Russell Banks - The Reserve

“You will have to stay inside until nearly dark, probably,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t let anyone know that you’ve been here.”

“No.”

“Do you think they can see your airplane from out there?”

“No. It’s anchored in a cove well out of sight. It’s behind a tree-covered spit of land. They’d have to come right up on it in the boat to know it was there.”

“That’s good,” she said and slipped his jacket off his shoulders altogether and pulled first one cuff, then the other, and drew the jacket away from his arms and dropped it onto the floor. “You’re very beautiful,” she said.

“You said something strange back there.”

“What?”

He reached down and retrieved his jacket and slipped it on. “About the sign, ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ You said your mother objected to it, but didn’t want to say why, so she had all the signs taken down.”

“I said that?”

“Yes. Why did she object to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” Jordan left the bed and sat in the chair facing her, his back to the window. Her equanimity scared him a little. He knew she wanted him to make love to her, but the calm ease with which she made that evident signified something other than physical desire, something more mental than of the body, as if her body were merely following orders.

“I don’t want to talk about my mother or my father. Not now,” she said. “Maybe not ever,” she added. Then she suddenly said, “Jordan, did you know that my father was…that he performed lobotomies? Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

“Sure. It’s brain surgery for psychos. It was in all the papers a year or so ago.”

“Daddy invented the procedure, you know.”

“I thought some Portugese quack developed it. Sounds medieval to me, like a pseudoscientific surgical exorcism. I can’t believe your father fell for that.”

“Oh, he more than fell for it. He was working with some people at Yale doing experiments on chimpanzees and monkeys, and then he was in Portugal, where he assisted in a dozen lobotomies, and last year he got permission to do it on human beings at the clinic in Zurich, where Mother was so set on sending me.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, it’s the truth. He taught the doctors there how to do it, because it’s not been approved here in the States. It’s brain surgery, but you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to do it. You just drill a couple of little holes in the front of the skull, insert this cutting instrument that Daddy invented himself. He actually showed it to me, a long, thin steel shaft with an L-shaped blade at the end. You twiddle it back and forth a few times, remove, and presto! No more demons. No more troublesome behavior. No more bad daughter.”

Jordan just smiled. He didn’t believe a word she was saying. But why on earth would she tell such a story? Was it to cover her disappointment that he had rejected her overtures? He hadn’t really rejected her, anyhow; he had merely backed away from her first touch and changed the subject, changing it only temporarily, perhaps. In matters of seduction, Jordan Groves was passive. Never the initiator, he let the woman come to him, giving her the responsibility for the invitation to the dance, and only then, when the dance had begun, would he take the lead. That’s all he was doing here, he thought — foisting on to Vanessa the obligation to declare her intent to have him make love to her, so that afterward he could tell himself that he had merely been complying with her wishes, fulfilling her needs, not his, slaking her lust, not his. Though, naturally, he well knew that he had met his wishes, too, had fulfilled his needs and slaked his lust as much as the woman’s.

That it was a pattern he knew, but he had never examined the causes. In every other action in his life, he was the initiator, the prime mover, but when it came to sex, he let the woman come to him. Or rather, he made the woman come to him. Even his wife, Alicia — except for that first time, way back when they left the gallery party drunk on champagne and new fame and went to his studio downtown, and he asked her to marry him and she said yes, and to celebrate they took off their clothes and made stormy love the entire rest of the night, until dawn broke and gray New York winter light drifted through the high windows and skylight of the studio and fell onto the two of them lying asleep in each other’s arms. From then on, though, he had waited for Alicia to come to him. For Jordan Groves, a man’s sexual favors were precisely that, favors. A woman’s were something else — a request, perhaps, a statement of need or of desire strong enough to require explicit expression by the woman. In a small way, it comforted his vanity and assuaged any residual guilt afterward that, in order to have sex with a woman, he had not been obliged to overcome her objections by any means fair or foul. And he never risked being rejected.

He surprised himself, therefore, when he stood up and took off his leather jacket again and crossed to the bed and sat next to Vanessa and put his bare arms around her. He kissed her on the mouth, softly, and then, as he felt his passion rise, with force this time.

Vanessa pulled away and pushed him back and said, “Wait. You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m lying.”

“Lying? You mean about your father? No, not exactly.”

“That means you think I’m lying.”

“It means you sometimes say things that are not exactly false and not exactly true, and it’s hard for me to know where they fall between the two.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was your father interested in lobotomies? Yeah, sure. Why not? He was a brain surgeon, after all. Did he perform them himself? Maybe he did, maybe he only wanted to, or intended to. But did he go to Europe and do it at that private clinic in Zurich and teach the doctors there how to do it? It’s possible, I guess, but unlikely. I’m sure you believe he did. But based on what? And was your mother setting you up for a lobotomy by sending you to Zurich? Again, I’m sure you believe she was, but based on what evidence? She never said that to you, did she?”

“She didn’t have to. But think about it, Jordan! What a publicity coup for the famous psychiatrist, Dr. Theobold, if he were able to say he miraculously cured the daughter of the equally famous American brain surgeon, Dr. Carter Cole, of an incurable mental illness by using the surgical techniques and tools invented by the late Dr. Cole himself. Rich parents and husbands from all over the world would be shipping their troubled and troublesome children and wives to Zurich. For a half-hour’s surgery and with only a few days needed for recovery, he could charge whatever he wanted, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars a head! Remember, Jordan, I know these people, Theobold and Reichold and the others. They’re Nazis, Jordan. Very ambitious and greedy Nazis. And I know my father.”

“You’re not suffering from an incurable mental illness.”

“Of course not! I’m not even mentally ill. I’m suffering from something, though.”

“What? Other than the sudden, unexpected loss of your parents.”

For a long moment they both remained silent, gazing out the window. Finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, Vanessa said, “Secrets. Secrets kept from me, and secrets I’ve kept from everyone else. Secrets aren’t like lies. They’re more like brain surgery. They kill your soul. Lying is only a technique for keeping secrets. One of the techniques. Lies and silence and…and storytelling, which is nothing more than changing the subject in an interesting way. All those clever diversionary tactics. Like bad behavior in public. Reckless behavior in public. Or like this,” she said, and she put her arms around him and drew him to her and kissed him and softly moaned. She whispered into his ear, “I want you to take me, now, here,” and ran her hand down his chest and began loosening his belt. He kissed her on the mouth and throat and began unbuttoning her shirt — her father’s flannel shirt, although he did not note that.