Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Why did you do it, Molly?”

  “Because I’ve had enough, Conrad! I’ve had enough—do you understand?”

  In fact, I hadn’t had enough. No, not even by then. Neither enough to sustain me, nor to force me to the point where I could contemplate giving Conrad up—both my need to be loved and my capacity to hang on without proof of it being larger than I ever would have suspected at the time.

  So if I remember screaming various things at him in that hallway—all the bitter accusations one is supposed to give vent to in such circumstances—I also must acknowledge the lack of conviction behind those utterances, the sense of all my words somehow falling short of the mark. It was only a false showdown in the end. I could not bring myself to make the ultimate threat—the removal of my person, my physical and psychic self, from his life.

  Oh, he had me there, Conrad did—and he knew it. Nor did he hestitate to seize the advantage this gave him. Now was when he chose to inform me, for example, that my brief defection to Fred had hurt him severely—quite apart from its consequences. Since I’d been married to the man in question, he’d felt it wasn’t his proper role to call me to account for what I’d done. But the incident had made him wonder whether he could ever rely on me absolutely. Perhaps our sensibilities weren’t as well matched as he’d once thought.

  “You’re much too volatile, Molly. I can see how you can even be vengeful. In this instance you acted without consulting me and hurt a person whose feelings I consider terribly important.”

  “Fuck you, Conrad! I wasn’t about to consult you!”

  “You see, Molly—you see how given to extremes you are! I know you’re not in a state to believe this, but I was about to talk to Roberta myself. I thought she was almost ready to hear what I had to say about the situation and even come to where she could accept it.”

  “What situation did you mean her to accept? You said months ago, months ago, Conrad, that you and I would be together.”

  “I never made any specific promises. We all have our own timetables.”

  “You did make promises. You did!”

  “Hairsplitting. What we should consider is our mutual lack of trust—and whether that gives us any basis to continue.”

  Intellectually, of course, the answer should have been no. With a sob I ran to him. It mattered much less now why he had gone to Philadelphia. Only the fact that even so, he hadn’t meant to let go of me was significant. If the danger of losing him had not existed before, my own act—even if morally justified—had brought it into being. I had made a perhaps fatal error in strategy.

  He proposed a moratorium. A moratorium of two months without contact. Some time in February we would reassess the situation. It was a period of concern about the bombings in Cambodia and the term moratorium was very much in the air.

  I remember running after him as he walked toward the door, shouting that this was nothing either of us wanted, that it was a juvenile and artificial solution.

  “It may be artificial and juvenile, Molly, but I absolutely insist on it.”

  The front door opened and closed behind him. The elevator was waiting and took him down.

  THERE IS NO relief for a painful relationship as immediately effective as another painful relationship. I say this with as much conviction as irony, thinking of Malcolm whom I have not yet mentioned, whom I still remember with anguish. There are still certain streets on Broadway in the Eighties that I try to avoid whenever possible now that I have moved further uptown, so imbued are they with memories of our accidental meetings that always seemed more than chance occurrences—he walking his dog, Shadow, I lugging my cart of groceries. Nor will I pass, if I can help it, a certain hillside in Riverside Park that we frequented one spring, planted with cherry trees sent over from Japan as a postwar gesture of goodwill. It is odd that it is Malcolm, whose relationship with me was much more fleeting and insubstantial than the one with Conrad, about whom I have this disturbing sense of lingering presence. Sometimes I have the feeling that we will inevitably meet again. He will appear before my eyes at some point in the future, a gaunt, apocalyptic figure in an embroidered shirt picked up during his travels with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend in Nepal. I will note the further incursion of gray in his overlong hair, the beads around his neck—and that, finally, will be the end.

  I fell in love during Conrad’s moratorium. It was not that loving Malcolm I fell out of love with Conrad, but that I now found myself with two love objects, both mercurial and tantalizing, each differently unsatisfying. Together the two might have made up one entire person, the perfect lover of my fantasies. I would have settled for either.

