The Lone Pilgrim (3 page)

In the fine tradition of romantic beginnings Cordy and Jane exchanged edited versions of their life histories. Jane learned that Cordy was rich. His name was Arthur Corthauld Spaacks. Everyone in his family had a baby's name, a nickname, or some other corruption of that which appeared on their baptismal certificates. His mother, Constance, was Contie. His father, Corthauld, was Hallie. His brother, Christian, was merely Chris, while his sister, Mercia, was called Mousy by all.

Jane learned that Cordy had married a girl named Lizzie Meriweather and that they had produced a child whose name was Charlie. On the subject of his marriage, Cordy seemed puzzled. It simply hadn't worked, he claimed. Jane knew that his divorce was rather recent and that recently divorced people are always puzzled. So Jane turned to the subject of his family life and asked him how he got along with his parents and siblings. To illustrate the point, Cordy told Jane about the last big Spaacks family outing. Everyone had been married at the time. Cordy to Lizzie, Mousy to Bobby LaVallet, the no-good heir to a racing stable, and Chris to a Canadian girl named Valerie Slowden. Of the three Spaacks children, only Chris remained in the married state.

The Spaacks seniors ran three households: a
pied-à-terre
in Manhattan; the family manse in Furnall, Connecticut, and a summer house in Salt Harbor. To Salt Harbor the family had repaired for an Easter weekend. There everyone fought. Cordy and Lizzie, when they spoke at all, argued bitterly in private. Cordy raked gravel with his father, both muttering about Mousy's behavior in an effort to avoid actually speaking to one another. Mousy, when she could be dragged away from fighting with her mother, quarreled with her father. Mousy and Bobby spent their time frantically looking for a place in which to smoke hashish unobserved. This prevented them from noticing that they had almost nothing to say to one another. Their son, Little Quentie, was knocked down by his cousin, Charlie, and cut his lip. He began to howl and Charlie began to scream.

Chris and Valerie had no children, and they never quarreled. They brought with them to Salt Harbor their pet, a basset hound named Tea. Tea was sick in many places, hidden and plain, around the house, but found the sea air restoring. At the dinner table, Chris and Valerie were made to feel uncomfortable about not having any children. No one approved of this. They sat in silence and watched the marriages around them crumble.

Meanwhile, Lizzie cowered by the beach. She aligned herself with Bobby and Mousy and spent as much of the weekend as she could swacked out on a form of cannabis called Durban Poison, which Bobby had scored from a South African acquaintance.

This lack of felicity was not unusual. In fact, it was daily life to its participants. The closest thing to affection was displayed by Chris and Cordy, when Chris gave Cordy a tip on the stock market and Cordy fixed the radio in Chris's car. The climax of the weekend came at Easter Sunday lunch. Spaacks senior presided, carving the tough flinty ducks, smiling the dim sort of smile you see on freshly killed corpses.

Jane listened to this recitation with real sorrow. How awful it was that Cordy did not have nice, warm parents like hers. Her doting parents took her to the opera on her birthday. Cordy needed salvation, and love, Jane felt, would surely save him.

It was Jane's apartment that revealed her to Cordy. It was small but crammed with artifacts: watercolors, family photographs in velvet frames, teapots, pitchers, and beautiful plates. On his first visit Cordy surveyed the place and asked: “How do you get any work done here?”

His own apartment had almost nothing in it. What he had was either rented with the flat or picked up from the Salvation Army. The Mayers were a family of watered-down German and Dutch Jews who had once had a lot of money. Now they had things. They had Persian rugs, English silver, Limoges plates, and Meissen soup tureens. It was from Cordy that Jane learned the lesson so valuable to the
haute bourgeoisie:
that some people have a good deal of money and almost nothing else.

Jane sat Cordy down to the first of their many home-cooked meals. She made an omelet, a simple one, with cheese and chives. Cordy appeared to be transported. He had never had such an omelet—not even in France, he said.

“How did you learn to cook like this?” he asked, marveling. “When I cook eggs, they lie around in my stomach all day. Yours nip right into my bloodstream.”

“What sort of eggs do you cook?”

