The Reserve by Russell Banks
“Oh. You’re in love with him, but you’ve closed your heart to him. Whatever that means. Does it mean you’re no longer in love with me?”
“No, it does not, Jordan. I will always be in love with you.”
“You will, eh? Well, that’s a little hard for me to grasp. Here’s a fact. Except for you, I have never been in love with anyone. Only you. Period. So I don’t know what the hell you mean when you say you’re in love with Hubert, despite having ‘closed your heart to him,’ and that you will also always be in love with me.” He rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know how you can be in love with both of us.”
“It’s not like that. Being in love, I mean. It’s more complicated and confusing than that.”
“Not to me. For me, with every woman the love switch is either off or it’s on. And it’s always been on with you, Alicia. With everyone else, off.”
“I’ve never doubted your love for me,” she said quietly. “But all those women, the women you’ve slept with, you never loved any of them?”
“No. Absolutely not. You know that, you’ve always known that. Cold comfort, maybe, but we’re not talking about me here, are we? Oh, I know I might be partly to blame for driving you into the eager arms of the noble Adirondack woodsman Hubert St. Germain. It’s obvious even to me that I’m hard to live with and have not been a faithful husband and have left you alone here with the boys for weeks and months at a time. And I know in some people’s eyes ol’ Hubert’s a charmer, even if a somewhat mournful and inarticulate one. And I know that after nearly ten years of marriage any woman gets restless and maybe a little curious about what it might be like to fuck someone other than her husband. So there are all kinds of causes ready to hand. So many that there’s no point in discussing them. What I have to know is, what exactly has happened, Alicia? What has happened? So that I can decide what I am to do now. My next move.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do I divorce you? Or do I fall down on my knees and promise to be a better husband? Do I fly into a rage and knock you down and bust all the furniture? Or do I weep in sorrow and self-pity for having lost the love of my life? What the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know the answer to that. Do I drive over to Hubert’s cabin and drag him out of his filthy adulterous bed and beat the shit out of him? Or do I sit down with him over a bottle of whiskey and talk about the perfidy of unhappily married women? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alicia,” he cried, and his voice broke. “What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to feel?” He spread his arms wide and opened his body and face to her.
She came forward and got down on her knees in front of him and put her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist. Weeping now, she said, “All of it, Jordan. Do all of it. If you ask for a divorce, I’ll give it to you. If you promise to be a better husband, I’ll believe you. If you beat up Hubert, I’ll understand. Though Lord knows it’s not his fault. None of it is. It’s all my fault. If you sit down and get drunk with him and talk about what an awful woman I’ve been, I’ll understand. Do all of it, Jordan. Do anything. Do everything. Just please, in the end, please forgive me, Jordan.”
Tears streamed down his broad cheeks. “Not possible, Alicia. It’s not possible. I can’t forgive you because I can’t forget what you’ve done. Not as long as I can picture the two of you crawling all over each other naked in bed. And what you’ve said. That you still love the man. It’s not fair, I know, I don’t have any right to feel the way I do. I know that. Because I’ve had my share, more than my share, of dalliances or liaisons or whatever you want to call them. But there’s a difference, Alicia. I never loved any of those women! They were just flashes of light in the dark. Fireflies. I never shared my secrets with them. Only with you, Alicia. I never let them know me. Only you.”
They stayed silent for several moments, Alicia with her head against his chest and Jordan with his arms around her, holding her close. She heard his heart pound, and he felt her back shudder as she wept. In all their years together, they had never both wept at the same time. She had wept, because of his sins against her, or he had wept out of guilt, but separately.
Finally, he let go of her and told her to go upstairs to bed and leave him alone. “I need to be alone. I need to think. I need to know what’s really happened here, and I don’t believe you can help me with that.” He pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face dry and gave it to her to do the same, which she did.
Then, awkwardly, she stood up, and when she turned to leave she saw that the dogs had come into the room and were sitting alertly by the door, watching Alicia and Jordan with worried expressions on their long faces.
Alicia said, “They know.”
“What do they know? They’re dogs.”
“They know that something terrible has happened to us.”
“Has it? I don’t know yet what has happened to us. I need time to think. Go to bed, Alicia. I’ll be up later. Or maybe I won’t.”
She left the room, and the dogs followed, still worried. When Jordan heard Alicia’s footsteps overhead, he turned back to his desk and picked up his letter to Dos Passos. He held it to the light and studied it for a moment as if trying to read it through the envelope. Then he tore the letter in half and half again and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket.
