The Lone Pilgrim (6 page)

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 not 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.”

He yawned and stretched, and fell back onto the blanket with a happy smile. A few minutes later he was asleep.

That happy boy had had his lunch. Full of the moment he went off to sleep as easily as a cat. I looked over at him and felt a pang of something—either tenderness or rage, I didn't know which. I realized that it was occurring to me to seduce him. That's what happens when you go out into the world: you discover yourself in the grip of feelings you did not know you owned. I wanted to seduce him and streak him with confusion and disorder as clearly as a disappointed lover mutilates a tree with the initials of the girl who turned him down. I could show him a thing about heartbreak and pathos and send him back to Marina marked for life—by me.

Of course, he would learn his lesson. If I met him by chance in an airport in ten years he would barely remember me. Or if he did, he would show me a picture of his wife and it would not be Marina. He would have dozens of Marinas.

I took a walk to the stream and sat beside it, watching the water rush past. Above me was a big, blue Scottish sky, crowded with bright clouds. I was going home. Someday all of this would be something to remember. I had books of photographs of Raggy and not one of Francis Cluzens. I had been careful never to take his picture. Certain things should never be captured—they ought to stay in your memory and serve as a sharp edge of broken glass to cut yourself on.

How lucky Billy was to have such tidy notions. Love
was
process to him. A vision such as his incorporated everything, even a random event that, if it happened to him, he would doubtless like to stretch out endlessly. Could you live if you remembered everything, or live properly if you remembered nothing at all?

When I got back Billy woke up and rubbed his eyes. He yawned, revealing the tender pink inside of his mouth. How happy he was! He was out in the countryside with a divorced American woman who was returning to her first husband; who wore her hair in a chignon; who carried a silk scarf and who had been through the fiery crucible and emerged on top of the mountain, a finer alloy.

He took my hand and walked me around the graveyard. Near the church's ruined wall was a crypt. He tugged my hand, and we sat down beside it. From his back pocket he took his candle stub, lit it with my cigarette lighter, and placed it on the crypt. From his pocket he drew a sheet of airmail paper and a pen. He leaned against me. Like most people who have been asleep, he smelled warm and sweet.

“Can you hand me my Italian dictionary?” he said. “It's in my jacket pocket.”

As he wrote he leaned closer to me. From time to time he looked at me and smiled as if we were soul mates.

The little candle flickered on the crypt. I looked over his shoulder and with the remnants of my college Italian I could make out:

Dear One:

This is a beautiful moment in my life. I am so close to you I do not have to count the hours until we are together. We are as near as two people ever were. Each breath I take is yours. These moments are printed on my heart forever.

A Girl Skating

I grew up in the shadow of a great man—James Honnimer, the famous American poet. My family lived on a college campus, and Honnimer was its sensation. His classes had to be divided into sections; his readings caused traffic jams on the local roads. When he came back from collecting the awards he was always winning, the receptions in his honor were held in the chapel, since no one's house was big enough. When he played tennis, his court was lined with students who loved to watch their hero sweat like other men; and when he went off campus, you could feel the change—something stopped happening.

When I was young, Honnimer was always on hand as the birthday-party entertainment. He loved a gathering of children—especially the bright offspring of his academic colleagues. If the fathers would not let themselves be made fools of, Honnimer would. He got down on all fours and growled like a bear. He let children ride on his back, and he swung them in his arms until their heads almost touched the ceiling. He could imitate the standard barnyard animals, and he could trumpet like an elephant. He taught children how to hang from doorjambs by their fingertips. Most of all, he liked to make up stories. At any birthday party, you could find him on the couch, surrounded by children, whose feet barely cleared the seat cushions. His children's books started out as stories told at these parties, and after they were published, he read from them aloud and showed the pictures. I hated him.

I was the only child of two professors. My father taught advanced mathematics; he was Honnimer's chess partner. My mother taught botany, and she supplied Honnimer with the Latin names of flowers that he used in his poems. We were a quiet family. Honnimer mistook that quietude for sadness; his poems indicate that he thought we were sad. So into our house he brought noise: large gestures, fierce opinions, his big laugh. My parents, who were extremely fond of him, did not mind having their peace disturbed in this way, and the calmness of their lives seemed to soothe him. They were not silent people, but they had the tidy, orderly habits of scientists. Their colleagues encouraged their own children to display emotions, lest they suffer from repression in later life. My parents would not have minded a demonstrative child, but I was not one. I was a tidy, orderly child.

