yet it was present time, and the triple-arched bridge over the Teme felt more like a place for Jack’s creatures than for a battle. Ivy clung along the edges in a thick mat that rustled in the wind like rain. The banks of the river were brown with winter and didn’t offer even a hint of the white flowers that would burst open in spring. Far off the Worcester Cathedral was almost a mirror of Magdalen College tower, its spires reaching to the sky. I took some notes in a damp notebook, wanting to remember the particulars of the land. Crossing the bridge, I walked into the thicker forest to the very place Charles had fought, and the thud of sadness came clear: I wanted Jack with me. I wanted to talk to him and show him all of this.

  No.

  I was there to heal, and to take home that healed woman to her family.

  Joy:

  Dear Bill and Renee,

  Forgive the sloppy handwriting; I have no typewriter on this trip. I’m staying in the moors with Jack’s friends the Matley Moores. They spoil me rotten and I’ve eaten enough of their rich food to burst at the seams. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Archaeologists, and he’s given me invaluable research books as well as taken me to Powick Bridge! Please tell me how everything is at home.

  No response.

  Joy:

  I am about out of money, Bill. I should have a royalty check from Macmillan in November, you can send that. And why haven’t you written to me? I can’t book my ticket home without a bit more cash. Ulp.

  And Unconquerabill, I believe I am beginning to understand our life together, but it is not a cheery understanding.

  After a few warm, convivial days and grateful cheerios to the Moores, I boarded the smoking train to Edinburgh, where I rested my forehead on the window as the train staggered through the backcountry around Lancashire and Birmingham. Through pastures and bracken fields, I watched it all go by: the heather and broom bending to the wind of the passing train; far off in the distance, the rolling hills. Sheep with mud-stained bellies grazed on the rich and undulating fields of green. Shaggy moorland ponies looked up with lazy stares, bored with the passing of yet another train.

>   We passed Cumberland, where lakes dotted the landscape like fallen pieces of the blue sky. And ever present was the stone—always gray: the cottages and dikes and churches. Falling always was the glorious golden light I’d come to revere. We moved from Carlisle across Dumfries and Galloway, bunnies and grouse rushing off in flashes into the moors, until I finally disembarked in Edinburgh.

  It was Bill I thought of as I trudged across the platform to hail a taxi. The few letters he’d sent overflowed with depressing news of all the problems at home, but what niggled at me more was the insight I was beginning to have about our life.

  I didn’t see a cure for us. God help me; I didn’t see a cure.

  In Edinburgh, I found a room in a nice enough hotel and warmed myself with thick blankets and whiskey. After some sleep, a cuppa, and hot soup, I entered the wide-street city. I fell under the spell of Edinburgh, and my panic eased. It felt airy after London, the houses ordered and the yawning store doors welcoming.

  Have you ever had this in your mind’s eye when you told your stories? I wrote to Jack. A fortress city made of stone and lichen, bowing down in reverential worship to Castle Rock above.

  The towers of Edinburgh thrust toward the sky, with the churches and buildings stepping-stones that climbed ever farther up and up into the hills. The great clock watched over the city, a timekeeper. The fountains gurgled over sculptures so finely wrought, I felt the mythical creatures in them would surely come alive.

  I didn’t feel a stranger, and I never once became lost. Hope arrived—this King Charles II book could become something I could write with passion. It would keep my mind from the uncoiling of my life as well as offer some financial freedom for all of us.