The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  “I came up here to recover from my second marriage,” I said. “I used to live in Texas and then I lived in San Francisco. Now I don’t really live anywhere.”

  That, I hoped, might shut him up. It did not.

  “I think divorced people sit on top of the mountain, so to speak,” Billy said. “I mean, it must be rather like looking down from an airplane. My feeling is that love is process. You go from strangeness into familiarity, into intimacy, and then into commitment. I mean marriage. And then you have domesticity. And if that breaks up, you know what the entire process is like.”

  I felt that was neatly put, for a novice.

  “Love is a crucible,” Billy said. “I think you walk into it the first time and emerge a finer, tougher, and certainly different alloy.”

  On that note I felt it might be wise to put an end to all such conversations, but I was not permitted to leave the table until I promised Billy that he could take me sightseeing. He left, and I went back to my room where I belonged.

  I grew up in a small New England town, a nice, obedient, dreamy girl. I believed in everything that was put before me: honor, fidelity, and marriage for life. I believed what the Girl Scouts, the Citizenship Club, and all the love comics told me. I had the temperament for all that belief; I was steady. For example, on my tenth birthday, I was given a camera. From that day on a camera has never been out of my reach. My first ambition was to be a photographer and that is how I ended up. I have never taken up and then dropped any sport, pastime, or friend.

  I met my husband Thomas Ragland, whom everyone called Raggy, at college. He was sitting under a tree looking mournful, and I took a photograph of him. He demanded to see the print and followed me around all afternoon as I took pictures of other hapless, less mournful students. I let him into the darkroom while I made the prints and learned that he was a homesick Texan. Everywhere he went he carried a bottle of green chili sauce that he dumped on everything he ate.

  Raggy was the first person I ever fell in love with, and I married him. That’s what I thought you did, and I was constantly confused by the girls in my dorm who had passionate love affairs and then went off and married someone else. Life was a straight line, a serious proposition. I did not see how you got over anything, and I felt it was prudent to take care what sort of memories you constructed. Therefore I had never bothered falling in love until I met Raggy. Raggy was the real thing. He spent a year at the business school waiting for me to graduate. When I did we got married and went to live in the town of Despelles, where Raggy helped to run the family ranch.

  Raggy was big and tall and open, the sort of man who makes you realize how the stereotype of the Texan was invented. He worked hard. He sweated under the sun. He had deep feelings about his land. He was kind to animals. Horses loved him. He could fix a truck, grill a steak, and was a minor expert on the flora and fauna of the Southwest. We lived in a stone house on the western end of the property. Each year we gave a barbecue and fed the county. In the winter we went to Houston to socialize. Each spring we took two weeks off and went to Mexico.

  In our marriage we were like a pair of pioneers. Everything we learned about the terrain we learned from one another. We were as fresh and intent as explorers. We believed in the same things. Raggy believed in closeness to the land. I believed in the wonder of nature. We believed that differences could be talked about and fixed; that the best cure for melancholy was a long walk; that fights were best repaired by cups of hot chocolate followed by an afternoon in bed. In short, we thought that life made sense. We felt that destiny was simple: you got born, developed lifelong interests, fell in love, got married, raised a family, and then died in your home town or the home town of your choice.

  Everyone around us seemed to feel the same way, including Raggy’s Aunt Bettine, who had divorced her husband, Uncle Clifford, and then had remarried him. It was, she felt, exactly what her marriage needed. Later she tried to leave some of her money to found an animal art museum you could take your pet to, a scheme that made sense to many of her friends.

  For eight years nothing gave me the slightest cause to disbelieve anything. Raggy and I knew what life was about. We decided we would have children after our tenth wedding anniversary. Then we would put ten years of pure fun behind us and get serious. We felt we should first establish ourselves. Raggy would learn to run the ranch. I would learn to be a photographer. We would devote ourselves to each other without encumbrance. Then we would bring to life a happy family. Raggy would teach our children how to shoot, appreciate horses, and deal with cattle. I would teach them how to swim, cook, and appreciate great works of art.

