Becoming Mrs. Lewis(10)
“Yes, he does.”
She exhaled as if in relief.
Jack:
You must become frustrated that I can’t answer all your questions, Joy. Your mind is as quick and lithe as any I’ve known. But sometimes I have no answer but his, which is “Just follow me.” Your marriage and your husband’s infidelity sound like horrors, but you also sound resolute to love.
Joy:
Yes, with the questions that won’t let me rest, it’s best to remember your answer. Again and again I will turn to that: “Follow me.”
Eva stopped as we crested the hill, spying Bill and Chad on a blanket with a picnic basket between them. All six children were at the lake’s edge, splashing and calling one to the other. Multihued wild flowers, thimbleweed and liverwort, aster and doll’s-eyes, bloomed in open-faced eagerness that made them seem desperate for attention.
“Look at this world,” I said. “It’s such a wonder, profoundly beautiful. I want to live in it that way—not as if life is one big chore.” I leaned over and picked a flower, held it to the sun.
“That’s a lovely thought. You, my friend, you are the most fascinating woman I know. I’m thrilled you’re here.” She hugged me with a tight squeeze before descending the hill to the men.
I stood still for a moment. The lake rippled with our children’s splashing and swimming. Bill and Chad cast a handsome scene, leaning back on the blanket and laughing.
It was two lives I lived: the one right there, the sun extending its warmth toward us, the children calling with happiness, the cry of songbirds in the canopy of oak trees overhead, the splash of lake water. Then there was the second, parallel life: the one where my mind was preoccupied with how to describe this time and feeling to Jack. What would I take of this day to share with him? I was living a life with him in my mind while externally picnicking with my family. It was both disorienting and balancing.
I walked carefully down and reached the blanket where Eva sat, her face lifted to the sun, laughing so freely. I was envious. There she was, happy with her husband and four girls.
Chad, his dark hair plastered against his round and eager face, smiled at me. “Welcome, ladies.” Mosquito bites welled on his freckled arms and he scratched absently.
Eva turned to him, and he leaned down to kiss her lips. “What are you boys doing down here?”
Bill sat up. “Poogle!” he cried in a joyous voice that suggested I had just arrived from far off. He too leaned over, kissed me with the sweet taste of Chianti on his lips, and palmed my cheek gently. “Aren’t you glad we came?” He turned back to Chad. “How can we ever thank you?” Exuberant, he was up and off to run into the lake with the children. He swooped Davy over his head and ran into the water with him to squeals of delight.
Jack:
I have read your conversion essay, “Longest Way Round.” I am quite in awe at your ability to explain what is almost impossible to articulate—the power of conversion and the realization that atheism was too simple. It is flaming writing. Not much in our world is as simple as it appears, and if you want to dig deeper, as you do, Joy, you must be prepared for the difficulty in that journey. Most are not. And I am honored that you mentioned my work in your essay. Thank you.
Joy:
In that essay I state that ever since that half minute, I’d been slowly changing into a new person. And for the first time in a long while, I can feel that change again—the transformation toward a new life with my true self.
Yes, of course I mentioned your work. Both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce stirred the dormant parts of my spiritual life. It took a little while, but the stories moved inside me until I was ready. Isn’t that the way with all good stories? But it was you, Jack, who taught me where I had gone wrong in my intellectual analysis. Your words were not the last step in my conversion, but the first.
Chad lifted a bottle of Chianti, poured some into a glass, and handed it to me.
Eva glanced at Bill in the lake and then lowered her voice as if we shared a secret. “I want to know how it all started,” she said, returning to the subject of Jack. “What do you two write about?”
“Everything. Books. Theory. We have a running argument about birth control. Love. Mythology. Our dreams. Our work.” I laughed. “There’s no subject off limits.”
Eva smiled. “There are learned men everywhere who would love to have Lewis write to them about philosophy and dreams.”
“Eva, it’s as if all the reading and all the writing I’ve done in my life have led me to this friendship.”
“I don’t feel that way about anything.” Eva smiled at me. “Except my girls.”
“And me, my love?” Chad asked and pulled her close.
“And you.”
I glanced toward Bill at the lake’s edge, throwing Davy from the far edge of the dock.
I wrote about the Ten Commandments, yet wrestled with their meaning in my own life. Yes, I was committed to staying married. I wanted to make it work with Bill, and yet my mind was consumed with what to say or write to another man and what he might say to me in return. This wasn’t infidelity, but what was it?
Jack:
You asked about mythology. It was Tolkien (have you yet read his work?) who convinced me of the one true myth—Jesus Christ. It wasn’t an easy conversion for me, but one of an all-night conversation at the river’s edge.