The Lone Pilgrim Read Online Free PDF

explained. “That’s why it looks like this. Of course, it’s always looked something like this.”
    Jane was given a guided tour. Cordy turned a corner and identified a room containing a table, a typewriter, and a wood file cabinet as the bedroom he had slept in as a child.
    â€œWhen I went to college, they turned it into a room to store their tax returns in,” Cordy said.
    He looked tired and seemed sad to Jane. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him. She wanted to wrap him up in all the nice things she had had as a child and compensate for what she imagined was the coldness of his childhood, his horrid parents, the fact that they had snatched his room away from him as soon as he had left home.
    â€œWhat was it like to live here?” she asked.
    â€œI can’t remember,” Cordy said.
    Trouble in love seeks a proper issue. In some cases it is sex; in others, politics or money. In the case of Cordy, it was work. The time he spent with Jane, he said, was taking him away from his work. She was too seductive—too fragrant, too luxurious. He had changed his entire life to be with her, he said.
    Jane, on the other hand, had gone on living as she had always done. Before Cordy came along, she had prepared dinners for herself, lolled around on Saturday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, just as she did with Cordy. She had worked on her thesis without Cordy, and she worked as well with him.
    He said as he sat at the table, pouring cream over the strawberries: “All this life is getting in the way of life.”
    Jane felt as if she had been slapped. She recalled the first conversation they had ever had. She had never thought her appetites were at all voracious—they were the normal appetites everyone had for pleasure in life. That first interchange made it clear that Cordy did not feel this way at all.
    For a few weeks nothing much changed except that Jane began to feel embarrassed by her salads, by the dish of pears she kept on the coffee table. The attention Cordy lavished on the details of her life was beginning to make her feel not singled out and appreciated but freakish. They soon began to quarrel. The brilliance of their initial affection began to mire down in fights about meeting places, time spent together, and the cost of lamb chops. In the beginning, these quarrels were repaired quite simply. After all, they had started off magnificently. A glowing smile, a declaration, a kiss on the back of the neck could still bring them back to their original state in which they had felt that no other lovers had had the advantages of their fine minds, their attractiveness, the intelligence with which they adored one another. Now it seemed that there was rather more quarreling than enchantment. Cordy began to display a cold, bitter side. Jane, in turn, became businesslike and brisk.
    It was soon decided that they should spend several nights apart. This was Jane’s idea, prompted by a sincere worry that Cordy should be working on his thesis and a great desire not to watch her brilliant love affair look more and more like a second-rate domestic failure.
    Cordy went back to his Spartan diggings, where, with the aid of instant coffee and powdered milk, he began to work on his dissertation. When lovers agree to part, doom is right around the corner. Cordy and Jane were no exception. When they were together, they found themselves constantly misunderstanding one another, and when they were apart, the misunderstandings were further annotated by late-night telephone calls. It sometimes seemed to Jane that these disagreements were manufactured by Cordy, as if to rub her nose into his reality and show her that life was not, in fact, nice for very long.
    On these solitary nights Jane entertained thoughts of throwing out every endearing object she possessed; of pouring the dread olive oil down the sink. It was hard for her to believe that what had begun so happily and with such