The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  Dan said: “Can’t you leave yourself alone for five seconds? Can’t you just go with life a little?”

  Nellie said: “Don’t you want this to have anything to do with your life? Do you think we fell in love for no reason whatsoever? Don’t you want to know what this means?”

  “I can’t think that way about these things,” Dan said. “I want to enjoy them.”

  Nellie said: “I have to know everything. I think it’s immoral not to.”

  That was when Dan had said: “You’re very rough on me.”

  Any city is full of adulterers. They hide out in corners of restaurants. They know the location of all necessary pay telephones. They go to places their friends never go to. From time to time they become emboldened and are spotted by a sympathetic acquaintance who has troubles of his or her own and never says a word to anyone.

  There are plain philanderers, adventurers, and people seeking revenge on a spouse. There are those who have absolutely no idea what they are doing or why, who believe that events have simply carried them away. And there are those to whom love comes, unexpected and not very welcome, a sort of terrible fact of life like fire or flood. Neither Nellie nor Dan had expected to fall in love. They were innocents at it.

  There were things they were not prepared for. The first time Nellie called Dan from a pay ’phone made her feel quite awful—Joseph was home with a cold and Nellie wanted to call Dan before he called her. That call made her think of all the second-rate and nasty elements that love outside marriage entails.

  The sight of Nellie on the street with Jane upset Dan. He saw them from afar and was glad he was too far off to be seen. That little replica of Nellie stunned him. He realized that he had never seen Jane before: that was how distant he and Nellie were from the true centers of each other’s lives. He was jealous of Jane, he realized. Jealous of a small daughter because of such exclusive intimacy.

  When Nellie ran into Dan with his middle son Ewan at the liquor store one Saturday afternoon, it had the same effect on her. Both she and Dan were buying wine for dinner parties. Both knew exactly what the other was serving and to whom. This made Nellie think of the thousands of things they did not know and would never know: that family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities—that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional. The sight of the beloved’s child is only a living demonstration that the one you love has a long and complicated history that has nothing to do with you.

  They suffered everything. When they were together they suffered from guilt and when apart from longing. The joys that lovers experience are extreme joys, paid for by the sacrifice of everything comfortable. Moments of unfettered happiness are few, and they mostly come when one or the other is too exhausted to think. One morning Nellie fell asleep in the car. She woke up with the weak winter light warming her. For an instant she was simply happy—happy to be herself, to be with Dan, to be alive. It was a very brief moment, pure and sweet as cream. As soon as she woke up it vanished. Nothing was simple at all. Her heart felt heavy as a weight. Nothing was clear or reasonable or unencumbered. There was no straight explanation for anything.

  Since I saw remarkably little of Nellie, I suspected something was up with her: she was one of those people who hide out when they are in trouble. I knew that if she needed to talk she would come to see me and eventually she did just that.

  It is part of the nature of the secret that it needs to be shared. Without confession it is incomplete. When what she was feeling was too much for her, Nellie chose me as her confidante. I was the logical choice: I was family, I had known Nellie all her life, and I had known Dan for a long time, too.

  She appeared early one Friday in the middle of a winter storm. She was expected anyway—she and I were going to pick up Jane later in the afternoon and then my husband and I, Nellie, Joseph, and Jane were going out for dinner.

  She came in looking flushed and fine, with diamonds of sleet in her hair. She was wearing a grey skirt, and a sweater which in some lights was lilac and in some the color of a pigeon’s wing. She shook out her hair, and when we were finally settled in the living room with our cups of tea I could see that she was very upset.

  “You look very stirred up,” I said.

  “I am stirred up,” said Nellie. “I need to talk to you.” She stared down into her tea and it was clear that she was composing herself to keep from crying.

  Finally she said: “I’m in love with Dan Hamilton.”

  I said: “Is he in love with you?”

  “Yes,” said Nellie.

