The Captive Condition (4 page)

He ignored the remark—she could turn quite suddenly into an angry drunk—and marveled at the silhouette of her body against the white blinds. “So? Is it a date?”

Emily took a contemplative sip of her cocktail and hesitated before speaking. “I read in the paper that the college is screening a David Lean movie. Sounds interesting. It takes place in Ireland during the First World War.” Before he could invent a clever excuse she added quickly, “I wouldn't mind a little culture for a change, you know.”

“Well, I'm not sure…”

“What, aren't those professors worldly and sophisticated? Not easily scandalized by the presence of a colleague's
mistress
?”

She meant for the word to sting, and he found himself pulling the sheet up to his chin. If word got around the department about this affair, it would mean instantaneous and unequivocal ruin for him. It was the main reason he enjoyed heaping maledictions and obscenities upon those chattering academics whose tongues were like knives.

“I don't enjoy socializing with that crowd,” he said. “They're a pretty stuffy bunch. Conventional.”

“You mean they're normal.”

“They're hardly that.”

“They have the decency to be shocked. Appalled.” From an old dresser lacking three of its glass knobs, she produced a long tangle of turquoise-colored cloth and held it up to her torso. “Don't worry, Martin. I wouldn't even know what to wear around those people. Look at this thing.”

“A stunning dress,” said Kingsley.

“It's called a sari. Gujarati style. Saris are
comme il faut
this season, that's what all the fashion magazines say.”

Kingsley nodded. “Yes, now I see what you mean. I'm sure a few of my colleagues would take umbrage at such an overbearingly vulgar imperialist gesture. Or do I mean postcolonialist? It's hard to keep up with all the changing lingo.”

“Charlie bought it during our trip four years ago to Delacroix Cay, a disgusting spit of sand in the middle of the Caribbean. Lots of dead fish floating in the water. At least there were palm trees and stiff drinks, I'll give him credit for that.” She shook the sari in her fist. “I guess this was his idea of a souvenir. He insists I wear it whenever he comes home. But it doesn't exactly fit the way it used to. Besides, it's a color for a much younger woman. A happier one.”

Kingsley pretended to admire the sari's complicated sequin work, but his eyes drifted to the nightstand, where he saw buried under an untidy pile of pink stationery his paperback copy of
Madame Bovary,
the spine cracked, the pages turning faintly yellow. He'd lent her the book a few months ago when she expressed an interest in learning more about his work, but he doubted she would ever get around to reading it, and he was more concerned that she would forget to return it to him before the semester started.

“You're lovely in whatever you wear,” he told her, though what he really wanted to say was that she looked sexy, shamelessly so. After all, it wasn't her erudition that interested him—she admitted to enjoying historical romances about handsome pirates who rescued and fell madly in love with headstrong damsels in distress—but given her sullen mood he thought better of it. “Listen, you deserve an evening of wine and candlelight. It's not like we're doing anything criminal.”

She tossed the dress on the bed. “Don't you feel like a lowlife, Martin? Don't you sometimes want to kill yourself? Maybe we should do it together. End it all. Like Romeo and Juliet.”

“We're a little old for that sort of thing, aren't we? Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. And Juliet stabbed herself with Romeo's dagger. Very messy stuff and painful.”

“Didn't they take poison? We could take poison.”

“A romantic gesture.” Kingsley nervously eyed her jar of Red Death and wondered if there was a way he could hide it without her noticing.

“Actually, I thought it sounded logical. Greek. Like Plato. He drank poison, right?”

“Someone like that. You don't have any hemlock in your medicine cabinet, do you?”

“Hemlock? Does it grow in the valley?”

“No, it's not a native species.”

Emily yanked up the blinds and squinted at the trembling light on the pool, but before she could finish her thought or accuse him of moral cowardice, she raised a finger to her lips and cocked her head. In the hallway, on the other side of the bedroom door, there came sibilant whispers and the pitter-patter of bare feet as two giggling conspirators raced downstairs. Like sneaks the world over, the twins knew which steps creaked and made sure to avoid them.