The three newcomers learned at breakfast that they were listed for two missions today, a morning flight and an afternoon, their first flights over enemy territory. It was not great weather for flying. The early morning rain had stopped, but a blanket of low clouds remained. They had been waiting for a week for their airplanes to arrive from Bilbao and had been given Breguets, not the Russian Polikarpov monoplanes they had requested. The Breguets had been fitted out with two machine guns and bomb racks that held four twenty-five-pound bombs. Their mission was to bomb a pair of gunpowder factories deep in enemy territory, just beyond the Jarama River, fifteen miles from Madrid. To get the job done with the Breguets they would have to do it twice. All nine of the foreign pilots in the squadron stood by their planes until they saw the starting signal, a white flare shot from the field house. As soon as they were in the air, the planes moved into a V of V formation, in which each of the three-man patrols was in a V and the three patrols themselves were in a V. The American named Groves flew on the right wing of the first patrol, which was led by the Englishman Fairhead. Chang flew on Fairhead’s left wing. The ceiling had settled at three thousand feet, making it easy to cross into enemy territory unseen in the clouds. When they had passed over the target factories and flown a few miles beyond, Fairhead swung the formation back toward home territory. The right-wing patrol crossed over the top of Fairhead’s lead patrol, and the left slid under, the three together making as quick and tight a 180-degree turn as a single patrol alone could make. When they were almost on top of the factories Fairhead gave the signal to attack, and all nine planes dove, still in a V of V formation. Fairhead’s lead patrol was to take out the antiaircraft battery located between the two factories. The two wing patrols were led by the veterans, Papps, the Englishman, and Brenner, the American, who had Whitey on his wing. They went for the factories. The pilots lined up their bomb sights and released the bombs, continuing the dive, machine-gunning people, mostly civilians madly racing away from the factory yards. At three hundred feet they flattened out their dive and sped across the Jarama River and until they got into friendly territory kept their aircraft as close to the ground as possible, following the narrow valleys and draws to keep the enemy from seeing where they’d gotten to. Later that same afternoon they made the return trip, all nine of them, to bomb the same factories. There was much more antiaircraft fire this time, little puffs of white smoke here and there, like small detached cumulus clouds, growing more numerous as the airplanes approached the factories. They dropped their bombs, finishing off the factories and, as they had before, machine-gunned anyone foolish enough to be caught in the open. This time, on their return to base Fa
A DENSE, LAYERED, ROSE-TINTED MIST HOVERED ABOVE THE lake as Jordan Groves came over the Great Range and began his descent. From above, the mist obscured the pilot’s view of the black surface of the water. There was no wind. He cut his speed as close to a stall as he dared and brought the biplane in gently, like laying a newborn baby into its downy crib. He felt the lake before he saw it, and when he knew the pontoons had settled squarely into the glass-smooth water he brought the engine speed back up a notch and headed for the hidden cove south of Rangeview, where he had anchored the day before. From a distance of a hundred yards he could make out the shoreline easily enough, but little else, nothing higher up on the shore, not the clear blue sky above the mist or the towering pines and not the Coles’s camp buildings. Just the mossy rocks and the low pucker bushes at the edge of the lake and the graveled spills where the brooks and streams tumbled from the heights into the lake.
He pulled into the cove and quickly anchored the airplane and strode ashore. It was not yet six in the morning. He had slept barely two hours the night before, half of it on the leather sofa in his office, the other half in his easy chair. His mouth was sour and dry from whiskey and tobacco. All night long he had struggled to make up his mind about something, anything, but had been unable to do it. His entire life felt like a swirl of irresolution, until just before dawn when he made up his mind to fly out to the Second Lake and speak with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He had no idea what he would ask or tell her. But she had been a witness to his betrayal, perhaps the only witness—other than Hubert St. Germain, of course, and Alicia herself, and there was no way he could expect to be comforted or enlightened by talking with either of them. Not now. They could only bring him more pain, more irresolution. Vanessa, however, might somehow help him capture the calm objectivity that he needed in order to regain his sense of himself as a man, a man of action. He could not bear thinking of himself in any other way.
Rather than sneak furtively through the brush and forest the way he’d done the day before, Jordan approached the camp forth-rightly, from the shore. He had no fear today of being seen, no shame at being here, no guilty fantasies to hide from himself or anyone else. All he wanted was to tell Vanessa what his wife had confessed to him and ask her what she had seen at Hubert St. Germain’s cabin. From those two points of contact, plus his remembered long history of his marriage and his own crimes against it, he could begin to triangulate and locate his exact position in the shifting present. And once he knew that much, he would know how to navigate the future. Until then, he would thrash about like a child lost in the woods, abandoned and alone, with no idea of how to get home.
He stepped onto the deck and pushed open the screened door to the porch, and there on the wicker couch lay Hubert St. Germain, startled awake by the sound of the door closing and astonished by the sight of Alicia’s husband standing before him. Hubert may well have been dreaming about the artist, he couldn’t remember, but for a few seconds he thought he was still dreaming about him, and somehow in the dream the artist had found out that his wife had been sleeping with Hubert and that she and he were in love with each other, and now the artist had come to kill him.
