“That love,” he said and bent down to look me in the eye, “will be what destroys. When love becomes a god it becomes a devil. And the ugly older sister will turn her love for Psyche into a god.”
“Jack, go write. And don’t stop.”
“Thank you, Joy.” He blurted these words, and in a great burst of happiness, kissed me on top of my head. He hurried away to begin writing that very night.
I touched the top of my warm hair, his kiss lingering there as his words echoed across my consciousness: when love becomes a god it becomes a devil.
By the middle of the next day Jack brought me chapter one, written in his tight scroll of liquid ink.
I sat at the desk in my bedroom where I’d organized the multiple projects I was immersed in. He hadn’t entered that room while I stayed there, always offering me privacy. But that day he burst in as I was muddling through Warnie’s history book, indexing it with a growing headache.
“Joy!”
I startled and stood. His mere presence in my room brought a warm flush to my thighs and belly.
“What?” I laughed and was conscious of how I appeared: I wore an A-line dress I’d bought in London, sleeveless and dainty. I hadn’t yet brushed my hair, and it fell over my shoulders. I was barefoot.
But he noticed none of this. He held out his hand with a sheaf of handwritten pages. “Will you type these? And then tell me—am I on to something at all?”
He sat on the edge of my bed, unaware of anything but our creative collaboration. I returned my attention to the pages. “Do you want me to type now?”
“First . . . read.”
I sat and began to do just that. Orual, the name he had given Psyche’s ugly older sister, was speaking from her old age, from the knowledge of her imminent demise. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods.
From there the prose and the story unfolded, confounding and enchanting as an original myth, as if he’d spent months on the pages.
Orual was the eldest daughter of the King of Glome. She told of their castle where she and her sister Psyche; their nurse; and the Fox, their beloved tutor, resided. But mostly Orual told the reader of Psyche and her beauty and Orual’s great love for her—blinding love. Orual’s ugliness was described in detail, and the reader discovered that in her old age she wore a veil to cover her face. When I reached the end of the chapter I looked to Jack, who had not looked away.
“I’m envious that you can write this in a night and half a day, and it can hold an entire story in its hints and foreshadowing.”
“I’m not here for praise, Joy. Tell me where it lacks.”
“Let me type it and write notes, not off the cuff.”
“A little off the cuff?” He smiled; he already knew, as I did, that I would never turn away from that smile.
“Okay, on first blush. I need to understand why the Fox loves poetry so much, and I want a hint of who he will become to Orual. He seems integral and interesting. He needs to hint at what is to come.”
“Yes.” Jack took the papers from me and a pencil from my desk, making a mark in scribbled handwriting.
I looked at him. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”
“That it’s a terrible idea to head down this road, to write this book?”
“No. Not that at all. I want to tell you about the day I received your first letter. A winter afternoon in January of 1950. Five years ago now.”
He nodded at me and set the papers to the side, crossed his legs, and leaned on his elbow. “Yes?”
“You’d asked for my history, and I didn’t know where to begin. I spent hours thinking about it and realized that my life had been made of masks, many of them. And I decided that afternoon that I wouldn’t wear any of them with you. I decided that I would show you me. That I would be barefaced. And here—in your story—you have Orual covering her face with a veil.”
He stared at me for so long that I almost wished for Orual’s veil. Then he spoke. “Never hide your face from me. It is precious and dear.”
I smiled. “Sometimes I wish I could, but I cannot.”
“Bareface,” he said. “That should be the title.” He stood and held the pages. “I haven’t been this excited about my work in a very long time. How can I thank you?”
“Get out of here and finish it.”
Or take me in your arms and set me down on that bed and make love to me.
The forbidden thought flew by unspoken. Jack rushed out of the room to return to his true love: the page.