Russell Banks - The Reserve

She hesitated before answering. “I…I thought I was. I was unhappy, Jordan. For a long time I was very unhappy.”

“I don’t care about causes! There are a thousand reasons why a woman commits adultery. And a thousand and one why a man does it. Right now all I care about is getting the material facts. I don’t even care if it was good sex or bad sex or anything in between. That’s your private business and will only disgust me anyway. I want the facts. So I can…so I can know what to do next.” He studied his hands and saw they were shaking, and he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you in love with Hubert St. Germain? Are you still in love with the son of a bitch?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “But I have closed my heart to him.”

“Oh. You’re in love with him, but you’ve closed your heart to him. Whatever that means. Does it mean you’re no longer in love with me?”

“No, it does not, Jordan. I will always be in love with you.”

“You will, eh? Well, that’s a little hard for me to grasp. Here’s a fact. Except for you, I have never been in love with anyone. Only you. Period. So I don’t know what the hell you mean when you say you’re in love with Hubert, despite having ‘closed your heart to him,’ and that you will also always be in love with me.” He rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know how you can be in love with both of us.”

“It’s not like that. Being in love, I mean. It’s more complicated and confusing than that.”

“Not to me. For me, with every woman the love switch is either off or it’s on. And it’s always been on with you, Alicia. With everyone else, off.”

“I’ve never doubted your love for me,” she said quietly. “But all those women, the women you’ve slept with, you never loved any of them?”

“No. Absolutely not. You know that, you’ve always known that. Cold comfort, maybe, but we’re not talking about me here, are we? Oh, I know I might be partly to blame for driving you into the eager arms of the noble Adirondack woodsman Hubert St. Germain. It’s obvious even to me that I’m hard to live with and have not been a faithful husband and have left you alone here with the boys for weeks and months at a time. And I know in some people’s eyes ol’ Hubert’s a charmer, even if a somewhat mournful and inarticulate one. And I know that after nearly ten years of marriage any woman gets restless and maybe a little curious about what it might be like to fuck someone other than her husband. So there are all kinds of causes ready to hand. So many that there’s no point in discussing them. What I have to know is, what exactly has happened, Alicia? What has happened? So that I can decide what I am to do now. My next move.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do I divorce you? Or do I fall down on my knees and promise to be a better husband? Do I fly into a rage and knock you down and bust all the furniture? Or do I weep in sorrow and self-pity for having lost the love of my life? What the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know the answer to that. Do I drive over to Hubert’s cabin and drag him out of his filthy adulterous bed and beat the shit out of him? Or do I sit down with him over a bottle of whiskey and talk about the perfidy of unhappily married women? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alicia,” he cried, and his voice broke. “What am I supposed to do ? What am I supposed to feel?” He spread his arms wide and opened his body and face to her.

She came forward and got down on her knees in front of him and put her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist. Weeping now, she said, “All of it, Jordan. Do all of it. If you ask for a divorce, I’ll give it to you. If you promise to be a better husband, I’ll believe you. If you beat up Hubert, I’ll understand. Though Lord knows it’s not his fault. None of it is. It’s all my fault. If you sit down and get drunk with him and talk about what an awful woman I’ve been, I’ll understand. Do all of it, Jordan. Do anything . Do everything. Just please, in the end, please forgive me, Jordan.”

Tears streamed down his broad cheeks. “Not possible, Alicia. It’s not possible. I can’t forgive you because I can’t forget what you’ve done. Not as long as I can picture the two of you crawling all over each other naked in bed. And what you’ve said. That you still love the man. It’s not fair, I know, I don’t have any right to feel the way I do. I know that. Because I’ve had my share, more than my share, of dalliances or liaisons or whatever you want to call them. But there’s a difference, Alicia. I never loved any of those women! They were just flashes of light in the dark. Fireflies. I never shared my secrets with them. Only with you, Alicia. I never let them know me. Only you.”

