The Lone Pilgrim Read Free

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