  I was not surprised at all, and that I was not surprised upset her. She began to cry, which made her look all the more charming. She was one of those lucky people who are not ruined by tears.

  “I’m so distressed,” she said. “I almost feel embarrassed to be as upset as I am.”

  “You’re not exempt from distress,” I said. “You’re also not exempt from falling in love.”

  “I wanted to be,” she said fiercely. “I thought that if I put my will behind it, if I was straight with myself I wouldn’t make these mistakes.”

  “Falling in love is not a mistake.”

  She then poured forth. There were no accidents, she knew. That she had fallen in love meant something. What did it say about herself and Joseph? All the familiar emotional props of girlhood—will, resolve, a belief in a straight path—were gone from her. She did not see why love had come to her unless she had secretly—a secret from herself, she meant—been looking for it. And on and on. That she was someone who drew love—some people do, and they need not be especially lovable or physically beautiful, as Nellie believed—was not enough of an explanation for her. That something had simply happened was not an idea she could entertain. She did not believe that things simply happened.

  She talked until her voice grew strained. She had not spared herself a thing. She said, finally: “I wanted to be like you—steady and faithful. I thought my romantic days were over. I thought I was grown-up. I wanted for me and Joseph to have what you and Edward have—a good and uncomplicated marriage.”

  It is never easy to give up the pleasant and flattering image other people have of one’s own life. Had Nellie’s distress not been so intense, I would not have felt compelled to make a confession of my own. But I felt rather more brave in the face of my fierce cousin: I was glad she was suffering, in fact. I knew she divided the world into the cheerful slobs like me and the emotional moralists like herself. A serious love affair, I thought, might take some of those sharp edges off.

  I began by telling her how the rigorousness with which she went after what she called the moral universe did not allow anyone very much latitude, but none the less, I was about to tell her something that might put her suffering into some context.

  “I have been in love several times during my marriage,” I said. “And I have had several love affairs.”

  The look on her face, I was happy to see, was one of pure relief.

  “But I thought you and Edward were so happy,” she said.

  “We are,” I said. “But I’m only human and I am not looking for perfection. Romance makes me cheerful. There have been times in my life when I simply needed to be loved by someone else and I was lucky enough to find someone who loved me. And look at me! I’m not beautiful and I’m not so lovable, but I’m interested in love and so it comes to find me. There are times when Edward simply hasn’t been there for me—it happens in every marriage. They say that it takes two and sometimes three to make a marriage work and they’re right. But this has nothing to do with you because I picked my partners in crime for their discretion and their very clear sense that nothing would get out of hand. I had my bad moments, but nothing ever did get out of hand. I can see that an affair that doesn’t threaten your marriage is not your idea of an affair, but there you are.”

  This made Nellie silent for a long time.
She looked exhausted and tearstained.

  “One of the good things about this love affair,” she said, “is that it’s shot my high horse right out from under me. It’s a real kindness for you to tell me what you’ve just told me.”

  “We’re all serious in our own ways,” I said. “Now I think you need a nap. You look absolutely wiped out. I’ll go call Eddie and tell him to meet Joseph and then when you wake up we can plot where we’re going to take Jane for dinner.”

  I gave her two needlepoint pillows for her head, covered her with a quilt, and went to call my husband. When I got back I sat and watched my cousin sleeping. The sleety, yellowish light played over her brow and cheekbones.

  She was lying on her side with her hand slightly arched and bent. Her hair had been gathered at her neck but a few strands had escaped. She looked like the slain nymph Procris in the Piero di Cosimo painting A Mythological Subject which depicts poor Procris who has been accidentally killed by her husband Cephalus. Cephalus is a hunter who has a spear that never misses its mark. One day he hears a noise in the forest, and thinking that it is a wild beast, he takes aim. But it is not a beast. It is Procris. In the painting a tiny jet of blood sprays from her throat. At her feet is her mournful dog, Lelaps, and at her head is a satyr, wearing the look of a heartbroken boy. That picture is full of the misery and loneliness romantic people suffer in love.

