Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  A miracle of a sort. Buried all her life in Lake Wobegon, now she had (sort of) shacked up with a man she’d just met—sat on his bed and let him touch her in the Hotel Paradiso. Would Audrey have done this? You bet your boots she would’ve.

  She tried to visualize life without Carl. The man who lay next to her reading yet one more book about the Civil War, blue pajama bottoms, the furry chest, the sheer Carlness of him, his bouquet of sawdust and motor oil and Mountain Lake deodorant. If she wanted him to come over, she used to be able to simply touch his arm, and he’d snake his foot over and find her foot and then she could snuggle up close to him, put her chin on his shoulder, and if he was in an amorous mood he’d turn the light out and they’d neck in the dark and then undress and follow their routine—Missionary, Spooned On Side, Cowgirl, All Fours—and for years it was always on Tuesday nights until Carla’s basketball games knocked them off the pace. But no more. He had gone across the hall. His choice. So if he wasn’t going to return to duty, why not give him his discharge papers?

  Last winter, she caught an old movie on the movie-classics channel, Lassie Brings The Pie, about the couple who split up and the dad moved to San Francisco, far from the mom and kids in Idaho. They missed him on Thanksgiving Day and Lassie, ever sensitive to human feelings, took a pumpkin pie that the mom had brought home from the bakery and trotted down the street with it. It was in a box, tied up with string, and Lassie held the string in her teeth, and carried the pie through a blizzard and over rickety swinging bridges and fought off a cougar and over the Sierras and down to the Bay and across the Oakland Bay Bridge, trotting between lines of rush-hour traffic, too late for Thanksgiving but just in time for Valentine’s Day, and found the dad, who was about to go out on a date with a sexy model. He saw Lassie and burst into tears. “You never told me you had a dog!” the model said in a pouty voice. “I’m allergic to dogs.” Lassie set the pie at his feet and untied the string and the model sneezed and stepped in the pie, and fell down and fractured her leg, and in the next scene the dad and Lassie were on a bus heading for Idaho and he was singing “Let the Rest of the World Go By.”

  Maybe Carl’s problem was stress. He’d promised to build that huge lake home for Mr. Ladderman, a handshake deal—Carl assumed that a big Minneapolis investment mogul who drove a Lexus was good for the money—and then in November, Ladderman’s wife found the letters he’d written to Honey Bunny and the wife fired both barrels at him as he jumped naked out a secondstory window of their home in Aspen. He suffered buckshot wounds in his left calf. “How can you fire both barrels at a man from fifteen feet away and just hit him in the calf?” said Margie. “How could you not get him in the chest?” Had the man been killed, Carl would’ve been paid off by the estate, but now Ladderman was sued for divorce and was living in El Paso under an assumed name because the bloodhounds were on his trail as his investments tanked and his notes came due and he was six months in arrears on payments to Carl for this monstrous half-finished structure that Carl had stopped work on and mortgaged his own home (for the first time in his life) to keep the business afloat, and now was getting urgent calls from Hjalmar at the bank to come in and talk, all of which might take a man’s mind off the pleasures of the flesh.

  Maybe he had wilted in the hot sun of parenthood. It happens. You’re in love with a woman and the next thing you know she turns out to be the mother of three children. And dang it, they’re yours!

  Sleep apnea?

  Claustrophobia?

  Allergy?

  A side effect of cleaning chemicals? Perhaps the fumes rising from her sparkling clean floors had denutted her husband and turned him into a hermaphrodite.

  She called Dr. DeHaven and asked him straight out if Carl’s prostate medicine might affect his sex drive and Dr. DeHaven said, “No. Why?”

  “Just curious,” she said.

  How about fear of vaginal entrapment?

  Maybe he was just trying too hard. You start down the slope, kissing and touching, and it picks up speed, and then what if you think “What if I can’t?”—it becomes self-fulfilling. The woman is breathing hard, panting, rearing up, and crying, “Do it! Do it, Baby! Pound that nail in! Sock it to me, big boy!” And the poor man lies there with a wilted daffodil in his pants.

