Bad Connections

by Joyce Johnson

  Someone called Conrad in September and asked if he wanted to work on a case in San Diego—three Chicano farmworkers were accused of shooting a state trooper who’d attempted to break up a demonstration. He made up his mind in one phone call. He flew out there over a weekend, met with members of the defense committee, and took a three-month lease on a garden apartment with a swimming pool, which he described in glowing terms on his return. Why shouldn’t he have a swimming pool? he said a bit defensively. Even the workers had swimming pools in California. He said mostly he wanted to have a separation from Roberta. And from me? I asked. Of course not, he assured me. He was finally going to do what I’d often suggested—take time to think, to sort out his relationships. He was going to devote special thought to the one he had with me.

  I understand from what Francine told me later, long after the fact, that he asked Roberta to come out with him. She is quoted as saying she had too many irons in the fire. I understand he proposed marriage and that she said it was an outmoded social form, which of course he would have had to agree with.

  Next or before or simultaneously, he asked me to make a trip out there to visit him—ten days in October, after he’d gotten himself situated. It was going to be very different from the last trip, he assured me. We were going to take a drive all along the coast. And since we’d be only fifteen miles from Mexico, he’d take me there for a weekend. We’d bathe in the Pacific and review the history of our relationship. He got quite enthusiastic about the idea. It was our chance, he said, to come to some decision about the future.

  I thought of it as one last try.

  Conrad addressed a rally of thirty hot dog vendors the day before he left.

  When I was five, I had a romantic attachment to a boy of seven who tormented me by threatening me with snakes and witches. He went away to camp for the summer and promised to bring back a bear who would devour me. He said he would keep it in his garage—a logical place. I didn’t tell my mother, not wishing to upset her. For two months I counted off the days of my life. I looked out my window one day and saw that my friend was back. He was bouncing a ball against the fence in his back yard. The garage door was shut. I thought I would go down there and confront my inevitable fate. I counted off my final hour.

  “What about the bear?” I said, walking right up to my friend, not wishing to waste any more time.

  “What bear?” he said, puzzled.

  I wept in fury because he had forgotten something that was so important to me.

  Was that the beginning of it all?

  Molly, you always hold on a little too long.

  I have always been too faithful to the illusions of others.

  LOVE.

  We took a trip that Sunday in California, leaving San Diego early in the morning and heading south toward the border. Conrad was going to show me Mexico for a day. True, originally he’d said we were going to spend the weekend there. But a day was what it came to. Still he thought we could get all the way to Ensenada and back—not that that was the real Mexico; we would have had to go much further for that.

  We crossed the border into Tijuana, leaving California behind in the diner where we’d had breakfast, squeezing lurid blue syrup out of plastic containers onto pancakes that were all too pink—a veritable sunset in the plate. A different, foreign shoddiness awaited us. A swarm of peddlers and skinny children invaded the slow-moving traffic, running along beside the cars offering false pottery, bulbous glazed pigs, planters stickily varnished painted with cacti and sombreros, religious figures hideously gilded—the sun glistening pitilessly on everything, the broken streets, the bruised facades of houses, the raw dirt hills with never a tree in sight, just the shanties, one piled on top of another. “You’re looking at the Third World,” Conrad said, taking the back streets deliberately just so I could see it before we got on the highway that led to the sea.

  I stared out the window with dismay—and yet with an unfamiliar happiness, because he, Conrad, was showing me this misery he’d seen a hundred times before and was probably even bored with because of its very hopelessness. No question that he was doing it just for me—the car bumping over the deep ruts, the stones and shards of bottles, the flattened-out cans; the heat-baked dust rising, settling on the windshield, sifting in upon us. Yes, I was happy, grateful, even distinctly optimistic, sensing change around every corner—like the promise of an icy bottle of soda pulled wet out of a freezer. Coca-Cola, Orange Crush, any flavor would have done. In the window of a little shop, I spotted a dusty Pepsi sign. “Let’s just keep going,” Conrad said, “We’ll get some later.” He seem possessed by the desire to drive without stopping. I would have liked to have gone into the little shop.

  We took the coastal highway, the blue Pacific glinting at us between cliffs and behind Turista signs advertising shabby motels and shops selling more damn pottery—enough planters for every patio in California. He said we would find a beach somewhere, but it always seemed hard to get down to the sea. You’d end up in a parking lot with the blue water three hundred feet below. Still, it was sort of beautiful. We went inland for a time, winding though little mountainous roads hardly ever passing a person or a house, just a few cattle in a dry field sometimes. And once in the middle of nowhere there was a huge sign plowed into the side of a hill, JUAN LUIS PORTILLO. I am remembering all these oddments very clearly. The fact that we never once stopped that day to have a drink and I was thirsty and wouldn’t say it. As if only he could decide to stop, not I.

  We found a beach in the late afternoon—not a beach exactly, but another parking lot by the side of the road with fine black gravel underfoot. You could get very close to the water, though. There were rocks you could climb down and sit on. He went ahead of me down the cliff and I scrambled after him rather cautiously because I am not much of a climber. We each found a rock. We sat facing each other looking out to the sea. He had for some reason brought a book, but he didn’t read it. We’d look at each other sometimes. I don’t think we said much.

