The shadow of pain is lifted from my eyes
And I see how gold you are
“SONNET XLII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
New Year’s Eve, 1954
The parties had begun all around Cambridge that New Year’s Eve. Men and women walked the streets in their finery, the holiday lights strung twinkling on the lampposts.
The year had ended with Britain’s removal of military force from the Suez Canal, Winston Churchill’s eightieth birthday, and an air disaster of a Boeing 377 crashing at Prestwick airport. Neither Jack nor I had ever boarded an airplane, and now together we vowed we never would. “What a terrible way to die,” we’d said in unison. In America, Ellis Island’s immigration port had closed, and the Red Scare and the Cold War continued. But we were there, in Jack’s new Cambridge rooms, surrounded by warmth and safety as the crazy world spun.
“Cambridge is so quaint,” I said as we stood surrounded by boxes.
“It is.” He stared absently at the mess I was there to help him unpack and organize. He didn’t like chaos, or any disarray other than that of his own making. “It’s a perfect tiny college, so unlike the cynical Magdalen.” He glanced at me. “But that does not make it feel anything like home.”
“It will.”
“Oh, Joy, what have I done? I had a job I loved, and perfectly nice rooms, and now I’ve gone and upended it all.” He frowned when he spoke, attempting levity, but I heard the distress creeping below like the ivy on the stone walls outside.
“Oh, Jack, I do believe you’ve ruined your life. Why would you do this to yourself? Three times the pay for half the work. And you can return to Oxford every Friday to Tuesday.” I shook my head. “Terrible. Just hideously awful.”
His laughter filled the room, echoing off the walls. He sat on a box labeled Books. “What an exhausting and exciting way to end 1954,” he said. “Starting here as the new year begins.”
I sat on a box across from him. “Let’s get some of these unpacked so we can find out what we need to buy for your rooms.”
He shook his head. “Do you realize they give only one glass of port at dinner? One!”
“What did they give at Oxford?”
“Three,” he said.
“Oh, the misery!”
He loosened his tie before a quick glance my way. “Wait, have I said thank you for coming to my inaugural address, Joy? Or have I been a delinquent and unworthy friend by not saying it out loud?”
“Even though I wasn’t invited?”
He blushed, his cheeks dark red.
“Oh, I’m joking, Jack. Don’t look piqued. It was stupendous. You should have heard everyone talking about it as they came out of the room. I guarantee they’ll be forever quoting the line about medievalists—‘Use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.’ The room was packed with so many robes and hats I could barely see you there, but I did listen.”
“I knew you were there, and it was calming. I was quite nervous. My first lecture, and there was all that recording equipment. I felt like I was inside a glass bell trying to make an impression that would last for all my tenure.”
“It’s a lecture they will talk about for years. But I must disagree with you on one point.”
His eyebrows rose. “Do tell me.”
“You made the case that the break between cultures came with the fall of Rome or the Renaissance, but I believe it was with the rise of science as logic.”
His mouth broke into a great smile. “Oh, you do?”
“I do. Are you sure you didn’t sacrifice accuracy in the name of entertainment?”
“No, I’m not sure at all. Now must I rethink my entire inaugural lecture?” He smacked his hand on his knee.
“You didn’t agree with everything I wrote in Smoke,” I said to soften the blow—if it was a blow at all.
“We mustn’t always agree,” he said. “Sometimes that is the intrigue.” He stood and ripped open a box and took out a pile of books.
I did the same, both of us in a jolly mood. The empty dark wooden bookshelves began to fill as we unpacked. From a dusty pile, I held up a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’” I said with great dramatic flair.
He bellowed that laugh and then furrowed his brow above his glasses. “‘The devil is not as black as he is painted.’”
We were off and running: as we unpacked, we chose a book and then quoted a line from memory. If we doubted the truth of the line, we’d check inside. When I pulled Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps from the box, the very book my husband had written a foreword for, I flubbed the line “Nothing was certain, but everything was safe—that was part of the mystery of love.” Instead I stated, “‘Everything is safe, that’s the mystery of love.’”
“Aha!” Jack bellowed. “You aren’t perfect.”
“Perfect? Far, far from it, Jack. As you well know.”
Yet he didn’t flub one line. Not one. Soon we were competing to quote the most absurd or dirty line, one that might make the other blush. In any other small room with any other man, this might be considered flirting, but not with Jack—it was only great fun. Wasn’t it?
I plucked a book from a box and dusted off the cover. It was Phantastes. I smiled and held it up to Jack without a word—we knew what it meant to both of us.
“‘Past tears are present strength,’” Jack quoted and reached for the book.
“Oh yes! That’s so true.” I pressed the volume to my chest.
He reached over and eased it from my hands, held it up. “This book isn’t so much a book as a thunderclap.” He ran his hand over the cover. “Do you think anyone else could play this little game with us? Anyone who has the same photographic memory?”
“If there is such a someone, I don’t know them.”
He shook his head. “And neither do I.”
This game, which he won, though I gave him a great run for his money, went on well into the night.
At last I stood and ran my hands along the spines of newly shelved books. “Jack, it’s almost midnight. Let’s be done with this for the night.”
“Almost midnight?”
“Old lang syne,” I said and brushed off my shirt, which was covered in dirt and book dust. I was bone tired and yet unwilling to forfeit five minutes with him if he still wanted me near.
New Year’s Eve—would this be the moment when he would close that space between us with a kiss? Would he see and feel what flickered in his new rooms? As the tower outside tolled midnight, the bells echoing and clanging, he collapsed onto his desk chair, then swiveled toward me. “A new year. I can’t think of a better way to begin it than with you.”
