The Captive Condition (5 page)

At eight o'clock she put Christopher to bed and asked the girls to play quietly in the guest room. Then she went downstairs to work on her speech for the retrospective and must have nodded off on the sofa because when she opened her eyes the girls were standing beside her, gently swaying and smiling sweetly. “Mommy is in the pool,” they told her with strange indifference. Marianne didn't know what to make of these words. Somewhat dazed, still groggy with sleep, she put her notepad aside and went to the kitchen window. In the twilight she saw the vacillating and indistinct outline of a dark figure floating in the water.

“There wasn't anything I could do, Martin. I made the girls stay put and then ran next door. But she'd been in the pool for too long. I thought the paramedics would be able to revive her, but they wouldn't let me near the ambulance while they worked on her. Even when I tried to explain the situation to them, even when I told them that I was watching the girls because their mother was supposed to be out for the night.” By this point in her story, Marianne was crushing his hands, twisting his fingers. “The police found a mason jar of alcohol and a vial of pills near one of the Adirondack chairs. But when I asked what it all meant, they just stared at the tips of their shoes and scratched their heads like idiots. Then one of them said to me, ‘We need to speak to the next of kin.' ”

From where he stood in the kitchen, Kingsley could see a glassy shimmer of moonlight on the surface of the pool. The water seemed to heave weirdly back and forth like mercury. He wanted suddenly to take his wife by the shoulders, to shake her violently, to shout, “What the hell are you talking about! Start making sense!” But the wine bubbled in the cauldron of his stomach, and he found he was incapable of saying anything at all. The room started to spin. He closed his eyes, began to pant. He contrived to make his way to the bathroom before the worst could happen, but Marianne wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her face against his chest.

She sniffed, and with tears streaming down her cheeks she jerked away from him and said, “My God, Martin, have you been
drinking
?”

When the delirium of love dies and the asphyxiating cloud of romantic ruin finally dissipates, the bruised and battered survivors will often find lurking among the rubble and ashes of the human heart an insidious beast who yearns to wreak more havoc. Since he could think of no one else to blame for his wretched fate, Kingsley would later convince himself that I was the beast, and to a certain extent I suppose he was right, but my involvement in the events of that tragic night could be traced back to the demise of my own long-term relationship. The breakup wasn't something I took lightly. I'd given the matter serious thought and concluded I had little choice. My reasoning was sound, my philosophy admirable: no sane man, if he wishes to remain sane for long, can live with a woman foolish enough to pin all of her hopes for the future on him.

Morgan Fey, who came from desperately poor circumstances and who suffered big dreams, believed I would not only finish my master's degree in comparative literature but also go on to earn a PhD and then, with her encouragement and wise counsel, become a tenured professor at a prestigious university, a noted essayist, a prizewinning novelist, a public intellectual, a sophisticated and debonair cosmopolite strolling in tweeds and bow tie through the bustling streets of some famous and glittering big city, and she would make sure my inquisitive admirers knew that, as my sole muse and confidante, she deserved half the credit for my extraordinary achievements.

I had ambitions to be a writer and had already seen a few of my shamelessly autobiographical stories of teen angst published in middling literary journals associated with third-rate university writing programs, though one journal was based in Spokane and edited by Charles Pierce Flitcraft, a reclusive curmudgeon who'd garnered moderate fame for his hard-boiled detective stories that, as they progressed, became devious little exercises in metafiction and intertextuality. This wasn't a total defeat. Intellectual anonymity was, for a budding writer, an important and nurturing thing, and from out of the black marshes and muddy bottoms of small-town experience, I was determined to wrest a book, an enigmatic, ruthlessly apocalyptic, elegantly filthy dirigible of a novel that, in order to make its points all the more salient and startling, was unafraid to suffer under the weight of its own showiness and pretense, and for a little while I believed I might actually succeed.

After earning our undergraduate degrees from Normandy College, Morgan and I rented an apartment in a row house of soot-covered brick and calcified limestone that teetered at the river's edge. A single bay window offered an unobstructed view of the flotsam that accumulated and swirled in the powerful eddies—plastic bags, cardboard boxes, wooden crates—before it continued downstream and plummeted over the falls into the valley. In front of our building, atop a muddy knoll, there was a sandlot where serious children played their serious games. Every night someone draped a flannel shirt on the rusty bars of the jungle gym, and as it flapped in the wind, the shirt looked like the cruciform figure of a headless man, arms reaching out in a lunatic embrace, another body ripe for the river, unloved and casually discarded.

