Joy:
Dear Jack,
It’s misery. Renee and Bill sneak off to be together, while Bill tries to convince me to stay and raise a family, but also allow them to be happy in their love. How disgusting can one man be? I must get divorced. Can it be God’s will? I don’t understand how it could be his will that I stay, but . . . And the children. I don’t know how to find what God wants of me—how does one ever truly know?
Jack:
Tearing apart what was meant to be “one” is brutal but sometimes required. I am with you, Joy, and hold you in prayer all the time. Here, Warnie is on the drink again and I believe he must go for treatment. It breaks my heart. Look at us, my friend, both devastated by the drinking of those we love.
Oh, dear Joy, how do we know what God wants of us? Imagine you are a house and he has come to rebuild you—yes, some things must be torn down and cast away. Faith, patience, and bravery, dear—more than you dreamed possible.
When an invitation for a MacDowell Colony reunion in New York City arrived in January, I clutched at it like food for the starving. The first thing I did was ring Belle.
“I’m coming to see you,” I said. As my best friend, roommate at Hunter, and confidante through the years, Belle, so beautiful then, had been kind to her New York roommate with the sickly pale complexion, who walked around in a red hat and tried to reinvent herself all those years ago. I longed to see her.
When the train arrived, Belle waited for me inside the arched majesty of Grand Central Station. The painted constellations swayed above her wavy black hair, which was pinned in lovely victory rolls I could never achieve. Her smile was wide on her broad face. When I’d first met her in college, her beauty had caused me to withdraw. Comparison was the devil of self-esteem. But her friendship had thawed me. Now she stood there in her prim suit, buttoned tight around her tiny waist. As much as her high heels would allow she ran toward me and then threw her arms around me.
I held to her longer than she might have expected before stepping back to take her in after all this time. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve only been a train ride away,” she said with her Russian lilt, a trace that remained even though she’d moved to the United States as a child. While my parents had supported me in college, she’d sold books from a basement book division. She knew me during the heady days of sexual exploration and adolescent narcissism. She knew me when I’d married and had children. She knew me when I’d found God, or more aptly, he’d found me. There wasn’t much she didn’t know, and to have someone like her still in what felt like a tilted world was ballast holding me steady.
Together we’d once scribbled our notes and poems, poured our hearts out onto paper. She’d published her first poem about the same time that I had—hers had recounted her hungry, atrocious childhood in Russia. When my novel, Anya, was released, I’d wanted her approval more than almost any other. Later both Belle and I graduated with master’s degrees from Columbia, believing that our life would overflow with literary honors, parties, and publications.
There in Grand Central we linked arms and headed into the city for lunch, chattering without pause until we sat down at a prim white tablecloth in a room full of chic businessmen drinking martinis and eyeing Belle. I ordered a sherry, and the waiter looked at me with raised eyebrows. Belle ordered a glass of white wine.
“Sherry?” She laughed. “Are you a true anglophile now?”
“I believe I am,” I said. “Which doesn’t quite match with being a housewife in upstate New York.”
“You’ve never been a housewife,” she said with deep laughter. “Even when you were, you weren’t.”
“Sadly, you’re probably right,” I said with a small sigh.
“Oh, Joy, tell me how you’ve been since you returned home. I loved your letters from England. They were full of happiness, adventure, and interesting people.”
“I’m going back,” I said.
“What?” She slipped off her coat to reveal a beautiful V-neck black wool dress hugging her breasts. Men passing by our table glanced and then glanced again.
The waiter arrived with my sherry in a beautiful cut-glass goblet, and I sniffed it with my eyes closed before taking a long gulp. The aroma took me to the Eastgate for my first meeting with Jack, to Magdalen’s dining hall, to the Kilns common room and the sweet, soft feel of autumn in the golden air.
I opened my eyes and looked right at Belle. “I didn’t know it until I just said it out loud. But it’s true. I am going back. And I’m taking my boys with me and starting a new life.”