THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER, C. S. LEWIS
CHAPTER 28
Saying I must not love him any more;
But now at last I learn to disobey
“SONNET OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS,” JOY DAVIDMAN
January 9, 1953
The farmhouse shimmered, ice and snow covering it like a veil. I stood on the front porch like one entering a prison. I had willfully submitted myself to the sentence and would find the willpower to face the disarray. Claim my part in it. I would take care of my children and write furiously and completely. I would be brave.
I entered the house, and an odd stillness surrounded me, a waiting silence like that right before a battle begins. The children were in school. The hallway overflowed with shoes and coats, schoolbooks and mittens, in organized piles or hung on hooks. Family life, one I’d always wanted and needed, seemed a mirage. Renee had taken my place, and yet this was my place. My heart was at the Kilns and my body was here, and nothing at all in the world made any sense.
Bill strode down the stairs and, not having heard me enter, was surprised to see me standing in the hallway in my coat and hat, my suitcase and trunk at my feet. He wore pressed blue jeans and a black sweater I’d never seen, but his grimace was familiar.
“Joy,” he said flatly. “You’re back.”
And I hated him. That suddenly and that completely. All resolve and all promises to be the nicest girl washed away as finally as if a flood had come through the front hallway and swept me away. “That’s right, Bill, I’m back. Back to your little love nest.”
It was vitriol. It was the sin I’d placed before God more times than any other: my anger and my acidic tongue. But it was the truth, and my spirits had been rubbed raw and open. This was the blood of it all.
He bounded down the last few steps and grasped my shoulders, his face contorted with rage. “Don’t you come in here and ruin the peace and love that Renee and I have built.”
“Renee and you?” My voice rose to a high screech of pain. “You are a horrid person, Bill Gresham. You’re a sociopath, and she has no idea who you are and what you’re capable of. You’ve seduced her so that you can have the life you’ve always wanted, one of adoration while you write your pitiful stories alone in your room.”
In an instant, like a snake’s strike, his hands closed around my throat. I stood perfectly still, my eyes a challenge. If he was to choke me to death in the foyer of my own house, it was a better ending than to live with him. His fingers pressed into the flesh above my collarbone, anger an electric current flowing through his hands. Despair buried me, black as any grave.
“You are disgusting,” he said and flung me from him as spittle flew from his lips. I rocked back, my head banging into the wall behind me.
I steadied myself to find my footing before stepping toward him. “You don’t frighten me. What a cheating, lying man you are. I’m not one bit fooled.”
“You know nothing,” he said. “If I ever loved you, and I doubt I did, it wasn’t even close to the way I love Renee.”
A small mewling sound came from the top of the stairs, and I looked for my cat; instead I saw Renee standing with a basket of laundry in her arms, tears falling freely down her pretty face.
“Stop.” She dropped the basket, and a full burst of clothes fell down the stairs: socks and underwear, children’s shirts and pants. “Both of you stop it! Not here. Not now.”
I picked up one of my suitcases and pushed past Bill to climb the stairs, kicking laundry clear of me with each step. I couldn’t even look at the room Bill and I had once shared. I stormed instead into the bedroom I’d once split with Renee. Her personal belongings cluttered the room. Her hairbrush sat faceup on the dresser, long strands of black hair caught in the bristles; her perfumes and makeup organized in a straight line; her clothes folded neatly on the bench at the end of the bed. Her bed was made and her pillows fluffed and sitting upright.
I grabbed her belongings, one by one, slowly and deliberately throwing them into the hall. Her clothes. Her makeup. Her shoes and finally her pillow. Only then, when the room had once more become itself save her cloying perfume, did I slam the door and fall onto the single bed, the one I had lain on only months before, confiding in my cousin my husband’s cruelty and betrayal.
Hot tears rushed from me, and I shuddered with their release. If only I believed God would come down to fix it all. If only hurt could leak out of me with tears. If only I knew what to do or how to do it. If only I could run to Jack, crumble upon him, and start a new life.
