The Captive Condition (12 page)

Martin Kingsley looked at the menu taped to one of the bistro's windows. He seemed undecided, unsure of what to do next, and as I lingered on the square I wondered what it might be like to have dinner with a woman like Emily Ryan, to reach across the table and hold her hand and watch as she became charmingly drunk on a bottle of wine, knowing as we enjoyed each sumptuous course that she would come home with me for a night of love, that she was mine whenever I wanted her, a scenario for which the poets had invented many names: bliss, heaven, nirvana. Unlike Kinglsey, who enjoyed a steady and reliable income and knew a big fat pension waited for him at the end of the rainbow, I was on a tight budget, and I understood how comical it would be to finish a candlelit dinner and then expect someone as ravishing as Emily to walk back to the row house on the edge of the river. Few women in this world were willing to have a romantic tryst with an impoverished graduate student, and the first rule for a night on the town was to have a clean and cheerful apartment with a proper bed instead of a sagging futon.

Like a spurned lover burning with sexual jealousy, I envied Kingsley's status, his money, his petty power, his inexplicable ability to woo a married woman, and I wished for one small taste of his former happiness. It didn't seem fair to me. I was a writer of
belles lettres,
as was Emily, and like her I had suffered at the hands of that narcissistic egghead. But what frustrated me most of all was that I was living the appallingly familiar cliché of unrequited love. Alive or dead, Emily Ryan was permanently unattainable, and the best I could ever do was settle for a kind of platonic necrophilia.

Before these thoughts could drive me completely mad, I looked on as Kingsley, to my disbelief, ducked into the alley beside the bistro and made a hasty purchase from Xavier. He glanced over his shoulder, as if he sensed someone watching him, and for the first time I saw real terror in his eyes. Quickly, I pressed my back against the gazebo and made small adjustments to my eye patch, pretending to read the faded and peeling posters of missing teens and toddlers slapped on nearly every lamppost. Bound to become famous for its runaways, abductions, and unsolved cases, Normandy Falls was said to have adopted Moloch as its patron saint, chewer of children's corpses.

Confined within the prison of his own warped logic, trying to act as normal as possible, nothing out of the ordinary here, no blood on his hands, Kingsley gave Xavier some cash and then slid a small bottle of
jazar
into his coat pocket. After leaving the alley, he strolled through town, aimlessly it seemed, pretending to admire the tumbledown walls of long-abandoned warehouses and factories until he crossed the bridge and headed toward the college campus. With obscene confidence, foolishly believing he was beyond suspicion, he walked along the quadrangle, passing the neo-Georgian redbrick buildings, and then entered the small art gallery, where he contemplated the spectacular number of nudes on display, immense canvases depicting libertine gods, wood nymphs, lecherous satyrs frolicking in enchanted dales and beside green tidal pools. For a full thirty minutes he meditated deeply on the images in the gallery, studying lush landscapes and pretty women reading books in flower gardens. The artwork seemed to have a calming effect on him, somehow indicating, like tea leaves to a superstitious crackpot, that what he had done was perfectly aligned with the natural order.

Having achieved the requisite sense of serenity, he exited the gallery and walked across Anderson Boulevard to the neighborhood of Victorian houses. With one hand thrust deep in his coat pocket, his fingers no doubt fondling the contraband stowed safely there, he went up the walkway to his house and stood on the porch, where he stared at the ground like a squirrel hunting for acorns before the big winter freeze, trying to horde nuggets of ingenious thought. He had about him a sense of fatigue, resignation, a reluctant acceptance of Emily's wretched fate.

With bated breath I scurried behind the trunk of a pin oak and picked absently at the bark. Never a fan of detective novels, I made for a clumsy and incompetent gumshoe. Like any well-established culture, the pursuit of a killer was a fine art, one that took years to master, and my biggest mistake, other than getting high, was to wear the eye patch. A good investigator must appear nondescript and draw as little attention to himself as possible, but I wanted my eye to heal properly and was now worried that it was seriously infected. I also believed the patch made for a clever disguise, instantaneously transforming me from an aimless college dropout into a talented sleuth.

It would be a simple matter for me to call the police and present them with the evidence, but I wanted to let this game play out just a little while longer. Murderers may have been justifiably famous for their fancy prose style, but extortionists were equally renowned for their gift of recitation. I could quote Emily's note from memory and was prepared to do so in the unlikely event that Kingsley saw me snooping and decided to confront me.

