How, I wondered, does one make oneself not fall in love? Not destroy the most sublime philia?
As usual, I didn’t have the answer.
CHAPTER 38
Do not be angry that I am a woman
And so have lips that want your kiss
“SONNET XXXIX,” JOY DAVIDMAN
August 1954
“Warnie had the most awful binge.” Jack said this with the twist of pain in his voice. “He’s off to treatment, and that means I’m with you and the boys for a couple weeks. You must tolerate my company also.”
Jack and I sat together in the Bird and Baby, which was as stifling inside as the August weather that simmered across Oxford. It was finally summer break and we had come—my sons and I—to spend a month at the Kilns. A month!
“Tolerate?” I laughed and shook my head at him. “That’s not the right word. I’m sorry about Warnie. You know how much I love him, and I wish I could help. But by golly, I’m happy you’ll be here with us.”
He lifted his beer in salute.
“Is it over?” Jack asked quietly. “Are you legally divorced?”
“Yes indeed. I’m single.” I allowed the simple statement to shimmer between us, watched carefully for the change those two words might bring, but found only the same kind smile. “And do you know what Bill did? He married the very next day. He married Renee the very next day.” I shook my head. “But how could I have expected any different? Where we start is where we end, or so it seems.”
“How do you mean?”
I cringed and, feeling peevish, told him what I never had. “Bill was married before me. He didn’t have children, and it wasn’t very real as far as marriages go—that’s what he told me at the time. He married me only days after that divorce was final. How could a tiger ever change his stripes?”
“Well, it’s over,” Jack said and lifted his house cider, as yet untouched. “Here’s to the forgiveness of sins.”
I smiled and lifted my own cider. “And here’s to Bill and all the pleasure he may find.”
We clinked glasses, and our eyes met and held. He hadn’t believed a word written in that lie-soaked decree. He knew my heart and my mind; he understood the harsh and the cruel, the soft and the vulnerable.
“How is Warnie doing at the hospital?” I asked when we set down our glasses.
“Not very well, Joy. I’m worried near to death. This binge was the worst yet. The doctors believed he might not make it, but he’s recovering.”
“I know the pain of watching someone you love destroy himself with drink. It seems there must be something to do, but then they off and binge again, breaking your heart. Breaking their own hearts. You know I’ve been through this, Jack. If you’d like I can tell you some of the AA steps and theories. They really do work. They are very spiritual, all about surrender to God.”
“Thank you.” Jack lifted his own glass of cider. “Of course drinking itself isn’t a sin. It’s the too much of it all. It’s temperance. Going the right length and then not any further than that.”
“Mere Christianity,” I said. “You said that in there.”
“Did I? What a fool, repeating himself in a bar. Ignore me. I’m knackered.”
We talked a bit more of Warnie and how to help him. I suggested bitter ginger at the end of the night, which tasted like liquor but was not.
“However would I do without you now?” he asked me as finally we rose to set off and walk Shotover with Davy and Douglas as promised.
“I hope you’ll never know.” I jostled him as we walked out the door.
Shotover Hill had become as familiar to me as the curve of Jack’s neck. My first long walk with him had been on this hill, the thick, tufted grass like patches on a bald man’s head, punctuating the pathway. For each season I’d hiked it since, the flowers and trees had shown new faces. In fall, the leaves dropping one by one until the trees bared their skeletons, the acorns plopping to the ground like footsteps. In winter I’d crunched over frosted grass, seen the white landscape of barren trees crystalized with ice. A season later I’d swatted at nettles and memorized the woodland flowers, multihued, their faces lifted to the spring sun. Now summer, the heat and breeze mixing in an intoxicating scent of new grass and damp earth.
The white-balled flowers of the marsh valerian lined the pathway, wandering up the hill to join the scaly fern in nature-marriage. The orpine flower, its burgundy flower head, stood proud and tall. The bark of the gnarled sycamore enchanted, and the rain of white and pink petals from the cherry tree covered the ground.