The Lone Pilgrim Read Free Page A

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?”
    â€œSometimes 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