Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Where would you have reached me?”

  “At Roberta’s. I didn’t think you’d appreciate it much.”

  “It would not have been a good idea.”

  “I could have pretended to be someone else. I could even have pretended to be me, since she doesn’t know who I am anyway.” Somehow, even in this situation, I ended up as the injured one. Inevitably all our quarrels led to the same place.

  “Oh come on, Molly!”

  “Suppose there ever really was a bad emergency. Could I reach you there?”

  “Of course you could,” he said.

  “Conrad, you really are the limit!”

  “Well, in a genuine emergency of course—”

  “But it would have to be a matter of life and death. Not something as trivial as this. Even though in this case it affects her too.” This is not the way, not the way, I told myself—attempting to no avail to hold myself in check.

  “It really does affect her, Conrad.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said grimly.

  “You’re going to have to tell her.”

  “I had no thought of doing otherwise.”

  “Maybe it’s even for the best. You never know.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, nothing’s ever as bad as whatever it is you dread. Even the clap is just something you cure right away with penicillin. Nobody dies of it. I’m feeling much better since I got my shot.”

  Enacting a tenderness I did not exactly feel, I touched his hair, ran my hand down his impassive cheek.

  We had been sitting next to each other all this time on the living-­room couch and now abruptly he stood up. “I think I should go,” he said.

  “You’re not going to stay over?”

  “Not tonight, Molly. Not tonight.”

  Separated by the expanse of the coffee table, they are sitting on their injections in her living room listening to Mahler’s First Symphony—which Conrad has turned up to full volume, making conversation nearly impossible. It is a lack in her that she is not particularly fond of Mahler herself. She would have picked something by Satie for this occasion, or perhaps the Billy Holliday recording of “Don’t Explain.” In any case, she knows that in other more important ways, too, they are out of tune with each other. It is the beginning of a new and more difficult period. Tonight she is irritated by the way she has seen him listen to music so often before—eyes half closed, fingers swaying an imaginary baton. If not for his fascination with the law, his dedication to social justice, he might have become a world-famous conductor or at least a fiddler in the Philharmonic. How intensely he appreciates Mahler’s genius—shutting her out. She remembers the interminable Saturday afternoons of her childhood when there was no one to play with and her parents were listening to the opera.

  It is raining outside, a cold late October downpour that floods the rear courtyard below, setting the garbage can lids afloat. Full of Mahler-gloom, she gets up and stands at the window, staring into a brilliantly lit apartment across the way where a pimp and his two women are smoking grass, passing a communal joint ceremoniously from hand to hand, sometimes stopping to toss a ball to their small communal poodle. She thinks for some reason of some lines of Pound’s that she has not read for a long time:

  And I am happier than you are,

  And they were happier than I am;

  And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing.

  She is nearly overwhelmed by the poignancy, the irony, of the last line. “And the fish swim in the lake … ” One of the women, a tall, spectacular blonde in little satin hotpants, comes to the window and stares aggressively into the night. Perhaps she sees Molly standing at her own window. The front paws and head of the poodle appear beside her. The woman pulls a cord and draws the drapes, which are of some heavy dull golden silk, probably synthetic. A pinkish light glows behind them for a few moments and then goes out.

  She turns and finds Conrad watching her—not warmly but with a kind of guarded objectivity, the way one might watch an attractive but unpredictable wild animal from a distance as one wonders what it will conceivably do next.

  He never mentioned Roberta. It was as if I had dropped a pebble into a pool and it had sunk straight to the bottom without a trace of that expected pattern of concentric spreading rings. Now I was left on the shore staring at the smooth surface of the water which gave me back only my own reflection.

  I didn’t mention her either. Things were much too fragile for that.

  Some people can never admit to being angry. They will sit in stony silence, they will pretend to be affable, they will engage in meaningless civilities, they will physically remove themselves from the premises if they have to—anything but reveal that they are gripped by strong emotion.

  Conrad seemed determined not to react except obliquely. He continued to come around to see me the same two nights of the week just as if nothing had happened. There was no repetition of the time he had fled. His references to his experiences in the clinic, to the discomfort he was prepared to gallantly and stoically endure as the price of our association, were wryly humorous. He drank the tea I made for him in lieu of the wine that was forbidden, but impatiently dismissed any other ministering efforts on my part—as if in some way they might mock him. He wasn’t quite sure of me now that I had become the transgressor and he the victim.

  There was no doubt that I had inflicted a wound upon him where he was most vulnerable—the locus of his pride and anxiety, that bit of flesh he employed with such wonderful dexterity, that unfailing flesh that imperiously ruled him, that was in a sense his Achilles’ heel. He concealed it from me, on the nights when we retired together, under a layer of stretched white cotton—as if even my gaze might contaminate it further. Not wishing to be naked where he was not, I took to undressing in the bathroom and covering myself with my flannel nightgown. We would sleep with a cold breadth of sheet between us—although we might have held each other, there would have been no harm in that. Nothing but affection would have been transmitted by our kisses.

  In the past we had invariably reached temporary settlements of our differences in bed—there was always that attraction that seemed to have a life of its own, so that even in the midst of the most profound verbal rift, there was the implicit knowledge that shortly we would be physically joined. But now the pleasure that had initially caused our fall from grace was denied to us just when we needed it to fall back on.

