I fetched my bags and straightened my shoulders. “Let’s be on with it then.”
Phyl and I sat side by side as the train lurched from the platform. She read a novel and I watched her face, her long eyelashes sweeping down and up, and a horrid memory flooded me: a terrible fight with Bill in December of last year. He’d taken Phyl in our old Chrysler to Pier 88 in Manhattan for her return trip to London. I’d been sick, miserable, cooped up, and suspicious after the previous nights of admitted infidelity, and I hadn’t been rational. When Bill called to say the car was sputtering with trouble and he would spend the night at Hotel Woodstock, I accused him of seducing Phyl. I screamed and cursed and embarrassed myself. He in turn raged at me. I didn’t remember the words that were said, but the gaping soul-wounds had cut deep and remained.
Phyl had proved herself to be the most loyal and uplifting friend; I wondered how I ever could have thought she’d take any such nonsense from my husband. And Bill had sworn his infidelity was over . . . but for a wife it is never over. Ever.
“Phyl,” I said as the train exhaled coal-tinged smoke and heaved toward Oxford.
“Hmmm?”
“I’m nervous. Isn’t that odd? Why should I be nervous about meeting a man and his friend at a restaurant? I’ve met a hundred writers in my day, and most of them not worthy of the awe I gave them.”
“Because you respect this writer so much. I think you’re quite afraid to meet the real man. Maybe he’s not everything you’ve imagined him to be.”
I laughed, too loudly as always, and two women a row ahead turned with disapproving looks. I offered them my biggest smile. Nothing like a little kindness to kill. “Oh, cookie,” I said to Phyl. “Could you be any more blunt?”
“We might as well face the truth, my dear.” She stretched and closed The Great Divorce, which she’d wanted to skim before meeting Jack. “There’s no real use in pretending you don’t care. Of course the butterflies must be flapping all over your insides.”
I thought for a moment as the landscape flickered by, green and gold. “It’s not losing the respect for him that makes me nervous; there’s no chance of that. It’s the regard he might or might not have for me. You know, my dear, Jews aren’t taken too kindly round these parts. Even ex-Jews. What if this ex-atheist, ex-Communist, Bronx-born woman appalls him?”
“Maybe appalled, but more likely a little enthralled. Like a good book unfolding, you’ll just have to wait and see.”
The checkered fabric-covered seats itched to the touch but I sank back anyway, lifting the shade higher on the window. Green fields passed by, wetlands and rivers, marinas and creeks. It seemed as if we crossed many rivers, although it might have been only one, snaking its way between London and Oxford. High on a knoll we blew by a small town where the chimney pots below looked like headstones. Then we passed through the coal-tinged Industrial Slough and onward through Reading. The rocking sensation of the train left me sleepy as I imagined a few opening lines for the moment I saw Jack.
It’s an honor and a privilege.
You’ve changed my life.
I’ve adored you since halfway through The Great Divorce when you stated, “No people find themselves more absurd than lovers.”
Hi, I’m Joy, and I’m a nervous mess.
But in the end I said none of those things.
CHAPTER 10
I’ll measure my affection by the drachm
“SONNET I,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The brick of the Eastgate Hotel, a grand dame of a structure in Oxford, was the tawny color of my cat’s fur. I was, even after a month, still struck by the solid antiquity in England—the fashion in which structures were built as if they’d known their ethereal beauty would be needed for thousands of years. The windows were inset like sleepy-hooded eyes. The four steps to the front door were wide and curved. To our right was what one might believe was a medieval fortress but was really one of Oxford University’s thirty-four colleges, Merton College, with the long stone wall that followed the curved street as closely as a lover.
“Phyl,” I said, and we paused at the dark wood doorway, “although I miss my collection of poogles, I’m very happy to be here.”
She gave me a calm and knowing look, her blue eyes squinting against the sunlight. “This will be interesting, my friend. Enjoy it.”
I nodded at her and placed my hand over my stomach to settle the nerves. Dabbed my lipstick with a tissue. For years I’d hoped to meet Jack, yet doubted I would, and now I stood on an Oxford sidewalk outside the place he met friends for lunch.