But instead I curled, exhausted, on my bed, pulled my pillow close, and closed my eyes. Somewhere from far off in the house a phonograph played Nat King Cole singing about love. My boys would be home from school in a few hours, and I would pull myself together for them, and for myself.
Bill had wanted a Southern home. He wanted to pretend he was a modern-day Rhett Butler. Well then, I could pretend to be a modern-day Scarlett O’Hara. I would think about what to do . . . tomorrow. Tomorrow was another day.
I rolled over and picked up The Screwtape Letters, which still sat on my bedside table, and opened to a random page. Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
I slammed shut the book. Words weren’t going to help as they once had; they weren’t going to cure me. A book wasn’t going to save me, and neither was its author.
I needed to save myself.
Yes, God saved my soul—was drawing me slowly out of my self-centered world view—but only I could pack up my things and leave, only I could protect my heart and my sons.
I rose to place my things in their spots as if I’d never left. I hung my dresses and thought of each place I’d worn them with Jack. I set my books out, one by one, on the dresser where Renee’s beauty creams had been only moments ago.
Soon the front door slammed, and the sweet and familiar voice of my younger son rang through the house. “Mommy?”
I bolted from the room, charged down the stairs, and answered that call, the one I hadn’t been able to heed in months, the call of being a mother.
Davy and Douglas stood in the hallway, their books in their arms. Davy straightened his glasses as if making sure it was truly me, then dropped his books with a resounding thump. His little body slammed into me, setting me off balance. Douglas was close behind, and I laughed and dropped to my knees, taking them both in my arms with a cry of pure delight. Their bodies against mine, breathing them in; the aroma of snow and earth from their walk home, their damp hair smelling of soap, and their chapped cheeks waiting for my kisses filled my senses.
“My poogles,” I said, drawing back to look at their faces. “I want you to show me everything right now. I want to meet Mr. Nichols the snake and see your schoolwork and all of your Christmas presents.”
“Mommy,” Davy said and touched my face as if making sure it was real.
“Yes, my love?”
“Are you staying?”
“I will never leave you again. I missed you with all my heart.”
“Me too,” Davy said.
I stood. “Now let me take a closer look at you.” I took a step back. “Douglas, you have grown a hundred feet tall. And you, Davy, you look like a grown man about to go to your job in the city.” I playfully yanked at his buttoned coat.
“Renee fixed all my clothes.”
“Well, good for her,” I said, and yet I smiled. “Let’s go for a walk through the acres. I have missed my gardens and our creek and my orchards.”
“But nothing is growing now, Mommy,” Davy said in the mature, concerned voice of the older child.
“I don’t care what is or isn’t growing. It’s all hidden under there waiting to come out.” I held out both my hands. “Let’s go and see.”
I donned my coat and scarf, yanked on my mittens, and ignored Renee, who had come into the foyer with a dishcloth in her hands. With precision, my boys grabbed each of my hands and we walked into the bright winter sun.
Right there, I began to reclai
m my life.
I couldn’t know what might happen next, but I could take one step at a time with my work and my sons by my side.
CHAPTER 29
The best of me is merely commonplace,
And I am tired, and I am growing old
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The train to Manhattan smelled like rotten fruit, a stench that permeated the car. I stood unsteadily and moved to another car as the train rocked toward New York City. I found a seat, closed my eyes, and imagined that I was sitting with Phyl on an entirely different train from Paddington Station to Oxford. But it was no use.
It was February, and winter held us in its grip. The house was filled with misery. Renee hid and wept in the extra room where she’d moved. The children were confused and anxious and tiptoed around the house. Rosemary and Bobby acted like skittering mice, afraid to be stepped upon.
Sometimes I felt as if my anguished prayers of uncertainty were received into the hands of great Love, and other times I sensed that they hit the ceiling and landed flat in my lap, dusty, withered, and useless. I started to see that faith was something akin to understanding that it didn’t matter so much how I felt but was closer to what I believed.
