Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  Back at her desk she selects a sharpened pencil and hangs on to it, staring at a paragraph on the proof sheet in front of her. She knows already that it is not going to be a good day for concentration. She is staring at the opening of an essay by an eminent cultural critic:

  There is no doubt that we have experienced in our own lifetimes, even in those rare instances where we are insulateed somewhat

  She does not catch the typo in the spelling of insulated, which will annoy the eminent critic considerably, when he finds insulateed right in the first sentence of his essay on illiteracy in the fall issue of New Thought. She is imagining Conrad walking into his office on West Twenty-first Street any minute now—Conrad back from wherever he has been, rumpled and unshaven, wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday when he called her and said nothing about being out of town.

  against the shocks of the onslaught, the profound and inescapably deleterious effects of mass—

  At her right elbow there is the telephone. She feels slightly nauseated. She knows she is going to end by dialing the number of Conrad’s office. She asks herself not to, but she does.

  A young woman, an ex-girlfriend of Conrad’s who is now a part-time secretary at the People’s Law Collective and is working her way through law school, answers. She says that Conrad isn’t in. “We don’t expect Conrad until later this afternoon. Any message?”

  She almost says, “Tell him Molly called,” but doesn’t. This way if she doesn’t reach him it will be by default as if she hadn’t called him in the first place.

  She hesitates for a moment or two, then calls Conrad at home. The line is busy. She sees a door with nothing in front of it. One copy of the New York Times is in the garbage. The other is spread out in front of Conrad on the kitchen table next to the opened mail.

  She calls back a few minutes later. This time there is no one there.

  “Hello,” Conrad said to me. “How are you?”

  Since I hadn’t considered the possibility that Conrad might call me before I reached him, I was so thrown off guard I nearly said I was fine.

  “Not so good.”

  “Oh? That’s too bad.” There was the usual good-natured warmth in his voice. “Did something happen?”

  “Conrad, I was at your house at six-thirty this morning.”

  “You were?”

  “But you weren’t home.”

  “I was there. The downstairs buzzer doesn’t work sometimes.”

  “No, I got in. The doorman was on duty.”

  “Ah.”

  “I went up to your apartment and rang, Conrad.”

  “I feel terrible. I just didn’t hear you.”

  “There was a pile of mail outside your door and two newspapers.”

  There was a pause.

  “What were you doing there at that hour anyway?” he asked almost indignantly.

  “I walked out on Fred today.”

  “I guess we should talk.” He lowered his voice to a level suitable to the discussion of intimate affairs in crowded offices.

  “Yes. We should talk.”

  “But not now,” he said. “I’m just about to go into a meeting.”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to sound as sarcastic as I possibly could.

  “Why don’t you just go on up to my house after work?”

  “No, I’m not going to your house. I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I think we’d better meet on neutral ground.”

  “I can tell you’re very angry,” he said sadly, “and very very upset. This is the first time I’ve made you angry. We could talk much better at my house really.”

  “No.”

  Somehow hearing from Conrad that I was angry and upset had made me begin to cry. I have always been undone by sympathy.

  “I’ll meet you in front of your building after work then.” He was brisk now, all business. “Hi, Dianne. I’ll be right with you.” I could hear a commotion in the background, muffled voices. “Is that neutral enough?” he said.

  Before I could answer he had hung up.

  I WAITED FOR Conrad looking anxiously up Fourth Avenue, trying to catch sight of the Saab. I was amazed by the number of small green cars of various makes that passed me. I had never been aware there were so many of that particular shade. It reminded me of being pregnant and suddenly seeing other pregnant women all over the place—bellies moving toward me down every street.

  He arrived slightly late, pulling over smoothly to the curb. “Heavy traffic,” he said, opening the door for me. I got in next to him, displacing a pile of books and a half-eaten hero sandwich and putting them down on the floor behind my feet. “Why don’t you throw those in the back?” Conrad said.

  “It’s okay.”

  He was studying me. I looked just once very quickly at his wonderfully blue eyes that were so richly fringed with dark lashes. I looked away, clutching my small paper bag.

  “Been shopping?” he said.

  “Not exactly.”

  He smiled brilliantly for a moment. His hand brushed my knee as he started the car. I felt a flash of incongruous joy at being with him. I struggled to keep my anger intact, uninvaded.

  He asked me if I wanted to go any place in particular.

  “Anywhere,” I said coldly.

  “Let’s just drive around then. I have another meeting in a couple of hours.” He turned the corner and headed uptown. “Want to go through the park?”

  “You sound like a cabdriver.”

  “I drove a cab for a while in ’65. You didn’t know that.”

  “Just one of the many things you’ve done.”

  “What’s eating you, Molly?”

  “I hate being lied to.”

  He sighed.

  “You’re not even good at it.”

  “That’s true. Actually, I have a great respect for the truth. If I didn’t, I’d be a much better liar, believe me. In some situations a lie is necessary.”