The stories I was read as a little girl that impressed me most were stories about Indian children, who did not cry when they were hurt. Instead, they were brave and fleet, and learned to make useful implements out of willow twigs. I was let loose to wander in the woods and pastures that bordered the campus, where I spent as much time as possible practicing to be an Indian.

My parents were bookish, and so was I, but they taught me all the other things they had loved as children. I learned to swim, fish, and sail. On weekends, my mother took me bird walking; and when I could read and write, my parents presented me with a pair of child's field glasses and a notebook in which to start my life list. Honnimer knew all this and found it enchanting.

I was the child he loved best, and there was no escaping him. When he read to a group of children, I was the one he read for. I never sat on the couch with him, but in my own chair or on the floor in the corner. When he came to the house, he tried to draw me out by asking what birds I had seen, or he made up a bird and asked me what it was. In the spring and summer, he brought me birds' eggs and feathers, bouquets of wild flowers. This upset me in a way that I did not understand. It made me uneasy that he knew about my collection of birds' eggs, my shoebox of feathers, and my book of pressed flowers. I did not see why he should bother to know anything at all about me. He was an adult, and I was a child. His attentions made me more quiet and solemn than I generally was. When I did not respond as other children did, Honnimer was further delighted by what he called my “infant seriousness.”

Everyone else adored him. He and his wife, Lucy, were the most popular couple on the campus. Lucy had blond hair and wore cashmere sweaters. She often went to his lectures and sat in the front row, smiling up at him. When he ran out of cigars, he would look down at her and she would hand him one. She either could not have or did not want children. The two of them kept three large black cats, one of whom produced a litter a year. There was a waiting list for these kittens and also an unofficial lottery to see who got to drive with Honnimer when he took his sports car to the next county to be serviced. If Lucy went with him, they always left a few disappointed students hanging around the parking lot, watching Honnimer and Lucy drive off with the top down—Honnimer in his army jacket, Lucy with a silk scarf over her hair. Undergraduates fell in love with the idea of them.

Honnimer crept up on me little by little. When I went out with my fishing gear or field glasses, he always spotted me. He was either in his car on the same road or crossing my path on his way to the tennis courts. I became so used to these encounters that I started to expect them. As soon as I saw Honnimer, I saw myself: a long-legged, black-haired child wearing khaki shorts and carrying a fishing rod. I could scarcely take my field glasses off their peg without thinking about myself.

Besides learning how to be an Indian, I taught myself to ice-skate. My parents started me on the college pond, holding out a broom handle for me to steady myself with. As soon as I got my balance, I began to watch the better skaters. I studied what they did and imitated it. Once you get the feel of ice, it doesn't fight you.

When the ice on the pond got mushy or started to crack, my parents gave me bus fare to go to the rink in town. There the townies sat in the bleachers, drinking hot chocolate and kissing. My peers shouted and fell down on the ice. In the center of the rink, away from falling children, the serious skaters worked out. I hung around the perimeter, watching. I did not want to be taught to skate. I wanted that mastery all to myself. The things you teach yourself in childhood are precious, and you have endless patience for them. My parents knew that I skated, but they knew that I did not want to be encouraged or given fancy skating sweaters for Christmas. I did not want them to witness my achievement, or comment on it, or document it. I did not want praise for effort.

My colleagues in childhood were the precocious children of intellectuals—ferocious, noisy kids who learned calculus at the age of nine and were trilingual at ten, sources of pride to their parents. My parents, I felt, were simply pleased with me. They were interested in my pastimes but kept their distance. We had three sets of amusements: mine, theirs, and ours. My father loved to go fishing and taught me to tie flies. In the spring, we trekked to a trout pool and spent the day in water up to our hips, pushing gnats out of our eyes. My mother took me bird walking, and from her I learned my orderly habits of observation and notation. But they left me alone, liking to be left alone themselves.