Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  The bus stops at Lincoln Center and still more people pile on. They are all on top of each other, hanging from every strap. Where are they going? It is somehow indecent that they all must be contained like this in the same container—she and Conrad and …

  The bus is moving forward again and she is suddenly standing, pulling on the cord, signalling she wants to get off. She grabs Matthew’s hand and pushes through the bodies crowded near the front door, yanking him behind her. “But I thought we were going to the zoo!” he is wailing in rage and astonishment.

  She doesn’t have a plan. They will get there somehow, they will walk, take a taxi. They will end up going home. She cannot see herself looking at animals, at anything. “Excuse me,” she is saying, “excuse me,” breaking through to the door with her elbows, Matthew in tears as they exit.

  “But I want to go to the zoo!”

  They are standing on the pavement as the bus pulls away and she catches a glimpse of Conrad looking out at her behind glass, his red hair, his large stunned face.

  It turns out later that she has jumped to conclusions again. The young woman she saw was “only Stephanie,” a friend Conrad had neglected to mention to her—a former lover, but now more of a sister, a confidante. Some of his best friends are ex-lovers. He was upset by her conduct on the bus, her coldness. That was why he had not lingered or introduced Stephanie to her. “I think you have a propensity toward jealousy,” he says. She has suffered for nothing.

  I went to bed with my ex-husband on my birthday. Maybe because it was my birthday, maybe because it was another Saturday night that Conrad was spending with Roberta. Maybe because I was slightly depressed. Most of all, I suppose, I was curious. Who knows why you do certain dumb things? I do not discount curiosity as a factor. I was curious about what it would be like to go to bed with Fred when he was feeling attracted to me—and he was attracted now that he was past his initial territorial fury. Somehow the fact that I was desired by another had made me a desirable object in his eyes as well. At any rate, divorce clearly agreed with him. He came up to see Matthew that Saturday afternoon, took both of us out to dinner and resembled his old premarital self so much that I ended up sleeping with him accidentally, more by default than intention.

  Later I asked myself whether we might have been making some unconscious effort toward reconciliation. But I don’t think it was that. It was what it was—an act occurring in a sort of moral vacuum, to which it would be a mistake to ascribe too much meaning. Afterward we parted amicably, our mutual curiosity satisfied if nothing more. I didn’t think to mention it to Conrad, since I was entitled to my own secrets. Not that I was hiding it, particularly. It just seemed to have very little to do with him—although I have little doubt in retrospect that it would not have occurred at all if our own relationship had been less tenuous.

  It was an act, however, that had far-reaching repercussions. It was, in a sense, the accident I had been waiting for.

  ABOUT TEN DAYS after my birthday, I woke up in the morning with severe pains in the lower part of my abdomen. I thought I had a virus—my diagnosis for all unspecific ailments. I would have stayed in bed if it had been a weekend, but it was a Monday and the proofs for the November issue of New Thought were coming in. I sent Matthew to school, took three aspirins and went to the office. I was sitting at my desk nearly doubled over with pain when the phone rang. It was Fred, yelling at me incoherently—something about “you and your goddamn fucking boyfriend.”

  “Fred, would you mind calming down and speaking a little more distinctly. I’m not feeling very well today.”

  I couldn’t imagine why he was having an attack of jealousy at this late date, especially since we had not been in communication since the night he slept over. It was all much more than I was willing to deal with. My head throbbed and so did my belly. I felt close to tears.

  “You got it from that rotten motherfucker and gave it to me!

  “Gave what, Fred?”

  “The clap! Don’t you even know what you’re walking around with?”

  “I’m not walking around with any such thing.”

  “I always thought you were a decent woman, Molly. We had our troubles, but I respected you. And now you’re just going down the drain—going down the drain in every conceivable way. I’ll never touch you again, you can be sure of that. We’re finished, Molly. Finished.”

  I hung up. I sat at my desk a few moments, then got to my feet and painfully made my way to the cubicle of my friend Felicia, whom I consulted in all matters of catastrophe, both literary and personal. She was a diminutive, high-strung woman who had been book review editor of New Thought for fifteen years. During that time she had had three marriages, as well as numerous affairs with some of the best minds of her generation. Her glamorous but unsettled life and the physiological toll it had taken of her, her consuming interest in matters of the flesh, had made her an encyclopedia of valuable information about certain medical emergencies.

  Felicia was on the phone when I approached her, the receiver cradled under chin while she made notes on the margins of a manuscript with her right hand and chainsmoked with her left. Always welcoming an opportunity for distraction, gossip or analysis of the personality traits of our colleagues, she smiled at me warmly, enthusiastically waving me to a chair piled high with books stuck with slips of paper. I sat down on the edge.

  As my life once again tilted crazily, there was something reassuring about sitting here surrounded by so much familiar disorder—“creative chaos,” Felicia called it. There was an odd comfort in the sight of the dusty proofs and manuscripts going back at least five years bulging precariously on the inadequate shelves, the back issues of journals piled high on the window sill next to the moribund philodendron, the emaciated avocado with its two surviving leaves. It was over this impressive accumulation that my friend reigned in perfect confidence that she alone knew where everything was.

