The Reserve (19 page)

Jordan shook his head sadly. “You certainly have been a fool. But not as much a fool as
I’ve
been. Are you in love with him?”

She hesitated before answering. “I…I thought I was. I was unhappy, Jordan. For a long time I was very unhappy.”

“I don’t care about causes! There are a thousand reasons why a woman commits adultery. And a thousand and one why a man does it. Right now all I care about is getting the material facts. I don’t even care if it was good sex or bad sex or anything in between. That’s your private business and will only disgust
me anyway. I want the facts. So I can…so I can know what to do next.” He studied his hands and saw they were shaking, and he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you in love with Hubert St. Germain? Are you still in love with the son of a bitch?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “But I have closed my heart to him.”

“Oh. You’re in love with him, but you’ve closed your heart to him. Whatever that means. Does it mean you’re no longer in love with me?”

“No, it does not, Jordan. I will always be in love with you.”

“You will, eh? Well, that’s a little hard for me to grasp. Here’s a fact. Except for you, I have never been in love with anyone. Only you. Period. So I don’t know what the hell you mean when you say you’re in love with Hubert, despite having ‘closed your heart to him,’ and that you will also always be in love with me.” He rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know how you can be in love with both of us.”

“It’s not like that. Being in love, I mean. It’s more complicated and confusing than that.”

“Not to me. For me, with every woman the love switch is either off or it’s on. And it’s always been on with you, Alicia. With everyone else, off.”

“I’ve never doubted your love for me,” she said quietly. “But all those women, the women you’ve slept with, you never loved any of them?”

“No. Absolutely not. You know that, you’ve always known that. Cold comfort, maybe, but we’re not talking about me here, are we? Oh, I know I might be partly to blame for driving you into the eager arms of the noble Adirondack woodsman Hubert St. Germain. It’s obvious even to me that I’m hard to live with and
have not been a faithful husband and have left you alone here with the boys for weeks and months at a time. And I know in some people’s eyes ol’ Hubert’s a charmer, even if a somewhat mournful and inarticulate one. And I know that after nearly ten years of marriage any woman gets restless and maybe a little curious about what it might be like to fuck someone other than her husband. So there are all kinds of causes ready to hand. So many that there’s no point in discussing them. What I have to know is, what exactly has happened, Alicia? What has happened? So that I can decide what I am to do now. My next move.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do I divorce you? Or do I fall down on my knees and promise to be a better husband? Do I fly into a rage and knock you down and bust all the furniture? Or do I weep in sorrow and self-pity for having lost the love of my life? What the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know the answer to that. Do I drive over to Hubert’s cabin and drag him out of his filthy adulterous bed and beat the shit out of him? Or do I sit down with him over a bottle of whiskey and talk about the perfidy of unhappily married women? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alicia,” he cried, and his voice broke. “What am I supposed to
do
? What am I supposed to feel?” He spread his arms wide and opened his body and face to her.

She came forward and got down on her knees in front of him and put her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist. Weeping now, she said, “All of it, Jordan. Do all of it. If you ask for a divorce, I’ll give it to you. If you promise to be a better husband, I’ll believe you. If you beat up Hubert, I’ll understand. Though Lord knows it’s not his fault. None of it is. It’s all my fault. If you sit down and get drunk with him and talk about what an awful woman I’ve been, I’ll understand. Do all of
it, Jordan. Do
anything
. Do everything. Just please, in the end, please forgive me, Jordan.”

Tears streamed down his broad cheeks. “Not possible, Alicia. It’s not possible. I can’t forgive you because I can’t forget what you’ve done. Not as long as I can picture the two of you crawling all over each other naked in bed. And what you’ve said. That you still love the man. It’s not fair, I know, I don’t have any right to feel the way I do. I know that. Because I’ve had my share, more than my share, of dalliances or liaisons or whatever you want to call them. But there’s a difference, Alicia. I never loved any of those women! They were just flashes of light in the dark. Fireflies. I never shared my secrets with them. Only with you, Alicia. I never let them know me. Only you.”

They stayed silent for several moments, Alicia with her head against his chest and Jordan with his arms around her, holding her close. She heard his heart pound, and he felt her back shudder as she wept. In all their years together, they had never both wept at the same time. She had wept, because of his sins against her, or he had wept out of guilt, but separately.

Finally, he let go of her and told her to go upstairs to bed and leave him alone. “I need to be alone. I need to think. I need to know what’s really happened here, and I don’t believe you can help me with that.” He pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face dry and gave it to her to do the same, which she did.

Then, awkwardly, she stood up, and when she turned to leave she saw that the dogs had come into the room and were sitting alertly by the door, watching Alicia and Jordan with worried expressions on their long faces.

Alicia said, “They know.”

“What do they know? They’re dogs.”

“They know that something terrible has happened to us.”

“Has it? I don’t know yet what has happened to us. I need time to think. Go to bed, Alicia. I’ll be up later. Or maybe I won’t.”

She left the room, and the dogs followed, still worried. When Jordan heard Alicia’s footsteps overhead, he turned back to his desk and picked up his letter to Dos Passos. He held it to the light and studied it for a moment as if trying to read it through the envelope. Then he tore the letter in half and half again and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket.

