The Lone Pilgrim (2 page)

Well, I'll tell you what was. I had suffered in love three years before, and it had not stopped haunting me. The man in question was an astronomer by the name of Jacob Bailey. Somewhere in the heavens is a galaxy named for him: the Bailey galaxy. It can only be seen through an observatory telescope—he showed it to me once at an observatory in Vermont. I will probably never see it again. I met Jacob in the line of work—the way I felt it was proper to meet those with whom you will have a profound connection. I was doing the drawings for a children's book on Kepler, and Jacob was checking the text and pictures for accuracy. It was love at once—hot, intense, brilliant, and doomed to fail. When it did, and we parted, it was with much puzzlement and despair. Jacob wanted a grand event—something you would never forget but not something to live with. I wanted something to live with. A love affair conducted with the same thrilling rev-up that starts a Grand Prix race usually runs its course and stops. When the Rice and Bailey show was over, I went into a form of mourning. I felt that being crossed in love had changed me, and it had, but my life stayed the same. I worked with what I felt was new depth, and carried Jacob around as a secret in my heart.

When you fall in love like that, it strikes like a disease, and you can understand why nineteenth-century poets felt they were either sick with love or dying of it. Divorced people sometimes remember the joys of married life as strains, but in a love affair just the reverse is true. Since marriages are final and love affairs are open-ended, you tend to think about what might have been instead of what was. So I recalled Jacob's gorgeous smile but not his cruel streak. I remembered the resemblance I thought he bore to an angel but not his frequent nastiness and its effect. But what difference does it make? I remembered. My life—my inner life—became a kind of reverie, and it would not have shocked me had I found that in some dreamlike state I had created a little shrine to Jacob Bailey: his photograph, my book on Kepler, a parking ticket from the Bronx Zoo, the little pearl earrings he gave me. The idea of committed, settled love is as remote to a romantic as lunar soil.

Gilbert's taste in music is that of a tin-eared highbrow. He goes to the opera. He likes Mozart. He listens, abstractly, but music is just another taste to him, and not his primary taste by a long shot. To him it is a sort of cultivated white noise, like glasses tinkling in the background during an expensive meal at a restaurant. Well, I can hum along with the best of them, but my reactions are hardly cultivated. Music is not a taste to me but a craving—something I must have. If I find something I love to hear, I play it over and over again. Then I am able to sit on a bus and play a Brahms quartet in my mind from memory, or any of a million rock-and-roll songs I love. Music becomes foreground then, or landscape gardening. It alters or complements my mood. On windy nights, I like to go home, light a fire, and flip on a little Boccherini, just to warm up. By the time I sit down to work, another mood overtakes me. My best drawing for
The Art of Courtly Love
was done listening to the Everly Brothers singing “Sleepless Nights.” When that palled, I started on Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Another Place, Another Time.” After a few hours of work, I like a good weep, to the Harp Quartet.

The thing about music is it's all your own. It puts you into a complex frame of mind without your even leaving the house. I can relive long moments with Jacob Bailey by playing what I listened to when he was around or what I wept to when he wasn't: It makes your past come back to you, and if you must pinpoint a moment in your life you can say, “That was when ‘He's a Rebel,' by the Crystals, was a hit,” or “right after the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau concert.” This kind of music worship is a form of privacy, and a great aid to highly emotional people who live in a hermetic state—a door key to the past, an inspiration.

Gilbert and I worked on
Courtly Love
for a year, and after it was sent to the printer we began on the poems of Marie de France. The poems, since they are about love in vain, made me think of Jacob Bailey. I would break from work to stick my head out the window in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the Bailey galaxy. I worked accompanied by a record of country hymns. My favorite was called “The Lone Pilgrim.” A man comes to the place where the Lone Pilgrim is buried, and hears someone calling to him. It is the Pilgrim, who tells his story. Away from home, far from his loved ones, he sickened and died. I played one stanza over and over again:

O tell my companion and children most dear

To weep not for me now I'm gone
.