“Well, I get up in the morning, put some corn oil in a pan, turn the light on under it, and then I shower, shave, and dress. When I get back to the kitchen, the pan is about the temperature of a Bessemer converter. I beat the eggs and put some spice in …”

“What spice?”

“Some stuff I found in the apartment when I moved in. The other tenants left it behind. Chervil, savory. Is there something called turmeric? Then I throw the eggs in, and they immediately turn into an asbestos mat.”

“It's very easy not to make eggs like that,” Jane said. “I could show you in a second.”

“I don't have time to think about food,” said Cordy. “Besides, no one ever offered to teach me. If I got used to eggs like yours, I might find myself getting used to a whole slew of other things and end up leading a soft life and not getting any work done. Furthermore, I wouldn't be in a position to ask you for another. May I have one?”

The work Cordy referred to was his dissertation. Since he had been a researcher at a think tank for several years, he felt at a slight disadvantage: teachers younger than Cordy already had their doctorates. He felt he should have his as well. This thesis was sitting on his desk, as it had been for some time. Jane suspected that she was his current excuse for putting it off and that, since he was regarded by his department as one of its young geniuses, it didn't much matter when he finished it. She was working on her dissertation, which her affair with Cordy in no way interrupted. In fact, she felt she was working better than ever. After dinner, she sat at the kitchen table with her books, while Cordy sprawled on the couch with his, but although he claimed her apartment distracted him, he also claimed the distraction was worth it. He was happier than he had ever been, he said.

Jane used lavender soap, which Cordy found extremely pleasing. One day she slipped a cake of it into his briefcase and, when he discovered it, his eyes misted over.

“No one ever gave me a present before,” he said. He said it with such a tremor in his voice that Jane did not stop to say to herself: “This guy has a trust fund. What does he mean he never got a present before?” She believed it. She believed that he had had presents before on occasions but not on the spur of the moment, simply because someone adored him. She believed. Here was a man deprived, and there is no greater magnet for a generous woman than a deprived man.

The food he ate before he met Jane, whose use of olive oil in salads he frequently remarked on, consisted of instant coffee, powdered milk, and dried mashed potatoes. He was addicted to cafeterias and claimed a fondness for food that had been warming on a steam table for several days. Jane had previously believed that people who ate this way were poor people who were forced to eat this way, but then Cordy, who was in his thirties, still had some of the clothes he had worn at prep school and almost all of the clothes he had taken away to college. He seemed to feel, like William Penn, that if it was clean and warm it was enough, but Cordy was not a Quaker and had an independent income.

When Jane visited each of the three Spaacks households, she began to understand her lover a little better. The first she saw was the Manhattan
pied-à-terre.
Lizzie Meriweather Spaacks, after a trip to the Dominican Republic shed her of Cordy, had retired with Charlie to the country. Once a month, Cordy took Charlie for the weekend, and since Lizzie refused to see Cordy, Charlie was trucked in from the country, and the Spaackses' Manhattan apartment was used as a dead drop, so to speak. When their affair had progressed by several months, Cordy took Jane along to collect Charlie one Saturday afternoon.

The Spaacks apartment was small but grand. It looked out over the river and was decorated in the way of the reception rooms in foreign embassies. It was full of the sort of furniture you feel you must not sit on—either upholstered in silk or extremely fragile. The most inviting was the couch, but this was covered in a putty-color velvet that is stained so easily by a misplaced hand or foot. Jane stood by the window and watched garbage scows float the debris of Manhattan out to the Ambrose Lighthouse. The Spaackses, Cordy told her, referred to these vistas as “river traffic.” On the walls were Chinese prints, matted with gray silk, that decorators feel bring a soothing tone into the homes of bankers and other corporate capitalists.

When Cordy appeared with Charlie, a white-haired child with tiny teeth, Jane felt she had been delivered. But behind Cordy was Spaacks senior, an apparition Jane had not bargained for. He was wearing a business suit that looked as if it had been baked on him, like paint on a Bentley. He looked through Jane and, when the introduction was hastily made, extended his hand as an afterthought. It was a hard, dry hand, quickly withdrawn, the sort of hand that, when attached to the wrist of your loved one's parent, is often a portent that you and your beloved are not going to spend your declining days watching the sun go down and reflecting on the happy years you have had together.

