The Captive Condition (3 page)

“Are you saying fatherhood doesn't agree with you?”

He pondered this for a moment, and when he finally answered, he tried to sound assertive; for him never an easy thing. “I'm not convinced men, especially young men, are cut out for the job, that's all. You wouldn't trust another man with your children, would you?”

She squeezed his arm and smiled. “I trust
you,
Martin.”

From behind the sheets Madeline and Sophie performed an infuriating shadow play, pantomiming the adults, using lewd and obscene gestures, and with awful exuberance they resumed their impersonation of Pontificating Professor King-silly.

“Something to harden the soul,” they proclaimed, “something to harden the soul, something to harden the soul before a long, brutal winter!”

Deciding it was time to take shelter from the sun's blistering downward rays, Kingsley and Emily led the children under a patio umbrella and prepared a late lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. After wiping sticky mouths and fingers, they ordered the children into the family room, where Emily turned on the television. Madeline and Sophie nestled against each other on the sofa, their eyes growing heavy with exhaustion. In the flicker and fog of gray light, the twins looked somewhat less impish, and Christopher, curled up on a recliner, looked positively cherubic. At the first hint of snoring, Kingsley and Emily rushed hand in hand upstairs to the master bedroom. There was always a slim chance that one of the kids might wake up and disturb them, but with any luck they would have an entire hour to make frantic and soulful love in the stifling summertime heat.

To Kingsley's way of thinking, the affair had simply happened just as a rainstorm happens, and surely no one was to blame for a rainstorm, and he refused to believe that he was the sort of sinister character one is likely to encounter in those melodramatic novels he assigned to his students, sprawling nineteenth-century epistolary epics thronging with bourgeois sadists, cruel and vindictive toward their lovers and spouses and thus deserving of some cosmic punishment, condemned by God to mingle among the wanton and lustful souls in Dante's second circle of hell. He was not a savage, he assured himself, a panting maniac yearning to tear off Emily's clothes and gleefully fornicate in filthy public restrooms and the cramped backseat of her minivan—although every now and then these thoughts did cross his mind, or at least that part of his mind still reeling in adolescent fantasies. He wasn't driven by malice or emotional desperation but by pure physical lust, nothing more.

After they satisfied each other's needs, Emily turned to him, sweaty and spent, and her voice, though flat and distant, seemed to fill the hollow room with a vague sense of foreboding. “In a few days Charlie will be coming home. I'll need to wash and dry these sheets again.”

“Are you looking forward to seeing him?” Kingsley stretched his arms and legs.

She didn't answer, but her vacant laughter and the pale rigidity of her eyes told him all he needed to know.

“Maybe it will be good having him around,” he said. “He'll help you with the girls.”

“No, Charlie likes to remind me that he's been working hard and deserves a break. Oh, he'll watch the twins for an hour or two while I make a quick trip to the grocery store. But even that's asking a lot of him. Men can be such selfish bastards. No need to state the obvious, right? But for raising his children, a woman is allowed to make certain demands on a man's life. She deserves more than his respect and loyalty.”

Kingsley understood what she meant. Trapped for months in that house, without any close friends or family members to keep her company, Emily had started to “lose her shit,” as she frequently put it, and seldom managed to flee her captors. Her situation only worsened when Charlie was home.

In the early evening, while writing in his study, Kingsley sometimes turned to the window and saw a small colony of brown bats coming and going from an air vent at the peak of the Ryans' house, and with growing unease he listened to the shouting and screaming and sudden, portentous silences that issued forth from its dark and dirty rooms. For a long time now he'd suspected Charlie of slapping her, slamming her against doors, shoving her against crumbling sheetrock walls, pinning her face to the floor with his huge, calloused hands, the sort of man who probably slept soundly at night, even with the burden of abuse on his soul.

