Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  “Too bad you didn’t get here two days ago,” Tessa said sourly.

  But either way, it was bound to be anticlimactic.

  I remember thinking that. I didn’t feel any particular pain. There was a freedom in knowing how little I really expected from Conrad. He had come three thousand miles to be the same person he always was. It was only I who had undergone a change.

  I USED TO be able to imagine Roberta in a very detailed way. I can’t do it anymore. She’s flat to me now—no more dimension to her than a cutout. I’d imagine her with hate and with an intensity that approached affection. I’d fill her out with what I knew about myself. At times she’d stand in for me, become my surrogate. She was there in the airport the night I returned from California. I had a distinct image of her waiting for Conrad in that state of resentful unease I was so well acquainted with—that condition Conrad might have called paranoia, if one can be paranoid about reality.

  Until the very moment he appears at the top of the ramp, she is not even quite sure Conrad is on this plane, because she believes nothing about him very firmly. She rushes forward to claim him, throws her arms around his neck. She has a tendency to be effusive. “Did you miss me?” she says. “Yes, of course,” he answers. “But I was very busy.” Pursing her lips, she runs the tip of one finger down the front of his coat as he begins to account for all the time spent away from her. She draws him out with little leading questions—“Meet anyone interesting?” she asks lightly, as she thinks of the phone call he got the day before he left. He spends some effort upon the description of one individual who was hostile to him for some reason, a woman named Tessa. A jetsetter, he says disparagingly. And she is relieved—he met another woman and it came to nothing while he was in California alone.

  Here I wanted to intervene and give Roberta a little push for allowing herself to be satisfied so easily. I make her slip her arm through his and say, “Well, I hope you won’t be getting any more of those phone calls.” “That was just Molly,” he says blandly, “being hysterical about something” as I walked down a ramp in a separate part of the airport.

  I had flown the friendly skies of United. Conrad had come back on American. Our planes must have touched ground almost simultaneously.

  I was clutching a dime in my hand, moving through a crowd of people being met by other people. There was a call I wanted to make. I think I wanted to know that someone was waiting—and then I’d be able to go home. I’d have liked just to have known—I didn’t want it to be crucial.

  I went and sat in a phone booth for a while. I kept thinking I was going to put the dime in, but I didn’t.

  It was snowing the next morning. The temperature had dropped during the night. There would be intermittent flurries for all of Thursday, according to the radio. I set out for the office in a stiff wind that blew from the Hudson, stinging my eyes with sharp little crystals that melted against my lashes. I had to keep my head down as I crossed Broadway. I saw Shadow, his rough red coat crusted over with white, before I looked up and saw Malcolm standing in front of me where the steps went down to the IRT.

  “I have a friend,” he said, “who takes the subway.”

  He was smiling at me through his glasses. I must have appeared rather dim and watery to him because his lenses were all misted over.

  “It’s real weather,” I said, my intense pleasure at seeing him robbing me of more imaginative conversation. The temperature of the air was making my eyes well up.

  “Unlike California. I could have told you that California does not have weather.”

  I said I had found that out.

  He made a slight nod, looking at me very steadily. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

  “I’m all right, you know. I’m getting over it.”

  “Not only about your condition. That isn’t what I meant. Though I’ve thought about that as well.”

  “You mean the way one thinks about a friend.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That way.”

  I laughed somewhat shakily. I told him I’d become very good at finishing his sentences. I stared away at Shadow who was tracking snowflakes, snapping at them as they passed. “Look at that. He’s trying to eat the snow.”

  “That’s a dog’s function—to provide a source of distraction.”

  We were both still standing where we had been standing. The snow beat down between us. I said I was going to work and afterward I was going up to my mother’s to get Matthew.

  “Gathering your forces.” He said it almost cruelly.

  I could feel myself making a great effort to smile, drawing out the corners of my mouth, my cheeks aching with the cold.

  “My forces,” I said.

  He stepped forward and pulled me against him. Two strangers couldn’t have been stirrer. I put my arms around him after a while and all at once we were holding each other very tightly in our wet bulky coats. My fingers slipped into the rip just below his shoulder, pressed down beneath the sheepskin lining until I felt the warmth of the sweater he wore against his skin.

  He said, “Couldn’t you be late today—seeing as how you just got back from the Coast?”

  Still holding on to each other, we walked to his place. He locked Shadow out in the hall. Standing in the middle of the floor, we took off our clothes, a strange solemnity in our haste, our determination to be naked.

  It was like getting something back that had been lost for a long time, a quality of feeling, something profound and scary. We both lay shaking after it was over, our bodies fluttering against each other like trapped birds. I feel pain whenever I think about it, seeing it now as something that wouldn’t happen again. My mind glances away from the couple on the bed. It was an ending of a sort, rather than the beginning I thought it was, shining off into the future. I even wastefully cut it short, deciding I shouldn’t stay any longer. They were expecting me at the office, and it would take too much explanation if I came in later than ten-thirty. He walked me all the way to Broadway, back to the subway. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  He didn’t, of course, I spent nearly a week in a state of self-deluded happiness until I realized I hadn’t heard from him.

