The Captive Condition (17 page)

Fighting the urge to scream, he bent over, picked up the card, and crumpled it in his fist without bothering to look at the recipe for the Red Death. He waited for her under a palm tree and stared at an iguana climbing through a heap of coconut shells. He hesitated from plunging in after her because he knew that if he dared to jump into that loathsome water he might never return to the shore. Emily would keep swimming farther and farther out to sea, and then she would clasp her arms around his waist and try to pull him under. In a way it was a damn shame. The reef would have been such a beautiful place to die together.

Back at his house, slumped sideways in an Adirondack chair by the swimming pool, an empty jar of the Red Death wedged precariously between his legs, five or six cigarette butts scattered around his boots and one burning between his limp fingers, Charlie stared into the night sky and waited for Madeline and Sophie to return from the valley. Unlike his wife, who knew all about the stars and from their precise arrangement in the heavens could interpret many meanings, Charlie never sat with the girls and pointed out the mythic creatures lurking among those first constellations cresting the horizon, here the pincers of a crab, there a stinging scorpion, its ponderous tail bulbed with poison. He never told them about Auster, whose south winds brought heavy cloud cover and impenetrable mists, or about Boreas, who sent sleet and snow tearing across the planet from his icy lair way up north. He didn't teach them these things because he had no interest in learning them himself. Mainly he stared at the black spaces between the stars, the widening chasm of infinite space. Sometimes, too, he stared at a crack in the pavement, a stone, a beetle, a red clover mite as it scuttled across the back of his hand. For hours he stared and stared, his eyes blank and glassy, and he never uttered a word, not even to the twins when they stood on either side of his chair and whimpered for him.

As he started to nod off, he began to imagine things, crazy things, the summer skies spinning with fortunes good and bad, meteors plummeting from some remote sector of the solar system, ill omens falling across water so still it might have been a magic mirror polished smooth by the wind, and he worried that he would be swept away by the momentum of the whole reeling cosmos, propelled into the void among the terrors of space. He dreamed his daughters had come home and were standing in the center of the swimming pool, the water frozen solid and gleaming like a midnight anvil. With mischievous twitters the girls asked their father to follow them. “Mommy would like a word with you,” they told him, and despite Charlie's stern commands to stop, the twins jumped up and down until the ice started to crack. “She's under here, Daddy! She's
under here
!”

Now, after their adventure in the barn, Madeline and Sophie burst through the gate only to find their father whining and thrashing like a sleeping dog. He waved his arms and drummed his fists against his knees. He moaned and cursed and whimpered. They usually discovered him this way. Easily agitated, half-witted, insensibly drunk, prone to violent outbursts, Charlie often passed out in the chair. If the weather was especially cold, he managed to crawl on all fours back into the house. Sometimes he made it to his bed, sometimes not. Typically, the girls found him the next morning on the kitchen floor, a big pile of disorder sprawled halfway under the table.

They approached him now with caution. Madeline pelted him with small stones; Sophie poked him with a stick. His eyes briefly fluttered but did not open all the way. The glass jar in his lap toppled to the ground and rolled toward the edge of the pool, where it fell with a quiet plop into the shock of bilious green water. The sound roused him, and he lifted his head.

“I was dreaming again about your mother,” he said foggily. “I forgot she was dead. Ghosts can do that, you know. Visit you while you sleep.”

They smiled. “Yes, we know.”

He stood up, his legs a bit unsteady, and rubbed his eyes. Slowly the world became more clear, and the air grew heavy with the smell of distant wood fire and the delicate bouquet of unwashed little girls. He gazed into the murky depths, and with a groan he fished the mason jar from the pool and placed it on the patio table.

“An absolute disgrace,” he said, shaking his head, grunting, assessing. He reached into the linty pocket of his flannel shirt and searched for a cigarette. “You two haven't seen anything out here, have you? Anything
weird,
I mean?”

The twins nodded. “We almost killed a werewolf tonight, Daddy!”

“A werewolf, huh?” Charlie crossed his arms and gave his daughters a disapproving look. “I want you to listen to me carefully. We have to roll the tarp over this pool right now. Because there's a monster living under the water, understand? A monster with a hundred arms that will clamp onto you and drag you under if you ever get too close.”