  Does this indicate a person of shallow emotions? A fickle, inconstant creature—such as women left to their own devices were once traditionally viewed to be? I have already shown myself to be jealous and vindictive. What other base qualities shall I acknowledge? A vulnerability to certain types of men?

  No doubt in the old people’s nursing home, I will meet a failed poet, still handsome in his declining years, brilliant and bitter-mouthed—a withered lecher to whose room I will carry bowls of unappreciated fruit in my softly wrinkled hands, seeded rolls stolen from the table and wrapped in napkins. I will find things to admire in each of his poems. The imagery of one, the rhythm of another. Never the two together—but I will not mention that. Just as I will try to overlook his pathetic flirtation with the recreation director, for whose eyes he will write verse of appalling triviality. I will still know that I am the sensitive one, the one who truly understands, the secret sharer.

  I met Malcolm at a demonstration in Foley Square in support of the Mahwah Seven, whose trial was shortly to begin. Honesty compels me to admit that I attended that demonstration for motives that were not entirely political. Conrad, who was the lawyer for one of the defendants, had been listed in the Village Voice as one of the speakers. I had not heard from him for several weeks.

  As I traveled downtown on the subway during my lunch hour, I ran through various scenarios. I would show up for his speech and take pains to bury myself in the crowd. Looking up at him on the courthouse steps, I would notice an unmistakable pallor, perhaps even weight loss. As his eyes swept over his rapt listeners, he would accidentally notice me. For just a moment words would fail him; he would resume with a hoarseness in his voice and a lack of continuity in his argument. I would slip away to the IRT.

  Another version involved Roberta. In this one I walked boldly and deliberately over to where the two of them were standing. “Don’t you have the guts to say hello, Conrad?”

  I felt slightly nauseous as I got off the subway. Wasn’t I invading Conrad’s territory without his sanction? And yet this was a public event, I told myself angrily. Anyone had the right to participate. Indeed posters had gone up all over the city soliciting support. COME JOIN YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS AT THE COURTHOUSE. THIS IS YOUR STRUGGLE.

  There was only a small group of demonstrators, maybe thirty or forty people—not the large crowd I had imagined. As I walked through the line of police, I tried to fight off the feeling of illegitimacy that assailed me. I was aware how much I looked like what I was in part—a person with a respectable job uptown who had just left her desk for an hour, wearing a stylish red plaid coat that was only seeing its second season, her hair lightly but guiltily sprayed with an ozone-depleting conditioner, her complexion painted with byproducts of the petroleum industry. I felt lonely among the army surplus jackets, the pale, fervent, unembellished faces. Clearly the revolution when it came was to be done in shades of brown. Those who refused to give up the primaries, the soft pastels, would be objects of suspicion. Even Conrad felt uneasy about my use of eye shadow, although he admired the effect. I wondered if Roberta wore olive drab, foreswore lipstick, just to please him. I looked for her among the army jackets. I looked for a large redheaded figure on the steps above me, where the speakers were.

  It was driz
zling. Magic Marker bled down the signs people were holding aloft. There was an attempt to get everyone to burst into song—“We Shall Overcome.” I opened my mouth but no sound came forth—I felt paralyzed by the kind of shyness that used to come over me in school assemblies. A tall man who had been looking me over for a while laughed. “I’ve always hated public singing,” I said somewhat angrily.

  “So have I. What do you suppose there is about it?”

  “Fear of singing flat.”

  He was quite a pleasing looking man. Narrow gray eyes behind rimless glasses, sandy hair tied back neatly—he looked a bit like a Founding Father of our country. “No, there’s more to it than that,” he said. “Fear of joining. A desire not to become merged.”

  “But actually I would like to be.”

  “One can want both,” he said reasonably.

