Becoming Mrs. Lewis(99)

“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.

I sat at the desk in my bedroom where I’d organized the multiple projects I was immersed in. He hadn’t entered that room while I stayed there, always offering me privacy. But that day he burst in as I was muddling through Warnie’s history book, indexing it with a growing headache.

“Joy!”

I startled and stood. His mere presence in my room brought a warm flush to my thighs and belly.

“What?” I laughed and was conscious of how I appeared: I wore an A-line dress I’d bought in London, sleeveless and dainty. I hadn’t yet brushed my hair, and it fell over my shoulders. I was barefoot.

But he noticed none of this. He held out his hand with a sheaf of handwritten pages. “Will you type these? And then tell me—am I on to something at all?”

He sat on the edge of my bed, unaware of anything but our creative collaboration. I returned my attention to the pages. “Do you want me to type now?”

“First . . . read.”

I sat and began to do just that. Orual, the name he had given Psyche’s ugly older sister, was speaking from her old age, from the knowledge of her imminent demise. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods.

From there the prose and the story unfolded, confounding and enchanting as an original myth, as if he’d spent months on the pages.

Orual was the eldest daughter of the King of Glome. She told of their castle where she and her sister Psyche; their nurse; and the Fox, their beloved tutor, resided. But mostly Orual told the reader of Psyche and her beauty and Orual’s great love for her—blinding love. Orual’s ugliness was described in detail, and the reader discovered that in her old age she wore a veil to cover her face. When I reached the end of the chapter I looked to Jack, who had not looked away.

“I’m envious that you can write this in a night and half a day, and it can hold an entire story in its hints and foreshadowing.”

“I’m not here for praise, Joy. Tell me where it lacks.”

“Let me type it and write notes, not off the cuff.”

“A little off the cuff?” He smiled; he already knew, as I did, that I would never turn away from that smile.

“Okay, on first blush. I need to understand why the Fox loves poetry so much, and I want a hint of who he will become to Orual. He seems integral and interesting. He needs to hint at what is to come.”

“Yes.” Jack took the papers from me and a pencil from my desk, making a mark in scribbled handwriting.

I looked at him. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”

“That it’s a terrible idea to head down this road, to write this book?”

“No. Not that at all. I want to tell you about the day I received your first letter. A winter afternoon in January of 1950. Five years ago now.”

He nodded at me and set the papers to the side, crossed his legs, and leaned on his elbow. “Yes?”

“You’d asked for my history, and I didn’t know where to begin. I spent hours thinking about it and realized that my life had been made of masks, many of them. And I decided that afternoon that I wouldn’t wear any of them with you. I decided that I would show you me. That I would be barefaced. And here—in your story—you have Orual covering her face with a veil.”

He stared at me for so long that I almost wished for Orual’s veil. Then he spoke. “Never hide your face from me. It is precious and dear.”