The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  Great works of art are those in which everything fits perfectly, each part revealing the whole. Andrew and Rachel’s love affair worked that way, too. Why else did Rachel read courtly love poems in the bathtub? Why did Andrew refer to Rachel’s visit as a feast? Because the opposite was famine, and it was feast or famine with Andrew Dilks. Moderation was not within the spirit of the thing. Courtly love is, after all, a tradition of thwarted love. If Rachel wished to be cherished in this fashion, she would have to pay the price for it. Comfy, homey domestic life does not send you home on the shuttle inflamed. It does not cause huge telephone bills.

  Rachel, since she had not been given the opportunity, wondered what it would be like to live with Andrew. Why, it would be wonderful, she thought, since she could not see beyond the pleasures of sheer availability. Of course, the mutual friends who introduced them had told Rachel some of the reasons why Andrew’s marriage had broken up. That he insisted on turning off the heat in the winter and sleeping with the bedroom windows open, claiming that he had to cool out mightily in order to get to sleep. That when he stopped smoking and his wife reached for one of the three tasteless filters she liked to smoke in the evening, he flew into a rage and made her smoke in the cellar. That when she brought home a kitten that had lost its mother, Andrew threatened to drown it.

  Rachel chalked that up to the unhappiness of a bad marriage. She knew that Andrew was a tease, and sometimes a cruel one, but she had never been the victim of direct abuse. Instead, Andrew nattered her to death. In New York, they slunk around like beaten dogs for fear of running into his parents’ friends or Carol’s. There was his legal image at stake, he explained. When Rachel reminded Andrew that Carol had left him and was only angry that the legal machinery was so slow in making their divorce final, he brought up Brownie. A fit father for Brownie would not be having an affair. When Rachel suggested that a fit father for Brownie might allow himself the happiness of a stable relationship, he lowered his voice and spoke unhappily of what might turn into a custody fight. That Carol was a perfectly fit mother and that Andrew did not want to be a full-time father was quite beside the point. All eventualities must be covered, Andrew felt. How easily these things get out of hand.

  Rachel, an intelligent girl who favored the rational and orderly, could not believe that Andrew loved her as much as he said he did and not do anything about it. Her expectations were conventional, so of course she had forgotten how mutually exclusive this sort of intense emotional drama and a nice life are.

  Be that as it may, she had allowed herself to sit at a table with what she most loved and could not have. She had gone with Andrew from her apartment to the Dilkses to pick up Brownie. The Dilkses were out, and the housekeeper handed the child over, still rubbing his eyes. Off they went, on a bus to a bar in Rachel’s neighborhood to give Brownie his afternoon hamburger and glass of milk. Andrew said: “You remember Rachel, Brownie.” Rachel remembered taking Brownie to the zoo, holding him up to see the monkeys, cutting up his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She remembered Brownie, who loved her instantly, pulling on her coat. She remembered kissing the top of his white hair.

  “No,” croaked Brownie.

  “Sure you do. She took you to the zoo lots of times. Remember?”

  “Leave him alone,” said Rachel. “There’s no reason for him to remember.” Brownie was three then. He was now five. He didn’t remember at all, but he responded to Rachel all the same. They sat watching Brownie pinch a little piece of clay into a shape that looked vaguely like a hat.

  The truth had been learned and, if Rachel were not so ardent and Andrew so facially deceptive, the truth had been learned a thousand times. There is love and love. Why wasn’t Rachel content knowing that Andrew would always adore her? He doubtless would. Taking care of love in the world—that is, nest building, homemaking, togetherness—is chicken feed in the face of this eternal feeling. If Rachel lived in a tower and Andrew were a gallant courtier, she would be perfectly happy to receive a caged nightingale from time to time, as a symbol, wouldn’t she?