  Shortly after my twenty-ninth birthday Raggy went to Chicago for a convention of livestock breeders, and I was left alone for a week. Around this time a team of geologists turned up to survey the property for oil. A Quonset hut appeared on the north border, and in the morning you could see surveyors when you went to get the mail.

  The second day of Raggy’s absence I went out early with my camera. It was one of those brilliant days on which you can see clouds hunching on either side of the horizon—the sign of a slow-approaching storm. The air seemed to radiate energy. I rode out slowly on my horse and was wondering what I might photograph when my path was crossed by a man riding on a pinto. He was lean and slightly hawk-faced and he had the sort of uncomfortable seat that people who ride English saddle assume in the West. We saluted one another, stopped our horses, and exchanged a few pleasant words. His name was Francis Cluzens, and he was the chief petrogeologist of the surveying team. I introduced myself, and we talked for a while about the beauty of the Ragland ranch. Out of courtesy to a stranger I offered to ride with him a little and show him around.

  He proved to be a pleasant if somewhat disconcerting companion. He asked dozens of questions, and when we finally dismounted and sat under a tree I found myself in the line of a fierce, intense gaze. He was, I realized, the first man I had talked to except Raggy—discounting Raggy’s father, uncles, and cousins and my family—in eight years. He told me that he lived in San Francisco and taught at Berkeley, and that once in a while he hired himself out as an oil hunter. Then, quite unexpectedly, he asked me how long I had been married and what I thought of it. I told him eight years and that I was a firm believer in the institution. The conversation then turned to photography, landscape painting, and the geology of the state of Texas. Before we parted I asked him, without thinking about it very much, if he would like to come and have coffee the next afternoon. I thought he was someone Raggy would probably like to meet when he came back.

  Francis Cluzens showed up the next day, and we had coffee on the veranda. The storm clouds had moved in from the horizon, and the air was wet. We talked about Texas weather, the Muir Woods, and Mexican food. That is, I chatted pleasantly. Francis Cluzens was not the sort of person I was used to chatting with. Unlike Raggy and his family, he was not big, warm, and open. He was not small, but he was taut and full of some sort of energy I was not used to—the sort of energy that is not dissipated by hard work. When an hour had passed he stood to leave and asked if he might come back the next day. That seemed perfectly fine to me.

  The next day we decided to take a ride together. Half a mile out the first raindrops fell and then stopped. By the time the storm began to break we were near the Quonset hut in which the team stored its gear. We made a dash for it, put the horses in a shed, and ran inside. Francis bolted the door against the rain. The hut smelled pleasantly of rope and canvas. Rain drummed down on the roof. There was a window you closed with a canvas flap that the wind was pulling out. Francis went to tie it down and when he came back he looked rather stormy himself. He lifted me off the camp chair I was sitting on and took me into his arms. Not long after that I committed adultery on my husband’s property.

  When Raggy came back I realized how easy it is to conduct what is called normal life. One indiscretion doesn’t do much damage these days. Women’s magazines report that their readers fantasize about men oth
er than their husbands during the act of love, but I never did. In fact, I could very well have thought that nothing had happened to me, and had I gathered around me my mother and my friends, and even Raggy’s mother, and explained the situation to them, their advice would have been to shut up and carry on. After all, I loved Raggy, didn’t I? I had hardly betrayed him, if you believe that betrayal has in it a component of premeditation. My feelings for Raggy had not in fact changed one whit. I had changed.

  I was, I discovered, capable of adultery. Before Francis Cluzens that notion was as remote to me as Jupiter, and a contemplation of it would have been as random and uninformed as speculation about life on other planets. No matter what psychological journals tell you about personal growth, finding a hidden part of your nature is quite unpleasant. It is like being in a war in which unpredictable bullets fly at you from hidden corners. The woman who believed in faithfulness, who thought that life was a straight line, who married the only man she had ever loved, had given herself over intimately to another. That meant something.