In the treetops blackbirds whistled and sang, but when a passing pickup backfired they fluttered away in a dark cloud of cowardice. Clearly irritated by the noise, the murderer stepped inside and wandered distractedly through the spacious rooms of his house.

The professor wasn't a flight risk, I decided, and he certainly wasn't a homicidal maniac, at least not in the usual sense of that term. The logistics alone made it impossible. A swimming pool wasn't a very private place for a murder, and the sounds of a woman thrashing in the water and trying to fight off her assailant would have attracted far too much attention. The real mystery of this story wasn't how Emily died but how a cream puff like Kingsley had managed to seduce her. In fact, the man seemed competent at only one thing: critiquing the hastily written essays of his idle students. Still, I continued to wonder: Was his the last face Emily saw before she died? And as she resigned herself to her fate, did she decide that the only way she could retaliate was to haunt this self-obsessed man for the rest of his life?

On Monday morning, the first day of the fall semester and the deadline for my thesis on Flaubert, I punched in at the Bloated Tick, fully prepared to withstand a barrage of insults from those pernicious bullies from the bottom bins. Over the course of the summer some of the ticks had put on so much weight that they'd metamorphosed into a nest of mindless, roaming esophagi, searching with rheumy eyes for boxes of jelly doughnuts and generous slices of meat pie. Others, from a steady diet of pills and liquor, had shed so many pounds that they resembled scarecrows, their ill-fitting clothes hanging from their emaciated frames.

When they saw me enter the building the men cheered, they applauded, they marched around the lunchroom table and chanted, “The Cyclops! The Cyclops! Love the eye patch! It suits you! Bestowed upon you by the gods as punishment for your crimes. Yes, punishment from the gods for your crimes!”

“What crimes?” I said, maybe more defensively than I'd intended.

“The Gonk already gave us the scoop, told us how he took you up to the titty bar on Friday night. Now, why in the hell would you throw away your hard-earned cash in a sinful place like the cabaret? That's not what we had in mind when we told you to find a woman. Plenty of fish in the sea, you know?”

Yes, I knew, and I was tempted to tell them that I
had
found a woman, the
right
woman, and that she was a heaven-sent muse, an unpretentious poet, a small-town sage, a mystic whose words transcended time and space, but of course I could never adequately explain to that obstreperous crew of unwashed scamps that she was also, to use their own words, “the professor's wench.” If any consolation was to be found, it was in Emily's carefully composed note, which I carried in my shirt pocket like pages torn from a hymnal, and for the rest of the day, as I stroked the folded sheets and endured the predictably childish taunts of the men, I wondered why matters pertaining to love and lust had to be so strangely conspiratorial and why old-fashioned letters, written with black ink on pink stationery, became repositories for unutterable thoughts, the nuclear waste of the human heart.

Ordinarily, at five o'clock, shortly after the jackhammer of practical concerns finished chipping away at my brain, reducing my mind to rubble, my thoughts to an impenetrable cloud of neural dust, I hurried from the Bloated Tick and returned to my apartment, but now things had changed. First I stopped at the corner store to purchase a newspaper, a shameful extravagance, and consulted the obituaries to find visiting hours. I'd never made a practice of seeking sorrow, but now, with a renewed sense of purpose, I showered and shaved and doused myself in cheap cologne. Donning an ill-fitting, cream-colored, department-store suit, the only one I owned, and a paisley tie that was so wide and loud it looked like I'd stolen it from an old steam trunk in a circus clown's dressing room, I walked to the funeral home five blocks from the bistro. At the last minute, before entering the lobby, I debated whether I should wear the eye patch or take it off and use it as a pocket square. In the past twenty-four hours my eye had become red with infection, the eyelid pink and swollen, and since I didn't want to cause the mourners any undo alarm, I decided to wear it. Besides, it seemed like the kind of thing a merchant marine might appreciate.

Inside, I was greeted not by some obsequiously smiling funeral director but by the cloying perfume of flowers, hundreds of white lilies that had been strategically arranged around the air vents in order to disguise the faint whiff of formaldehyde drifting up from the basement. The otherwise clean and cornered rooms seemed to amplify the muffled sobs of the mourners as they filed by the open casket, and while I waited to view the body and offer my improbable condolences to Emily's husband and their mischievous twin daughters, I contemplated the macabre pageant of grief and the gruesome ritual of interment. I also kept a keen eye out for Professor Kingsley.

