Russell Banks - The Reserve

Soon the trees and brush thinned out, and he saw the roofs of the camp woodshed and the caretaker’s shack. Avoiding the open ground in front of the camp, he walked through tall pines toward the guest quarters and approached the main building from the side. He passed the big stone fireplace chimney and was a few feet from the steps leading up to the deck when he stopped suddenly and stood stock-still, as if to hear the breeze stroking the high branches of the pine trees.

This is crazy, he thought. I’m a goddamn lunatic doing this, coming out here in the middle of the afternoon. I’m like a hound chasing a bitch in heat. It was his first conscious thought since he’d put Frances Jacques in charge of the boys. Alicia was in town, he knew, doing her thrice-weekly volunteer work at the little medical center there and picking up groceries afterward and would be home by three or so. He’d told Frances to inventory all his tools and brushes and to let the boys help her. That way she would learn where everything was located in the studio and what it was called. Just as his own father had done when he was a small boy, Jordan had taught his sons the names of the tools of his trade. It was the first step toward teaching them the trade itself. He gave the girl a pad and pencil and said that if she found a tool or a piece of equipment that neither she nor the boys could name, she was to make a drawing of it, and he would tell her later what it was called. He wanted her to memorize the location and name of every tool he owned, so that he could be like a surgeon and she his nurse, and all he’d have to do was ask for a particular brush or chisel, and she’d place it in his hand. He instructed her to go through all the drawers and look on every shelf and into the cabinets. He had nothing to hide. No secrets, he told her. He wanted her as familiar with every square inch of the studio as he was. Today was tool day, he said. Tomorrow they would inventory materials. Then he had left the studio for the hangar and his airplane, and until this moment, when he found himself in the Reserve at the Second Lake and about to step up onto the deck of the late Dr. Cole’s camp, Rangeview, and quietly knock on the front door, he had no thoughts about what he was doing or why. He simply did it.

He realized that his silly sexual fantasy, not the woman herself, had gotten the best of him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was beautiful and provocative and intriguingly unpredictable, but she was flawed, terribly flawed, as if something inside her, a crucial, defining part of her mind, were permanently broken and made her dangerous to anyone foolish enough to get close to her. It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. You were magnetically attracted to her or you were repelled, and in his case it was both. He glanced down the slope in front of the camp to the glittering water and noticed that the guide boat was not there. So she was gone, then.

He searched the lake for a moment and saw only a deer with her fawn stepping cautiously from the woods on the far side to drink. A pair of loons floated offshore a ways, bobbing in the low waves, disappearing abruptly underwater, reappearing a minute later fifty yards farther on, and Jordan wondered if, like swans, loons mated for life. Then suddenly the artist felt very foolish. He felt foolish and exposed, like a lovesick adolescent boy caught standing below the window of an inaccessible woman, a nobleman’s young wife or daughter, and he merely the carpenter’s son. Turning, he walked back along the side of the main building of the camp and into the woods and made his way downstream along the brook to the inlet where he had anchored his airplane.

The new American flyers flew formation drills at Los Alcázares twice a day for a week. The rest of the time they amused themselves pitching coins with their Spanish mechanics, tossing five peseta pieces the size of silver dollars. The tall American, the one they called Rembrandt, mostly kept himself apart from the others and made drawings of the blond hills. Finally one morning in early February, after they had been checked out and approved by their Spanish commander and a Russian colonel, they were sent to Valencia aboard an old Fokker trimotor transport. The Fokker landed at a half-constructed airfield in Manises, just outside the city, shortly after noon, and the Americans took a taxi to the Hotel Ingles, where they dropped their luggage and strolled to the nearby Vodka Café. They went there to meet the other foreign pilots based in Valencia, men who had been in Spain most of the fall of ’36 and now the winter of ’37. They were Allison and Koch and Brenner from the United States, and the Englishmen, Fairhead, Papps, and Loverseed. The three new arrivals were known to each other by their nicknames, taken earlier when they’d first arrived in Los Alcázares — Whitey, because of his pale hair, Chang, because of his round face and flat features, and Rembrandt, because back in the States he was a well-known artist — but they introduced themselves to the veteran pilots by their last names instead, Richardson, Collins, and Groves, as if somehow here in Valencia where there was a war on, nicknames seemed frivolous. Groves, the artist, asked, What’ve they got us flying out of here? All we had in Los Alcázares were a couple of old Polish Cojo-Jovens. Real clunkers, barely held together with tape and baling wire. Fairhead, who was the squadron commander, smiled and said they’d be flying even older 1925 Breguet 19s. Groves scowled. Christ, that crate was obsolete the day it came out of the factory, he said. The Englishman laughed. Oh, you’ll get so you can squeeze enough out of it. It’ll always get you home. Or nearly always. Every airplane has its virtues, Groves. Like women. You just have to learn how to locate them. Their virtues, I mean. And then how to get the bloody most out of them. Do you read me, Groves? he asked. Do you read me? The Englishman seemed drunk, and the American didn’t answer. He moved away from the group and after a while left the café and went back to the hotel. The rest of the flyers kept drinking, and as the afternoon wore on they grew very loud and raucous, the veterans because they felt lucky to be still alive, the newcomers, Whitey and Chang, because they were afraid.

TREMBLING AS IF SUDDENLY CHILLED, ALICIA GROVES DROVE rapidly downhill from Hubert St. Germain’s cabin and said to herself that she hated this, lying like a child and hiding like a common criminal. And most of all, she hated having been exposed this way. Though it was probably a good thing, she thought. The exposure would allow her to end the deception. But not the guilt. No matter what Jordan did when he found out, the punishment would not be severe enough to end the guilt. And he would find out. And he would punish her. That girl will make sure he knows. She wants him for herself, Alicia thought, although she’s probably already had him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was the kind of woman who takes a man away from his wife and children just because she can and then leaves him behind and moves on to steal another. Alicia hadn’t known women like that, not personally, but she had read about them in novels and magazines.

It wasn’t that way with Hubert. It was different with him, wasn’t it? It had to be. That difference, however, was the source of her guilt. For she believed that she loved Hubert and he loved her, and she believed that Hubert had made her happier to be who she truly was than her husband ever had. In fact, it was Hubert who had shown her who she truly was. But there was a price to pay. A high, ongoing price. Regardless of what happened now, Alicia’s happiness and freshened knowledge of who she truly was had corrupted her marriage, had tainted it forward and backward, from its beginning to the eventual end of it. It was as if she had been false to her husband all the years they were married and now was condemned to be false to him for the rest of her life. That’s what Alicia believed.