The same hand that led me through scenes most severe

Has kindly assisted me home.

Since I was thinking about Jacob Bailey anyway, this song made me long for him. I knew he was on an expedition in Greenland, all alone. I thought of the scenes most severe he might be passing through and the kind hand that might lead him home: mine.

These were days when I thought I saw him on the street. My heart jumped; I thought he had come back. But it never was Jacob. I wanted to go up to the man I thought was Jacob and shake him for not being, to shake him until he was. There were times when I could not believe our connection had been broken. That was love, wasn't it?

All this time, of course, I continued to be in love with Gilbert. What I thought might be a crush had turned into true affection. The year we spent working on
The Art of Courtly Love
had given me ample time to judge his character.

The worst you could say of him was that he was prone to fits of abstraction. In these states, when spoken to he took a long time to answer, and you felt he was being rude. When he was concentrating, papers littered his desk, causing his secretary to wonder if he was messy at home. At home he was messy when abstracted. His bed was unmade. Clothing piled up on his bed in the shape of an African termite nest. Mail, newspapers, books, and catalogues were scattered on his desk, his coffee table, in the kitchen.

But the result of his abstraction was perfection. Gilbert's books were more than handsome; they were noble. His energy was bountiful and steady, and he gave people the same attention to detail he gave to books. Gilbert got to know me, too. He knew when I was tired out, or when I had faded on a drawing and couldn't see what form it was taking. He knew how to make me laugh, what sort of food I liked. He learned to have a cup of hot tea waiting for me at the end of a day, and he remembered things I told him. When we first started working, I described to him a plate that I had seen in an antique shop and that I wanted with all my heart. This was by way of illustrating a point; we were talking about impatience and the wisdom of holding off from obtainable pleasure as a test of will. The day, one year later, that
Courtly Love
went to press, the second cousin to the plate I wanted was presented to me by Gilbert: dark-blue Staffordshire, with flowers all around.

In short, he was just like me. When he was not abstracted, his quarters were immaculate, and arranged for sheer domestic pleasure. He bought flowers when people came to dinner. He liked to take a long time over a meal. I in turn knew how to cheer him when he became cranky and dispirited. I knew he loved rhubarb pie, so the first of the season's rhubarb went to him. But best of all, we were perfect workmates.

The night we saw the finished edition of
Courtly Love
, we went out to dinner to celebrate and drank two bottles of champagne. Gilbert walked me home, and on the way he stopped and astonished me by taking me into his arms and kissing me. I was giddy and drunk, but not so drunk as not to know what my reactions were. He had never so much as brushed my arm with his sleeve, and here we were locked in an embrace on an empty street.

When he released me, I said, “Aren't you going to kiss me again?”

“Sometimes if you work very closely with someone, you get used to working, and don't know how to gauge what they feel,” Gilbert said.

In my apartment, he told me what he felt, and I told him. Then we celebrated our first night together.

The solitary mind likes to reflect on the pain of past love. If you are all alone, it gives you something to react to, a sort of exercise to keep the muscles flexed.

I knew that Gilbert was falling in love with me. I watched it happen. And Gilbert knew that I was falling in love with him. We thought we had been fated for one another, but actually we were only getting used to good romantic luck. It is not so often that well-matched people meet. My being in love with Gilbert was accompanied by a sense of rightness I had never felt before, and we decided that we would marry within a year.

But when I worked alone in my apartment I was consumed with a desire to see Jacob Bailey. This desire was sharp as actual pain. I wasted many sheets of stationery beginning letters to him, which I tore up. When your heart's desire is right within your reach, what else is there to do but balk?

I pictured my oak desk secretary next to Gilbert's Chinese lamp, my books next to his, my clothing beside his in the closet. All my friends lived in pairs, except me. I had only fallen in love—love being what you one day wept over in private. What did you do with love that didn't end? That ceased to be sheer romance and moved on to something more serious?

