The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  But the result of his abstraction was perfection. Gilbert’s books were more than handsome; they were noble. His energy was bountiful and steady, and he gave people the same attention to detail he gave to books. Gilbert got to know me, too. He knew when I was tired out, or when I had faded on a drawing and couldn’t see what form it was taking. He knew how to make me laugh, what sort of food I liked. He learned to have a cup of hot tea waiting for me at the end of a day, and he remembered things I told him. When we first started working, I described to him a plate that I had seen in an antique shop and that I wanted with all my heart. This was by way of illustrating a point; we were talking about impatience and the wisdom of holding off from obtainable pleasure as a test of will. The day, one year later, that Courtly Love went to press, the second cousin to the plate I wanted was presented to me by Gilbert: dark-blue Staffordshire, with flowers all around.

  In short, he was just like me. When he was not abstracted, his quarters were immaculate, and arranged for sheer domestic pleasure. He bought flowers when people came to dinner. He liked to take a long time over a meal. I in turn knew how to cheer him when he became cranky and dispirited. I knew he loved rhubarb pie, so the first of the season’s rhubarb went to him. But best of all, we were perfect workmates.

  The night we saw the finished edition of Courtly Love, we went out to dinner to celebrate and drank two bottles of champagne. Gilbert walked me home, and on the way he stopped and astonished me by taking me into his arms and kissing me. I was giddy and drunk, but not so drunk as not to know what my reactions were. He had never so much as brushed my arm with his sleeve, and here we were locked in an embrace on an empty street.

  When he released me, I said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me again?”

  “Sometimes if you work very closely with someone, you get used to working, and don’t know how to gauge what they feel,” Gilbert said.

  In my apartment, he told me what he felt, and I told him. Then we celebrated our first night together.

  The solitary mind likes to reflect on the pain of past love. If you are all alone, it gives you something to react to, a sort of exercise to keep the muscles flexed.

  I knew that Gilbert was falling in love with me. I watched it happen. And Gilbert knew that I was falling in love with him. We thought we had been fated for one another, but actually we were only getting used to good romantic luck. It is not so often that well-matched people meet. My being in love with Gilbert was accompanied by a sense of rightness I had never felt before, and we decided that we would marry within a year.

  But when I worked alone in my apartment I was consumed with a desire to see Jacob Bailey. This desire was sharp as actual pain. I wasted many sheets of stationery beginning letters to him, which I tore up. When your heart’s desire is right within your reach, what else is there to do but balk?

  I pictured my oak desk secretary next to Gilbert’s Chinese lamp, my books next to his, my clothing beside his in the closet. All my friends lived in pairs, except me. I had only fallen in love—love being what you one day wept over in private. What did you do with love that didn’t end? That ceased to be sheer romance and moved on to something more serious?

  You get used to a condition of longing. Live with it over time and it becomes part of your household—the cat you don’t take much notice of that slinks up against you at mealtime or creeps onto the foot of your bed at night. You cannot fantasize being married if you are married. Married to Gilbert, what would I long for? I would not even be able to long for him.

  Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.

  You long for someone to love. You find him. You pine for him. Suddenly, you discover you are loved in return. You marry. Before you do, you count up the days you spent in other people’s kitchens, at dinner tables, putting other people’s children to bed. You have basked in a sense of domesticity you have not created but enjoy. The Lone Pilgrim sits at the dinner parties of others, partakes, savors, and goes home in a taxi alone.

  Those days were spent in quest—the quest to settle your own life, and now the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours. Therefore, you lose your old bearings. On the one side is your happiness and on the other is your past—the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone’s hand—Gilbert Seigh’s—and strain through the darkness to see ahead.

  The Boyish Lover

  When Jane Mayer met Cordy Spaacks, she was at that stage of life in which all things look possible. She was full of energy and high spirits. The windows of her apartment faced a pretty street. She had begun to teach for the first time, and her students had liked her at once. The face that was reflected back at her from the mirror was more than confident—it was willing. She felt rather as athletes feel when they are in top form. Her life had assumed a shape she found entirely agreeable, and the circumstances she found herself in filled her with happiness. She was absolutely ripe to fall in love.

  She met Cordy at a faculty tea. This tea was held for the Humanities Department, in which Jane taught English literature. Cordy was in the Physics Department, but the Humanities tea was famous for excellent if small sandwiches, and Cordy liked a free meal when he could find one. Each Thursday he ambled over to the formal room in which the tea was held, guest of a pal in the French Department. This pal, the sort of well-meaning fool you get to play Cupid in a campus production about Saint Valentine, had met Jane, who was new to the university. He also knew that Cordy was unattached, and since Jane and Cordy struck him as two of the most attractive people he had ever seen, he felt an obligation to bring them together. He knew that Cordy had been divorced. He did not know that Cordy had spent the last four months of his unhappy four-year marriage in almost total silence or that the failure of this marriage was in large part attributable to Cordy, who had wed a slightly addled girl and then paid her back for it. This, however, is not the sort of information that generally falls into the hands of nonprofessional matchmakers, and it was with a sort of flourish that he led Cordy over to Jane.

