The best of me is merely commonplace,
And I am tired, and I am growing old
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The train to Manhattan smelled like rotten fruit, a stench that permeated the car. I stood unsteadily and moved to another car as the train rocked toward New York City. I found a seat, closed my eyes, and imagined that I was sitting with Phyl on an entirely different train from Paddington Station to Oxford. But it was no use.
It was February, and winter held us in its grip. The house was filled with misery. Renee hid and wept in the extra room where she’d moved. The children were confused and anxious and tiptoed around the house. Rosemary and Bobby acted like skittering mice, afraid to be stepped upon.
Sometimes I felt as if my anguished prayers of uncertainty were received into the hands of great Love, and other times I sensed that they hit the ceiling and landed flat in my lap, dusty, withered, and useless. I started to see that faith was something akin to understanding that it didn’t matter so much how I felt but was closer to what I believed.
Meanwhile, Bill and I fought as if our lives depended on the next ill-mannered word. If I held these times in my mind against Oxford, against the smoke-filled peace of the common room at the Kilns or the ivy-draped stones of Headington or the silver-birch-lined lane to Jack’s house, a despondency swept over me that felt both complete and irreversible.
Joy:
Dear Jack,
It’s misery. Renee and Bill sneak off to be together, while Bill tries to convince me to stay and raise a family, but also allow them to be happy in their love. How disgusting can one man be? I must get divorced. Can it be God’s will? I don’t understand how it could be his will that I stay, but . . . And the children. I don’t know how to find what God wants of me—how does one ever truly know?
Jack:
Tearing apart what was meant to be “one” is brutal but sometimes required. I am with you, Joy, and hold you in prayer all the time. Here, Warnie is on the drink again and I believe he must go for treatment. It breaks my heart. Look at us, my friend, both devastated by the drinking of those we love.
Oh, dear Joy, how do we know what God wants of us? Imagine you are a house and he has come to rebuild you—yes, some things must be torn down and cast away. Faith, patience, and bravery, dear—more than you dreamed possible.
When an invitation for a MacDowell Colony reunion in New York City arrived in January, I clutched at it like food for the starving. The first thing I did was ring Belle.
“I’m coming to see you,” I said. As my best friend, roommate at Hunter, and confidante through the years, Belle, so beautiful then, had been kind to her New York roommate with the sickly pale complexion, who walked around in a red hat and tried to reinvent herself all those years ago. I longed to see her.
When the train arrived, Belle waited for me inside the arched majesty of Grand Central Station. The painted constellations swayed above her wavy black hair, which was pinned in lovely victory rolls I could never achieve. Her smile was wide on her broad face. When I’d first met her in college, her beauty had caused me to withdraw. Comparison was the devil of self-esteem. But her friendship had thawed me. Now she stood there in her prim suit, buttoned tight around her tiny waist. As much as her high heels would allow she ran toward me and then threw her arms around me.
I held to her longer than she might have expected before stepping back to take her in after all this time. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve only been a train ride away,” she said with her Russian lilt, a trace that remained even though she’d moved to the United States as a child. While my parents had supported me in college, she’d sold books from a basement book division. She knew me during the heady days of sexual exploration and adolescent narcissism. She knew me when I’d married and had children. She knew me when I’d found God, or more aptly, he’d found me. There wasn’t much she didn’t know, and to have someone like her still in what felt like a tilted world was ballast holding me steady.
Together we’d once scribbled our notes and poems, poured our hearts out onto paper. She’d published her first poem about the same time that I had—hers had recounted her hungry, atrocious childhood in Russia. When my novel, Anya, was released, I’d wanted her approval more than almost any other. Later both Belle and I graduated with master’s degrees from Columbia, believing that our life would overflow with literary honors, parties, and publications.
There in Grand Central we linked arms and headed into the city for lunch, chattering without pause until we sat down at a prim white tablecloth in a room full of chic businessmen drinking martinis and eyeing Belle. I ordered a sherry, and the waiter looked at me with raised eyebrows. Belle ordered a glass of white wine.
“Sherry?” She laughed. “Are you a true anglophile now?”
“I believe I am,” I said. “Which doesn’t quite match with being a housewife in upstate New York.”
“You’ve never been a housewife,” she said with deep laughter. “Even when you were, you weren’t.”
“Sadly, you’re probably right,” I said with a small sigh.
“Oh, Joy, tell me how you’ve been since you returned home. I loved your letters from England. They were full of happiness, adventure, and interesting people.”