Meanwhile, Bill and I fought as if our lives depended on the next ill-mannered word. If I held these times in my mind against Oxford, against the smoke-filled peace of the common room at the Kilns or the ivy-draped stones of Headington or the silver-birch-lined lane to Jack’s house, a despondency swept over me that felt both complete and irreversible.
Joy:
Dear Jack,
It’s misery. Renee and Bill sneak off to be together, while Bill tries to convince me to stay and raise a family, but also allow them to be happy in their love. How disgusting can one man be? I must get divorced. Can it be God’s will? I don’t understand how it could be his will that I stay, but . . . And the children. I don’t know how to find what God wants of me—how does one ever truly know?
Jack:
Tearing apart what was meant to be “one” is brutal but sometimes required. I am with you, Joy, and hold you in prayer all the time. Here, Warnie is on the drink again and I believe he must go for treatment. It breaks my heart. Look at us, my friend, both devastated by the drinking of those we love.
Oh, dear Joy, how do we know what God wants of us? Imagine you are a house and he has come to rebuild you—yes, some things must be torn down and cast away. Faith, patience, and bravery, dear—more than you dreamed possible.
When an invitation for a MacDowell Colony reunion in New York City arrived in January, I clutched at it like food for the starving. The first thing I did was ring Belle.
“I’m coming to see you,” I said. As my best friend, roommate at Hunter, and confidante through the years, Belle, so beautiful then, had been kind to her New York roommate with the sickly pale complexion, who walked around in a red hat and tried to reinvent herself all those years ago. I longed to see her.
When the train arrived, Belle waited for me inside the arched majesty of Grand Central Station. The painted constellations swayed above her wavy black hair, which was pinned in lovely victory rolls I could never achieve. Her smile was wide on her broad face. When I’d first met her in college, her beauty had caused me to withdraw. Comparison was the devil of self-esteem. But her friendship had thawed me. Now she stood there in her prim suit, buttoned tight around her tiny waist. As much as her high heels would allow she ran toward me and then threw her arms around me.
I held to her longer than she might have expected before stepping back to take her in after all this time. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve only been a train ride away,” she said with her Russian lilt, a trace that remained even though she’d moved to the United States as a child. While my parents had supported me in college, she’d sold books from a basement book division. She knew me during the heady days of sexual exploration and adolescent narcissism. She knew me when I’d married and had children. She knew me when I’d found God, or more aptly, he’d found me. There wasn’t much she didn’t know, and to have someone like her still in what felt like a tilted world was ballast holding me steady.
Together we’d once scribbled our notes and poems, poured our hearts out onto paper. She’d published her first poem about the same time that I had—hers had recounted her hungry, atrocious childhood in Russia. When my novel, Anya, was released, I’d wanted her approval more than almost any other. Later both Belle and I graduated with master’s degrees from Columbia, believing that our life would overflow with literary honors, parties, and publications.
There in Grand Central we linked arms and headed into the city for lunch, chattering without pause until we sat down at a prim white tablecloth in a room full of chic businessmen drinking martinis and eyeing Belle. I ordered a sherry, and the waiter looked at me with raised eyebrows. Belle ordered a glass of white wine.
“Sherry?” She laughed. “Are you a true anglophile now?”
“I believe I am,” I said. “Which doesn’t quite match with being a housewife in upstate New York.”
“You’ve never been a housewife,” she said with deep laughter. “Even when you were, you weren’t.”
“Sadly, you’re probably right,” I said with a small sigh.
“Oh, Joy, tell me how you’ve been since you returned home. I loved your letters from England. They were full of happiness, adventure, and interesting people.”
“I’m going back,” I said.
“What?” She slipped off her coat to reveal a beautiful V-neck black wool dress hugging her breasts. Men passing by our table glanced and then glanced again.