The three newcomers learned at breakfast that they were listed for two missions today, a morning flight and an afternoon, their first flights over enemy territory. It was not great weather for flying. The early morning rain had stopped, but a blanket of low clouds remained. They had been waiting for a week for their airplanes to arrive from Bilbao and had been given Breguets, not the Russian Polikarpov monoplanes they had requested. The Breguets had been fitted out with two machine guns and bomb racks that held four twenty-five-pound bombs. Their mission was to bomb a pair of gunpowder factories deep in enemy territory, just beyond the Jarama River, fifteen miles from Madrid. To get the job done with the Breguets they would have to do it twice. All nine of the foreign pilots in the squadron stood by their planes until they saw the starting signal, a white flare shot from the field house. As soon as they were in the air, the planes moved into a V of V formation
,
in which each of the three-man patrols was in a V and the three patrols themselves were in a V. The American named Groves flew on the right wing of the first patrol, which was led by the Englishman Fairhead. Chang flew on Fairhead’s left wing. The ceiling had settled at three thousand feet, making it easy to cross into enemy territory unseen in the clouds. When they had passed over the target factories and flown a few miles beyond, Fairhead swung the formation back toward home territory
.
The right-wing patrol crossed over the top of Fairhead’s lead patrol,
and the left slid under, the three together making as quick and tight a 180-degree turn as a single patrol alone could make. When they were almost on top of the factories Fairhead gave the signal to attack, and all nine planes dove, still in a V of V formation. Fairhead’s lead patrol was to take out the antiaircraft battery located between the two factories. The two wing patrols were led by the veterans, Papps, the Englishman, and Brenner, the American, who had Whitey on his wing. They went for the factories. The pilots lined up their bomb sights and released the bombs, continuing the dive, machine-gunning people, mostly civilians madly racing away from the factory yards. At three hundred feet they flattened out their dive and sped across the Jarama River and until they got into friendly territory kept their aircraft as close to the ground as possible, following the narrow valleys and draws to keep the enemy from seeing where they’d gotten to. Later that same afternoon they made the return trip, all nine of them, to bomb the same factories. There was much more antiaircraft fire this time, little puffs of white smoke here and there, like small detached cumulus clouds, growing more numerous as the airplanes approached the factories. They dropped their bombs, finishing off the factories and, as they had before, machine-gunned anyone foolish enough to be caught in the open. This time, on their return to base Fairhead led them down along miles of enemy trenches, and following his example the pilots fired their Vickers .303 machine guns at infantrymen helplessly firing back with small-bore rifles and revolvers. After their first pass, the American named Groves, the one called Rembrandt, ceased firing. It was April 4, 1937. The American had suddenly remembered that it was an anniversary. Twenty years ago on this day he had shot down two German Fokker Dr. Is over France. He held formation, but his guns went silent, while the others kept firing their machine guns until they finally ran out of ammunition and headed back to the base.

A
DENSE, LAYERED, ROSE-TINTED MIST HOVERED ABOVE THE
lake as Jordan Groves came over the Great Range and began his descent. From above, the mist obscured the pilot’s view of the black surface of the water. There was no wind. He cut his speed as close to a stall as he dared and brought the biplane in gently, like laying a newborn baby into its downy crib. He felt the lake before he saw it, and when he knew the pontoons had settled squarely into the glass-smooth water he brought the engine speed back up a notch and headed for the hidden cove south of Rangeview, where he had anchored the day before. From a distance of a hundred yards he could make out the shoreline easily enough, but little else, nothing higher up on the shore, not the clear blue sky above the mist or the towering pines and not the Coles’s camp buildings. Just the mossy rocks and the low pucker bushes at the edge of the lake and the graveled spills where the brooks and streams tumbled from the heights into the lake.

He pulled into the cove and quickly anchored the airplane and strode ashore. It was not yet six in the morning. He had slept barely two hours the night before, half of it on the leather sofa in his office, the other half in his easy chair. His mouth was sour and dry from whiskey and tobacco. All night long he had struggled to make up his mind about something, anything, but had been unable to do it. His entire life felt like a swirl of irresolu
tion, until just before dawn when he made up his mind to fly out to the Second Lake and speak with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He had no idea what he would ask or tell her. But she had been a witness to his betrayal, perhaps the only witness—other than Hubert St. Germain, of course, and Alicia herself, and there was no way he could expect to be comforted or enlightened by talking with either of them. Not now. They could only bring him more pain, more irresolution. Vanessa, however, might somehow help him capture the calm objectivity that he needed in order to regain his sense of himself as a man, a man of action. He could not bear thinking of himself in any other way.

Rather than sneak furtively through the brush and forest the way he’d done the day before, Jordan approached the camp forth-rightly, from the shore. He had no fear today of being seen, no shame at being here, no guilty fantasies to hide from himself or anyone else. All he wanted was to tell Vanessa what his wife had confessed to him and ask her what she had seen at Hubert St. Germain’s cabin. From those two points of contact, plus his remembered long history of his marriage and his own crimes against it, he could begin to triangulate and locate his exact position in the shifting present. And once he knew that much, he would know how to navigate the future. Until then, he would thrash about like a child lost in the woods, abandoned and alone, with no idea of how to get home.

