The Captive Condition (24 page)

While I pondered the matter I noticed Marianne Kingsley storming up behind her husband. I have always enjoyed watching the full extravagance of domestic dramas, and it occurred to me that the impending confrontation was a small but crucial scene in an elaborate play that Mrs. Kingsley had scripted well in advance—she'd been anticipating and preparing for her husband's inevitable arrival, rehearsing her lines, doing vocal warm-ups, but she had not anticipated the presence of a stranger in this story, and now she was in serious danger of overplaying her part. As I followed her across the tawdry stage of the bistro, I wasn't entirely sure how to play my own role—charming, defiant, deranged, morally ambiguous?—and before she could reach her husband I managed to stop her.

Reaching a hand into the pocket of my sport coat, I said, “Forgive the intrusion, but I've come with an urgent message from Emily Ryan.”

Without taking the time to relish the puzzled expression on her face, I presented her with the pieces of pink stationery and then vanished into the pitching and swaying crowd. For many minutes she stood immobilized against the wall, her eyes scanning the pages. She continued to smile prettily, but she'd never been especially skillful at disguising her feelings, and her face gave off an incarnadine glow. The note was less a revelation than a confirmation of what she'd long suspected, and with the calm and confidence of proprietorship she clasped her hands behind her back and approached her husband.

“Are you totally fucking mad?” she said to him. Her dark and dangerous eyes had turned into tiny tar pits, and anyone foolish enough to get too close would soon find that he was unable to extract himself from their steamy bitumen.

Kingsley blinked at the heat of her anger and answered with a stoic smile, “Oh, a bit imprudent maybe, but there's no need to be crude, is there?”

“You're supposed to be home watching the children,” she said, her voice dripping with scorching acid. “I should have you arrested for child endangerment.”

“Idle threats seldom foster a productive dialogue between partners.” He wanted to sound confident and formidable, but the words felt heavy on his tongue. They tumbled from his lips like little lead weights and clattered on the floor at his feet, where his wife could have gathered them up and rammed them back into his mouth, shattering his professionally bleached and polished teeth. “Marianne, I came here to speak to you. Next week is our tenth wedding anniversary. Ten long years, a not insignificant milestone, and I've been busy searching the antique shops for mementos made of tin. In case you didn't know, tin has long been a symbol of the flexibility one needs to weather the storms of a long-term relationship and is given and received on the occasion of one's tenth anniversary. A charming if curious custom that, at least in this particular situation, makes perfect sense.”

“How so?” she asked.

“Through the ages marriages have been multitudinous in form and configuration. They are strange and unpredictable and flawed, but for these same reasons they can also be pliable and endlessly adaptable.”

She breathed deeply and once again became the aspiring and fastidious socialite. “Do you see those two men standing over there by the sculpture? They might be interested in this information.”

“Why?”

“They're police detectives, that's why.”

“They are? What makes you say that? They don't
look
like detectives.”

“Because I had the pleasure of speaking to them on the night Emily Ryan died.”

“Are you sure?”

“It isn't the sort of thing you're likely to forget, Martin. They wrote detailed notes, photographed everything. And I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear about your involvement with our neighbor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Martin, if you know my secrets then I certainly know yours.”

Kingsley reflected on this for a moment, struggling with how best to proceed, and then backed slowly against the exposed-brick wall. “But I don't know your secrets, Marianne. I've
never
known them.”

Now she positively radiated hostility, and her animated smile abruptly hardened into an expression of permanent displeasure. She straightened the hem of her sleek skirt, adjusted her silk scarf. “It's almost midnight and I need to deliver my speech. If you'll excuse me, please…”

