The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  In fact, this was the most depressing thought I had ever had. If you stay high enough you never wonder what will become of you. A large joint was waiting in my jacket pocket. How I longed to smoke it. Somewhere near me was adult life: I knew it. I could feel it breathing down my neck. Professor’s wife smokes dope constantly must see shrink. Must grow up. Must find out why she cannot be straight. Why she refuses to enter the adult world. And so on. And Thorne—much sympathy for Thorne—for example, the chairman of the department’s wife: “Dear Thorne, you poor thing! All alone in that house with a drug addict! When Ann has been sedated why don’t you come over and have dinner with us and our lovely niece Allison and after Ann has been committed to a mental institution, you and Allison can establish a meaningful and truly adult relationship.”

  The thing that divides the children from the adults is that children know it’s us against them—how right they are—and adults are children who grew up and are comfortable being them. Two terrible images flashed before me. One was that life was like an unruly horse that rears up and kicks you in the head. And the other was that my life was like a pane of glass being carried around by a nervous and incompetent person who was bound to let it slip and shatter into zillions of pieces on the pavement. My futureless life, besides being shattered and rearing up, unwound endlessly before me. What was around for me to be? There did not seem to be very much of anything. Suddenly I felt a rush of jaunty courage, the kind you feel when everything has bottomed out and just about every old thing is lost.

  “Thorne,” I said. “I smoke marijuana unceasingly and always have. What do you think of that?”

  “Incessantly,” said Thorne.

  “Thorne,” I said. “I have been stoned from the first minute you laid eyes on me and I am stoned now.”

  He regarded me for a moment. “You mean, you came to my class high?” Thorne said. “And you’re high now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was stoned in your class and I am stoned right now but not as stoned as I want to be. So I am going to take this great big gigantic reefer out of my pocket and light it up and I am going to share it with you.”

  He looked shocked.

  “You can get in jail for smoking that stuff, Ann,” he said in an awed voice.

  “An interesting locution, Thorne,” I said. He stopped looking awed and began to look rather keen and hungry. I realized with a sudden jolt of happiness that I could very well change my husband’s life in one easy step.

  “Take this thing and inhale it,” I said.

  “How can I when I don’t smoke?” Thorne said.

  “Make an effort. Try hard and be careful,” I said. “Go slow and don’t exhale for a long time.”

  “How long?” Thorne asked.

  “Oh, a half an hour or so.” He inhaled successfully several times. In a little while he was high as a kite.

  “My,” he said, “this certainly is an interesting substance. I feel I’ve been standing here for a few centuries. My hands are cold and my mouth is dry. Are these symptoms?”

  For an hour Thorne went from room to room having impressions. He was having a wonderful time. Finally, he sat down.

  “Were you stoned on our wedding day?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “On our honeymoon?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I see,” said Thorne. “In other words, you’re like this all the time.”

  I said more or less, mostly more.

  “In other words,” said Thorne, “since you are like this all the time, you have no idea what it’s like to be with me when you’re not like this.”

  That seemed logical to me.

  “In other words,” Thorne said, “you have no idea what it’s like to be with me when you aren’t like this.”

  I said that sounded very like his previous other words, and that such a thought had never occurred to me.

  “This is terrible, Ann,” said Thorne. “It isn’t normal. Of course, this stuff is pretty interesting and all, but you can’t be stoned all the time.”

  “I can,” I said.

  “Yes, but it must be wrong. There must be something terribly wrong, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, no,” I said.

  “But, Ann, in other words, this is not normal reality. You have not been perceiving normal reality. How long has it been, Ann, since you actually perceived normal reality?”

  “This is normal reality, silly,” I said.

  “Yes, well, but I mean I’m sure there is some reason why it’s not right to be this way all the time.”

  “There may be, but I can’t think of it. Besides,” I added, “you seem to be having a swell old time.”

  “That cannot be gainsaid,” said Thorne.

  “Or cannot not be gainsaid.”