  The lovely thing about marriage is that life ambles on—as if life were some meandering path lined with sturdy plane trees. A love affair is like a shot arrow. It gives life an intense direction, if only for an instant. The laws of love affairs would operate for Nellie and Dan: they would either run off together, or they would part, or they would find some way to salvage a friendship out of their love affair. If you live long enough and if you are placid and easygoing, people tell you everything. Almost everyone I know has confessed a love affair of some sort or another to me.

  But I had never discussed my amours with anyone. Would Nellie think that my affairs had been inconsequential? Certainly I had never let myself get into such a swivet over a man, but I had made very sure to pick only those with very secure marriages and a sense of fun. Each union had been the result of one of the inevitable low moments that marriages contain, and each parting, when the right time came to part, had been relatively painless. The fact was, I was not interested in love in the way Nellie was. She was interested in ultimates. I remembered her fifteen years ago, at twenty-three, rejecting all the nice, suitable young men who wanted to take her out for dinner and in whom she had no interest. She felt this sort of socializing was all wrong. When my husband and I chided her, she said with great passion: “I don’t want a social life. I want love, or nothing.”

  Well, she had gotten what she wanted. There she lay, wiped out, fast asleep, looking wild, peaceful, and troubled all at the same time. She had no dog to guard her, no satyr to mourn her, and no bed of wild flowers beneath her like the nymph in the painting.

  What a pleasant circumstance to sit in a warm, comfortable room on an icy winter’s day and contemplate someone you love whose life has always been of the greatest interest to you. Procris in the painting is half naked, but Nellie looked just as vulnerable.

  It would be exceedingly interesting to see what happened to her, but then she had always been a pleasure to watch.

  Saint Anthony of the Desert

  Haphazardness, as a condition of life, has its usefulness but is of fixed duration. At the time of which I am writing, my life was entirely the product of haphazardness, and I had encountered no reason not to enjoy it. Along with being haphazard, I was lucky. These conditions are often found together, like gold and pyrite. For example, I was very bad about money. It flew out of my pocket, and I could not account for it at the end of the week. My checkbook was described to me as looking more like a poem in free verse than a record of my finances. Naturally, my checks, through no malicious intent of mine, were frequently sent back marked “insufficient funds.” But unlike others who receive letters from their banks that begin: “Due to the sloppy and inconsequential manner in which you keep your account, we no longer wish to do business with you,” I was telephoned by a harried bank flack named Dan Pirotta, who said, “Miss Greenway, if you will come over here some afternoon, I will be happy to show you how to balance your checkbook.”

  I also had a habit of losing my wallet. I left it on counters and in taxis, and it was always returned to me, often with the money untouched. My education was as hapless as my finances. As I had conducted it, it suited me for nothing. I had been a cheerful student with a short but intense attention span, waiting for some subject to commit itself to me. Since none did, I floated from course to course and ended up unhirable. No one seemed to have a job for someone whose qualifications included a love of American poetry, an imperfect understanding of astronomy, and a fascination with but by no means a firm grasp of the principles of cultural anthropology. The job I got when I left school was in the gift shop of a museum, selling postcards, calendars, and replicas.

  After two years of this work and after my lecture from Mr. Pirotta at the bank, I managed to save enough money to go to Paris. Saving that sum of money was the most serious gesture I had made in my life up to that point.

  Once there, I threw myself on the mercy of my cousin Charles, a much older relative who was an architect working for UNESCO. I had chosen Paris for no discernible reason except that one of my few skills was an ability to show off in imperfect French. Charles had once been my baby-sitter. I had not seen him in many years, but he took one look at me and pegged me for one of those American girls who come to Paris looking for adventure. It was clear that something had to be done with me, so Charles sent me on a walking tour of churches and cathedrals. Perhaps he thought that if I got inside those buildings I might acquire a little sense. He made me check in with him every afternoon so that he could be sure that I had not gotten lost or otherwise gone astray. To his amazement and relief, I was enthralled. Here, I felt, was a subject I might have a lifelong involvement with. I bought a notebook and took detailed notes on what I was looking at.

