Bad Connections (10 page)

I
DIDN'T SEE
much of Malcolm for a while after that. At least, we never met by prearrangement. Maybe because I looked for him, I'd run into him now and then. I'd be walking somewhere in the neighborhood and suddenly there he'd be turning the corner and coming toward me. He'd smile and wave. We'd always touch when we reached each other, and I'd find myself feeling obliged to account to him for my sudden presence in his path—“I'm just on the way to Food Fair to pick up a few things. We seem to have run out of nearly everything.” A couple of times he walked me all the way to the door of my house but wouldn't come up. He always had his dog with him, a nervous loping creature, given to unpredictable displays of macho ferocity.

I saw Malcolm with another woman once. I was waiting to cross Broadway and the two of them were standing on the other side engaged in conversation. She was a tall young woman wearing shorts in the middle of winter, a rabbit's fur jacket, platform shoes. The dog was pulling on the leash and Malcolm kept jerking it back impatiently. I changed my mind about crossing right there and went on a few extra blocks.

Conrad called me early in February.

“Hi, Molly.”

There was all that familiar cheer again, that total assurance. Had he ever doubted that he would simply find me there when he was ready—unchanged and waiting. He gave me a full report on his favorite subject, his most recent activities on the left. The progress of the Mahwah Seven trial, the article prominently mentioning him that was about to appear in
Newsweek,
an invitation to speak at Harvard in the spring. On a somewhat more intimate level, he reported on the declining condition of his car, the current mental health of his mother.

Nonetheless, there was comfort in this conversation. The calm of neutrality descended upon me like a drug, momentarily robbing me of my defenses. I considered actually confiding in him in the same matter-of-fact tone—telling him how hurtful his two-month silence had been to me, how I had at first counted off the days of our abstinence like a child counting off the days till Christmas, and how I'd felt bereft in a different way ever since I'd met Malcolm, inhabiting a fantasy existence of troubling intensity wherein Malcolm and I bedded down again and again just as we had that first and only time, his movements and mine formalized by now into a slowed-down elaborate dance. It was the kind of conversation I could have had with Felicia. But Conrad was not my friend.

Finally I said, “But how have you
been,
Conrad?”

There was a pause, and then he said in a reluctant voice, “Well, I've missed you.”

I suppose that was what I wanted to hear.

I got over there fast enough that night. He said his back was hurting and he couldn't come out, but he wanted very much to see me.

I left the dinner dishes unwashed in the sink. I phoned a neighbor with whom I had a slight acquaintance. She was a mother of three who'd hardly notice one more child, I thought. I asked her if she'd mind watching Matthew for a couple of hours. How resourceful I was in the service of madness. I told her my fiancé was seriously ill. “Oh dear,” she said. “Do you think he will require hospitalization?” I said I hoped it wouldn't come to that.

I remember Matthew tearful in the elevator we took to her apartment. Above all things, small children desire consistency. It takes maturity to develop a taste for the impossible, as well as the willingness to rush after it at the drop of a hat.

“I didn't expect you so soon,” Conrad said after he had opened the door.

There was a pleased look on his face that made me wish I had arrived much later.

“Well, I can't stay long.”

Smiling, he kissed me, quick to thrust his tongue between my lips. “Come in,” he said. “I'm on the phone.”

“Naturally.”

“There's just one more call that I'm expecting and then I'll take it off the hook.”

“I wouldn't dream of asking such a sacrifice.”

He left me in the front hallway of the apartment, then limping slightly, headed back toward the kitchen. I stood there taking off my coat, all my attention focused upon an object I had never seen before in Conrad's house—the newest feature, so to speak. It was a female bicycle. An ordinary black bicycle that might have been the twin to the one that Conrad owned himself. Jauntily embellished with a basket, it stood side by side with its male counterpart with an air of complete self-possession, as if they were a pair of long standing. I had an urge to shake it by its handlebars and knock it down.

Slowly I advanced into the living room, scanning it for further signs of invasion. It looked reassuringly much the same. Only the piles of books and papers had changed their configurations. The dust was as thick as ever. Finally I spotted what I was looking for—a small pepper plant on a window sill. A gift no doubt, since Conrad had very little interest in horticulture. I noted that it had lost three quarters of its leaves. Four remaining purple and magenta peppers clung to its withering stem. Clearly it had been neglected for at least a week.

Attached to the telephone cord by the receiver cradled under his chin, Conrad emerged in the small archway that led from the kitchen. He held up a bottle of beer and a glass and made pouring gestures. I nodded affirmatively and again he disappeared from view. Finally I heard the click of the receiver, the slamming of the refrigerator door and various clinking and rummaging sounds, followed by the vision of Conrad himself slowly bearing in a battered tin tray on which there were two glasses of beer and a bag of pretzels. He had a look on his face of rather consciously boyish charm, as if he knew there is nothing more endearing to a woman than a large helpless man struggling with the little chores of domesticity.

“Your plant needs watering,” I said, thinking we might as well get down to basics.

“Oh, that's right. I seem to keep forgetting it.” He set the tray down on the coffee table in front of me, wincing as he straightened up.

