Russell Banks - The Reserve

Kendall sat down at his desk and drew a ledger from a drawer, opened it, and went down the list of guides and their assignments. “No, Hubert’s free. He hasn’t worked since you left for New York on July fifth. At least not here at the Club or for any of the other Second Lake camps. Of course, he may have found work elsewhere by now. I mean, among the locals. Unlikely, though, given the way things are. And given the way guides are,” he added and smiled ruefully. “All the guides want is permission to hunt and fish in the Reserve, and they can’t do it unless they’re hunting or fishing for a member. Of course, they do it anyhow. In the off-season when we’re not here. Honestly, I don’t know how these people survive.”

She asked him how she could contact Hubert, but it turned out he had no telephone. Very few local people had telephones, Kendall explained. She would have to drive into the village and go to his house, which was out beyond the old Clarkson farm, a log house he’d built himself and where he lived alone, with no one but his dog for company since his wife died — a nice enough young woman, very plain, but quite pleasant when she worked at the Club, killed a few winters ago in an automobile accident. “Most of us expected Hubert to remarry, as he hadn’t been married long and had no children. But no. He is quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean. At least the local ladies seem to think so, the housekeepers and kitchen help. They practically swoon when he comes around,” Kendall nattered on. He was trying to sound like an intimate female friend, an equal, but it was hard for Kendall to be more than merely polite to Vanessa Cole. “Hubert is handsome, I suppose, in a rustic way. And very quiet. But you know what they say about the quiet ones,” he said.

“No. What do they say?”

“Oh, still waters and all that.” Kendall hoped he wouldn’t have to see much of the Cole girl this summer, or her mother, either. But if the two women did end up staying at their camp till the end of August or even longer, Hubert St. Germain would help keep them out of the manager’s hair. St. Germain was competent, independent, and discreet, a guide who kept things from getting complicated, and when he worked for one of the camps he made sure the owners didn’t have reason to come to the clubhouse complaining to management. “I’ll draw you a map to his house. It’s a little hard to find. It’s stuck over there beyond the village north of the Tamarack River, in the woods below Beede Mountain,” he said and pulled out a sheet of club stationery and began to draw.

JORDAN GROVES’S NEW STUDIO ASSISTANT ARRIVED EARLY FOR her first day of work, surprising the artist and irritating him, for she had interrupted the start of a silly, sexually explicit fantasy, a detailed continuation of his most recent encounter with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, revealing for his delectation what surely would have happened had he not turned away from the woman at the last possible second. Turning away was not unusual for Jordan Groves. He was good at it. Several times a year, sometimes more, he walked to the very edge of a precipice, looked over and down the cliff with a longing to step off it, then backed away, later to enjoy from a safe mental distance the terrible consequences of a near leap into domestic disaster. The fantasies gave him an ache that was oddly satisfying and provided a sexual charge that he believed enlivened him without endangering him or anyone else. The only women he actually made love to, other than his wife, of course, were women he was incapable of loving, and he never had sex with them more than once and almost never saw them again. The others he visited like this, in fantasy, telling himself little sex stories, over and over. In this way — perhaps it was the only way — he had managed all these years to avoid falling in love with anyone other than his wife, and, except for the fact that he knew it was an indulgence and would certainly not have wanted his wife to enjoy a similar indulgence, it left him guilt free.

This practice over the years had made the artist sexually incandescent to certain women. It made him behave in an invitational way, indicating that he was clearly available, even eager, to bed them, but would not do it. He was dangerous, and yet was unavailable, off-limits, safe. It did not hurt that he was a famous artist and handsome and healthy, a legendary adventurer and sportsman, a roistering world traveler with a loving family, leftist politics, and a lot of money. It did not hurt that he was the subject of much idle gossip. Certain women enjoyed having people think they were sleeping with Jordan Groves. The artist was aware of the source of his attractiveness to these women — he knew that his fantasies invoked theirs — and did nothing to discourage it.

Vanessa Von Heidenstamm had entered today’s dreamy narrative so vividly that she had displaced everyone else. It was as if all those other women Jordan Groves could have fallen in love with, had he only let himself make love to them, in a flash had been completely forgotten, erased from memory. This was different. In the past, whenever mundane reality intruded — as in the early arrival of Frances Jacques, his newly hired studio assistant — he could simply put his little story down without feeling frustrated or deprived, the fictional dimension of his life blending easily with ordinary reality. But no longer. Closing the book on Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, even temporarily, made him cross.

“What the hell are you doing here now!” he barked at the girl. “I told you to come at noon. You’re supposed to be here twelve to five, not eleven to four.”

Frightened and embarrassed, the girl stood in the doorway and wrung her hands. “I thought, it being the first day and all, I thought I’d get here early, you know, to kind of get used to where things were and all. Gosh, I’m sorry, Mr. Groves,” she said. “I’ll go away and come back later.” She was a local kid just out of high school, teachable, he had thought, though he’d been disappointed when she showed him the portfolio of awkward, amateurish drawings and paintings she’d made in art class. Not much talent there. But her teachers had spoken highly of her intelligence and character, and she seemed good natured and alert and physically strong, and besides, all she needed to do was keep the studio clean, take care of his tools and materials, stretch the occasional canvas, and when necessary pack and ship his work for him, most of which she could learn in a week. And she was from a poor family, the father jobless, the mother at home with four younger kids, and so on. That was in the girl’s favor. Her job would at least put food on the family’s table.

“No, forget it. Come in, I’ll get you started,” he said and waved her into the studio.

She was small but wiry, a farm kid used to physical labor. Her hair was a dark brown mass of thick curls, cut short more for ease of maintenance than appearance, and she wore no makeup or jewelry. She had dressed too carefully for the job, the artist noticed, like a secretary come to take dictation.

“Really, Mr. Groves, I’ll go away and come back later,” she practically pleaded.

He softened toward her then and smiled and apologized for being so grouchy. He liked her large dark eyes and rosy complexion and her sinewy forearms, unusual in a girl her age, and he wanted her to be happy and excited to be working for him. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Okay? You go back outside and knock on the door, and we’ll take it from there.”

Relieved, the girl smiled and did as she was told. She knocked, and the artist said, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Frances!”

“C’mon in, Frances!”

She opened the door and stepped inside, smiling broadly.