Kingsley scrambled out of bed and in a clumsy dance pulled on his polka-dot boxers. He remembered the gun and hoped Emily had sense enough to keep it locked up where the girls couldn't get at it, and for the first time since the start of their affair, he had no regrets that their afternoon together had come to a premature end.

When he first met Emily, Kingsley experienced a
coup de foudre,
as the French say, but now that summer was coming to an end and things were beginning to cool between them, he concluded that their affair was, at least in some sense, a kind of marriage in miniature. If an orgasm is
la petite mort,
then an affair must be
la petite emprisonnement,
because any intimate relationship, whether lawful or not, goes through three distinct stages: the first stage is a lot of fun, too much fun perhaps, like receiving an invitation to a secret party that rages long into the night where everyone is insanely, irresponsibly, obscenely drunk on a spellbinding potion ladled from a ritual basin; the second stage is the obligatory, crushing, shameful hangover, a day of glaring white light that reveals things obscured by the haziness of sweet intoxication, a day of cold sweats, unabated nausea, and bitter sobriety, a day to contemplate with disbelief and horror all of the embarrassing—and possibly unhygienic—things you did the night before and to pledge never again to commit the same terrible mistakes; during the third and final stage you stop deluding yourself and accept the fact that you are unlikely to be invited to another rollicking soirée, and that instead of going it alone it is much wiser to remain faithful to one person, bad breath and all, and try to make the best of it.

Kingsley now suspected that he'd slipped imperceptibly from the first stage into the second; it was as though he had gone through an invisible portal but hadn't realized it until long after the fact and understood much too late that, once crossed, it was virtually impossible to retrace his steps and pass back through to the other side. But by then he believed he had an unspoken agreement with Emily: they weren't committed to each other; they were committed to lying.

All of this became much clearer to him as he waited for her at Belleforest. Although the bistro's exterior was in many ways indistinguishable from an ordinary greasy spoon a traveler might encounter along a lonely stretch of two-lane highway, the interior had a startling carnival-like quality, the colors and music loud as a midway. With its kitschy reprints by Toulouse-Lautrec hanging on every wall and Edith Piaf gargling every
r
of
“Non, je ne regrette rien”
from the tinny speakers, the restaurant would have made for an amusing dining experience in some demented theme park. Certainly the centerpieces, original sculptures created by Colette Collins, contributed to the overall oddness of the atmosphere. Small, misshapen, vaguely amphibious creatures that stood upright on webbed feet, the sculptures threatened to step off their bases and onto the tables to squat with satisfaction over steaming crocks of
tartiflette.
Despite the remarkably bad stagecraft and its reputation for stale baguettes and overcooked hunks of unidentifiable meat drowning in rich sauces, the bistro was bustling with couples, mainly townies who'd scraped together enough cash for a night out, but the longer Kingsley waited near the entrance the more anxious he became that someone might recognize and expose him. After fifteen minutes he stepped outside to the patio, a simple cement slab with cheap wrought-iron tables, folding chairs, and a makeshift bar where he ordered a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

At half past eight, after pouring himself a generous glass, Kingsley concealed his face behind a menu and adjusted his chair to avoid making eye contact with a young man who stumbled from the cabaret next door and wandered down the dark alley. In the shadows the drunk could have been an anonymous derelict, a dangerous drifter, a man with a past, or a man with no past at all, but had Kingsley looked more closely, with a Flaubertian flair for conscientiously chronicling the quotidian, he would have recognized him right away and noted how his eye patch made him look less like a brutish buccaneer and more like a James Joyce impersonator, effete, bohemian, doomed to a lifetime of deteriorating health and a dependency on illicit substances.

There were whispers that the chef, aside from being an oversized gourmand, peddled hallucinogens behind the bistro. Evidently, for a small percentage of the profits, the mortician soaked the chef's product du jour—tobacco, marijuana, hashish, a sack of carrots imported from some North African bazaar—in a fifty-gallon drum of formaldehyde that he kept in the basement of the funeral parlor near the boiler room. By adding a dash of PCP to the mix, the chef could then market his wares as mystical substances that transported their habitual users to higher levels of consciousness. Judging from the quality of the fare and the generally bad service, Kingsley believed it would have been difficult for the chef to achieve a living without an additional source of revenue.

