Or fill your eyes and ears with any loud
Mere thanks—until I am no longer proud!
“BREAD-AND-BUTTER SESTINA,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The sights and sounds of Oxford during those ten days soaked into my skin and settled into my bones. I walked for miles, ignoring the dull ache in my hips. I crafted sonnets about longing, but for what? I wasn’t sure, but understood it had something to do with Oxford and how I felt a kind of freedom I’d never felt before.
I wrote letters to Bill and Renee and the littlest poogles while ignoring the nagging sensation that something was amiss at home. It was probably irritation that I was still gone, too many kids underfoot with too little money in hand. I would make up for it when I returned home.
That last afternoon I sat in Jack’s rooms after he’d given me some pages of O.H.E.L. to read on my journey to Worcester. I’d handed him the rough draft of the “Day of Rejoicing,” and there we sat, each other’s work in hand. I eased slowly to stand and walked to the window, looked west to the deer park where elm trees shed the very last of their gold. The croquet lawn was empty of players that day, but I could imagine how it looked when the weather warmed and it was full. “Let’s walk along the river?” I asked.
“Yes.” He stood quickly and his pipe fell to the ground, ash scattering across the carpet. He brushed his trousers but didn’t even register the mess on the floor, which only made me smile.
I tucked the pages he’d given me into my bag while he plucked his hat from a hook on the wall and settled it on his head. It landed crooked, and all the more charming. With a swoop of his hand he retrieved the smooth walking stick that had been leaning against the wall and then locked his office door behind us. “Shall we?”
We wound our way along the pathways of Addison’s Walk to the river’s edge as the sun burst through a cloud. My breath caught in my throat. “This,” I said. “This is the place you wrote to me about—where you walked all night with Tolkien and Dyson. This is the place you came to believe.”
“Yes.” He tipped his hat in response.
“It’s like walking into one of your stories, to see a place once only imagined. To see where you were convinced of the one true myth.”
“That God is the storyteller and Providence is his own storyline.” He stopped and exhaled.
“I wish I’d been here for that discussion, to have someone like you to talk to, or have just listened in.”
“Ah.” Jack laughed and leaned on his walking stick with that twinkle in his eye. “You think you could have just listened?”
I smiled and shook my head. “I’d like to think so . . .”
“It would have been a better conversation were you included.”
“It’s odd, isn’t it? One minute we don’t believe at all. In fact, we are a bit snobbish about those who do believe. And then we know it’s true. We just know.”
He stared at me so intently I almost looked away. “It seemed sudden, didn’t it? But we know it’s not. It had been creeping up on both of us all of our lives.”
“Yes,” I said, and a tremor rumbled under my chest—to be seen like this by a man, to know he felt and sensed all that I did.
He began walking again. “Yet even as I believed in God, I wasn’t sure if I believed in Christ.”
“When did that happen? Here also?” I imagined the air remembering, the trees and the flowers and all the company of heaven remembering the conversation Jack Lewis had on this very walkway, the one that changed his life.
“No.” He laughed. “I was in the side car of Warnie’s motorcycle on the way to the zoo. Somewhere between the Kilns and the zoo, I believed in Christ. I don’t know where it happened on that ride, but it did.”
“In a side car on the way to the zoo. God does have a sense of humor.” I fell silent a moment, watching the flow of the river. “I can see why God would reveal himself here. It’s achingly beautiful. I would come here every day if I could.”
“I do.”
With each dropperful of our lives that we dripped into our conversation, the closer we became. It was a quick flutter inside my belly that told me to be careful. I’d ruined more than one friendship with the wrong kind of love. This was a friendship I would never sacrifice.
“Tell me about your average day, Jack,” I said brightly.
He swung his walking stick in a circle and then popped it onto the ground. “It’s not so thrilling. Maybe you’d rather imagine.”
“No.” I shook my head and my hat fell over my eyes; I pushed it back with a laugh. “Bore me.”
“On the nights I stay here in my rooms, I’m awakened at seven fifteen by my page bringing me tea. Then I walk down here.” He tapped his walking stick on the green earth and looked directly at me. “To Addison’s Walk. I linger for as long as I can. I pray and allow nature to bring me to silence.”
“The beauty that brings us to peace and whispers that there’s something more.”
“And every square inch claimed by God.” He gave me that look I’d come to know—that we agreed and there was nothing more to say. It was just enough.
“Then at eight o’clock we have Dean’s Prayers in the chapel.” He pointed toward the quadrangle. “Then to breakfast in the Common Room, and by nine in the morning I’m in my rooms, reading correspondence and answering as bloody much as I can. My students then arrive until about one in the afternoon.”
“Since I’ve been here I’ve barely been up before nine,” I said. “And there you are with half your day done. And structured. I believe I need more of your order.”
“I’m quite sure your life has more excitement,” he said. “And variety.”
“Well, go on,” I urged, hungry for more of his everyday-ness.