  “What does that mean, anyway?” said Thorne. “But never mind. The fact is that if you’ve been high all this time, we don’t know each other at all, really.”

  “What,” I said, thinking with sudden longing of the hashish upstairs, “is knowable?”

  “An interesting point,” said Thorne. “Maybe in the open knowableness of things their sheer knowableness is obscured. In other words, light darkening light, if you see what I mean.”

  I did see. I looked at my husband with great affection, realizing that he had possibilities I had not counted on.

  “What about your affair with Lionel Browning?” Thorne said. “Is that knowable?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Lionel Browning is responsible only for the very substance that has put you in this state of mind, see?”

  “I do see,” Thorne said. “I see. In other words, you sit around and get high together.”

  “Often we stand up and get high together.”

  “And I as a professor can never join you since that would be undignified, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, then, in honor of Lionel and in the interests of further study, let’s have a little more of this stuff, okay?”

  “A very good idea,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Thorne, stretching out on the couch. “Let’s carry this one step further.”

  “An interesting locution,” I said. “I wonder how it works. In what way can a step be carried?”

  Thorne sat up. He looked puzzled. “It must go like this: the step is the province of the foot, without which there can be no step. The foot is carried by the body, but the action of the step is carried by foot. Therefore the step is to the foot as a baby is to its mother. And so it can be said that the foot is the mother of the step, or rather, the step is the potential baby of the foot.”

  I thought about that for a very long time.

  “Say, Ann,” Thorne said. “Where’s the more we’re supposed to have?”

  “It’s illegal, Thorne,” I said. “We could get in jail for simply being in the same room with it.”

  “Get it if you have it,” Thorne said.

  I brought down a bag of Linnie’s top quality and my lump of hash. This I scraped with our sharpest kitchen knife and sprinkled deftly on the unrolled reefer, I rolled wonderfully. Thorne was impressed, and he was intrigued by watching me do something I had obviously done millions of times but not in front of him.

  “You’re awfully good at that,” he said.

  “Years of practice,” I said. “Now, Thorne, why have you never told me how much Lionel Browning looks like me?”

  “Because he does not look like you,” said Thorne. “You have the same loafers, that’s all.”

  “We are virtually identical,” I said.

  “Ann, this mind-impairing substance has impaired your mind. Lionel Browning and you look nothing alike. Now are you going to roll those things all night or are you going to smoke them?”

  The thing about history is, most people just live through it. You never know what moment may turn out to be of profound historical significance. When you are meandering near the stream of current events, you do not know when you have dipped
your toe into the waters of significance. I like to think that as I passed that joint to my husband, a new era opened. The decade was fairly new, and just about everything was about to happen. In what other era could a nice young thing pass a marijuana cigarette to her straight-laced husband?

  In those days potheads liked to try to track down their fellow heads. Everyone had a list of suspects. William Blake was on everyone’s list. On Linnie’s list was Gerard Manley Hopkins. It amused him inexhaustibly to imagine the Jesuit father smoking dope and writing in sprung rhythm. I myself could not imagine any straight person writing those poems and as I watched a happy, glazed expression take possession of my husband’s features, I had cause to think of my favorite Hopkins poem—“The Windhover”—which contains the line, “my heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”

  I felt full of achievement and mastery—Thorne being the victim and beneficiary of both. Getting him stoned was a definite achievement of some sort or other.

  I said to Thorne: “What do you think of it?”

  “It produces a strange and extremely endearing form of cerebral energy,” he said.

  “Yes,” I sighed in agreement. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “It produces unhealthy mental excitement,” Thorne said.

  Suddenly I was full of optimism and hope for the future.

  “Oh, Thorne,” I said in a happy voice. “Isn’t this fun?”

  And as Thorne has frequently pointed out, that very well could have been the slogan for the years to come.

