Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  “I knew you were there, and it was calming. I was quite nervous. My first lecture, and there was all that recording equipment. I felt like I was inside a glass bell trying to make an impression that would last for all my tenure.”

  “It’s a lecture they will talk about for years. But I must disagree with you on one point.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Do tell me.”

  “You made the case that the break between cultures came with the fall of Rome or the Renaissance, but I believe it was with the rise of science as logic.”

  His mouth broke into a great smile. “Oh, you do?”

  “I do. Are you sure you didn’t sacrifice accuracy in the name of entertainment?”

  “No, I’m not sure at all. Now must I rethink my entire inaugural lecture?” He smacked his hand on his knee.

  “You didn’t agree with everything I wrote in Smoke,” I said to soften the blow—if it was a blow at all.

  “We mustn’t always agree,” he said. “Sometimes that is the intrigue.” He stood and ripped open a box and took out a pile of books.

  I did the same, both of us in a jolly mood. The empty dark wooden bookshelves began to fill as we unpacked. From a dusty pile, I held up a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’” I said with great dramatic flair.

  He bellowed that laugh and then furrowed his brow above his glasses. “‘The devil is not as black as he is painted.’”

  We were off and running: as we unpacked, we chose a book and then quoted a line from memory. If we doubted the truth of the line, we’d check inside. When I pulled Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps from the box, the very book my husband had written a foreword for, I flubbed the line “Nothing was certain, but everything was safe—that was part of the mystery of love.” Instead I stated, “‘Everything is safe, that’s the mystery of love.’”

  “Aha!” Jack bellowed. “You aren’t perfect.”

  “Perfect? Far, far from it, Jack. As you well know.”

  Yet he didn’t flub one line. Not one. Soon we were competing to quote the most absurd or dirty line, one that might make the other blush. In any other small room with any other man, this might be considered flirting, but not with Jack—it was only great fun. Wasn’t it?

  I plucked a book from a box and dusted off the cover. It was Phantastes. I smiled and held it up to Jack without a word—we knew what it meant to both of us.

  “‘Past tears are present strength,’” Jack quoted and reached for the book.

  “Oh yes! That’s so true.” I pressed the volume to my chest.

  He reached over and eased it from my hands, held it up. “This book isn’t so much a book as a thunderclap.” He ran his hand over the cover. “Do you think anyone else could play this little game with us? Anyone who has the same photographic memory?”

  “If there is such a someone, I don’t know them.”

  He shook his head. “And neither do I.”

  This game, which he won, though I gave him a great run for his money, went on well into the night.

  At last I stood and ran my hands along the spines of newly shelved books. “Jack, it’s almost midnight. Let’s be done with this for the night.”

  “Almost midnight?”

  “Old lang syne,” I said and brushed off my shirt, which was covered in dirt and book dust. I was bone tired and yet unwilling to forfeit five minutes with him if he still wanted me near.

  New Year’s Eve—would this be the moment when he would close that space between us with a kiss? Would he see and feel what flickered in his new rooms? As the tower outside tolled midnight, the bells echoing and clanging, he collapsed onto his desk chair, then swiveled toward me. “A new year. I can’t think of a better way to begin it than with you.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “A very brand-new year.”

  Back in London, January’s gift was deep snows with fat snowflakes and bitter cold, which brought me the flu. Set in bed for a week, I had much to think about with my new Cinderella book. Warnie had sent valuable books and research. Although I couldn’t get my brain to work well enough to write, I could make it read.

  A deep and broken part of me wanted to give up on the writing. Smoke’s low sales in America seemed the last disappointment I could tolerate. Good reviews and all that, but otherwise a loss. Soon it would release in England and I waited, hoping that Jack’s preface and large name on the cover would help. Money was an ever-present worry.

  Jack settled easily into Cambridge, and we both wondered aloud how he ever could have thought of turning it down in the first place, much less twice. We spent as much time together as we could—whether I was editing his book or helping him choose a hearthrug for his room. I hand-delivered pages with the excuse that he needed them straightaway, but really just to be near him. And he too stopped in London for no other reason but to linger at my side. He met more of my friends and even accompanied me to the Globe Tavern to meet the sci-fi boys, where he was both revered and stared at with curiosity.

  Although I had a busy social life and was beginning to find my place in the London crowd, I missed Jack when he was gone; I was at peace when he was near. What category of his four loves could possibly contain this definition?

  The evening was cold when he and I stood in my backyard, bundled in our coats and scarves as he smoked a cigarette and talked about a meeting he’d had at Cambridge. Twilight fell across his face, lighting it aflame.

  I turned my palms up and let the light puddle there on my gloves as if it were resting before disappearing. “Look at that,” I said.

  “Patches of Godlight.” Jack touched my gloved hand as if he too could hold the twilight.

  We paused, both of us seeming to hold our breath. He wrapped his fingers through mine and drew me closer as he dropped his cigarette to the ground. We were face-to-face, only inches between us. Neither of us spoke.

  I was afraid to move, to speak, to break the twilight spell that held us both in its Godlight. With his other hand he touched my cheek, the fuzziness of his glove tickling my skin. I leaned into his palm just as Sultan had once done with me, and he allowed that tender moment before dropping both his hands and taking a step back.