“I think they need watering every two days.”

He smiled at me through his pain in innocence and tenderness. “I'll try to remember,” he said.

“But that one looks as though it's too far gone.”

He sat down next to me on the couch and took my hand. His round and cheerful face descended toward mine, then momentarily veered. Very deliberately he breathed into my ear. “Do you think I should throw it out?”

I was a little shocked by his lack of sentiment.

“I would if I were you.”

“You have a strain of ruthlessness, Molly,” he sighed.

“Along with my capacity to be vindictive.”

“I think I might be able to live with that.”

I made note of that choice of words.
Live with.

“But could you live with the rest of me? Isn't that the question?”

I noted that I was being terrifically direct—and wondered what all this noting signified. Perhaps a change in the way in which I cared for Conrad. A real diminishment.

“That's a more difficult one,” I heard him say.

I smiled at his predictability.

Turning away from him, I stared at the plant on the window sill. As if it withered under my gaze, a pepper dropped off and fell into the pot with a small dry sound. I found myself laughing. “You've lost another pepper,” I said.

He moved closer to me. “Forget the goddamn peppers.”

“You know what I wish, Conrad?”

“What do you wish?” he said patiently, as if to a child.

“I wish you were just an old friend I hadn't seen for a while. I wish we could just be—restful.”

“The desire to be restful is one that I share. It makes me happy to see you, Molly. I have very warm feelings toward you. I thought we could have a quiet drink, a good talk, see where we're going from here.”

“Where
are
we going, Conrad?”

“Well, there've been certain changes.”

“There've been certain changes in my life, too,” I said quickly. “Certain additions. There's someone I've become preoccupied with.” I thought that was the most accurate way of describing my relationship with Malcolm without going into further detail.

“I'm not surprised,” he said after a moment. “I'm sure you could have a lot of additions in your life if that was what you wanted. I don't think you even know how attractive you are.”

“I have short legs,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“That's what Fred always used to tell me.”

“Well, Fred is a fool.”

“Actually, I look like my grandmother. They're the kind of legs that run in the family.”

“Molly, certainly you've never doubted that I found you attractive.”

I could feel happiness about to sneak up on me any minute. I tried to steel myself against it. “No,” I said. “There've been different problems.”

Closing his eyes wearily, Conrad sank back against the pillows at the other end of the couch. “My back happens to be killing me,” he said.

“I'm sorry.” Reaching out slowly, I put my hand on his forehead, covered his closed eyes.

“That's friendlier,” he murmured.

“Did you do something to it? Or is it tension?”

“Tension,” he said.

“Are these changes you mentioned before making you tense?”

“Yes,” he said grimly.

“I told my neighbor you were seriously ill. That was how I got out.” I moved my hand down his face, gently rubbed the side of his neck. “Does that make you feel any less tense?”

“To tell you the truth, my back hurts like hell at the moment. But it's nice you're doing what you're doing.”

“Oh, I can be nice.”

“I know you can, Molly.”

“May I ask you just another small question?”

“If it's a nice question.”

“Is the bicycle a permanent fixture?”

“The bicycle?”

“The one that isn't yours, the one in the hallway. I'm really trying to forget the peppers, but I keep remembering the bicycle.”

“Roberta thought it would make sense to leave it here for a while. She goes riding a lot in Central Park even at this time of the year.”

“I see. Maybe I'll get one myself and leave it here too if there's room. Except mine will probably be yellow.”

“Molly, you've told me you don't even know how to ride.”

“Well, you could teach me. Is the bicycle going to be followed by anything else I should know about?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean other possessions of Roberta's. Roberta herself.”

He sighed—more heavily this time. “I was getting to that,” he said. “What's actually happening is that Roberta's bicycle is going to go away. It won't be here the next time you come. She's picking it up tomorrow. She's very angry with me.”

“Angry? After having you all to herself for two months?”

“I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I have many faults that can be annoying on a day-to-day basis. Still Roberta has become convinced that we should live together. She thinks that's the only way to resolve many of our problems.”

For a moment I could scarcely breathe. “And you don't feel the same,” I said.

“I'm not at a point where I'm ready to make that commitment to anybody.”

“But if you did, it would be to her.”

“I didn't say that, Molly.”

“No, I said it.”

“Molly, don't you think my feelings for you have quite a lot to do with all of this?”

“I don't really know anything, Conrad.”

“Then you should allow your own instincts to tell you something.”

“Lately I've been trying not to have any instincts. I'd just like to exist in a realm of fact for a change.” Actually, it was Malcolm I was thinking of as well as the situation at hand. I wondered if I'd even be making such statements to Conrad now if it hadn't been for what had happened with Malcolm, too.

Conrad was looking at me meanwhile in a soft sort of way, as if he sincerely wanted to show me he understood. “What would you say, Molly, if I told you Roberta and I have decided to stop seeing each other—and that there is a seventy-five percent chance that this is a permanent decision?”

“I'd say,” I said, still curiously unable to breathe normally, “that I'd still have to worry about the other twenty-five percent.”