“I’m going back,” I said.
“What?” She slipped off her coat to reveal a beautiful V-neck black wool dress hugging her breasts. Men passing by our table glanced and then glanced again.
The waiter arrived with my sherry in a beautiful cut-glass goblet, and I sniffed it with my eyes closed before taking a long gulp. The aroma took me to the Eastgate for my first meeting with Jack, to Magdalen’s dining hall, to the Kilns common room and the sweet, soft feel of autumn in the golden air.
I opened my eyes and looked right at Belle. “I didn’t know it until I just said it out loud. But it’s true. I am going back. And I’m taking my boys with me and starting a new life.”
“You can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Who are you, Joy? What is happening to you?”
I poured it all out to her, wine from burst skins, flowing over the table. I told her of Bill and Renee and the miserable pain in the house.
“This is a nightmare,” she said. “Why doesn’t he just move out with her? Why don’t you just get a divorce?”
“We’re stuck, Belle. Stuck. We have no money to get a divorce. They have no money to live somewhere else. I’m waiting to sell something, anything, and then get the hell out of there. My poor boys . . .”
“Can you take them away from Bill? He’ll allow it?”
“I don’t much care what he will or won’t allow right now, Belle.”
She nodded.
“I know I sound cruel, but I’m repulsed by him. For the sake of all that is true, he’s trying to make himself into a magician now. He wrote a nonfiction book called Monster Midway about the carnival life, and now he’s trying to be part of it. It’s like living with a disgusting adolescent boy who wants to eat fire for a carny act. The hate is eating at me.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know. Sit here and drink with me?” I smiled at her. “Bill asked me, actually asked me, if I would just agree to be a threesome with Renee. A threesome!”
“Oh, that is horribly distasteful.” Belle shuddered. “And meanwhile you’ve fallen in love with England.”
“Yes, but not just the country—also the friends and the land and the Lewis brothers.”
“Let’s remember that I’ve seen you in love many times, Joy.” She paused and leaned forward as if someone were eavesdropping on us. “Are you in love with C. S.?”
“No.” I took another sip of sherry. “I’m confused. I miss them both as if I’d known them all my life, but it’s more than that . . . About Jack, I don’t know. This time it’s not just about some physical need. For goodness’ sake, the man smokes sixty cigarettes a day and then his pipe in between. He’s seventeen years older than I am. But he still has this great gusto for life—for beer and debate and walking and deep friendship. Christianity most definitely has not turned him into a dud. This isn’t some lust-fueled fantasy. It’s the connection between us. The discourse. The empathy. The similar paths. This isn’t an obsession with getting something, Belle. It’s the feeling of finally coming home. It’s confusing at best.”
Belle leaned back in her chair, patted at her lipstick with a napkin before taking a sip of her wine. “I don’t want you to make a huge mistake that will destroy your family for good.”
“Destroy my family? As if that isn’t already done?” Heat rushed into my cheeks, a fiery determination. “I know my past mistakes, Belle. Even in my marriage I see my mistakes. This isn’t all about blame. And I’m not sleeping with Jack. I just love him, and his brother also, but in different ways. We feel like a family. It’s a fact as inescapable as breathing.”
“But that’s what I mean. I’m not being cruel. You know I love you. But you fall in love passionately, and then you don’t listen to reason.”
“Does love have any reason?” Tears rose easily, and I almost longed for the days when I wept only with rage.
“No, it doesn’t. But you do. Why would anyone leave New York?”
“Belle.” I leaned forward with the urgency to make her understand. “My husband is sleeping with my cousin. He is ‘in love.’ He is ‘more married’ to her than he ever was to me, he says. For so long I’ve been required to subvert who I am to be who men want or need me to be, and in England, with those friends, that isn’t true at all.”
Belle’s eyes filled with tears. “I wish I could have been there for you.”
“You’ve always been right there with me. Always. Remember the night I won the Russell Loines Award? When a thousand dollars seemed like a million? It was this great triumph, and I was haughty because Robert Frost had won the same award several years earlier. I took you to the awards ceremony and got so deep into the cups I could barely speak at the microphone. You took care of me.”
“I do remember,” Belle laughed. “Of course I do.”
“And you were there to help me celebrate when I came home from the inferno and infestation of Hollywood. You remained friends with me during the days of Communism, inviting me to your parties and your house. Remember when I got in a screaming match with your pal Kazin? You’ve seen the worst of me, Belle. And I’m trying to tell you that I’m the best of me when I’m with Jack.”