  My breath held, and the tremor of desire flamed below my stomach. “Why do you stop yourself, Jack?” I asked, my voice deep and quiet.

  “Stop myself?”

  “I need to understand why you stop yourself from kissing me, just when I believe you will.”

  “Oh, Joy.” He hesitated. “I don’t want to cross over to eros and destroy the love we do have. I can’t lose you or this deep, abiding friendship. And the church forbids our union. In their eyes, you’re technically still married. And I’m an old man—too old to start again or change.”

  I took his hand again, pressed it to my heart. “I’ve watched what’s happening to poor Princess Margaret. I see how the Church of England views divorce; I’ve watched from afar the abdication crisis of King Edward, how his love for Wallis made him choose between the crown and love. He chose love. Sometimes that’s what happens; love is preferred, but usually not. Usually the crown or the god or the family or the duty is chosen. I understand this, of course. Lives are altered. Completely settled, lovely lives can be altered by love. And who wants change? Hardly anyone at all.” Frustration crept into my voice. “But I don’t understand why you keep the most vulnerable pieces of your heart from me. Why do you draw near and then fall back? Because I can feel your love.”

  “Joy.” He exhaled my name and took a step not closer but farther away, as if I had pushed him, and maybe I had. I dropped his hand.

  “I’ve spent all of my life in an attempt to find Truth and moral good, and then to live it. I can’t discard my moral habits for feelings, which are just that—feelings.”

  “The virtues,” I said. He’d written about them at length, and I discerned that they were as ingrained in him as the wrinkles now radiating from the corner of his mouth and drooping eyes.
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  “They are my footholds for moral goodness. Morality is about choice.”

  “You think God is judging you for wanting us, or because I’m divorced?”

  “God doesn’t judge by internal disease but by moral choices. We must protect our hearts.”

  Anger, my old and familiar companion, surged. “You’re spouting theology and empty words. I read what you wrote about sex—that it’s either in marriage or else total abstinence. But sometimes love changes things. Or love should change things.”

  He reached for his pipe and then his hand dropped as if even that was too much energy to muster. “We can’t just surrender to our every desire—man must have his principles and live by them regardless. Our nature must be controlled or it can ruin our lives.”

  “But how?” I sounded like Davy when he asked ten million questions as a child, never satisfied with the first or second answer.

  “If I attempt virtue, it brings light to my life. If I indulge desires, I invite fog and confusion.”

  “Oh, Jack, that logic takes no account for the heart. How can you tell a heart what to do? I’m incapable of such things.” I turned away from him, desire’s fire alchemizing to anger.

  “I’m trying,” he said. “Because I must.”

  “I think it’s time for you to leave.” I took a step toward the back door, not wanting him to see the pain quivering on my face and the frustration shaking my body. His logic would not quell or explain.

  “Joy.” His voice was soft, but I didn’t turn back to him.

  “Your logic,” I said as I opened the door to enter the house. “It offers no rest for the heart.”

  He was instantly next to me, his hands on my shoulders to spin me around to face him. “Don’t turn from me,” he said. “I cannot bear that. If we can’t indulge in eros, surely we have all the beauty that remains in philia.” He pulled me close to wrap his arms around me. Twilight turned to night and my head rested on his shoulder and the palm of his hand was on my neck, stroking my skin with gentleness as if consoling a small child after a frightful storm.

  But this wasn’t fright he was trying to subdue; this was desire. His mind might twist firm around logic, but his body divulged the truth.

  It was he who let me go, and gently touched my cheek before leaving me quaking without another word.

  CHAPTER 43

  Blessed are the bitter things of God

  Not as I desire but as I need

  “BLESSED ARE THE BITTER THINGS OF GOD,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  Spring, 1955

  Three months passed until I was able to return to the Kilns for the rising of spring. Touch between Jack and me came easier now, a hand on the knee or wrist, a hug in greeting or farewell. But still Jack was chaste in the way he knew how, keeping that last inch open.

  “You know,” I said, handing Jack a pile of letters I’d answered for him that morning, “when your first letter arrived I was afraid to open it, believing that Warnie might have written instead of you.” I tapped the pile now in his hands. “Now I feel sorry for the poor bloke who receives my reply instead of yours.”

  Jack shook his head. “For some of these questions posed, your answers are better than mine. The recipient should feel privileged to have your hand in it.” His voice was subdued, quieter than usual, and I took this to be a cue for peaceful work. I too sat, settling into my chair across from him. Pages of Queen Cinderella in my hand, I began to edit my work but found my mind wandering.

  It was spring holiday at the Kilns. March of 1955 had arrived not quite like the lion it was rumored to be, but more like a heralding of all goodness and light. My sons ran through the Kilns and through Oxford as if they’d lived there all their life. The Screwtape Letters was out in paperback, and I was editing Jack’s biography and indexing Warnie’s history book. Our days together were languid, long and comfortable.

  What a flip,

  I’d written to Belle just the night before.

