The Lone Pilgrim (17 page)

These thoughts were dispelled as soon as I walked through the Bridgeses' door, which for me was the walking into another country. The Bridgeses represented all of adult life. They had substantial furniture and a silver service. At holiday time they gave parties, to which guests came in evening clothes. Both of them worked on Wall Street, and both cultivated their interests. Karen belonged to a group that read and discussed the works of famous philosophers. Philip was constantly upgrading his stereophonic equipment and buying subscriptions to the opera and the symphony. Both of them were interested in food. They went to wine tastings and belonged to a gourmet club. The meals they served were always correct and very good.

I was often invited to be a fourth at dinner, doubtless because I was younger and therefore less predictable. The Bridgeses liked to throw me in with their more conservative and stuffy friends to see what happened. Nothing very radical ever did, but the investment bankers were pleased to have a chance to explain the real world to a shiftless, undirected book clerk, and I had a chance to feel superior to a bunch of staid grown-ups who paid in rent each month more than I earned in half a year.

In ordinary times, devils are ordinary. You meet them not in caves but at dinner parties. The shape they assume is that of attractive mortals of the opposite sex. The Bridgeses had also invited an extremely attractive mortal by the name of Alden Robinson. I had heard him mentioned—he was an old friend of Philip's. There was a copy of each of his books on their shelf. Alden was a socio-economist. His books were published by a university press. These bore his full name: Alden C. W. Robinson. He had just given up his teaching post in California and come East to lend his fine mind to the World Economic Committee.

I assumed that Alden was one of the Bridgeses' distinguished stiffs—the sort of people who hardly existed for me, since I divided the world into adults and people like myself, the way a child does. The questions I asked myself, for example, about the boys I met were: Did they look as if they knew how to dance? As if they were any fun? Daring? Good kissers?

Alden was not a boy, but he had a nice grin, for a grownup. His hair was shiny brown, and his eyes were blue. He did not look like he would be much of a dancer, and it was not yet clear if he was any fun, but he did look to be a good kisser. During cocktails, he conversed with the Bridgeses and stared at me. I paid attention to the attention, but not to him. During dinner, he focused on me entirely, and I was not surprised when much later he offered to drive me home. All adults had cars, and Alden had told an elaborate story at dinner about driving his across country. He drove me to my door, although I lived out of his way. I hesitated to ask him in for a drink. Was it too late for a respectable socio-economist? Would he think I was forward? It turned out that he asked me.

“Are you terribly tired?” he said.

“I'm not tired at all,” I said.

“Then may I come up for a nightcap?”

I was too embarrassed to tell him that the only thing he might get as a nightcap was some awful old sherry someone had brought me a year ago, but when I gave it to him he did not seem displeased with it. While I made myself a cup of tea, Alden surveyed my apartment, which contained family cast-offs—furniture that was old and good, but all of it was broken or damaged in some way, and none of it matched. The cane seat of the rocking chair had two holes in it. The couch had a foot missing and it was propped up by a dictionary. It was clear that Alden noticed everything. I was alarmed at what he was thinking of the untidy pile of books next to the couch and the coffee cup and ashtray on the table. He paused in front of one of my few pictures—a framed plan of the London Charterhouse. Then he sat down. I drank my tea. He drank his sherry. Neither of us had a thing to say.

“It's nice just to sit here and look at you,” he finally said.

This made me blush. “I don't understand anything about sociology or economics,” I said. “That's why you're stuck looking at me.”

“I find looking at you very interesting,” said Alden. “Is there any chance I can come and look at you some more one day soon?”