He stepped onto the deck and pushed open the screened door to the porch, and there on the wicker couch lay Hubert St. Germain, startled awake by the sound of the door closing and astonished by the sight of Alicia’s husband standing before him. Hubert may well have been dreaming about the artist, he couldn’t remember, but for a few seconds he thought he was still dreaming about him, and somehow in the dream the artist had found
out that his wife had been sleeping with Hubert and that she and he were in love with each other, and now the artist had come to kill him.

The man did not seem angry, though. He stood over Hubert as large and sad as a bear. Slowly, Hubert sat up and pushed the blanket away. Fully clothed, he put his stockinged feet into his boots, and leaned forward and carefully tied the laces. Then he sat back and looked up at Jordan Groves and waited for something bad to happen.

For several moments neither man spoke. The artist reached behind him and drew up a large wicker chair and sat down heavily in it, facing the guide. Neither man had taken his eyes off the other’s face. “All right, then. So tell me, Hubert,” Jordan finally said. “Tell me why you did it.”

The guide held his breath and then slowly exhaled, as if in relief. So it was over. Over and done with. “I guess she must’ve told you…about us.”

“If I understood you, if I knew why you were willing to take my wife away from me, I’d probably want to be you. Her I understand. Me I understand. But not you. She has all kinds of reasons for falling in love with someone other than me. I can accept that. But you, Hubert, you I do not get.”

“I don’t know what you mean, if you understood me you’d want to be me.”

“Because then I’d be a real romantic. Like you. But I’m not. Y’know, Hubert, I’ve fucked other men’s wives. It’s true. Just like you. But I never wanted to take them away from their husbands. I only wanted to fuck them. Was it like that for you, Hubert? You just wanted to fuck Alicia? Maybe you’re like me after all.”

“I never meant that,” he said. “She’s not like that. And neither am I.”

Jordan nodded. He agreed, Alicia was not like that, and neither was Hubert. “That’s the thing I don’t understand, why you’d want to steal another man’s wife,” he said. “I don’t get it. It’s outside my mentality.” He looked around him as if registering for the first time where he was located: the Tamarack Mountain Reserve; the Second Lake; Rangeview. “What are you doing out here, anyhow? Fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, too? Maybe I’m wrong about you. Maybe you’re not a romantic. Have you been servicing both of them all along? You’re quite a stud, Hubert. I’d never have figured you for that.”

Hubert said no, there was nothing between him and Miss Cole, and said nothing more. What could he say to Jordan Groves? The guide was not a man of many words. He tried to be truthful and accurate about everything, but too many things, especially when it came to human beings, and even more especially when it came to men and women, were too complicated to speak about honestly or accurately. He had never spoken of the puzzling, conflicted mix of elation and apprehension he had felt when he married his high school sweetheart, Sally Lawrence. Not even to Alicia. And he’d never even tried to speak of the shameful mix of sorrow and relief he had felt when she died. He had told no one of the beatings he had endured at his father’s hands when he was a boy and his mother’s inability—or was it her unwillingness?—to protect him and his three brothers from the drunken man they called, with a sneer, the Old Man. Hubert, the youngest, had been abandoned by his brothers one by one as soon as each was able to leave home, the first for Alaska, the next for Colorado, the third for Montana—loners all, guides, hunters, trappers, woodsmen, each safely protected by his own personal wilderness, except for Hubert, the youngest, who, after the Old Man died drunk in a snowbank when Hubert was seventeen, had
stayed on in the Reserve, the Old Man’s wilderness, doing the job his father had done before him.

He never spoke of any of this, not even in painless, smooth generalities. There were no words to describe the feelings that since childhood had warred in his large, wounded heart, and he had almost given up on ever finding them, until he met Alicia, whom he came quickly to believe was willing and able to give him those words and listen to his use of them with sympathy and understanding. That was why he had begun to steal her from her husband. It hadn’t been his intention or desire. It surely was not merely to make love to her, although their lovemaking, tender and trusting and passionate, had brought him closer to speaking of these things and revealing his secret self than he had ever been before.

There was no way he could tell this to the sad, angry, bewildered man before him. So he simply shook his head and said no. No to the man’s accusation that he was fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. No to his charge that he had wanted to steal the man’s wife. Hubert had wanted only to be wholly known and understood by another human being, and because she was a woman, a beautiful, loving woman, he knew of no means of obtaining that understanding other than by making love to her, and afterward, talking in the dark of what’s right and what’s wrong, sorting out the conflicted welter of feelings that each had endured in the past and were fast creating anew, and later, walking in the high meadows, naming the flowers blooming there and naming the birds in the trees from their songs. Until the moment yesterday when Vanessa Von Heidenstamm knocked on his cabin door, it was their lovemaking and its accompaniments that had brought him to the point where he could at last begin to speak directly from his divided heart. And now he saw that he had no
choice but once again to silence his heart, to return to being the man of few words, the simple, solitary man of the lakes and woods and mountains, the much admired and sometimes envied Adirondack guide.

“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.