The Lone Pilgrim (11 page)

That overstates the case, but he is a man not unencumbered by theatricality when it suits his purpose. The fact is, they should never have married. They were both at Juilliard, and contemplated a life of sheet music and duets. When he went to Vietnam, he thought about the war, and she thought about him. If he had thought about her—if there had been no war he was forced to contemplate—his return might not have been so filled with bafflement.

My husband likes the intense moments of flying—ice, fog, flying on instruments, heavy weather. On jets, he likes takeoff, landing, and air turbulence. When we travel, we jet to someplace central and then trek through the airport to a spur line. We have been to Laconia, New Hampshire, on Winnipesaukee; Bear, Montana, on Wild Cat; Myra Springs, Louisiana, on Cajun; Fulton, Kentucky, on Rebel; Mansard, Oklahoma, on Apache; and Bogota, Colombia, on El Condor.

We met flying—or, rather, we found ourselves at the same table at the same inn, having flown to the same place. The inn was on Tangier Island, a tiny fishing island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay with a private airstrip. Our table was full of aviators. I was flown there—as a favor to my sister, who felt I should get out more—by a jovial lawyer friend of my brother-in-law's. He sat next to me while I leaned against the table and stared at my husband.

My husband is a concert pianist who hates performing. Instead, he makes records and tries to live like a recluse. He hates performing because he hates to travel for a purpose. He likes travel only for itself. He hates hotels, hotel food, and schedules. When he was younger, he did several concert tours, and they baffled him the way his divorce did. He felt there was no center to anything—just a series of cities and stages, and nothing to go back to. Once in a while, his agent pressures him into a recital at Carnegie or Alice Tully Hall, for which he trots out the most difficult or inaccessible music he can find—his admirers only seem to love him more for it.

His love of flying has made his agent old before his time, or so his agent says. “Why does he want to chance death so often?” his agent asks. “It's not the commercial flights—it's those weird little planes he likes to fly around in.”

My husband wants to be weightless, and flying is as close as he can get to it. If he had not been a pianist, he might have been an astronaut, he thinks, but he is too tall. If he had been two inches taller, he would never have been drafted, and therefore would never have flown at all. After being married to him for three years, I began to fear that he would crash—him, not me, although we always fly together. My dreams, which were usually very ordinary dreams, became crowded with flaming wreckage, torn limbs, and the feeling you sometimes have before falling asleep of falling out of gravity, of falling straight down.

No one thought I would get married. My sister and mother brooded about me, but I did not fall in love with any ease or frequency, and the few times I did, nothing ever came of it. Instead, my life was tidy. I had an apartment overlooking a garden, and I commuted daily in a secondhand Saab to a marine-biology station in Riiks Point, Long Island, where I performed experiments with oil-eating algae.

My sister is ten years older than I; my brother is fifteen years older. I was an afterthought, and since that fact is undeniable I had from very early on a sense of adult sexual life. When I learned at five the way babies are created, I looked at my handsome, stoic parents and realized what they had done to get me. Later, I felt there was something special, something particularly loving and intense about my conception. But the sense of being an afterthought marked me—although I was not an unhappy surprise to my parents—as sickly children or refugee children are marked, and I grew up thinking that I would always be thought of last, the thing that you didn't plan for but that turned up anyway.

For example, when I met my husband on Tangier Island, it never occurred to me that I would ever see him again. When I got to know him, he did not expect ever to remarry, although at the time he was allied with a flutist who had long red hair. He thought his first wife had broken his heart irreparably.

I am tall, wide-boned, but thin. In the summer, I tan easily. I spent a year at a marine-biology station at Baja, and a summer at Woods Hole, and each time turned the color of burnt cork. But in the winter I am slightly yellow. My hair is my best feature: very thick, very straight—a darkish-yellow color. For this reason, although my given name is Marguerite, my baby name was Butter.