  Family Happiness

  Everyone in Polly’s family was odd in some way or other. Her mother, Wendy, got everybody’s name wrong, and once she got it wrong, she stood by it. For example she called Douglas Stern “Derwood” and had for fifteen years. She could never remember the names of Polly’s school friends (unless they were the children of her friends) and referred to them as “the little Underwood girl,” “the little Rice girl,” and “the Harbison girl”—Wendy had not liked the Harbison girl at all, and so she did not put “little” in front of her name. Wendy also got the names of famous people wrong. She did not call Pablo Picasso “Carlos” as her family joked she did, but she might as well have. Her real name was Hortensia, and her sisters—they had been the Mendoza sisters—were Carmelita, called Lila; Hildegarde, called Hattie; and Graciela, who was not, as one might have expected, called Grace but Nancy. This explained, it was felt, Wendy’s problem getting names straight.

  Polly was flanked by two difficult brothers. The younger, Henry, Jr., had one passion in life and that was aerodynamics. As a child he had stayed in his room streamlining kites and making model airplanes. He had been allergic as a child to a great many ubiquitous substances such as cow’s milk, dust, and feathers. He had shocked the family by going to engineering school—the Solo-Millers did not know any engineers and did not know what sort of people they were. At engineering school he had met a Czech girl named Andreya, and they had gotten married. Andreya’s English was either scanty or she was shy. She rarely spoke. Polly said that Henry and Andreya communicated algebraically and did not need normal speech. Andreya, who was also an engineer, was a vegetarian, a fact neither she nor Henry had bothered to tell anyone. For several years as they watched her pass up the roast beef and the spring lamb, the family felt she was trying to starve herself, although she was always as healthy as a horse. A lovely plate of vegetables could easily have been provided her, if anyone had known.

  Polly’s older brother was Paul, also known to his mother as Polly. And since Polly’s father was Henry, Sr., this gave Wendy only two names to get straight. Paul had always been solitary and cranky. He was said to be very brilliant, but since he was so silent no one had ever heard him say a brilliant thing. Like his father he was a lawyer so it was felt that his partners got the benefit of the brilliance he possessed. As for Henry, Jr., who was also said to be very brilliant, no one except Andreya understood his field. Paul should have been married but was not. He did not show any signs of being homosexual—in the Solo-Miller family that meant taking more of an interest in the theatre or opera than was socially required. In fact he had a consort—a woman slightly older than himself who owned a fashionable antique store and had twin teenage daughters. He had not brought this woman—Wendy referred to her as such—to the family, but they were often seen at the symphony, which was Paul’s passion, sharing an opened score.

  Polly’s father was rather mad. He believed all food should be washed before being cooked, even eggs in the shell. No one paid much attention to this except for Polly, who as a teenager had once put a chicken into the washing machine. The food at the Solo-Millers was generally wonderful. Thus Henry, Sr., was constantly lied to. He was told that things which had not been washed had. He had many crotchets about nutrition and was always told that the butter on his plate was margarine and that every vegetable was verifiably organic.

  As for Polly, Polly was marvelous. The family doted on her, but no one paid much attention to her. She was the solid, normal one—friendly, cheerful, good-tempered. She had no oddities at all and reminded her family what they would have been like if they hadn’t been so unusual—a word Polly felt had only a pejorative connotation. She was good-looking—all the Solo-Millers were—a good cook, good at games, could write nonsense verse, remembered everyone’s name, got the shy to speak and the timid to come forward. Polly was married to a man named Henry Demarest who was also a lawyer and they had two children. The joke was that Polly had married a lawyer named Henry so as not to confuse poor Wendy who got everything so screwed up.

  This was the family that people without family, or with a family in trouble, or a family that no longer worked, looked to. And looking to the Solo-Millers made people feel how unfair life is. They had money, good looks, and a sense of cohesion. They behaved like an exclusive tribe, and it was felt that the Solo-Millers preferred the company of their fellow Solo-Millers to that of anyone else. Wendy’s sisters were all considered part of this tribe. The Solo-Millers drew people into their circle, but the family, of course, came first.

  Everything about them looked attractive, including their oddities. And so even though Paul was abnormally silent and would not reveal his lady friend, and Henry, Jr.’s wife would not speak English, and Wendy got everything wrong and Henry, Sr., had an opinion on every subject, the family was together rather a lot.