  “I have a favor I have to ask of you,” Conrad Schwartzberg says. He is sitting naked on the orange bedspread on the very edge of the mattress, having just thoughtfully removed his second sock. His left ankle is still poised over his right knee and the expression on his face is one of mingled worry and embarrassment, as if he is a small boy about to be reproached for stealing cookies. He hesitates a moment, running his fingers through his hair.

  “I’d like to ask you not to bite.”

  Molly stares up at him.

  “Please,” he says. “I don’t think I need to explain, do I?”

  “Does she check you for marks?” Molly says unkindly. “Does she, Conrad? Well?” she says teasingly, squeezing the flesh at the base of his neck. “What if I get carried away and forget myself?”

  “I’m asking you not to,” Conrad says, flushing.

  “Not to get carried away?” Raising herself, she puts her mouth open against his shoulder, grazes it slightly with her teeth. “The mad biter,” she whispers in his ear, nipping it deliberately. “Will she think of looking there?”

  “Sometimes you behave very inappropriately, Molly. I don’t think I asked you anything unreasonable.”

  Leaning away, she makes a count of the number of moles on his back. “Did you know that you have nine moles, Conrad?”

  “Thanks a lot for the information.”

  “I’m better acquainted with your back than you are.”

  She touches a spot between his shoulder blades, brings her head forward to inspect it.

  “What’s that?” he says.

  “Just some red fingernail scratches. Not mine,” she says. “I’ve seen them on you a lot in different places.”


  For all her teasing, she doesn’t bite him again after that. Not once does she slip up. Even in the throes of the most overwhelming passion, she remembers what he asked her not to do and is therefore never overwhelmed entirely, never thoroughly lost. “Don’t bite,” she thinks in Conrad’s voice, in that small part of herself that remains conscious, held back. The disobedience is in the remembering.

  Malcolm avoided me for a while and then drifted tentatively back into my life, imposing formality upon us. He said we should agree to see each other only on certain specified nights of the week, that previously our identities had been in danger of merging—and that now we would have to be on guard against this possibility. He said nothing was more important to him than his freedom and he knew he’d have to be ruthless in protecting it—not only from me but from his own impulses. He said he felt pulled toward me in a way that disturbed him greatly, that he abhorred the institution of the family and nevertheless had fantasies of moving in with me and Matthew, that he’d actually desired to impregnate me when we’d gone to bed and that we could never again have sex without his being conscious of that desire.

  I wept and felt strangely hopeful, because I knew now that he loved me. I went back to being his friend and thought of him as my lover, thought of him all the time. Even in bed sometimes with Conrad, I’d close my eyes and make a substitution; it would be Malcolm who lay upon me, Malcolm who moved inside my body. I’d will myself to think of Malcolm, quite aware of what I was doing. I’d summon him up to be interposed between Conrad and myself.

  It is difficult to know what one believes in certain situations, to separate belief from desire or even the lies one tells oneself. Did I believe, as I thought I did, that somehow Malcolm and I would end up together, that at some imaginary point in the future I would have to choose between Malcolm and Conrad? I would let Conrad go, of course. How could there be any question of that? I would win Malcolm by my great patience—a quality I had not consistently demonstrated in the past. I would be patient with Malcolm because I was still involved with Conrad.

  Loving Malcolm, I thought of Conrad as my sex object. He would have been horrified to have been so reduced in my thoughts, to have been dropped so ignominiously from primary to secondary place—such essential parts of his Conrad Schwartzbergness as his intellectual brilliance, unflagging energy, unfailing good humor, commitment to the liberation of women and all other oppressed groups, unfairly discounted—only his abundant fleshly self given importance. I heard him bang indignantly against the constricting walls of the little compartment in my consciousness I had stuffed him into.

  In reality, men like Conrad elude such subtle forms of revenge. Their obliviousness shields them from the sticks and stones of psychological warfare. For a time Conrad was under the impression that our relationship flourished. He would often refer approvingly to my new attitude, which he found refreshingly relaxed. “How are you getting on with your friend?” he would ask magnanimously without a tinge of anxiety. It was certainly beneath him to worry about competition. Adopting the same tone, I would ask him about Roberta. He would oblige me with certain facts—she was teaching him to bake bread, she was coming down with bronchitis, she was spending three nights a week at a Marxist study group so as not to remain overpowered by Conrad intellectually.

  “It’s like hearing about a cousin,” I said once.

  “What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I mean, it’s just domestic life when you come down to it. You have a domestic life, Conrad.”

  “You make it sound as though it’s nothing. You don’t know what a constant struggle it is to maintain it.”

  “Why do you struggle so hard?” I said, and then remembered that having decided the future lay elsewhere, I had begun to stop caring.

  LOOKING FOR ALL the world like a family, they walk, deceptively, through the park, the four of them—she, Malcolm, the two boys.