The day I met my husband, he said two things that shocked me. After lunch, we walked around the island, by the shore. The aviators ambled together, talking shop. I walked with my husband. At the water's edge, he said, “You have a very contemplative relationship with the ocean,” and I explained that I was a marine biologist. Then he said, “You look very buttery. I noticed at lunch.”

It is true that you can feel a wave of love; I did. I felt my heart being torn open, and I accepted it. It was something that happened without consequence, so I let it happen. On that particular day, my vision of these matters was particularly bleak, and I did not believe that any virtue came of chance meetings or accidents of destiny. But suddenly I felt intelligible to another person, who knew by looking that I had been called Butter and that I had a connection with the sea. It was only a moment, but I was grateful. It is not everyone who gets a moment of unexpected understanding on a remote island you have to fly in a private plane to get to.

By the end of the afternoon, we had trotted the circumferences of Tangier twice and went back to the airstrip to fit ourselves into separate planes. My husband knew my name and where I lived, and I knew his name and where he lived. We shook hands as our two pilots started their engines and the propellers churned up the air.

I never thought that I would see him again, but I did. He came to see me one rainy evening without calling first, without giving any reason for his visit. He might have said, “People shouldn't meet on an island and never see each other again,” but he didn't. He gave my apartment the once-over, and sat in the best chair.

At the time I lived in all ways like a Shaker. My apartment might have had fresh straw on the floor. It was in an old Village building. The rafter beams had been exposed, and all the walls were white. I didn't have much in the way of ornament or furniture, so it was not entirely my fault that my apartment looked like a restored room at the Hancock Shaker Village. What I had was old. I had a glass bird from my grandfather, an eighty-year-old decoy given to me by my boss at Woods Hole, and my father's brass fishing rod, hung across two hooks. I had a watercolor of flowers my grandmother had painted and a picture of a donkey, done by my great-grandmother. I hadn't had anyone to love in three years.

From the armchair my husband asked if I would like to have dinner with him—if I was hungry, that is. His visit was so informal that I didn't feel the need to state anything except the case. I said that I didn't want to go out but that I would feed him.

The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums. I cooked carrots with honey and garlic and ate them cold—the odd tastes of a solitary person. When I had people in to dinner, I spent days wondering what ordinary people ate. I gave my husband what I ate: a cup of thick yogurt; a plate of pickled cabbage, salted plums, and cold carrots; and some chicken cooked the way I liked it—with soy sauce, paprika, and clove. He ate what was set before him and never said he found the meal strange, which warmed me to him. It never occurred to me that he might have the same odd taste, or his own odd taste. Outside, the rain spun on intensely. My husband said, “I came over here to claim you, if that's possible.”

When I looked at him, I realized that I had never wanted anyone so much in my life, so I claimed him, too.

Thus, at the age of thirty, in top physical condition, with excellent training and an excellent job, the author of two highly praised monographs—one on oil-eating algae and one on the regenerative mechanism in starfish—I found myself involved with a tall, standoffish, moody, and temperamental pianist, who, at the time we claimed each other, was living on the upper West Side with a flutist. It was not until weeks later, by which time my husband and I claimed each other every chance we got, that I knew of his alliance with her. I never knew her name. After I was made aware of her existence, there were times when my husband did not call when he said he would, or called to say that he would not appear as he had planned, and I expect he thought that my knowledge of his situation would get him off the hook.

On the other hand, my husband knew the condition that lay beneath that tidy apartment. He knew I strove to keep my life level, and that if he was not around I would work at my research, commute to work, strain my yogurt, and live as I had always done. He knew I didn't want to expect much—I was frightened to. He knew if he wasn't around I would step back and run my life as if he had never walked into it.

But he was wrong. He didn't know what he had done, so I told him, as simply as you explain addition to a child. I told him that I had a heart to break and that he was breaking it. I said I didn't want to be misunderstood, and as I said these things I could imagine how he would look leaving my apartment, and how I would feel watching him walk down the street. But he didn't leave. He asked me to marry him. Then he went home and settled matters with the flutist. Five months later, we were married at my parents' house, and the chief emotional feature of that wedding was relief.