The waiter arrived with my sherry in a beautiful cut-glass goblet, and I sniffed it with my eyes closed before taking a long gulp. The aroma took me to the Eastgate for my first meeting with Jack, to Magdalen’s dining hall, to the Kilns common room and the sweet, soft feel of autumn in the golden air.
I opened my eyes and looked right at Belle. “I didn’t know it until I just said it out loud. But it’s true. I am going back. And I’m taking my boys with me and starting a new life.”
“You can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Who are you, Joy? What is happening to you?”
I poured it all out to her, wine from burst skins, flowing over the table. I told her of Bill and Renee and the miserable pain in the house.
“This is a nightmare,” she said. “Why doesn’t he just move out with her? Why don’t you just get a divorce?”
“We’re stuck, Belle. Stuck. We have no money to get a divorce. They have no money to live somewhere else. I’m waiting to sell something, anything, and then get the hell out of there. My poor boys . . .”
“Can you take them away from Bill? He’ll allow it?”
“I don’t much care what he will or won’t allow right now, Belle.”
She nodded.
“I know I sound cruel, but I’m repulsed by him. For the sake of all that is true, he’s trying to make himself into a magician now. He wrote a nonfiction book called Monster Midway about the carnival life, and now he’s trying to be part of it. It’s like living with a disgusting adolescent boy who wants to eat fire for a carny act. The hate is eating at me.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know. Sit here and drink with me?” I smiled at her. “Bill asked me, actually asked me, if I would just agree to be a threesome with Renee. A threesome!”
“Oh, that is horribly distasteful.” Belle shuddered. “And meanwhile you’ve fallen in love with England.”
“Yes, but not just the country—also the friends and the land and the Lewis brothers.”
“Let’s remember that I’ve seen you in love many times, Joy.” She paused and leaned forward as if someone were eavesdropping on us. “Are you in love with C. S.?”
“No.” I took another sip of sherry. “I’m confused. I miss them both as if I’d known them all my life, but it’s more than that . . . About Jack, I don’t
know. This time it’s not just about some physical need. For goodness’ sake, the man smokes sixty cigarettes a day and then his pipe in between. He’s seventeen years older than I am. But he still has this great gusto for life—for beer and debate and walking and deep friendship. Christianity most definitely has not turned him into a dud. This isn’t some lust-fueled fantasy. It’s the connection between us. The discourse. The empathy. The similar paths. This isn’t an obsession with getting something, Belle. It’s the feeling of finally coming home. It’s confusing at best.”
Belle leaned back in her chair, patted at her lipstick with a napkin before taking a sip of her wine. “I don’t want you to make a huge mistake that will destroy your family for good.”
“Destroy my family? As if that isn’t already done?” Heat rushed into my cheeks, a fiery determination. “I know my past mistakes, Belle. Even in my marriage I see my mistakes. This isn’t all about blame. And I’m not sleeping with Jack. I just love him, and his brother also, but in different ways. We feel like a family. It’s a fact as inescapable as breathing.”
“But that’s what I mean. I’m not being cruel. You know I love you. But you fall in love passionately, and then you don’t listen to reason.”
“Does love have any reason?” Tears rose easily, and I almost longed for the days when I wept only with rage.
“No, it doesn’t. But you do. Why would anyone leave New York?”
“Belle.” I leaned forward with the urgency to make her understand. “My husband is sleeping with my cousin. He is ‘in love.’ He is ‘more married’ to her than he ever was to me, he says. For so long I’ve been required to subvert who I am to be who men want or need me to be, and in England, with those friends, that isn’t true at all.”
Belle’s eyes filled with tears. “I wish I could have been there for you.”
“You’ve always been right there with me. Always. Remember the night I won the Russell Loines Award? When a thousand dollars seemed like a million? It was this great triumph, and I was haughty because Robert Frost had won the same award several years earlier. I took you to the awards ceremony and got so deep into the cups I could barely speak at the microphone. You took care of me.”
Becoming Mrs. Lewis Page 20