  When I knew Malcolm better, I realized how characteristic it was of him to strike up a conversation with a stranger—always seeking the intense chance encounter that would perhaps reveal to him the mystery of himself. A man who lived in his head or in the streets, never comfortably in anybody’s living room, including his own. Perhaps it was my unmergedness that attracted him, the red of the coat I wore that day.

  Conrad never showed up. I learned later that he had been planning to fly in for the demonstration from Buffalo where he’d been doing some fund raising, but had overslept and missed his plane by fifteen minutes. As in many acts of fate, there was in my meeting with Malcolm an element of the predictable.

  I didn’t go back to work that afternoon. I called in sick from a phone booth outside the coffee shop where Malcolm and I had taken shelter from the downpour that ended the demonstration. We had by that time exchanged histories as well as other things that were unspoken—certain looks and gestures open to interpretation, indicating more than met the eye. We talked about displacement—we were both lately come from failed marriages, people starting over again. It was his candor that drew me—his life spread open among the coffee cups. I didn’t tell him about Conrad.

  He had left his wife two years ago. He had a son who was having a painful late adolescence in which he felt powerless to intervene. His wife was the daughter of a university president—he had married her after knowing her a week, enacted the respectability she demanded. He had been a tenured professor of literature at Vassar. Now he was teaching creative writing to black prisoners at Greenhaven, living in a basement apartment rent-free in return for janitorial services. The very austerity of his existence was a source of exhilaration for him, freeing him from a guilt he’d carried secretly all his adult life, ever since he, the son of dirt-poor working-class parents, had gone to Princeton on a full scholarship.

  “Only in the recognition that we are all prisoners of society is there the possibility of freedom. Across the Formica table, Malcolm’s gray eyes, slightly enlarged by thick glass lenses, fixed on mine.

  Compelling words—even though I knew that particular recognition was not unique to Malcolm. It was carried in the air of the time, so to speak, usually mouthed as a sign of solidarity with what Conrad liked to call the Lumpen Proletariat. It was something else again to take it unto oneself as Malcolm had. Conrad would never have embraced such despair.

  At the thought of Conrad, I felt a pang, a sharp ache in the flesh. Or was it the presence of Malcolm? Matching him candor for candor, I said that as a woman I was not only a prisoner of society but of biology as well—that I admitted my ability to make choices was limited by the latter. My head was swimming slightly.

  It was shortly afterward that we stood up from the table to go our separate ways—the die was not yet cast. He touched the sleeve of my coat, ran his fingers up and down the closely piled fabric. “You look so warm in that,” he said.

  I stood stock still, wondering whether I was experiencing a caress. I said something lame and idiotic. “Well, it keeps the cold out.”

  His hand, no longer in motion, rested on my sleeve with what now seemed deliberate intention. “What I would like,” he murmured, “is for us to spend the rest of this day together.”

  The clock above the cash register said it was only two-thirty. In three hours the baby sitter would be bringing Matthew home. I wondered in the back of mind whether Malcolm and I would have made love by then.

  It was still raining outside and so we didn’t go for a long walk as we might have done—as we often did, in fact, later in our relationship. Instead I invited him to accompany me uptown, which turned out to be quite convenient for him since his house was only four blocks from mine.

  I knew what I was doing, why I was inviting him. I wanted to break the seal Conrad had set upon my emotions, my sexuality. As each day passed, I had become more and more incensed by the so-called moratorium. It seemed the very betrayal of passion. For is it not the nature of passion to flow like an unregulated stream, rather than to be confined and measured, to be tested in deliberate cooling-off experiments? It was the grand flow that I wanted from Conrad and never got.

  I wonder now if there might have been something generalized in that desire, if it was free-floating, so to speak—ready to attach itself with a rather astonishing ease to whatever object drifted into its path.

  For obvious reasons, I prefer not to call it desperation.

  Despite everything that happened afterward—or didn’t happen—I still see that first time with Malcolm as a joyful adventure. “I would like us to go into your bedroom,” he said after we had sat drinking coffee on the living-room couch long enough. I appreciated his way of stating things very simply—“I would like” or “I would not like.” The gap between what he was saying and what he was thinking seemed narrower than with most people. If he’d asked me whether I wanted to make love with him, I would, out of perverse female convention, probably have said no.

