“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.”