The Lone Pilgrim (18 page)

There was also a fat white cat who could be found sitting by its owner's gate in the morning. Everyone stopped to pet it. If you stroked it, it would follow you halfway up the street and then walk back and wait for the next person to walk by.

The time of my most terrible sadness over Alden occurred during the winter, when the white cat stayed in. By the spring I felt that I was on the way to keeping myself together. The cat appeared on the street again.

One morning I stopped to pet it. I kneeled down next to it and scratched its ear. This cat was not discriminating. It was nothing I did but a whim of the cat's that made it jump into my arms and put its paws on either side of my neck. One can only fight sentimentality so long. The cat licked my cheek. I burst into tears.

For months I had been living in a cave with my own small demons. Now I was ready to go out into the desert, which was my life, through which I was bound to stumble. Unlike Saint Anthony, I had no militancy of faith to bring to bear against pain. A good bout with the devil does not leave you free of temptation and misery. My tears over that cat were simply tears of envy over what would never be mine to give again: that witless, spontaneous affection; that hungry, purposeless availability; that innocence.

The Smile Beneath the Smile

In the restaurant section of a local bar a man, a woman, and a small boy sat at a table having lunch. It was a cold January afternoon—the lazy part of the day when the lunch crowd had mostly left and the regular drinkers had not yet arrived. Two women, tired from shopping, dawdled over their hamburgers, their attention casually focused on the pretty family at the next table.

The man was in his early thirties, faunlike, boyish. The girl was in her middle twenties, curly-haired and lithe, with wide gray eyes. Both wore blue jeans and expensive sweaters. Between them sat the little boy, a towhaired child of exceptional beauty who was playing with a lump of clay.

The man was Andrew Dilks, and the boy was his son, Brownie, whose full name was William Brownwyn Dilks. The girl was Rachel Manheim, and she was well aware that they were being watched. It had happened before.

Yes, they were beautiful: Brownie in his own right; and Andrew and Rachel, both attractive, had a glowing edge in their features. They had been lovers a year ago and had parted with a good deal of pain, but neither had been able to entirely give the other up. Although communication between them had ceased—Rachel was in New York and Andrew in Boston—they were as bound as if they had been together. The source of this bond was of little interest to Andrew. He felt it as a power and a pull—a pull toward Rachel and the power to affect her. Rachel, who had spent a year amazed that she could not get over Andrew, now realized that the bond they shared was one of awful sadness. Nothing good would ever happen to them again, no matter with what ardent innocence they approached each other.

They had met in the nicest way—introduced by mutual friends at a dinner party. On New Year's Eve they had fallen in love under the best circumstances: neither was interested in falling in love, so when it happened, they knew it was destiny. Andrew's life was crowded, so he felt, with obligations. He had been in the middle of his divorce from the former Carol Brownwyn. His responsibilites existed as he liked them to exist: neat, numerous, and plain as the nose on his face: Brownie, separation papers, the lawyers, his parents. Andrew conducted his life as if it were a decathlon. It kept him from feeling, or so his beloved Rachel had told him.

He and Rachel had parted shortly before his divorce became final. But with the divorce had come a new roster of problems: custody, grandparents, child support payments. When he was not attending to these unpleasant matters or was not engaged in his work—he taught pure math to advanced graduate students—it was Rachel who floated in front of his eyes. That he had hurt her didn't occur to him. He merely thought of her, of her hair, of her face in repose, the set of her shoulders, her laugh, the smile that lit her face. Late at night when he was half asleep, he composed wild, unfocused letters to her, letters which he forgot the next morning but which left him with the sense that he ought to
do
something about her. He had no idea what that might be.

Rachel's life was crowded, too, but not with obligations. She worked for a rare book firm and entertained a faithful set of friends. She enjoyed her work and had been making notes for a monograph on an Italian printer of the eighteenth century. Still, not a day went by—not a minute it seemed—that she did not think of Andrew. He hovered over her. He sat next to her on the bus. She heard his inflections in her own voice. She caught herself using phrases she had picked up from him.

