This practice over the years had made the artist sexually incandescent to certain women. It made him behave in an invitational way, indicating that he was clearly available, even eager, to bed them, but would not do it. He was dangerous, and yet was unavailable, off-limits, safe. It did not hurt that he was a famous artist and handsome and healthy, a legendary adventurer and sportsman, a roistering world traveler with a loving family, leftist politics, and a lot of money. It did not hurt that he was the subject of much idle gossip. Certain women enjoyed having people think they were sleeping with Jordan Groves. The artist was aware of the source of his attractiveness to these women — he knew that his fantasies invoked theirs — and did nothing to discourage it.
Vanessa Von Heidenstamm had entered today’s dreamy narrative so vividly that she had displaced everyone else. It was as if all those other women Jordan Groves could have fallen in love with, had he only let himself make love to them, in a flash had been completely forgotten, erased from memory. This was different. In the past, whenever mundane reality intruded — as in the early arrival of Frances Jacques, his newly hired studio assistant — he could simply put his little story down without feeling frustrated or deprived, the fictional dimension of his life blending easily with ordinary reality. But no longer. Closing the book on Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, even temporarily, made him cross.
“What the hell are you doing here now!” he barked at the girl. “I told you to come at noon. You’re supposed to be here twelve to five, not eleven to four.”
Frightened and embarrassed, the girl stood in the doorway and wrung her hands. “I thought, it being the first day and all, I thought I’d get here early, you know, to kind of get used to where things were and all. Gosh, I’m sorry, Mr. Groves,” she said. “I’ll go away and come back later.” She was a local kid just out of high school, teachable, he had thought, though he’d been disappointed when she showed him the portfolio of awkward, amateurish drawings and paintings she’d made in art class. Not much talent there. But her teachers had spoken highly of her intelligence and character, and she seemed good natured and alert and physically strong, and besides, all she needed to do was keep the studio clean, take care of his tools and materials, stretch the occasional canvas, and when necessary pack and ship his work for him, most of which she could learn in a week. And she was from a poor family, the father jobless, the mother at home with four younger kids, and so on. That was in the girl’s favor. Her job would at least put food on the family’s table.
“No, forget it. Come in, I’ll get you started,” he said and waved her into the studio.
She was small but wiry, a farm kid used to physical labor. Her hair was a dark brown mass of thick curls, cut short more for ease of maintenance than appearance, and she wore no makeup or jewelry. She had dressed too carefully for the job, the artist noticed, like a secretary come to take dictation.
“Really, Mr. Groves, I’ll go away and come back later,” she practically pleaded.
He softened toward her then and smiled and apologized for being so grouchy. He liked her large dark eyes and rosy complexion and her sinewy forearms, unusual in a girl her age, and he wanted her to be happy and excited to be working for him. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Okay? You go back outside and knock on the door, and we’ll take it from there.”
Relieved, the girl smiled and did as she was told. She knocked, and the artist said, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Frances!”
“C’mon in, Frances!”
She opened the door and stepped inside, smiling broadly.
“Hey, Frances, good to see you. Came a little early, eh? To get the lay of the land before starting?”
“Y-yes. Is that all right? I can come back later if you like.”
“No, no, that’s fine. Usually I like to work alone till noon, but this morning I got in early myself. I was thinking of taking a break now anyhow.”
“Oh, that’s good!” she said, genuinely pleased and believing him.
“Before you do anything, though, you better get into some proper work clothes. I don’t want you to ruin that pretty dress.”
“Oh, dear. But…I didn’t bring anything else.”
“That’s all right. Go to the house, and tell my wife that I need her to loan you some overalls and a sweatshirt. She’s a bigger size than you, but it won’t matter. You can roll up the sleeves and cuffs.”
“She won’t mind? You’re sure?”
“Of course not, she’ll be delighted. It’s all boys around here, so she never gets to loan her stuff.”
Frances said, “Thank you, Mr. Groves,” and almost curtsied and quickly left the studio.
As soon as the door closed behind her, Jordan Groves returned to the story he had been telling himself when the girl had first knocked. He opened it at the page he’d marked. It was where he imagined Vanessa Von Heidenstamm sitting beside him on the sofa in the living room at Rangeview, the room lit by the golden light of the sun slipping behind the mountains across the lake. She places her glass down on the coffee table and looks up at him and says, “This must always be our secret, Jordan. We must never tell anyone that we have shown each other our scars….” He is unsure of his answer. What would he say if she said that? What scars?