The girls peered over the edge, indifferent to the danger.

“Promise me you'll never go near the pool. Can you promise me that? You have to promise.”

They promised.

“Well, okay then. I guess we've waited long enough to do this.” He clapped his hard, powdery palms together and cleared his throat harshly, tried to muster the autocratic tone he'd perfected over the years, but his voice no longer rang with the confidence it possessed before he shipped off on his last voyage. It wheezed and creaked; it sounded thin and scratchy and morose, the voice of a man dying of thirst in the desert, and he rubbed his scruffy neck and winced as each syllable clawed its painful way from his burning larynx. “The three of us should have this pool cleaned up in no time. What's done is done, right? Life goes on, doesn't it?”

The girls seemed to consider this for a moment.

“You're afraid of Mommy, aren't you?” said Madeline.

“You shut your mouth,” he warned.

“You're afraid she'll come back and try to drown you,” said Sophie.

Charlie loosened his belt. “I'll smarten you up, all right!”

The girls skittered away to the opposite end of the pool before he could swat them. Their bodies already bore the hallmarks of hard experience, of paddles and leather straps and brooms that went whooshing through the air and cracked sharply against their bare flesh, leaving unsightly bruises.

“Get inside the house!” he snapped, but they just stood there and giggled. “Go on! I'll close up the pool on my own. Gotta be something on TV.”

They ran inside, still laughing, and Charlie berated himself for having waited until the last possible minute to put the tarp on the pool; for having waited until the surface of the water resembled an alien organism, eyeless, mossy, kaleidoscopically oily, an amorphous creature that yearned to swallow him whole and slowly digest his flesh and bones beneath the rotting leaves that glinted under the October moon; for having waited until Madeline and Sophie, now back in the safe and familiar tranquillity of their bedroom, could no longer quell their curiosity and looked out the window to observe their father as they might observe an alarming silhouette inside their closet, wondering just what sort of bloodthirsty beast lurked in the shadows and then, when he caught them staring, quickly cowered behind the blinds, pretending to play with their dolls.

“Crazy, both of you,” he muttered. “Like your mother.”

Madeline and Sophie were strong swimmers, Charlie knew this for a fact, and they were perfectly capable of pulling Emily from the water. So why had they not plunged into the pool and saved her life? Why had they not screamed for help? Why had they taken the time to walk calmly downstairs and hover like a couple of ghouls before the couch where Marianne Kingsley slept? Were they relieved by their mother's death, overjoyed? Charlie recoiled at the thought. He wouldn't allow himself to contemplate such a terrible thing.

He flicked his cigarette into the water, and the glowing ember hissed for a second before going dark. Though the pool was in a sorry state, he had managed to turn the backyard into a kind of grotto, a white-trash Lourdes with a statue of Mother Mary looking over the swampy water, the radio playing vespers of the Blessed Virgin, all of it a testament to his unspeakable misery, but sometimes it was unclear to him if he'd erected the icon to summon the spirit of his wife or to cast it out. Because even though all the evidence was against it, Charlie still believed in ghosts, in restless spirits determined to air the dirty laundry of the dead.

Attending Sunday services at the white clapboard church on the square used to be part of his normal routine, but nothing about his life was normal anymore, all routines had been disrupted and indefinitely postponed, and the pool was now his sole place of worship, the temple where he prayed most every night. During the funeral service, the organist played the chorus of a forgettable hymn, and Charlie, convulsed with grief, developed the maddening habit of singing the refrain whenever he approached the pool—“Be not afraid, I go before you always…”—as if waiting for Emily to emerge from the murky water and through gibbering blue lips assure him that he need not blame himself for the terrible thing she'd done. On that dark day of disgrace, the pastor, who had a fondness for spouting quasi-biblical clichés, took him aside and said, “We're all made of the same clay, you know. And we all burn in the furnace of God's love, ordeal by fire, while a whole host of His angels takes bets on which of us will harden and crack first. But you're not going to crack, are you?” Words meant to provide comfort. But after the funeral Charlie never returned to the church.

These days he found nothing more comforting than the sensation of darkness, and he sat once more in the Adirondack chair, hands folded across his chest, and in the silence, as his eyes grew heavy again with sleep, he thought he heard his wife's gravelly voice.