But retrospect makes everything look easy. It wasn't as easy as that. There was a large gulf between finding out about the flutist and saying anything about it—I was that glad to have someone love me. I wanted my Shaker life disturbed utterly but quietly. I didn't want slammed doors or shouting. One night, my husband and I sat down quietly and wrenched our hearts out—at least, I wrenched mine. He went home, and for a week I didn't see him. Those nights, I felt I was sleeping on top of a live wire in a rainstorm, I was so fearful. I made lists of his bad qualities: covert, silent, moody, sometimes won't talk, doctrinaire about music, frequently snobbish, has girl on whom he cheats—with me. I thought I would never come to know him. On the other hand, when he looked at my life what did he see? Did he see some multilayered, complicated homemade jam with a thick seal of paraffin on top? How did he know what he was getting into?

Well, he left the flutist without a trace—on himself I mean. I never saw one of her possessions, or any letter she may have written. One day he showed me a diary he kept sporadically—two years in one notebook, mostly musical ruminations. He lived with her a year, and she was never mentioned once.

My husband had been drafted over the protest of his agent, the head of Juilliard, and several renowned pianists. The president of Octagon Records had threatened to take out a protest ad in the
Times
, but my husband put his foot down. None of this sat well with him—he didn't see why he should be exempt from service because he was talented, while those who were not talented were unspared. It was not exactly a noble sentiment; it was, rather, that he wanted to be left alone. He didn't have any feelings about the war, but he had been a prodigy in a mild sort of way, and he was tired of special treatment.

Actually, as it turned out, he liked the army. No one had ever heard of him, and he sat around the canteen playing “Chopsticks” on the piano; this ironic gesture amused him. The war itself upset him, but he was glad, since it was an upset outside himself. Besides, he isn't very protective about his hands, as some musicians are. All his life he fought his parents and teachers for the right to play baseball and otherwise endanger his priceless limbs. In the winter, he never wears gloves, and he likes to go fishing. The fish he likes best are fighters—bass and blues. He says he was more comfortable in the army than he ever had been before.

We are not a young couple, so our sense of personal history is wide and separate. My husband remembers his first piano—a child's piano. My family took lessons on a huge Chickering we felt like gnats in front of, and forgot all we had learned by the time we were in high school. I didn't play Mozart sonatas when I was twelve. Instead, I stole a lipstick from a drugstore in Kennebunkport, Maine. My husband was thirty-five when we got married, and I had just turned thirty-one. We didn't have a pool of mutual friends. The friends he had at Juilliard he had either outgrown or known so well so long that they seemed exclusively his. His pals from the army live in places like Ketchum, Idaho, or Blue Mountain Lake, New York, and he never sees them. No, we came with separate friends. We have separate love affairs to think about. He had his marriage. I saw whales at Baja, and he saw combat in Vietnam. That accounts for a lot of richness but quite a lot of sadness, too. I would be happy not to travel on out-of-the-way spur lines—although I love to fly over islands—but I often think the more we travel to inaccessible places the more we will be like a couple who fell in love in high school and married out of college. Our personal histories will merge, and our reference point will be each other. The parts of my life that were solitary will blur. He will think, maybe after thirty years, that it was to me he wrote from Vietnam, and I will think that I commuted home in my old Saab from Riiks Point to him, and my prim apartment will be the memory of waiting at a bus stop before my husband came along to pick me up.

In September, we flew to Miami on a yellow jet, and in a glum corner of the airport we found our spur line, Everglades Airways. We were going to fly to French Falls. The gloomy lobby was manned by an overweight giant with hair crew-cut into a putting green, and a dour monosyllabic Indian with a gold tooth. Waiting for the tiny Cessnas were our fellow-travelers: a Cuban woman and her child, three sleeping Indians with straw hats and dead cigars, a dissipated boy in rumpled white ducks, and us. No one was flying. We sat down and waited out the tail end of a tropical storm.