Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  He turned up at my office the following day—it was like old times, when our relationship had been less self-conscious. I came out to find the receptionist chatting with him, chiding him for not coming around for a while as if he were a long lost son-in-law.

  I think he had the need to tell someone about the girl in order to make her real to him—and he picked me, counting perhaps on the neutrality of the office, the gray steel desk between us, the telephone ringing into our conversation. There weren’t many people Malcolm could talk to.

  The piece of bone and the thong it hung on, I learned, had been a gift from the “child” he met the night he was out with his son—a female child, nineteen years old, by the name of Daria. Her wanderings, mostly disastrous, had been in pursuit of various members of rock groups, drummers in particular. Her pallor was the result of indiscriminate experimentation with too many different kinds of pills and a diet of Mallomars and No-Cal soda. I gather she was beginning to fall apart about the time she met Malcolm, looking around for an available guru. It seems to be a role that has an irresistible appeal for men in their forties.

  She’d literally picked them up at the concert, he said wonderingly, both of them. There had been something about the father-son combination that had attracted her. An exquisite little waif, he called her, on her own since she was sixteen, when she’d been kicked out of a progressive boarding school in an incident involving an acid trip with one of the teachers. She had invited the two of them back to her hotel room and she and Malcolm had sat up all night on her bed talking and smoking dope, with Jeremy silent, refusing to participate. Perhaps it was shyness, Malcolm said. He remembered being agonizingly shy at that age. Daria, with all her experience, might have seemed old to Jeremy, he thought.

  He gave me an almost angry look, challenging me not to agree. I didn’t think he wanted an honest opinion.

  “Did Jeremy say anything?” he asked finally. “Anything about the evening?”

  “Not directly. He asked me what I thought of you. It was peculiar. ‘What do you think of Malcolm?’ Just coolly, like that. He didn’t say ‘my father.’”

  “He was trying to place you,” Malcolm said.

  “Place me?”

  “Figure out who you were in relationship to me. He must have been confused because of the lack of signals. He wouldn’t have asked that if he’d seen you as someone I was close to.”

  “Who am I in relationship to you?” I asked very quietly.

  He looked distinctly unhappy. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Things change. I believe in change. I have to—when the present is intolerable.”

  “Is that how you feel about the way things are with us?”

  “The way things are with me,” he said. “With me. I’m intolerable to myself. You always make me aware of that.”

  He stood up abruptly and said that he was going—he could see I had work to finish. I got up too. I remember I stepped forward and kissed him, much more insistently than I should have.

  “You always hold on a little too long,” he said.

  There were various impending failures in Malcolm’s life that must have made him look for a means of escape at that time. I was only one of them. Jeremy of course was another. Then there was Arnold Lewis, who had lately withdrawn from Malcolm’s classes and no longer wrote poetry. He sat in his cell drawing elaborate diagrams of Greenhaven, making up what he called “battleplans.” He had asked Malcolm to help him break out. I suppose Malcolm’s image of himself made it impossible for him to say no. It involved bringing a gun into the prison. Malcolm could get permission to show his class a film and the gun could be smuggled in inside the projector. Malcolm said he’d have to think about it, that he’d give Arnold his answer soon—and each week Arnold would press him for a decision, his desperation more evident, his language wilder, more apocalyptic, making Malcolm go over and over every detail of the plan—until its execution and his own part in it must have begun to seem inevitable.

  He must have known all the while, though, that he wouldn’t do it—that he was finally not capable of going the limit, that in this he and Arnold Lewis were unalike. He used to talk about how it would all come to nothing anyway, the odds against Arnold were too great—he would be killed, or end up with an extended sentence. But sometimes he’d say that he saw how it could actually work, and then he’d speak of himself as someone whose life had lacked any significant acts.

  There was never any real outcome to all of this. Malcolm never faced Arnold and told him the truth. Arnold still sits in his cell, for all I know, his plan still alive in his head—only the means of getting the gun is unsolved.

  Fortune provided Malcolm with Daria. If she hadn’t picked him up that night at the concert, it is possible he would shortly have found someone very much like her. Fortune kindly dishes up the people we think we need—not necessarily the ones we really do.

  New York was just a way station for Daria—she met Malcolm in transit, so to speak, on her way to the East in search of spiritual enlightenment—all financed by a family trust fund. The night Jeremy left, Malcolm evidently went back to her hotel. She moved in with him three days later, simply turning up on his doorstep at two A.M. with several suitcases of antique clothes, the complete works of Castaneda, the I-Ching, Love Without Fear and a book on astral projection. Eyes no doubt brimming with tears, her small pink mouth trembling, she told him it was their karma to be together. He was, by his own admission, both “immensely moved” and “scared as hell.” And in that state he left with her at the beginning of April for Nepal.

  As I am by nature a demander of explanations for things that appear to make no sense, I demanded from Malcolm before he left an explanation for why he’d chosen to cast his lot with Daria.

  He said, “She is a person who is open to anything”—meaning, I suppose, that I was not.

  “Meaning that she is someone who has no center of her own. Is that what you want, Malcolm?”

