Russell Banks - The Reserve

But at least she could tell him that she had ended the relationship. She would say that she had ended it so that their marriage, however broken and betrayed, could continue in some form. And she would tell him that she was ashamed and remorseful, even though she was not ashamed of what she had done and was not remorseful, regardless of the damage it had done to her marriage. She would humbly accept her husband’s righteous wrath and stoically endure the license he had now — license to conduct, without guilt and probably not even secrecy or discretion, an affair with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Alicia would be almost relieved by that, however. If he were openly having an affair, Alicia would no longer have to deal with his secrets and the lies that went with it and the rumors and gossip, which for years had afflicted the marriage, making it sullen and suspicious and sexually tepid.

When Alicia arrived home, Jordan was not there, and his new assistant, Frances, was taking care of the boys, amusing them in the studio. They were teaching her the names of the artist’s tools and equipment, the girl explained brightly, so that she could make an inventory.

“Frances is very smart, Mama,” Wolf said.

“And she’s nice, too,” Bear added, and the girl reddened.

“I’m sure she is. Where did Mr. Groves go?”

“I don’t know. He said he had some business to attend to. He took his airplane. That’s a swell thing to have, your own airplane that you can land on water.”

“He’ll take you for a ride, if you want,” Wolf said. “Papa likes taking people for rides in his airplane.”

“There are brownies on the kitchen counter by the stove, and milk in the icebox. Help yourself when you’re ready. I’ll be upstairs, so just holler if you need me,” Alicia said and went into the house. She would write to Hubert now and tell him of her decision. Alicia was glad that Jordan was not at home, so that she could write the letter before she had a chance to change her mind; and she was glad that he had taken his airplane, because she could hear its engine a half mile upriver and could hide the letter before he came into the house.

Upstairs in the bedroom, sitting at the writing desk, Alicia took out a vanilla-colored envelope and a sheet of stationery, and she wrote,

Dear Hubert, this is the first and last letter I will write to you. What happened today has brought me to my senses. I will always treasure the love that we shared with each other, but we cannot continue this any longer. You are the only man other than my husband whom I have ever loved or ever will love. I am grateful to have had that. Before I knew you I was content and, though I did not know it, unhappy. You made me very happy, but with it came a terrible discontent. It cannot go on. The costs to my children and to my marriage are too great. When that woman came to your house today, I was forced to look at myself through her eyes, and I realized that I have been swept up in a kind of madness. Please forgive me for allowing it to happen. Forgive me for loving you.

And signed it, Always, A.

She folded the letter, sealed it in the envelope, and wrote Hubert’s full name on the envelope and put it into her purse. Tomorrow she would drive to town and stop at the turnoff by the Clarkson farm where Hubert’s mailbox was located, and she would leave the letter in the box.

No, she would do it now, she decided, before Jordan returned. Before she understood fully what she was giving up. Before she could change her mind.

JORDAN GROVES FLEW HIS AIRPLANE FROM THE SECOND LAKE south over the headwaters of the Tamarack River into the wilderness and then around to the west and across the Great Range, the same way he had come in, so as not to be seen by anyone fishing the First Lake or hiking in from the clubhouse. Shortly, he was on the other side of the Great Range, beyond the Reserve and flying high above the broad valley. He was on his usual route now, following the river home, headed downstream from the outskirts of the village, flying over the scattered roadside farms and the green meadows and cornfields and the clusters of maple and oak and elm trees. There were crosswinds in the valley at this altitude, churning the air slightly, and rather than climb out of the turbulence, he dropped down until, at about twelve hundred feet, cupped by the surrounding mountains, the air smoothed, and he was able to see the freshly oiled road that ran like a scorched ribbon alongside the widening river, and he could even make out individual cows in the fields and people working in their gardens and yards. Only a few vehicles were visible — a dump truck trundling into town, then Darby Shay’s delivery van carting the week’s groceries over to the poor farm in Sam Dent, and then, headed in the opposite direction, he saw the tan Packard sedan that he recognized as Vanessa Von Heidenstamm’s and, following close behind, the modified Model A Ford coupe that he knew belonged to the guide Hubert St. Germain.

Seeing the two of them in the same frame made Jordan Groves freshly ashamed of his mad pursuit of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Though he had not seen much of the guide since that autumn night when he’d first met him, he liked the man. The artist admired the guide for his honesty and stoicism and independence. He had been impressed by the straightforward, tough-minded way the man handled the death of his wife. Hubert St. Germain, the longtime caretaker for the Coles, would do without complaint whatever Vanessa asked him to do, but no more or less than that. Hubert St. Germain had the calm good sense and moral clarity not to indulge in elaborate fantasies about the woman, no matter how seductive a game she played. Hubert St. Germain would never find himself out there at the Second Lake, uninvited, unexpected, hoping to step into the living room and take the woman into his arms and make love to her. The guide was a man another man could admire, a man another man could try to emulate.

The situation was new, but his emotions were familiar to him. He saw that this was fast becoming one of those times when, to clear his mind of weakness and confusion and to regain the meaning of his life, Jordan Groves periodically left home and family and journeyed alone to a far place. It had been nearly two years since his August ’34 trip to Greenland, four years since the winter in the Andes when he climbed Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, and Aconcagua and hacked his way through the jungle to Machu Picchu and lived for a month in a hut by the shores of Titicaca. On each of these journeys he had made a daily written record of his thoughts and observations and his sometimes reckless and dangerous experiences, exact and truthful and unsparing, and he had made drawings of the people he met and the places he visited. Each time, on his return, he had published a revised, lightly edited version of his journal as a book, along with many of the drawings. He hadn’t been able to finish the Greenland book yet because he’d been so taken by the natives and their hardy yet delicate ways and their persistent good cheer that he’d filled his sketchbooks and journals with drawings of human beings and had neglected to make pictures of the glaciers that surrounded them. It was the huge white glaciers, those vast mountains of ancient ice, he realized later, that had made the people seem simultaneously strong and vulnerable. To make sense, to be faithful to his perceptions of the Greenlanders, his book needed the glaciers. For that he would have to return to Greenland.

Though not best-sellers, his books had been very well received, partially because of the drawings, but also because the artist was a clever writer with a knack for storytelling. Mostly, however, his readers enjoyed the explicit nature and apparent honesty of his descriptions of his sexual encounters with the women native to those places. To his wife and friends and even to journalists interviewing him, he claimed that those episodes were mostly “tall tales,” fictionalized autobiography, and no one pressed him on the point. But the drawings, made from life, confirmed the claims made by the words, for Jordan Groves, like the American expatriate writer Henry Miller, seemed to hold nothing back, recording in both pictures and words his misadventures alongside his adventures, his happy ease in succumbing to temptation and his occasional principled resistance to it, his delight in the life of his body as much as his compulsion to muse philosophically on subjects great and small. He himself made no claims for the books as literature — he referred to them as his “travel books”—but critics and reviewers admired them, albeit with a certain condescension, invariably noting that, for an artist, Jordan Groves was a remarkably good writer.