  Jane had just come from delivering a lecture on Charlotte Bronte and she was in fine appetite. The introduction was made as she stood next to a plate of the famous sandwiches. The well-meaning pal withdrew beaming, leaving Cordy to watch Jane knock back seven of these sandwiches and wash them down with a cup of lukewarm tea.

  “Are all your appetites that voracious?” asked Cordy.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “Aren’t everyone’s?”

  Thus they announced themselves, had either bothered to notice. That small interchange might have been a pair of policy statements, and neither would have needed to say another word. Instead, Jane thought that the word Cordy brought to mind was “winsome.” He had a true grin, a slightly manic chuckle, and a very beautiful mouth. Furthermore, he was clearly smart—she could tell at once. Cordy noticed that Jane’s hair was the color of taffy, that her eyes were green, and that she was a unique combination of style and intelligence. They retired to a corner to begin a conversation during which they fluttered brilliance at one another. They agreed instantly on everything. Jane felt her best self emerge—charming, passionate, and original. Fate had handed her the p
erfect other. In Cordy’s brown eyes Jane saw the reflection of the effect she was creating. Cordy, who before his marriage had broken hearts in many of our nation’s finer institutions of higher learning, was captivated. After several days of similar meetings in other settings and one spectacular kiss, the setup for which Cordy engineered by taking the ribbon out of Jane’s hair, they were inseparable. Night after night you might see them in the library, their chairs close together. Under the table, if you were on your hands and knees, you could see Jane’s shoeless foot resting on top of Cordy’s sock.

  In the fine tradition of romantic beginnings Cordy and Jane exchanged edited versions of their life histories. Jane learned that Cordy was rich. His name was Arthur Corthauld Spaacks. Everyone in his family had a baby’s name, a nickname, or some other corruption of that which appeared on their baptismal certificates. His mother, Constance, was Contie. His father, Corthauld, was Hallie. His brother, Christian, was merely Chris, while his sister, Mercia, was called Mousy by all.

  Jane learned that Cordy had married a girl named Lizzie Meriweather and that they had produced a child whose name was Charlie. On the subject of his marriage, Cordy seemed puzzled. It simply hadn’t worked, he claimed. Jane knew that his divorce was rather recent and that recently divorced people are always puzzled. So Jane turned to the subject of his family life and asked him how he got along with his parents and siblings. To illustrate the point, Cordy told Jane about the last big Spaacks family outing. Everyone had been married at the time. Cordy to Lizzie, Mousy to Bobby LaVallet, the no-good heir to a racing stable, and Chris to a Canadian girl named Valerie Slowden. Of the three Spaacks children, only Chris remained in the married state.

  The Spaacks seniors ran three households: a pied-à-terre in Manhattan; the family manse in Furnall, Connecticut, and a summer house in Salt Harbor. To Salt Harbor the family had repaired for an Easter weekend. There everyone fought. Cordy and Lizzie, when they spoke at all, argued bitterly in private. Cordy raked gravel with his father, both muttering about Mousy’s behavior in an effort to avoid actually speaking to one another. Mousy, when she could be dragged away from fighting with her mother, quarreled with her father. Mousy and Bobby spent their time frantically looking for a place in which to smoke hashish unobserved. This prevented them from noticing that they had almost nothing to say to one another. Their son, Little Quentie, was knocked down by his cousin, Charlie, and cut his lip. He began to howl and Charlie began to scream.

  Chris and Valerie had no children, and they never quarreled. They brought with them to Salt Harbor their pet, a basset hound named Tea. Tea was sick in many places, hidden and plain, around the house, but found the sea air restoring. At the dinner table, Chris and Valerie were made to feel uncomfortable about not having any children. No one approved of this. They sat in silence and watched the marriages around them crumble.

  Meanwhile, Lizzie cowered by the beach. She aligned herself with Bobby and Mousy and spent as much of the weekend as she could swacked out on a form of cannabis called Durban Poison, which Bobby had scored from a South African acquaintance.

  This lack of felicity was not unusual. In fact, it was daily life to its participants. The closest thing to affection was displayed by Chris and Cordy, when Chris gave Cordy a tip on the stock market and Cordy fixed the radio in Chris’s car. The climax of the weekend came at Easter Sunday lunch. Spaacks senior presided, carving the tough flinty ducks, smiling the dim sort of smile you see on freshly killed corpses.

  Jane listened to this recitation with real sorrow. How awful it was that Cordy did not have nice, warm parents like hers. Her doting parents took her to the opera on her birthday. Cordy needed salvation, and love, Jane felt, would surely save him.

  It was Jane’s apartment that revealed her to Cordy. It was small but crammed with artifacts: watercolors, family photographs in velvet frames, teapots, pitchers, and beautiful plates. On his first visit Cordy surveyed the place and asked: “How do you get any work done here?”

  His own apartment had almost nothing in it. What he had was either rented with the flat or picked up from the Salvation Army. The Mayers were a family of watered-down German and Dutch Jews who had once had a lot of money. Now they had things. They had Persian rugs, English silver, Limoges plates, and Meissen soup tureens. It was from Cordy that Jane learned the lesson so valuable to the haute bourgeoisie: that some people have a good deal of money and almost nothing else.

