Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “I decided I’d take a walk,” I said, feeling the usual obligation to explain my movements to him. The dog sniffed my legs, making me feel absurd.

  “Shadow!” he called warningly.

  “It’s a good night for it,” he said. “Do you come here often?”

  “No. Just tonight, in fact. Probably not again.”

  “Something’s wrong?” he asked kindly, coming closer. “You have a look … ” he said.

  I shrugged. “Restlessness,” I said. “My life is very complicated at the moment. Confining and complicated.”

  He stared at me through his glasses, then took my hand. “You never did tell me much about yourself … ”

  “There wasn’t much opportunity,” I said. “I would have gotten to it after a while.”

  “But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the time.”

  I said I’d rather it wasn’t.

  “What we should really do,” he said, “is look at these trees. This is possibly their peak, this particular evening. It’ll be downhill for them from now on.”

  I said it was the warm weather we’d been having.

  Smiling, he reached up for a branch and shook it. A few petals drifted down. “You have some caught in your hair.”

  “Your fault,” I said. “You have some in yours as well.”

  “Do I?” he said. “Where?” He took the hand he was holding and guided it up toward his head.

  I touched him just above his forehead. “Right here,” I said.

  “You can leave it there,” he said in a low voice.

  I think it was I who kissed him then, although we moved toward each other at more or less the same time. Perhaps the hunger in me made me swifter by a moment. Perhaps enough time had elapsed so that I was strange to him again. He told me that passing by the hillside earlier, he’d thought it would be good to be with a woman there. “I’m glad it’s you,” he said.

  We lay down under the trees, he on top of me, pressing me into the damp ground and the dead leaves of winter, an occasional blossom falling upon us like the first trace of an unseasonable snow.

  I have a purple nightgown I’ve worn only once, the most expensive piece of lingerie I’ve ever owned. It dips low with a keyhole effect in the front and is essentially backless. It’s not something anyone would wear for warmth. I bought it for $29.98, thinking it would appeal to Conrad—who’d decided finally the problem was that I didn’t know how to be seductive. I just took my clothes off and lay there next to him hoping for the best. More imaginative efforts were necessary at this juncture.

  And maybe another problem was that I was boring—not very boring, just a little—my interests being too specifically literary rather than political. Again, the heat of debate might have served to inflame him. My best quality—which always meant a great deal to him, even now—was my supportiveness. That, if only combined with the ability to be stimulating to him both sexually and intellectually, would have made me the perfect companion to share his life.

  These conclusions were expressed some time in May during an argument we had after a party he’d taken me to. Leaving me at the cheese table, he’d pretended for the rest of the evening that I was someone he hardly knew—rotating enthusiastically among the other guests, many of whom were Movement friends whom he greeted with fervent embraces, carrying them off to the dance floor where he stomped and shook until the buttons popped off the lower half of his shirt, revealing his navel like a blind cyclopean eye. Nor did he neglect new acquaintances. He had a way of giving a stranger his entire attention, consuming her upturned, fascinated face like the pinkest and most delectable smoked salmon, absorbing her words into the very center of his soul. Occasionally a slip of paper and the stub of a pencil would be drawn from the pocket of his trousers and something would be written down—perhaps a note on some insight of brilliance that had fallen from her lips, perhaps a telephone number. “Schwartzberg’s running for office,” I heard one woman remark knowingly to another. Occasionally his eyes would meet mine—to be instantly retracted, an innocent glaze coming over them.

  Perhaps I read too much into what I saw. I was in an unselfconfident period. At any rate, the dark side of my personality came out during the taxi ride home. I accused Conrad of making dates with others. He accused me of morbid suspicion, protesting his virtual monogamy as well as the painful struggle of maintaining it in view of our present difficulties—for which, he had begun to see, I was by no means blameless for the already stated reasons.

  It took him a year to make me an apology of sorts, admitting the desperation of that spring, when he’d felt little if anything for any woman. Quite consciously he had tested himself with almost anyone he met, trying to see whether it was possible to locate any feeling of attraction in himself even momentarily.

  I only half-believed the day I bought the nightgown that once I had it on I would somehow manage to live up to it. I decided to attempt to take Conrad by surprise, appearing in it at a totally unexpected, even seemingly inappropriate time. Surprise was the all-important element in the art of seduction, according to a book I was reading on the subject by a Dr. Hyman D. Ventura. It was a runaway bestseller. I felt shame in even having such a book in the house, let alone having purchased it in a despairing mood for twelve dollars and reading it when I should have been reading Marcuse. Dr. Ventura, whose practice was located in Chula Vista, California, was, I suspected, a frustrated filmmaker—“You are on camera,” he would write. “Now for the scenario!” Fading into the bedroom, he would recommend some rather extreme forms of surprise—such as suggesting playfully to one’s partner an experiment in bondage. Two and one-half yards of one-inch velvet ribbon were suggested for this purpose, and accompanying diagrams instructed the reader in the tying of various sailor knots that would provide enough pressure to induce excitement without entirely cutting off circulation. One would obviously have to prepare in advance by mastering these complicated knots in secret. So much premeditation seemed dreary. I wondered if the good doctor were aware of the thin line between the seductive and the ludicrous, since it was the maintenance of this fragile boundary that concerned me. The nightgown was about as far as I was prepared to go. I thought I would happen to have it on at dinner rather than reserve it for the hour of retirement. It was a scenario lacking complexity or even much imagination.

