Becoming Mrs. Lewis(41)
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.