Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Sometimes I think you only come over here to fuck.” Said half-indulgently, half-seductively—although it is what she actually sometimes bitterly thinks. Would she trade that, though, for the egg? Would such a trade invariably be necessary? Ironically, it is Roberta who could shed some light on that question.

  “What do you do after you leave here?” she asks him once.

  “What do you mean what do I do? I go home.”

  “But what do you do? You just get in bed with her and go to sleep?”

  “Sometimes we have conversation.”

  “But what if she wants you to make love to her? Do you just excuse yourself?”

  “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “Is it more exciting to make love to her after you’ve made love to me?”

  “Molly, there are nights I get into bed thankful I don’t have to make love to anybody. I’m not only a political activist, I also have the small problem of making a living. I’ve been to Buffalo and back with some lousy dinner in an airport. Every time I make a speech, by the way, there are at least three women offering themselves—”

  “That’s really terrible, Conrad.”

  “I’m explaining to you that my life is not a picnic. You don’t have any understanding of the totality of my life. You’re entirely focused on one aspect of it.”

  “We’ve spent time together, Conrad. Don’t forget that!”

  “I’m forgetting nothing. I’m trying to correct a very lopsided impression.”

  And then he reminds her that it was her choice, her choice to go on like this. He always knew how difficult it was going to be. It is hard for him too, this getting up and leaving in the middle of the night. It never feels natural. But what can he do? While Molly can tolerate the knowledge of the existence of Roberta in his life, Roberta cannot tolerate the existence of Molly. So all he can offer, until the situation resolves itself, are these truncated visits and perhaps the hope of a trip somewhere.

  The trip is a completely new idea. Where and when, she demands, immediately seizing on it.

  He comes up with California, perhaps because it is as far away from New York as they can go. A trip to the Bay Area in some indeterminate week, certainly before Christmas. “I’ll try to sandwich it in,” he says, unaware of the contradiction of speaking of sandwiches when his life is not a picnic.

  WE ALL HAVE our own imagery. If I existed for Conrad sandwiched into the everlasting limbo of interstices, my friendship with Malcolm was an island, a warm, green place unconnected to the mainland of my life. Happiness in the middle of misery—necessary to my survival yet never quite enough to sustain me.

  It was indicative of our limited relationship that Malcolm liked especially to visit me at my office. Often, having walked all the way down from the Upper West Side, he’d turn up late in the afternoon on a day he wasn’t teaching at Greenhaven. The receptionist thought the whole thing was romantic. “Your young man is here,” she’d say, even though Malcolm was neither young nor mine in the precise sense of that term of expression. He’d walk back with me to my cubicle, past the long row of women in the subscription department working at their gray metal desks. They’d look up at him—this erect, long-legged person in frayed jeans, bearing with him the chill of the outside. Malcolm would smile back in amused sympathy, nod to them in greeting, answer questions about the weather from which they were cut off by the absence of windows. “Is it still raining?” “Just a little.” “Think it’ll be over by five?” “Sure,” he’d say. Sometimes one of them would flirt a bit—“Is that a promise now?” “An absolute guarantee”—laughing, the glasses slipping as they always did. A fine figure of a man. “A regular lady-killer,” he once described himself ruefully.

  I think he felt safer with me during those brief visits than at any other times—the bounds of possible behavior being so circumscribed. I was the prisoner in need of distraction who could be liberated only by the clock. He, on the other hand, could come and go as he pleased, thus taking the measure of his own uneasy freedom. Sitting in the visitor’s chair, he’d watch me as I put the last red marks of the day upon a long proof sheet, listen gravely as I made phone calls to the printer or the author of an article. Often he’d bring with him papers from the other prison to which he had access—poems by Arnold Lewis in the same disturbing vein as the first ones he’d shown me, a newsletter also by Arnold that was to be smuggled back in and passed secretly from hand to hand. We’d stay after hours, let ourselves into the Xerox room and make illicit copies together.

  “My friend,” Malcolm used to call me, with a sadness but with a definite insistence—assuring me I was the only woman he knew with whom his relationship was not disastrous. He’d tell me about the others just so I would not be jealous. His latest disaster involved one of his most brilliant and sensitive former students, now married and studying comparative literature at Yale. She had taken the train down to New York one day for the purpose of showing Malcolm some poems by her young husband. After an hour or so of grass and intense conversation, during which she revealed to Malcolm the secret of her undergraduate passion for him—now to be safely regarded as ancient history—they ended up in his bed in the historical present, thus rounding off her education with a lesson in the inevitability of disillusionment. Her subsequent offers to leave her husband, the poet, and devote her life to her former instructor had been greeted with a silence that drove her frantic—spurring further trips to the city, letters on thin blue paper, midnight phone calls.

  There was something familiar in her style. I felt a certain guilty sympathy for her desperate determination, even as I tried to relieve Malcolm’s gloom. Culpability overwhelmed him. Every fresh analysis of the incident only led him back to the conclusion that he had behaved unconscionably to someone almost childlike in her openness and trust.

