Russell Banks - The Reserve

“So what the hell are you doing out here this early in the morning, sleeping on the porch, instead of out back in the cookshack or the lean-to?” Jordan asked him, thinking that the guide had a better right and reason to ask him what he was doing out here this early in the morning. He had no idea of what he would give him for an answer. How do you tell a man like Hubert St. Germain that you don’t know why you are where you are? That you’re looking for some solid ground to stand on, and you think this strangely incandescent woman can somehow give it to you? How can you tell the man who has been sleeping with your wife that, because of him, you no longer know who your wife is and therefore no longer know who you are, either?

Hubert said, “I’m helping Miss Cole out with her mother.”

“Her mother, eh? Why? Is she ill or something?”

“No.” Hubert sucked thoughtfully on his lips for a few seconds, then said, “It’s not something I can talk about.”

“What the Christ does that mean?”

“You better get Miss Cole to explain. It’s complicated.”

“I guess to hell it must be,” Jordan said and stood up. “You and I, Hubert, we have more to discuss. A lot more.”

“I expect so.”

“Where is she, Vanessa? Is she up yet?”

“Can’t say.”

Damn the man, Jordan thought. What the hell did he and Alicia ever talk about? It must have been completely sexual between them, he thought, at least on her part, and he felt himself shudder with anxious jealousy, something he could not remember ever feeling before, not with Alicia, certainly, and not with Anne, his first wife, whom he had met and married right after returning from the war. He’d come home an American innocent made cynical by what he’d seen and done in the skies over France and had been brought briefly back to his innocence by marrying a slim, sweetly smiling, blond girl from his Ohio hometown. But her own innocence and naiveté, cut with his new cynicism, had left him exhausted and empty of affection for Anne within a year, so that when he left Canton for Greenwich Village in 1920 to study with Charles Henri, he refused to take her with him. Anne Zayre, his war bride, as he referred to her, had been incapable of making him jealous or sexually insecure, although before his departure for New York she had tried to hold him by deliberately conducting several flagrant love affairs, which had not upset him in the slightest. They had merely eased his guilt for abandoning her and her world and his familial past for a life in art.

Alicia, a much greater sexual threat, due to her physical beauty and Viennese charm and smooth intelligence, had up to now so flattered him by word and deed for his sexual prowess that it simply had never occurred to Jordan that another man could satisfy his wife as completely as he — until this man, Hubert St. Germain, came along, this melancholy widower of the woods, this man of a few well-chosen words who had never been farther from his traplines and hunting grounds than Albany and Schenectady, if he’d even been that far. It made no sense, Jordan thought. None.

Except for the old perennial sexual attraction of the bourgeois woman for the proletarian male. That must be it. It was an attractiveness that Jordan Groves, no matter how radical his politics, was unable to generate for himself, except among aristocratic women. Aristocratic women, he believed, had the same weakness for men like him as Alicia had for men like Hubert. That’s the explanation, he thought, it’s all about class, and felt a little better, his jealousy no longer quite so tainted by sexual insecurity. He was merely angry and confused again.

He was about to knock on the door to the living room and go inside, when the door opened as if of its own accord, and there was Vanessa, in tan slacks and one of her father’s flannel shirts untucked and open at the throat, her hair pulled back and tied with a black ribbon. She was barefoot and carried a small round tray with two mugs of steaming coffee.

Startled to see Jordan Groves, but evidently pleased, she gave him an open smile and leaned forward and kissed him on his unshaven cheek as if greeting a family friend. “Why, Jordan, I didn’t expect to see you out here this morning. And so early!” She brushed past him and set the tray on a table by the couch where Hubert sat and quickly disappeared inside again, returning with a third mug of coffee. “Isn’t this a beautiful morning?” she said and raised her cup to the lake and the pinking mist and, on the far side of the lake, the mountaintops floating above the mist.

Jordan picked up one of the mugs and sipped at the strong black coffee, closing his eyes for a moment as if to gather his thoughts. Vanessa took the seat he had vacated earlier and looked first at Hubert, then at Jordan standing beside her. Both Hubert and Vanessa seemed to be waiting for Jordan to speak.

“It’s all very strange,” Jordan finally said.

“What is?” she asked.

“The three of us out here together, politely drinking coffee by the lake, as if nothing’s happened.”

“But nothing has happened, Jordan,” Vanessa said, and she meant it, because in her mind nothing had happened that could not be explained away. At least nothing between her and her mother that Jordan could possibly know of, and nothing between her and Hubert, and so far nothing between her and Jordan. And since she had said not a word to anyone other than Hubert about seeing Alicia at Hubert’s cabin yesterday and drawing the obvious conclusion, she thought nothing had happened between the two men, either. Everything, for the moment, was neatly separated into discrete compartments that did not communicate with one another. Vanessa was still able to track all the lies and keep the contradictions and inconsistencies between them from revealing the larger, comprehensive truth. She believed that she alone knew that truth, of which Hubert knew a small part, and Jordan a lesser part, and his wife, Alicia, an even lesser part. Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn, knew her part of the truth — that her daughter had kidnapped and imprisoned her here in the middle of the vast wilderness of the Reserve and had somehow convinced the family’s longtime guide and caretaker to assist her in carrying out this crime. Thanks to Hubert St. Germain, Evelyn Cole was free now to move about the camp and was no longer tied to a chair and gagged, as long as she stayed inside the main building and out of sight. If she did not try to escape, Hubert had said, he wouldn’t tie her up, while behind him Vanessa had nodded threateningly over his shoulder. Hubert had tried to explain to Evelyn Cole, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing, why her daughter was doing this to her.

Evelyn Cole was no longer afraid that Vanessa was going to kill her. Not as long as Hubert was present. But the man was inarticulate and not very bright and was obviously smitten with Vanessa and in her thrall. He didn’t know the half of it, anyhow, Evelyn believed — that Vanessa’s rage and insane need to punish her mother had little to do with her fear of being sent to a mental hospital in Zurich or of being cut out of her inheritance from her grandparents and father. No, it was rooted somehow in the distant past, in the darkness of her early childhood and the sordid things she imagined had occurred there. Most of Evelyn Cole’s own memories of those years were cloudy and indistinct, blighted by a pervasive, unaccountable, nameless shame. But, really, she was sure that nothing terrible had happened in Vanessa’s childhood. Certainly nothing at the hands of her father. There were no naked photographs of Vanessa that she knew of, although she had not gone through her late husband’s files, as Vanessa thought, or his albums. Somehow she had been afraid to examine them.