  The women in their beaver coats were leaving. It was getting dark. They took a last look at the pretty threesome. Mournfulness had tinged the features of both Andrew and Rachel. Brownie was still absorbed in his clay—he had a long attention span for such a little boy. Rachel felt that she would scream if nothing was resolved. Then reason intruded. No, she would never marry Andrew and be Brownie’s stepmother. She would not even have a satisfactory love affair. Andrew, if she agreed to see him again, would conduct their meetings like a series of two-car collisions. He would say he loved her and leave early. She looked at him and thought of what they had had. What did they have? Why, feeling. Pure spirit. A way of being that had nothing to do with ordinary life. All she was getting was an education in yearning, which was actually a four-point course in futility.

  She looked at Andrew. He had gotten what he came for: an event, brilliantly emotional, so powerful that she could scarcely believe it wasn’t real. If she let him, Andrew would continue to visit her in this way, leaving him satisfied and her bereft. Andrew sat in contemplation. His expression was one of poignant sadness. He was saying to her: “I love to watch your face move. You have that smile beneath the smile.”

  The women paid their bill. One of them came back to leave the tip. She stopped at the table—she couldn’t help herself.

  “What a lovely child that is,” she said. The last beams of winter light streaked the table. It wasn’t often you saw three people so beautiful, and so beautifully lit.

  The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing

  Once upon a time, I was Professor Thorne Speizer’s stoned wife, and what a time that was. My drug of choice was plain, old-fashioned marijuana—these were the early days when that was what an ordinary person could get. By the time drugs got more interesting, I felt too old to change. I stood four-square behind reefer except when a little opiated hash came along, which was not often.

  Thorne was an assistant professor when I first met him. I took his Introduction to Modern European History—a class I was compelled to take and he was forced to teach. Thorne was twenty-seven and rather a young Turk. I was twenty-one and rather a young pothead. I sat in the back of the class and contemplated how I could get my hands on Thorne and freak him out. I liked the idea that I might bring a little mayhem into the life of a real adult. Thorne was older and had a job. That made him a real citizen in my eyes. He also had an extremely pleasing shape, a beautiful smile, and thick brown hair. His manner in class was absolutely professional and rather condescending. Both of these attitudes gave me the shivers.

  I employed the tricks childish adolescents use to make the substitute math teacher in high school nervous. I stared at his fly. Then I stared at him in a wide-eyed, moronic way. At a point of desperation when I felt he would never notice me, I considered drooling. I smiled in what I hoped was a promising and tempting fashion.

  It turned out that Thorne was not so hard to get. He was only waiting for me to stop being his student and then he pounced on me. I was high during our courtship so I did not actually notice when things got out of hand. I was looking for a little fun. Thorne wanted to get married. I felt, one lazy afternoon when a little high-quality grass had unexpectedly come my way, that a person without ambitions or goals should do something besides smoke marijuana, and marriage was certainly something to do. Furthermore, I was truly crazy about Thorne.

  I got wrecked on my wedding day. I stood in front of the mirror in my wedding dress and stared intently at my stick of grass. You should not smoke this on this day of days, I said to myself, lighting up. Surely if you are going to take this serious step, I said, inhaling deeply, you ought to do it straight.

  You may well imagine how hard it was for an innocent college girl to score in those dark times. You had to run into some pretty creepy types to get what you wanted. These types preferred heavier substances such as smack and goofballs. How very puzzled they were at the sight of a college girl in her loa
fers and loden coat. For a while they thought I was a narc. After they got used to me they urged me to stick out my arm and smack up with them, but I declined. The channels through which you found these types were so complicated that by the time you got to them you forgot exactly how you got to them in the first place, and after a while they died or disappeared or got busted and you were then left to some jerky college boy who sold speed at exam time as well as some sort of homegrown swill that gave you a little buzz and a headache.

  Of course I did not tell Thorne that I used this mild but illegal hallucinogen. He would have been horrified, I believed. I liked believing that. It made me feel very free. Thorne would take care of the worrying and I would get high. I smoked when he was out of the room, or out of the house. I smoked in the car, in the bathroom, in the attic, in the woods. I thanked God that Thorne, like most privileged children, had allergies and for a good half of the year was incapable of detecting smoke in the house. And of course, he never noticed that I was stoned since I had been stoned constantly since the day we met.