  Thus freed from myself, I lay down with him. Our unfamiliar bodies mingled. He was light and hard in my arms. I felt his long bones grind against mine. He entered me fiercely and held me afterward, his head with its graying hair that was much softer than Conrad’s, between my breasts.

  IT IS DECISIVE for Molly that he calls her the next day—in fact, the morning after. The phone rings just as she is leaving to go to the office.

  “How are you?” says a man’s voice.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she answers, embarrassed because she is not sure at first of the identity of the speaker.

  “I’m fine, too. Really fine,” Malcolm says warmly. It is Malcolm, she is quite positive now. After all, he has never phoned her before.

  “I wanted you to know,” he says, “that I’m very glad it happened. That’s why I’m calling.”

  She is rendered almost speechless.

  “I’m glad, too,” she says after a moment. She is amazed by his kindness. Whatever she had expected of him, it had been much less than this.

  “Molly, I’d like to see you again very soon. Why don’t we have lunch on Thursday?”

  Lunch? It is only when she is riding downtown on the subway that she questions the limitations of that arrangement as opposed to dinner.

  By Thursday she has alternated a thousand times between expectation and caution. Felicia warns her against optimism. What does she really know about this man? “For all you know,” Felicia sensibly points out, “he might be seriously involved with someone.”

  “Oh yes,” she agrees cheerfully. “For all I know.”

  “You’ve been wrong before, ducky.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to be consistent.”

  Stubbornly Felicia refuses to be impressed by the phone call. “It could merely have been good manners on his part—not that that isn’t an unusual quality these days.”

  There is no way Molly can convey to her friend the exact quality of tone, the tenderness and honesty, with which the words “I want you to know that I’m very glad it happened” were uttered—something quite dif
ferent than civility that had momentarily transfixed her, as if she were a prisoner finding the door to her cell unaccountably left open.

  They have agreed to meet in the lobby at half-past twelve, but she leaves her office ten minutes earlier than she has to. She has the desire to stand down there alone and get her bearings. She will watch people go in and out through the revolving glass doors; finally one of them will be Malcolm.

  The elevator opens into the lobby and he is there already, coming forward, saying her name.

  “But you’re early.” She laughs shyly.

  So are you.

  “I had to do an errand,” she says, embarrassed by the excitement she feels. What if it is visible?

  “Do you want to do it now?”

  “It can wait.”

  He is looking at her with an odd reserve, as if he is gathering himself for some important statement. Then he steps up close to her and kisses her. It is neither passionate nor ceremonious but a small act of defiance—a kiss in the lobby of an office building.

  As they leave the building and walk down the street, his arm encircles her shoulders, his fingertips dangling just above her left breast. They are lovers for all the world to see. Her thick winter coat makes the effect less dramatic than it would have been in a warmer season. Bobbing up and down a little against his arm, she tries to adjust her stride to his longer one. She sees herself smiling up at him. They are discussing which restaurant to go to. “Come,” he says as they reach the corner, just as the traffic light is about to change to red. The arm that is around her unwraps itself. His hand grips hers, pulling her after him. They race across the street like children, pausing on the other side while she catches her breath. The arm encircles her again.

  He is even handsomer than she remembers—or at any rate, she is seeing him with a different intensity. She tells him that she likes his coat, which is a suede sheepskin-lined one, no doubt from his professorial days. It is very much stained and softened. Just under his left sleeve, the suede has begun to split downward. She thinks that you could put your fingers in there and feel the warmth of the sheepskin underneath. She imagines­ them in a room, the one he lives in—a narrow, white low-ceilinged­ room with very little in it; a low, hard bed in a corner covered by a black blanket tucked under the mattress in a taut, military sort of way. She would like him to kiss her—not here in the street but in that room.