Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Uh huh,” he said. His knee burrowed in between my legs and I clasped my trembling thighs around him, staring over his shoulder at the hydrant, the bottom halves of pedestrians passing as if in a dream. I thought of Roberta and her unstated sexual problems. I thought of Fred eating a hamburger alone in Max’s Kansas City. He orders it medium and gets it well done. Morosely he eats one French fry after another and leaves the pickle. He scans the bar for an available long-legged beauty but it is full of businessmen drinking Martinis. And then I stopped thinking of anything but how I could go on and on with Conrad just like this.

  Since the car could no longer be considered neutral territory, we went to Conrad’s apartment after all, rushing there in such a hurry that Conrad parked the Saab illegally and found it towed away when he got up the next morning. I went into the bedroom­ and took off my clothes while Conrad made an important­ phone call. He had asked me if I would mind changing­ the linen on the bed and gave me a set of sheets provided by his mother. They were printed with little daisies. As old as he was, his mother still bought him all his underwear, socks and linens­. The sheets that were on the bed had a palmtree motif. I wondered­ if he had lain on them with Roberta. I stripped them off and threw them in the corner.

  In the next room I could hear Conrad canceling his meeting. He was telling someone that a crisis had come up and he had to go to Detroit. “But, baby,” I thought I heard him say. However, it might have been my imagination.

  I was suddenly very tired and a little depressed. I spread out the clean sheets and waited.

  IT’S SIX O’CLOCK in the morning again, and this time she’s in a taxi headed downtown, trying to get home before Fred wakes up.

  There is not much traffic. The streets have a clean, bare look to them. The sky is rather pale, as if there will be rain later. In the twenties there are trucks delivering flowers. She wonders what it would be like to live in the flower district. Already she has a sense of homelessness that is surprisingly exhilarating. She has been rooted in a small and stunted place. It is time for her to move on. Later perhaps she’ll buy a newspaper, look at the ads for apartments.

  Just why she’s going downtown this morning, aside from the fact that her clothes are there, is not quite clear. It seems the thing to do. She has begun to operate by a whole new set of rules. She makes them up as she goes along. Last night, for example, it suddenly seemed no longer conceivable to go, as she’d been going all along, ever since her affair with Conrad began, from Conrad’s bed to her husband’s.

  Around one A.M. when the clock radio Conrad had set awakened them, she’d announced that she was going to stay. He’d seemed a little alarmed—and she was somewhat surprised herself by this decision. “Is that wise?” he’d asked. “It’s okay,” she’d reassured him, “I know what I’m doing.” Even though she didn’t know. She was improvising, really. She’d made Conrad lie down again and wrapped herself around him. He’d tossed restlessly for a while, but had finally fallen asleep. She herself had been sleepless, her mind racing with excited, disconnected thoughts. She’d left when it became light, tucking the blanket she’d disarranged around his shoulders and whispering, “Don’t get up.”

  Her absolute failure to consider consequences will seem rather strange to her later. She actually had the idea that Fred would not particularly notice her absence, since he took so little notice of her in general. How could it matter to him whether she was in or out? Either she’d find him asleep when she arrived or not yet back himself from the night’s adventures.

  She stares out the window at the familiar neighborhood below Fourteenth Street as the cab speeds down Seventh Avenue. She directs the driver to turn right on Christopher Street and has him let her out on the corner of the block where she lives. She crosses the street to the local newsstand and buys a paper. She tries to remember whether they have run out of anything. Catfood? Coffee? Liquid detergent? For a moment she thinks of going to the all-night delicatessen around the corner, returning with groceries. She realizes she is a little nervous. It is an unfamiliar situation.

  She lets herself into her building and goes quietly up the stairs. She digs her key out of her pocket and slips it into the lock. She listens and hears nothing. Then she opens the door.

