Russell Banks - The Reserve

The house was an attractive, sprawling, physically comfortable, but essentially masculine structure. Jordan had designed it, in consultation with Alicia, naturally, and had done most of the construction himself, in the process teaching himself basic plumbing, wiring, and masonry. Carpentry had been his father’s trade, and Jordan, an only child, had learned it working alongside him as an adolescent and, briefly, after he came home from the war. The unconventional layout of the house and the strict use of local materials and even the fine details of the interior — banister rails made from interwoven deer antlers, yellow birch cabinets with birch bark glued to the facing, hidden dressers built into the walls, and elaborately contrived storage units, with no clutter anywhere and minimal furniture — reflected almost entirely Jordan’s taste and requirements, not Alicia’s. None of the windows had curtains or drapes or even shades to block the light, and during the daytime the house seemed almost to be a part of the forest that surrounded it. And at night the darkness outside rushed in. On every wall of the house, framed prints and paintings and drawings by Jordan Groves mingled indiscriminately with pictures and small sculptures and carvings that had been given to him over the years by fellow artists — John Curry, Tom Benton, and Ed Hopper, and a Lake George landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe — usually in exchange for a work of his. Jordan believed that an artist should not have to purchase art. Exchanging artworks with your fellow artists was a way of honoring and being honored by your peers.

Jordan had purchased the land — three hundred forested acres with a small mountain of its own and a half mile of frontage on the Tamarack — the year they were married, when his pictures and illustrations had begun to sell for large sums of money. He built the studio first, and they had lived in it for two years, until Bear was born and the house was ready to receive them. Then he put up a shed large enough to store his Studebaker truck and the Ford sedan and his tools and building supplies, and a few years later built the boathouse for his floatplane. Alicia had wanted to give their home a name and tried Asgaard on him and Valhalla, but Jordan said no, too pretentious. She tried north country names like Rivermede, Shadowbrook, and Splitrock. He shook his head no and grew impatient with her. The only people who gave names to their homes and put up fancy signs at the gate, he explained, were rich people with aristocratic pretensions. Summer people. People who wanted to distance themselves from the peasants. No one local gave a name to his house. “And all indications to the contrary,” he said, “we’re locals.”

When the boys returned to the kitchen washed and dressed for the day, Alicia came down with them. At the sight of Jordan standing at the stove cooking bacon and eggs, she raised her eyebrows in mild surprise, filled a mug with coffee, and sat at the long table and watched him. Bear and Wolf slid onto the bench at their usual places and waited.

“You want some bacon and eggs, too?” Jordan asked his wife without turning from the stove. “There’s plenty.”

“Coffee’s enough. I’ll eat later.”

They were silent for a moment. The boys looked from one parent to the other and remained silent also.

Her voice rising slightly, Alicia said, “When did you come home, Jordan?”

“Around ten. You were asleep already, so I didn’t wake you.”

“We waited for you, and then it was too late.”

“You should’ve gone without me. I got talked into giving someone a flying lesson. Over at the Reserve. Cole’s daughter,” he said and served the boys their food. “That famous socialite. Or debutante. You know the one.”

“Yes. I know the one.”

Alicia had met Jordan in New York City when she was nineteen and had come to America to study art curatorship at the Pratt Institute and he had been teaching a course in printmaking. Ten years older than she, long divorced, and a onetime student of the famous Charles Henri, he was broke and unknown. Alicia was the only child of a wealthy Viennese manufacturer of glass-ware and his doting wife. The girl was nearly six feet tall, with a creamy complexion, blue eyes that were strikingly blue, the eyes of an Alpine goddess, Jordan had thought, and white blond hair cut fashionably short, like a flapper’s. She was the most beautiful girl at the institute, perhaps the most beautiful girl Jordan had ever met, and her accented English was like lieder to him. Halfway into Alicia’s second year at Pratt, Jordan held his first one-man show at the Knoedler Gallery, and at the crowded opening, with nearly every picture in the show already sold, he asked her to sleep with him. When she refused, he at once proposed marriage to her. Certain he was joking, she accepted his proposal, and later that same night, drunk on champagne and Jordan’s new celebrity, Alicia went with him to his Greenwich Village studio and slept with him. The next day he quit his job at Pratt. To the consternation of her parents, Alicia dropped out of school and moved in with him, and three months later, to their dismay, she and Jordan eloped to Edinburgh, where it was easy for a divorced American man to marry again and where he had long wanted to make pictures of the scoured landscapes and winter skies of the ancient Gaelic north.

Jordan brought his own plate from the stove and sat opposite the boys and, head down, began to eat. He hated these morning-after conversations, when he felt judged and convicted of a minor crime, but couldn’t name exactly the thing that he had done wrong and therefore could not properly apologize and get it behind them. He was good at apologizing, as long as he knew what for, and thus he almost welcomed accusations. But he was rarely given the chance. Over the years there were times, indeed many times, when he had committed minor crimes against her, but he was almost never accused of these. He was not even sure they were crimes. Nearly everything he had done that ended up hurting or depriving her, he had done with her permission and full knowledge, and therefore he could not apologize for it. The months alone in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland; his solo excursions to Cuba and the Andes; his trip to Louisiana and Mississippi; his long stays in Manhattan, London, and Paris: for his work, he insisted. On these expeditions and trips he took care not to fall in love with other women. Therefore he did not believe that he should feel guilty — except for having drunk too much, for talking too loosely to people he regarded as fools and knaves, and for indulging himself in what he regarded as harmless flirtations and brief sexual liaisons that never went anywhere dangerous. These were minor crimes, yes, but only against himself, he felt, not her. They did not threaten the status quo. They did not oblige him to feel guilty. Ashamed, perhaps, but not guilty.

“You’re not working today, I take it,” she said. She rolled a cigarette, a practice she’d borrowed from him years ago, and lighted it.

“No, not this morning. I’ve got a package of materials from Sonnelier that’s waiting at Shay’s in town. Thought I’d drive in with the boys and pick it up and maybe go swimming with the dogs at Wappingers Falls. Make up for last night,” he added weakly.

“Yes. Fine.”

“Feel like joining us?”

“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “So what did you think of the famous socialite?”

“A spoiled bitch.”

“A beautiful spoiled bitch?”

“You could say that.”

“And her father’s paintings? The Heldons? Were they beautiful, too?”

“Not really. Little altars,” he said. “Altars to nature. Not nature itself.”

She nodded and looked away. “Nature itself” was what Jordan painted and drew. He rarely made pictures of scenery, however, and never without evidence of the dynamic presence of human beings. To Jordan, history and politics and economics were all parts of nature. Sex, work, play: it didn’t matter. To him, human beings were no less a part of the natural world than the mountains and lakes and skies that enveloped them.