“Some afternoons I give lectures on High Street. But usually after my students leave, I walk or catch a bus back to the Kilns, three miles from here. Once home, I sneak my way into the fourth dimension.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “My nap. Then I’m back here by five for more tutoring. It’s the evenings I enjoy most—full of readings and guests and conversation in the Common Room at Magdalen.”
“It sounds wonderful. A life full and stimulating.”
He drew a pipe from his breast pocket and filled it with dark leaves of tobacco from a small pouch, lighting it with a match that took four efforts to strike. He did this all in such a slow ritual that I wondered if he’d forgotten I stood next to him. Then he looked at me and puffed, his cheeks like small bellows, until the pipe lit and smoke plumed upward.
“Since I’ve handed over the pages of O.H.E.L. to you, I feel concerned about how you see the work.”
“Concerned?”
“To be found the fool.” He set a hand on the back of an iron bench and leaned forward, his pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth. The wind rustled his hair and the yellow tie that hung from his neck. “Yet all seems right from this angle, doesn’t it? One of those moments when bother fades away.”
“Yes.” We were standing so close that our shoulders almost brushed. “Being here right now, I feel that nothing in the world could be wrong.”
He turned to me then. “But it is, isn’t it.” His cheeks rose with his sly smile, patient and waiting for my honest answer.
“Yes.” I pulled my coat closer, buttoned the top button to stave off the chill I felt coming. “The letters from home feel off. Bill is being hedgy at best.”
“Hedgy? There’s something he’s not telling you?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“I’ve never been married, Joy. How can I give you advice? But I can say that letters don’t always give the full rounded truth of how someone might or might not feel.”
“Not between you and me,” I said. “I understood you.”
“Yes.” He nodded and tapped his pipe on the edge of the bench. “Not between us.”
I stood in the comfortable moment, its ease, and wondered if I could take it with me wherever I went. “I’m not asking you to say anything, Jack. Or give advice. But suffice it to say that it’s been a terrible few years and I’ve lost my steady sense of self in it all.”
“Why do you stay, Joy?”
“God’s will, I hope, but maybe safety. Not wanting to give up on my family. I want to do the right thing.” I wrapped my arms around myself, rubbed my arms to get warm as the wind above rustled the nearly naked trees.
“Sometimes it feels as if God’s demands are impossible, does it not?”
“Impossible.” I nodded. “Love. It’s a complicated endeavor, Jack.”
“I’ve attempted to write about it—over and over—drafts of a book about the subject, you know. We are the only ones who have but one word for it. In Greek we have storge for affection, philia for friendship, agape is God, and of course eros. But even words, Greek or otherwise, can’t hold the truth of what it is or isn’t.”
Jack’s smile was then replaced by a look of such caring warmth that I wanted to throw my arms around him.
“Your first love?” I asked, tentative and with a smile.
“Poetry.” He paused. “Or Little Lea, my childhood home.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” I jostled him slightly.
“I worked on the poetry for years until I realized that I would never be good enough.”
“Good enough?” I laughed so loudly that he startled. “I’ve read your poems. They are more than good enough.” I shook my head. “I left poetry for publication and money. And you left it because you believed you weren’t meant for it. Either way, we both left our first loves.”
“But it led us to the prose and to the now,” he said.
I folded my hands behind my back, stared off. “You know what I believe?” I asked, but didn’t wait for his answer. “It is poetry that is rooted in the sacred. The prose is good and well, but the poetry is something else.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes I believe it is only the paper and the words that understand me. I wonder what I haven’t tried—from screenwriting to essays to book and movie reviews.”
He was quiet, as if we had all the time in the world to watch the sunlit water move in waves, yellow and russet leaves riding the current. “A sestina,” he finally said. “Have you written one of those?”
“Oh, maybe not since school, if then.”
“Try it.” He stepped away from the edge of the bench.
“Before I leave for Edinburgh,” I said, “I will write us a sestina about these days.”
“Now there is something I’d want to read.”
A voice behind us called out Jack’s name, and a man in long black robes approached through the film of autumn sun. I wanted to shoo this man away.
“Good afternoon, Lowdie.” Jack greeted him with gusto.
He introduced me to his colleague, and I felt the shiver of knowing that I often ignored—it was time to take my leave. I departed with promises to meet Jack and Warnie for bangers and mash at the Eagle and Child that evening. I was anxious to enter its doors, settle into its corners, and be another part of Jack’s life, the very place where the Inklings—his group of fellows and writers who met to indulge in a pint or two while quipping about philosophy and writing—met on Tuesdays. No women allowed, of course.
As I wandered off I wondered what might have happened if right there on the banks of the river, as we talked of poetry, I’d told him of all the other poems I’d been writing—love sonnets naked with yearning, so quivering with need that he might jump into the river in fear of me. If they weren’t about him directly, they were most definitely about the feelings he disturbed inside me.
No, I would never show them to him.
Never.