  First of all, I knew I must have undergone some profound change, or my meeting with Francis Cluzens could not have happened. But when had this change taken place? Had I slept through it? Had it crept up on me in such minimal stages that I could not know it? And if I had changed, I was therefore not the person Raggy had married. Second of all, I was high-minded. I believed that actions of the flesh are sacred. I thought I believed in married love, and only married love. I had not been a scared virgin when I married Raggy, but a determined one. Why be intimate casually? was my motto. My encounter with Francis Cluzens shattered all these principles. How casual had that encounter really been? Had I planned it without knowing it? Had I broadcast something to him—lust? desire? boredom? Did strangers on your husband’s land ask you how you felt about marriage as a matter of course?

  I could not believe that this was whim. If it was whim—pure accident, or a mistake—then I was not myself. Events do change everything. Two weeks later I found a letter from Francis Cluzens in my mailbox. It said that he had wanted me at first sight. It said: “When you are ready, call me. I’ll be waiting.” On the bottom was his San Francisco telephone number. When you are ready. Did those intense eyes of his peer through my good-wife front right down to the heart of a woman who was about to be ready?

  A month later I left Raggy. I told him everything. He was hurt, but not in the normal way. He said he knew I would come back. I expect I knew it, too. He seemed to feel that this was something I had to do, which made me realize how shocking it is when someone takes you up on what you think you are. I thought I was the least casual woman alive. Raggy thought so too. He was as he always was: big, open, generous, and kind. He gave me my head as you give a horse his head. The horse goes off in the wrong direction out of some impulse of its own. Then it comes back to you.

  I married Francis Cluzens for reasons that probably wouldn’t have washed with anyone. The fact is, it was a gesture. It was my strike on the side of seriousness. It was my way of making concrete what might have been a moment’s weakness. But I did not believe in the weakness of the moment. It was for people like me that the phrase “there are no accidents” was created.

  Raggy was very kind about the divorce. He managed to keep it quiet in Despelles—to make it easier when I eventually got back. I had a man I had left who loved me, and a man to go to who loved me. I stood in a little church in San Francisco, realizing that on two separate occasions I had vowed to two different men to love, honor, and cherish till death us did part.

  The trouble with second marriages is rather like the trouble with new shoes: they don’t fit the way your old ones did. They pinch in places you are not used to feeling pinched in. All those easy moments, the private codes, the nicknames, the easy patterns, are gone from you. Of course, I was entirely wrong to marry Francis Cluzens. Marrying out of principle is hardly a wise move. And while he was difficult to live with, my experience of being married to him was not entirely unpleasant. Rather it was continually exotic. Francis was cool and private. He did not have a big generous hand. He had a precise, methodical way of doing things. He left his hairbrush and toothbrush lying next to each other on the bathroom counter at night. He ate the same breakfast every day. His desk, when he finished working at night, was neat and bare. These things touched me in the way that arrangements in foreign countries touch you. When I said “my husband” it was Raggy I meant, not Francis. I stayed with Francis for a year. He was more like romance than like marriage. In marriage you get used to things. In romance what you want is constant strangeness.

  I didn’t have much to pack. Most of my things I had left with Raggy, which gave him excellent reason to assume that I was coming back to remarry him, as Aunt Bettine had Uncle Clifford. I thought that I would eventually go back to Raggy. He didn’t seem to mind the idea of some profound change in me, but I did. If I was going to go back I felt I needed a little taste of flight, some self-imposed solitude. I minded changing. The very least I could do was to catch up with myself.

  Billy McLeod became my tour guide and cruise director. He took me to lunch at an inn in his home town. He drove me to Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness. He drove me to look at Ben Nevis, the highest point in the British Isles, and was constantly angry that I never brought my camera along.

