Becoming Mrs. Lewis(49)

Bill was both blunt and articulate, as if writing an appendix for his novel. His words were like a great bludgeoning hammer.

He suggested that I find someone to fall in love with in Staatsburg, and then we could live near each other and raise the kids together. Oh, he was even so kind as to suggest that he could wait to marry Renee until I too fell in love, of course with someone convenient and near.

And, could I believe, he didn’t see anything sinful in “attaining the maximum love with Renee”?

Nausea boiled. The cold felt colder, the bare floor rougher. How had I held this understanding at bay? Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe the past weeks of anxiety had been nothing more than this knowing breeding inside.

He ended by telling me not to feel “forsaken and unloved, Poogle.” But what the blazing else was I supposed to feel? I was a teenager and overweight, and my mom forbade me to wear the dress that made me look fat. I was in love with my professor, and he slept with me and went home to his wife. I was standing outside the circle of beautiful girls in college who knew how to giggle and flirt. I was reading a horrific review of my novel. Jack told me of my manly attributes and joked of his love for blondes. I relived all these moments in one fell swoop of the grand forsakenness Bill told me not to feel, each memory rising to join anger and rejection. My cousin? My beautiful cousin and best friend?

I slammed my hand on the table, typewritten pages of O.H.E.L. falling to the floor.

Bill ended the letter with the announcement that he wouldn’t carry my sons to the docks to pick me up in a few weeks, but they were excited I was returning home. The end of the letter was filled with chatter as casual as if he’d told me he loved a new car or book, not my cousin.

I sank to the kitchen chair and wondered what the annoying high-pitched scream above me could be when I realized it was the kettle. I rose in a daze and mindlessly poured the boiling water over the tea ball, bounced it up and down, dropped in two cubes of sugar, and took a sip. I cradled the cup and drank, tears as hot as tea rolling down into the corners of my mouth before I knew I was weeping.

If I went back to bed, I wouldn’t get up. I had to keep moving. Maybe I should have never left to pursue anything other than what I’d been given at home. Was I being punished? Did I even believe that God punished?

I glanced at the pages scattered across the tiny kitchen table: my notes, work, and research. It all seemed futile. I tried and I worked and I tried and I wrote and I did what I thought was best—and now my cousin was sleeping with my husband? She wanted to claim my family as hers?

My emotions spun out of control—I blamed myself, blamed Bill, blamed Renee, and then of course blamed God himself. Bill was despicable. He wandered through life fulfilling his needs and then settled on my cousin? Rage coursed through my body like fire.

I finally dressed and with haste pulled my hair up, wrapped myself tight in a coat, and burst outside to find my breath.

I walked the streets like the dove from Noah’s ark in search of mooring but finding only water, endless miles of ocean and nowhere safe to land. It was of course all my doing, the ruin in which I found myself. What did I think would happen if I left Bill with the perfect Renee? What did I think would happen if I chased peace and health across an ocean?

I had destroyed my own ark.

For hours I wandered through London—the first city I’d ever really loved—twisting through alleyways I’d never seen, around squares that ended where I started, in parks of deep green. It was late afternoon by the time I paused on Westminster Bridge over the River Thames. The sunlight both rosy and golden, the bloated and magnificent moon hanging in the sky behind me while the false moon of Big Ben loomed before me. When darkness began to filter through, evening leaking into the edges of the river, I walked with determination to the Abbey. The arched windows of the sand-castle cathedral glittered in the twilight, their stained glass beckoning me to view their glory inside. It would close tomorrow to prepare for the June coronation, and I needed to find refuge before the doors shut me out.

I slipped in. A service had just begun. The sanctuary surrounded me like a Gothic forest, the buttresses winging down over the crowd of over five hundred people. I took stock: altar boys in white carrying burning candles, priests in black at the front of the altar, and the black-checkered floor leading me toward a pew on the left side.

“The Lord be with you,” the priest said from the front of the church, his words echoing with a reverberating bellow.

“And with thy spirit,” we responded as one.

I stayed, and the service felt both familiar and cleansing, a ritual that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, a sanctity. When the lights were shut off for the homily, only candlelight and torches and twilight saturated the sanctuary. When the Eucharist was over I was the last to linger, alone in a pew with thoughts that would not settle. Eventually I rose to return home and collapse into bed, the grief as heavy as concrete.

I wept for all the loss I had never acknowledged, all the pain I’d held in reserve: my marriage, my dreams, my career, and my health. To acknowledge their demise meant to mourn them, and I hadn’t been ready.

The next morning I began my wanderings again, prowling through the city like a stray cat. I didn’t want Bill back. Not now. Almighty, no! But the betrayal in my own house felt as sick as any illness that had sent me to bed.

It was unseasonably warm, the sky a cloudless and intense blue. I draped my coat over my arm and put one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read. I could merely walk and feel.