  I shut myself in my bedroom to try it on a few hours before I expected Conrad. Staring at my reflection skeptically, I cut off the price tags so that I wouldn’t be tempted to return it to the store unworn. My son, coming in unceremoniously to demand his bedtime story, was much taken with my appearance. “Mom, you look pretty. Sort of like Cat Woman.” He hurled himself upon me in imitation of a wrestling hold he’d seen on television. “Hey Matthew! Stop acting silly,” I protested, laughing uneasily as I disengaged myself.

  I was making beef goulash that night, one of Conrad’s favorite dishes. I put candles on the table, then took them away. Standing casually in my gown, I stirred the pot from time to time. I put down the wooden spoon I was holding when the doorbell rang.

  Slowly I walked to the door, the hem of my gown picking up little bits of lint. I kissed him before he even had a chance to greet me, the nylon fabric crackling with static electricity. He stepped back from me, averting his eyes slightly. So much for surprise.

  “We have goulash,” I said.

  In Chula Vista, it might have been chili. In neither case would Dr. Ventura have allowed such a line to appear in any of his scripts.

  Conrad informed me that he had eaten a hamburger in the middle of a meeting and wasn’t very hungry. Fearing to expose my backlessness prematurely, I leaned against the door of the hall closet and said, “Why don’t you just sit down in the kitchen and help yourself to some wine?”—indicating that I wished him to precede me there. Once he had sat himself at the table, I walked swiftly past him to the stove.

  “Is this your
birthday or some other kind of special occasion?” I heard him say.

  “No. What gave you that idea?” Seizing the paprika, I bent over the pot.

  “Well, you seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call it trouble.” I glanced at him for just a moment. He was reading the label on the wine bottle with great attention, frowning as he did so. “I just wanted things to be a little different,” I said, my voice cracking in an odd way.

  I felt relief when there was no response from him. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me. I stirred in silence for a while.

  “Is that why you have that on?”

  I put the dripping wooden spoon down carefully on the counter next to the stove.

  “This? This is just something new,” I said.

  “Different.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Different.”

  “It’s not at all your usual style.”

  “Maybe my style is changing,” I said.

  “That’s always possible,” he said coldly.

  I carried the large red pot to the table, brought out the salad of tender greens, the loaf of French bread. As he had warned me, his appetite was poor. There was an air of weariness about him, of melancholy. I almost wished he’d make his usual maddening series of phone calls. He kept his eyes on his plate. Occasionally he’d look up past me with an expression of real pain. Perhaps he read something contemptuous into the act of putting on the gown, as if it were an expression of my impatience rather than an attempt to allure him. And yet I was impatient—nearly desperate by that time—my constant desire for him mixed with bitter anger at his withholding.

  He said he had an article to read in a law journal before he went to sleep. He took it with him into the bedroom. I stayed in the kitchen washing the dishes. I wiped off the top of the stove and the front of the refrigerator, I swept the floor and cut back a plant that had become unruly. I felt I wanted to be alone. I went into the living room when I was finished and lay down on the couch, pressing my face against the pillows, drawing my knees up over my belly.

  I heard sounds in the middle of the night. Conrad was up, moving around in the rear of the apartment, walking back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom. Lights were turned on and off. Water ran into the sink. Then I heard his steps in the hall. He walked across the living room and stood beside the couch.

  “Are you awake?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well I’m going,” he said. “In case you’re interested.”

  “Conrad,” I said with difficulty, “I love you.” I tried to reach for his hand to hold him back.

  “I really want to go home, Molly. I want to be in my own space. I can’t see the future.”

  IT IS EARLY in the morning and she is at the typewriter because thinking is too circular and painful to be confined inside her head. She has written several letters and thrown them away. It embarrasses her that they all said different things—one expressing a confidence grounded in nothing, another existential despair, one a suspiciously saintly sense of resignation. This will be a last attempt.

  Dear Conrad,

  You say you cannot see the future. I feel your pain as keenly as I feel my own. I am sitting here crying because I acted badly and hurt you. Can you understand my feelings of helplessness at all? I should have gone in and held you in my arms, but I was afraid you wouldn’t want even that. You are right—I don’t know how to be seductive. I only know how to be myself. I am also not always brave.

  What makes it hard is that I am often overwhelmed with desire for you. It has been that way ever since we met. I have never had such feelings before. Lately I’ve tried to disguise them so that you wouldn’t feel the burden of them so much. Probably that was the wrong thing to do. But then everything I do has seemed wrong lately.