  They gathered for Sunday brunch, for birthdays and anniversaries, on New Year’s Day, on Christmas Eve as well as Easter Sunday. They were an old, old Jewish family of the sort that is more identifiably old American than Jewish. They gathered at Passover but not at Chanukah, and they went to synagogue twice a year on the two High Holy days. On Yom Kippur they did not fast but had family lunch in the afternoon.

  They had their Thanksgiving turkey, Easter ham, Christmas goose, and Passover capon off English Victorian plates. Their silver was old Danish. They liked great big cut crystal glasses and cut crystal wine glasses. Proper wine glasses seemed precious and rather arriviste to them.

  On an early spring day, Polly sat in a big leather chair in her father’s study. The Solo-Millers had a duplex apartment the study of which was on the second floor. Polly could faintly hear the sound of her children, Pete, six, and Dee-Dee, four, downstairs annoying their father and grandfather. The Sunday paper was on Polly’s lap. She had skimmed its contents and was now staring out the window, past the big china bowl of lilies of the valley that Wendy had set on a table in the corner. She was finishing her coffee and waiting until it was the right time to call her best beloved. Polly was having an affair with a man her own age, a painter by the name of Lincoln Bennett. She dialed his number, let it ring once, hung up, and dialed again. It was her signal. He picked up instantly.

  “Yellow dog,” he said.

  “Hello, Linky,” Polly said. “It’s only me.”

  “Only you, huh?” Lincoln said. “I keep getting telephone calls all day long none of which are only you, if only they
were. I assume you’re in the study, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the lawyer and the little grubs are downstairs.”

  “Yes,” said Polly.

  “Then, what, beautiful darling, is our schedule?”

  “Well, I’ve come up with another seminar downtown.”

  “Hmm,” said Lincoln. “The fictitious seminar ploy. It’s a good thing none of them understand what your job is. Can you get down here by three?”

  “In the neighborhood of.”

  “All right, swell Yellow. Bring me some leftover salmon, will you?”

  Lincoln was the only person Polly knew who called her by her given name, which was Dora. He called her any number of things as well—he made them up as he went along. He called her Doe, Dot, Dottie, Dorrit, Doreen, and Dor, which had been corrupted into Dog and then turned to Yellow Dog and Yellow. Lincoln had known Henry, Jr., since grammar school, and the basis of their friendship was kite flying. Many attempts had been made to draw Lincoln into the Solo-Miller orbit. His grandmother, in fact, and Polly’s grandmother had been friends. But Lincoln was not much of a fan of the idea of families, and he found the Solo-Millers, as an artifact, rather antipathetic. They were smug, he felt. If you found them enchanting you said they were eccentric. If you did not, they were annoying. The Solo-Millers did not properly appreciate their beautiful and remarkable Polly, Lincoln felt. Polly was different: privilege had not made her Olympian and snooty like her brother Paul, or arrogant and sulky like Henry, Jr. Catering to those temperaments had made her kind, tenderhearted, and innocent in her feelings. As to the Solo-Millers, they would have liked to collect him. Wendy, of whom he was not fond, had always liked him. “That nice Leonard Bender,” she always said. “So attractive and so well behaved, for a painter.”

  Polly had remet him at one of his openings. She and her husband Henry and her brother Henry had gone to Lincoln’s fancy gallery and sipped white wine while admiring his paintings. He was, in fact, very talented. Furthermore, he was very attractive: tall, lanky, boyish, with an unsmiling face, plain glasses, and a thick shock of straight hair that hung over his forehead. He had a big, almost pouty mouth and, when he smiled, an extremely silly grin. He was wearing the sort of clothes a young fisherman might wear, or they might have been painter’s clothes: a turtleneck sweater, heavy tweed trousers, and heavy shoes that seemed to be oiled and which laced. Polly could tell at once that he was rather loony. And, she was not surprised when, upon introduction, he kissed her on the mouth.