  He said I was as intolerant as he’d expected. I had not yet learned—and would never learn, in his estimation—what it was to “go with the flow.” Even now, at this inappropriate moment, when it was quite obviously too late, I sought control. “I think you’d keep me here if you could. You’d tie me hand and foot with your arguments.”

  “If I could find such arguments, I’d use them,” I said fiercely.

  “Because you want, you want. I always feel you wanting and I hate it. I don’t know what to do with it, Molly. I don’t want to feel it anymore.” He turned pale after he’d said that and pushed at his glasses. “Christ, I don’t hate you,” he said.

  “Can you have sex with her, Malcolm? Is that it?”

  Laughing bitterly, he shook his head. “I’m no different with her than I was with you.”

  IT WAS CONRAD’S fortieth birthday in May. I bought him a ledger book bound in black with a red leather trim at the edges and a border of gold stamping. Having reached his middle years, he contemplated writing a memoir of his interesting life. I wrote with Magic Marker on the flyleaf, “A book to write your book in.” I thought about signing the inscription M., mysteriously, but decided finally on Molly. I wrote my name with deliberate boldness, making each letter as distinct as possible. It was a very conspicuous gift. I wondered what he would do with it, whether he would jettison it rather than bring it home.

  He said he loved it and that it was what he had always wanted—the inscription, particularly, delighted him. He said he would certainly use it as a place to jot down his fragmentary thoughts, which he usually scribbled on little scratch pads and the backs of envelopes that got lost immediately. He said now he would surely learn to be more organized—“But probably not as organized as you.” he said. Because God forbid he should abandon his endearing helplessness, which bothered me much less than it evidently bothered Roberta—who apparently nagged him all the time now because of his sloppy ways, his lateness, his habit
of leaving old linty socks and underwear lying around in corners, his constant accumulation of the printed word, his tendency to wear clothes until the point of total disintegration, his interminable phone conversations during dinner and his suspicious vagueness about where he spent the evenings when she was at the study group he’d encouraged her to join.

  Perhaps I was fortunate in having some of the pleasures of Conrad’s company with relatively little of the housekeeping that would have been associated with it in a more conventional arrangement. Or so I told myself. I had decided that from now on I would try to want no more than I had.

  I wasn’t the same after my conversation with Malcolm. There is something terrifying in finding that someone you thought you knew well has all the while been concealing a profound resentment of you, almost a revulsion. I’ve known that feeling myself with perfectly acceptable men who’ve pursued me too hard when I did not want them—I’ve found myself cornered and gagging, gasping for breath. Did I suck the air from Malcolm’s lungs at the very moment I thought I was being patient? Did some fatal essence emanate from me at all times, striking terror into the hearts of men—what Malcolm called wanting, what Conrad called pressure? And yet the want was innocent, I’d thought, entirely well-intentioned. What did I want but love? Where was the loss to them in that?

  “Have you noticed,” Conrad said, “that our sex life has become extraordinary?” Rolling off me, he made a grab at the pillows and stuffing three of them under his head, propped himself up for a brief session of analysis of this phenomenon. “Theoretically, at least, we should be experiencing a decline at this point. How long has it been—two years?”

  “Theoretically,” I said, “with less psychological involvement, one can concentrate more on the act.”

  A look of worry momentarily came over him. “You say the damnedest things, Molly.”

  “I’m saying,” I said thoughtfully, “that perhaps I finally understand you.”

  “And what do you understand?” he said, smiling indulgently.

  “That you are the way you are.”

  “You’ve given up on me then.” The smile still held. “Bitterness has led you to underestimate me.”

  “Conrad, you should be going home. It’s getting late.”

  “I feel you underestimate me, Molly—and it’s certainly not pleasant. You’ve written me off in a way, formed certain judgments.”

  “I’ve only come to accept the situation. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?”

  “Molly, I know you.” He laughed in disbelief.

  “Not entirely.”

  “Bullshit. I know you inside out. Especially there.” He put his hand between my legs.

  “I know you there, too.”

  “So what’s all this about lack of involvement?” he said hoarsely. “Whose lack are talking about?”

  “Maybe mine,” I said.

  “A new twist, Molly. Two years of guerilla tactics—but you’ve never lied. What do you hear from your friend Malcolm, by the way?”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Have you written him off as another hopeless case? But maybe you’re only attracted to lost causes. Look at Fred, for example. And then of course there’s me. What do you think that means, Molly? What would become of you if you ever won?”

  I didn’t answer that question—it would have led me over a mined terrain. Conrad was always a better tactician than I was.

  I used to tell myself I’d definitely go to the grave alone, and that this was the time to start getting used to it.

  I’d look in the mirror over the bathroom sink each morning to see if overnight I’d gotten older, tracing each new faint line upon the skin, finding a hair that had grayed and coarsened, become peculiarly tenacious. I could read my fortune in these signs.

  I was not yet alone, of course. It was only a rehearsal. In case, I thought.

