The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  The love Jane bore for Cordy was at this point very hot. It pained her to see the flesh of his flesh and someone else’s flesh. She craved Charlie. She cut up his sandwiches for him and gave him his milk in a mug with a picture of a rabbit on it. When they went for walks, she was overcome with pleasure when Charlie took her hand or pulled on her coat to get her attention. She felt that she would someday like to be Charlie’s stepmother, which, she knew, was another way of expressing her hope that Cordy would be hers forever. Cordy had said that he would never marry again. Romance and marriage were mutually exclusive, he felt. Jane took this to be a reflection of the fact that he had never known any domestic happiness, and she was a domestic genius.

  For months they were extremely happy. Love, in its initial stages, takes care of everything. Love transforms a difficult person into a charming eccentric; points of contention into charming divergences. It doesn’t matter that popular songs are full of warning—songs like “Danger, Heartbreak Dead Ahead” are written and sung for those who have no intention of doing anything but dancing to them. And while lovers do almost nothing but reveal themselves, who notices?

  But as time went on it occurred to Jane that there was something odd about what she now saw was Cordy’s cheapness. The coldness that emanated from his parents’ Manhattan apartment, the lifeless, life-denying sitting room, the glacial hand of his father, seemed to hover around Cordy. His raptures about the way she lived began to make Jane feel like a hothouse orchid—pretty, expensive, and not long for this world. Cordy’s lavish coo of joy at the sight of two filets mignons, whose virtues in terms of cost and waste Jane found herself explaining, made her feel that what transpired between them did not resemble normal life to Cordy. Steam-table food, empty apartments, and family fights were normal to him, not lavender soap, being adored, and having his coffee brought to him in a big French cup.

  One night he as much as stated his case. They stayed almost entirely at Jane’s apartment, since Cordy’s was not a fit place in which to conduct anything resembling a romance. He had had one bed pillow. The thought that Jane might someday sleep beside him had prompted him to go to a cut-rate bedding store and buy another, whose lumpy filling he could not identify. He admitted, however, what any sensible person will admit: that barring allergies, a good night’s rest is aided greatly by European goose down.

  Cordy had had his dinner. He repaired to the couch, commandeered all the needlepoint cushions, pulled Jane near, and, with his nose pressed against her fragrant neck, announced that she was too rich for his blood.

  “I live on my salary,” said Jane.

  “I think I ought to go to a detoxification clinic,” said Cordy. A shiver ran through Jane. Was living well a kind of poison?

  “You live in a needlessly horrible way,” she said.

  “I live simply,” said Cordy. “It’s very dangerous to become used to luxury.”

  “You seem to enjoy things,” Jane said. “For example, my things. You don’t mind drinking good coffee and getting wrapped up in a quilt to take a nap. You have a mania for deprivation. Besides, you don’t notice any million-dollar cameras with zoom lenses around here, do you?”

  “I don’t use my camera,” Cordy said.

  “That’s because you’re too cheap to buy film. It doesn’t matter whether or not you use it. You own it.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Cordy. “The point is that things give you a false sense of life. If you have a nice house, you begin to think that life is nice.”

  Jane said: “Isn’t it?”

  “Not for long,” said Cordy.

  Shortly after this interchange, Jane met Cordy’s mother. Mrs. Spaacks offered her son an electric frying pan. She discovered that she had two. If Cordy did not want one, she intended to sell it to a secondhand shop. Cordy and Jane drove two hours to the Salt Harbor house to get this implement, which Jane suspected Cordy would never use.

  The house containing this extra frying pan was built on prime land overlooking the water. The setting into which it intruded was spectacular. The house itself was rather ugly and was furnished in that stiff, unsittable wicker that leaves deep red grooves in the flesh. It occurred to Jane that she had now seen two of the Spaackses’ domestic settings and had yet to spot any surface on which a human being might comfortably rest.

  Cordy found his mother sitting in a wrought-iron chair, doing a Double-Crostic in the weak sunlight. She was wearing a suit that held her body like a straitjacket, and when she stood, she had the sort of carriage taught to girls who know that they will never in their lives have to bend over to pick up so much as a pin.

  She did not kiss her son. She merely lifted her head toward him, as if to warm up the air near his cheek. She gave Jane the benefit of a look, shook her hand, and turned to Cordy, whom she then led away, leaving Jane alone to ponder the landscape. Cordy was back shortly, carrying the electric frying pan. Soon he and Jane were in the car, on their way to Furnail, half an hour’s drive away, so Jane could see where Cordy had spent his childhood.

  The house in Furnall was huge and cold. Everything was covered with slipcovers.

  “It’s being sold,” Cordy explained. “That’s why it looks like this. Of course, it’s always looked something like this.”

  Jane was given a guided tour. Cordy turned a corner and identified a room containing a table, a typewriter, and a wood file cabinet as the bedroom he had slept in as a child.

  “When I went to college, they turned it into a room to store their tax returns in,” Cordy said.

  He looked tired and seemed sad to Jane. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him. She wanted to wrap him up in all the nice things she had had as a child and compensate for what she imagined was the coldness of his childhood, his horrid parents, the fact that they had snatched his room away from him as soon as he had left home.

