Over weeks, we braided our themes and stories together into this novel—the new myth set in Glome, a fictional Greek town: two sisters, princesses—one beautiful, one ugly. Orual loved her younger sister with a destructive possession and narrated her case to the gods—how she’d only meant to protect and love her sister even as she caused her to lose true love by forcing her to face “reality.” Meanwhile, even as Orual eventually became Queen of Glome, she loved a man she could never have: her loyal advisor Bardia. Although Orual eventually came to self-knowledge, self-love, love for the gods, and reunion with Psyche, much destruction had been wrought along the way.
I saw both Jack and myself in the pages we forged together, but in Orual’s obsessive and possessive love for Psyche I caught more than a glimpse of myself. God, I asked, how much of Jack’s creation was of me?
Finally one night, after the second whiskey, I asked. “Jack, do you think I’m ugly?”
He jolted as if I’d prodded him with electricity. “Whyever would you ask that?”
“You put my words into Orual’s mouth many times. And I’m not a blonde,” I said, a meager attempt at a joke.
“I do not think you’re ugly. You are beautiful. It’s not your countenance in Orual, Joy. And many times I feel I am Orual also.”
“And are you the Fox? Orual loves him, and he’s devoted to her but doesn’t love her the same. Are you . . .”
Jack’s kind expression didn’t change as he spoke. “How can I know what parts of us are threaded through this story? But one thing I do know—this story would not be what it is without you. Its depth and intimacy would not exist without who we are together.”
Much of our friendship and our lives found its way into that novel: my Fairyland and his North, his Island. Our views on longing and need and joy. Our accusations and questions for the gods. Our shared history of mythology and its ability to offer meaning. And for me, the problem of obsessive love. There was a tangled twine ball of us in that myth, unraveling day by day with our discussions and our readings, our bantering and our debate. There were moments in the writing of that novel that we merged into one without ever touching.
We were consumed and distracted by Orual and Psyche—we talked about them even as we picked apples or walked to Oxford or sat in the garden. Over dinner or beers it was Orual, the Fox, and Psyche who joined us.
“All I’ve ever read or done has led to this novel,” he told me as we walked through Oxford, untangling how Psyche would be removed from the tree in the forest where she’d been bound and sacrificed.
“I feel the same, Jack. Although I’m not writing it, I feel the same.” I paused and touched his arm. “As it’s always been—we use stories to make sense of the world.”
He’d stopped right there in front of the bookshop and faced me with his lopsided fisherman’s hat and his red cheeks, with his great admiration. The cobblestone streets were wet with rain, small puddles rippling in the dip of the road. A priest on a bicycle rode by, ringing the small bell on his handlebars and waving to us both. Jack paid him no mind but spoke right to me.
“You are writing it, Joy. I’m putting the words on paper and so are you with every word you speak, every question you ask, every thought you offer, every page you edit. We are writing it.”
“What will we call it?” I asked. “Still Bareface?”
“Yes.” He was resolute in this title and smiled when he said it. “Because eventually for love to be true, we must show our real faces.”
“What is it in the end, what is it that must happen at the end of the story? The shattering of Orual’s self-centeredness?”
Jack nodded. “The journey from possessive love to wholesome love.” Jack looked off as if not speaking to me at all, as if Orual herself stood behind us and slowly lifted her veil. “From the profane to the divine: union with the divine through love.”
“Yes,” I said in agreement that went far beyond the words he spoke.
The book eventually came to be titled Till We Have Faces. It braided our spiritual journeys together like two stories from the same Father, parallel and mystical, infused with nature’s divine ability to change us.
Through the process of its writing we had become as bound together as any man and woman.
Only one step remained, and it was not my step to take.
CHAPTER 44
Love me or love me not, the leaves will fall
And we shall walk them down. I have my joys