  And then there are wood ticks. One of them crawls up your leg and finds a place where the moon doesn’t shine and feeds off you and at the same time releases a toxin that attacks your libido. It’s the wood tick’s way of protecting itself—if you don’t undress in bright light, you’re less likely to find it—and that’s why Thoreau didn’t date girls and that’s why our rural population is shrinking.

  Could Carl be gay? Had he lost interest in her because he had discovered Another Side of Himself?

  She found an ad in the back of Christian Cavalier magazine for a “love potion” that gave a man “more energy and sustaining power” but it was offered by a company that also made a metal disc to put in your mouth that enabled you to sing in perfect pitch, “no more whinnying or quavering.”

  In high school they spoke of Coke and aspirin having aphrodisiac powers, but not for men, only for girls. A man was supposed to have those powers in his back pocket. She Googled “aphrodisiac” and found an article about garlic and Cajun dishes such as blackened catfish (“Spicy food can backfire. Passion is a fragile mood and may be disrupted by stomach gas.”) and alcohol, of course (“It is easy to overshoot the mark when plying a lover with drinks. Alcohol reduces a woman’s level of judgment to where her affection for you doesn’t mean so much.”). One article said that an exchange of clothing between lovers can stimulate hitherto unexpected levels of passion, that a small-town banker in Illinois who, in the privacy of their bedroom, tied one of his wife’s long silk scarves around his neck, suddenly stripped the clothing from her body and also from his own and cast himself down at her feet and engaged in various exciting actions with her toes that inexplicably made her cry out with pleasure and thus began ninety minutes of loud and passionate entanglement that wound up in a climax that, according to his stopwatch, lasted for thirty-seven seconds.

  Or maybe Carl had never loved her, in the sense of actually truly loving her, in the sense of searching high and low for the Beloved and finding her and crying out, “I want to be with you for the rest of my life, O you magnificent one.” In Lake Wobegon, you worked from a small pool of appropriate partners and a man stepped in where the woman had signaled a vacancy and if she thought he was okay, not an incipient drunk or child molester, she didn’t dismiss him, which was the Lake Wobegon equivalent of falling in love, and thus, quietly, obediently, like schoolchildren falling into line two by two by two on a field trip, people formed pairs and marched to the altar.

  Except for some, like her older sister, Linda, who escaped to become a flight attendant for Continental, lanky Linda, hair dyed bright red, devoutly single, jetting off to Delhi, Rio, Copenhagen, Rome, phantom Linda who returned home rarely, who existed in postcards and the 4 A.M. phone call. She called from Beirut in February, to ask how things were, and for once Margie told her the truth. “Take him on a trip,” Linda said. “Shake up the routine. You people get so deep in your trench, you can’t see over the side.” Linda was bisexual. Women were more pleasant to be with, not so scary, and there wasn’t the erection problem or the semen to deal with or such dreadful diseases. No strings attached. You just lay together, the two of you, and then you said thank you very much and moved on. Or vibrators were nice, too. Or you met a nice man who knew how to show you a good time and then go away. Linda had no desire to have children. God, no. She loved hotels. She loved to take a nice hot bath with a stack of magazines on the edge of the tub, and lie in bed with a good novel, and then turn out the lights, pet the cat, and go to sleep. Dreamland. Who could ask for more?

  BAD BAD BAD BAD

  She had Paolo’s phone number in her pocket the next morning as she and Eloise, Daryl, Marilyn, and Lyle trudged through the ruins of the Forum, a junk pile of imperial
history, and snapped pictures of each other standing before a single column rising above the scattered stones. Once it had been part of a temple and now, orphaned, a mere memoir of ancient glory. Nearby, stairs rising to the six columns of the façade of a temple, the temple itself gone. Vacant pedestals where statues had stood. Cornerstones half buried in the turf. Marilyn stopped and said it reminded her of church. The old people sitting around at coffee hour talking about their kidney stones. “You don’t dare use the word ‘prostate’ or you’ll draw a crowd. Don’t even say ‘interstate’ because their hearing isn’t that good either, and they’re likely to pull out their prostate and give you a look.”

