The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  IT WAS NEARLY DARK WHEN THEY HEARD FOOTSTEPS ON THE DECK at the front of the house and then the squeak of the screened door of the porch opening and closing, and someone crossed the porch and knocked lightly on the living room door. Jordan reached for his clothes and rapidly began pulling them on, while Vanessa calmly rose from the bed, strolled naked to the dressing room, and emerged wrapped in a white cotton sheet. She told him to stay where he was and walked from the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind her. Jordan peered cautiously from the window along the front of the house to the porch. In the heavy shadow of the overhanging pines, even with a full moon rising in the east, it was too dark for him to see who was there, except that it was a man.

  At the living room door Vanessa called, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Hubert. Hubert St. Germain, Miss Cole.”

  “What do you want? I’m not dressed.”

  “I got to talk to you, Miss Cole.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  She opened the door, but did not invite him inside. “What do you want? You shouldn’t be here now, you know.” The cold air rushed into the room, and she shivered and pulled the sheet tightly around her. She was not fooled: the guide was bringing news that she did not want to hear.

  “I know I shouldn’t have come out. But I got to warn you.”

  “What, the British are coming?”

  “No. I did something that I thought…that I thought was the right thing to do. The only thing I could do, under the circumstances. Only it didn’t work out right.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Hubert, you sound like you’ve been a bad boy. Stop beating around the bush and tell me,” she said, although she already knew what he’d done and what would follow. She turned away and told him to come inside, then walked to her bedroom door and called to Jordan, “Come on out. It’s Paul Revere. The British are coming.” He’s told someone, she said to herself. The bloody fool. She never should have trusted him. He was weaker than she had thought.

  Returning to the living room, she strode to the bar and poured herself a half glass of rum and the same for Jordan. “You want a drink?” she asked Hubert. “Sit down and have a drink,” she said. Then, “No, make a fire first, will you? It’s cold in here.”

  “I could use a drink, I guess. H’lo, Jordan,” he said as the artist entered the room, dressed, but shirtless, with his leather jacket on and zipped.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Jordan said.

  “I’m afraid he’s the harbinger of bad tidings. What do you want, Hubert? To drink, I mean.”

  “Same as you, I guess.”

  “You guess. Is that all you do, guess?”

  “No. I know a few things. I’ll have the same as you and Jordan,” he said and knelt by the fireplace and crumpled newspaper into it and laid some sticks down and while the others watched in silence got the fire lit.

  Jordan slumped in a large chair and looked at him. Finally he asked, “What’s the bad news, Hubert? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You got back to your cabin and sat there looking at your dog and had a crisis of conscience. Right?”

  Hubert stood and looked at Jordan, then at Vanessa, who handed him the drink. The burning pine sticks snapped loudly behind him. He saw that they had spent the afternoon making love, and was glad of it. So many things were fracturing and getting reconfigured that it felt somehow reassuring to see still more of it. What the hell, let it all come down, he thought. Everything that’s broke is beyond repair. He was even glad that Alicia and he would not be able to see each other again, and that he might never be able to hire out his services to the Reserve again. Better that nothing will ever be the same again, rather than only some things. “Yes, you’re right,” he said to Jordan. “As far as it goes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Vanessa said. “‘As far as it goes.’” She moved from table to table, lighting the kerosene lanterns, filling the large, high-ceilinged room with pale orange light. “My father’s dead only a few weeks, and my mother’s killed this morning by a shotgun blast, a regrettable, sad accident, as we know, and Daddy’s ashes are in the lake, and Mother’s body is buried in the woods, both deeds illegally done, and you’re having a little crise de conscience? Get some perspective, Hubert. I haven’t even started to properly mourn yet, because of all this goddamned mess, and meanwhile you’re feeling a little guilty? Why should we care about that?”

  “If that’s all it was, that I talked to Alicia about…about what happened this morning and all, I wouldn’t have come out here tonight. I would’ve just left it like it was.”

  “You did what?” Jordan said. “You told Alicia? Jesus!”

  “Why on earth did you do that, Hubert? What were you thinking?”

