Russell Banks - The Reserve

ALICIA KNEW JORDAN WASN’T IN THE HOUSE — HE HADN’T COME up to bed, and she’d heard his airplane take off at dawn — and did not know when he might return or what he would say or do then. She did not yet believe that their marriage had ended. Because of the boys, he would not ask for a divorce, she was sure of that much. Jordan would never leave their upbringing to her and was incapable of raising them alone. And he was not in love with anyone else. He wouldn’t leave Alicia for another woman. Not even that Von Heidenstamm woman. And because Jordan was a sexually confident man, sure of his power to attract all types of women, he was not likely to be threatened by the fact that his wife had slept with Hubert St. Germain, who was not a sexually confident man. She did not think Jordan would become violent, even though he was known for his occasional outbursts of violence. There were men whom she might have slept with, she thought, men who might have made him lash out physically against them and against her as well — famous artists, rich men, politically committed men of the left, like Dos, who actually had once suggested to her that they become lovers. But, no, now that she thought about it, not even the rich and famous author John Dos Passos had made Jordan Groves jealous. She had told Jordan that Dos had invited her to meet him secretly for the purpose of making love — waiting before she told him until after Dos and Katie had gone back to New York, explaining that Dos had been drunk and probably would have propositioned any halfway attractive woman in the room that evening. Jordan had found it funny and faintly ridiculous. “Dos? The little rascal,” he’d said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

Jordan competed with every man he met, whether in arm wrestling, making art, politics, money, or gathering the attention of women, but he seemed jealous of no man. Jealousy was close to envy, however, and Alicia knew that there were certain men her husband envied. But as types rather than as individuals. That may be the difference between the two emotions, she thought: one felt jealous of individuals, but one envied types. And she knew, as only a wife can, that her husband secretly envied, not men like John Dos Passos, but the poor. Especially the poor working-class men and women of his town. Her husband wished that he could be the famous artist Jordan Groves and yet also be one of them, one of those he perceived as the oppressed, the downtrodden victims of the rich and powerful. And it wasn’t just the poor, out-of-work, white Americans of his town, but also the Eskimos he’d lived among for months in Greenland and the Inuits of Alaska, the Negro field hands he’d drawn and painted in Louisiana, the Cuban sugarcane cutters, the Indians in the Andes silver mines, and most recently the peasants and workers fighting against the Fascists in Spain. He wanted to be one of them. He envied their powerlessness. To him, their powerlessness signified an innocence that he had abandoned long ago, when, after he’d come home from the war, he’d refused to work alongside his father, the carpenter, and had left his war bride and gone east to New York to become an artist.

Though Hubert St. Germain was an Adirondack guide, a type of man much admired in the region by the locals as well as by the wealthy visitors who hired him, Alicia knew that nonetheless he was in fact little more than a servant to those wealthy visitors. He was a man whose only power in the world came from his intimate knowledge of his immediate environment and from his quiet, dignified acceptance of his powerlessness. In that sense, Hubert, as a type, was like those Inuits and cane cutters and the Spanish peasants. She could imagine Hubert joining one of the Communist or anarchist brigades of workers and farmers, marching off to wage war against Franco and the Fascists. Well, not Hubert himself, exactly, but as a type of man. The type of man her husband envied. The type of man she had fallen in love with, she suddenly realized, and to whom, for nearly five months, once and twice a week and more, she had given her body and all its secrets.

She went through her day as she normally would, tending to the boys and her gardens and the house, to all appearances the calm, competent, organized wife and mother she had been for over a decade now — ever since her one most self-defining act of defiance, when she’d disobeyed her parents by dropping out of Pratt to elope with the artist, her professor, the suddenly celebrated Jordan Groves. She was filled today with the same fear and uncertainty she had felt those long years ago. Her parents had forgiven her — once she was pregnant — and had reluctantly come to accept their daughter and son-in-law’s bohemianism, as they saw it, and leftist politics and atheism. At least she hadn’t gone to America and run off with a Jew or a Negro. The artist could always change his way of life as he grew older and wiser, unlike a Jew and a Negro, who could never change who they were, and besides, he was financially successful and famous and interestingly eccentric in a very American way. Alicia’s Viennese parents liked and admired self-made Americans for their energy and confidence almost as much as they liked and admired their Prussian neighbors to the north.

All day Alicia’s stomach felt tight and light, like a helium-filled balloon, and her arms and legs were weak and watery. Her hands trembled, as if she’d drunk too much coffee. Standing on the threshold of a life whose shape and details she could not imagine terrified her. Whatever happened or did not happen over the next few days or weeks, she knew that her life would never again be the same as it had been. By nature, Alicia did not like surprises. It was one of the reasons she had so easily adapted to her husband’s willful and impulsive nature. He was free to go and come, to make all the big decisions regarding the overall shape of their life together, so long as from one day to the next, year after year, she was allowed to play the unwobbling pivot. She was free neither to act nor react, and while other people, especially women, felt sorry for her and wondered why she so placidly accepted her husband’s outrageous public behavior (he wrote about it in his books, for heaven’s sake, for all the world to read), she had not felt sorry for herself. Lonely, perhaps. But there had been a useful and satisfying trade-off: her stability and commonsensical maintenance of the everyday and her tolerance of her husband’s waywardness had endowed her with a capacity for making him feel guilty. And now she had lost that capacity, perhaps for the duration.

A little after three o’clock, Hubert St. Germain knocked at the kitchen door. Alicia hadn’t heard him arrive or knock. She was in the library playing Jordan’s Jimmie Rodgers records on the cabinet-size Victrola, teaching Wolf and Bear to memorize and sing the songs, a gift to Jordan when — or was it if? — he came home. All three were sitting on the floor together singing “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” along with Jimmie Rodgers, when Alicia heard the dogs bark and looked out the window and saw Hubert’s Model A in the driveway.

“Stay here, boys. Someone’s here,” she said and told them to keep practicing the songs. “But be careful handling the records. You know what they mean to Papa. No scratches or fingerprints.” She went through the kitchen to the door, roiled by anxiety mingled with anger. What on earth was he thinking, coming here like this? Was this his response to her letter? Or had Jordan confronted him somehow, threatened him or even physically attacked him? Or maybe Jordan had simply told him, Go ahead, you want her, she’s yours.

It didn’t matter. It was too late for that now.

She hushed the dogs, opened the door, and was relieved that the guide had a downcast expression on his face, shoulders slumped. A defeated man, she thought, though his face showed no signs of having been attacked by her husband. Defeated by her letter, then.