Once, Kingsley thought he glimpsed a bruise on Emily's left arm, the purple indentation of fingers pressed hard into delicate flesh. She started wearing long-sleeve shirts and jeans in warm weather. It wasn't his business, he told himself, but he did have the right to know what sort of people lived beside him. After all, one's neighbors were a fairly strong indicator of one's own status in this world, and Kingsley worried that he'd slipped a rung on the socioeconomic ladder, that despite his proud middle-class bearing he was just another anonymous wage slave struggling to eke out a modest living in this shabby quarter of town.

He had a more difficult time convincing Marianne. At these idle theories his wife rolled her eyes and scolded him for his snobbery.

“Every man,” she said, “no matter his station in life, is capable of ghastly behavior.”

He snorted with incredulous laughter. “
Every
man?”

“Affluent husbands beat their affluent wives, too.”

“Oh, come on, you have to concede that, statistically speaking, low-income earners are far more likely to resort to physical violence. Young professionals tend to rely on psychological warfare. Our neighbors have limited means, let's be honest. I don't like the looks of that pool anymore. They don't clean it regularly. And any property in advanced stages of decay is a bad omen. Bad for resale values, too.”

Even before moving to Normandy Falls five years ago and purchasing their home, he and Marianne had expressed concern about the pool. Despite all of the new child-safety measures—a net over the crib, a microphone on the dresser, a lock on the door—Christopher had become something of a prodigy at escaping from his nursery, and soon the day would come when he decided to scale the chain-link fence and take a fateful midnight dip.

“Have a look at their backyard.” Martin guided his wife toward the kitchen window. “Who the hell uses a clothesline these days? I'm surprised the girls haven't decapitated themselves yet.”

Marianne smirked. “For god's sake…”

“And do you see that? The tiles are falling off the roof.”

“All right, so their house could use a makeover. What do you expect? Emily is all alone over there. She can't fix up the place by herself. Charlie will get around to it, eventually.” Marianne moved away from the window and planted her hands on her hips. “Our house isn't exactly a palace either. Maybe you should consider taking a few carpentry classes at the college and focus more on home improvement projects this summer. No, you're always working on that damn book. How long have you been at it now, this quest of yours to become the unchallenged doyen of scholarship on Flaubert? Three years? Do you plan to finish it any time soon?”

In actuality, it had been closer to four years, four miserable years of creative constipation, occasional panic attacks, and those all-too-infrequent flashes of inspiration, but he wouldn't admit this to anyone, least of all to Marianne. She wasn't a dedicated maniac as he was. She was a clock watcher, the sort of no-nonsense number cruncher who demanded regular progress reports, spreadsheets, pie charts, colored graphs, accurate word counts. As an adjunct instructor of art history and professional grant writer, she worked regular hours in a small, windowless office, trying to raise the necessary funds to host a swanky New Year's Eve retrospective on the life and work of a local painter and sculptor named Colette Collins, one of the pioneers in the surrealist and psychedelic movements and a cult figure in the world of contemporary art.

Marianne was also an amateur bodybuilder, and every morning she spent an hour in the gym doing shoulder presses, squats, and lunges in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, admiring how the sharply layered and defined muscles cleaved to her bones. She was especially proud of the way her striated deltoids bulged under her taut skin, and she wore her hair pulled back so everyone could admire her broad and sloping shoulders. Her center of gravity wasn't in her impressive upper body, however, but in her muscular thighs, and whenever they made love she squeezed her legs against Kingsley's torso, causing him to cry out in pain. She'd become so adept at this that she could control the tone and rhythm of his yelps and shrieks, and sometimes she referred to him, even around his students, as “my little pipe organ.”

She was probably right about his own negligence as a homeowner, but by that point in the conversation Kingsley had grown irritated with her charitable opinions and absolute rectitude. He expected a rhapsodic affirmation of their superiority, a lovely ode to their granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances and the reassuring smell of cleaning solution so pungent it singed the hairs in his nostrils and made his eyes water.

