Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  On and on the women talked, getting quite loud sometimes, each eager to succeed the next, hold the floor for a moment with tales of even more outrageous atrocities suffered and survived. I contributed reminiscences of my marriage, warming up with the chicken pox episode and going on to a spirited description of the summer Fred had rented a bungalow without indoor plumbing on the Jersey Shore for me and Matthew to go away to every weekend so that he could have an affair with someone in our air-conditioned apartment.

  One strikingly attractive woman whose psychiatrist husband had always mercilessly criticized her appearance, her cooking, her lack of interest in current affairs, her inability to balance the checking account and to be gay at cocktail parties, now offered him up to the other assembled guests, as if on auction. Gray and distinguished, she said, good tennis player, lucrative practice. Jolly, she said, though we all looked at her dubiously. Yes, jolly. “Very ho ho ho,” she said, holding her rounded arms in front of her as if to indicate a Santa Claus-shaped figure. “Any takers?”

  There were none, of course. In this context we all had the highest standards. At least Conrad was not critical, I thought. The woman who’d had the psychiatrist husband also had a lover now—someone much younger than she was who adored her. She admitted she lived in so much terror the affair would end, she could not allow herself to be happy.

  We laughed with her at that paradox. More wine was passed around. Matthew wandered away from the table and turned on the television, where an impoverished family of eight during the depression had just won a turkey on a church raffle ticket bought by the thirteen-year-old daughter who was dying of leukemia. He lay on the rug dreamily eating a cupcake with orange frosting that had been specially purchased for him. It was way past his bedtime. He had no interest in the soufflé Grand Marnier that had now been brought in from the kitchen. By the time the commercial came on, he was asleep. I tiptoed across the room and turned off the set, the women’s voices, the laughter, rising now to an even higher pitch over the extravagant sweetness, the seductive texture of the dessert, the forbidden caloric pleasure. Felicia, released finally from culinary responsibility, was holding forth, quoting a line from Hemingway: “If a woman is good, she doesn’t need a pillow.” “Oh that’s too wonderful, he couldn’t have written that,” someone said. But it appeared that he had, it was somewhere in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the rest of us wondered how we had ever missed it. But the point of mentioning it at all, Felicia said, the important point was the seriousness with which she, intellectually and sexually precocious at fifteen, had originally taken it, having only the vaguest idea of its meaning. “I was quite determined that (a) I was going to be good and (b) I was never going to need a pillow.” “And have you?” the woman who had been married to the jolly psychiatrist called out. “Never,” she responded grandly. “Never in thirty years.”

  I laughed with the others until my throat ached and my eyes smarted. But I was suddenly anxious. It was nearly eleven and what if Conrad was trying to reach me? Any minute now he might be saying good night to his mother, going to the phone—even though he hadn’t promised. He’d only said he’d try.

  I ended up being the first one to leave, shamelessly rushing away from there toward the arms of the enemy, refusing cognac and coffee, using Matthew as an excuse—the child needed his sleep—although everyone could see he was sleeping very comfortably. He cried when I woke him to put on his shoes and jacket—I struggled fiercely with the zipper of the latter which always stuck just when you were in a hurry—besides which, it is very hard to zip another person. “Goddamn crumby zipper,” I said, because it was late, it was late, I was losing valuable seconds. The phone rang insistently in my mind. Felicia gave Matthew a kiss and a fistful of nuts and we descended into the dark and empty street and I hailed a cab. We were home by eleven-fifteen. And then I sat up for the next two hours and waited.

  I used to do that very often, Conrad—rush away from somewhere because I thought you might be going to call me. Who knows what I missed on those truncated evenings of my life? Once I was at a delightful party engaged in an intense and promising conversation with an immensely attractive man I’d just met. I walked away from him in the middle of a sentence—and you didn’t call that night, after all. You were never tied to me like that—wired would be more accurate—wired to me with invisible telephone wire. I thought I could actually feel the calls trying to come through sometimes, getting short-circuited—although the line was always open.

  Felicia once told me she’d had a special phone installed with a number known only to her lover, so that he could always reach her, even at the very moment she was talking to someone else on the other phone. Although it would have embarrassed me to have gone that far for anyone, I admired her ingenuity. It was only a small additional charge on her bill and for her it was a solution. I understood her anxiety perfectly. He used it three or four times, I think, and then they broke up. Maybe it was too much for him—the significance of such unabashed availability. Never personally having been on the other end of it, I cannot imagine what it would be like.

  Conrad was not even in town that Thanksgiving or for the rest of that weekend, as it turned out. He was in Philadelphia with Roberta and her family.

  It was Deborah who told me. Perceiving me clearly on this occasion as the underdog, the victim, she broke silence at last and phoned to tell me of running into Roberta at the exercise class earlier that week. She described to me Roberta’s joy and self-congratulatory sense of accomplishment—Conrad had been so difficult recently, so moody and unpredictable, but now it seemed, under the ascendancy of her influence, he was straightening out.