This was their first meeting in a year, and time had not dimmed what they felt. They could not take their eyes off each other, but what was operating between them was longing and wariness. Their affair and its aftermath had marked them both. Each had been over it so often alone that the particulars—what he had promised or what she had said—were clouded by the event itself, and now they behaved as if something dire had
happened
to them unawares. Yes, they loved each other, but love in these situations is never enough. Rachel had written Andrew a terrible letter. He remembered the letter, but not what prompted it. Rachel remembered how he balked when after months of listening to his declarations of love, she had suggested they stop commuting and settle down together. He had simply turned on his heel, citing the complexities of his legal situation and his need for what he called a “clean legal image.” And the questions Rachel asked about their future he treated like the idealistic statements children make about world peace. But what difference did it make?

The women at the next table continued to look at them, as who would not? When Rachel looked herself, she saw the source of her deepest love mired hopelessly in misunderstanding, countercharges, and cross fires. Andrew simply saw something he loved, would love, and that was the end of it. Two more simple people would have either married or parted and stayed that way, but such easily determined love does not spring up between romantics; and Andrew and Rachel, had they but known, were nothing if not hard-core romantics. Romantic love takes its power from deprivation and innocence. It would be easy to subject it to the flat scrutiny of the psychological, except that spirit is involved here, not pathology.

The women next to them were chatting and eavesdropping at the same time. Shopping bags rested at their feet. As they drank their Coca-Colas, they were witness to a moment of beauty—the sight of that charged-up couple across the way. They listened as Rachel talked to Brownie, whose stepmother she once longed to be. Her attitude was loving, but cautious. She was teaching him to make a figure out of his dirty, yellow clay. Andrew said: “Remember, Brownie, when Mama gave you that clay? She told you you could turn it into people.”

Brownie said: “Mommy went skiing.”

Andrew replied: “She'll be back soon.”

At this, the women at the next table turned back to their conversation. Some of the charm had gone out of the scene. Why, that pretty girl wasn't the child's mother after all! Instead of an exceptional family, they realized that what they had been watching was not so exceptional after all—a divorced man, his child, and some poor girl who got in the middle of it.

If you live in a city, you cannot avoid inadvertently opening your life to strangers in public places. When you are in love, happily or unhappily, you find eyes all over you. The world is full of women—ordinary citizens, neighbors—sipping Cokes and looking on with yearning, envy, pity, or disapproval. If you turned your head to look at them, you might wonder who they are, what they want, or what secret lovers haunt their pasts. But Andrew and Rachel, of course, didn't. For, although it reaches toward the Other, love is a self-involving pastime, and the fact of the matter is that no one else is ever as glamorous, as glowing. A love affair will teach anyone with sense a thing or two about aesthetics: love is artifice, like painting.

There were people in the world who found Andrew Dilks an ordinary-looking man. He had round eyes, a flat nose, and wavy hair. One of his front teeth was charmingly crooked, but so are the front teeth of a great many men who have been to good schools. When Andrew was with Rachel, he was not ordinary at all: he glowed. Rachel was a pretty girl by any standards, but in her state of love and longing and confusion, she was a positive vision. Although it is a cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, most people feel that this useful phrase simply covers the vagaries of subjective taste. While this is true for paintings, with living beings in a highly charged emotional condition, the fact is that sheer faith in the beauty of the Other makes the Other beautiful. Andrew believed Rachel to be beautiful, and the power of his gaze—the gaze of the ultimate beholder—worked some change in her. A room full of people would have found her glorious under these conditions.

It is no accident that love finds expression in poetry. Love has nothing to do with personality. It has to do with form. Translate this into emotional terms, as Rachel was doing, and you find that romantic love has nothing to do with content, with commitment or weddings. It only has to do with love.