  As a reward for not being as hopeless as I appeared, Charles took me on a car trip to the Benedictine abbey of Saint Wandrille de Fontenelle. Unlike the ruined abbeys we had stopped to look at on the way, this one had real monks living in it. From the public side of the chapel I could hear them singing vespers. The fact that actual people lived in this building filled me with wonder. What sort of lives did they lead? Who had built this place? And were there principles on which religious buildings were planned?

  On the way back to Paris, I pestered Charles with questions. What was the difference betweén a cathedral and a church? An abbey and a priory? Charles then asked me for my impressions and listened patiently while I rambled incoherently. From time to time, it would occur to me that I wasn’t making very much sense and then I would shut up.

  “Go on,” said Charles. “This is very interesting.”

  Then I revealed that I had a notebook full of notes. My cousin said, “You seem to have some genuine feeling for form and space. Why don’t you do something with it? You say your life has no direction. Why don’t you go to architecture school?”

  I explained that I could hardly do math, that I could hardly sit still, that I was sick of school and that I did not want to be an architect. After all, was he building cathedrals, priories, abbeys? Besides, I was not at all sure that I had any genuine feelings about form and space. I was not even sure how interested I was. I simply loved being in those buildings—that feeling of chill and reverence, the gorgeousness of that tribute to something higher. Listening to those unseen monks chanting plainsong had stirred me up. For I myself was overheated, had nothing to revere, had never deprived myself of anything. There was nothing serious in my life, and I was so silly that my own face in the mirror hardly mattered.

  Charles did not understand interest that did not translate into practical action, but he gave me the name of a friend of his who o
wned a bookshop. This man was Pete Ethridge, and the shop was called The Architect and Travel Book Supply. I was to go and see him for advice—what books to read, what lectures to hear, what trips, if I had any money, to take. In this way Charles set me on my path, for, if you behave like something with as little weight as a piece of paper, life may float you in the general direction of your inclinations without your having to figure out what your inclinations are.

  When I got back to New York, I went to see Pete Ethridge and he gave me a job. His assistant had quit the day before, and although I had little to recommend me besides my cousin’s name, I knew how to handle a cash register and Pete needed immediate help. Pete had been trained as a draftsman and he loved to travel. He dealt in new, used, and rare books—anything an architect or traveler might need. On one long shelf were Pete’s favorite books—accounts of architectural travel such as The Old Road, A Time To Be Silent, and The Towers of Trebizond. In time I learned to stock, shelve, order, talk to salesmen, and do the bookkeeping. In general, I began to learn how to run a bookshop, and as I became more useful Pete took me along with him when he went to buy private libraries.

  Under his minimal direction, I began to read. The unifying topic of this reading was religious architecture, but if one can be said to pursue this subject in a voluptuous way, I did. I read haphazardly but steadily for two years. I had nothing else to do, except work. I lived in a cheap, fairly pleasant apartment and conducted my social life with rowdy, fun-loving friends, all of whom had minimal jobs: they were actresses who worked as waitresses, poets who were readers at publishing companies, and students who were fooling around with their dissertation topics. I had had crushes, a few inconsequential romances, but I had never been in love. From time to time, a nice steady young man would fall in love with me: a resident at Bellevue Hospital; a lawyer I met at a lecture on baroque cathedrals; a young architect who hung around the shop for weeks on the pretext of seeing if a book he had ordered had arrived. But I did not want one of these nice young men. Their lives looked too plotted for me. I could not see myself safe and married, setting a dinner table with wedding silver and wedding plates and producing an ambitious, correct, and not entirely successful dinner for my in-laws.