That was the last Jane ever saw of father Spaacks. Charlie was taken to Jane's house, since she had more to offer in the way of amusement. Her collection of lead animals—her father's from childhood—her picture books, and her colored pencils were far more intriguing than Cordy's computer printouts, calculator, or the camera with zoom lens.

The love Jane bore for Cordy was at this point very hot. It pained her to see the flesh of his flesh and someone else's flesh. She craved Charlie. She cut up his sandwiches for him and gave him his milk in a mug with a picture of a rabbit on it. When they went for walks, she was overcome with pleasure when Charlie took her hand or pulled on her coat to get her attention. She felt that she would someday like to be Charlie's stepmother, which, she knew, was another way of expressing her hope that Cordy would be hers forever. Cordy had said that he would never marry again. Romance and marriage were mutually exclusive, he felt. Jane took this to be a reflection of the fact that he had never known any domestic happiness, and she was a domestic genius.

For months they were extremely happy. Love, in its initial stages, takes care of everything. Love transforms a difficult person into a charming eccentric; points of contention into charming divergences. It doesn't matter that popular songs are full of warning—songs like “Danger, Heartbreak Dead Ahead” are written and sung for those who have no intention of doing anything but dancing to them. And while lovers do almost nothing but reveal themselves, who notices?

But as time went on it occurred to Jane that there was something odd about what she now saw was Cordy's cheapness. The coldness that emanated from his parents' Manhattan apartment, the lifeless, life-denying sitting room, the glacial hand of his father, seemed to hover around Cordy. His raptures about the way she lived began to make Jane feel like a hothouse orchid—pretty, expensive, and not long for this world. Cordy's lavish coo of joy at the sight of two filets mignons, whose virtues in terms of cost and waste Jane found herself explaining, made her feel that what transpired between them did not resemble normal life to Cordy. Steam-table food, empty apartments, and family fights were normal to him, not lavender soap, being adored, and having his coffee brought to him in a big French cup.

One night he as much as stated his case. They stayed almost entirely at Jane's apartment, since Cordy's was not a fit place in which to conduct anything resembling a romance. He had had one bed pillow. The thought that Jane might someday sleep beside him had prompted him to go to a cut-rate bedding store and buy another, whose lumpy filling he could not identify. He admitted, however, what any sensible person will admit: that barring allergies, a good night's rest is aided greatly by European goose down.

Cordy had had his dinner. He repaired to the couch, commandeered all the needlepoint cushions, pulled Jane near, and, with his nose pressed against her fragrant neck, announced that she was too rich for his blood.

“I live on my salary,” said Jane.

“I think I ought to go to a detoxification clinic,” said Cordy. A shiver ran through Jane. Was living well a kind of poison?

“You live in a needlessly horrible way,” she said.

“I live simply,” said Cordy. “It's very dangerous to become used to luxury.”

“You seem to enjoy things,” Jane said. “For example, my things. You don't mind drinking good coffee and getting wrapped up in a quilt to take a nap. You have a mania for deprivation. Besides, you don't notice any million-dollar cameras with zoom lenses around here, do you?”

“I don't use my camera,” Cordy said.

“That's because you're too cheap to buy film. It doesn't matter whether or not you use it. You own it.”

“That's not the point,” said Cordy. “The point is that things give you a false sense of life. If you have a nice house, you begin to think that life
is
nice.”

Jane said: “Isn't it?”

“Not for long,” said Cordy.

Shortly after this interchange, Jane met Cordy's mother. Mrs. Spaacks offered her son an electric frying pan. She discovered that she had two. If Cordy did not want one, she intended to sell it to a secondhand shop. Cordy and Jane drove two hours to the Salt Harbor house to get this implement, which Jane suspected Cordy would never use.

The house containing this extra frying pan was built on prime land overlooking the water. The setting into which it intruded was spectacular. The house itself was rather ugly and was furnished in that stiff, unsittable wicker that leaves deep red grooves in the flesh. It occurred to Jane that she had now seen two of the Spaackses' domestic settings and had yet to spot any surface on which a human being might comfortably rest.