  Roberta took a lover that spring—someone in her study group—took him officially by Memorial Day weekend, when they went off to Provincetown together. He was twenty-two years old, a graduate student in philosophy who sold Sabrett’s hot dogs in front of the Forty-second Street branch of the Public Library. Previously he had often dropped over to ask Conrad’s advice on how to organize the hot dog vendors of New York, a project he and Roberta were working on jointly. This serious young man saw the hot dog vendors—supplying, as they did, lunch for large segments of the working class, although members of the middle class as well were known to be tempted by the steaming franks in the cold buns soggy with onions in chili sauce—as a potential revolutionary force of great value.

  “Sincere but naive,” Conrad sighed to me, shaking his head. He theorized that Roberta had reached a stage in her development where she needed someone she could dominate.

  We spent the weekend Roberta was in Provincetown together, Conrad considerately returning to the apartment on Sunday night so that she would not come home to an empty house. It was important, he said, for Roberta to validate her independence and selfhood without being punished for taking such a vital step. He proudly pointed out the contrast between his attitude and that of my ex-husband’s.

  “I have never felt that I possessed Roberta,” he said. “That would be a contradiction of all my principles.”

  Despite the rhetoric, his tone was melancholy. He confessed to a slight feeling of displacement—which of course was to be expected.

  Being an expert in hurt feelings, I pointed out to him that his feelings were hurt.

  “How little you understand me,” he said.

  And yet it got to him.

  By the middle of the summer, Roberta’s affair was still going on. She would come home after spending a day or two with her Sabrett man and she and Conrad would have endless discussions, separating her positive motives from her negative ones—which had to do with her accumulated hostility toward Conrad and her desire to compete with him. They were finally having what Conrad called “a very open relationship.”

  I remember him saying at one point that he was lonely. To live with someone preoccupied entirely with herself was a very lonely thing, he said.

  My first reaction was not sympathy. Conrad was not entitled to sit in my house and speak to me of his loneliness—me, of all people. In fact, such self-indulgence enraged me.

  “Conrad, you arrange your whole life so that you’re never alone,” I pointed out. “You have at least two girlfriends, eighteen meetings a week, fifty million other people whose liberation movements you’ve promised to organize personally. And your big complaint is always that you don’t have solitude. Maybe you’re lonely for two minutes when you’re in the john—but that’s about it, Conrad. I’m not about to discuss it as a major problem.”

  Head bowed during this tirade, Conrad pulled at clumps of his curls. When I was finished, he looked up at me reproachfully. “You never think of my life as painful.”

  “Painful, perhaps. But not lonely.”

  “Because I have at least two girlfriends,” he said in an injured tone.

  “I wonder sometimes if there are others.”

  “No, Molly. There are not.” He spoke with weariness and sadness.

  “Well, only two then,” I said more gently.

  “Molly, I can appreciate how hard it would be right now without you.” His blue eyes were slightly filmed and bloodshot, yet intense.

  “Well, maybe I should let it be hard, Conrad,” I said. “Maybe I should remove myself and let it be hard for you. Maybe you’d learn something from that. Except you’d probably just find a replacement.”

  “You couldn’t be so easily replaced. I need you, Molly,” he said with feeling. “Even Roberta knows that—on some unconscious level. I could tell her I was seeing any other woman in New York, but you’re the one she has the obsession about. She says that even though she knows you’ve gone from my life, she feels you cast a shadow over
our entire relationship.”

  “But I’m not gone from your life,” I said.

  “That’s beside the point. The shadow’s certainly there.”

  “But I don’t want to be a shadow. I hate being a shadow.

  “Maybe someday you won’t be,” he said too quickly.

  “Don’t ever say things like that to me unless you mean them.”

  “I mean them, Molly,” he said.

  I acknowledge Roberta’s contribution to my psyche. The concept of shadow, of shadowhood. It was a clarification of precisely what troubled me and of what I wanted most from Conrad or any man—the permission to be real. To be neither a shadow nor a category of experience, but myself—whatever that was. I had thought it was the other way around—that Roberta shadowed me; that because of this, it was I who was obsessed with her. Now I saw us both as incomplete—dark, two-dimensional figures wafting diaphanously through Conrad’s imagination like restless ghosts. He denied both of us existence. Therefore he was lonely. I don’t know why, but I always felt closest to Conrad when I was sorriest for him.

  IN LATE AUGUST a postcard arrives.

  The swirling wake. Ship’s lights upon dark waters. Flying fish glide between troughs, scatter phosphorescence at lift-off. The wind indolent but unamused. Occasionally seasick but blissful.

  Malcolm

  It is dated May 22, written aboard the freighter Samuel B. Paterson, mailed from Calcutta. There is of course no return address.

  For a few days she ponders the word blissful. Can one be blissful and seasick at the same time? If so, that is bliss indeed. Troubled, she walks in the park deliberately past the hill where the cherry trees, blossomless, are in full leaf. Green trees like any others.

  Conrad went to California the way Malcolm went to India. It seemed a solution. The state of California gets a lot of its population that way. You can always go there when you don’t know what else to do with your life.