Russell Banks - The Reserve

Alicia lay in bed upstairs and listened to the two men laugh and talk. Something in the voice of the stranger attracted her. It was not his north country accent. Alicia was not especially fond of the way the local people spoke; she sometimes had difficulty understanding their flattened, brisk English. But she liked listening to this man — his tone was sweet and unbroken, pitched lower than her husband’s. She could not hear their words very well, even though the door to the hallway was open, but she knew that they were talking about cars, she could make out that much, comparing the virtues and limitations of Model T, A, and B Fords, agreeing that for this climate and these roads the Model A was the best vehicle. The stranger called them that, “vehicles,” not cars.

She heard the stranger say that he ought to be getting home, adding with an odd wistfulness that he hated going back to his house at night now. Alicia got out of bed and put on her robe and walked to the doorway of the bedroom.

“Why’s that, Hubert?” her husband asked.

The stranger said, “On account of the house being empty now. My wife got killed a year ago last November,” he added in a flattened, expressionless voice, as if he were too used to speaking these words, and people’s sympathy only made him feel worse and this was a way to deflect their sympathy. Even so, he felt obliged, despite his full knowledge of the inadequacy of his words, to let people know of his pain and loss, because they were real and inescapable, a part of who he was, and people who did not know of his wife’s death often unintentionally said things or asked questions that squeezed his heart in an iron fist, bringing back full-blown his memories of that cold late-autumn night when the state trooper came to his door and told him that his young bride, his wife of three months, a passenger in a car driven by her older sister, had been killed. The car had hit a patch of black ice on the old Military Highway in West Tunbridge and had slid sideways off the road, gaining speed as it slid, crashing into a maple tree as thick as a man, hurling his bride from the car onto the frozen bare ground, a blow that crushed her skull and broke many of the large bones in her body. Now he got to the subject early, volunteering the information in a rehearsed, efficient, unemotional way, as if his wife had been someone else’s wife.

Alicia made her way down the narrow back stairs to the kitchen and heard the stranger say to her husband, “Mostly I’m over it. But it comes back hard sometimes when I go home late like this.”

Alicia’s husband said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Hubert, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. And I apologize for bringing it up.”

“You didn’t bring it up. I did. You would’ve liked her, probably. Sally was good. A good person.”

Alicia stepped into the kitchen and saw Hubert St. Germain for the first time and was startled and felt her throat tighten. She felt herself go out to him and was astonished by the speed and force of it. This had never happened to her before. There seemed to be a light in his face, as if someone in the room were shining a flashlight onto it. She couldn’t tell if it emanated from her fixed gaze and was reflected back by his sun-burnished face or if his face somehow gathered light on its own. Though she had never seen him before, even at a distance or in a crowd, he seemed strangely familiar to her. She had the uncanny feeling that he could have been her long-lost brother, taken from the family before her birth and raised in the forest by peasants as their own and now suddenly, unexpectedly, placed here before her. He was a squarely built man of average height and wore a denim shirt buttoned to the throat and tan trousers and leather boots. His brown felt hat was pushed back on his head, and when Alicia Groves entered the room, he stood and removed his hat, and a shock of sandy hair fell across his forehead. His skin was smooth and fair, his eyes bright blue with pale, almost white eyebrows that gave him a look of innocent surprise. She guessed he was in his middle thirties, a few years older than she, a few younger than her husband.

“Please…please, sit down,” she said, and he complied.

His words slightly slurred, Jordan Groves said, “Sorry we woke you. This’s Hubert St. Germain. He’s a guide over at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Hubert, this’s my wife, Alicia.”

“Yes, ma’am, really sorry about waking you up,” Hubert said. “And pleased to meet you, for sure. I was just leaving,” he added and stood again and squared his hat.

“I overheard the last part of your conversation. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. St. Germain. That’s a terrible thing.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is. Thank you.”

“You should stay the night here,” she said. “We have plenty of room. It’s late, and you shouldn’t be driving anyhow. I know you boys have been drinking. And I can understand how difficult it must be to go home to an empty house. Please,” she said. “Stay.”

“Yes, Hubert, spend the night here and go home in the morning,” Jordan said.

“Really,” Alicia said. “I want you to stay.”

The guide hesitated a moment, then accepted their invitation, grateful for it. Too many nights through the hard year and a half since his wife’s death he had ended up drinking late with strangers at the Moose Head until the place closed or drinking in a stranger’s kitchen like this and finally having to make his way back to his cabin, driving drunkenly over narrow country roads, his Model A coupe drifting from one side of the road to the other, the headlights of oncoming vehicles doubling in his blurred vision, until at last he pulled up in front of his cabin and staggered inside, where, still fully clothed, he dropped onto his bed and, before losing consciousness, let himself be crushed by the weight of his loneliness, and wept. And then he blacked out, and the next morning remembered only the sad fact of his weeping and the feeling of his chest being pressed by a stone the size of the room itself. And with each day’s waking his loneliness and sorrow were worsened by his fear that neither was due to the death of his wife, that both had been in him all along.

Alicia lay in the darkness with her husband sleeping next to her. He had come to bed only minutes earlier and was snoring already and smelled of alcohol and meat and sweat. She heard the bed in the guest room creak and imagined the guide turning in his sleep, dreaming of his lost bride. Or perhaps, she thought, lying in bed in the room next to hers, he, too, was awake and listening for some indication that she was thinking about his presence in her house, and perhaps he was as eager as she for them to talk to each other with no one else present. And though Alicia soon fell asleep, when she woke in the morning her mind was instantly filled with this thought. And when the guide woke in the Groveses’ guest room bed, his loneliness and sorrow seemed mysteriously to have fled. When the artist, Jordan Groves, woke, he was mildly irritated by how late he had slept and hurriedly washed, shaved, and pulled on his clothes, so that by the time Hubert St. Germain and Alicia Groves were sitting down opposite each other at the breakfast table, the artist was already at work in his studio.

NOW THAT THE AFFAIR HAD BEEN DISCOVERED BY THAT DAMNED socialite, Alicia decided that she could not go on seeing Hubert any longer. She knew that she could have stayed hidden from the woman’s sight; Hubert could have insisted on speaking to her outside, and she would have gone away; Alicia must have wanted to be seen by her, to be discovered, uncovered, revealed — not so much to the rest of the world, but to herself. She would break it off immediately and wait for the Cole girl to tell Jordan what she had seen, and Jordan would draw his own conclusions: simply, he would know at once that his wife had been lying to him all these months. She had not been playing visiting nurse at the medical center in Sam Dent at all, had she? She had been with Hubert St. Germain those afternoons. He would bring those conclusions to Alicia, and she would have no choice but to confess everything.