Russell Banks - The Reserve

He shut off the motor and sat there for a few seconds and watched Vanessa. She was in a group of perhaps ten people, but he saw no one else. She wore a calf-length black skirt and a dark gray silk blouse with billowing sleeves and over her broad shoulders a black crocheted shawl, and she looked even more beautiful to Jordan today than when he’d seen her yesterday in the fading, late-afternoon sunlight standing alone by the shore of the Second Lake. She had on bright red, almost scarlet lipstick, and mascara, and though she was pale and her face full of sorrow, she was luminous to him, enveloped by a light that seemed to emanate from inside her. He did not think that he had ever seen a woman with a visible field of light surrounding her like that, a gleaming halo wrapped around her entire body.

He told the boys to wait for him and got out of the car and walked toward the veranda. As he approached the group, the people ceased speaking and looked at him, and then, except for Vanessa, abruptly turned away. Russell Kendall took Evelyn Cole gently by the arm and led her along the veranda toward the steps at the far end of the long, open structure, past the Adirondack chairs and wicker settees and gliders, and the others followed, although Vanessa did not. She waited with a puzzled expression on her face, as if Jordan Groves were only a vaguely remembered acquaintance approaching.

He said to her, “I just now heard about your father. I want to say I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“What?”

“Say that you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry. I am.”

He was filled with an unfamiliar longing. He wanted to reach up and touch her and realized that not once yesterday had he actually touched her skin. Though she had whispered in his ear, their cheeks had not brushed. He remembered extending his hand to help her when she stepped from the water to the airplane, and a few seconds later, when she got into the cockpit, reaching again to assist her, but she had ignored his offers and not even their fingertips had touched. He had only seen and heard her.

“Yes, well, you have much to be sorry for,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. She knew without looking that at the far end of the veranda her mother and Mr. Kendall and the others had turned and were watching her. She could see over Jordan’s shoulder that even the drivers were watching her. She decided not to slap him, although she wanted to, and he deserved it. But a slap would not create a scene so much as end one. No one could hear them, but everyone could see them, and she didn’t want the scene to end just yet.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I do. I do have much to be sorry for. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I’m afraid that I do.”

“Then tell me, please,” he said, and meant it. He wanted to know what he had been thinking last night when he’d left her up there at Bream Pond, and he believed her, believed that she knew what he had been thinking.

“You wanted to make love to me. And couldn’t.”

He inhaled sharply. She stepped down from the veranda and walked toward him, and as she swept past he smelled her perfume, the faint odor of a rose. He had seen her and heard her, and now he had smelled her. But he still hadn’t touched her. “Wait,” he said and reached out and took her left hand into his.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I have to leave. I have to arrange for my father’s funeral.”

She tried to pull her hand free. He wouldn’t release it. He held it tightly, but carefully, as if her hand were a small, captured bird, terrified and fragile, struggling to escape his powerful grip without injuring itself. He felt the delicate bones and tendons turning beneath the cool, smooth skin of her hand.

“You may be right,” he said. “About what I was thinking.”

She looked up at him. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Does it?”

“Yes, it matters. A lot. It matters to me.”

He could not help himself, and meant no disrespect or mockery: he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly and released the bird into the air.

For a split second Vanessa glared at him, as if he had indeed mocked her. Then she turned and quickly strode toward the tan sedan parked in front of his Ford. She called her mother sharply to come along and got into the rear seat of the car. The driver — a man Jordan knew, Ben Kernhold, who had once owned a now defunct machine shop over in Tamarack Forks and had made polished aluminum picture frames for him — closed the car door, cast a quick glance at Jordan, and went around to the other side, where he waited for Vanessa’s mother. One by one, Evelyn Cole and the others came down the far steps of the veranda and got into their vehicles.

Slowly, like a cortege, the vehicles pulled out of the clubhouse driveway in a line and departed. Jordan stood by his car and watched them go over the hill and down, until they had disappeared from sight. Finally, he turned and, startled, saw that the manager of the club, Russell Kendall, was standing next to him.

“Oh, hello, Kendall,” he said.

“Mr. Groves, you should leave now.”

“So you remember my name after all.”

“Yes. And I know all about last night. You and your airplane at the Second Lake. You are not welcome here, sir. You should leave at once.”

“I should leave at once, eh?” He could hear his blood roaring in his ears and knew that trouble was coming. “Well, you know, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to leave yet. I’ve got my two little boys here, and I was thinking of showing them this grand historic structure and taking a good look at it myself. I’ve never been up here before. I might want to become a member someday, you know.” He swung open the rear door of his car and said to his sons, “C’mon out, boys. We’re going to take the tour.”

The boys, sensing something wrong in their father’s voice, hesitated. The dogs, Dayga and Gogan, did not. They scrambled over the boys’ laps, leaped from the car, and happily took off across the broad lawn. Like hounds in wild pursuit of a fox, they galloped in ever widening, intersecting loops through flower beds, across the manicured bowling green, and onto the adjacent eighth fairway of the golf course, where last night half the town had sat on the grass waiting to watch the fireworks when Vanessa flew Jordan’s airplane across the night sky above and aimed it at Sentinel Mountain and Goliath.

Kendall shouted at Jordan, “Call those dogs! We can’t have unleashed dogs!”

Jordan gazed at the sky, as if half expecting to see his airplane return. What a pretty sight it must have been from here, he thought. He wished he could keep thinking about that and could ignore what was happening here. He wished he could somehow avoid what he knew was about to happen.

“Mr. Groves, call those dogs!”

“Daddy, we’ll get them,” Bear said and got out of the car. He called, “C’mon, Wolf!” and his younger brother followed, and the two boys ran up the slope of the fairway after the dogs. A party of golfers waved angrily at the dogs and the boys and shouted at them and sent their caddies loping over the grassy bluffs after them, which only kept the dogs happily running in more elaborate and widening circles. On the veranda a half dozen of the clubhouse staff — waiters and the two desk clerks — had stepped outside to see what was happening, several with barely concealed smiles on their faces, cheered by the slightest sign of disorder. A groundsman came around from the rear of the building, stopped, folded his arms, and took in the scene.

Jordan recognized most of the crew — local folks. Friends of his, neighbors. And they recognized him. It was the artist, Jordan Groves, from over in Petersburg in a row with Mr. Kendall. They liked the sight of the artist towering over the manager, seeming cool and calm and apparently unfazed by the little man’s rage. They were used to Kendall’s tirades. The artist they believed was a good man and meant well. But he was a troublemaker and didn’t seem to be aware of it. They hoped he wasn’t trying to organize some kind of workers’ union again, not here at the Tamarack club, like he did a year ago at the paper mill in Tamarack Forks. It was Roosevelt’s Wagner Act that had given him the idea that it was legal. Two months later the mill closed its doors and moved to one of those states down South. The Tamarack Club was practically the only private employer left in the region, and if you got hired here for the summer — despite the low wages, the long hours, and the rough treatment by the members and management — you counted yourself lucky. Except for the eight weeks of July and August when the Club was open, most people in town, unless they were able to hook on to one of the WPA projects or the Civilian Conservation Corps, stayed unemployed year-round and, as much as you could in this climate, lived off the land.