  He had called her that morning and said, “I’m taking my son to the park later. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with sons?” sounding strangely keyed up, incanting over the throbbing of an electric guitar, saying a walk was going to clear his head, clear his mind, because everything always looked different in the daylight, didn’t it? And he wouldn’t tell her what he meant, preferring to talk in riddles—something about meeting a child the evening before, “a little pale night-wandering child”—conjuring up for Molly the image of a child, someone about Matthew’s size, but pale—whom he and his son Jeremy were still with, he’d informed her. “I can sense your disapproval,” he said, when all she’d thought was that he was high, speaking perhaps in metaphors. He’d been upset for weeks about the visit of his son, long before the boy even arrived for the weekend. It had been almost a year since he had seen him.

  It is the first Sunday in March and the lawns are brown and muddy, the trees bare, the sun surprisingly full and warm—bringing out crowds of walkers and Frisbee players. Bicyclists glide by along the paths, Conrad and Roberta-like, in pairs. Matthew gives her his coat to hold, as well as a stick he has already collected and several plastic men—because it is the function of mothers to hold things—and runs ahead to join Malcolm, this wonderful grownup who this afternoon seems entirely at his disposal. He is drunk on so much unexpected attention, a little insatiable, out of control. “Throw me the spaldeenball, Malcolm!” he yells importantly, because Malcolm has just taught him the name Spalding. “Throw me the spaldeenball, Conrad—I mean Malcolm!”—because he sometimes gets confused as to who is who in a given moment, seeing both men generically as not-his-father and therefore interchangeable to some extent.

  Cautioned by Molly to avoid a large puddle, he glares back at her defiantly, having no patience for such dreary considerations. As he puts one foot into it, Malcolm grabs him around the waist and lifts him kicking and giggling. This sets a precedent for all other puddles that they encounter. “Now!” Matthew demands when they come to the next one, holding out his arms.

  “My father really freaks out over little kids,” the boy walking next to Molly says—unmistakably implying that his father is making a fool of himself. He is seventeen, fair and longboned like Malcolm, with a rather inconsequential mustache—a man almost, not very likeable so far. She has been wondering whether his air of languid sourness is something permanent. And yet for a moment now she is seized with pity for him.

  “I can do without little kids myself,” he says. “But I guess in your case you haven’t much choice. You’re stuck with him.”

  “Oh yes, I’m stuck,” she says, making a joke of it—knowing­ that what he wants is the acknowledgment of some sort of alliance­. For isn’t Malcolm excluding her as well, even though it is her child Malcolm lifts up to ride upon his shoulders. She thinks of being touched by him as naturally as he touches Matthew­, of being held without the constraint she always feels in him now, his body hardening against her like a wall; watches as Malcolm breaks from the path and runs across an empty ball field, circling it in laps, her child holding on for dear life, flushed and laughing.

  “Put him down! You’re spoiling him!” she cries.

  The boy, Jeremy, she notices, is deliberately looking away. She remembers that he will be leaving New York on a seven o’clock train. The afternoon, by rights, should have belonged to him. She feels an obligation to do something for him, attempts to draw him out with questions about school, the concert Malcolm took him to last night—the Rolling Stones, wasn’t it? She remembers Malcolm sold some books to a secondhand store to buy the tickets, but doesn’t tell him that. Maybe Malcolm wouldn’t want him to know.

  He says the Stones are a group he used to like. He used to be into music more than he is right now.

  “Well, what are you into now?” she says.

  He shrugs. “Anything he’s not into,” he says finally. “Just because he’s my father, it doesn’t mean we’re soul-mates.”

  She says, “I can see
you’re very different.”

  “Well, I’m not some kind of weirdo. That’s a big disappointment for him to get used to.”

  She has an unbearable thought. Could Matthew have a conversation like this with someone someday?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. She watches Malcolm still circling the field, slowing down more and more, almost limping. She can feel the boy watching, too.

  “You’re out of shape, man!” He cups his hands over his mouth and yells to his father. “You’re out of shape! You look terrible, man! Old man, you look terrible!” It is the first time that afternoon he has shown any animation.

  Malcolm puts Matthew down and comes walking slowly toward them across the field, breathing hard, beads of sweat on his face, glasses clouded with moisture—the eyes behind them blank, unseeing.

  “Tell me,” the boy asks her, “what do you think of Malcolm?”

  I DON’T THINK I ever assessed Malcolm, I only responded to him. I took him whole, even the troubled parts of him. He remains in my mind as someone unfinished—all the possibilities are there in him, never quite actualized.

  As he walked across the grass that Sunday, for a moment I saw a displaced, desperate middle-aged man, his responses skewed, inappropriate. His shirt had come open, I remember, and as he approached my attention was drawn to the fact that around his neck he was wearing a thong with a small pointed white object dangling from it, a sort of wild animal tooth or miscellaneous piece of bone. Teenagers bought such things from sidewalk vendors in the Village. It hung incongruously among his curling gray chest hairs. I pointed at it and said, “Is that to keep evil spirits away?”

  To my surprise, he gave me a very embarrassed look. And then he buttoned his shirt.