The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online

dozens of questions, and when we finally dismounted and sat under a tree I found myself in the line of a fierce, intense gaze. He was, I realized, the first man I had talked to except Raggy—discounting Raggy’s father, uncles, and cousins and my family—in eight years. He told me that he lived in San Francisco and taught at Berkeley, and that once in a while he hired himself out as an oil hunter. Then, quite unexpectedly, he asked me how long I had been married and what I thought of it. I told him eight years and that I was a firm believer in the institution. The conversation then turned to photography, landscape painting, and the geology of the state of Texas. Before we parted I asked him, without thinking about it very much, if he would like to come and have coffee the next afternoon. I thought he was someone Raggy would probably like to meet when he came back.
    Francis Cluzens showed up the next day, and we had coffee on the veranda. The storm clouds had moved in from the horizon, and the air was wet. We talked about Texas weather, the Muir Woods, and Mexican food. That is, I chatted pleasantly. Francis Cluzens was not the sort of person I was used to chatting with. Unlike Raggy and his family, he was not big, warm, and open. He was not small, but he was taut and full of some sort of energy I was not used to—the sort of energy that is not dissipated by hard work. When an hour had passed he stood to leave and asked if he might come back the next day. That seemed perfectly fine to me.
    The next day we decided to take a ride together. Half a mile out the first raindrops fell and then stopped. By the time the storm began to break we were near the Quonset hut in which the team stored its gear. We made a dash for it, put the horses in a shed, and ran inside. Francis bolted the door against the rain. The hut smelled pleasantly of rope and canvas. Rain drummed down on the roof. There was a window you closed with a canvas flap that the wind was pulling out. Francis went to tie it down and when he came back he looked rather stormy himself. He lifted me off the camp chair I was sitting on and took me into his arms. Not long after that I committed adultery on my husband’s property.
    When Raggy came back I realized how easy it is to conduct what is called normal life. One indiscretion doesn’t do much damage these days. Women’s magazines report that their readers fantasize about men other than their husbands during the act of love, but I never did. In fact, I could very well have thought that nothing had happened to me, and had I gathered around me my mother and my friends, and even Raggy’s mother, and explained the situation to them, their advice would have been to shut up and carry on. After all, I loved Raggy, didn’t I? I had hardly betrayed him, if you believe that betrayal has in it a component of premeditation. My feelings for Raggy had not in fact changed one whit. I had changed.
    I was, I discovered, capable of adultery. Before Francis Cluzens that notion was as remote to me as Jupiter, and a contemplation of it would have been as random and uninformed as speculation about life on other planets. No matter what psychological journals tell you about personal growth, finding a hidden part of your nature is quite unpleasant. It is like being in a war in which unpredictable bullets fly at you from hidden corners. The woman who believed in faithfulness, who thought that life was a straight line, who married the only man she had ever loved, had given herself over intimately to another. That meant something.
    First of all, I knew I must have undergone some profound change, or my meeting with Francis Cluzens could not have happened. But when had this change taken place? Had I slept through it? Had it crept up on me in such minimal stages that I could not know it? And if I had changed, I was therefore not the person Raggy had married. Second of all, I was high-minded. I believed that actions of