Russell Banks - The Reserve

Twice she felt the car begin to shudder and bump off the corrugated, switchbacking lane and had to yank the wheel and pull the vehicle away from the steep ditch at the side. And twice, lost in her thoughts, overwhelmed with guilt — and now dread, too, for she had seen herself through the calculating eyes of the other woman — she let the car coast almost to a stop before suddenly realizing it and accelerating back to a normal speed. Alicia had not intended to become involved with Hubert. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She told herself that she had not been looking for love outside the marriage, and she believed it. She and Jordan had often quarreled, of course, as all couples do, coming sometimes closer to violence, however, than most husbands and wives; and they had endured long periods of sullen detachment from each other, for Jordan was a difficult, demanding man with a roving eye and a permanent wanderlust and a need for constant forgiveness. But she had accommodated herself to his sharp, selfish ways, accepting them as an even trade for all the other ways in which he was large and exciting. Alicia believed that Jordan Groves had given her a bigger life than she ever could have acquired on her own or with a lesser man. Consequently, until she met and fell in love with Hubert St. Germain, Alicia had thought that, given her unique personality and desires, she was a happily married woman.

Over the years she had on several occasions been tempted to sleep with a man other than her husband — many men, usually friends or colleagues of Jordan’s, had made themselves available, especially when Jordan was off on one of his extended painting treks. But she had always turned them away with a gentle, appreciative smile, glad for the attention, but unwilling to break her marriage vows. Alicia had been raised a strict Catholic, and though she had not been to confession or mass since arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, and had said of herself in the intervening years that she was, like her husband, an atheist, and also like him was a Marxist, yes, but not a Communist, a Trotskyite, maybe, but not a Leninist, she still took vows of any kind seriously. It did not matter that she had made her marital vows in a civil ceremony performed by a Scottish justice of the peace with witnesses pulled in from the street. A sworn vow was a promise that, regardless of changed circumstances, one kept.

Thus, even though throughout her marriage to Jordan Groves there had been the usual crushes and flirtations, brief infatuations with men who resembled her husband not at all — short-lived fantasies generated by mild sexual curiosity — they had never come to anything. A few mixed signals and Alicia had quickly backed off, relieved, her curiosity doused, her fantasies fading fast and no longer able to excite her. In that way she had learned, to her surprise, that she was attracted to quiet men, self-contained, intelligent men who were modest about their accomplishments, men whose small, compact bodies were not at all like her husband’s Viking body. She discovered that she was attracted to men who knew things she didn’t, who possessed skills she lacked, and whose background and social status were radically different from hers. Knowing this, she was able to stand slightly outside her attractions and observe them dispassionately, even with mild amusement, for she was married to and, as far as she knew then, was still deeply in love with and made adequately happy by an entirely different sort of man — a man physically large and energetic and known to all the world for his turbulence and his frank outspokenness and egoism and his unquestioning belief in the importance of his life and work. A belief she had no difficulty in sharing with him.

In many ways they were, after all, a natural pair, Alicia and her husband, Jordan Groves. Jordan was educated in the arts, as she was, and like her was an only child raised by religious, politically conservative parents against whom he had rebelled early on — although his parents, of course, were American working class, Midwesterners, very blue collar, while hers were from the European haute bourgeoisie . And though they had made their home in a small farm village at the edge of the northern wilderness, Jordan and Alicia Groves were both cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated people. And they were rich. Together, but independently, and almost without trying — he by virtue of the immense early popularity of his work, she by virtue of being the daughter of well-to-do parents and the wife of Jordan Groves — the couple had become wealthy, renowned members of the haute bourgeoisie themselves. Thus she found it surprising and amusing and faintly ironic that, while she loved her husband for all the ways he and she were alike and in spite of the few ways they were different, she was periodically attracted to men like Hubert St. Germain for all the ways they were different and in spite of the few ways they were alike.

How they were different from each other was glaringly obvious to her. But until she had come to know the man intimately Alicia Groves could not have said how she and Hubert St. Germain were alike. There in his narrow bed in the furtive darkness of his small hand-built house, she learned that he was a man abandoned and lonely. She learned that he was a stoical man with low animal spirits, but one nonetheless eager to please in a sexual way and easy to please. And though essentially passive and trusting of all forms of authority, he was at bottom a man stubbornly independent of influence by others, especially in matters of right and wrong — ethical matters. And in that way she discovered that she, too, was all these things.

For she was abandoned and lonely. She had not been widowed like Hubert and was not childless and therefore was not, of course, abandoned and lonely in the same ways as he. But she was married to a man who was driven by powerful needs and desires, a man who for years had moved through her life like a hurricane, as if she were a single, small island in a vast archipelago, unable to alter his direction or diminish his force. After his storm had passed over and on, she always found herself alone, awaiting its return. Abandoned and lonely, then.

Also, her slow, gentle lovemaking with Hubert had taught her that she wanted to be held, not taken. She wanted to be touched with delicate precision by tongue and fingertip, not penetrated and lifted, awkward and off balance, unable to control her body herself, forced to give its leverage over to another. And she saw that, easy as she was to please, she was just as eager to give her lover pleasure back. She gave it, not as repayment, but as a gift outright, pure and simple, and the giving aroused and satisfied her.

They met in the fall and did not become lovers until the following spring. And all that spring, into the summer months, whenever she could steal away for a few hours, they made love and afterward walked in the woods and mountain meadows up behind his cabin, and there she discovered that she enjoyed deferring to Hubert’s authority in matters where she was incompetent or ignorant, as in the names and natures of the trees of the forest that surrounded them and the Alpine flowers and the berries and bushes and the natural history of the land and the streams and the lakes. She admired his woodland skills, which to her were arcane, like hunting and fishing and building a house with little more than an ax, a splitting maul, and a buck saw. And she never lied to Hubert, never pretended to possess knowledge or experience that she lacked, the way she lied to her husband to keep him from instructing her. She did on occasion, however, give over to Hubert’s authority in matters where she herself happened to be expert, such as gardening and cooking — skills she had learned from her Viennese mother and refined over the years of her marriage — but she did not believe that this was the same as lying to him. In these ways she learned that she was not vain or a liar by nature, as she had thought; she saw that she merely disliked conflict.