  To her great astonishment all the lights in the house are on. And Fred is up, he is fully dressed, he is just getting to his feet in the tiny dining alcove where, judging by the litter of ashtrays and coffee cups on the table, he has spent a good part of the night. He rushes at her and knocks her to the floor. “Whore!” he yells.

  IN MY FIFTH year of marriage I met a man through my work. He was a professor of economies from Milwaukee who was writing a three-part reconsideration of Thorstein Veblen for New Thought. He was an older man, in his late forties, who had a certain blond, perpetually innocent look that I always associate with the Midwest. His sentence structure was beyond belief—dreadful agglutinations of words in which there lurked flashes of theoretical brilliance. I sat with him for days, shearing away dependent clauses that were not attached to anything and suggesting ways they could be made to have independent existences of their own. He was abjectly grateful—particularly so when the essays were published and his colleagues praised his clarity of expression. He was not the first writer I worked with who fell a little bit in love with my pencil. Nor was he the last. He would insist on taking me out to long lunches in the middle of our work sessions. Just before he went back to Milwaukee, he told me I reminded him of his favorite high school English teacher, Miss Metcalf.

  I was depressed by this association. I went to the ladies’ room and inspected my face for signs of severity and age, for any hint of asexuality. I would not have been shocked to have found the latter—such were my relations with my husband at the time.

  I was therefore considerably surprised when the phone in my office rang three weeks later. It was the economist. “Hello, Miss Metcalf,” he said. “I’m back in town.” He asked me if I were free that evening, explaining that he was attending an economists’ convention and was staying at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn, where he wished us to meet and have cocktails. I was so totally unprepared for this kind of invitation, after my years of faithfulness to Fred, that I was thrown into a kind of tongue-tied panic. I collected myself after a moment and invited him home to dinner. He hesitated and then accepted. “That’s real nice of you,” he said.

  It was a rather peculiar evening. First, Fred was very critical of me for allowing my “work” to follow me home. He told me he fully expected to be bored, since most writers he had met socially were both dull and opinionated, and he detested the thought of being trapped into the role of host. Second, my child had an upset stomach and called out to me in heartrending tones all through the meal and finally ran out into the living room and vomited on the flokati rug. I ran back and forth between the kitchen, the dining table and my child with food and buckets of water and hardly got in a word of conversation. Fortunately, the two men discovered they had a mutual interest in football—one that I did not share. By ten o’clock, when I was finally able to sit down, I was exhausted. Meaningless fragments of discussion about the Green Bay Packers buzzed in my ears until my eyes finally closed and I drifted off into a humiliating sleep.

  I thought I’d seen the last of the economist. But he turned up at my office the following day just before noon. He looked flushed and troubled. He implored me to go to lunch with him. As we waited for the elevator he gave me a clumsy kiss, springing away afterward with mumbled apologies. As we sat a few minutes later in the Szechuan restaurant around the corner, he confessed to having contracted a hopeless passion for me, not unlike the one he’d had for Miss Metcalf when he was an adolescent boy. I was touched. I let him squeeze and knead my fingers upon the plastic upholstery of the booth. His tweed-covered leg pressed tentatively against mine beneath the table cloth. I sat stock still and unresistant, feeling only the slightest response—perhaps because it
was a relationship in which I so clearly had the upper hand. I told him I would never be unfaithful to my husband. He said he understood. He wanted only to keep seeing me under any circumstances.

  The affair, if you can call it that, went on for nearly nine months. The economist and I would meet whenever he came to town and have lunch in various ethnic restaurants, where we would enjoy the limited physical contact permitted by the decor. He never asked me to the Howard Johnson Motor Inn again. In a way I was disappointed by this lack of spirit on his part as much as I was relieved. In between his visits I tended to forget him—being reminded of the fact that I lived in his imagination by an occasional picture postcard addressed to Miss Metcalf and signed “Fondly, Stewart.” At any rate, he was adequate in his role as my secret admirer. A more tangible and demanding one would have terrified me. At the time I still had thoughts of saving my marriage.