  SHE HAS TAKEN to her bed, hiding out there under the covers, burning up one minute, cold the next—pretending for Matthew’s benefit that she is ill with something real. But the pain is real enough, although the illness is not. She gives him extensive direction on how to make himself a peanut butter sandwich and sinks back against the pillows exhausted, knowing she should be marketing, taking out the laundry. But her whole head is burning, her cheeks are aflame; the fire rises up all the way to her scalp, travels along her hair, singeing it at the edges. She is a person who has been lied to, casually humored then betrayed.

  “I have a headache too, Mom.” Matthew’s small body plumps down next to her on the bed companionably.

  “No you haven’t, Matthew.”

  “Yes I do. I need a baby aspirin.”

  “You’re acting like a baby.”

  He thinks it over. “Maybe,” he says.

  She hears a shrill, unpleasant voice obviously belonging to someone at the end of her tether cry out, “For god’s sake! Will you leave me alone!” He lies there quite still, unnaturally solemn. Stricken by guilt, she explains that this desire characteristic of grownups is often hard for children to understand. She asks him if he would please just take her word for it.

  Recovering immediately, he argues that this is not necessarily true of children because he, Matthew, understands everything she tells him.

  “In that case, would you please go and play in your room for a while.”

  He goes away for fifteen minutes, during which she cries and wonders whether in addition to everything else she is turning into a rotten mother—hating Conrad for that, too. Hating him. Yes, that is certainly the emotion she feels and she wants only to tell him that immediately, reach him immediately with the clean, fresh hatred pure and undissipated. That is what I want to do, she thinks with one half of her, the other half in anguish thinking that she has lost him, lost him without knowing it because he didn’t even have the guts to tell her. All the time he was sitting on her couch looking at her in that concerned way, taking her in his arms, he knew damn well what he was really going to be doing this weekend—not to mention all the obvious connotations of that trip out of town with Roberta. What could that mean except what she thought it did—that formality of going to meet the parents?
r />   And she never even knew it, never suspected—all these weeks everything going on as usual, except for the strain between them for a while, and even that had disappeared. And that is somehow the worst of it—the knife that twists again and again—that she hadn’t known, that she has been just as unconscious as she ever thought Roberta was. They have each known different portions of the truth—and in the gap between Conrad swims back and forth with the untroubled ease of a fish, back and forth from one to the other. So that even now if by all the external evidence she thinks she has lost him, that too may be an appearance, nothing more than that, just something she was not supposed to ever find out. He will appear on Tuesday just as usual. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” he will ask.

  “Hello. I don’t think you know me. But I know who you are.”

  I finally settled on that as my opening. If I could just say that much, get that far, I could say the rest—having rejected “We met a couple of years ago in Amagansett, but I don’t think you would remember me,” as too much like normal conversation. It was conceivable that, losing nerve, one might go on from there to a discussion of summer houses in Amagansett, mutual friends and other trivia and never get to the point. In “I know who you are” there was a certain undertone of dark suggestion, committing one irrevocably to what was to follow.

  It was not that I wanted to frighten Roberta—it was that I distrusted myself. I was afraid of leaving too much room for my cowardice or my scruples—I wasn’t sure which might serve to inhibit me. Last minute cowardice probably. There was an unspoken but very strong taboo against certain acts of communication between women—a taboo undoubtedly first invented by men, protecting their sacred prerogative to pick and choose and sample, all in the estimable cause of “finding themselves.” God forbid! What if they didn’t! And yet taboos are made to be broken. There are acts almost inconceivable in contemplation that in execution are as simple as picking up a phone and dialing the seven digits of a particular number. The phone rings. One holds on to the receiver, heart beating, and waits. “Hello. I don’t think you know me … ” Anyone could say it. Who says that a woman cannot talk to another woman?

  The more I thought about making that call during that long and bitter weekend, the more it seemed the only thing to do—if not the right thing. Seen from a distance, the act had a cold and shining hardness about it, drawing me on toward the moment of commission with the silent force of a magnet. And yet could I really do it? Could I become transformed from the depressed and essentially forgiving person I thought I was into someone quite unfamiliar—a sort of terrorist striking with a flaming Biblical sword? I think it is only fair that you should know the truth, Roberta.

  Oh, I was determined to be fair. She was not, after all, my enemy. The real enemy was Conrad’s indecision. We were both its victims—although she was a victim more privileged than I, occupying a larger and more comfortable cell. I wondered if even in Philadelphia, at her parents’ table, she felt really sure of him—if even there she felt a persistent uncertainty, the sense of inexplicable omissions just below the surface, days and nights unaccounted for, secret transgressions, inconsistencies. Had he promised her he was turning over a new leaf? She would have believed it, of course, just as I would have believed that kind of promise myself—because I wanted to. Conrad himself might even believe it, temporarily. He would come to see me with a reserved and solemn face—“Molly, I have something to tell you … ”

  I turned and twisted in my unmade bed. I staggered to the kitchen and heated a can of soup, ladled it into a bowl and ended by pouring it into the sink, clogging the drain with noodles. If I had lost him anyway, there was nothing left to lose. I could make the call or not, it wouldn’t matter. I would know only the satisfaction of acting rather than being acted upon. Did the means then justify themselves?