  “For example?” I said bitterly.

  “For example,” he said chidingly, shaking his head. “Do you know how much regard I have for you?” His voice was husky, slightly choked.

  Tears rushed into my eyes, although it was love I would have preferred him to say.

  He was looking straight at the traffic now. His hand moved on the wheel in a myriad of small adjustments.

  “Conrad,” I said, “are you involved with someone?”

  “Involved?” With a deft swerve, the car shot ahead of a slow-moving bus. “Involved,” Conrad said, “is a term that hardly has any meaning. There are degrees of involvement. Are we involved—you and I?”

  “Yes, I think we are.”

  “But what does that mean to you, Molly?”

  “It means,” I said with difficulty, the words catching in my throat, “that we care for each other.”

  “That is certainly the case.” He turned now and beamed his smile at me. “Even though you care less for me right at this moment than you have at times in the past.” His eyes changed from tender to slightly mischievous. “At any rate, I think involvement means more to you than you’ve said.”

  “Perhaps,” I said unwillingly.

  “No. Definitely. Don’t think I don’t know what you expect of me, Molly.”

  “I asked you a question before.”

  “Yes, you did. On the basis of what you found this morning when you turned up and I wasn’t there.”

  “I can put two and two together.”

  “And much more than that, much much more. Molly, you’re a thoroughly grown-up woman in most respects.”

  “In what respects am I not?”

  “In your tendency to jump to conclusions.”

  “I see nothing ungrownup about that.”

  “But already,
you see, you have me involved with someone you don’t even know about.”

  “Well, aren’t you?” I cried.

  “Yes,” he said defiantly, roughly, “I happened to be with a close friend last night. Yes, and the night before that too.”

  “Okay, Conrad! Okay!”

  “You’ll note that what I said was with!”

  “Why couldn’t you just say it in the first place?”

  “Because I cared about how you heard it, goddamn it!”

  We had both been shouting back and forth at each other in the little car. We looked at each other in amazement and fright. Conrad steered to the left and pulled over in front of a hydrant. I noticed beads of sweat on his face. Wet rings of hair were plastered to his forehead. I could see that he was suffering, that he must have felt humiliated. I would have if I had been him. His blue eyes looked at me pleadingly like my kid’s did when I’d scolded him too hard. I almost took my hand and brushed his hair back from his forehead. I thought I was going mad with the anger and love all knotted up inside me and all that had happened to me that day and Conrad’s tortuous logic going round in my head and confusing me further.

  And now he began saying some things that were perfectly true. I couldn’t argue with them. That all of us came into each other’s lives from wherever it was we’d been before. That nothing was ever neat, especially for people who lived fully. We came to each other trailing old relationships, old attachments. “And who should know that better than you, Molly?”

  I had an image of me dragging Fred into Conrad’s life like an old vacuum cleaner gliding along on his little runners.

  He said something too about nothing ever really being over, which didn’t make too much of an impact on me at the time. I wanted only to get to what I thought was the point.

  “And what about this attachment of yours, Conrad?”

  I was determined that day to get the full story out of Conrad, however painful. Without information, how can one make choices? It was facts that I wanted. I made the mistake, however, of forgetting the importance of context. And Conrad was a master of that. He could spin a context out of himself like a great silken web.

  The context in which he told me about the other woman in his life was an appeal for sympathy, my compassion for another frail and battered human, a sister if you like. I must confess, though, to having difficulties with the word sister in its all inclusive, non-filial sense. It is absolutely clear to me that there are some women who are my sisters and others who are definitely not. In this case I did not feel particularly sisterly, although I tried—guiltily aware of my political shortcomings.

  This woman, my sister, was a modern dancer who’d become a dance therapist, who was now struggling toward a degree in psychology—which was only one of her problems. It was Conrad who had radicalized her, encouraged her to go to graduate school, to overcome the sense of intellectual inferiority that her disastrous marriage to a self-absorbed experimental filmmaker had left her with. Gradually he had been rebuilding her shattered sense of herself. His restoration was almost completed.

  “Henry Higgins,” I said.

  He winced.

  “I know you’re angry, Molly. But if you could just see this woman, you’d understand.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Because you’re not an unkind person.”

  I laughed painfully. “Maybe I’m not as kind as you think. Maybe I’m selfish, Conrad, about some things.”

  “Molly, I feel terribly responsible for Bobbie. I can’t help it. She could be so easily destroyed just when things are beginning to open up for her. I can’t just walk in on her and say, ‘Listen, Bobbie, I’ve met someone else.’”

  Oh yes you can, Conrad, I thought. You can go there tomorrow and say it.

  He was going on now about her problems—some of which he hinted were sexual in nature, although he was unspecific about what they were. She had a tendency to panic, to become hysterical, enraged at the slightest provocations. He spoke of his suffering, the constant pressure he felt. It was hard to see why he stayed with her if she was as dreadful as he said.