  Jane sat Cordy down to the first of their many home-cooked meals. She made an omelet, a simple one, with cheese and chives. Cordy appeared to be transported. He had never had such an omelet—not even in France, he said.

  “How did you learn to cook like this?” he asked, marveling. “When I cook eggs, they lie around in my stomach all day. Yours nip right into my bloodstream.”

  “What sort of eggs do you cook?”

  “Well, I get up in the morning, put some corn oil in a pan, turn the light on under it, and then I shower, shave, and dress. When I get back to the kitchen, the pan is about the temperature of a Bessemer converter. I beat the eggs and put some spice in …”

  “What spice?”

  “Some stuff I found in the apartment when I moved in. The other tenants left it behind. Chervil, savory. Is there something called turmeric? Then I throw the eggs in, and they immediately turn into an asbestos mat.”

  “It’s very easy not to make eggs like that,” Jane said. “I could show you in a second.”

  “I don’t have time to think about food,” said Cordy. “Besides, no one ever offered to teach me. If I got used to eggs like yours, I might find myself getting used to a whole slew of other things and end up leading a soft life and not getting any work done. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be in a position to ask you for another. May I have one?”

  The work Cordy referred to was his dissertation. Since he had been a researcher at a think tank for several years, he felt at a slight disadvantage: teachers younger than Cordy already had their doctorates. He felt he should have his as well. This thesis was sitting on his desk, as it had been for some time. Jane suspected that she was his current excuse for putting it off and that, since he was regarded by his department as one of its young geniuses, it didn’t much matter when he finished it. She was working on her dissertation, which her affair with Cordy in no way interrupted. In fact, she felt she was working better than ever. After dinner, she sat at the kitchen table with her books, while Cordy sprawled on the couch with his, but although he claimed her apartment distracted him, he also claimed the distraction was worth it. He was happier than he had ever been, he said.

  Jane used lavender soap, which Cordy found extremely pleasing. One day she slipped a cake of it into his briefcase and, when he discovered it, his eyes misted over.

  “No one ever gave me a present before,” he said. He said it with such a tremor in his voice that Jane did not stop to say to herself: “This guy has a trust fund. What does he mean he never got a present before?” She believed it. She believed that he had had presents before on occasions but not on the spur of the moment, simply because someone adored him. She believed. Here was a man deprived, and there is no greater magnet for a generous woman than a deprived man.

  The food he ate before he met Jane, whose use of olive oil in salads he frequently remarked on, consisted of instant coffee, powdered milk, and dried mashed potatoes. He was addicted to cafeterias and claimed a fondness for food that had been warming on a steam table for several days. Jane had previously believed that people who ate this way were poor people who were forced to eat this way, but then Cordy, who was in his thirties, still had some of the clothes he had worn at prep school and almost all of the clothes he had taken away to college. He seemed to feel, like William Penn, that if it was clean and warm it was enough, but Cordy was not a Quaker and had an independent income.

  When Jane visited each of the three Spaacks households, she began to understand her lover a little better. The first she saw was the Manhattan pied-à-terre. Lizzie Meriweather Sp
aacks, after a trip to the Dominican Republic shed her of Cordy, had retired with Charlie to the country. Once a month, Cordy took Charlie for the weekend, and since Lizzie refused to see Cordy, Charlie was trucked in from the country, and the Spaackses’ Manhattan apartment was used as a dead drop, so to speak. When their affair had progressed by several months, Cordy took Jane along to collect Charlie one Saturday afternoon.

  The Spaacks apartment was small but grand. It looked out over the river and was decorated in the way of the reception rooms in foreign embassies. It was full of the sort of furniture you feel you must not sit on—either upholstered in silk or extremely fragile. The most inviting was the couch, but this was covered in a putty-color velvet that is stained so easily by a misplaced hand or foot. Jane stood by the window and watched garbage scows float the debris of Manhattan out to the Ambrose Lighthouse. The Spaackses, Cordy told her, referred to these vistas as “river traffic.” On the walls were Chinese prints, matted with gray silk, that decorators feel bring a soothing tone into the homes of bankers and other corporate capitalists.

  When Cordy appeared with Charlie, a white-haired child with tiny teeth, Jane felt she had been delivered. But behind Cordy was Spaacks senior, an apparition Jane had not bargained for. He was wearing a business suit that looked as if it had been baked on him, like paint on a Bentley. He looked through Jane and, when the introduction was hastily made, extended his hand as an afterthought. It was a hard, dry hand, quickly withdrawn, the sort of hand that, when attached to the wrist of your loved one’s parent, is often a portent that you and your beloved are not going to spend your declining days watching the sun go down and reflecting on the happy years you have had together.

  That was the last Jane ever saw of father Spaacks. Charlie was taken to Jane’s house, since she had more to offer in the way of amusement. Her collection of lead animals—her father’s from childhood—her picture books, and her colored pencils were far more intriguing than Cordy’s computer printouts, calculator, or the camera with zoom lens.