  “What does that have to do with the Romans?” said Lyle.

  “Well, we read Romans in church,” said Marilyn.

  They stopped to look at the great arch of the Roman Senate, which put Lyle in a funk. “All gone,” he said, softly. “A whole civilization. Gone. And soon we will be too.”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Daryl.

  “I read that stars get hotter just before they collapse and that’s what is happening to the sun. In a billion years, it’ll burn about ten percent hotter than it does now, which means that Earth will be uninhabitable. Isn’t that a horrible thought?”

  “No,” said Daryl. “It ‘s not. A billion years is a long time.”

  Lyle threw his arms out, to embrace the Forum, the glory, the history, the classics, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, the works—“We’re all going the way of these guys. In the end, we’re going to turn into cinders.”

  “In your case, it isn’t going to take a billion years,” said Daryl. “I’d say fifteen, give or take a couple.”

  “You don’t understand! All the glory of the human mind—art, music, architecture, science—it’s all futile. Why do we bother? It all ends up as a small dead scorched astral body drifting in space. That’s the ultimate story. It’s all ashes.”

  Margie said, “So what should we do, Lyle? Become nihilists?”

  He didn’t know. But the enormity of it stunned him. All your life you strive to accomplish something. Aim for the stars. And for what? For nothing.

  “So what were you going to do instead of teach biology? Sit and play Solitaire?”

  They moved on to the Colosseum, its walls intact, the arena floor gone except for the stone ribbing below and the brick-lined remnant of an ancient sewer, and through narrow alleys to the Villa Borghese, a dusty park, Daryl setting the pace, Lyle trailing behind, contemplating Man’s Fate, Eloise wishing Fred would call her. “I can forgive him,” she told Margie, waiting for Lyle to come out of the men’s toilet. “I can understand someone you love having a crazy fling with someone, can’t you? It probably hap pens all the time!”

  “Oh yes. Of course.”

  When Lyle emerged, Daryl was in the mood to make a speech. Right there in front of the Temple of Venus, weeds growing in the pavement. “We’re stronger than we know,” he said. “We will endure. I believe that.” Oh please, thought Margie.

  “When my dad lost his right hand in the corn picker, he just picked it up and came back to the house and asked Mother for a bucket of ice to put his hand in and a dish towel to bind up the stump. He said he’d drive in to St. Cloud to find a surgeon to sew it back on.

  “She asked if he wanted her to drive him in. He said, ‘No, I can manage. But I’ll need to take your car. It’s got automatic transmission.’

  “She said, ‘Can I make you a sandwich?’

  “He said, ‘I’m not so hungry and besides, I don’t see how I’m going to manage a sandwich, Mavis.’

  “She said, ‘You could steer with your knees.’ And she made him a cheese sandwich and off he went. That was Dad. He came back six hours later, his hand sewn on, and within a couple weeks he was wiggling his fingers. He never regained full usage, never could put a minnow on a hook or shuffle cards and it took him a while to button up his trousers, but it was good enough.”

  Margie ducked into the women’s toilet and into a back stall and called Maria and told her about Paolo and Maria said, “Call him. What can it hurt? You’re here for fun. So have fun. You want to see him? Flirt with him? Kiss? Maybe go to bed, maybe not? What’s the harm? Do it.” And so she did. She called his phone and before she could change her mind, he answered. He was delighted to hear from her. He had been thinking about her. “I want you to come meet me,” he said. “You could come to my hotel now. Or if you’d rather, we could meet at the coffee bar. Either one is fine by me.”

  “The hotel is good,” she said in a small voice. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Can I bring something?” Thinking: pastry, fruit, perhaps a couple of ham croissants. “All I need is you,” he said. “Beautiful you.”

