Russell Banks - The Reserve

Jordan pulled out his tobacco and papers and rolled a cigarette.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to become Mother’s caretaker, now that Daddy’s gone. She depended on Daddy for everything,” Vanessa said, watching his deft movements, fingertips, lips, tongue. “Can you show me how to do that?” she asked.

“She didn’t seem particularly frail to me,” he said.

“Mentally.”

“Oh.” He passed her a cigarette paper and sprinkled tobacco into it and, softly guiding her fingers with his, got it rolled into a lumpy tube. “Now wet the leading edge of the paper lightly,” he said and sat back to watch. She ran the tip of her tongue across the paper, looked up at him and smiled, then skillfully — expertly, he noticed — finished making the cigarette.

“I feel you’ve done this before,” he said.

“Not with tobacco.”

She tucked her long legs under her and lighted the cigarette and smoked, and though Jordan knew she was showing off, he could not stop himself from admiring what appeared to be her nonchalant, natural grace. The room was flooded with tawny sunlight. Wood smoke from the fireplace, the brown sugar aroma of the rum in the glass, and the smell of burning tobacco — private, deeply familiar odors to Jordan — mingled and perfumed the room and somehow let him feel that he had known this woman for many years. She made him feel glad to be alive. It was a rare, simple-hearted pleasure just to sit back and look at her full, precisely formed mouth and listen to her low, husky voice.

She wanted to talk about her father, she told him, but not with anyone who knew her father well or was related to him or one of his friends, and definitely not with her mother. They wouldn’t understand. When her father was alive Vanessa had spent a year talking about him to a world-famous Swiss psychiatrist, she said, and it hadn’t helped in the slightest, because she had come away both adoring her father and despising him fully as much as she had at the start. And now that he was dead, she adored and despised him to an even greater degree than before. And she was troubled by this, she said, for it made it difficult for her to grieve over his death in a useful or even an honest way. She had hoped that bringing his ashes up here would help, but she could already tell that it hadn’t made any difference at all. “It’s painful, his death, naturally. But all the same, I feel false. I feel ungrateful.”

“I can understand why you might adore your father. What the hell, he was your father. But why did you despise him? Why do you, I mean.”

“You’d be better off asking why I adored him. Actually, either way, the answer would be the same. After a year on the good doctor’s couch, I learned that much,” she said. “One hates a person for the same reason one loves him. Especially if that person is one’s parent.” Her father and mother had adopted her when she was little more than an infant, she told him. An only child, she had been doted on, swaddled by their love and care — even spoiled, she admitted it. All her life she had been given everything she wanted. With one exception. Right up to the day her father died, he had refused to tell her who her real mother and father had been or how she had come to Dr. and Mrs. Cole for adoption. All he would say was that she had not been wanted by her real parents. “Our foundling,” was how Dr. Cole had described her, even to strangers. “He so dominated Mother in this that, even now, with his ashes at the bottom of the lake, she still won’t tell me where they ‘found’ me or who left me there. Daddy’s wishes were and are and always will be her commands,” she said. “For all I know, they could have kidnapped me.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jordan said. “You can’t despise your father just because he wouldn’t tell you how you came to be adopted. There’s got to be another reason. He may have had good motives for it. Rightly or wrongly, he may have felt he needed to protect you somehow. I mean, what if your real mother was a whore and your real father a drunken sailor on a weekend pass? He might reasonably want to keep that from you.”

“You’re right,” she said. “The truth is, the great, beloved Dr. Carter Cole was not the man everyone thought he was,” she said. “Not in private, not in secret. Not when he was alone with Mother and me. And alone with me…” She trailed off. “Well, let’s just say he was different . A different man. He was not a nice man, Jordan.”

“No one’s the same when he’s alone with his wife or his children. It’s where you let your guard down, especially if, like your father, you’re more or less a public figure.”

She moved closer to him on the sofa. “You’re a public figure, Jordan, and I know you’re different when you’re with your family alone. In private. I can tell from a single visit to your home that Jordan Groves in private is a nice man.” She laughed lightly. “Actually, it’s in public, with the whole world watching, that you’re not a nice man. A brawler. You’ve punched critics in the jaw and given reviewers black eyes. You’re an opinionated, drunken Red. And a famous womanizer. Oh, you have such a dangerous reputation, Jordan Groves! While you’re up here in the mountains holed up in your studio and your sweet wife bakes bread and your sons study the local flora, people in New York City are talking. Or when you’re off on one of your famous adventures in the Arctic or wherever it is you go alone for months at a time to paint and where it’s clear from your pictures and writings that you sleep with the native women and probably participate in horrid native rituals, all the while, back here and in the cafés of Manhattan, tongues are wagging. No,” she said, suddenly serious, “you’re the opposite of my father.” She reached out and brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “You didn’t shave this morning, did you?”

He swiped at her hand and shoved it away and scowled. “Yes, I shaved.”

“Why are you so violent with me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“What makes you think you know me?”

“You’re answering a question with a question, Jordan,” she said softly and touched his cheek a second time.

“Once I would have eaten you whole,” he said and took her hand gently away from his face. “Right down to your beautiful white fingertips,” he said, and he put her fingers into his mouth and held them there and touched them with his tongue.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. After a moment, he withdrew her hand and placed it on her lap. “But not now,” he said. “Not anymore.” He put his glass on the table beside him and stood. “I know what people say about me. I know my reputation, and mostly I don’t give a good goddamn. Listen, Vanessa, somebody once asked me in one of those dumb magazine interviews what I wanted out of life, and I told him the truth, I said, ‘I want all of it.’ And until recently that’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life.”

“‘Until recently.’”

“Yes. But now…now I’m starting to realize that I can’t have all of it.” He paused and looked above her and out the window at the lake and the mountains and the sky. “Some of the things we want cancel out other things we want. I’m not going into details,” he said, “but I want my wife and my boys to be happy. I want them to be proud of me. And I want that more than I want certain other things,” he said and turned back to her. “Even you.”

“And you believe that? If you can have me, you can’t have them? And vice versa, that if you can’t have me, then you can have them? Are you sure?” she said. “Because I’m not.”

“Look, you’re not some pretty little Chilean dance hall girl showing me her tits, or a smiling round-faced Inuit girl lying naked under a bearskin blanket, or some doe-eyed model from the Art Students League dying to sleep with the famous artist. You’re not one of those Fifth Avenue society hostesses looking for a discreet tumble in the maid’s room after the party’s over and the other guests have gone home. No, you’re like me, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. And people like you and me, we leave a lot of wreckage behind us. I don’t want my family to be part of that wreckage. That’s all I’m saying.”