There is no one in the world more lonely than an uninvited guest at a party, and with my hands buried deep in my pockets, I made my way around the room. To me the guests looked like mischievous children suffering from progeria, dozens of prematurely shriveled faces crammed into the confines of the converted warehouse, an image reinforced by the powerful presence of Colette Collins, the crazed and sainted guest of honor, an individual so reclusive and so seldom photographed that very few people knew what she looked like. A brazen woman deep into her senescence and the only person present tonight who could get away with violating the town's strict smoking ban (one of the few privileges of being both a genius and frightfully frail), Colette Collins finished the cigarette already burning close to her knuckles before flicking the butt to the floor and grinding it under the heel of an orthopedic shoe. Her hair was a tangle of white curls; the lines on her face hinted at self-loathing and self-confidence; her bright blue eyes, ringed by dark circles, glowed like gas jets and made her appear both weary and excited, clever and naive, intelligent and dull, creative and destructive, reasonable and deranged. Many of the guests were quick to point out how similar she was to one of her own creations—spectral, strange, infuriatingly enigmatic—and how her words were slightly cryptic, a secret message, an obscene overture, an expression of her splendid and sickening desires.

She looked like a reanimated corpse that through some evil hocus-pocus had risen from one of the cold, metal tables in the refrigerated holding room of the county morgue; the only thing missing from her ghoulish ensemble was a large candelabra to light her way through the bistro's semi-luminous shadows. She hobbled over to the ransacked buffet table (“
Banquet
table,” Marianne Kingsley politely corrected her) as if her very bones were on the verge of disintegrating, and there she nibbled on a roasted radish drizzled with garlic-infused olive oil and several pieces of stale
bâtard
heaped with Swiss chard, crushed red peppers, and thinly sliced ribbons of carrot. With trepidation she sniffed a skewer loaded with chunks of wine-drenched turkey vulture.

“You mean to tell me this chef considers himself an
artist
?” she said with ecstatic disgust, her voice deepened by decades of nicotine abuse, her mouth becoming a raw, pink crevice of contempt. “Wild animals rendered down to mucilage!”

“Ms. Collins,” said Marianne Kingsley, taking her by the hand, “come along with me. It's time I introduce you formally to our guests.”

While I waited for Mrs. Kingsley to speak, I studied the strange sculpture in the corner. Superhuman in its enormity, a misshapen mound of kiln-fired mud baked hard as rock and cracked from limb to limb, the sculpture proved difficult to interpret. Its single eye was a large piece of banded black onyx that reflected the distorted faces of the revelers, its feet long protrusions of petrified earth, its toes curled and askew like concrete cucumbers scattered on the floor, its primitive apelike knuckles tough and calloused as any schoolyard bully's, its glazed torso purple as an eggplant, its hollow limbs as deceptively sturdy as the wooden beams holding up the ceiling and walls, its gut as bloated and slovenly as a beer-guzzling laborer who might feel at ease in a saloon, a strip club, a bawdy house, and its prominent and irascible brow hinted at a simple masculine predilection for pillage and plunder. But the sagging breasts, the dimpled backside, and the general air of inaccessibility made the thing seem somehow feminine, an overbearing mother ready to pounce upon and severely reprimand its naughty progeny for the most minor of infractions.

Near the bar, gazing in mock adoration and secret scorn at the perplexing installation, the two detectives—if, in fact, they were detectives as Mrs. Kingsley claimed—made guesses at what the thing might be. The first man said: “It's a depiction of how time has devastated this once strong and beautiful town, now a defeated ogre, continually ravaged by the incurable pestilences of addiction and violence.” The second said: “No, it's a representation of our sad society, a confused Colossus of Rhodes, a woebegone Mother of Exiles overwhelmed by so much wretched refuse.”

Professor Kingsley cautiously approached the men and tried to think of something clever to say. For most academics, no matter their area of expertise, there were only two rather contradictory rules of art criticism: the first was to be as insightful as possible; failing that, the rule was to be humorous, snide, acerbic. After all, when confronted by a baffling work of modern art, the best way to disguise one's lack of erudition and stark incomprehension was to try to lighten the mood in any way possible. The problem, so far as I could tell, was that these men had no sense of humor whatsoever. Wishing to prove his innocence and profess his undying devotion to his beautiful bride, Kingsley impudently declared, “I say it's Marianne, the bare-breasted avatar of the revolutionary spirit, symbol of
liberté, égalité, fraternité,
trying to fight past the barricades of ignorance and folly that the people of this town have erected.”

The men barely acknowledged his comment and clinked the ice cubes in their otherwise empty cups.