  Thorne took me away to a pastoral men’s college where there were sure to be no drugs, I felt. That was an emblem of how far gone I was about him—that I could be dragged off to such an environment. However, a brief scan of the campus turned up a number of goofy stares, moronic giggles, and out-of-it grins. It did not take me long to locate my fellow head.

  In those days professors were being encouraged to relate meaningfully to their students. I did my relating by telephone. Meaningful conversations took place, as follows:

  “Hello, Kenny. Am I calling too early?”

  “Wow, no, hey Mrs. Speizer.”

  “Say, Kenny. Can’t you just call me Ann.” I was only three years older than Kenny but being married to a faculty member automatically made one a different species.

  “Hey,” said Kenny. “I’ll call you Mrs. Ann.”

  “Listen, Kenny. Is it possible to see you today on a matter of business?”

  “Rightaway, Mrs. Ann. I’ll meet you at six in front of the Shop-Up.”

  That’s how it was done in those days. You met your connection in an inconspicuous place—like the supermarket, and he dropped a nickel bag—generally all these boys sold—on top of your groceries and you slipped him the money. Things were tough all right. Furthermore, the administrations of these colleges were obsessed by the notion that boys and girls might be sleeping together. Presumably the boys would have had to sleep with the drab girls from the girls’ college ten miles away which had a strict curfew. Or they would be forced to hurl themselves at the campus wives who were of two varieties: ruddy, cheerful mothers of three with master’s degrees, private incomes, foreign cars, and ten-year marriages. Then there were older wives with grey hair, grown sons, old mink coats, and station wagons. These women drank too much sherry at parties and became very, very still. Both kinds of wife played tennis, and their houses smelled evocatively of a substance my ultimate connection, Lionel Browning, would call “Wasp must.” Both of these kinds of wives felt that students were animals; and they didn’t like me very much either.

  I was quite a sight. I was twenty-three and I wore little pink glasses. I wore blue jeans, polished boots, and men’s shirts. For evening wear I wore extremely short skirts, anticipating the fashion by two or three years. I drove the car too fast, was not pregnant, and liked to listen to the Top 40. Faculty wives looked at me with fear—the fear that I knew something they did not know. When they had been my age they had already produced little Amanda or Jonathan and were about to start little Jeremy or Rachel. They wore what grown-up women wore, and they gave bridge and tea parties. These women lived a life in which drugs were what you gave your child in the form of orange-flavored aspirin so they did not, for example, go rooting around the campus looking for someone off of whom to score.

  The older wives said to Thorne, whom they adored: “Gracious, Thorne, don’t Ann’s legs get cold in those little skirts? Goodness, Thorne, I saw Ann racing around in the car with the radio on so loud.” These women hadn’t seen anyone like me before, but years later after a few campus riots they would see a much more virulent and hostile form of me in large numbers. From my vantage point between the world of students and the world of faculty it was plain to see how much professors hated students who, since they had not yet passed through the heavy gates of adulthood, were considered feckless, stupid, with no right to anything.

  It was assumed that Thorne was married to a hot ticket, but no one was sure what sort. This pleased Thorne—he did not mind having a flashy wife, and since I never misbehaved I caused him no pain, but I looked as if I were the sort to misbehave and this secretly pleased him. My image on campus however was not my overriding concern. I was mostly looking for decent grass.

  Connecting on the college campus of the day was troublesome. Everyone was paranoid. I was lucky that I did not have to add money to my worries—I had a tiny bit of inheritance, just enough to keep me happy. I was a good customer when I could find a supplier, mostly some volelike and furtive-looking boy. Those blithe young things who spent their high school days blowing dope in suburban movie houses had not yet appeared on campus—how happy we would all be to see them! One’s connection was apt to flunk out or drop out, and once in a while they would graduate. As a result, I was passed hand to hand by a number of unsavory boys. For example, the disgusting Steve, who whined and sniffled and sold very inferior dope. Eventually Steve was thrown out of school and I was taken over by another unpleasant boy by the name of Lester Katz. He carried for Lionel Browning, and Lionel Browning was the real thing.