  A Mexican family drove up into the lot above us and got out of their car. A middle-class family, an older man and woman and a young couple—the women stiffly, incongruously dressed in pants suits. Standing on the gravel, their backs to the sea, they all took pictures of each other for a while, then got in their car again and drove away.

  We sat a while longer, maybe twenty minutes. It was, for me, the best time we ever spent together. I think I was perfectly happy. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe because of the stillness, maybe because we could finally, for once, just sit with each other like that, not even having to say anything, and yet have it complete. We’d had to cross a border to be that way with each other. It was something much rarer than passion, much harder to get to. I think—I am sure—he felt it too.

  I didn’t want it to end. I with a child waiting back home in the East and a living to earn—a responsible person, I would have gone on with him if he’d asked me, disappeared with him into Mexico, moving farther and farther South, all his commitments and mine forgotten. I was ready to take any risk, any leap—my mind crazily seizing out of thin air practical solutions to what in sanity would have seemed impossible. I’ll call my mother and ask her to keep Matthew for a while. I’ll ask for a leave of absence from my job. I computed the balance in my checking account. I saw myself breaking free of everything that bound me.

  “It’s getting late,” he said. “Let’s take off for Ensenada so that we can drive back before dark.”

  Ensenada was as far as we went. It wasn’t much of a town. No charm in particular. The houses on the dirt streets were slightly better than the ones in Tijuana and the same pottery was for sale. I could have lived without seeing Ensenada. We drove through it, then turned around and drove out again. He showed me a cantina where he had once had drinks—with a friend, he said. He said it was a terrific place, but we didn’t stop there.

  There was fog on the road up the coast, billow
ing veils of it rolling in from the sea. I looked out the window for the beach where we had been, but somehow I missed it. He was driving rather tensely, his eyes straight ahead on the road. I told myself I was still having a good time.

  Just outside Tijuana there was a sunset. Ah, the purples, the golds, the fiery rose in the center of it, the mysterious shafts of light piercing through clouds straight down to the sea, the warm shadows on the cliffs. Who can deal with a sunset like that? It is the kind that makes banal postcards or paintings that are a humiliation to the artist. It is as if the human eye flinches away from such beauty, is somehow unequal to the viewing. It is the same way with happiness, perhaps. Once one identifies it, grasps after it, it has already come and gone.

  HE IS IN the kitchen of the garden apartment with the swimming pool catching up on his calls. In the next room Molly, having washed off the dust of Mexico in the shower, is lying on their bed.

  She thinks of it as their bed only by virtue of the fact that she will be in it with him for a few more days, then it will become his again. There are exactly four and a half days left. The rest of the room is clearly his, dominated by his scattered possessions—articles of clothing she realizes she does not recognize, electric razor, tape deck, typewriter, a pile of paperbacks and unanswered mail on top of the desk. Also the ledger book she gave him for his birthday—“A book to write your book in.” How odd to see it there. But it pleases her that he has brought it with him. She wonders if her inscription is still in it, although there is no reason to think it should not be.

  She has opened the copy of Middlemarch she brought with her from the East. She can hear Conrad’s voice very plainly. First he talks to several members of the defense committee, then to a student at the university who is evidently inviting him to be a speaker at a teach-in. That is only a short conversation. He hangs up and walks into the bedroom, smiles approvingly at Molly. “Reading?” he says. He puts a cassette on the tape deck and turns it on. A Mozart serenade for woodwinds. He stands listening to the opening passage by the flute, then walks out of the room again.

  The oboe picks up the theme, plays a slower, slightly mournful variation. In the next room the phone is being dialed. Now Molly lies very still on the bed, hardly daring to move—her sense of hearing suddenly sharply attuned like a fine precision instrument to pick up both levels of sound, separating one from the other—his voice under the liquid, innocent stream of notes. She cannot quite hear what he is saying, but there is a drop in the tone into intimacy. A few words are distinct—“No, no, I got your letters … ” A little while later he says quite loudly, “I’m not speaking in a low voice. I happen to have a frog in my throat.” As if in demonstration, he coughs three times.

  She cannot look at him when he comes back in. She pretends to read, her fingers clenching the book, her mouth stretched tight over her teeth. He does not sit next to her on the bed, but goes to his desk and pulls open drawers, rummaging through papers. She does not think she is going to cry. This is a new, much colder feeling that she has now—the severe implacability of a judge. Not for the world would she even explain to him what it is that is so wrong. So we could not even have one day. No, she will never say it. She turns an unread page of Middlemarch.

  The Mozart ends. He selects another tape, a Brahms quartet. He walks over to the bed and sits down now, a piece of folded paper in his hand with something inside it.

  “You know what this is?” he says.

  “No.” She scarcely looks up from the closely printed lines of type.

  “Hash. One of the students I met here gave it to me.”

  She is silent.

  “I thought we’d smoke it,” he says.

  “I’ve never had it.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to try it out?” He gets up again and goes back to the desk, looks for something.

  “I’ll try it out,” she says.

