Open your door, lest the belated heart
Die in the bitter night; open your door
“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN
“There might not have ever been a more sublime October,” Jack said quietly. The lit end of his cigarette glowed, its own full red moon, and then fell in sparks to the ground. “The mornings cool, the days warm, and the nights like this. I can’t remember another as beautiful.”
The October moon was full, hovering over us in the back garden of my Old High Street house. We’d grown silent after hours of talking as we sat on the same bench, our knees touching.
I nodded, and although he wasn’t looking at me I knew he felt the agreement. Kay and Austin Farrar and others had just left a little dinner party I’d given. Kay had whispered to me in the kitchen, “Austin and I agree that Jack seems more genteel in the past months. He’s quieter and more relaxed. It’s as if his sensitive nature has at last come through. And we all know it’s because of you.”
For dinner that night I’d cooked mutton the best I knew how, served mashed potatoes American style, and green beans I’d canned from last summer at the Kilns. I made the apple pie from my backyard apples and could almost taste summers in Vermont with the Walshes. The wine and conversation had flowed as smooth as could be.
It was eleven p.m. by then, and Jack was the last to leave. He was always the last to leave. Every day he walked to my house from the Kilns, and we worked or wandered into town.
“Today I bought fireworks for Guy Fawkes Day,” I said. “So don’t hoard any more or the boys will have enough to destroy your whole back forest.”
“I’ll tell Warnie,” he said. “He’s the one who stockpiles them. Oh! Has he told you? He’s reading your husband’s book, Monster Midway.”
I laughed and rested my head on his shoulder. “I believe you’re my husband.”
“Indeed I am.” Jack patted my knee.
I paused before delving into the subject I had held tight until all the guests had gone. “Jack, these days and nights have been some of the most treasured of my life. The dinner parties and friends. The conversation. I almost feel like I’ve made a life here.”
He turned to me, his cigarette almost to the filter. He dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath his shoe. “But?”
“There’s talk about me. About us.”
“What kind of talk?”
“Can’t you imagine, Jack? The Oxford don who comes to the divorced woman’s house until late at night, every night. People gossip.” I paused. “Kay told me that Tollers is afraid of what Cambridge will think when they get wind of it. We appear inappropriate.”
He attempted a laugh but it didn’t work, so instead he quoted another sonnet. “‘Would smile contempt, and in the brazen noon.’” He paused after the line when I didn’t laugh or reply. “Since when have you started to care about what others think is inappropriate?”
“I care, Jack.”
“Would you like me to not come round as much? Because I couldn’t bear that.”
I’d worn my hair down for the night, and it fell over my shoulders. The wind fluttered through and whipped it into my eyes as I spoke. “No, but I’d like to stop being your little secret. We’re married. I know not in the eyes of God. I know not in the eyes of eros, you’d say.” I stood then and looked down to him. “But we are married. And no one knows.” Tears rose in my eyes, ones I’d held back for so long. “I feel as if you’re ashamed of me. That you like to keep our friendship in this little cardboard box where only we and a few others have access.”
“Joy, I have brought you into my life fully. I have introduced you to Oxford and Cambridge. I’m with you every day.” His face fell with sorrow. “There isn’t an area I have hidden from you.”
“Do I embarrass you?”
Jack stood to face me. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“I no longer know what to believe about us.”
“If you don’t want me to stop coming round, what is it? Would you like me to tell everyone that we had a civil marriage so you could stay in the country? I told my very dearest friend Arthur in Ireland.”
I held my hand to stop his defenses. “I just ruined the night,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, and probably not making much sense. My old insecurities are rising. But keeping our marriage a secret feels clandestine and dirty. And dismissive.”
“Joy.” He took two steps closer to me, the aroma of the common room at the Kilns, cigarette smoke, and autumn air of crushed leaves engulfing me. He took my hands and pressed them to his chest as if it were something he’d done a million times before, not this, the first time.
“Would you and the boys like to move into the Kilns then?”
“Pardon?”
Had I heard him right? Had he just asked us to move in? Not a vacation, not a holiday or a feast, but to move. Were the wine and moonlight playing tricks? Were we another Janie and Maureen?
“I’ve been puzzling it out, and you’ve made me see that it’s time to stop merely thinking about it. It’s time to do it. We will make a life there, Joy. There won’t be any more gossip, and I’ll tell everyone that we’ve married.”
“But not in the eyes of the church, and not in flesh?”
“The church will never allow it.”
“King Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, the love of his life. But that doesn’t happen much—a love grand enough to defy the strict rules that make little sense.” I paused. “Here I am, a terrible divorcée just as she was.”
“No.” The pain in his voice made me look up, and I watched his face crumple. He swiftly brought my hands to his lips.
I closed my eyes and let the sensation wash over me, the simple bliss of his lips on my skin, my heart racing for more, the autumn air ruffling his hair in the moment that he asked me to move in with him. He released my hands, and I opened my eyes.
His hand rose, and at first I couldn’t imagine why, an exotic choreography in the dance of our relationship. Then his hand was behind my head, fingers wound into my thick hair, and with a slight tug he pulled me forward.
He kissed me.
Gently.
Finally.
My lips found his as easily as the sea finds the shore, as sun reaches earth. Our mouths soft, yet eager within the gentleness. My hands were behind his neck on the soft space beneath his hairline where I had often gazed as he walked ahead of me. I touched his skin. Against me, I felt the outline of a body I’d already memorized. All inside me loosened and untied, a surrender to anything he would want of me.
We lingered there for a few moments under that Selena-full moon.
Some things are more intense in the imagination, and some more powerful in reality. His touch and his lips—I could not have imagined the ecstasy of both. Nothing had ever been as worth waiting for as this.
He withdrew and rested his forehead on mine before kissing the soft spot below my ear. I shivered with the want of more. When he stood apart from me, holding both my hands, he smiled, but it wasn’t a smile I’d seen before. This one, curled at the corners with his eyes on mine, was just ours. Only ours.
“Good night, my dear Joy.” And with that, he was gone.
I felt almost as I had the night when God entered the cracked places of my ego in my sons’ nursery—as if my boundaries had been dissolved, as if all that I was would become one with all that was another. Just as that night, it didn’t fix anything, but it was the beginning of something that could change me, change us.
Pure love, it seemed, was not limited to a singular experience.
For two weeks I thought of little else but his kiss and his touch, yet I attempted to work. My mind spun back to that moment his lips found mine, and I’d discover myself standing stock-still wherever I was, my hand over my heart and my eyes closed. This was a state of longing and expectancy where time opened.
The days were blissful except for the aches in my legs and hips, but even this was colored by growing desire. When Jack broke free of Cambridge for short times, there had been more kisses: soft ones of promise without spoken words. He held my hand on the long walks through Shotover Hill. He slowly drew nearer, closer, as if he needed to court me when already I loved him.
When he was in Oxford, he stayed late with me as he always had, but now rested comfortably against me when we were alone. I hadn’t pushed—waiting so patiently to experience who we would become when we lived together.
Would I move into his room? Did he still want us to hold fast to abstinence? My body would not allow me to think of much other than Jack and his touch.