FOLLOWING THE CLUB MANAGER’S MAP, VANESSA DROVE QUICKLY through the village of Tunbridge to the Flats, turned onto the rutted dirt lane known locally as Clarkson Road, and wound uphill toward Beede Mountain. It was a bright sunshiny day with white towers of cumulus clouds stacked at the western horizon. Halfway up the mountain, a narrower, rougher lane split off to the left, ending five hundred yards farther at a single-story log structure, more a cabin than a house, with a wide stone chimney at one end and an open porch across the front. The yard was potted with tree stumps, and most of the forest downhill from the house had been clear-cut, leaving heaps of brush and tree scruff for burning. The place resembled the forest home of an early American pioneer.
She was greeted by a large dog, a butterscotch Labrador that careened off the porch and charged the driver’s-side door of her car and stood there barking ferociously. Vanessa waved the dog off as if brushing away cobwebs and got out of the car. She ignored the dog, and it cringed and backed off and, with ears and tail lowered, went silent. Vanessa seemed not to notice its existence one way or the other. She walked past the animal and marched up the steps of the front porch, where she turned for a second and looked back at the entire Adirondack Great Range. It was a spectacular view of the mountains, running from Goliath and Sentinel all the way around to the south and then west to Mt. Marcy—180 degrees of unbroken wilderness, millions of forested acres spreading south and east almost to the suburbs of Albany and Utica. As she raised her hand to knock on the rough-hewn door, she glanced at the battered Model A Ford coupe parked next to the cabin, a large wooden box in its trunk converting the vehicle from a car to a pickup, and then saw and recognized, half hidden in the pines just beyond, Jordan Groves’s black Ford sedan.
Well, well, well, she thought.
She knocked on the door with freshened authority. The artist would be tempted to shove the guide aside and offer himself instead, she thought, once he saw her asking another man for help. Men were like that. She knocked a second time. Then called, “Hello! Hubert St. Germain! Are you there?”
The door opened a few inches and no farther. It was dark inside, but she could make out the guide’s somber, craggy face. His shirt was unbuttoned and his suspenders dangled at his sides, and he was tousled and unshaven, as if just awakened. “Hello, Miss Cole,” he said. “Sorry…I was doing something in back and must not’ve heard you right off.”
She said, “I’m sorry for coming unannounced. But I need to ask a very special favor of you, and it can’t wait. May I come in?” Placing her hand flat against the door, she pushed lightly, intending to speak with Hubert St. Germain, but only in the immediate presence of Jordan Groves.
Hubert pushed back from the other side. “Is something wrong up at the lake, Miss Cole?” he asked, his face nearly expressionless — unreadable to Vanessa, but not mysterious. For her, there was no mystery to the man. He was compact and muscular, like most of the guides, and of average height, his hands and neck darkly tanned. Vanessa had never really thought of him as someone with a life of his own and therefore had never thought of him as someone who was unknowable. For years he had merely been the coolly detached, competent, always available guide, efficient and attractively designed, like one of those fine Adirondack guide boats he built and handled more expertly than any but the old legendary guides from her grandfather’s day.
In the near darkness behind him she saw a silhouette of a person slip out of her line of sight into a bank of shadows deeper in the room. Hubert moved to come out onto the porch and close the door behind him.
“May I come inside?” Vanessa asked. The dog had followed her onto the porch and now stood beside her as if ready to escort her into the cabin. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I do need to speak personally with you.” She wanted Jordan Groves to hear her plea and volunteer to help her in Hubert’s place, and she resented to a small degree the artist’s obvious avoidance of her. She intended to press herself on him, to make it impossible for him to ignore her specific need and rising desire. Confident since yesterday’s encounter at the camp that his need and desire matched hers, she felt entitled, even invited, to risk being rejected by him. He was trying to run from that fact, and she had no intention of letting him.
Hubert said, “It’s all a mess inside. We can talk out here on the porch. I…I’ve got a…,” he stammered uncomfortably.
Then a woman spoke from the darkness behind him. “I’m just leaving, if you want to have a private conversation,” she said, and suddenly, standing in the doorway beside the guide, was Alicia Groves. “Hello, Miss Von Heidenstamm,” the artist’s wife said and pushed past them onto the porch. The dog backed out of her way, but otherwise made no fuss over her presence. Clearly, the animal was used to her.