Another thirty minutes went by, and he poured a second glass from the bottle, but in the summer heat the wine tasted thick and bitter like medicine. A proper drink was what he really needed, a martini, a bourbon on the rocks, even one of Emily's potent Red Deaths. Alternately checking his watch and gazing profoundly into his wineglass, he'd become the quintessential spurned lover—every restaurant needs one—and his wounded pride shone plainly on his face. Though he didn't know it at the time, his affair with Emily had ended without a single word of warning. He should have trusted her judgment. Women were so much better than men at detecting moral depravity and could more easily throw off the chains of erotic enslavement. Well, what was wild, romantic love without a great renunciation?

At nine o'clock a waitress slunk over to the bar to tell him that his reservation had been invalidated. He grunted and waved her away, and for the next hour, still hoping Emily might show up, he nursed the bottle until it was empty. Finally, he tossed a few bills on the bar and stormed from the bistro, startled by how his emotions had gone from uncontrollable lust to absolute loathing.

Driving recklessly home in the dark, Kingsley forced himself to concentrate on the center line to keep from weaving, and in the rearview mirror he watched for patrol cars. A silver mist rolled with sinister intent from the valley and obscured the bridge, and as he approached his house, he felt an eerie calm descend on the neighborhood. Shafts of ghostly moonlight cut through the blue mottled clouds and illuminated a row of red maples, their heads brutally chopped to make a passage for electric lines. On the back stoop he struggled with the lock, and after angrily shoving open the door, he found Marianne wrapped in a terrycloth robe. She sat at the kitchen table, clutching a box of tissues to her chest, her hair wet, her lips shrunken and trembling, her face inflamed and swollen with sobbing. Even before closing the door, he caught a powerful whiff of chlorine.

He laughed uneasily. “An odd time for a swim, isn't it?”

With caution he entered the house. When it came to picking up on his wife's subtle hints and clues, Kingsley considered himself an expert without rival, but now he worried that, like so many negligent husbands, he was utterly incapable of seeing the most obvious of facts, and it took him a moment to deduce what had happened: Emily, delirious after a long day of hard drinking and reprimanding her untamable brats, had nixed dinner plans in favor of inviting her lover's wife over for a refreshing dip in the pool, and after guzzling a few more jars of moonshine, she'd made a stupid slip of the tongue, hiccupped her confession, slurred a rambling and tearful speech.

From the manic look in Marianne's eyes, Kingsley understood that he would need to pack his things and move out that night. He'd been foolish not to plan for such a contingency, and now he imagined himself living out of a battered suitcase for the next few weeks and sleeping on the couch in his office at the college until he found a studio apartment in town. He recalled seeing a sign in one of those frightening row houses at the river's edge:
ROOMS FOR RENT.
Eventually, he would need to solicit the services of a slick attorney who worked for reasonable fees and then wait for the disgraceful day when he had to appear before a judge. Worst of all he pictured the confused and desperate expression on Christopher's face when Daddy had to explain the concepts of separation and divorce.

“I phoned the library,” said Marianne, “but they weren't able to find you.”

“Okay, listen to me…”

His wife choked. “It's so senseless.”

“Here, let me get you some water.”

But Marianne's hands shook so badly that she couldn't hold the glass without spilling it.

“I think you're in shock,” he said. “Try to stay calm. We'll get through this thing.”

Marianne regarded him with astonishment. “Who cares if
we'll
get through it? What about the twins? What are
they
going to do? Those girls, they're just babies. They need their mother. And what about Charlie? He'll be lost without her.”

Although it dawned on him that he was missing a crucial piece of information, Kingsley didn't possess the imagination to fathom anything more terrible than an act of infidelity to upset his wife in such a dramatic way. He sat beside her and with escalating horror listened as she told him in the iciest of whispers the terrible facts.