You get used to a condition of longing. Live with it over time and it becomes part of your household—the cat you don't take much notice of that slinks up against you at mealtime or creeps onto the foot of your bed at night. You cannot fantasize being married if you are married. Married to Gilbert, what would I long for? I would not even be able to long for him.

Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.

You long for someone to love. You find him. You pine for him. Suddenly, you discover you are loved in return. You marry. Before you do, you count up the days you spent in other people's kitchens, at dinner tables, putting other people's children to bed. You have basked in a sense of domesticity you have not created but enjoy. The Lone Pilgrim sits at the dinner parties of others, partakes, savors, and goes home in a taxi alone.

Those days were spent in quest—the quest to settle your own life, and now the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours. Therefore, you lose your old bearings. On the one side is your happiness and on the other is your past—the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone's hand—Gilbert Seigh's—and strain through the darkness to see ahead.

The Boyish Lover

When Jane Mayer met Cordy Spaacks, she was at that stage of life in which all things look possible. She was full of energy and high spirits. The windows of her apartment faced a pretty street. She had begun to teach for the first time, and her students had liked her at once. The face that was reflected back at her from the mirror was more than confident—it was willing. She felt rather as athletes feel when they are in top form. Her life had assumed a shape she found entirely agreeable, and the circumstances she found herself in filled her with happiness. She was absolutely ripe to fall in love.

She met Cordy at a faculty tea. This tea was held for the Humanities Department, in which Jane taught English literature. Cordy was in the Physics Department, but the Humanities tea was famous for excellent if small sandwiches, and Cordy liked a free meal when he could find one. Each Thursday he ambled over to the formal room in which the tea was held, guest of a pal in the French Department. This pal, the sort of well-meaning fool you get to play Cupid in a campus production about Saint Valentine, had met Jane, who was new to the university. He also knew that Cordy was unattached, and since Jane and Cordy struck him as two of the most attractive people he had ever seen, he felt an obligation to bring them together. He knew that Cordy had been divorced. He did not know that Cordy had spent the last four months of his unhappy four-year marriage in almost total silence or that the failure of this marriage was in large part attributable to Cordy, who had wed a slightly addled girl and then paid her back for it. This, however, is not the sort of information that generally falls into the hands of nonprofessional matchmakers, and it was with a sort of flourish that he led Cordy over to Jane.

Jane had just come from delivering a lecture on Charlotte Bronte and she was in fine appetite. The introduction was made as she stood next to a plate of the famous sandwiches. The well-meaning pal withdrew beaming, leaving Cordy to watch Jane knock back seven of these sandwiches and wash them down with a cup of lukewarm tea.

“Are all your appetites that voracious?” asked Cordy.

“Yes,” said Jane. “Aren't everyone's?”

Thus they announced themselves, had either bothered to notice. That small interchange might have been a pair of policy statements, and neither would have needed to say another word. Instead, Jane thought that the word Cordy brought to mind was “winsome.” He had a true grin, a slightly manic chuckle, and a very beautiful mouth. Furthermore, he was clearly smart—she could tell at once. Cordy noticed that Jane's hair was the color of taffy, that her eyes were green, and that she was a unique combination of style and intelligence. They retired to a corner to begin a conversation during which they fluttered brilliance at one another. They agreed instantly on everything. Jane felt her best self emerge—charming, passionate, and original. Fate had handed her the perfect other. In Cordy's brown eyes Jane saw the reflection of the effect she was creating. Cordy, who before his marriage had broken hearts in many of our nation's finer institutions of higher learning, was captivated. After several days of similar meetings in other settings and one spectacular kiss, the setup for which Cordy engineered by taking the ribbon out of Jane's hair, they were inseparable. Night after night you might see them in the library, their chairs close together. Under the table, if you were on your hands and knees, you could see Jane's shoeless foot resting on top of Cordy's sock.