A waitress with bright-red hair arrived, and after we’d both ordered the salmon, Belle rubbed her hands together and then folded them as if in prayer. “I want you to find peace without running away.”
Fortitude rose in me. I glanced around the dining room and lowered my voice. “I’m not running away. I’m running toward. It’s a quiet and intellectually stimulating life I want to make there. I know I sound irrational. But there is a life to be had in England, in London, and it’s a life I want.”
“Your sons?”
“They will be better off for it.” I gave it one more try. “Belle, for some reason I’ve believed that I needed to withstand the infidelities and furies, that it was my job and duty as a wife. But that’s not true. I have my faults, no doubt about that. But my faults do not mean I must stay and endure his.”
“That’s as solid a truth as I’ve ever heard you utter.” Belle’s curls bounced with her acquiescence.
I steered away from the subject and turned my attention to her life. “How is your writing?” I asked. “And how are Jonathan and Thea?”
“Oh, like yours, the kids take buckets of my time. But I’m still writing articles for Esquire and working on a novel about an English teacher in New York City. I’ve titled it Up the Down Staircase. Sounds exciting, right?” She rolled those beautiful eyes and laughed that beautiful laugh. “It will probably never see the light outside my writing room.”
“Anything you write is enthralling. I still remember the pangs of envy when I read your poems in our dorm room.”
She smiled and reached across the table for my hand. “I don’t believe I’m the one who won the Yale Younger Poets prize or had my first book of poetry published at the age of twenty-two. I believe your envy is misplaced, my friend.”
“None of that seems to matter now,” I said. “Those things I thought would bring eternal happiness are dirt in my mouth.” I looked away to see the waitress approaching and then placed my attention back to Belle. “How is your marriage, Belle? Tell me it is wonderful, so I can believe in real love.”
“It is a good marriage.” She picked up her fork and we began our lunch, filling the remainder of it with literary gossip, which she still heard in New York. The Crucible by Arthur Miller had opened on Broadway; Saul Bellow and Ray Bradbury had new books coming in the next months, and they were whispered to be the best they’d written. And Belle had become enamored with Halley’s Seven Years in Tibet, reading it twice already.
When we polished off dessert—crème br?lée we split—we walked the streets of Manhattan, window shopping and pretending we could have whatever we put our gazes upon.
“I remember when I believed I’d be rich enough to buy anything I wanted,” I said as we passed Bonwit Teller. “That our literary success would bring the world to our feet.”
“Honestly, Joy, I don’t even like writing nearly as much as you do.”
I stopped and stared at her, bundling my coat closer. “I couldn’t live without it.”
“I don’t believe I could either, but I also don’t love it as you do. I live for the one moment when it works. It’s like a high I search for again and again, and rarely find.”
“Better than the kinds of highs my husband is after.”
Belle squeezed my arm. “You always cover your hurt with jokes.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s better than dragging you into the lousy gutter with me.”
On the corner of Fifty-Second and Park we sat on a bench, the icy wind whipping past us with the aroma of burned chestnuts and the cabs along Park Avenue honking incessantly.
“Has Mr. Lewis ever been in love?” Belle asked quietly, as if the question itself might hurt me.
“I don’t know.” I twisted to face her on the bench, lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the wind. “I haven’t asked. He’s never married. And I’ve read his views on sex, and they are not provincial. He’s not a man who has been celibate all his life.” I suppressed a smile. “And he hasn’t always been a Christian, a man so devoted to his virtues.”
“So why has he never married?”
In quiet tones I told Belle all about Mrs. Moore and Maureen.
“Do you think . . . ?” she asked, her question trailing off.
“I don’t know. I do wonder.” I sat back and tried not to imagine what Belle was intuiting. “Remember all those years we were obsessed with Freud’s work and believed everything had to do with either our mother, our father, or sex?”