  “What was it like to live here?” she asked.

  “I can’t remember,” Cordy said.

  Trouble in love seeks a proper issue. In some cases it is sex; in others, politics or money. In the case of Cordy, it was work. The time he spent with Jane, he said, was taking him away from his work. She was too seductive—too fragrant, too luxurious. He had changed his entire life to be with her, he said.

  Jane, on the other hand, had gone on living as she had always done. Before Cordy came along, she had prepared dinners for herself, lolled around on Saturday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, just as she did with Cordy. She had worked on her thesis without Cordy, and she worked as well with him.

  He said as he sat at the table, pouring cream over the strawberries: “All this life is getting in the way of life.”

  Jane felt as if she had been slapped. She recalled the first conversation they had ever had. She had never thought her appetites were at all voracious—they were the normal appetites everyone had for pleasure in life. That first interchange made it clear that Cordy did not feel this way at all.

  For a few weeks nothing much changed except that Jane began to feel embarrassed by her salads, by the dish of pears she kept on the coffee table. The attention Cordy lavished on the details of her life was beginning to make her feel not singled out and appreciated but freakish. They soon began to quarrel. The brilliance of their initial affection began to mire down in fights about meeting places, time spent together, and the cost of lamb chops. In the beginning, these quarrels were repaired quite simply. After all, they had started off magnificently. A glowing smile, a declaration, a kiss on the back of the neck could still bring them back to their original state in which they had felt that no other lovers had had the advantages of their fine minds, their attractiveness, the intelligence with which they adored one another. Now it seemed that there was rather more quarreling than enchantment. Cordy began to display a cold, bitter side. Jane, in turn, became businesslike and brisk.

  It was soon decided that they should spend several nights apart. This was Jane’s idea, prompted by a sincere worry that Cordy should be wor
king on his thesis and a great desire not to watch her brilliant love affair look more and more like a second-rate domestic failure.

  Cordy went back to his Spartan diggings, where, with the aid of instant coffee and powdered milk, he began to work on his dissertation. When lovers agree to part, doom is right around the corner. Cordy and Jane were no exception. When they were together, they found themselves constantly misunderstanding one another, and when they were apart, the misunderstandings were further annotated by late-night telephone calls. It sometimes seemed to Jane that these disagreements were manufactured by Cordy, as if to rub her nose into his reality and show her that life was not, in fact, nice for very long.

  On these solitary nights Jane entertained thoughts of throwing out every endearing object she possessed; of pouring the dread olive oil down the sink. It was hard for her to believe that what had begun so happily and with such promise was ending in such a small-time way. She remembered that she had once felt that she and Cordy were protected by a magic mantle against the petty-mindedness that creeps into the relationships of others. After all, didn’t people stare at them in the street? Didn’t their colleagues look upon them with longing in their eyes? Weren’t they beautiful, brilliant, special?

  It occurred to Jane that this terrible pass they had come to could easily be explained in terms of interior decoration. Can the cut-rate lie down with the dearly purchased? It was clear that it was all over. Her greatest attributes were now her deficits. They had passed some point of no return—somewhere where discount pillows and imported strawberry jam cannot meet.

  Their last encounter took place in a coffee shop. They had decided to meet on neutral ground. The table between them was crowded with empty coffee cups and full ashtrays. By this time they had been mostly apart, except for telephone calls. Nothing seemed to work between them any more, although the looks they exchanged across that squalid table were of pure longing. The fact was they adored each other. How they could feel that way when they were unable to find anything over which not to quarrel mystified them both. But there was no way around it. They adored one another, and it made no difference at all.

  Cordy said: “I miss you so.”

  Jane said: “What is it you miss? You miss someone who spends too much time in the bathtub, who reads for pleasure, which you think is some sort of crime, who spends too much money on food and who encourages you not to buy your ties in the drugstore. You no longer seem to approve of anything I do. How can you miss me?”

  “I just miss you,” Cordy said.

  “But I get in your way,” said Jane. “You said I was a luxury you couldn’t afford. I told you I pay my own way, but you meant that I waste your time. You think living a nice life is frivolous.”

  “I adore you,” said Cordy. Jane put her head down so as not to weep in public. She adored him, too. She adored someone who had begun to carp at her every gesture, who made her so self-conscious she could hardly get dressed in the morning.

  “How can you adore me when we can no longer be together for five minutes without fighting?” she said.

  “How long we can be together without fighting has nothing to do with adoration,” said Cordy.

  Jane’s tears ceased. She was amazed that the matter could be so easily put. She remembered the incident of the lavender soap and his heartfelt confession that no one had ever given him a present. What all this meant was that in Cordy’s case, actual deprivation and the feeling of deprivation were one and the same. To feel that you have never been given a present is almost as good as having been neglected. Cordy thrived on this form of loss. He had twenty times the money she would ever have, yet not a day went by that he did not strive to find some novel way of cheating himself out of something. She had watched him window-shop, yearn for an item easily within his reach, and turn away. It was hopeless.