  Jordan said, “I’ll tell you what he was thinking. He carried his little bag of guilt straight to his lover, my wife, because he couldn’t handle it himself, and she’s the only one he knows who would keep his secret, since I’m a part of it and she’s married to me, the father of her children, and is therefore obliged to protect me. Besides, she’s good at keeping secrets, isn’t she, Hubie? So now Alicia knows about it, and you’re feeling guilty about that, too. You’re having a second crisis of conscience, and you’ve rowed all the way out here in the dark to get it off your chest. You can screw another man’s wife, but you can’t stand thinking badly of yourself. Better get used to it, Hubie.”

  “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.

  Vanessa left the library and carried the folder to the living room. There she held it against her breasts and stared at the fire for several seconds. The flames had begun to die, and she was shivering from the cold now. Kneeling, she placed the folder flat on the hearth. She reached behind her for the fallen sheet and draped it over her shoulders like a robe. On her knees, she stared at the file folder and reached one hand forward and nudged the folder a few inches toward the open fire, all the while murmuring and shaking her head from side to side as if arguing with herself. She pushed the folder another inch closer to the flames. She looked up at the mantelpiece. She could feel the heat of the flames against her face and throat. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….

  She stood then and slowly approached the mantelpiece, reached out and lifted the kerosene lantern off it. Holding the bowl in her two hands, she backed a few steps away from the fire. She hurled the lantern through the flaming mouth of the fireplace into the darkness beyond, and the entire room filled with a flash of hot light.

  JORDAN GROVES MADE HIS WAY WITH RELATIVE EASE ALONG the rocky shore. The full moon above the lake was like a gigantic eye looking in on the earth. He pushed through brushy undergrowth and splashed across the mouths of small, rock-strewn brooks to the hidden cove a mile south of the camp, where his airplane was anchored. Stepping onto the near pontoon, he pulled the anchors free of the lake bottom and climbed into the cockpit and started the engine. He hit the rudders, and brought the airplane around to the south, facing the soft wind. A broad streak of moonlight crossed the water in front of him like a brightly lit, rippled runway, and his takeoff along it was quick and smooth and straight, a gracefully rising arc drawn from the surface of the lake into the cloudless, star-filled sky above. As he passed over the camp buildings, he kept his gaze fixed on the stars above and ahead of him and did not see the living room windows of the camp suddenly change color—dark orange flaring to bright yellow.

  ALICIA MOVED SLOWLY THROUGH THE HOUSE, SHUTTING OFF the lights one by one. The boys had finally fallen asleep—all day and into the evening they had been anxious and somber, as if they knew that something was about to change their lives irrevocably, even though Alicia had made every effort to demonstrate to them that today was just another ordinary summer day in the life of the Groves family. Papa was gone someplace in his airplane but would be back in a day or two, she told them, maybe even tonight. Where has Papa gone? they wanted to know. She wasn’t sure, it was business, it had come up suddenly, and he had left early before any of th
em was awake and didn’t give her the details. They’d memorized and rehearsed singing the Jimmie Rodgers songs, and in the afternoon, after Hubert came and left, she asked the boys to keep helping Papa’s new assistant learn everything she could about the studio, told them to go on teaching the girl the names and places of the different tools and materials the same way Papa had taught them, by making an inventory of all the inks and paints and pastels and pencils, all the blocks and plates and even the sheets of paper organized by weight and size, and the rolls of canvas and stretchers and the brushes, knives, chisels, gouges—reminding Wolf and Bear that Frances had never been inside a real artist’s studio before yesterday and that by helping her they were helping Papa, because when he got back he would have lots of new work to do and would not have the time to train her himself.

  With Frances and the boys safely ensconced in the studio, Alicia had continued to behave as if it was just another normal late July afternoon—weeding the garden, gathering the first summer squashes and cucumbers, restaking the branches of the tomato plants that were about to break under the weight of the clusters of new green tomatoes. And later she’d taken Wolf and Bear to swim in the river, and the dogs, as anxious and somber as the boys, for the first time refused to go into the water. They stood on the sandy shore and watched, as if protecting the boys, who dutifully practiced their strokes a short ways beyond, and when the boys came out of the water and Alicia toweled them down, the dogs lay on the warm sand of the short beach and continued their watching, as if something strange was happening, when, in fact, everything was normal, life as usual, just another afternoon and evening at the Groveses’.