Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Angry? After having you all to herself for two months?”

  “I’m not the easiest person to get along with. I have many faults that can be annoying on a day-to-day basis. Still Roberta has become convinced that we should live together. She thinks that’s the only way to resolve many of our problems.”

  For a moment I could scarcely breathe. “And you don’t feel the same,” I said.

  “I’m not at a point where I’m ready to make that commitment to anybody.”

  “But if you did, it would be to her.”

  “I didn’t say that, Molly.”

  “No, I said it.”

  “Molly, don’t you think my feelings for you have quite a lot to do with all of this?”

  “I don’t really know anything, Conrad.”

  “Then you should allow your own instincts to tell you something.”

  “Lately I’ve been trying not to have any instincts. I’d just like to exist in a realm of fact for a change.” Actually, it was Malcolm I was thinking of as well as the situation at hand. I wondered if I’d even be making such statements to Conrad now if it hadn’t been for what had happened with Malcolm, too.

  Conrad was looking at me meanwhile in a soft sort of way, as if he sincerely wanted to show me he understood. “What would you say, Molly, if I told you Roberta and I have decided to stop seeing each other—and that there is a seventy-five percent chance that this is a permanent decision?”

  “I’d say,” I said, still curiously unable to breathe normally, “that I’d still have to worry about the other twenty-five percent.”

  “Twenty-five percent is just a generous allowance for outside possibilities. I know your desire for me to be honest. But wouldn’t you say the odds are in your favor—assuming of course that you still want to have me? I know nothing about your relationship with this other person.”

  “I still want to have you, Conrad,” I said after a while.

  He drew me down to him and kissed me, holding me against him. “I hope you’re prepared to see a lot of me. I’m going to be very lonely, you know.”

  THERE ARE TIMES when words run away from us. Even the most persuasive orator, the brilliant negotiator, the expert weaver and dodger, can make a slip. A faltering of attention, a moment of ambivalence, and we are apt to say the totally inappropriate thing—or to be more honest than we ever intended. Conrad was not exempt from this weakness. That incongruous remark about being very lonely was one of the most revealing things he ever allowed himself to say to me.

  At first I noted it as incongruous—nothing more. My mind was adjusting to the realization that I had won, and I wondered why the victory seemed so undramatic. Why there was a dullness of feeling, when one might have expected exhilaration. I suppose I had always imagined that at some point Conrad would consciously choose me. Instead I felt rather like a consolation prize, what was left to Conrad in the wake of Roberta’s defection. Since I was already there, he had me to fall back on. But why even then would he say he’d be lonely? It was an effect of stress like his backache. Perhaps I was wrong to expect too much from him. Whatever his less positive feelings had been for Roberta, he had undoubtedly become very used to her. With her terrible dependency she had filled his life, confirmed his sense of his own importance. Maybe Conrad didn’t feel important at all, and thus needed confirmation over and over again from as many different sources as possible. He was vulnerable, my Conrad. Perhaps you had to keep going down to get to that place in him—but it was there.

  I felt a tenderness for him. The brittle game of words I’d been playing suddenly ended. Lying in his arms, I whispered to him that he was not to worry about being lonely.

  If there is one thing I have always believed in, it is the inability of men to know their own minds. Putting my faith in this negative side of their character, I have acted accordingly—not always with success. I believed, for example, that I could turn Fred into a father by the very act of producing a baby. It was I who promised nothing would change—and he who kept his side of the bargain to the letter. Still I have my son, the one male in my life with whom I have a permanent relationship. Other miscalculations have left me with less.

  Is it better not to win at all than to win by default? Whatever the answer to that question, it was not in me to have walked away from Conrad at that juncture. Perhaps Isabel Archer could have done it. There was a time when I was much younger when the novels of Henry James had considerable influence upon my notion of morality. It was that repeated Jamesian act of renunciation that became for me almost a religious ideal. The summer I was nineteen I seriously wanted to be Lambert Strether. Instead I grew up and became the person I am.

  I have found it nearly impossible most of the time to live my life by absolute standards. It is more a matter of getting by, making do with what one has—improvising recklessly out of some misguided belief in one’s ability to prevail. I present myself to the world with a rather self-effacing exterior. Perhaps underneath there is a blind and stubborn arrogance.

  It was like a marriage, she thought after a while, in the sense that Conrad could be absent in the very midst of being present in the way that husbands often are. At least that had been her own experience of marriage, although she retained hopes that it need not necessarily be universal. At any rate, they did not seem very much like lovers. This was partially due to the fact that even after Conrad had recovered from his back ache, they made love on an average of only once a week, usually for some reason Thursdays—though they now spent four or five nights together, including weekends.

  He talks about being tired so much, she begins to worry he may indeed be in danger of burning himself out—an expression he uses once when he feels particularly depressed. Another time he tells her, “I feel depleted.” She does not really think that it is her fault, but she tries to be very understanding. Soft-spoken with him now, never caustic or demanding. She is troubled by something apologetic in this behavior, but once she has assumed it, it seems to overwhelm her normal personality. Often when she is with him, she feels muted, dim—missing the sense of herself that used to come in the midst of combat or in the devious subtleties of interrogation. Yet it was she who’d wanted things to be restful.