They stayed silent for several moments, Alicia with her head against his chest and Jordan with his arms around her, holding her close. She heard his heart pound, and he felt her back shudder as she wept. In all their years together, they had never both wept at the same time. She had wept, because of his sins against her, or he had wept out of guilt, but separately.

Finally, he let go of her and told her to go upstairs to bed and leave him alone. “I need to be alone. I need to think. I need to know what’s really happened here, and I don’t believe you can help me with that.” He pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face dry and gave it to her to do the same, which she did.

Then, awkwardly, she stood up, and when she turned to leave she saw that the dogs had come into the room and were sitting alertly by the door, watching Alicia and Jordan with worried expressions on their long faces.

Alicia said, “They know.”

“What do they know? They’re dogs.”

“They know that something terrible has happened to us.”

“Has it? I don’t know yet what has happened to us. I need time to think. Go to bed, Alicia. I’ll be up later. Or maybe I won’t.”

She left the room, and the dogs followed, still worried. When Jordan heard Alicia’s footsteps overhead, he turned back to his desk and picked up his letter to Dos Passos. He held it to the light and studied it for a moment as if trying to read it through the envelope. Then he tore the letter in half and half again and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket.

The three newcomers learned at breakfast that they were listed for two missions today, a morning flight and an afternoon, their first flights over enemy territory. It was not great weather for flying. The early morning rain had stopped, but a blanket of low clouds remained. They had been waiting for a week for their airplanes to arrive from Bilbao and had been given Breguets, not the Russian Polikarpov monoplanes they had requested. The Breguets had been fitted out with two machine guns and bomb racks that held four twenty-five-pound bombs. Their mission was to bomb a pair of gunpowder factories deep in enemy territory, just beyond the Jarama River, fifteen miles from Madrid. To get the job done with the Breguets they would have to do it twice. All nine of the foreign pilots in the squadron stood by their planes until they saw the starting signal, a white flare shot from the field house. As soon as they were in the air, the planes moved into a V of V formation, in which each of the three-man patrols was in a V and the three patrols themselves were in a V. The American named Groves flew on the right wing of the first patrol, which was led by the Englishman Fairhead. Chang flew on Fairhead’s left wing. The ceiling had settled at three thousand feet, making it easy to cross into enemy territory unseen in the clouds. When they had passed over the target factories and flown a few miles beyond, Fairhead swung the formation back toward home territory. The right-wing patrol crossed over the top of Fairhead’s lead patrol, and the left slid under, the three together making as quick and tight a 180-degree turn as a single patrol alone could make. When they were almost on top of the factories Fairhead gave the signal to attack, and all nine planes dove, still in a V of V formation. Fairhead’s lead patrol was to take out the antiaircraft battery located between the two factories. The two wing patrols were led by the veterans, Papps, the Englishman, and Brenner, the American, who had Whitey on his wing. They went for the factories. The pilots lined up their bomb sights and released the bombs, continuing the dive, machine-gunning people, mostly civilians madly racing away from the factory yards. At three hundred feet they flattened out their dive and sped across the Jarama River and until they got into friendly territory kept their aircraft as close to the ground as possible, following the narrow valleys and draws to keep the enemy from seeing where they’d gotten to. Later that same afternoon they made the return trip, all nine of them, to bomb the same factories. There was much more antiaircraft fire this time, little puffs of white smoke here and there, like small detached cumulus clouds, growing more numerous as the airplanes approached the factories. They dropped their bombs, finishing off the factories and, as they had before, machine-gunned anyone foolish enough to be caught in the open. This time, on their return to base Fairhead led them down along miles of enemy trenches, and following his example the pilots fired their Vickers.303 machine guns at infantrymen helplessly firing back with small-bore rifles and revolvers. After their first pass, the American named Groves, the one called Rembrandt, ceased firing. It was April 4, 1937. The American had suddenly remembered that it was an anniversary. Twenty years ago on this day he had shot down two German Fokker Dr. Is over France. He held formation, but his guns went silent, while the others kept firing their machine guns until they finally ran out of ammunition and headed back to the base.