  As the conversation went on, Felicia made shrugs of resigned impatience, conveying to me by certain eloquent gestures that the person at the other end was outrageously boring and she couldn’t wait to turn her full attention to me. “Logorrhea,” she muttered, replacing the receiver in its cradle. “How are you, ducky?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said portentously.

  “Something wrong? Break up with Conrad, that bastard—although it might be all for the good? You don’t look so well,” she observed.

  “I’m not well at all, Felicia.”

  “Oh my god. Not pregnant!”

  I leaned toward her and said quietly, “I think I may have a social disease. Of all things.”

  “Of all things indeed.”

  We both looked in alarm at the doorless entrance to the cubicle. Felicia rose from her desk, grabbed up her cigarettes. “Let’s go into the ladies’ room,” she said in a low conspiratorial tone. Passing the accounting and subscription departments unobtrusively, we made our way there and locked ourselves in.

  “Now tell me,” Felicia said, flicking her ashes into the sink. “Do you think you have any definite symptoms?”

  “Pain here,” I said, pointing to my belly. “And I had a phone call from Fred.”

  “He gave it to you of course.”

  “He says I gave it to him.”

  “Nonsense. Or maybe not nonsense, considering the other one you’re involved with. But more likely it’s Fred. You know his habits.”

  “Yes,” I said grimly.

  “High promiscuity. I’d say he’s been asking for it. And now he’s just trying to displace the blame. Very nice.” Felicia scowled.

  “I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed,” I said. “I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

  “I have. And various other forms of sexual punishment. Of course you’re overwhelmed. And just when you’re getting settled in your new apartment.”

  “I could have lived witho
ut it.”

  “Of course, ducky.” Despite my possibly diseased condition, Felicia put her arm around me and gave me an affectionate squeeze. “Take my advice and go right away—right this minute—to the public health clinic on Twenty-fourth Street. According to the New York Times, they’ve been handling up to three hundred cases a day.”

  “As many as that!”

  “It’s reaching epidemic proportions. Don’t you read the papers?”

  I confessed with some embarrassment that I usually skipped the medical news.

  “Not allergic to penicillin, are you?” I shook my head. “Then you should have absolutely no problem. Of course, there is a particular strain from Indochina that’s highly resistant to penicillin and for which there’s no known cure. But I think it’s quite unlikely you’ve contracted that. Want me to come with you?” she asked kindly. “I’ll cancel my lunch date.”

  An offer of support was something I had encountered so rarely that I was thrown into confusion, not knowing whether to accept it or to decline. “No,” I said, “I think I’ll be all right.”

  I took a taxi only as far as Twenty-second Street and got out in front of a moving and storage company. I walked the rest of the way. A school stood next to my destination. Cutouts of autumn leaves and jack o’ lanterns were pasted against its windows and there were the innocent cries of first-graders from the playground.

  The lobby of the Public Health Clinic smelled of disinfectant, just as I had anticipated. A pimp in high-heeled silver shoes walked briskly past me. A guard, snapping his fingers to a transistor radio, stood behind a little table.

  I walked up to him.

  “Which way to the social disease department?” I asked.

  He looked me up and down. “Uh huh,” he said with a grin. He pointed left.

  The waiting room of the women’s section of the social disease department was totally lacking in amenities. Not one copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal, not one picture of fruit and flowers on its institutional-green walls, not one potted plant. It was thronged with patients waiting on the hard plastic benches—women of every age and description.

  Distracting myself from the business at hand by pretending I was more a sociologist than a patient, I studied my fellow afflicted—the tense young student in the corner biting her lips as she bent over her French grammar; the grandmotherly woman with Clairol-red hair, stolidly crocheting; the model in pants suit with perfectly matched accessories; the weary mother anxiously keeping track of the three small children who accompanied her—and across the room from me, clinging to each other in a highly wrought-up state, two young women I recognized from the few times Fred had taken me to Max’s Kansas City, who had been described to me as “making all the parties,” as well as being frequently written up in the “scenes” column of the Village Voice. In the fluorescent light of the clinic, they looked like two bedraggled night birds, their vintage patchwork finery fluttering limply around their bare skinny thighs, their drugged, painted eyes wide with apprehension as they awaited the results of their tests.

  The disease, I reflected, was a great equalizer, cutting across all distinctions of class. (I was sure Conrad would be interested in that particular observation.) It was entirely possible one could sit next to a perfect stranger who had been a crucial link in the chain of one’s own infection.

  Perhaps unjustly, I studied the girls from Max’s with special interest, making certain speculations as to their circle of acquaintanceship. One of them glanced across the room at me with a bemused look that indicated I might have seemed somewhat familiar—but where … ? She looked away again quickly, desiring eye contact as little as I did. I took out some proofs I’d brought with me and listened for my name.

