Becoming Mrs. Lewis(98)
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.