  She took a deep breath and told Cordy that he would be doing her a real service if he simply got up and left. He sat for a moment, gave her the benefits of his most beautiful and tortured gaze, and then walked out the door.

  When he hit the street, tears started down Jane’s cheeks. She ordered another cup of coffee, drank it slowly, dried her eyes, and watched a parade of students walking up the street. It was a hot spring day. Everyone was coatless. A few were shoeless. Couples strolled arm in arm.

  And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cordy leaning against a car across the street, watching her. She realized how easy it would be to fling some money onto the table, race out the door, and dash across the street to him. She could feel his arms around her.

  Instead she watched him back. It all made sense. He was now depriving himself of her. She thought sadly that he was like a cheapskate who loved flowers, who walked around with spare change in his pocket, prowling around flower stalls to get a free whiff of roses and carnations but never buying any.

  Such a man might stand for hours outside a florist’s window looking at a gardenia that could quite easily be his. But why, he might ask himself, would a man want a gardenia and what would he do with it once he had it? A man like that might get very close to the florist’s door, and might even go inside, just to look around. He might ask the clerk the price of a gardenia and know that he could buy seven of them. That gardenia would be waiting to be bought, but not by him—not if there were no practical reason for such a gesture, and especially since it would be so much more fulfilling not to.

  Sentimental Memory

  When I arrived in Inverness, Scotland, one freezing March, I had it in mind to tell anyone who asked that I was on a photographic assignment. I had the cameras to prove it. I could have further substantiated my claims to professionalism by displaying copies of a magazine called Wildlife, which had run series by me on the subjects of wild flowers, snakes, and cacti, but nobody asked.

  Actually I was on the lam, so to speak, from my second husband, Francis Cluzens, a petrogeologist residing in San Francisco, and my first husband, Thomas Ragland, a rancher of Despelles, Texas.

  My first marriage had been a somewhat lengthy one. My second had been extremely brief. When I left Francis Cluzens, which I did quite abruptly, I felt I needed an alien landscape to hide out in. Actually I needed a place in which to do penance: no one was looking for me. I needed a place in which a foreign language did not have to be coped with; one in which the inhabitants would take no notice of me; or one in which I could take little notice of the inhabitants. Scotland fitted all these particulars, and so I flew from San Francisco to London and, aided by my pocket atlas, picked the town of Inverness. A helpful and informative taxi driver took me to King’s Cross Station and I boarded the London-to-Inverness Express. The train was full of Japanese scientists who, I learned at dinner, were on their way to check out the Loch Ness monster.

  I checked into the four-star Station Hotel, where I was regarded as an eccentric American woman on the loose. This was made clear by the bartender in the almost-empty hotel bar, who flinched each night when I came in for my solitary glass of Scotch. No matter how many times I sat reading the paper and minding my own business I could tell the bartender felt that mayhem was right around the corner.

  I lived in that hotel for five months without having a conversation that lasted more than forty-five seconds. Each morning, to keep myself from atrophy, I beat a little path from the hotel to Inverness Castle and back. In the afternoon I walked across the square and bought a paper. My purpose was to make my life float in front of me unimpeded. I felt that with no distractions I would be able to reflect on my thirty-one years of life and see if they made any sense. I wanted to put myself in order. After all, I was still young enough to think myself too young to have had two husbands. Two husbands. The thought of it kept me up at night and my heart seemed to beat two men, two men over and over as I paced around.

  In June I did what I swore I would not do: I opened the way to human contact. One rainy night as I sat in the hotel bar I was joined by an overheated boy. I drew him like a magnet. His name was Billy McLeod, and he wa
s home from the University of Edinburgh where he studied architecture. He lived across the canal in Fort Marie and was having a very dreary holiday. He was violently in love with an Italian girl named Marina who was home in Florence on her holidays.

  A study of the way in which people connect in bars is a life’s work for an old-fashioned sociologist. Perhaps it is the availability of liquor or the wide display of bottles that makes people smack right into one another. It took less then ten minutes for Billy to reveal his state of mind to me—or perhaps it is the insane state love puts young men into that got him going. He began to talk about Americans, but really he was talking about love.

  “The thing about Americans is, they’re so open compared to us. I mean, they have emotional fluency. I mean, they can speak from the heart, don’t you think?”

  Since I had said almost nothing, I wondered why he felt this way.

  “I can spot someone who’s emotionally open. All the Americans at Edinburgh are. They think emotionally. I mean, don’t you notice the absence of openness up here? I mean Americans tend to notice that. All my friends can speak brilliantly on any number of subjects, but they haven’t got the language of feeling. And if you don’t have that, you don’t have any language at all, don’t you think?”

  I thought that this was a very dangerous conversation—just the sort I had sworn to myself I would not have. I decided to sidestep the language of feeling and veer off to more secure topics, like geography. I asked Billy where Fort Marie was. His eyes opened. I had been here five months and didn’t know where Fort Marie was? Why, it was right across the Caledonian Canal. Had I not left the hotel? I confessed I had not. This piqued him. Where was I from? What was I doing here?

  Were I sociologically inclined I could blame my answer on the row of bottles, the rain, the empty bar, the peat fire in the grate. But I was lonely.