  Actually, she believes that this restfulness, if she can only sustain it, will eventually restore him. Roberta in this situation might have become hysterical. Molly, on the other hand, is the exemplar of quiet patience.

  Much of her time and energy is spent in the preparation of food. She consults books on international cuisine and follows out elaborate recipes, requiring the mincing and chopping of many different ingredients. Getting started on dinner early in the evening, she puts things on the stove or in the oven, adjusting the cooking temperature down or up or removing the dish in question from the heat altogether, depending upon the arrival time specified in the phone call from Conrad that invariably comes at the very moment she had expected him to sit down at her table. She becomes an expert at keeping things warm for him without drying them out, although it often hardly matters. He is apt to eat ravenously but with a kind of obliviousness—chewing abstractedly as he makes his innumerable late night phone calls, following up the loose ends of meetings, apologizing for appointments missed during the day, making mysterious arrangements to go to other cities, to be picked up at airports, to be put up in houses—because he never stays at a hotel if he can help it, and there seems to be no end to the number of people who desire to put him up, whether upstate, in the Midwest or in the New England area. All these people are in the Movement, and they are all described to her as “one of my good friends.” “I never meet your friends,” she remarks from time to time, and he says, yes, isn’t it a shame she’s so tied down, he’d take her with him otherwise. But then, most of his trips are so short, they’d hardly be worth the money they’d cost her or the trouble of making arrangements.

  They watch the Late Show and go to bed. His eyes
start to close almost as soon as he lowers his head to the pillow. He rolls away from her to the far side of the mattress. She contemplates his massive back, the various freckles and moles upon it, the ridge of red hair that runs down the center, and then, finally, turns off the light.

  “Have you noticed,” I said one day, “that you and I hardly ever make love any more?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you could call it hardly ever,” he said. “But I have noticed. When was the last time?”

  “Two weeks ago,” I said.

  “It wasn’t as long ago as that.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “Do you keep a chart?” he said bitterly.

  Tears instantly streamed out of my eyes.

  “Molly,” he said tiredly, “I’m going through some kind of transitional period.”

  “Are you really sure it’s just transitional?”

  “For some reason I feel a lack of desire. I don’t feel sexual with you right now. If it disturbs you, maybe we should see each other less.”

  I said it didn’t disturb me violently. It just disturbed me a little.

  One night I dreamed about Conrad and Roberta. I dreamed I was walking down the blank and unending corridors of a hotel—sort of a Hilton of the imagination. All the identical doors were closed except one. This one opened upon a room from which music issued. Looking in, I saw that a wedding was in progress. It was the wedding of Conrad and Roberta—a Jewish wedding complete with canopy, chopped liver, and the traditional glass that was to be broken by the groom, which stood elevated and separate on a special little table. The guests, drinking wine and enjoying themselves, were all in olive drab and denim. “Come in,” they urged me. And even Conrad turned for a moment and said, “Why don’t you come in, Molly?” But I stood in the doorway and would go no farther.

  When I related this dream to Conrad, he said it just proved how deeply our early conditioning was rooted in our subconscious, so that even our dreams took on stereotypical capitalist forms. As to my anxiety relating to his going back to Roberta, he reminded me of his honesty in establishing his original ratio of sixty:forty.

  “Seventy-five!” I cried out in correction.

  “A figure of speech, Molly. What are we really talking about anyway? People you’ve been very close to don’t simply drop out of your consciousness—” he paused and gave me a long, deliberate look— “or even out of your life,” he said.

  “Oh, have you been seeing her?” I tried to get the words out very evenly.

  “We keep in touch. She’s decided now that what she really wants to do is go to law school. Naturally, she came to me for advice.”

  “Who else?”

  “She’s calmed down considerably about her relationship to me. A lot was set in motion when you called her, Molly. I was very upset at the time, but actually it forced a great many clarifications to the surface. I see it now as probably constructive for her, although I know that was not your intention.”

  “I just wanted everyone to know the truth, Conrad.”

  “But you took out your anger on her. I still find that disturbing. Maybe that’s why there’s blockage now in some of my feelings.”

  “Will it go away?” I asked very quietly.

  “I certainly hope so. I don’t intend to remain in this state indefinitely.”

  We talked very openly now about Conrad’s state. Once we had named it, it became a subject between us. We no longer called it exhaustion but blockage. It was as if the name gave the condition a certain density. I felt it as something palpable—a perceptibly increasing mass. It took its place among the dishes on the table, located itself in the very center of the bed. I was constantly aware of its presence in the excruciating way I was aware of Conrad himself—his hand brushing against mine when he reached for the salt, the very slight amount of pressure in the quick kiss he gave me late one night when I greeted him at the door and he was tired and forgetful for a moment. I would watch him as he wrote on his long yellow pads or read the newspaper, registering the turning of a page in the pores of my skin, waiting for him to look up across the room.