“Yes,” I replied. “A very brand-new year.”
Back in London, January’s gift was deep snows with fat snowflakes and bitter cold, which brought me the flu. Set in bed for a week, I had much to think about with my new Cinderella book. Warnie had sent valuable books and research. Although I couldn’t get my brain to work well enough to write, I could make it read.
A deep and broken part of me wanted to give up on the writing. Smoke’s low sales in America seemed the last disappointment I could tolerate. Good reviews and all that, but otherwise a loss. Soon it would release in England and I waited, hoping that Jack’s preface and large name on the cover would help. Money was an ever-present worry.
Jack settled easily into Cambridge, and we both wondered aloud how he ever could have thought of turning it down in the first place, much less twice. We spent as much time together as we could—whether I was editing his book or helping him choose a hearthrug for his room. I hand-delivered pages with the excuse that he needed them straightaway, but really just to be near him. And he too stopped in London for no other reason but to linger at my side. He met more of my friends and even accompanied me to the Globe Tavern to meet the sci-fi boys, where he was both revered and stared at with curiosity.
Although I had a busy social life and was beginning to find my place in the London crowd, I missed Jack when he was gone; I was at peace when he was near. What category of his four loves could possibly contain this definition?
The evening was cold when he and I stood in my backyard, bundled in our coats and scarves as he smoked a cigarette and talked about a meeting he’d had at Cambridge. Twilight fell across his face, lighting it aflame.
I turned my palms up and let the light puddle there on my gloves as if it were resting before disappearing. “Look at that,” I said.
“Patches of Godlight.” Jack touched my gloved hand as if he too could hold the twilight.
We paused, both of us seeming to hold our breath. He wrapped his fingers through mine and drew me closer as he dropped his cigarette to the ground. We were face-to-face, only inches between us. Neither of us spoke.
I was afraid to move, to speak, to break the twilight spell that held us both in its Godlight. With his other hand he touched my cheek, the fuzziness of his glove tickling my skin. I leaned into his palm just as Sultan had once done with me, and he allowed that tender moment before dropping both his hands and taking a step back.
My breath held, and the tremor of desire flamed below my stomach. “Why do you stop yourself, Jack?” I asked, my voice deep and quiet.
“Stop myself?”
“I need to understand why you stop yourself from kissing me, just when I believe you will.”
“Oh, Joy.” He hesitated. “I don’t want to cross over to eros and destroy the love we do have. I can’t lose you or this deep, abiding friendship. And the church forbids our union. In their eyes, you’re technically still married. And I’m an old man—too old to start again or change.”
I took his hand again, pressed it to my heart. “I’ve watched what’s happening to poor Princess Margaret. I see how the Church of England views divorce; I’ve watched from afar the abdication crisis of King Edward, how his love for Wallis made him choose between the crown and love. He chose love. Sometimes that’s what happens; love is preferred, but usually not. Usually the crown or the god or the family or the duty is chosen. I understand this, of course. Lives are altered. Completely settled, lovely lives can be altered by love. And who wants change? Hardly anyone at all.” Frustration crept into my voice. “But I don’t understand why you keep the most vulnerable pieces of your heart from me. Why do you draw near and then fall back? Because I can feel your love.”
“Joy.” He exhaled my name and took a step not closer but farther away, as if I had pushed him, and maybe I had. I dropped his hand.
“I’ve spent all of my life in an attempt to find Truth and moral good, and then to live it. I can’t discard my moral habits for feelings, which are just that—feelings.”
“The virtues,” I said. He’d written about them at length, and I discerned that they were as ingrained in him as the wrinkles now radiating from the corner of his mouth and drooping eyes.
“They are my footholds for moral goodness. Morality is about choice.”
“You think God is judging you for wanting us, or because I’m divorced?”
“God doesn’t judge by internal disease but by moral choices. We must protect our hearts.”
Anger, my old and familiar companion, surged. “You’re spouting theology and empty words. I read what you wrote about sex—that it’s either in marriage or else total abstinence. But sometimes love changes things. Or love should change things.”
He reached for his pipe and then his hand dropped as if even that was too much energy to muster. “We can’t just surrender to our every desire—man must have his principles and live by them regardless. Our nature must be controlled or it can ruin our lives.”
“But how?” I sounded like Davy when he asked ten million questions as a child, never satisfied with the first or second answer.
“If I attempt virtue, it brings light to my life. If I indulge desires, I invite fog and confusion.”
“Oh, Jack, that logic takes no account for the heart. How can you tell a heart what to do? I’m incapable of such things.” I turned away from him, desire’s fire alchemizing to anger.
“I’m trying,” he said. “Because I must.”
“I think it’s time for you to leave.” I took a step toward the back door, not wanting him to see the pain quivering on my face and the frustration shaking my body. His logic would not quell or explain.
“Joy.” His voice was soft, but I didn’t turn back to him.
“Your logic,” I said as I opened the door to enter the house. “It offers no rest for the heart.”
He was instantly next to me, his hands on my shoulders to spin me around to face him. “Don’t turn from me,” he said. “I cannot bear that. If we can’t indulge in eros, surely we have all the beauty that remains in philia.” He pulled me close to wrap his arms around me. Twilight turned to night and my head rested on his shoulder and the palm of his hand was on my neck, stroking my skin with gentleness as if consoling a small child after a frightful storm.
But this wasn’t fright he was trying to subdue; this was desire. His mind might twist firm around logic, but his body divulged the truth.
It was he who let me go, and gently touched my cheek before leaving me quaking without another word.