A waitress with bright-red hair arrived, and after we’d both ordered the salmon, Belle rubbed her hands together and then folded them as if in prayer. “I want you to find peace without running away.”
Fortitude rose in me. I glanced around the dining room and lowered my voice. “I’m not running away. I’m running toward. It’s a quiet and intellectually stimulating life I want to make there. I know I sound irrational. But there is a life to be had in England, in London, and it’s a life I want.”
“Your sons?”
“They will be better off for it.” I gave it one more try. “Belle, for some reason I’ve believed that I needed to withstand the infidelities and furies, that it was my job and duty as a wife. But that’s not true. I have my faults, no doubt about that. But my faults do not mean I must stay and endure his.”
“That’s as solid a truth as I’ve ever heard you utter.” Belle’s curls bounced with her acquiescence.
I steered away from the subject and turned my attention to her life. “How is your writing?” I asked. “And how are Jonathan and Thea?”
“Oh, like yours, the kids take buckets of my time. But I’m still writing articles for Esquire and working on a novel about an English teacher in New York City. I’ve titled it Up the Down Staircase. Sounds exciting, right?” She rolled those beautiful eyes and laughed that beautiful laugh. “It will probably never see the light outside my writing room.”
“Anything you write is enthralling. I still remember the pangs of envy when I read your poems in our dorm room.”
She smiled and reached across the table for my hand. “I don’t believe I’m the one who won the Yale Younger Poets prize or had my first book of poetry published at the age of twenty-two. I believe your envy is misplaced, my friend.”
“None of that seems to matter now,” I said. “Those things I thought would bring eternal happiness are dirt in my mouth.” I looked away to see the waitress approaching and then placed my attention back to Belle. “How is your marriage, Belle? Tell me it is wonderful, so I can believe in real love.”
“It is a good marriage.” She picked up her fork and we began our lunch, filling the remainder of it with literary gossip, which she still heard in New York. The Crucible by Arthur Miller had opened on Broadway; Saul Bellow and Ray Bradbury had new books coming in the next months, and they were whispered to be the best they’d written. And Belle had become enamored with Halley’s Seven Years in Tibet, reading it twice already.
When we polished off dessert—crème brûlée we split—we walked the streets of Manhattan, window shopping and pretending we could have whatever we put our gazes upon.
“I remember when I believed I’d be rich enough to buy anything I wanted,” I said as we passed Bonwit Teller. “That our literary success would bring the world to our feet.”
“Honestly, Joy, I don’t even like writing nearly as much as you do.”
I stopped and stared at her, bundling my coat closer. “I couldn’t live without it.”
“I don’t believe I could either, but I also don’t love it as you do. I live for the one moment when it works. It’s like a high I search for again and again, and rarely find.”
“Better than the kinds of highs my husband is after.”
Belle squeezed my arm. “You always cover your hurt with jokes.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s better than dragging you into the lousy gutter with me.”
On the corner of Fifty-Second and Park we sat on a bench, the icy wind whipping past us with the aroma of burned chestnuts and the cabs along Park Avenue honking incessantly.
“Has Mr. Lewis ever been in love?” Belle asked quietly, as if the question itself might hurt me.
“I don’t know.” I twisted to face her on the bench, lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the wind. “I haven’t asked. He’s never married. And I’ve read his views on sex, and they are not provincial. He’s not a man who has been celibate all his life.” I suppressed a smile. “And he hasn’t always been a Christian, a man so devoted to his virtues.”
“So why has he never married?”
In quiet tones I told Belle all about Mrs. Moore and Maureen.
“Do you think . . . ?” she asked, her question trailing off.
“I don’t know. I do wonder.” I sat back and tried not to imagine what Belle was intuiting. “Remember all those years we were obsessed with Freud’s work and believed everything had to do with either our mother, our father, or sex?”
“Yes!”
“Well, if I had to guess, Mrs. Moore was a mother substitute for him as well as a promise he fulfilled. I haven’t asked . . .” I cringed with the thought of it.
“You must ask!” she said with a laugh, and then she jumped up. “There’s an empty taxi.” She lifted her arm, waved, and whistled, and the yellow cab squealed to the curb. It was time for me to catch a cab to the Columbia Club for the MacDowell Colony party.
I hugged her, holding her tightly “I love you, Belle.”
“I love you too, Joy. Be safe.”
I climbed into the dingy back seat and waved good-bye to my best friend. I didn’t know when I would see her again, but even her words would not keep me with Bill or in New York for very much longer.