“Listen, Charlie, listen now if you dare. No matter what the scriptures tell you, there are certain things for which a man cannot be forgiven. It's easy to forgive people when you're unaware of the sins they've committed. But I
do
know, Charlie. I know your sins, and I know the sins you're destined to commit. For what you did to me, I can forgive you. But should any harm come to the girls, to our daughters, to
our babies…
”

Like Charlie Ryan, I had no one willing to listen to my troubles, and on Saturday night after Metal Mayhem, as I drove aimlessly through town, I contemplated stopping by the bistro to squander the last of my cash on an appetizer. I knew such a visit would be pointless, and I could already hear Morgan Fey's mocking voice as I proposed a truce: “Oh, what a bunch of melodramatic, self-pitying crybabies you boys are. You're all the same.” From the day she moved into the row house next door, my encounters with Morgan, while infrequent, became increasingly hostile. In the mornings and on the weekends we would sometimes run into each other—how could we not?—and while I tried to be civil, smiled, waved hello, commented on the weather, Morgan hurried away without speaking a word. In a note she slipped under my door one night, she accused me, among other things, of being a stalker and threatened to obtain a protective order if I ever acted aggressively toward her.
I carry a bottle of pepper spray and I'm not afraid to use it.
Fortunately, she never made good on these threats, never served me with papers or blinded my one good eye as I tried to collect the mail jammed into my door slot.

Even though I knew such a visit was pointless, I entered the bistro and ordered a beer at the bar, but as luck would have it, Morgan was not working that night. At a table in a far corner of the dining room, a comfortable distance from the stifling heat of the kitchen, a representative couple of middle-aged loonies from the college practiced their elocution, pursing their lips and rolling their
r'
s. Loud and messy masticators, they indiscriminately mixed their salads with their buttered bread and jabbered away without bothering to savor or swallow. Having already killed one bottle of red wine before their entrées arrived and showing no signs of slaking their epic thirst, the associate professor and his wife continued speaking just as before, their clipped and precise consonants starting to slur ever so slightly, the overall thrust of their words acrimonious as ever.

Martin Kingsley was now a loyal customer in the bistro's alley, paying nearly double the going rate for large quantities of
jazar.
And no doubt Mrs. Kingsley was here tonight to find out how the plans were coming along for the party on New Year's Eve. Irritated perhaps by the tacky Norman-inspired decor of the bistro, the sham beams, the lights on the walls done up as candlesticks, they both looked like they were about to launch into choric howls of complaint. It was always these preening, posturing cognoscenti, worrying themselves sick about cultural debasement, who looked down their noses at the residuum, the underclass, the impure and unrefined proles who peopled this pitiful town.

“You still haven't explained to me,” I overheard Kingsley say to his wife, “why you insist on conducting business with this chef.” He fidgeted with the napkin on his lap. He seemed agitated, nervous, paranoid, and I guessed he'd been drinking more than just red wine tonight. “I think it's a mistake having the party here.”

“Too late to change venues, dear. I've already mailed out the invitations.” Mrs. Kingsley's hair was pulled back so tightly from her face that instead of a smile her lips formed a ferocious sneer. “This establishment seems to enjoy repeat business. Always a good sign. It means the penny-pinching geezers haven't found feathers in their
duck à l'orange
or fur in their rabbit stew.” Unsightly squares of diced kale clung to her teeth, giving her a decidedly rustic look. “It's also a cozy spot. Almost romantic, you know. In a pathetic sort of way.” She ran a finger around the rim of her empty wineglass. “Is something wrong, Martin? You look ill.”

Kingsley pretended not to see me sitting alone at the bar. Maybe he didn't recognize me, didn't associate me in any way with the college, a sad possibility that served to reinforce my suspicion that I'd become an expendable extra in the tragicomedy of this town, insignificant and utterly forgettable. These patronizing professors liked to tell their students that they could choose any path in life they liked, but I knew I would never enjoy Kingsley's kind of success and happiness. For most people—for people like me—paths didn't open at all, and when they did open they were just as likely to be bad ones as good. But Emily Ryan had presented me with another kind of path. While it wasn't a noble path, it was a realistic one, and only a damn fool waited around all his life, hoping for the right one to materialize, the one he wanted, the one he felt he deserved. Like Xavier D'Avignon, a man with an absurd sense of entitlement.

