The Captive Condition Read Online Free PDF Page B

his snobbery.
    “Every man,” she said, “no matter his station in life, is capable of ghastly behavior.”
    He snorted with incredulous laughter. “
Every
man?”
    “Affluent husbands beat their affluent wives, too.”
    “Oh, come on, you have to concede that, statistically speaking, low-income earners are far more likely to resort to physical violence. Young professionals tend to rely on psychological warfare. Our neighbors have limited means, let’s be honest. I don’t like the looks of that pool anymore. They don’t clean it regularly. And any property in advanced stages of decay is a bad omen. Bad for resale values, too.”
    Even before moving to Normandy Falls five years ago and purchasing their home, he and Marianne had expressed concern about the pool. Despite all of the new child-safety measures—a net over the crib, a microphone on the dresser, a lock on the door—Christopher had become something of a prodigy at escaping from his nursery, and soon the day would come when he decided to scale the chain-link fence and take a fateful midnight dip.
    “Have a look at their backyard.” Martin guided his wife toward the kitchen window. “Who the hell uses a clothesline these days? I’m surprised the girls haven’t decapitated themselves yet.”
    Marianne smirked. “For god’s sake…”
    “And do you see that? The tiles are falling off the roof.”
    “All right, so their house could use a makeover. What do you expect? Emily is all alone over there. She can’t fix up the place by herself. Charlie will get around to it, eventually.” Marianne moved away from the window and planted her hands on her hips. “Our house isn’t exactly a palace either. Maybe you should consider taking a few carpentry classes at the college and focus more on home improvement projects this summer. No, you’re always working on that damn book. How long have you been at it now, this quest of yours to become the unchallenged doyen of scholarship on Flaubert? Three years? Do you plan to finish it any time soon?”
    In actuality, it had been closer to four years, four miserable years of creative constipation, occasional panic attacks, and those all-too-infrequent flashes of inspiration, but he wouldn’t admit this to anyone, least of all to Marianne. She wasn’t a dedicated maniac as he was. She was a clock watcher, the sort of no-nonsense number cruncher who demanded regular progress reports, spreadsheets, pie charts, colored graphs, accurate word counts. As an adjunct instructor of art history and professional grant writer, she worked regular hours in a small, windowless office, trying to raise the necessary funds to host a swanky New Year’s Eve retrospective on the life and work of a local painter and sculptor named Colette Collins, one of the pioneers in the surrealist and psychedelic movements and a cult figure in the world of contemporary art.
    Marianne was also an amateur bodybuilder, and every morning she spent an hour in the gym doing shoulder presses, squats, and lunges in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, admiring how the sharply layered and defined muscles cleaved to her bones. She was especially proud of the way her striated deltoids bulged under her taut skin, and she wore her hair pulled back so everyone could admire her broad and sloping shoulders. Her center of gravity wasn’t in her impressive upper body, however, but in her muscular thighs, and whenever they made love she squeezed her legs against Kingsley’s torso, causing him to cry out in pain. She’d become so adept at this that she could control the tone and rhythm of his yelps and shrieks, and sometimes she referred to him, even around his students, as “my little pipe organ.”
    She was probably right about his own negligence as a homeowner, but by that point in the conversation Kingsley had grown irritated with her charitable opinions and absolute rectitude. He expected a rhapsodic affirmation of their superiority, a lovely ode to their