  I reached for the kitchen phone and dialed his number—not hers—giving him his last chance to explain, to tell me what was going to happen in my life. I wanted to hear it all now, not Tuesday. How could I wait another three days or even another hour? I almost hoped he would lie to me. That would be a sign he still cared enough to try to keep me. But I would have to be hard on him, tell him what I knew, not allow him to deny it. Holding the receiver slightly away from my ear, I listened to the phone ring eight times. He always picked it up by the third ring if he was home. But it was not yet the end of the weekend, it was only Saturday night. They were still together, unreachable in some private space sacred to couples, “out of town for the holidays” like any more conventional pair, taking a respite from the pressures of the city. No need to hasten their return.

  They came back on Sunday. Around eight there was a busy signal on Conrad’s line. Perhaps at that moment he was trying to reach me. I never asked him. After I hung up, I picked up the phone and dialed again. By this time I knew the other number by heart.

  “Hello,” she said in the flat, little girl’s voice that I remembered.

  “Hello. Is this Roberta?” I recognized the crisp, civil tone as the one I used in the office when talking to strangers.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Molly Held. I know who you are but you don’t know me.” I realized after I had spoken that I had reversed the order of my original statement, given it a baldness, a bluntness, it had not had before.

  “Am I supposed to?” she asked rather coldly.

  “No. We are not—either of us—supposed to know each other. I’m calling because I felt there was something you ought to be aware of.”

  “And what is that?” she asked after a moment.

  “I am a person whom Conrad has been seeing. He has been seeing me rather seriously for several months now.”

  There was a silence.

  “I suppose he never mentioned it. I thought he would have told you himself. Anyway, I’m tired of being the person who knows everything. We both should know all sides.”

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t understand how Conrad could be seeing you. He’s with me every night of the week.”

  I had to ponder the logic of what she had just told me. I wondered—if it was true that I could not be seen—whether I existed, whether Conrad existed. “Well,” I said clumsily, all my adroitness, my desire to maintain a certain delicacy, having deserted me, “someone must be lying. Why don’t you think about it? Goodbye,” I said and hung up.

  Felicia, whose wisdom about the nuances of human relationships I trust absolutely, has often warned me about the unreliability of dialogues imagined in advance of their occurrence—a lesson learned through her own tendency to endlessly project and rehearse, taking both parts—her own and that of her adversary. “It always comes out very differently from what you expected, Molly. That’s the only certainty you can count on.”

  I think I had expected anything but a denial. Hurt, certainly. Rage—directed against Conrad rather than at me, although I might have borne the brunt of it at first. But finally she would have recognized the essential morality of what I had done. The bringer of the truth is always in the right.

  I believed that then, but since I’ve come to question it. Was I not also punishing Roberta in deliberately depriving her of her illusion of happiness—the truth then being not merely itself, gratuitously delivered, but the instrument of a less admirable motive? I did not want her to be happier than I was, even if that happiness was based upon a deception and therefore not objectively real. I wanted her to suffer as I was suffering, and only in that sharing was I prepared to be generous, fantasizing a commiseration that Conrad would have abhorred between two women who had so much in common.

  He called me about twenty minutes later. “Are you expecting to be in for a while, Molly?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I’d like to come over to talk to you.”

  “Do as you please, Conrad!” I shouted. “Do as you please!”

  “I’m coming over.” There was a click.r />
  How dare he ask if I was going to be in? Wasn’t I almost always in, there at his convenience? Didn’t he always know just exactly where I was? But that was going to change, I thought wildly, that was going to change. Tomorrow I was going to start a whole new life, become a person who went out a lot. Energized by rage, I whirled through the apartment, straightening, tidying, sweeping the accumulated mess of the weekend into corners and drawers—a rampage of order. “Get your things out of the living room!” I yelled to Matthew, locking myself into the bathroom to strip off the nightgown I had worn for two days and change into sweater and jeans, brush my hair—my hands shaking as I put on makeup, mascara burning into my eyes, smudging my cheeks so that I looked as if I had been shoveling coal in a basement. I was scrubbing if off when the doorbell rang.

  “The door, Mom!”

  “Get it, Matthew!”

  “What?”

  “Get it!”

  Drying my face on a towel, I heard Conrad come in.

  “Where’s your mother, Matthew?”

  “Oh, she’s here.”

  I felt sick with a watery sickness, my life flowing away from me. Gone almost gone. I stepped out of the bathroom into the hall that ran from the living room into the rest of the apartment. It was a narrow place, a close, constricted little passageway. Conrad stood facing me in the entrance to the living room. He seemed jammed into that space, filling it up almost completely. It was as if he had become huge, all his S familiar proportions suddenly swollen.