The man did not seem angry, though. He stood over Hubert as large and sad as a bear. Slowly, Hubert sat up and pushed the blanket away. Fully clothed, he put his stockinged feet into his boots, and leaned forward and carefully tied the laces. Then he sat back and looked up at Jordan Groves and waited for something bad to happen.
For several moments neither man spoke. The artist reached behind him and drew up a large wicker chair and sat down heavily in it, facing the guide. Neither man had taken his eyes off the other’s face. “All right, then. So tell me, Hubert,” Jordan finally said. “Tell me why you did it.”
The guide held his breath and then slowly exhaled, as if in relief. So it was over. Over and done with. “I guess she must’ve told you…about us.”
“If I understood you, if I knew why you were willing to take my wife away from me, I’d probably want to be you. Her I understand. Me I understand. But not you. She has all kinds of reasons for falling in love with someone other than me. I can accept that. But you, Hubert, you I do not get.”
“I don’t know what you mean, if you understood me you’d want to be me.”
“Because then I’d be a real romantic. Like you. But I’m not. Y’know, Hubert, I’ve fucked other men’s wives. It’s true. Just like you. But I never wanted to take them away from their husbands. I only wanted to fuck them. Was it like that for you, Hubert? You just wanted to fuck Alicia? Maybe you’re like me after all.”
“I never meant that,” he said. “She’s not like that. And neither am I.”
Jordan nodded. He agreed, Alicia was not like that, and neither was Hubert. “That’s the thing I don’t understand, why you’d want to steal another man’s wife,” he said. “I don’t get it. It’s outside my mentality.” He looked around him as if registering for the first time where he was located: the Tamarack Mountain Reserve; the Second Lake; Rangeview. “What are you doing out here, anyhow? Fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, too? Maybe I’m wrong about you. Maybe you’re not a romantic. Have you been servicing both of them all along? You’re quite a stud, Hubert. I’d never have figured you for that.”
Hubert said no, there was nothing between him and Miss Cole, and said nothing more. What could he say to Jordan Groves? The guide was not a man of many words. He tried to be truthful and accurate about everything, but too many things, especially when it came to human beings, and even more especially when it came to men and women, were too complicated to speak about honestly or accurately. He had never spoken of the puzzling, conflicted mix of elation and apprehension he had felt when he married his high school sweetheart, Sally Lawrence. Not even to Alicia. And he’d never even tried to speak of the shameful mix of sorrow and relief he had felt when she died. He had told no one of the beatings he had endured at his father’s hands when he was a boy and his mother’s inability—or was it her unwillingness?—to protect him and his three brothers from the drunken man they called, with a sneer, the Old Man. Hubert, the youngest, had been abandoned by his brothers one by one as soon as each was able to leave home, the first for Alaska, the next for Colorado, the third for Montana—loners all, guides, hunters, trappers, woodsmen, each safely protected by his own personal wilderness, except for Hubert, the youngest, who, after the Old Man died drunk in a snowbank when Hubert was seventeen, had stayed on in the Reserve, the Old Man’s wilderness, doing the job his father had done before him.
He never spoke of any of this, not even in painless, smooth generalities. There were no words to describe the feelings that since childhood had warred in his large, wounded heart, and he had almost given up on ever finding them, until he met Alicia, whom he came quickly to believe was willing and able to give him those words and listen to his use of them with sympathy and understanding. That was why he had begun to steal her from her husband. It hadn’t been his intention or desire. It surely was not merely to make love to her, although their lovemaking, tender and trusting and passionate, had brought him closer to speaking of these things and revealing his secret self than he had ever been before.
There was no way he could tell this to the sad, angry, bewildered man before him. So he simply shook his head and said no. No to the man’s accusation that he was fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. No to his charge that he had wanted to steal the man’s wife. Hubert ha
“So what the hell are you doing out here this early in the morning, sleeping on the porch, instead of out back in the cookshack or the lean-to?” Jordan asked him, thinking that the guide had a better right and reason to ask him what he was doing out here this early in the morning. He had no idea of what he would give him for an answer. How do you tell a man like Hubert St. Germain that you don’t know why you are where you are? That you’re looking for some solid ground to stand on, and you think this strangely incandescent woman can somehow give it to you? How can you tell the man who has been sleeping with your wife that, because of him, you no longer know who your wife is and therefore no longer know who you are, either?
Hubert said, “I’m helping Miss Cole out with her mother.”
“Her mother, eh? Why? Is she ill or something?”
“No.” Hubert sucked thoughtfully on his lips for a few seconds, then said, “It’s not something I can talk about.”
“What the Christ does that mean?”