  “You haven’t told her about us, I suppose.”

  “No,” he said. “Of course I haven’t. I think she senses something though.”

  “Senses something?”

  “Sometimes she tells me that I seem different to her. I try very hard not to be.”

  “Is Bobbie a nickname or something?”

  “Yes, it’s short for Roberta.”

  “Roberta what?” I asked.

  “Roberta Holloman. But why would you want to know that?”

  “Because I’m going to be thinking about her a lot and I guess I want to know her name.”

  His face reddened in fury. “You’re making it hard, Molly, harder than it needs to be.” The words came out of him in a clenched kind of way. “Why would you want to think about her? What goes on between you and me has nothing to do with Roberta.”

  “You should have told me about her right at the beginning, Conrad, not kept it a secret! It isn’t fair, Conrad. It isn’t fair at all!”

  “Would it have made a difference? Would you have decided to stay away from me?”

  I looked at him. His blue eyes burned into mine. I could feel the heat between us that all this combat had brought on, a live kind of heat that invaded my flesh, vibrated against my skin.

  “No, Conrad. It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  He pulled me to him then, crushing me against him. “Oh, Molly,” he said.

  WHO ISN’T HUMAN?

  Perhaps I should have walked out on Conrad, abandoned him to Roberta. The fact is that now I wanted him more than ever.

  To many women—and I ruefully number myself among them—there is nothing more attractive than a strong man with weaknesses. There is something infinitely compelling in that contradiction. We see the man as an uncompleted work. It is we who will supply the finishing touches. Our belief in our wisdom and forebearance, our female hubris, are all too frequently either fatal or ridiculous—depending on one’s angle of vision.

  Feminists have only brought into the open a view of men that women have shared secretly all along. The truth is that we expect them to be frail creatures, rather than the reverse. And we excuse behavior in our men we would never permit ourselves or pardon in others of our kind. That is our peculiar double standard. We think of this as love.

  Can you imagine the richness of conversation in a harem? Allowing for a certain amount of competition and jealousy among the concubines, imagine the delicious opportunities to pool certain observations about the pasha, to compare his performance with one to his performance with all the others—and perhaps see that they are the same. Surely in the process there would develop a highly sophisticated form of gallows humor. All this—and communal childcare as well!

  But all these observations of course are hindsight. Returning to the scene in the Saab, where one of Conrad’s solid thighs is wedged assertively between mine and his tongue is in my mouth and mine is in his and I run it along the edges of his sharp little teeth and feel everything cold and firm inside me melting away like so much sherbet, I see that my excuse-making mechanism has already started up, is in fact pumping away furiously because it has such an enormous amount of work to do. What it is coming up with very quickly is the image of Conrad as the victim of his own idealism. My Conrad, so sunny in his temperament, so unfailingly giving of himself to causes others would consider lost, had blundered into a situation where the zeal so admirable and appropriate in his professional life became a destructive element in his personal one. He was a man who could not resist an obligation. So it was Roberta’s misery in fact that bound him to her! And I suspected that no one understood this better than Roberta did herself.

  “Oh, Conrad,” I said, disengaging my mouth from his for a moment, “I’m so tired o
f being miserable. I’d just like to be happy for a change. Wouldn’t you?” Since I knew there was no way I could compete with Roberta, what I was doing was offering a contrast.

  “We’re happy together a lot of the time,” Conrad said, struggling with his left hand to unhook the back of my bra.

  “But I don’t want to be happy in bits. I want it to be a continuum.” The bra came loose under my shirt and flapped against my skin, its stiff nylon lace grazing my nipples. Conrad’s hand came around from behind, lifted the fabric away and took a breast.

  “I love your tits,” he said. He squeezed gently, then a little too hard. “You’re very sensitive there, aren’t you?”

  I became afraid of losing my train of thought. “Yes,” I whispered faintly.

  “I think you’re sensitive all over.” He bit my ear. His right hand began to undo the middle buttons on my shirt. I began to feel more undressed than if I were naked.

  “Conrad, we’re on Madison Avenue.”

  “I’m seizing some moments of happiness for myself. I’ve had a hard day. Besides, the windows are very dirty.”

  “Conrad, I’m serious about what I was saying before.”

  “I know you are.”

  “What I mean was I thought you and I could be happy. I think we really have a chance.”

  “No one can be truly happy in a capitalist society,” he reminded me sternly, plunging his face between my breasts. I held him to me, my fingers playing with his wonderful hair, twisting it into little red ringlets and letting them spring away from me, as his mouth moved eagerly upon my flesh.

  For some reason, I was reminded of the scene at the very end of The Grapes of Wrath, where Rose of Sharon, the young nursing mother, gives the starving man her breast. I hadn’t read it since junior high school but it had made a lasting impression on me.

  Conrad, are you listening? I was referring to the possibility of a private happiness.”