  It was small consolation to me that in my ex-husband’s eyes, at least, I was vindicated. He eventually called me and confessed with some embarrassment that he’d totally forgotten a passing encounter with a certain young lady from an East Side discotheque a few nights before we slept together. She had since left for Paris with a rock group, so there had been no way of verifying his suspicions, but still it seemed to him now that she must have been the source, and he was glad because he would not have wanted to have thought of me without respect, since after all he had been joined in wedlock to me and I would always be the mother of his child, that fine little guy whom he intended to see every other Sunday if he could manage it. He humbly hoped that I had not been seriously inconvenienced, etc. It was one of Fred’s finest moments. He had never been a man given to making apologies. Perhaps the shifting fortunes he’d experienced recently had begun to have a humanizing effect.

  I told him I had no hard feelings. “Well, live and let live,” I said. It costs nothing to be forgiving when one no longer loves.

  And yet if Fred had been seeking vengeance, he could not have chosen a more effective form.

  I think Conrad was always a little afraid of me after that. The anger he never expressed remained with him, a secret hidden even from his conscious self. I am guessing, of course. Certainly his behavior was entirely in keeping with his ideology. If he believed in perfect freedom for himself, how could he deny the same freedom to
a woman without being sexist? Roberta, I suppose, was as free in his mind as I was. And since she and I and he were all equally free, we all could do as we pleased in respect to each other. From a theoretical standpoint it worked perfectly. Fred, needless to say, never thought about such questions at all. And I am not sure myself that emotions are subject to theory.

  Even in Conrad’s realm of theoretical freedom, there were boundaries as well as a definite hierarchy. Conrad was on top, of course. Just below him there was Roberta and sometimes me—our positions kept fluctuating. There were times when she was what he called “the primary relationship” and times when I was. Or maybe I never was more than secondary. I felt primary in the beginning—if one can trust one’s feelings. Later I felt entitled-to-be-primary—which is not quite the same. Let me see if I can define “primary relationship.” It is the one that is considered the objective rather than the obstacle to the objective. It is the one that is to be worked out in the future, the obstacle having been dealt with and laid to rest. It is the one that is rational, that is consciously chosen, the secondary being considered a neurotic attachment.

  What I had lost forever in Conrad’s eyes, I think, was the peculiarly virginal status of a woman just liberated from marriage. Conrad would be the first to disagree with me on this point, since virgins have no place at all in his theoretical system. An encounter with a real virgin and the responsibilities thereof would almost be too much for him—and I think he would wisely abstain. However, the virgin, rare as she has come to be in our culture above a certain age group, still occupies an exalted place in the hearts of men, still is highly prized, is in fact the ultimate possession, the fulfillment of that masculine desire to go where no man has gone before. I cannot believe that Conrad was that different from men in general, that the mask of the libertarian did not conceal the stern visage of the puritan. How else to explain his consistent passion for the newly separated—Roberta, for example, and then me, and I can recall hearing him speak of other women in that condition with an unmistakable flickering of erotic interest. Was it merely coincidence, was it really nothing more than his attraction to someone’s particular qualities in each case? Was it not that we were all as close as he could come to the real thing, women just out of the convent, our innocence restored by years of separation from the world of casually traded sex, ready for his imprinting.

  Conrad, I am being hard on you. I am not acknowledging your specialness. I am only drawing conclusions from what I have observed—the inevitable rush of masculine attention when a married woman first “comes out.” Later it markedly drops away. Who can explain it?

  I allowed myself to be deflowered. I dragged you into the mud, Conrad. I lost my aura, became less for you. I am sorry.

  Roberta was clearly primary after all that. I receded, dropped to second place.

  I wonder what he told her. He told her something, but I am almost certain it was not the truth. Since she was given, according to Conrad, to Sturm und Drang, I imagine she wept and stormed and reduced him to humiliation. Then, when all seemed most hopeless, perhaps there was a touching scene of forgiveness—no less effective for the fact that she probably knew she was going to forgive him all along.

  I finally did ask Conrad what happened.

  “By the way, what happened with Roberta?”

  “She took it in her stride.”

  THANKSGIVING WAS going to be bad that year. I could feel it approaching like a doom by the second week of November, when exhortations went up in supermarket windows to ORDER YOUR TURKEY NOW. Conrad was going to spend it with his mother. I had never met that particular lady of mythic needs. “Why don’t I make dinner for all of us?” I suggested in a casual tone. “I really wouldn’t mind.”

  Conrad looked somewhat startled. “No Molly, it’s nice of you, but it wouldn’t work out. I don’t think she’d understand.”

  I’d actually had a mad and hopeful vision for a moment of all of us around the dinner table together, a kind of false family—Conrad’s mother naturally being somewhat reserved in her feelings toward me as I dished out the turkey (hopefully not too dry), the chestnut stuffing (which she would probably find too heavy) and the spicy cranberry relish (which she would no doubt refuse), but since she was said to be very fond of small male children, she was sure to be enchanted at any rate by Matthew, who would have to submit to a bath, shampoo and cleanup of his room for the occasion. Conrad, never a picky eater, would have seconds and thirds of everything and come back during the week to finish up the leftovers.

