The Captive Condition Read Online Free PDF

first hint of snoring, Kingsley and Emily rushed hand in hand upstairs to the master bedroom. There was always a slim chance that one of the kids might wake up and disturb them, but with any luck they would have an entire hour to make frantic and soulful love in the stifling summertime heat.
    To Kingsley’s way of thinking, the affair had simply happened just as a rainstorm happens, and surely no one was to blame for a rainstorm, and he refused to believe that he was the sort of sinister character one is likely to encounter in those melodramatic novels he assigned to his students, sprawling nineteenth-century epistolary epics thronging with bourgeois sadists, cruel and vindictive toward their lovers and spouses and thus deserving of some cosmic punishment, condemned by God to mingle among the wanton and lustful souls in Dante’s second circle of hell. He was not a savage, he assured himself, a panting maniac yearning to tear off Emily’s clothes and gleefully fornicate in filthy public restrooms and the cramped backseat of her minivan—although every now and then these thoughts did cross his mind, or at least that part of his mind still reeling in adolescent fantasies. He wasn’t driven by malice or emotional desperation but by pure physical lust, nothing more.
    After they satisfied each other’s needs, Emily turned to him, sweaty and spent, and her voice, though flat and distant, seemed to fill the hollow room with a vague sense of foreboding. “In a few days Charlie will be coming home. I’ll need to wash and dry these sheets again.”
    “Are you looking forward to seeing him?” Kingsley stretched his arms and legs.
    She didn’t answer, but her vacant laughter and the pale rigidity of her eyes told him all he needed to know.
    “Maybe it will be good having him around,” he said. “He’ll help you with the girls.”
    “No, Charlie likes to remind me that he’s been working hard and deserves a break. Oh, he’ll watch the twins for an hour or two while I make a quick trip to the grocery store. But even that’s asking a lot of him. Men can be such selfish bastards. No need to state the obvious, right? But for raising his children, a woman is allowed to make certain demands on a man’s life. She deserves more than his respect and loyalty.”
    Kingsley understood what she meant. Trapped for months in that house, without any close friends or family members to keep her company, Emily had started to “lose her shit,” as she frequently put it, and seldom managed to flee her captors. Her situation only worsened when Charlie was home.
    In the early evening, while writing in his study, Kingsley sometimes turned to the window and saw a small colony of brown bats coming and going from an air vent at the peak of the Ryans’ house, and with growing unease he listened to the shouting and screaming and sudden, portentous silences that issued forth from its dark and dirty rooms. For a long time now he’d suspected Charlie of slapping her, slamming her against doors, shoving her against crumbling sheetrock walls, pinning her face to the floor with his huge, calloused hands, the sort of man who probably slept soundly at night, even with the burden of abuse on his soul.
    Once, Kingsley thought he glimpsed a bruise on Emily’s left arm, the purple indentation of fingers pressed hard into delicate flesh. She started wearing long-sleeve shirts and jeans in warm weather. It wasn’t his business, he told himself, but he did have the right to know what sort of people lived beside him. After all, one’s neighbors were a fairly strong indicator of one’s own status in this world, and Kingsley worried that he’d slipped a rung on the socioeconomic ladder, that despite his proud middle-class bearing he was just another anonymous wage slave struggling to eke out a modest living in this shabby quarter of town.
    He had a more difficult time convincing Marianne. At these idle theories his wife rolled her eyes and scolded him for