Through the round window of the kitchen door, I could see the chef standing behind the six-burner gas range, juggling three copper saucepans and a hot skillet. On Saturday nights, when the bistro was at its busiest, Xavier had to contend with the voices of dissatisfied customers whose constant complaints sounded more and more like the snarls of coyotes tracking the sickly scent of social failure. Somehow he managed to inoculate himself against clinical depression and at the same time keep properly hydrated by nursing a pitcher of carrot juice.

Although he was an impoverished chef toiling away in the claustrophobic kitchen of a failing restaurant and could only dream of attaining a high level of culinary virtuosity, he was an autodidact with an insatiable appetite for information of all kinds, especially knowledge about the bewildering history of food preparation. Had Normandy College offered a degree in food history instead of culinary arts, he might have pursued a much different path in life. Maybe he would have studied the ecological history of root vegetables, but the administration at Normandy College failed to see the profound message concealed in the time capsule of a carrot carved thick and coarse like sheets of parchment, a practice that for millennia had gone virtually unchanged. Evidence suggested that in Mesopotamia the dour priests of the Sumerian mystery cults sliced carrots atop their menacing ziggurats, and in the beautifully argued pages of medieval midrash, one could find innumerable passages suggesting that Father Abraham, before binding Isaac on Mount Moriah, served his son a sumptuous meal of chickpeas and finely chopped carrots drizzled with olive oil. That the cutting of carrots might be as old as Genesis and
The Epic of Gilgamesh
filled Xavier with a sense of awe that left him trembling and close to tears, but these reflections were short-lived as always. He stormed across the steamy kitchen and glanced out the window of the swinging door to spy on the professor and his wife.

“
Mon Dieu!
Who are these fools to make such demands on a great artist?”

A small part of Xavier looked forward to the
soirée.
Here at long last was an opportunity to escape, however briefly, from the onerous working-class world to which he'd become accustomed, his big chance to give in to new temptations, if one had to think of such things as being so unabashedly sinful, so improper, so lascivious and corrupt as to call them temptations, a glorious night hobnobbing with the town's power brokers and intelligentsia, an escapade into the rarefied realm of elitism, snobbery, exclusivity. He was growing tired of how disappointing life always turned out to be, and as he put the finishing touches on a
choux à la crème
drenched in dark chocolate for some diabetic slob in the dining room, he envisioned an elegant evening serving dignitaries and philanthropists, conversing at length with men and women who, despite their extensive travels, had yet to come across cooking so unique and revolutionary in its ability to seamlessly blend elements of the old world and the new. Lifting the lid on a silver platter, he would announce to the charmed guests, “
Mesdames et messieurs,
may I present tonight's main course. Turkey vulture
confit,
a special recipe of my own.” The provost would vigorously shake his hand, congratulate him on a job well done, and inquire about his plans for the future. “Mr. D'Avignon, do you intend to write a cookbook? Might you have an interest in guest lecturing at the college? Have you given serious consideration to teaching professionally? As you may know, I'm searching for a
chef de cuisine.
” But Xavier was no fool. Beneath the sedate surface of respectable society, there existed a kind of spiritual squalor that rivaled the worst poverty of the town. These men and women weren't as genteel as they pretended to be, and some of them, an unscrupulous few, tried to hide their checkered pasts behind empty words and forged references.

Now, with some hesitation, Xavier stepped into the dining room, fully prepared to have his humble fantasies shattered, and he noticed right off that the carrots on Mrs. Kingsley's plate had gone untouched.

“Ah, Mr. D'Avignon!” She produced an embossed business card from her purse and thrust it at him like a straight razor. When he reached for it, Xavier managed to sustain a nasty paper cut and sucked on the tip of his injured finger. “Did you lose my phone number, sir? I'm beginning to worry about our partnership. I searched high and low for a suitable location to host the party on New Year's Eve, not to mention a responsible chef capable of providing an eclectic menu for our guests, but so far you've given me very little information. From now on I expect regular updates about your arrangements for the retrospective on Colette Collins.”