  I told him there was no such thing as such innocence—although that was more for the purpose of argument than absolute conviction on my part. I believed in Malcolm’s peculiar kind of innocence, for example—even to some extent in my own.

  I railed at him in a way that he always seemed to appreciate, scolding him for what I termed his masculine presumption. “Why do you assume that everything flows from you and nothing from the other person? Do you really believe that women have no active desires—and are only acted upon by you? No wonder you can only deal with them by keeping your distance. Who could want such responsibility?”

  I suppose there was a lot of truth in what I said. I remember he laughed painfully. “You know me very well, but not completely.”

  “Malcolm, I’m guessing, I’m improvising.”

  “Do your theories apply to what happened with us?”

  “Probably. Though maybe not as much,” I added quickly. “We seem to have managed to make an exception.”

  “Still,” he said, “there’s the physical distance. There’s the distance between friendship and love.”

  I made an awkward joke at that point. “Well, if you can’t go to bed with your friends, you go to bed with your enemies.”

  He looked at me with an ironic glint in his eyes without saying anything, sparing me the obvious question that would have had to do with Conrad.

  We cultivated an honesty that never drew blood—and thus all our exchanges fell slightly short of the mark. We touched each other constantly—all within the bounds of friendship—walking Shadow for blocks with our arms around each other, lying sprawled for hours on Malcolm’s bed listening to music, passing a joint ceremoniously back and forth. Toward the end, as it diminished, he would take it from between his own lips and hold it against mine. We had a comedy routine that went—

  Malcolm (looking at me with mock severity): Sometimes I think that if you weren’t involved with Conrad, you’d have designs on me.

  Me (very warmly and reassuringly): Malcolm, you are a hopeless case of hopelessness.

 
(To cement this understanding they kiss, Molly deliberately pulling away before he does, Malcolm laughing.)

  I REMINDED CONRAD from time to time about the trip we were supposed to take. “What about the trip, Conrad?” I’d demand as naked he searched for his clothes in the dim light of the bedroom, the radiator chugging ineffectually as a chill blew in through an inch of open window. “What about the trip?”

  I’d ask about it as if I believed it were something that would actually take place, but the question became more and more rhetorical. By the middle of November the longest stretch of time we’d been able to spend together was five and a half hours when Conrad had taken a late flight from Cleveland and phoned Roberta from my house to tell her he was stranded at the airport in a blanket of fog.

  One day, though, just as if he’d thought of it for the first time, he called and said, “How would you like to go to California?”

  He was going there himself for five days after Thanksgiving and thought I might find it enjoyable to be there with him—if I could arrange to leave on such short notice. He didn’t exactly say he wanted me to come, but it was only logical to infer that his own desires played a part in his suggestion. Careful not to alarm him by displaying undue excitement, I said I thought I could make the necessary arrangements.

  I’m embarrassed to say I felt joy. I sat in my office afterward unable to work for the rest of the day or even to think coherently at an abstract level.

  Malcolm called and remarked that something good must have happened to me.

  I said I supposed it was good, that anyway it made me happy.

  “I can hear it in your voice.”

  I hesitated and then I said, “I’m going to California next week with Conrad,” wishing he’d called later when some second thoughts might have begun to set in, when I might have sounded less buoyant.

  “Well, don’t ask me to water your plants.” I think he’d meant it to be a joke, but it didn’t come out that way.

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” I said very quickly.

  “Of course I will, if there’s no one else.”

  There was a confusing silence in which I found myself waiting. Just as I would have liked Conrad to say he wanted me to come—to actually say it—I waited for Malcolm to tell me he wanted me to stay.

  “You don’t have to go, you know,” was what he finally said.

  I said it wasn’t that I had to go—I wanted to. I went on about how much I’d always wanted to see San Francisco.

  “As long as you’re sure,” he said.

  In my collection of mental pictures, there is a tree I saw once from the window of a taxi, flaring up before me red and yellow just as the cab coming out of the park turned onto Fifth Avenue. In one flash I saw it through the bars of an iron fence, much too quickly to identify it. I think now that it might have been a maple. It was an anomalous tree, at any rate—the others around it being either completely brown or quite devoid of leaves of any color. It gave me a strange shock for a moment. It was all that was left of the autumn. I remember thinking that I had lost an entire season.

  The taxi was carrying me to Kennedy Airport and I was alone in it. Perhaps I wouldn’t have had such a thought if Conrad had been with me. I would have been preoccupied with him, with the elation of the two of us setting out on a journey. The tree, if I had noticed it at all, might have seemed a sign of something hopeful. Perhaps I would have recognized it as a fellow survivor, hanging on like me to its red and yellow.

  Wasn’t I making something constructive out of what might otherwise have been disappointment—his insistence that we fly out on separate planes? Roberta might offer to drive him to the airport and how could he refuse? Now that they were living together, she was apt to make a point of seeing him off and picking him up. I doubted that her reasons were entirely sentimental, but I knew the danger of dwelling upon trivialities.