  It is her ability to create distance that carries her through many a trying situation. In her twenties, she had worried, even anguished over this tendency to absent the Me at various crucial moments—thus possibly denying herself the full range of human experience. Now she suspects that certain varieties of experience are simply not worth having.

  Where is the value in this present one, for example?

  The recognition of the extent of the insidious corruption whose outward manifestation is this spreading disease that is nothing if not social?

  Conrad often criticizes her for leading an all too privatized existence, for living somewhat aloof from the great social movements of her time. Now she is caught up against her will in this one—and so, by implication, is he.

  “Would you mind letting us have a list of your contacts?” the special investigator asks (after she has been examined, pronounced positive and dosed with penicillin). He indicates to her the appropriate spaces on the yellow form where names are to be filled in. He is an ordinary bland young man who could just as well have become an insurance agent or a bank teller. She wonders what quirk of fate has led him into this unusual branch of the Civil Service.

  For a moment she hesitates, confronting the moral issue raised by this unexpected extension of the honor system.

  “I have no contacts,” she lies—which the young investigator accepts in perfect faith, since the fact that the disease has in a sense come to her honestly, through her husband, indicates a certain respectability.

  He even blushes a little, explaining that this is just a routine question, since it is the practice of the department to follow up all leads relating to contacts, notifying same to report for immediate examination and treatment.

  “Of course,” she says pleasantly, handing the form with its unfilled spaces back to him. She knows instinctively that countless others have automatically committed this identical act of civil disobedience. No wonder the disease has flourished. There are areas in human affairs from which the state must be excluded at all costs.

  She will have to tell Conrad herself as soon as possible. And he will then have to tell Roberta. And suddenly she sees the disease in a new light entirely. It is a form of communication!

  WHEN I’VE BEEN injured by someone close to me, I am astonished at first, almost paralyzed. And then I become more and more troubled by whatever is incomprehensible—the opaque and brittle crust that forms over an act, concealing motives, reasons, without which the act itself appears gratuitous, even irrational. I pick away at this crust as if at one of the scabs ever present on my knees during childhood—a bit of it flakes off and then more and I almost stop, anticipating the pain that will be like the ghost of the original wound. And yet I’m drawn to continue to the end, to reveal the contours of whatever lies beneath.

  Conrad was not like me. He often made the mistake of interpreting my questioning as vengefulness—not understanding that it was more my wish to gather facts than to sit in judgment upon them. It was a subtle game he played—he the embodiment of good nature, I the embodiment of suspicion and anxiety. His own good nature was certainly his most outstanding feature, shining forth even in the most inappropriate circumstances. Who knew what dark thoughts lurked in the mind of the Great Accepter?

  Here, for example, was how he greeted the news of my infidelity and its unfortunate consequences when I saw him that Tuesday evening.

  “I’m not going to ask you to explain, Molly. Under the circumstances, I hardly have the right.”

  All of this was uttered in the mildest tones. He might have been inquiring why his shirt had not gone to the laundry. I felt abashed in the face of so much generosity. Another man might have indulged in recriminations. I wondered why he felt he didn’t have the right.

  “I am a little surprised, though,” he admitted. “I know you weren’t considering going back to Fred.”

  “Will it make any sense if I tell you I honestly don’t know why I did it?”

  “Why should I expect things to make sense? I just wish you’d picked a better time for your reunion.” He grinned philosophically.

  I turned away from him and stared at the rug.

  I
had spent two days in dread of this meeting—preparing to deal with Conrad’s jealousy and rage, to confront him openly even at the risk of being thrust away. As soon as I’d come back from the clinic, I’d called his office. His secretary thought he’d gone away for the weekend and had not yet returned to the city. Intermittently I tried his apartment. In the evening my sense of responsibility drove me to consider leaving a note under his door. But what could I have written?

  Feeling a confusing bitterness, I waited for my guilt to return.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go to the clinic tomorrow,” Conrad said. “Where did you say it was?”

  “Twenty-forth Street.”

  “I wonder how early they open. I’ll have to go before the office. Dammit, I have a ten o’clock appointment.”

  “I’m really sorry about this, Conrad,” I said.

  “There’s absolutely no room in my schedule for getting sick. But who knows?” he reflected cheerfully. “Maybe I don’t even have it. I haven’t felt any symptoms. What is it for men—a sort of burning sensation?”

  “I guess it’s still just incubating.”

  Conrad frowned. “Let’s see. You saw Fred on a Saturday?”

  “It was my birthday.”

  He ignored the implication. “And when was it we got together after that?”

  “Last Tuesday.”

  “That’s four days’ difference … ”

  “Maybe you’ll get the shot soon enough so you won’t come down with it in a bad way.”

  “That would be good.” But he was sounding much less optimistic. An anxious look had become visible on his face.

  “I really did keep trying to get in touch with you before this.”

  “I was around,” he said vaguely.

  “I even left messages at your office. I suppose I could have reached you last night, but naturally I didn’t try.”