Russell Banks - The Reserve

She locked the bedroom door behind her and walked from the living room to the porch. From the deck she saw a guide boat a half mile out on the lake. It was Hubert St. Germain — smoothly, expertly, his oar blades barely making a ripple in the water — rowing toward the camp.

The doctor shook the young woman’s hand and said, Good-bye, Vanessa, and bon voyage. Your luggage will be in your stateroom, he added, and she nodded as if agreeing. He turned her toward the other passengers, and she followed them onto the bus. When the bus had departed, the doctor walked into the hotel bar and ordered a schnapps and filled his pipe with tobacco and lighted it. A half hour later, in a soft, drizzling rain, the passengers arrived at the airfield and were taken inside a cavernous hangar, where they were inspected a second time for matches, lighters, and batteries. Beyond the hangar, tethered by its nose to a mooring mast, the enormous zeppelin floated in the air, ten feet from the ground. The silver ship was nearly a sixth of a mile long, shaped like a gigantic whale. An open staircase extended from its gleaming belly to the ground. One by one, the passengers climbed the stairs and entered the leviathan. A steward escorted the American woman to her room on Level B and left her alone there. She removed her hat and veil, exposing a single red spot above each eyebrow, tiny circular wounds recently healed. After a few moments, she stepped to the large rectangular window and looked down at the crowd of well-wishers and officers on the ground. A uniformed brass band played “Muss I Denn?” and a choir of Nazi youth sang the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland Über Alles.” Gradually, the crowd below — the brass band, the Nazi youth contingent, the Zeppelin officials and groundsmen, and the government officials and SS officers — began to diminish in size. Without a ripple of felt movement, the airship was silently rising. At about three hundred feet the muffled sound of the diesel engines penetrated the silence of the stateroom, and the great zeppelin slowly turned northwest and in the gathering dusk headed toward the lights of Koblenz, following the Rhine to the sea.

“YOU NEEDN’T CARRY IT TO THE HOUSE,” VANESSA COLE SAID to the guide and smiled winningly. “Just unload everything here by the shore.” She placed her hand lightly, like a fallen leaf, on his thick shoulder and continued to hold the smile. She was the same height as he, Hubert noticed for the first time, tall for a woman, but not as tall as Alicia. It had somehow pleased him from the start that Alicia was taller than he, as if there were a rightness to it, a legitimacy. It was an observation that he had never carried to its logical conclusion: that if she had been shorter than he it would have been somehow wrong, illegitimate. He did notice now, however, that it also seemed right to him that Vanessa Cole was tall, even if not as tall as Alicia, and for a second he wondered if people from away, especially the women, ran taller than local people.

“You sure? I don’t mind lugging it up to the house, Miss Cole. Most of it goes to the pantry anyhow,” he said.

She said she was grateful to him for coming out on such short notice and didn’t want to keep him at the camp any longer than necessary. Besides, her mother was napping on the living room sofa, and Vanessa didn’t want to disturb her. She glanced down at the four cardboard boxes of food and other supplies the guide had unloaded from the boat and saw that certain items were missing. “I guess you’ll be making a second trip out anyhow. Can you do that today?”

“Probably not. This here’s mostly the food. It’s getting a little on, so I figured to bring the rest tomorrow and maybe use what’s left of today to cut you some wood and tend to whatever else needs tending to.” Hubert grabbed a box and hefted it to his shoulder. “I’ll take it into the pantry the back way, real quiet. So’s not to disturb Mrs. Cole.”

“No! Here, let me have that.” She took the box from him and set it back on the ground. “I…I’m sorry. Is there any way you can make that second trip this afternoon? You could just bring it out and drop it here on the shore for me. Don’t worry about the wood or anything. I can do that myself. I…I just need you to bring the rest of the supplies and leave them here on the shore. Please?”

Hubert looked closely at the woman’s face. She was strangely agitated, he thought, more than usual, that’s for sure. She was almost always wound a little tight, but in a fluttery, flirtatious way that put him off, like she was playing him for a rube or something. This was different, as if she was scared of having him go up to the house. Or somehow scared of him on a more personal level, like she thought he might be going to hit her or try to seduce her against her will, both of which were the furthest things from his mind. He liked her better this way than the other, however. He stepped back and looked at her face directly, and she lifted her chin slightly and stared back. For the first time he saw how truly beautiful she was and understood what all the fuss was about. For years he’d heard the rumors and the gossip — the high-society marriages and divorces, the love affairs with rich, famous men and even with local men not so famous and not in the slightest rich and with married members of the Tamarack Reserve and Club, at least one every summer and sometimes more than one. No man, young or old, could resist her, that was the word locally. But up to now Hubert had not understood why. Up to now, however, her full gaze had never really fallen on him. He had never felt seen by her and thus had never experienced the intense, diamond-hard clarity of her need before. It was not sexual need strictly, but a little like that. This was something beyond desire. It was an urgent need to be seen by him, to be made real by his gaze. And along with it came a silent but clearly felt declaration that he, Hubert St. Germain, was the only person on the planet who could do the job, the only person who was capable of truly seeing her and thus the only person who could make her existence a reality.

He asked her if she was all right.

She shook her head like a horse tossing its mane from side to side and gave him that sorrowful, scared, needy look again. “I’m not…,” she began, and then said, “Yes, I’m okay. I think I’m okay. You’re kind to ask.”

“I imagine it’s been hard on you, losing your father like that. So suddenly and all. And being here. Where he died, I mean. I remember when my father died it was a long time before I could go back to where it happened, to where they found the body.” This was more than he had ever said to her at once, and it surprised him, and surprised him even more when he continued. “I guess it was because he died unexpectedly, sort of by accident. It was different with my mother, because she was sick for a long time first. And with Sally, my wife, it was different then, too, because I never had to go back to where she had died. Although I remember the first time I drove past where the car crashed, I got all weak in the knees and couldn’t look at the tree she’d hit. It wasn’t so bad the second time, because by then the road department had come out and cut the tree down, in case somebody else might go off the road and hit it the same as Sally’s sister did.”

“Yes, I heard about that. I’m sorry for that, Hubert. For your loss. It must have been awful.”

“For a spell it was. We weren’t married long, but we’d been together a long time. High school sweethearts, sort of.”

For a few seconds they were silent. Then she said, “What about you, Hubert? Are you all right? I mean now, today.”

“Well…no, not exactly.” He surprised himself by answering honestly.