  She told the others that she was going back to the hotel—not specifying which hotel—but Eloise clung to her. “Please don’t go. I need you right now. You’re the only one I can talk to. You understand.” Eloise was sure she had done something terrible to drive Fred away (O, please stop, thought Margie) and now God was going to make something very very bad happen. Something involving terrorists. “I know you think I’m crazy, but I keep seeing women with backpacks and one of them came and stood next to me and I about crapped in my pants,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

  “Yes,” Margie said. “A lot of people carry backpacks. Americans and everybody else. They’re as common as dark glasses.”

  “I just have this feeling that I’m about to be blown up.”

  “Then don’t stand too close to me.”

  “I mean it feels like a dangerous city. And the cops don’t seem all that alert, if you ask me. Somebody could put a suitcase full of dynamite into the back of our van and blow it sky-high.”

  “Somebody could dump a hundred bowling balls out of an airplane and one of them could hit you on the head and we’d be mopping up your brains. Same thing.”

  “I’m serious. Everywhere I look, I see liquids and gels. A plastic explosive the size of a bar of soap, if it’s placed in the right place—one minute you’re looking at the ruins and the next minute you’re a big grease stain.”

  “Just get a grip. Nobody’s going to blow us up. We’re not that important.” It made Margie feel like a heroine in a war movie, a nurse during the Blitz, telling her charges to buck up, cheerio, stiff upper lip, do your part for queen and commonwealth, nice cup of tea, duckie, pull up your socks, comb your hair, it’ll all be right as rain.

  He was waiting for her in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. A bottle of wine sat opened on the table and two white tapers were burning. She had never done this before. Done what before? What she was thinking about doing. She didn’t think she ought to do it but she thought maybe she would anyway. How else do you find out about these things? Mother said, Oh Marjorie, and started weeping. When are you going to wake up? Mother, I never tried adultery before. Maybe it’s not the answer, but who knows?

  Anyway, it was the direction things were headed unless she turned around and left right now. Which she didn’t do. She thought she might but then it turned out that she sat down on the bed instead and when he poured her a glass of red wine, she said, “Thank you very much, Paolo.”

  “It’s a Spanish wine. I spent a couple weeks in Spain once and met a girl in Madrid. She was American. From Idaho. We decided to travel together.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Her name was Lucy. She was twenty-four, studying to be a doctor. A nice girl but so self-centered. Very immature. Younger women are highly overrated. Anyway—”

  “Do you keep in touch with her?”

  He smiled. “I don’t believe in keeping in touch,” he said. “I believe in the moment. The beautiful moment. Life is a series of beautiful unforgettable moments and the beauty is in the moment itself. Keeping in touch—why? Retrospect only makes the moment ordinary.”

  “I love you, “he said. “You’re so delicate. The way you tremble when I kiss you.”

  His lips tasted of smoke and wine, and then his arms
were around her and he laid her down on her side, facing him, in his embrace, and he kissed her face and her neck, and then he unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her collarbone and bared her shoulders and kissed those. And then they lay, looking into each other’s eyes. His were green and very steady and she saw kindness in them and she kissed them, first the left eyelid, then the right.

  “What are you thinking?” he said. She said she was thinking that it was very nice to lie there with him and how lucky to meet him.

  “I think so, too. Would you like to get under the covers?”

  No, said Mother. Where are your brains? But Carl said nothing. He lay reading a book about the Battle of Shiloh and the carnage of the Civil War.

  She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. But when he sat up, she sat up, and when he pulled back the covers, she pulled back her side of the covers. He took off his pajama bottoms, and he moved over to her and unzipped her jeans and helped her out of them. She wore white panties with little cherries on them. He kissed her behind the ear and whispered, “You’re delicious, my American.”

  Fifty-three and a man in his thirties wanted to make love to her. That was some kind of accomplishment. Nothing you’d get an award for at a Thanatopsis banquet, but it made her feel pretty good. He raised his T-shirt over his head and she looked at him. He was rather in good shape, a patch of black hair on his chest, hairy legs, and a small rose tattoo on his shoulder. She touched it. She kissed it. And then she reached down and took his penis in her hand. She was sort of shocked that she did this. It wasn’t the Marjorie Schoppenhorst that people in Lake Wobegon thought they knew. It was another Margie, one whose story was yet to be written.