Love's homelier aspects are domestic. Consider Rachel and Andrew at Rachel's home. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. Andrew faced her in front of the fireplace. He had just rung the doorbell on the off chance of finding her in. This was no mere whim: he had been thinking of coming to see her when he had the chance and now he had. He and Brownie were in New York staying with Andrew's parents, since he had custody of his son during spring vacation, and it was easier to cope in the presence of a cook, cleaning woman, doorman, and two doting grandparents who were happy to take the flesh of their flesh to the zoo, or watch over him during his nap. Brownie was uptown, napping.

Above the fireplace was a mirror which reflected Andrew and Rachel's strained profiles. Their knees were shaking. Their palms were cold. The desire to embrace and say the hell with it, to kiss and wipe everything away, was rampant in both of them. Rachel could almost feel Andrew's soft lips on her brow. They were so close, they were almost touching. How easy it would have been to break the spell, and two less complicated people might have, especially with a lighter history behind them.

Rachel had already asked Andrew why he had appeared out of the blue. He had already said that he simply had to see her, and she had already wondered how much Brownie had to do with this: wasn't it nicer to spend your time with your child and your former lover than with only your child? She knew how much that question would wound Andrew and how close her supposition was to the truth. She knew as well, since this scene had been played over and over in their past and contributed a large part to their decline, that if she simply accepted the timbre in his voice and the stricken, passionate look on his face and gave in, several hours later he would tell her with much sadness that he had to leave. There was Brownie to look after, his clean legal image, his parents to answer to. She knew that as he stood there enraptured, he was calculating how much time he would allow himself to spend with her. What a sorry pass those faces in the mirror would come to.

Rachel said: “I wish you hadn't come. I want to see you, more than I can say, but I was in the business of biting the bullet and trying to get over you. Seeing you only sets me back, especially when I know you came here with nothing on your mind and that since you've got Brownie, you know in advance that you can't really see me at all.”

During this speech, Andrew's face went through the fine tunings that had caused Rachel to love him from the first. The sweet smile of contentment—contentment in her presence—faded and was replaced with something pinched and exquisite at the same time. His eyes opened with pain and tenderness. Rachel flinched. That look was the beam of the headlights on the car that was about to run her over. He placed his arms on her shoulders and held his warm cheek next to hers.

“Oh, my God, Rachel, I love you so. I've always loved you. You're the angel that sits on my shoulder. At night when I'm working, I talk to you. You've become my thought process.”

His tone was one of piercing sorrow. Rachel, who felt a sharp ache under her ribs, remembered that her moments of highest disappointment and loss had been accompanied by a terrible insight. It was true then. It was true now. The beautiful Andrew Dilks, who often watched her so closely when she talked that his lips moved with hers, did a brilliant imitation of a human being, except that the proportions were all wrong. His intensity was not born of excessive feeling, but of its lack. It was simply compensation.

But beauty sells the product every time, and Andrew Dilks had never come across so receptive a public as Rachel Manheim, so he sold her the only thing he had: a small need, easily fulfilled. If she cried, if she said she loved him, he would go away, not happy, but satisfied. But he would go away.
Go away!
After all that, Rachel could never quite believe that what he wanted was a quick hit of pure spirit, an emotional recharge that made him feel connected with the rest of his species.

Rachel spent her days working for the family Meyerhoff, four generations of rare bookmen. Three years engaged in this work was turning her into an expert, but at first it had amazed her that bibliophiles often like the binding better than the content. She had seen grown men spend vast sums on gold-embossed leather wrapped around an unreadable book. As she contemplated Andrew, who still held her in his sweet, tormented gaze, she realized she was perfect for her work. This beautiful binding stood before her, wrapped in his lavish emotions without any text. Andrew might love her, but he would not stay with her, would not marry her, would not arrange his life in order to let her into it, would not promise anything, except that he would carry his love for her throughout his life, wherever he was, which certainly wouldn't be around her. And what romantic lover can spurn a gift as rare as that?