  Gloom settled upon him, bringing with it a certain sweetness I had not seen in him before. He became peculiarly considerate—complimenting me on even the simplest meals, insisting on washing the dishes. Once he amazed me by mopping the bathroom floor, knocking over an entire bucket of water in the process. Almost ritualistically he would ask me about my day at the office. “You know your mother works very hard,” he would remind Matthew, lecturing him from time to time on cooperation and responsibility. It pleased Conrad to view me as a worker—and therefore oppressed.

  Perhaps he was afraid I might desert him. He began coming over every night of the week, sometimes turning up without warning or calling me in the small hours of the morning and telling me he was on his way. Now he would want me to hold him before he fell asleep. “Would you like me to make you hard?” I’d whisper. Most of the time I couldn’t.

  There was one week he didn’t go back to his apartment at all. He bought a package of underwear and rinsed the same shirt out every other night. He gave my number to his answering service. Finally on Sunday afternoon he said he thought he’d go and pick up his mail. “Would you mind walking over there with me?” he said. We took Matthew with us. It was a warm day at the very end of winter. Conrad was determinedly gay as we walked, turning his attention toward Matthew. He was teaching him a song—“Solidarity Forever.” “So-li-DAH-rity,” Matthew pronounced it for some reason.

  I hadn’t been at the apartment for quite a while. It had a desolate look, as if no one really lived there—it was a storage place of castoff clothes, books, unopened correspondence. “We won’t stay long,” Conrad said. “I just want to throw out the stuff that’s in the refrigerator.” He was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang—one short tentative ring at first and then a long, insistent one.

  “Shall I get it?” I called.

  “No, I will.” Drying his hands on a dishtowel, Conrad walked to the door. He opened it and stood in the entrance, blocking my view of his visitor. “You shouldn’t have come without calling,” I heard him say. “There’s someone here with me.”

  I knew instantly who it was that was standing outside. I felt the cruelty of that greeting he gave her. But what else could he have done? It would have been worse, I supposed, to have let her in. I wondered why he couldn’t bring himself to say my name to her. What was there left to conceal at this point?

  I really wanted to see her. I still had no precise face for her in my mind. Her features were always blurry in my memory of our one encounter.

  He was standing so that all that was visible from where I sat was a long shank of black hair, the sleeve of a dark brown quilted jacket.

  He stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him softly but very fast. I could hear the rise and fall of their voices, hers much fainter than his most of the time, now and then inaudible, once just for a moment a high and piercing tone. I couldn’t make out the words.

  He rang the doorbell after she was safely gone, and I let him in. He stood there distractedly tugging at his hair, trying to look composed. “That was Roberta,” he said. “She happened to be in the neighborhood, so she biked over. There was something she needed to ask me.”

  It’s odd to think that’s all I ever saw of her.

  THERE WAS A night that spring that I couldn’t stay in the house. Conrad wasn’t due until late and Fred had taken Matthew. It unsettled me to be alone. I had no plans. I decided to go for a walk finally—I wasn’t sure where. Broadway seemed logical. I went several blocks looking in shop windows, thinking perhaps I’d buy something. It was hard to know what I wanted. I remembered a blue shirt I’d seen in the window of a store that always stayed open late—and was indeed open when I passed it without even stopping, without even choosing not to stop, walking briskly as if with determination,
my hands clenched in the pockets of my jacket, my mouth choked with heaviness. To be aimless in the city is to risk being a victim.

  It was an evening that invited languor—a softness in the air, the smell of the river blowing up the cross streets—sweet, muddy and rotten. Subterranean, like the smell I always associate with basements. The river itself could be seen, looking west from any corner, gleaming beyond the trees in Riverside Park, the lights of Jersey reflected in its waters.

  I left Broadway and headed down in that direction. There was still a little light left in the sky but it was getting swiftly darker. I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed over to the park, passing the winos and derelict old people sitting fearfully on its rim, turning onto a path that led downward toward its empty, unkempt lawns, its silent playgrounds, walking faster as I passed a basketball court where a group of boys stood idly along an iron fence drinking beer as they waited their turn to play. “Hey baby … Come here, little pussy … Muchacha … ”

  I cried when I came upon the cherry trees. There was a whole little hillside of them in full bloom at the point where the park is bisected by the entrance to the highway. A streetlamp shone upon the pink and white flowers massed upon the branches. They shifted on their delicate stems in the gentlest currents of air, scented the river smell with their freshness. I felt the meagerness of my existence, the narrowness of the path I traveled every day of my life, the unendurable waiting, the accumulated burden of unexpressed desires. I had only to veer slightly away from the ordinary to see it. When was I ever so foolish as to walk in the park at night? I was thirty-six and would be thirty-seven. My life extended into the future in its essential sameness, only narrowing perhaps even more.

  I stared bitterly at the trees and at the dim lawn at the bottom of the hill where a man was exercising his dog, running with it in circles, stopping now and then to pick up a stick and toss it for the dog to fetch, the circles extending, coming closer. They passed under a light at the base of the hill, and I saw that the man was Malcolm. I called out to him and he climbed the hill and came toward me, stopping under the trees. I thought he looked pleased if anything, not even particularly surprised.