6
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 irresolution, 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.