The first quipped, “These artists are like modern-day witches, concocting gobbledygook all night long from the fiery cauldrons of their minds.”

The second said, “They are like the gods of old, fashioning primordial beings from clay and water.”

Feeling increasingly ill at ease around these men, the professor offered a decidedly less perspicacious response. “They are expert forgers and frauds, endeavoring to stitch together from so many scraps stolen from the masters a work they can claim as their own. And judging from the smell of those so-called cigarettes Ms. Collins is smoking tonight, I'd say artists are, in all likelihood, a hopeless bunch of chemically dependent oddballs. Just like the rest of us, gents. Nothing very special.”

The men sneered, and before the conversation took a precipitous plunge into the intellectual void of more congenial topics like the weather and work, Kingsley said, “We should replenish our empty cups, but first I'd like to ask you gents about a matter of great consequence.” He came a little closer and said in confidential tones, “Of all the women here this evening, who would you say is the sexiest?”

Hoping this most taboo of questions might provide further evidence of his fidelity and bring to these invariably dull proceedings a much-needed spark of life, he took a step back as if he'd just pulled the pin on a grenade, but the men were far too diplomatic to answer honestly or engage in a heated discussion, maybe because they, like practically every guest at these painfully polite cocktail parties, adhered to the credo of political correctness and possessed a collective sense of guilt about any topic that struck them as even remotely sexist and discriminatory—could someone be sexier than someone else; wasn't sexiness a purely subjective and thus entirely relative assessment of a fellow human being; and didn't such a question fail to take into account the more important and complex notion of inner beauty?

Growing impatient with their evasive answers and awkward mumbling, Kingsley pointed to his wife, who now stood at the podium near the entrance, and unashamedly proclaimed her to be the most attractive woman
by far.
From the uncomfortable silence that followed and the nervous adjustment of coats and shirtsleeves, he knew at once that he'd crossed the elusive line demarcating bad taste and outright incivility. Disappointed with the results of this innocuous parlor game and somewhat embarrassed by his inability to strike up a conversation, he slunk away and wandered dejectedly through the bistro.

Cursed with the task of addressing the guests, Marianne Kingsley gripped the sides of the podium with both hands and said, “May I have your attention?” With a manicured finger she tapped the microphone three times. Above the confusion of cackles and the vacuous gabble of the sweaty mob, she shouted, “Ladies and gentleman, your attention, please! I would now like to say a few words about our honoree…” When the room finally came to order, Mrs. Kingsley regained her composure and spoke once again in the manner of a woman whose accomplishments seemed complete and unassailable. “Some of you can probably guess my two favorite words in the English language.” She paused for effect before saying, “Captive audience.”

Reluctantly, the men and women set their empty drinks aside and offered their polite, ceremonial applause, but many looked with longing at the shallow punch bowl, hoping to get one last cup of the Red Death before ringing in the New Year. The old woman, meanwhile, doddered quietly away from the hostess's side and made her way to the bar.

“Most people,” said Mrs. Kingsley with a small smile cemented to her lips, “or at least those people who strike us as well adjusted to their current circumstances, are understandably reluctant to disclose those aspects of their personality that others might regard as not merely odd but positively wicked. We tend to treat our secret desires, our questionable impulses, our perverse proclivities as monsters. We lock them away, hopefully forever, in the dark dungeon of our soul and then throw away the key. But artists are different in that they keep the key close at hand. They become society's dungeon masters and make the treacherous descent to visit those fearsome creatures, to marvel at their strange, hideous beauty, to listen to the filthy secrets unspooling from their souls, their leaky brains, their ruptured hearts. Occasionally, despite all of the taboos against doing so, artists dare to release the monsters and let them stretch their legs in the confining prison yard of the canvas. Some of us, for a short while at least, like to gather around and gawk at them. Then the artist, like any responsible warder, returns the beasts to their proper place in the dungeon, confident they will go undisturbed until the next visit, or until such time as the key is misplaced and they can no longer gain access to those dark realms. A good thing, too. Because sooner or later the monsters always seem to turn on their keepers and destroy them.”