“‘Create in me a new heart.’” Jack stated the prayer with reverence. He took another step closer to me. “What do you say to your husband during these troubled times? When he comes home from another woman or erupts?”
“He can’t hear me, Jack. When I get upset, he asks if I’m on my period or if my shoes hurt. And then he launches into his ten million excuses.”
“Joy, I’m sorry for your troubles.”
“There’s this gap, Jack. This opening between the story it is and the story I had wanted it to be—that’s where the pain is, and that’s where God came in and where I now hope transformation can happen.”
“For too long we avoided that gap, didn’t we?”
“Yes. I turned away from it with every preoccupation known to man. But no more.” My heart opened. When had there ever been anyone I could talk to like this?
Jack donned his tattered gray fisherman’s hat, retrieved his coat from the rack by the door, and placed his hand on the doorknob. “Whenever you’d like to talk about it, you know our friendship is big enough for even the sorrow.” He opened his office door to the stone hallway.
“Thank you.” I stepped into the hall. “Please give Warnie my regards.”
I walked away, and as with each time I departed, I felt I left a piece of my heart in his hands.
Back at Victoria’s, I tweaked the poem “Ballade of Blistered Feet” （merely a way to relive that glorious day on Shotover）， organized a folder of King Charles research, wrote another letter to Bill, wondering why he hadn’t written back in so long, and drank a long hot cup of tea. My mind circled back again and again to Jack’s rooms, to his bright eyes and easy manner, to his laugh and his wit, to each subtle compliment or connection. I lifted the book he’d given me and ran my finger over the inscription of my name in his handwriting.
Eventually I lifted my own pen. Some had journals; I had sonnets.
I’d been writing them for years—it wasn’t a new way to release my pent-up emotions. Through those many years the faces of “love” had changed—the sonnets weren’t meant for one man, but for the amorphous feeling of being loved and loving in return, for that moment of connection and intimacy. And yet, that night in Victoria’s guest room, the sonnets began to pulse their sentiments, like a heartbeat that had quickened, toward Jack.
Even as I wrote about the commandments, the beast in the heart is always the self and how God was a being who demanded your whole heart, I knew to protect my heart. The monster that seduced me to break the very commandments I wrote about lived and seethed inside of me. And there was no Wormwood to cast my blame upon.
“No,” I said out loud to the empty room. I would not descend into that impossible fantasy of being with Jack.
Yet reason and emotion never wedded well in me. As Blaise Pascal stated, “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.”
CHAPTER 15
Or fill your eyes and ears with any loud
Mere thanks—until I am no longer proud!
“BREAD-AND-BUTTER SESTINA,” JOY DAVIDMAN
The sights and sounds of Oxford during those ten days soaked into my skin and settled into my bones. I walked for miles, ignoring the dull ache in my hips. I crafted sonnets about longing, but for what? I wasn’t sure, but understood it had something to do with Oxford and how I felt a kind of freedom I’d never felt before.
I wrote letters to Bill and Renee and the littlest poogles while ignoring the nagging sensation that something was amiss at home. It was probably irritation that I was still gone, too many kids underfoot with too little money in hand. I would make up for it when I returned home.
That last afternoon I sat in Jack’s rooms after he’d given me some pages of O.H.E.L. to read on my journey to Worcester. I’d handed him the rough draft of the “Day of Rejoicing,” and there we sat, each other’s work in hand. I eased slowly to stand and walked to the window, looked west to the deer park where elm trees shed the very last of their gold. The croquet lawn was empty of players that day, but I could imagine how it looked when the weather warmed and it was full. “Let’s walk along the river?” I asked.
“Yes.” He stood quickly and his pipe fell to the ground, ash scattering across the carpet. He brushed his trousers but didn’t even register the mess on the floor, which only made me smile.
I tucked the pages he’d given me into my bag while he plucked his hat from a hook on the wall and settled it on his head. It landed crooked, and all the more charming. With a swoop of his hand he retrieved the smooth walking stick that had been leaning against the wall and then locked his office door behind us. “Shall we?”