Naturally he came back, and I fell in love with him. I felt that I was being pulled out of my old self and becoming a new creature. I felt that Alden was my passport into the adult world—a world in which things were planned and calculated. Since I was in love with him, the transition would be painless. I could not have asked for a better guide. Alden was established. His opinion was sought. He contributed to a number of journals. His own life was a miracle of precision. His desk was tidy, his bills were paid, he had regular checkups, and had his teeth cleaned every six months. In the autumn he had the chassis of his car painted with a rust-resistant paint. He had files for everything. But for all that he was not dull. He was nothing like those nice young men who had fallen in love with me. For one thing, he had been married and was now separated; he was not an untried boy. This made him seem glamorous. After all, no one I knew was married. No one I knew had any commitments whatsoever. And for another thing, Alden's energy was furious. His orderly life seemed to be the result of daring and risk.

My appearance in his life was a great relief to him, he said. I disturbed the neat universe he lived in—or so he claimed. I took life's suprises (by which Alden meant traffic jams, wrong turns, spilled drinks, delayed trains, and being spoken to on the street by insane people) in stride. I had no expectations, and so I was pleased and charmed with whatever fell my way. Alden thought we would be the perfect travel mates. He would make up the itinerary, he said, and I would get us lost. Thus we would see at least some of the things a traveler was meant to see, and then we would have adventures. Left to our own devices, I would never find a landmark, and nothing interesting would ever happen to Alden. We planned a trip to France for the next fall.

My availability for experience inspired him, he said. One evening, with a look of beautiful affection on his face, he told me: “The trouble with being prepared for everything the way I am is that one false move and you feel the world
is
falling apart. Last week, when I lost my keys, I thought I was going to disintegrate, remember? But you—you really
aren't
prepared for things, so you're much better at life than I am. If you hadn't been with me, I would have just gone to pieces. I would have paid a locksmith some huge sum of money. I would never have traced our trail back to that restaurant and found the keys under the chair. So maybe you're the one who's prepared and I am simply overprepared. You are a great object lesson to me.”

How wonderful it was to have what I had thought of as an unfortunate character trait looked at as a grace. I was often sick of myself losing keys and wallets. Of course, I was an expert at finding them. But Alden saw this as flexibility, esprit, lightness. Suddenly that lazy floating feeling I had always lived with was good for something, a virtue.

My function was to cheer him. I took him dancing. I bullied him out of tempers when the service was bad at restaurants. I saw us as teachers and students both. From Alden, I was learning how to give life some shape, how real work was performed in the world, how to harness energy to a project. I realized that I might be buoyant but I need not be untidy. I cleared my desk. I began to pay my bills on time. I bought a notebook and began to codify all the reading I had done and assemble all the notes I had taken. For a year Pete had been talking about redesigning the shop. He had asked me to sketch out any ideas I might have, but I had never taken him seriously. Now I did. I made elaborate plans, most of which Pete approved.

From me, Alden was learning how to float, how to relish life without such strict rules for it. Our best selves, I thought, were on display. The variance of our natures seemed like art—light and shadow. There were times I felt that I was Alden's pet, and that did not bother me a bit, since, in a sense, he was mine. He was a pet from another country whose life was not, like mine, a relief map full of valleys, hills, and moraines, but was a hard, straight road that got you to an appointed city. Alden was pleased with my relief map. It was full of turns he had never taken. I was entranced by his straight road. We had absolutely nothing in common.

Beneath his proper exterior, Alden was an eccentric. I felt that doting on these eccentricities was good for him—after all, wasn't it my job to make him giggle and swoon? I singled out his oddities and doted on them: that he could imitate a cat's purr; that he was secretly afraid of shaving and, since he hated electric razors, he distracted himself from the thought that he might somehow slit his own throat by walking around the living room while he shaved; that he hated to wear shoes. These things were what I thought personality was all about. I did not stop to think that to Alden they were frivolities. I thought that the world was an open proposition: if I got tidier and Alden got less fussy, we would go along beautifully forever.

One evening Alden sat me down and told me that it was necessary to have a serious talk. I had thought that
all
of our talks were serious, but I was wrong. I sat down on the sofa next to him.

“I think you'd better sit in the chair by the desk,” Alden said.