  In the spring of that year an epidemic of chicken pox swept like wildfire through the Robin Dell nursery school. My son succumbed early with a mild case, requiring incessant doses of apple juice and television. I was not so fortunate. When the incubation period ended, itching blisters burst forth on every inch of my flesh. My husband shunned me as if I were a leper, averting his eyes as I sat across from him at meals and even suggesting we eat at separate tables. His offended esthetic sensibility drove him to the bars earlier in the evenings­ than ever before and often kept him out until dawn. I would paint myself with calomine lotion and lie itching and weeping upon my bed, questioning my very existence. It was one of several times in my life that I have reached almost absolute despair in circumstances that others might objectively consider­ ludicrous­. But my sufferings, my grief, as I lay in that lonely apartment, were very real. I knew without a doubt that my husband did not love me, that if my affliction were permanent Fred would disappear from my life. I looked in the mirror at my pocked and swollen face that seemed to belong to a stranger and imagined myself irrevocably scarred, abandoned by my husband without so much as a get-well card. I knew I would heal and that our normal life together would resume with its attendant­ apathy—but I no longer had hope of anything more. It is in the death of hope that one begins finally to let go—in the perception of an underlying pattern that repeats and repeats and will repeat again.

  It seems odd to me now that I ever shed a tear for Fred or for the kind of life that we had together. Perhaps I was really mourning the approaching end of my own inertia, and my tears were those of a coward. At any rate, for days they flowed from me like recycled water from a fountain, running down my loathsome blistered cheeks and making them itch all the more from the salt they left behind them.

  It was in such a mood that I heard the doorbell ring one afternoon. Hurriedly wiping my eyes on the edge of my sheet and throwing my decrepit quilted bathrobe around me, I went to the door to let in what I thought was the delivery man from the A&P. Instead I found the economist. I learned later that he’d turned up at the office that morning and was told I was sick, but not the nature of my illness. Perhaps the thought of appearing on my doorstep as I lay on my sickbed in slightly feverish déshabillé had inflamed in him the last flickering of his original intention. He was carrying what looked like a bottle of wine in a paper bag and a small bouquet of anemones. He stared at me in dismayed confusion as if he were trying to place me. “Go away,” I croaked. “I have the chicken pox.” I closed the door in his face and sank laughing wildly into the nearest chair until once more I began to weep.

  I never saw the economist again, except in my most strictly professional capacity.

  As I lay sprawled on the floor that morning, with my husband towering above me like a righteous and avenging archangel, I reflected rapidly upon our history and decided that the epithet he’d given me was undeserved. As was his assault upon a person admittedly so much smaller than himself. We seemed like actors in a Victorian melodrama rather than an average Village couple swept along by the Sexual Revolution. I lay there on the rug rather calmly, considering the shock of his attack. No one had tried to beat me up since I was nine years old.

  He was shouting now, his face fiery and contorted. I had never heard him express such strong emotion. I listened to his enraged description of his tormented, sleepless night, how he’d tossed and turned in the bed I had so cynically deserted, how he’d finally risen and paced, how he’d imagined me in various poses in the lurid embrace of Conrad Schwartzberg. “You fucking lied to me!” he yelled.

  Which was true. While I’d told Fred about Conrad at the very beginning—I suppose because I needed to show him that some other man could desire me—I’d had to promise the affair was over in order to be able to get out of the house on certain nights to carry it on.

  “You weren’t off raising your consciousness somewhere with a bunch of women. You were getting laid! You were getting laid! Right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was getting laid.”

  Fred lifted his fist as if to strike me again, but instead brought it crashing down on the Formica table top. The dishes there made a small but distinct clink of apprehension. With a fierce cry and an impatient sweep of his wrist, he cleared them to the ground.

  I raised myself cautiously on one elbow. “You’re being unreasonable,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me what’s unreasonable!”

  “But you don’t even want me,” I reminded him. “You don’t, really.”