Emily's husband stood at the other end of the casket, his neck and cheeks clawed from hasty shaving, his eyes bloodshot and bleary from what appeared to be a crippling hangover. Thickly muscled, rawboned, square jawed, casually racist, unmistakably American, Charlie Ryan might have been in an earlier epoch a pioneer, or a notorious outlaw who by the dusty light of a prairie moon went on cattle raids, or the first mate of a Nantucket whaling ship, an old salt inclined to signs and portents, his face as weathered as the tattered sails flapping from the foremast after an epic ocean crossing. In his present incarnation he played an abrasive merchant marine who seemed impervious to both pain and pleasure. He stared into the middle distance and remained strangely impassive, but it has always been my understanding that a distraught widower, when faced with an unexpected loss, becomes so emotionally exhausted that he is unable to shed even one more tear, and perhaps this was the case with Charlie Ryan.

His little girls, rather than standing in an attitude of respectful attention, grudgingly accepted the tearful embraces of aunts and uncles and then laughed like a pair of bleating goats.

Now, fighting hard to keep my paranoia in check (I had taken a few quick tokes from the old bong before leaving the row house), I inched ever closer to the casket, and though I promised myself I wouldn't do it, I let my burning eye drift toward the bloodless figure supine in the cheap wooden box, the folded hands stiff and artificial as those of a porcelain doll's, the waxen face painted with a half-dozen coats of makeup. A small, strangling sound escaped my lips. Experience had taught me that a woman's presence always brightened the dreariest of rooms, but not this time, not now. Emily looked carved, molded, a gruesome marionette cut free of its strings, a poorly built dummy lampooning a posture of repose. Could this really have been the same woman who walked along the campus quad with Martin Kingsley?

I kneeled and bowed my head, and as I mumbled a prayer just like the one uttered by the mourners before me, I worried that Emily could perceive my voice and that, with some effort, she could force open her eyes and give me an imploring look.
“Please, help me…”
It wasn't totally impossible. I read somewhere that neuroscientists had new research indicating that the synapses in the neocortex continued firing for twenty-four hours or more after the heart stopped beating and the other vital organs had started the process of decomposition. The idea made me shudder. Bad enough to be imprisoned in a perfectly healthy body, but to be trapped in a dead and inert one, a hardening shell of embalmed membranes, well, that seemed the most nightmarish fate of all. Although ensnared forevermore in that inert flesh, Emily, through her words, had transcended death, and I wondered if, at least in some strange scientific sense, she was
aware
of what was happening to her, outraged by the indignation and powerlessness of death. If I leaned in close, pressed my ear to her lips, would I hear her teeth clicking together like tiny castanets, all of her darkest secrets revealed in a kind of Morse code?

“Emily, can you hear me?” I prayed. “Emily, are you
in there
?”

I was so distracted by these thoughts that I didn't immediately notice how Professor Kingsley and his wife, electing to bypass this little ceremony at the casket, had jumped ahead of me in line. Rather than object I kept my head bowed and listened carefully to what they had to say.

“If there is anything we can do for you and the girls,” Mrs. Kingsley sniffled, “anything at all, Charlie, please let us know. Emily was such a lovely woman, so warm and friendly. It just isn't fair.”

“I was quite fond of your wife,” Kingsley chimed in. “Yes, very fond of her. A wonderful woman, long-forbearing and abundant in faithfulness. I would have done anything for her, provided her with any kind of help she needed.”

I was puzzled by the professor's initial composure. No doubt prior to the wake he had rehearsed a few inane and platitudinous lines. I expected the man to howl, to weep, to fall on his knees, to tear his shirt and pound his chest with clenched fists. A moment like this called for a theatrical display of grief, particularly when an adulterer was in the presence of his dead lover's unsuspecting spouse, but someone as arrogant as Kingsley probably planned to deliver an impromptu eulogy, hoping to console the bereaved with his linguistic effluvium and esoteric tautologies.

“I suppose,” he continued, “the question we're all asking is Why? Why did this happen? The main thing is that we not dwell on it. With a little practice a man can learn to control his thoughts and emotions and in time even his breathing and heart rate. It's a kind of subconscious athleticism. Almost like being a swimmer…”

At the regrettable choice of the word “swimmer,” Kingsley began to stammer, and it was then that I knew he'd been drinking some of Xavier's magic potion prior to the wake.