He felt it necessary to be more candid with her and lowered his voice. “Look, I haven't told you this, but I've seen bats, big ones with pointed ears, flying in and out of the attic next door. Once winter comes Charlie won't be able to get rid of those things. They'll hibernate in the walls and die inside the house and decompose if he tries to exterminate them.”

“Okay, Martin.”

“The entire neighborhood will end up reeking like a slaughterhouse.”

“Stop.”

“The stench, Marianne, the smell of
death and decay—
”

“I said stop it!” She gave him a look dark with reproach.

Kingsley was taken aback. He'd never seen such loathing in her eyes, and suddenly he worried that she suspected him of misconduct.

“I often wonder, Martin, if there's something wrong with you. I mean something
seriously wrong.
” Then she stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door with enough force to shake the whole foundation.

Now he scrutinized the ceiling above Emily's bed, counting the cracks, looking for telltale signs of guano, faint patches of gray leaking through loose scabs of plaster, and he listened for the scratch and scuffle of bats nesting in the walls. Only after assuring himself that the place wasn't an unsalvageable wreck did he commence yet another surreptitious appraisal of Emily's body. With the spurious smile of an experienced old lecher, he stroked her soft skin and searched longingly for irrefutable evidence of abuse. Kissing her thighs, her navel, her breasts, her shoulders, he wondered how their respective spouses might react if they chanced to walk in on them in flagrante delicto, a scene so clichéd it was almost comical, but Kingsley could guess what Charlie Ryan might do.

Prior to shipping out on his latest voyage, Charlie wanted to buy a Doberman, a Rottweiler, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, a real monster that would provide Emily with peace of mind while he was away from home, but Emily flatly refused to clean up after it, so Charlie settled on a gun instead, a simple, easy-to-handle
.38
revolver, a shiny new weapon that, if the situation presented itself, he would use on another man without a moment's hesitation, emptying all six chambers. About this Kingsley had no doubt whatsoever. There was only a question of whether he would spare Emily's life.

She pushed his head away and reached for her drink on the nightstand. “The kids will wake up soon.”

When their affair first began, Kingsley liked the fact that she had a seditious side to her nature, and he tried to guess which revelation would outrage Charlie more—that his wife was screwing the neighbor or that she was in danger of becoming a pill popper and alcoholic—but he worried that her reckless drinking had become a potential hazard not to her long-term health but to his. It was only a matter of time before she put him in serious jeopardy. Despite the risks, he found himself saying, “It's your thirtieth birthday. A milestone. I made reservations for eight o'clock at Belleforest.”

“
That
place again?”

“But I thought you liked French food.”

“It's always short staffed. One waitress on duty. Plus it's a dump.”

Kingsley, who had a habit of being unintentionally funny, shook his head. “No, it isn't. In fact, I'd say it's rather a classy place.”

Housed in one of the small converted warehouses on the square, Belleforest inserted a bit of tasteless humor into the drab, uneventful lives of the people who inhabited the town. The new restaurateur believed the old structure had enormous potential to become a charming spot where friends could gather after work to enjoy a glass of Beaujolais. Unfortunately, he refused to make the necessary investments to turn this particular dream into a reality. Not that it mattered. Normandy Falls wasn't a Beaujolais kind of town, and most of its unemployed citizens preferred moonshine and demolition derbies to imported wines and fancy fish stews. For Kingsley the bistro served as an ideal location for an illicit rendezvous. His colleagues avoided those blighted ten square blocks of town with the kind of paranoia that seemed more typical of xenophobic suburbanites than rigidly ideological intellectuals who never grew tired of extolling their belief in the concept of urban renewal.

“I can't go tonight,” said Emily. “Who will watch the girls?”

“Marianne, of course. I'll tell her you'd like to celebrate in style with a few of your friends. She enjoys having the girls over.”

“How considerate of her. And how about you, Martin? What's your excuse for leaving the house?”

“The usual—I have to conduct research at the college library.”

“Ah, yes, your magnum opus.” Her voice had a well-honed edge of contempt. “In order to concentrate on revisions, you need complete silence.” She left the bed and walked across the room.