  I once shared a bed with Bill, was part of his writing and his life, and yet I felt such contempt. And here I share love, esteem, and need, and yet not the bed. It’s taking some adjustment, but I won’t give it up. Not as long as he wants me here.

  When I glanced from my pages, Jack was staring at me. His face, that endearing face, his sleepy eyes hooded.

  “What is it?” I asked, knowing the curtain that fell over his dark eyes when something bothered him. No more could he hide from me than I from him.

  “Now that I’m settled into Cambridge and have more free time, I’m dry as a bone. I have no more ideas, Joy. What if I’m done?” He leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Really bloody done?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jack rose and strolled across the room, his hand out as if seeming to miss his walking stick. He stood in front of the window, pulling aside the blackout curtain and pressing his palm against the window. “Maybe it’s over for me. My writing, that is.”

  I stood to walk to him. “Even if that were true, which I doubt it is, your body of work is so profound already.”

  “That isn’t the point and you know it. If I have nothing left, what is there of me for God to work through? There must always be more until there isn’t.”

  “Let’s brainstorm. Let’s throw out the ideas you love the most. I know you’re not dry.” I settled back into my own chair. “Is there anything you’ve started and put away?”

  “Of course there is, but I put it away because it didn’t work.”

  “Sometimes things need time to grow in the soil of the imagination, to percolate in the unconscious, to unfold without our dirty hands all over them.”

  He smiled at me. “Yes.” Then he walked to the side table where he kept the liquor on the bottom shelf. He chose a decanter of whiskey and poured two glasses and motioned for me to sit opposite him at the game table.

  Did he notice my new haircut or new pearl earrings or the way I did my very best to make him see me as a woman? No. Instead he stared at me with an intensity that told me he wanted only to solve his dry spell, and I was the possible source of water.

  I sat across from him. “Is there anything you’ve abandoned that you might want to pick up again?”

  “One of my very first short stories rests unfinished. ‘Light,’ I had called it.”

  “Well then, what of that?”

  “I don’t believe I have the heart for it as of yet.”

  “Then let’s go here—what fascinated you the most as a child?” I asked, already knowing the answer and wanting to guide him to deep water.

  March winds howled outside. A storm was on its way, but neither of us mentioned it.

  “Myth,” he answered. “I could write another allegory like Screwtape or Pilgrim. Or another children’s book, but those seem to have run their course.”

  “And what myth do you think of the most when you think of myth at all?” I asked.

  “Cupid and Psyche,” he said without hesitation.

  “Well then . . .”

  “I’ve already tried that.” He sat in a posture of defeat, lit a cigarette as if the conversation were over.

  “You give up that easily, my lad?”

  He didn’t laugh, but a smile eased slowly from the corner of his lips. “I wrote a play about this myth, also tried prose, a ballade, couplets. I’ve approached it from every angle, but still I think of it often.” He poured another whiskey in his glass, sipped it. “I’ve even dreamt of the sisters.”

  Cupid and Psyche: it was a myth about the most beautiful of three sisters, Psyche, who was sacrificed to the gods, her older sisters complicit, only to be rescued by the winds and then discovered by Cupid—a love story at its finest. But when Psyche disobeyed Cupid and looked directly at him in the night, she was cast out to the forest, and then sent by Venus to fulfill impossible tasks. When Psyche finished the tasks with the help of the river god and magic ants, she was reunited with her true love. I knew the myth well—it was one of my childhood
favorites, complicated and chock-full of envious gods, jealousy, true love, and mystical rivers.

  “I first read of the sisters in Metamorphoses,” I said. “I was as jealous of the beautiful Psyche as if I were the older sister in the story. I felt as if I’d sent Psyche into the woods to be sacrificed. But I couldn’t have; I never would have stolen her happiness on purpose as her sisters did.”

  “Not even to save her?” he asked. “Maybe her sisters took away her happiness because they believed they were saving her.”

  “There, Jack. You’ve got it.” I popped my hand onto the tabletop. “Write about that.”

  He closed his eyes and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “The sisters weren’t taking away her happiness but trying to confirm reality.”

  “Yes, saving her, not destroying her. That’s it. Your story is hidden in there.”

  “In this version . . .” He stared past me to whatever Muse spoke to him. “In my version, Psyche is motherless, so her older sister is raising her.”

  “The beautiful older sister who isn’t quite as beautiful but—”

  “No,” he bellowed in a friendly way and stood with his whiskey to look down to me. “This time she’s ugly. She’s the opposite of Psyche. And she loves Psyche with such obsession that—” He slammed his hand on the table with glee. “Yes.”

  “More . . .”

  “That love,” he said and bent down to look me in the eye, “will be what destroys. When love becomes a god it becomes a devil. And the ugly older sister will turn her love for Psyche into a god.”

  “Jack, go write. And don’t stop.”

  “Thank you, Joy.” He blurted these words, and in a great burst of happiness, kissed me on top of my head. He hurried away to begin writing that very night.

  I touched the top of my warm hair, his kiss lingering there as his words echoed across my consciousness: when love becomes a god it becomes a devil.

  By the middle of the next day Jack brought me chapter one, written in his tight scroll of liquid ink.