  Now that he has made this suggestion, she knows that what she would like to do most at this moment is get out of herself in the most literal sense of the term. She would like to climb out of Molly, the reality of Molly and Conrad. Finally, she thinks, she understands addiction.

  He comes back with a small glass pipe. “This was also a gift,” he says, holding it up, delighted with his new plaything.

  “Oh, people really like you, Conrad. They like you a lot. I’ll bet that was from a woman, wasn’t it?”

  He seems confused by her tone, almost hurt. “I don’t care for what you’re thinking.”

  “But you don’t know what I’m thinking,” she says, the bantering note still in her voice. She feels brittle—brittle as the pipe which might snap in your fingers if you put too much pressure on the glass. So we couldn’t even have one day. Even if she did say it, he wouldn’t understand. And Roberta the one being lied to on the phone this time, long distance. No pleasure in such reversals. A Pyrrhic-victory. She savors the word Pyrrhic—the taste of acid in it.

  Later, when they are both sufficiently high, she asks, “Did the frog go away?”

  “What frog?”

  “The one in your throat.”

  “You crazy little cunt,” he says.

  “Is that what I am?”

  “Yes. Crazy.”

  They have been lying next to each other without touching. Now in an abrupt, purposeful way, he rolls over on his side and pulls open her robe. “I’ll put a frog in you,” he says. “I’m going to fuck you like you’ve never been fucked before.”

  “Oh, I’ve been fucked that way many times.” It is she who is speaking over long distance now.

  “But only by me.”

  “Oh, yes. Only by you.”

  She watches him come down upon the woman’s body on the bed. She lies unresistant, removed, his open mouth moving, sucking, the tongue playing insistently on the nipples, the hard fingers going inside her and then the mouth there too. She hears herself moan and the mouth bites, consumes. She struggles against it.

  “Don’t you like me to hurt you? Don’t you like it?” He holds her down, laughing. “You do, don’t you?”—thrusting himself up, his lips on her mouth, her own taste on them.

  Behind her closed eyes, there is a picture flashing in her brain, a picture of a woman holding a monster of corroding flesh in her arms, white, pulpy corroding flesh engulfing hers as she pulls him into her, embracing him, opening her legs. The monster rides her now, urging her on, curbing her, demanding and taking more.

  “Does it feel big?”

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  “This is what you want.”

  “Further,” she says. “Further.”

  “Like this?”

  “Oh!” she cries.

  “Your cunt is so open. You know that?”

  She holds the monster in her, rocks him, encircles him with her soft walls, until her flesh glows like a coal and he bursts inside her transformed into a shower of light.

  THE LAST WORDS Conrad Schwartzberg ever said to me are not particularly significant.

  “Take advantage of the pool.”

  He was on his way to a meeting. Something to do with the defense committee, I believe. Or was it the student group. He was going to be back in time for dinner.

  I was alone and so I looked in the ledger book still on top of the desk. I wasn’t intending to read it—just see the flyleaf where I had written my name.

  It had been half torn out very sloppily. You could see the jagged edge along the binding where the top part of the page had been. Only the bottom part, which was blank, remained.

  What I remember most clearly about the next few hours is the taxi ride to the airport—the feeling of speed, of having jumped off into space. I rolled down both windows in the back and let the hot dry air blow in upon me. I was walking out, I thought, over three thousand miles.

  On the plane I began to feel strange. I kept thinking I’d forgotte
n something—although I was sure I’d packed everything I’d brought with me. Finally, somewhere over the Rockies, I remembered I hadn’t left a note.

  Every now and then for a while afterward I had an urge to call him. It was like having committed suicide and knowing, that if you wanted to, you could find out what someone had to say about it.

  I never spoke to Conrad again—although one day I phoned Roberta.

  I said, “I think it’s only right to tell you that I was recently in California and it’s all over now between Conrad and me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  I said, “I really think we have a lot to talk about. I’d like to get together with you and have coffee.”

  I actually had a vision of some great communication taking place between us, after which everything would be finally understood.

  She said in a rather strangled voice, “I’ll call you if I think it’s a good idea,” and hung up.

  I AM LIVING what could be termed an orderly life. Sometimes in the mornings if I wake up very early and am by myself, I have disquieting thoughts. They begin to pass when I get up to make breakfast. I drown them in frozen orange juice, in the rush of water into the sink that washes away yesterday’s coffee grounds. I wake Matthew and get him ready for school. Since there is no one here to object, I let him turn on the Flintstones as loud as he wishes. I worry sometimes about the effect of so much mass culture upon his consciousness—yet he seems to be surviving the onslaught, to remain very much himself, joyous and critical, imaginative. He spends Sundays with Fred with some regularity, even sleeps over. Fred has been seeing a woman steadily for a while, but Matthew, loyally, never mentions her. I miss him when he is gone, although I am glad to have a night to myself. There is a stillness in the house that does not altogether please me—like the moment every morning when I return to the apartment after I have put him on the bus to school. I know that I am walking into an empty place. I finish putting on my makeup, feed the cats, have a last cup of coffee and go to work. There is something to be said for routine.