  Only my feelings remain clear

  She stops, seeing that she has used the word feelings three times. The language of love has a limited vocabulary. What feelings remain clear? That she has not stopped wanting him and indeed has never wanted him so much as just now when he has been so pitiably humbled, when she feels so terribly sorry for him she has almost forgiven even his cruelty the night of the party—although it is very hard not to take such things personally. Maybe she was unwittingly punishing him with the nightgown after all, flinging his words in his teeth.

  She erases the sentence and writes, I have been so confused—typing the words in the same space.

  I want so much to be close to you, but sometimes I wonder if closeness isn’t what you’re most afraid of. Oh Conrad, is that the trouble? How could I possibly threaten you?

  The words seem to have fallen upon the page. She is stunned, shaken by her own clarity. She thinks of tearing up the letter. But she believes in the power of the truth. Once having found it, one cannot then in conscience back away. She sees herself and Conrad as having become locked as combatants into a war neither of them ever intended. Only with the truth is there the possibility of change.

  Please allow me to be close to you now, she writes. That is what we both need—if we are to go on, she adds, then erases that. It is too absolute and therefore ominous as well as false. She realizes that her desire to go on is unconditional.

  The issue of sex is almost inconsequential in comparison, although of course it is part of the same question.

  She takes the letter out of the typewriter and signs her name, imagines herself actually sending it—or leaving now and putting it under his door. She sees herself doing that.

  She gets dressed very quickly. Going into Matthew’s room, she reassures herself that he is still soundly asleep. He will sleep on for nearly an hour. She will be back in twenty-five minutes.

  The feeling of clarity fills her, propelling her steps as she walks the eight blocks, the letter in her hand.

  She sees him around the corner just as she is putting Matthew on the school bus, hurrying with a lumbering gait that gets faster and more uneven as he approaches—his legs not quite in balance with his heavy body, shirt flapping open, something disorganized about all this effort.

  The bus pulls away toward Amsterdam Avenue, Matthew waving from the back window as on ordinary mornings. Faint with hope and apprehension, she tries to raise her hand with a bright mommy-smile—the words of the letter, the words of the letter, printed upon her mind. The strikeouts, the erasures. But then everything I do has seemed wrong lately.

  “I’ve read what you have to say, Molly.”

  She is nodding her head, trembling a little.

  His voice is hoarse, halting, as if he has not yet caught his breath. “When did you come over?” he asks.

  “Early. Very early,” she says.

  “I was up—but I didn’t hear you. I stayed up all last night. Are you going into work now?”

  “I’ll go in late,” she says, looking at him finally, at his gray, creased, unanimated face.

  He stares back at her as if through a film, then away as a car passes, followed by a truck.

  Stepping forward, she leans against him, shuts her eyes.

  He asks her why she hasn’t lost all patience. “Isn’t it time by now?” he says.

  “No.”

  “But what you said in the letter is probably true. I can’t disagree with your analysis. I don’t know where that leaves us, Molly.”

  Tears well up hot behind her eyelids. “Conrad, what are you feeling?”

  He thinks about it, he considers the question.

  “I think I feel like being with you.”

  It is the tentative phrasing of that sentence that makes her believe him. It is the kind of thing that is so hard for him to say, it is almost out of character—just as writing her the kind of letter she had written him would have been impossible, he admits a little later when they are lying in bed—having definitively completed all that had for a t
ime seemed uncompletable, all blocks having dissolved so quickly it is hard to believe any had ever existed. Hardly anything in his life has ever moved him so much as that letter. He is almost crying as he tells her that.

  He says, “My feelings for you are so intense, I can’t seem to assimilate them.”

  She rocks him in her arms. “Then why don’t you leave them alone?”

  “Isn’t that too much to expect?” he says teasingly, his normal good spirits restored.

  He assimilates for two days and then—just before the weekend—informs her that he is going back to Roberta.

  THERE IS A town upstate called Milton’s Crossing, a little to the south of the bridge that crosses the Hudson near Rhinebeck. It is in an area of Dutchess County known for its autumn crop of apples; in the summer a few of the local farmers let out houses—large shingled Victorian structures, the kind that have deep porches with rows of decrepit wicker rockers, upon which one sits in the evenings safe from the mosquitoes beating against the screening. It was such a house that Conrad rented with a group of radical friends and went to live in with Roberta that June, announcing to me his need for space and time in which to “repair damages,” as well as his intention of coming into the city as little as possible until September. “I’ll keep in touch,” he said. He told me he would be staying “somewhere near Saugerties”—a town that happened to be at least thirty miles away and on the other side of the river.

  I never told Conrad I once saw the actual house a year after he and Roberta lived there. Any blurring of lines around the compartments in which he kept the various segments of his life disturbed him considerably. It made him nervous enough that we had an acquaintance in common—a young woman named Francine, who’d come to work in my office around the time that Conrad vanished and who’d often been invited by one of her boyfriends to spend the weekend in Milton’s Crossing. She had even been asked to join the commune, which she disparagingly called “the orphanage,” although she admitted the level of intellectual discussion was high.