Fortunately for him Charlie didn't seem to be listening. “I can't thank you enough,” he muttered. “I know how hard it must have been for you to call me.”

“Oh, it was nothing at all,” said Kingsley, though in truth he wanted to eradicate from his memory every detail of that terrible night. “It was my duty to call you. My duty as a good neighbor.”

The scene on Friday evening wasn't a difficult one for me to imagine, and I clasped my hands more tightly and prayed with greater fervor.

While the twins slept soundly in the guest room, Kingsley went to his study and brooded over serious matters. Madeline and Sophie seemed unable to comprehend what had happened that night, the police, the paramedics, the sirens and flashing lights, but he found their innocence wholly unconvincing. The girls were eight, after all, not three, not Christopher's age, and yet Kingsley trusted his son to have enough common sense to seek help the moment he saw anyone, especially his mother, floating in a swimming pool. Maybe Marianne had fabricated the story for reasons of her own. Maybe she knew about the affair and had taken extreme measures, disposing of her husband's hillbilly whore out of sheer jealousy. This theory made even less sense to him, and he decided no one was to blame. It was just an unfortunate accident, that's all. But were there such things as accidents?

For one full hour he sat alone in his well-furnished study, gazing into the future and his own ungraspable destiny. He thumbed through his unruly manuscript on
Madame Bovary
and looked hopelessly at his glass-fronted bookcases crammed with leather-bound volumes. Ever since he was a boy, he'd regarded the great books of Western civilization as oracles. He need only flip to a random page and read a paragraph of cogent prose or a verse of poetry to find wisdom and solace. A stanza by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides offered simple solutions to some of life's most vexing problems and impenetrable mysteries, but Kingsley, much like the Greek tragedians, preferred that all deaths take place offstage. Forced to confront every scholar's worst nightmare—the prospect of actually experiencing firsthand all of the dreadful things he'd spent his entire professional life only reading about—he discovered that the books he so cherished, just when he needed them most, refused to provide him with easy answers, and he worried they might never have anything of value to say to him again.

Out of habit he scanned a collection of stories by Flaubert but knew he was torturing himself by delaying the inevitable. Under a rock in the flowerbed near the pool, Emily kept a spare key. Kingsley entered the house through the back door, half expecting to see a massive oil portrait of Emily hanging on the wall, her unrefined beauty smoldering down at him, a tear dripping from the corner of one eye. Inside, the air seemed stale and contaminated, and he found the kitchen in total disarray, the countertops piled high with dirty dishes. He spotted a recipe written in Emily's hand on an index card pinned to the center of a bulletin board cluttered with unpaid bills.

He almost tossed the recipe to the floor but chanced to see another index card tacked to a corkboard with a phone number and the words “In Case of Emergency.” The
Rogue
might have been eighty miles away or eight hundred; it might have been cruising by the sandbar near the mouth of the Wakefield River or it might have been loading iron ore into its enormous holds at a port along the north coast of Lake Superior.

Before he picked up the phone, Kingsley slumped against the counter, and in a quiet place where his wife wouldn't see him and begin to wonder, he bawled like a child, a wretched, inconsolable wail that didn't stop until he heard, faintly at first and then with increasing persistence and volume, the noises coming from within the walls of that shunned and deserted house. Kingsley wiped away his tears and listened. Bats, dozens of them, hundreds maybe, with their diseased teeth and talons, scratched and clawed their way through the insulation and plaster. Females formed maternity colonies in the summer and fed their blind and pale pups at night before hunting for moths and mayflies. He recoiled from the wall and wondered which news to break first—the infestation of bats or Emily's drowning.

Now, standing face-to-face with Charlie in the funeral parlor, he found he was too petrified to say anything more.

Charlie turned to Mrs. Kingsley, and his voice when he finally spoke was thin and raw, the sound of a man who'd been drinking nonstop for days and chain-smoking for years. “There's just one thing I don't understand,” he said. “On the night she died, Emily was wearing the turquoise sari I bought for her on our sixth anniversary. She wore it whenever I came home after a long journey. Special occasions only. I'm not sure what to think of it.”

“Emily made plans with her friends,” Marianne explained. “Sometimes a woman just wants to look nice. It's not that peculiar.”