  Lionel, who allowed himself to be called Linnie by those close to him, had laid low for his first three years at college. In his senior year he expanded from a self-supplier to a purveyor of the finest grass to only the finest heads—by that time there were enough to make such a sideline profitable. Lionel’s daddy was an executive in a large company that had branches abroad. Lionel had grown up in Colombia, Hong Kong, and Barbados, three places known for fine cannabis. He was a shadowy figure at college. He lived off campus and was not often seen except by my husband Thorne, whose favorite student he was. I had never seen him—he sent Lester to bring me my dope, with messages such as: “Mr. Browning hopes you will enjoy this sampling.” It killed Lester that he called Lionel “Mr. Browning.” He said it killed Lionel that Professor Speizer’s wife was such a head. When he said that, I looked into his beady little eyes and it seemed a very good idea for me to go and check out this Lionel Browning who very well might have it in mind to blackmail me. Or maybe he was the uncool sort—the sort who might sidle up to his favorite professor and say: “That dope I laid on your wife sure is choice.”

  Lionel lived off campus in a frame house. Only very advanced students lived off campus. On campus rooms were very plush—suites with fireplaces and leaded glass windows. But the off campus fellows considered themselves above the ordinary muck of college life. These boys were either taking drugs or getting laid or were serious scholars who could not stand the sight of their fellow boy in such quantities.

  Lionel lived on the top floor and as I mounted the stairs—I had, of course, made an appointment—I expected that he would be a slightly superior edition of the runty, unattractive boys who sold dope. This was not the case at all. He looked, in fact, rather like me. He was blond, tall but small boned, and he wore blue jeans, loafers with tassels, a white shirt, and a blue sweater—almost the replica of what I was wearing. He smiled a nice, crooked smile, offered me a joint, and I knew at once that I had found what I was looking for.

  Lionel did not fool around. He got bricks—big Survey of English Literature—size bricks of marijuana that came wrapped in black plastic and taped with black tape. Underneath this wrapping was a rectangular cake of moist, golden greenish brown grass—a beautiful sight. It was always a pleasure to help Linnie clean this attractive stuff. We spread newspapers on the floor and strained it through a coarse sieve. The dregs of this Linnie would sell to what he
called the lower forms of life.

  The lower forms included almost everyone on campus. The higher forms included people he liked. His own family, he said, was a species of mineral-like vegetation that grew on lunar soil. There were four children, all blond, each with a nickname: Leopold (Leafy), Lionel (Linnie), Mary Louise (Mally), and Barbara (Bumpy or Bumps). His family drove Linnie crazy, and the thought of their jolly family outings and jolly family traditions caused him to stay high as often as possible, which was pretty often.

  In matters of dope, it depends on who gets to you first. I was gotten to in Paris, the summer before I went off to college. I looked up the nice sons of some friends of my parents, and they turned me on. I had been sent to practice French and to have a broadening cultural experience. I learned to say, among other things: “Yes, this African kif is quite heavenly. Do you have more? How much more? How much will you charge me per matchbox?”

  The nice boys I looked up had just come back from Spain. They were giant heads and they had giant quantities. These boys were happy to get their mitts on such a receptive blank slate as me. Pot, they told me, was one of the great aids to mental entertainment. It produced unusual thoughts and brilliant insights. It freed the mind to be natural—the natural mind being totally open to the hilarious absurdities of things. It mixed the senses and gave flavor to music. All in all, well worth getting into. We would get stoned and go to the movies or listen to jazz or hang around talking for what may have been minutes and may have been hours. This was more fun than I ever imagined, so my shock when I went off to college and discovered my fellow head was profound. My fellow head was sullen, alienated, mute when high, inexpressive, and no fun at all. Until I met Lionel, I smoked alone.