  On these excursions Billy talked about his girlfriend, Marina. He described her as Botticellian, which I took to be the sort of hyperbole used by youthful romantics, but he showed me her photograph and I saw that he was only being accurate. He told me that they had made a pact to write to each other only by candlelight, and to this end Billy carried a candle stub in his back pocket so that if the mood struck him away from home, he could honor the pact and the impulse at the same time. Their last night together had been conducted by candlelight, he said, an all-night candle-lit vigil.

  He said: “When I think of Marina I get this sort of dream picture of her asleep. She sleeps with her hands tucked under her cheek like a little child. Sometimes I can’t bear it that she dreams. I mean, I don’t know her when she dreams or what she dreams about. There’s a sort of exquisite intimacy that isn’t possible but which one aspires to. Isn’t it sad, sleep, when you love somebody?”

  I found this impossible to answer.

  “Don’t you think?” Billy said.

  I realized that there were times when the only appropriate response to Billy would have been to strangle him.

  I said: “I’m too old to know what you’re talking about.”

  “Too old! My God, I’m too young. I mean, love is like a voyage and this is my first time out. I mean, you ripen as you travel through it. I’m just an infant but when I’m thirty I’ll know things I don’t know now. Like pathos and heartbreak. Those are things worth knowing.”

  I said I did not believe that he would find pathos and heartbreak all that rewarding.

  “Well, that’s what most people think, but most people are stupid. Love isn’t all jolly laughs and good times in bed. You have to ripen it. Pain ripens it. But of course the only pain I know is the pain of separation.”

  These rides made me long for my hotel room, the only place I felt I belonged, except with Raggy whom I felt I no longer deserved. Once a month he wrote to me—a long, newsy letter to keep me up-to-date, as if I were on some pleasant journey. These letters filled me with anguish and gratitude. Somewhere life was going on in a straight line. Francis, on the other hand, had fired off a barrage of angry letters during my first three months in Scotland, telling me what I appeared to be: witless, destructive, and cavalier. Finally, I got a letter from his lawyer informing me that I was being divorced on grounds of abandonment.

  Meanwhile, I was losing strength. I wasn’t finding out anything at all. My life floated before my eyes and underneath those visions of moral right, of constancy, of fidelity, was simply a person who had fallen into sin. No lessons of seriousness or purpose were being revealed to me. I had acted out of whim, and since that was a notion I could n
ot bear I had let the whole thing get out of hand. Perhaps heartbreak and pathos do ripen love. Perhaps nothing had ever happened to challenge me, and so I had made it happen. Perhaps I had been a terrific prig, holding the world at bay to spare myself the sight of an ordinary mortal—myself—doing mortal things that don’t make sense. I had nothing to offer. I only wanted to go home.

  I wrote to Raggy and told him how I felt. He wrote to say that I was the same woman he had married and would always be. We agreed to meet in New York to have some time alone, since I feared going back to Despelles. But then Raggy’s clan was much freer about human action than I was. Hadn’t they understood Aunt Bettine’s animal art museum and her divorce and remarriage to Uncle Clifford?

  The last day I spent in Inverness I spent with Billy. He took me on a picnic. His mother had packed us a lunch. She was terrifically upset about him. She felt he was too young to be in love, and if he was in love why did it have to be with a foreigner? And if a foreigner, why an Italian? To express her feelings of loss and pain, and to rope her son closer to her side, she went on baking binges and fed him the results. These he shared with me on our picnic. You could taste that woman’s oppressive hand in everything she baked. Her shortbread was so intensely sweet it sent a ring of pain through your molars. She baked a black bun you could have shattered a window with. I brought some oranges that I peeled and fed to Billy while he drove.

  After an hour’s drive we reached our picnic spot—a ruined church and graveyard near a stream. We spread out our blanket in the cemetery. The newest grave was 200 years old.

  Billy was radiant. “Why didn’t you bring your camera? This is our last day together. I want to remember everything. Sometimes I feel that life opens up like those Japanese fans with pictures on them. Everything seems so beautiful and intense. I hate it that we live from one minute to the next. I want to keep everything. I don’t want the minutes to fly away. I want to keep every second intact in my mind.”