  My time with Conrad was to be one of reconciliation—intense conversations, lovemaking in strange bedrooms in which our rediscovered passion would reach its peak uninterrupted by the curfews that maintained Roberta’s peace of mind in the East or even the awareness of Matthew stirring in his sleep on the other side of the wall.

  I’d avoided the anger that could be summoned up in me so easily by deciding to arrive on the Coast two days before Conrad—thus not only escaping Thanksgiving in New York, but allowing me to visit an old friend who’d been living in San Francisco and had often urged me to come and stay with her—making it plain, however, that she would prefer me to visit without Fred, whom she had warned me against marrying in the first place, and without Matthew, whose existence she approved of in theory but who would have made her acutely nervous since she wasn’t used to living under the same roof with small children. Unencumbered by either, I’d known, even before I called her, that my welcome would be assured.

  Women like Tessa always remind me that there are distances I will never travel. Up ahead like markers, indicators of change, they advance too quickly to be overtaken, flashing their brilliant, multicolored lights. There was always that feeling of speed about Tessa, even when we were in college, where I met her. She was always the first to do certain things—to stay out of the dorms all night on a phony pass, to lose her virginity and acquire a diaphragm, to march on a picket line and go to jail in Mississippi, to spend a summer on Bali, a winter in Tangiers, a weekend in Corsica with a French film director whom she met in Ireland when she was doing a photo essay on the IRA and who later turned out to be bisexual, although they still corresponded several times a year. She was always shedding lovers like outgrown clothes, each one reputedly more gorgeous than the last, yet ultimately lacking some vital quality; she’d try them on in different disciplines as well as languages, in varying degrees of accomplishment, of hipness, straightness, of sexual proficiency or eagerness to be instructed in the mysteries of the clitoris, the rhythms of the vagina—all to be turned loose at the slightest sign of restlessness on either part, let go without recrimination or regret. She told me once she was probably afraid of rejection, mocking herself the next moment with that generous, wide-mouthed laugh of hers in which you could see all her beautiful white teeth. We both, after all, knew she was fearless.

  I was her willing audience rather than her pupil. Although I admired her style, I could no more have emulated it successfully than I could have set myself on growing taller. She liked that. She was disparaging of imitators. What I’d have borrowed from her if it had been possible was some of her ability to cut out immediately from what promised to be painful on the assumption there was always something better up ahead. I was never as optimistic. Out of an affectionate sense of duty she’d often criticize me for my tendency to get bogged down. I’m not sure she didn’t prefer me that way. In the world of most of the people she knew, I must have seemed an exotic, a representative of a dying species.

  She had settled into the ground floor of an old shingled and gabled house in the Mission District—an apartment decorated with tribal masks and embroidered wall hangings, beaded lampshades suitable to lovenests of the roaring twenties, Moroccan rugs, an antique black marble bathtub with gilded legs in the bathroom where she developed her photos. She took me there after she picked me up at the airport.

  Sitting in the living room among the pillows of the couch on which I was to sleep, we spent some time catching up with each other. Tessa’s account of her current life involved the logistics of juggling a trio of lovers, two of whom were annoyingly beginning to demand exclusivity—the journalist offering a summer in China, the stockbroker a cruise of the Pacific islands on a windjammer; while the third, the one she really cared for, a painter who peddled a little dope on the side, was thinking of renting a cabin in Mendocino, moving into it with his “old lady” and only coming down to the city once a month. All things considered, Tessa said, it might be just as well. She would have to think very seriously about the trip to China; the journalist was a �
��beauty” in his way. The stockbroker had his sweetness, but an extended cruise with him might pall.

  “Now tell me about this person Conrad.”

  I tried to do full dramatic justice to my own situation—which in its way, I thought, was no less intricate than hers, no less rich in its weirdness, its ironic aspects, though there was less external action as well as a lack of variety in location. Surely, with the right point of view, the whole thing could be presented as an adventure.

  I failed, though. The narrative kept verging too much upon feeling and I could see Tessa growing inattentive. She had a white cat, an enchanting slender animal that she’d tease with a long feather, making it jump from the floor to the bookcase to the wooden molding that went all around the room. It would run along it with exquisite sure-footedness before thudding down again, rather loudly for such a small cat. “Oh, Sascha!” Tessa would affectionately exclaim.

  My voice sounded thinner and thinner in my ears as I kept talking. I could feel the meanings I had attached to things snapping like overstretched rubber bands. What were these people, Conrad and Malcolm and Roberta? What had I accomplished by leaving Fred or even now, by coming to California? All this running after expectations anyone could have told me would come to nothing—except I always preferred finding out for myself.

  True to form, Conrad didn’t come on Friday as he was supposed to. He called from New York about an hour before I would have gone to the airport to meet him. He said he was in a phone booth on Columbus Avenue and it was freezing, and that there were some Movement friends in town for the weekend whom he absolutely had to see, and so he would be arriving late Sunday afternoon. After all, he didn’t have any appointments set up until the next morning. That would still give us three days together, but maybe he could arrange to stay an extra day or so at the end.

  “It’s like sixty-forty!” I cried. “Remember sixty-forty, Conrad?”