With its beige carpets and dirty plaster walls covered in a machine-gun fire of nail holes, the one-bedroom apartment was a dun-colored shell that seemed intentionally designed to expunge from the minds of its broke and directionless tenants any traces of hope or dreams for the future, but Morgan worked diligently at transforming the place into a personal refuge, a sanctuary for the quiet contemplation of complex ideas. She spent nights and weekends patching and painting the cracked walls, choosing the best spots to display her small “art collection,” framed reprints of masterpieces by Cézanne, Pissarro, Rousseau, Gauguin, Degas, Cassatt, Doré. Though she endeavored to turn the place into a cozy gallery, she succeeded only in making it look like a consignment shop or the waiting room of a dentist's office, minus the algae-filled aquarium.

For the most part the other tenants—overworked and sleep-deprived machinists, gas station attendants, fast-food workers—seemed friendly enough, and whenever they passed us on the street with their brood of wailing toddlers strapped into unwieldy, puke-splattered, secondhand strollers, they stopped to ask, “So when are you two lovebirds gonna bite the bullet, tie the knot, have a couple of kids?” They smiled, but I never failed to notice how they looked imploringly at me as if begging for rescue from some forced-labor camp and warning me away from the nascent hell of domesticity.

In Normandy Falls people too often resigned themselves to a predictable pattern of unintended pregnancy, reluctant cohabitation, long stretches of unemployment, substance abuse, battery, incarceration. Some days parents sent their children to school, other days they did not. Men and women partied all night and slept all day. It made little difference to them financially and professionally, and it certainly cost them nothing socially because in Normandy Falls there were no routines, and the only real constant was the mayhem that lurked at the periphery of this forlorn place.

Morgan and I had no immediate plans for marriage, and we agreed not to have kids for a long,
long
time. Things continued just as before until one day, after sitting through a three-hour graduate seminar, I returned to the apartment to discover—whether by accident or design, I was never entirely sure—that she had stopped taking the pill. At the bottom of the bathroom trash can, clumsily concealed under a sheet of tissue paper, I found her unopened prescription. More mystified than alarmed, I fished the container out of the trash and confronted her.

She had just finished her afternoon shift at the bistro, and as always the work had taken its terrible toll. By then I worried that my notion of Morgan as the unrefined but industrious native had been incorrect all along. Unable to afford the cost of graduate school and unwilling to sign for another student loan, she decided to wait tables at Belleforest, earning just enough money to make her half of the rent. I rarely went into town anymore, but on occasion I would eat lunch at the bistro, the only time of day I could afford anything on the menu. Sitting alone in a corner booth, enjoying a
quiche poireaux
and glass of tap water, I removed my moleskin notebook and fountain pen from my leather satchel, and then in front of everyone, including my mortified
serveuse,
I began to tinker with my novel, a bloated behemoth of self-indulgent excess, while the other patrons paused from their impassioned debates about the incompetence of government to shake their heads and quietly condemn me for pursuing such foolish dreams.

Now, after adjusting Van Gogh's bright yellow and summer-swollen sunflowers, Morgan kicked off her shoes and slumped onto the futon. Her clothes smelled of grease fires and her hair was so tangled and oily it may have been combustible—one spark from a lighter and the whole block would have detonated like a bomb, turning the neighborhood into a raging inferno of poverty and madness. In a gruff voice she castigated herself, her coarseness on full display. “What the
fuck
was I thinking? Why the hell did I major in art history? Why did I focus on heists, stolen paintings, Modigliani's
Woman with a Fan
?”

I shrugged, wondering the same thing myself. Some women were meant for the wide world, but Normandy Falls seemed to suit Morgan Fey just fine. At twenty-two she already looked too washed away to be playing the part of a chain-smoking, alienated, bohemian waitress at a bistro that billed itself as “the finest upscale dining for a hundred miles around.” Not that my field of study offered a clear path to success. In the eyes of the world, a degree in comparative literature was equally worthless, and we both seemed to be in real danger of sliding toward premature middle age and a kind of permanent plainness.

Even though I no longer possessed the patience for drawn-out negotiations, I realized that in a delicate situation like this one I needed to be diplomatic, take my time, pay Morgan a compliment or two, it was a matter of common courtesy, but I'd grown so accustomed to the simple lines of communication offered by a serious relationship—a few key phrases churlishly spoken, a couple of impatient grunts, exasperated sighs—that I no longer knew the appropriate things to say or do. Also, a small part of me actually looked forward to ending the relationship. I'd been on the receiving end of breakups plenty of times and had always wondered how it might feel to see that stunned and puzzled expression on another's face. But when the big moment arrived, I was unable to look her directly in the eye.