Vanessa stepped out of her way, too, and watched in silence as Alicia Groves crossed the porch, hurried down the stairs, and walked from the yard to the pine grove where the Ford sedan was parked. Alicia’s bright blond hair, Vanessa noticed, had been freshly brushed. Without looking back, Alicia got into the car and drove quickly down the hill and away.
Vanessa said to Hubert, “Well, I believe that now we can talk out here on the porch, if you like.”
The guide gazed down the slope to the bend in the rough lane where the car had disappeared behind a stand of spruce trees, almost as if he expected Alicia Groves to return. “What is it you want me to do for you, Miss Cole?” he said without looking at her.
JORDAN BROUGHT HIS AIRPLANE INTO THE RESERVE FROM THE west this time, cutting a wide arc to avoid the clubhouse and the First Lake altogether, flying instead above the forested spine of the Great Range and coming in low over the swampy headwaters of the Tamarack River, where, except for a few solitary mountain climbers, he was least likely to be seen. A mile north of Dr. Cole’s camp, he cut his speed as much as he dared and put the airplane into the water gently and taxied slowly along the shore. He anchored it in a shallow, protected inlet a mile or so above the beach where he had first seen Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He came ashore there and went into the woods, making his way through low scrub alongside a small, rock-filled brook.
Soon the trees and brush thinned out, and he saw the roofs of the camp woodshed and the caretaker’s shack. Avoiding the open ground in front of the camp, he walked through tall pines toward the guest quarters and approached the main building from the side. He passed the big stone fireplace chimney and was a few feet from the steps leading up to the deck when he stopped suddenly and stood stock-still, as if to hear the breeze stroking the high branches of the pine trees.
This is crazy, he thought. I’m a goddamn lunatic doing this, coming out here in the middle of the afternoon. I’m like a hound chasing a bitch in heat. It was his first conscious thought since he’d put Frances Jacques in charge of the boys. Alicia was in town, he knew, doing her thrice-weekly volunteer work at the little medical center there and picking up groceries afterward and would be home by three or so. He’d told Frances to inventory all his tools and brushes and to let the boys help her. That way she would learn where everything was located in the studio and what it was called. Just as his own father had done when he was a small boy, Jordan had taught his sons the names of the tools of his trade. It was the first step toward teaching them the trade itself. He gave the girl a pad and pencil and said that if she found a tool or a piece of equipment that neither she nor the boys could name, she was to make a drawing of it, and he would tell her later what it was called. He wanted her to memorize the location and name of every tool he owned, so that he could be like a surgeon and she his nurse, and all he’d have to do was ask for a particular brush or chisel, and she’d place it in his hand. He instructed her to go through all the drawers and look on every shelf and into the cabinets. He had nothing to hide. No secrets, he told her. He wanted her as familiar with every square inch of the studio as he was. Today was tool day, he said. Tomorrow they would inventory materials. Then he had left the studio for the hangar and his airplane, and until this moment, when he found himself in the Reserve at the Second Lake and about to step up onto the deck of the late Dr. Cole’s camp, Rangeview, and quietly knock on the front door, he had no thoughts about what he was doing or why. He simply did it.
He realized that his silly sexual fantasy, not the woman herself, had gotten the best of him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was beautiful and provocative and intriguingly unpredictable, but she was flawed, terribly flawed, as if something inside her, a crucial, defining part of her mind, were permanently broken and made her dangerous to anyone foolish enough to get close to her. It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. You were magnetically attracted to her or you were repelled, and in his case it was both. He glanced down the slope in front of the camp to the glittering water and noticed that the guide boat was not there. So she was gone, then.
He searched the lake for a moment and saw only a deer with her fawn stepping cautiously from the woods on the far side to drink. A pair of loons floated offshore a ways, bobbing in the low waves, disappearing abruptly underwater, reappearing a minute later fifty yards farther on, and Jordan wondered if, like swans, loons mated for life. Then suddenly the artist felt very foolish. He felt foolish and exposed, like a lovesick adolescent boy caught standing below the window of an inaccessible woman, a nobleman’s young wife or daughter, and he merely the carpenter’s son. Turning, he walked back along the side of the main building of the camp and into the woods and made his way downstream along the brook to the inlet where he had anchored his airplane.