She gestured to the unnerving centerpiece looming over their basket of sliced baguette. A humanoid clay figure with thin limbs that tapered into menacing crustacean claws, the thing seemed more prehistoric than modern, a grotesque totem unearthed by archeologists at the sight of an ancient pit for human sacrifices. He knew nothing at all about these small sculptures; it was Morgan who'd purchased the pieces for the bistro, but like any competent businessman, Xavier had an instinct for equivocation and evasive answers and pretended to be an enthusiastic collector of Colette Collins's work.

Equipped with a fine sense of attack, more or less accustomed to bullying her social inferiors, Mrs. Kingsley said, “Now, then, how many dishes will you be serving,
monsieur
? And how soon can you present me with a menu?”

Xavier gawped at her. He could feel her extracting information from him the way a powerful magnet might forcibly extract the metal fillings from his chronically aching and worn-down teeth. Judging from her staid demeanor and the intensity of her unwavering stare, he suspected she would be far more comfortable in a courtroom setting, asking pointed questions of sociopaths atop rickety scaffolds, their necks festooned with the hangman's noose. To a hard-nosed, uncompromising, autocratic ballbuster like Mrs. Kingsley, a man could say anything he liked and never run the risk of offending her. Nothing was beyond her. She'd heard every filthy slander, every vile admission of guilt, every conceivable description of perversion and evil. The only thing she wouldn't tolerate was a lie, but for Xavier D'Avignon lying was more or less a way of life. He was a cheat, a chiseler, and he found it difficult to camouflage his dishonesty.

“The menu is set,” he assured her. “I'll be serving
moules à la crème Normande, matelote,
and for dessert a marvelous
terrinné.
Not to worry. The party will come off without a hitch—”

“Christopher!” she interjected. “I almost forgot. I need to arrange for a babysitter. And I still have to order place cards and rent audio equipment for my speech. And, oh, yes, we must install a large clay sculpture over there in the corner. And I have no idea what I'm going to wear. Something tasteful and original. But not too flashy. Understated, sartorial restraint. Now, as to the terms of our agreement. I've never believed in written contracts, complicated clauses, fine print. I'm not running a corporation, not even limited liability. But when I entered into a verbal agreement with you last month, I expected good service at a reasonable price.”

“You won't be disappointed,” he said.

“I'm glad to hear it. And perhaps you can recommend a competent bartender?”

Xavier rested his fingers against his greasy chin. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I believe I know just the person…”

With nowhere else to go, I returned to my empty apartment and salved my loneliness by taking dictation from the ghost of Emily Ryan, but as I sat at the kitchen counter and furiously filled a fresh notepad with another badly worded dream, I felt an unmistakable presence scratching at the brick walls outside the building. Since I believed there were more ghosts in Normandy Falls than there were people, I crept to the window, cracked the blinds, and discovered wandering through the shadows a shuddering figure whose hideous, hollow breathing so fouled the air that I feared the time had finally come to flee from this forsaken town.

Morgan must have sensed it as well. For reasons she could not explain, she'd taken the night off work and waited at home for something unusual to happen. Maybe Emily Ryan had certain secrets to share with her, too. As if heeding the call of a solemn and mysterious voice, she threw open the door and stepped outside. The light spilling from her apartment touched Lorelei's oval face, illuminating a shock of red hair and protuberant eyes that betrayed a kind of murky mindlessness, green and depthless as a scummy pond. Wrapped in her black cloak, Lorelei looked not like a dancer at the Normandy Cabaret but like a ragged mendicant and the last surviving member of a medieval village stricken with the plague.

Morgan crossed her arms and approached her as she might an unfamiliar dog. “Haven't seen you in, what, almost eight weeks now? What do you want?”

Lorelei's face retreated beneath the hood. “I didn't come to pick a fight.”

Morgan rolled her eyes and laughed cruelly. “Oh, yes, you did. You wouldn't be here otherwise.”

An expert at disguising her own vulnerabilities, Lorelei tried to smile, but it was obvious that something terrible had happened.

Morgan struck a match and with the fitful flash of fire lit a cigarette. “Look, I'd like to enjoy a quick smoke and then go to bed, okay? Do you need to use the phone or something? Call your sister? Are you in trouble?”