The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online Page A

the flesh are sacred. I thought I believed in married love, and only married love. I had not been a scared virgin when I married Raggy, but a determined one. Why be intimate casually? was my motto. My encounter with Francis Cluzens shattered all these principles. How casual had that encounter really been? Had I planned it without knowing it? Had I broadcast something to him—lust? desire? boredom? Did strangers on your husband’s land ask you how you felt about marriage as a matter of course?
    I could not believe that this was whim. If it was whim—pure accident, or a mistake—then I was not myself. Events do change everything. Two weeks later I found a letter from Francis Cluzens in my mailbox. It said that he had wanted me at first sight. It said: “When you are ready, call me. I’ll be waiting.” On the bottom was his San Francisco telephone number. When you are ready. Did those intense eyes of his peer through my good-wife front right down to the heart of a woman who was about to be ready?
    A month later I left Raggy. I told him everything. He was hurt, but not in the normal way. He said he knew I would come back. I expect I knew it, too. He seemed to feel that this was something I had to do, which made me realize how shocking it is when someone takes you up on what you think you are. I thought I was the least casual woman alive. Raggy thought so too. He was as he always was: big, open, generous, and kind. He gave me my head as you give a horse his head. The horse goes off in the wrong direction out of some impulse of its own. Then it comes back to you.
    I married Francis Cluzens for reasons that probably wouldn’t have washed with anyone. The fact is, it was a gesture. It was my strike on the side of seriousness. It was my way of making concrete what might have been a moment’s weakness. But I did not believe in the weakness of the moment. It was for people like me that the phrase “there are no accidents” was created.
    Raggy was very kind about the divorce. He managed to keep it quiet in Despelles—to make it easier when I eventually got back. I had a man I had left who loved me, and a man to go to who loved me. I stood in a little church in San Francisco, realizing that on two separate occasions I had vowed to two different men to love, honor, and cherish till death us did part.
    The trouble with second marriages is rather like the trouble with new shoes: they don’t fit the way your old ones did. They pinch in places you are not used to feeling pinched in. All those easy moments, the private codes, the nicknames, the easy patterns, are gone from you. Of course, I was entirely wrong to marry Francis Cluzens. Marrying out of principle is hardly a wise move. And while he was difficult to live with, my experience of being married to him was not entirely unpleasant. Rather it was continually exotic. Francis was cool and private. He did not have a big generous hand. He had a precise, methodical way of doing things. He left his hairbrush and toothbrush lying next to each other on the bathroom counter at night. He ate the same breakfast every day. His desk, when he finished working at night, was neat and bare. These things touched me in the way that arrangements in foreign countries touch you. When I said “my husband” it was Raggy I meant, not Francis. I stayed with Francis for a year. He was more like romance than like marriage. In marriage you get used to things. In romance what you want is constant strangeness.
    I didn’t have much to pack. Most of my things I had left with Raggy, which gave him excellent reason to assume that I was coming back to remarry him, as Aunt Bettine had Uncle Clifford. I thought that I would eventually go back to Raggy. He didn’t seem to mind the idea of some profound change in me, but I did. If I was going to go back I felt I needed a little taste of flight, some self-imposed solitude. I minded changing. The very least I