  How coolly now I could state the fact that a year ago had immobilized me, left me sobbing into my pillow. I thought my consciousness had indeed undergone a change.

  I regard myself as I was that momentous day, wondering at my dangerous innocence. Even Fred’s blow left nothing more than a bruise upon my chin. I burned with clarity like an incandescent­ bulb. The future I would have with Conrad shimmered almost within reach, lush and inviting. I had only to endure the last bleak stretch of the past and to skirt the small obstacle that Roberta represented. She was not included in my vision of the future.

  I was leaving a desert and entering a swamp. But no one could have persuaded me of that or deflected my path.

  There is such a thin line for women between adventure and misadventure. It is still hard for us to be heroes in the active, external sense of, say, climbing mountains, hopping freights. We tend to be heroes of our own imaginations. I am as much idiot as heroine, perhaps more the former than the latter—an educated dope, as my mother would say, having earned her right to pass judgment by her investment in my tuition.

  Nonetheless, I like to remember how invincible I felt as I left my old life. I was so unquestionably in the right that nothing very bad could happen to me. I had even taken it upon myself to become the bearer of the truth. No more lies to anyone, no more shabby excuses. I had been as guilty of those, for the sake of expedience, as my husband and my lover. How could I ask Conrad not to lie to me if I demonstrated each time I slipped away to see him how well I could lie myself, as well as the strength of the hold my husband still had upon me?

  I got to my feet and brushed myself off. I said something to Fred I will always recall with profound satisfaction: “I’ve had a hundred nights like the one you’ve had. And you’ve had only one.”

  He was silent for a moment as the truth of this observation struck home. I think he knew as well as I did that a hundred was a very low estimate. I wondered how many nights there’d really been, and attempted to multiply the average of two or three a week by the number of years we’d been together.

  “But you’re my wife,” he said finally, almost plaintively. “You’re supposed to be my wife.”

  I walked past him to the bedroom where I retrieved the purse I’d forgotten the day before and put some things into a small suitcase. I walked past him again to the front door as he stood, still wrestling with the double standard.

  “Don’t think you can come back, you little whore!” I heard him shout behind me as I left for good.

  FIRST IMP
RESSIONS HAVE a curious strength. They grip the imagination tenaciously. They are half-composed of physical bits of evidence—a warm voice, an understanding word, a soft look in the eyes—and half the creatures of our own minds entirely, our own desires and needs at a given moment. We tend to make up the people we fall in love with.

  I still remember with some wistfulness the initially appealing boyish irresponsibility of Fred, just as I remember the day an outrageously brash person named Conrad Schwartzberg walked into the office of New Thought, talked to me for two hours about how the magazine could be made more politically relevant, made several long distance phone calls without asking my permission, and finally fell silent and stared at me and said, “I’m going to see you again. I like your sensibility.” I see us hurrying around a certain corner in the Village only a few weeks afterward and falling upon each other in a kind of desperate passion—knowing­ we have exactly twenty minutes to be together before I must pick up my groceries and go home, arriving a little later than usual, which I will blame on the subway. We cling together and kiss right there on Eleventh Street off Seventh Avenue between a barbershop and a bakery. I think that was the day Conrad said he couldn’t stand to think of me going back to Fred each time, and he asked if I’d ever think of living with him in the country or having another child. And I told him I could if everything were right—although the truth was that the idea of living in the country, even with Conrad, scared the hell out of me. I knew that after a few months with the trees, I’d have a perverse craving for cement. But naturally the invitation meant everything to me, and I probably would have gone and tried it out if he’d really meant it and become a bread-baker and raised my own zucchini and produced as many redheaded babies as he wanted. I think it was Vermont that he had in mind.

  It was, however, to a four-room apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street that I moved myself and Matthew, my five-year-old son, much sooner than either Conrad or I had ever expected. Too soon, perhaps. It’s hard to say. Timing is an important but mysterious factor in relationships.