  “What’s there to understand?” I said.

  Silence. An embarrassed look.

  “Well, I’m not much in the mood for Thanksgiving anyway. If it wasn’t for Matthew, I wouldn’t make any kind of fuss at all, just eat spaghetti or something or go out to a Chinese restaurant and have Peking Duck.”

  “Now, there’s a good idea,” Conrad said cheerfully.

  “Maybe that’s what I’ll do.”

  I sat very still for a moment. “Excuse me,” I said. I got up and went and locked myself in the bathroom. I cried for several minutes, turning the cold water on so that it rushed loudly into the sink and splashing it all over my face before I came out.

  “You look funny,” Conrad said.

  “Do I?”

  “Flushed.”

  I turned my face away from him. He put his hand on my chin and turned it around again. “Is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “It’s just my annual pre-holiday depression. It’s a little bit worse this year.”

  “I always have dinner with my mother.”

  “It’s all right. Really. At my age I should be immune to the holidays.”

  “I am,” Conrad said with satisfaction. “Quite immune.”

  “Maybe you could come over afterwards.”

  “I’d like to very much, but it might be too late. I’ll try to call you.” I wondered whether he spent Christmas with his mother, too. What about New Year’s? But he was looking at me so kindly now, so warmly. It had been a long time since such warmth had emanated from him. I put my arms around Conrad, burrowed my face into his shoulder and sobbed almost contentedly. I felt him knead the back of my neck; his other hand moved firmly and gently down my thigh, cupped my knee.

  “I know a wonderful cure for depression,” he whispered.

  Such cures are momentary, and may be more distracting than curative. My depression returned full force the next morning, as did the problem of how to survive Thanksgiving, since Conrad had not succeeded in imparting any of his immunity. It might even be said that his own was debatable, since as far as I know he participated fully in the celebration of every family holiday during the time that I knew him—though never with me. One can only assume, I suppose, a profound attitude of alienation on his part in the very midst of the festivities.

  I am certainly still in total agreement with him that the emotionally laden American Holiday Season has deteriorated into little more than a capitalist potlatch based upon the appallingly dishonest assumption that everybody in this basically fragmented and troubled society either is or should suddenly be feeling terrific for at least a month.

  I could do without the whole damn period myself except for the long weekends. It embarrasses me considerably that just as if I am no older than Matthew, I feel it is my due to be happy on certain days of the year—and that I am therefore particularly unhappy in the knowledge that I will be feeling as rotten, as shut out in the cold as the Little Match Girl. On the chilly dawn of Christmas morning, I will be alone in my empty bed trying to assemble the G.I. Joe helicopter that is the heart’s desire of my child, tears running out of my eyes and curses streaming from my lips as I struggle with the brittle plastic parts that will not snap together. On Thanksgiving it’s always the Macy’s Parade and having to stand among all the families—the mommies and daddie
s, stepfathers and lovers—shivering in the November cold on Central Park West, awaiting the ancient, patched balloons that floated through my own childhood. And I grip Matthew’s little hand that is like a soft anchor, because I don’t like to stand there manless, childless. But of course I let him pull away from me. For isn’t he entitled to crawl under the police barrier to the curb, to see everything, to talk to the clowns?

  “I assume, naturally,” Felicia said, appearing suddenly one morning in the entrance to my cubicle at the office, “that you are otherwise engaged—but in case you aren’t, I’ve decided to have a few friends come over on Thanksgiving. I detest turkey, so I’m making a goose. There’s an excellent recipe in Julia Child, much better than the one in Larousse Gastronomique. I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried it.”

  “No I haven’t.” I was staring at her with astonished gratitude. “I’d love to come,” I said. “I am not otherwise engaged.”

  Felicia sighed. “I somehow thought you might not be. You must bring Matthew,” she said. “I adore that child, that intelligent, wonderful face.”

  “Can I bring anything else?”

  “Spinach greens. Five pounds. Snip off the stems and give them three rinsings to get out the sediment. But maybe you don’t really want to wash all that spinach—it’s an onerous task at best.”

  “I don’t mind at all. Felicia, I feel rescued.”

  “That’s what we all must do. We must rescue ourselves and others. Well, I’m delighted you’re coming and I assure you you won’t find it dull. It’s going to be entirely a gathering of women.”

  A gathering of women. I remember the defiant elegance of the menu. It was pumpkin soup that we started with. “It should have been a pie, Felicia!” Matthew said sternly. He was too young to accept such reversals. The grownups had had more practice—having­ experienced not only the transformations of pumpkins into the unexpected but desire into distaste, marriage­ into divorce, parenthood into custody, love into separation­. Farther­ uptown or downtown, east or west, the ears of the uninvited absent burned perhaps, or perhaps not, in the consoling­ presences of other women—yes, they had all probably found new women by now. There was an oversupply of women, a surplus. The sadistic husband of forty-four could find an eager girl of twenty-two. The alcoholic could find sympathy. The relentless bore was in demand for mixed dinners.