I crossed the room and sat in the chair by the desk. Alden sat silently on the couch. Then he began to speak. He said his wife was coming to New York. What was she doing that for, I wondered. I had not paid very much attention to Alden's separation. When you were separated, that was it. Besides, Alden hadn't seemed to have given it much thought. It turned out that she was coming back to live with him—to try to work things out. What things? The very concept amazed me. If things didn't work out once, they never worked out twice.

Alden explained to me, in the sober way a doctor tells you what is wrong with you, knowing that he knows more than you do, that you cannot, without his training, possibly understand. He sits on his side of the desk—the side with the expertise on it—and makes you feel that you and your body are bad children.

“I am very grateful to you,” was one of the things Alden said. “You've helped me to free myself a little. But I work on the principle of commitment, and marriage is a very serious one. It is my obligation to do everything I can to honor it unless I find out that it is totally hopeless.”

I did not say a word. Alden then went on to talk about his wife. Her name was Eleanor, and she was an economist, too. They shared a large store of communal memories. They had ideas and goals in common. Although the separation had been mutual, it had been Eleanor's idea to reconnect. That made immediate sense to Alden. Had it made immediate sense even while he was in my company? Those nights when I had watched him and he looked so dear to me, had it been his obligation to marriage he was thinking about?

It was not yet clear to me that Alden was packing me in and filing me under “an unserious romp with an entertaining girl.” It was not clear that all the time we had played so happily together, Alden's real life, in what he thought was the real world, was lived apart from me. I thought for a moment that Alden had misread me—that he took high spirits for superficiality. I thought that perhaps he did not understand the gravity of my feelings for him, so I told him. These were the sacred words—the words I thought changed everything. Alden was now sitting on a rickety chair with one of the back slats missing. He repeated that he was very grateful to me, that our time together had been an enchantment.

I said: “But this is serious, Alden. I love you.”

He said: “You'll get over it.” And then he left.

I was not prepared for the aftermath of this affair. The distress I felt seemed uncontainable. At the shop I found myself in the bathroom in tears, running the faucets so that Pete would not hear me weeping. It was hard not to notice what bad shape I was in, so Pete asked me if I wanted the week off, but the thought of being alone with my distress horrified me.

What difference did it make that my bills were paid on time, that my desk was in order, that my research was actually taking some form, that the shop had been redesigned according to my plans, and that Pete was finally thinking of making me a partner? I did not look around to see that in fact my life was adding up to something after all. I only knew that my days were very long and my nights were unendurable.

I was beset by devils I had not known existed: grief, rage, longing, and pure desire. I fought back impulse after impulse to call Alden at work, at home. To confront him on the street. To track him down and make him see me.

After six months of this unrelenting misery, Alden reappeared. He rang my doorbell one night and came in. He wanted to see how I was doing. He assumed that I was doing splendidly since I was so buoyant, so spirited, so game. He was doing fairly well—the operative word was “fairly,” he said. He and Eleanor were trying to work things out. A difficult business, but worth it. These gestures had to be made, and hard work generally paid off. This visit, Alden said, was purely casual—a doctor's checkup on the healthy. Alden snooped around my books, at my pictures, at my desk, just as he had the first night I had met him, except that he seemed entirely at home. His ease in my apartment broke my heart. I wanted to say, like Saint Anthony of the Desert: “Why do you do harm to me when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name, do not come near these things again.”

He did go away, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

On my street, people let their pets walk by themselves. I live on the shabby end of what used to be an elegant block of town houses. In front of one house sat a knock-kneed Irish setter who had been taught to flip the latch of the ornate iron gate with his nose. This dog walked himself up and down the street and then came back through the gate and spent the rest of the day sleeping on the stoop. A very stupid black and white kitten jumped from ground-floor window to parlor window, skittering away like a water spider if you came near it. This kitten, who belonged to a composer, had spent a night in almost every house on the block, taken in by suckers who thought it was a homeless animal.