4
TREMBLING AS IF SUDDENLY CHILLED, ALICIA GROVES DROVE rapidly downhill from Hubert St. Germain’s cabin and said to herself that she hated this, lying like a child and hiding like a common criminal. And most of all, she hated having been exposed this way. Though it was probably a good thing, she thought. The exposure would allow her to end the deception. But not the guilt. No matter what Jordan did when he found out, the punishment would not be severe enough to end the guilt. And he would find out. And he would punish her. That girl will make sure he knows. She wants him for herself, Alicia thought, although she’s probably already had him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was the kind of woman who takes a man away from his wife and children just because she can and then leaves him behind and moves on to steal another. Alicia hadn’t known women like that, not personally, but she had read about them in novels and magazines.
It wasn’t that way with Hubert. It was different with him, wasn’t it? It had to be. That difference, however, was the source of her guilt. For she believed that she loved Hubert and he loved her, and she believed that Hubert had made her happier to be who she truly was than her husband ever had. In fact, it was Hubert who had shown her who she truly was. But there was a price to pay. A high, ongoing price. Regardless of what happened now, Alicia’s happiness and freshened knowledge of who she truly was had corrupted her marriage, had tainted it forward and backward, from its beginning to the eventual end of it. It was as if she had been false to her husband all the years they were married and now was condemned to be false to him for the rest of her life. That’s what Alicia believed.
Twice she felt the car begin to shudder and bump off the corrugated, switchbacking lane and had to yank the wheel and pull the vehicle away from the steep ditch at the side. And twice, lost in her thoughts, overwhelmed with guilt — and now dread, too, for she had seen herself through the calculating eyes of the other woman — she let the car coast almost to a stop before suddenly realizing it and accelerating back to a normal speed. Alicia had not intended to become involved with Hubert. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She told herself that she had not been looking for love outside the marriage, and she believed it. She and Jordan had often quarreled, of course, as all couples do, coming sometimes closer to violence, however, than most husbands and wives; and they had endured long periods of sullen detachment from each other, for Jordan was a difficult, demanding man with a roving eye and a permanent wanderlust and a need for constant forgiveness. But she had accommodated herself to his sharp, selfish ways, accepting them as an even trade for all the other ways in which he was large and exciting. Alicia believed that Jordan Groves had given her a bigger life than she ever could have acquired on her own or with a lesser man. Consequently, until she met and fell in love with Hubert St. Germain, Alicia had thought that, given her unique personality and desires, she was a happily married woman.
Over the years she had on several occasions been tempted to sleep with a man other than her husband — many men, usually friends or colleagues of Jordan’s, had made themselves available, especially when Jordan was off on one of his extended painting treks. But she had always turned them away with a gentle, appreciative smile, glad for the attention, but unwilling to break her marriage vows. Alicia had been raised a strict Catholic, and though she had not been to confession or mass since arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, and had said of herself in the intervening years that she was, like her husband, an atheist, and also like him was a Marxist, yes, but not a Communist, a Trotskyite, maybe, but not a Leninist, she still took vows of any kind seriously. It did not matter that she had made her marital vows in a civil ceremony performed by a Scottish justice of the peace with witnesses pulled in from the street. A sworn vow was a promise that, regardless of changed circumstances, one kept.
Thus, even though throughout her marriage to Jordan Groves there had been the usual crushes and flirtations, brief infatuations with men who resembled her husband not at all — short-lived fantasies generated by mild sexual curiosity — they had never come to anything. A few mixed signals and Alicia had quickly backed off, relieved, her curiosity doused, her fantasies fading fast and no longer able to excite her. In that way she had learned, to her surprise, that she was attracted to quiet men, self-contained, intelligent men who were modest about their accomplishments, men whose small, compact bodies were not at all like her husband’s Viking body. She discovered that she was attracted to men who knew things she didn’t, who possessed skills she lacked, and whose background and social status were radically different from hers. Knowing this, she was able to stand slightly outside her attractions and observe them dispassionately, even with mild amusement, for she was married to and, as far as she knew then, was still deeply in love with and made adequately happy by an entirely different sort of man — a man physically large and energetic and known to all the world for his turbulence and his frank outspokenness and egoism and his unquestioning belief in the importance of his life and work. A belief she had no difficulty in sharing with him.
In many ways they were, after all, a natural pair, Alicia and her husband, Jordan Groves. Jordan was educated in the arts, as she was, and like her was an only child raised by religious, politically conservative parents against whom he had rebelled early on — although his parents, of course, were American working class, Midwesterners, very blue collar, while hers were from the European haute bourgeoisie. And though they had made their home in a small farm village at the edge of the northern wilderness, Jordan and Alicia Groves were both cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated people. And they were rich. Together, but independently, and almost without trying — he by virtue of the immense early popularity of his work, she by virtue of being the daughter of well-to-do parents and the wife of Jordan Groves — the couple had become wealthy, renowned members of the haute bourgeoisie themselves. Thus she found it surprising and amusing and faintly ironic that, while she loved her husband for all the ways he and she were alike and in spite of the few ways they were different, she was periodically attracted to men like Hubert St. Germain for all the ways they were different and in spite of the few ways they were alike.