Trying hard not to sound wheedling or appeasing, I asked her to vacate the premises. “The lease is in my name, after all, not yours.” With a mixture of curiosity and dread, I waited for her to thrust a knife, or at the very least a hatpin, deep into my small, dark heart. I expected a stormy exchange of words, and when she didn't respond I said, “Listen, Morgan, a fresh start might be a good thing for us both. You're miserable and I'm clearly incapable of making you happy. And I certainly don't think a child is the answer to your problems.”

Morgan laughed scornfully. If I could tear her down with a few choice words she could certainly do the same to me, and I shrank from the awful spectrum of her excessively sharp and narrow teeth.

“Are you suggesting this breakup is mutual? Because there is no such thing, Edmund.” She gave me a withering look and then, sinking into a serene lethargy, walked slowly toward the window, where she gestured to the river slithering darkly through the forsaken town of her birth. “I've often wondered,” she said in a quiet, measured way, “what kind of person voluntarily comes to a hellmouth like Normandy Falls. Now I know the answer. Welcome home, Edmund.”

For the first time in many months, I experienced the alien sensation of freedom. It made me feel oddly weightless, invisible, insignificant, and soon I developed a number of curious new habits. Before rising from the futon every morning and facing the day, I spread my arms in the wide and solitary waste of an empty bed and then sparked a big bowl of the really fine sinsemilla I purchased once a week from Xavier D'Avignon, the gnomic
chef de cuisine
who sold his homegrown bud in the alley behind the bistro (“Marijuana and sunshine go together like milk and cookies, don't they, son?”). I wanted badly to see my new life as an adventure, and in the afternoons I often paged through
The Odyssey,
the one book on which I relied to navigate life's unexpected twists and turns, committing to memory Homer's unrivaled descriptions of human striving and caprice. In time, I assured myself, I would meet a bewitching Circe, an insatiable Calypso. In the evenings my mood darkened sharply, and with the blinds pulled down and the volume on the TV turned way up, I watched black-and-white films directed by famously acidulous auteurs of the French New Wave until I nodded off to the ironic laughter of self-important Parisians.

Although I no longer suffered so acutely from the Catholic guilt that, as a child, I'd been encouraged to cultivate and keep close to my craven soul, I found that my Sunday-morning ritual, which used to consist of a quick lay followed by a bland breakfast of milk and cereal, now included a visit to that strange church near the square, refuge of heresiarchs and proselytizing cranks. I wasn't religious in any conventional sense of the word, but from the back pew I sang hymns with great enthusiasm as if beseeching heaven for a miracle, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine not into the Body and Blood but into a potent aphrodisiac that would resurrect my sex life, and this made me wonder if the church had a patron saint of concupiscence, of orgasms, of libidinous games and freaky fetishes.

At night I fantasized about inviting a bevy of pretty coeds back to my bachelor pad. I'd be like a wild animal released from its enclosure at the zoo, a tiger, a panther, a mountain lion, but then I felt idiotic for having thought of myself as a noble hunter instead of a more suitable creature like a ferret or a frog or a lice-infested vulture. The absence of physical love, I believed, was to blame for this terrible funk, and after a few months without the familiar cushion of Morgan's warm rump and the comfort of her firm tits, I worried that my own plans for a happy future might never come to fruition.

I fought the urge to call her and beg forgiveness, but one sleepless night, while staring into the whistling void of my threadbare apartment and listening to the dripping faucets, I suffered a sudden panic attack. I looked at the pages of my neglected thesis scattered on the coffee table and raced to the bathroom. In the mirror I saw an unshaven beast, stooped and haggard, with tartar-caked teeth and unspeakable impulses incubating in the back of its reptilian brain. Only then did it occur to me that sex was not the problem. The real reason so many people remained in unhealthy relationships was because they were incapable of caring for themselves, and as I shivered in the dark, appalled by the distorted, fun-house reflection staring back at me, I now understood that I belonged to their shameful number.

By the spring my grades began to suffer, and after weeks of procrastination and unproductive research on my thesis about the more sordid stories of the syphilitic genius Guy de Maupassant, I was placed on academic probation and summoned to my adviser's office. He answered my knock and showed me into the room. Small-featured, meticulously groomed, dressed in a herringbone blazer and a cornflower-blue button-down shirt, Professor Kingsley could have passed for a petite male model. With the certitude of academic privilege and the condescending air of a louche languid soul luxuriating in the warmth of his own intelligence, he leaned far back in his chair, held his hands up to the light, and frowned at his manicured fingernails. At least he didn't put his feet up on the desk—a small show of deference for which I was grateful—but he did tell me, rather glibly, I thought, that the provost had revoked my teaching assistantship for the following semester.