Russell Banks - The Reserve

“Jordan, don’t call me Hubie.”

“I’ll call you any damn thing I want.”

Hubert looked at Jordan, then at Vanessa. His partners in crime. Fellow liars. Adulterers. Everyone in it together, but only for him-or herself. He didn’t know who any of them was any more, not even Alicia. Not even himself. All he knew was what they had done. He had no idea of why, however.

“Stop it, you two,” Vanessa said. “Just tell us the rest, Hubert.”

“Tomorrow morning Kendall’s sending me and a couple of the boys from the Club out here with Dan Peters to dig up your mother’s body and take it in for an autopsy and suchlike.” He paused for a moment to let them absorb the information. “Peters is the Essex County sheriff,” he added.

Vanessa and Jordan glanced at each other, then turned away and stared expressionless at the fire.

Hubert said, “Kendall knows what happened out here today.”

“So I gather. Who told him?” Jordan asked. “Alicia? You told her what happened, and she took it to Kendall?” It was not like her to betray him that way. But it was not like her, he had once believed, to betray him by sleeping with another man and continuing to do it and lie about it for months. Falling in love with him, even. There wasn’t much left in his life now that was predictable, except lies and betrayal.

“You told him yourself, didn’t you, Hubert?” Vanessa said. “Because of Alicia. Because that’s what she wanted you to do.”

“Yes. I’m not sure that’s what she wanted me to do, though. I did it on my own account.”

“Oh, Hubert St. Germain, you’re like a moth to flame.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t resist what can destroy you. You think you’re being honest, but you’re acting on some dumb blind instinct.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I thought I was doing what was right. Finally.”

Jordan said, “Did you tell Kendall about me, that I’m involved?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose. But Alicia, she knows everything?”

“Yes.”

Jordan pulled his tobacco and papers from his jacket pocket and rolled a cigarette. Vanessa sat opposite him, turning her glass and staring at it. Hubert looked at the fire and drank off his rum and placed the heavy glass on the end table next to him. Three full minutes passed in silence, except for the snap of the fire in the fireplace. Then Hubert walked to the door. He waited there for a second, as if expecting one of them to stop him, to ask where he was going, why he was leaving, why he had done what he had done. But no one asked him anything, and he was glad. He wouldn’t have known how to answer. He didn’t know where he was going, or why he was leaving, or why he had done what he had done. He opened the door and departed from them. Let it all come down.

Jordan left his chair and crossed to Vanessa and stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, naked beneath the sheet, and pushed the sheet away and felt her cool skin. Firelight flickered across her breasts, and the artist thought it would make a beautiful picture — a seated, nearly naked woman seen from above and behind like this, her light auburn hair loose and long and streaked with red and orange bands of firelight, her buttery shoulders and her full, firm breasts with the pink nipples barely visible, the white sheet collapsed across her lap; and emerging from the darkness that surrounded her, obscure shapes of furniture, ominous, impersonal forms slowly encroaching on the lit space filled by the naked woman, thoughtful and grave. The fire in the fireplace and the kerosene lanterns were outside the frame. All the light on the woman was reflected light. He removed his hands from her shoulders — he didn’t want his hands in the picture, just the woman alone in the nearly dark room, naked and sad and in danger and aware of everything in the picture and beautiful to behold.

“You’re looking at me, aren’t you?” she said in a low monotone. She felt the heat and light from the fireplace and lamps on her face and upper body and the heat and light from the gaze of the man standing behind her, and she was filled with inexpressible joy. The warm illumination from both fire and man solidified her, gave her body and her mind three full dimensions and let her shape-shifting self, aswirl in a fixed world, stop and hold and, when she had become its still center, made the world begin to swirl instead. This must be how other people feel all the time, she thought.

Jordan could not resist touching her and placed his hands on her shoulders again. She shrugged them off. “Just look at me. Keep looking at me.”

“I want to touch you.”

“No touching,” she said. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, almost a plea.

Jordan took a step back and to the side and tried looking at her from a different angle, a three-quarter view, but it did not have the same mystery and sadness of looking at her from behind and above. It was merely a portrait now of a posed woman, a model instructed by the artist to sit naked in a large chair with a sheet draped across her lap. The woman he had seen before was gone.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Especially now.”

“No.”

“What will you do when they come tomorrow?”

“Whatever I have to.”

“What will you tell them?”

“Whatever I have to.”

“Will you tell them about me?” he asked. “That I was here?”

“No.”

“Will you be all right? Tonight, I mean. Alone.”

“I’ve never been anything but alone. I’ll be all right.”

He leaned down to kiss her, and she jerked away. “I said no touching.”

VANESSA HEARD HIM CLOSE THE OUTER DOOR AND CROSS THE porch and deck. Then silence — except for the dry, whispering rattle of the fire. She turned in the chair and cupped in both hands the pale green glass bowl of the kerosene lantern on the table beside her and lifted it into the air. She stood, and the sheet fell away, and she was naked. She carried the lantern to the fireplace. The crackling fire warmed her belly and breasts and thighs, its yellow light flickering across her pale skin like fingertips. She gently set the glass bowl onto the cut-stone mantelpiece, like an offering on an altar. Turning, she picked up a second lamp from a table and crossed the living room. Planes of orange light slid and skidded over the walls and high ceiling as she walked into the darkened hallway and turned from the hallway and entered the library.

“Everything you need to know is in the library.”

“Look in the library,” she had said to Jordan. He had questioned her claim to have graduated from college at sixteen, and she had told him to check the social register, even though she knew that the social register would neither confirm nor deny her claim. She was performing for him, mixing lies with truths, and he, naturally, was believing nothing. “Everything you need to know is in the library. Everything,” she had said to him, and a dreaded certainty, which until that moment had eluded her, came over her. Vanessa suddenly knew what to look for and where to look for it. There was no speculation or supposition about it; she knew that a thick, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon was located in a locked wooden cabinet built into the shelves behind her father’s reading chair. It had always been there, and she had always avoided looking at it, and it had become invisible to her. She set the lantern on the floor and pulled the heavy, leather-upholstered chair away from the wall. She yanked hard on the wooden knob of the cabinet, and it broke off in her hand. Grabbing a poker from the stand next to the corner fireplace, she proceeded with a half-dozen blows to smash the thin panels of the cabinet door to pieces. Inside the cabinet, she saw what she had known would be there. She removed the brown cardboard file folder from the cabinet and sat on the floor and held it flat on her lap and was about to untie the black ribbon and open it, when it seemed suddenly to burn her bare skin with a dark heat. She pushed the folder off her lap, to the floor. Then she stood and picked up the folder again. It was cool to the touch, now that she no longer wanted to open it.