“Twenty-five percent is just a generous allowance for outside possibilities. I know your desire for me to be honest. But wouldn't you say the odds are in your favor—assuming of course that you still want to have me? I know nothing about your relationship with this other person.”

“I still want to have you, Conrad,” I said after a while.

He drew me down to him and kissed me, holding me against him. “I hope you're prepared to see a lot of me. I'm going to be very lonely, you know.”

T
HERE ARE TIMES
when words run away from us. Even the most persuasive orator, the brilliant negotiator, the expert weaver and dodger, can make a slip. A faltering of attention, a moment of ambivalence, and we are apt to say the totally inappropriate thing—or to be more honest than we ever intended. Conrad was not exempt from this weakness. That incongruous remark about being very lonely was one of the most revealing things he ever allowed himself to say to me.

At first I noted it as incongruous—nothing more. My mind was adjusting to the realization that I had won, and I wondered why the victory seemed so undramatic. Why there was a dullness of feeling, when one might have expected exhilaration. I suppose I had always imagined that at some point Conrad would consciously choose me. Instead I felt rather like a consolation prize, what was left to Conrad in the wake of Roberta's defection. Since I was already there, he had me to fall back on. But why even then would he say he'd be lonely? It was an effect of stress like his backache. Perhaps I was wrong to expect too much from him. Whatever his less positive feelings had been for Roberta, he had undoubtedly become very used to her. With her terrible dependency she had filled his life, confirmed his sense of his own importance. Maybe Conrad didn't feel important at all, and thus needed confirmation over and over again from as many different sources as possible. He was vulnerable, my Conrad. Perhaps you had to keep going down to get to that place in him—but it was there.

I felt a tenderness for him. The brittle game of words I'd been playing suddenly ended. Lying in his arms, I whispered to him that he was not to worry about being lonely.

If there is one thing I have always believed in, it is the inability of men to know their own minds. Putting my faith in this negative side of their character, I have acted accordingly—not always with success. I believed, for example, that I could turn Fred into a father by the very act of producing a baby. It was I who promised nothing would change—and he who kept his side of the bargain to the letter. Still I have my son, the one male in my life with whom I have a permanent relationship. Other miscalculations have left me with less.

Is it better not to win at all than to win by default? Whatever the answer to that question, it was not in me to have walked away from Conrad at that juncture. Perhaps Isabel Archer could have done it. There was a time when I was much younger when the novels of Henry James had considerable influence upon my notion of morality. It was that repeated Jamesian act of renunciation that became for me almost a religious ideal. The summer I was nineteen I seriously wanted to be Lambert Strether. Instead I grew up and became the person I am.

I have found it nearly impossible most of the time to live my life by absolute standards. It is more a matter of getting by, making do with what one has—improvising recklessly out of some misguided belief in one's ability to prevail. I present myself to the world with a rather self-effacing exterior. Perhaps underneath there is a blind and stubborn arrogance.

It was like a marriage, she thought after a while, in the sense that Conrad could be absent in the very midst of being present in the way that husbands often are. At least that had been her own experience of marriage, although she retained hopes that it need not necessarily be universal. At any rate, they did not seem very much like lovers. This was partially due to the fact that even after Conrad had recovered from his back ache, they made love on an average of only once a week, usually for some reason Thursdays—though they now spent four or five nights together, including weekends.

He talks about being tired so much, she begins to worry he may indeed be in danger of burning himself out—an expression he uses once when he feels particularly depressed. Another time he tells her, “I feel depleted.” She does not really think that it is her fault, but she tries to be very understanding. Soft-spoken with him now, never caustic or demanding. She is troubled by something apologetic in this behavior, but once she has assumed it, it seems to overwhelm her normal personality. Often when she is with him, she feels muted, dim—missing the sense of herself that used to come in the midst of combat or in the devious subtleties of interrogation. Yet it was she who'd wanted things to be restful.

Actually, she believes that this restfulness, if she can only sustain it, will eventually restore him. Roberta in this situation might have become hysterical. Molly, on the other hand, is the exemplar of quiet patience.

Much of her time and energy is spent in the preparation of food. She consults books on international cuisine and follows out elaborate recipes, requiring the mincing and chopping of many different ingredients. Getting started on dinner early in the evening, she puts things on the stove or in the oven, adjusting the cooking temperature down or up or removing the dish in question from the heat altogether, depending upon the arrival time specified in the phone call from Conrad that invariably comes at the very moment she had expected him to sit down at her table. She becomes an expert at keeping things warm for him without drying them out, although it often hardly matters. He is apt to eat ravenously but with a kind of obliviousness—chewing abstractedly as he makes his innumerable late night phone calls, following up the loose ends of meetings, apologizing for appointments missed during the day, making mysterious arrangements to go to other cities, to be picked up at airports, to be put up in houses—because he never stays at a hotel if he can help it, and there seems to be no end to the number of people who desire to put him up, whether upstate, in the Midwest or in the New England area. All these people are in the Movement, and they are all described to her as “one of my good friends.” “I never meet your friends,” she remarks from time to time, and he says, yes, isn't it a shame she's so tied down, he'd take her with him otherwise. But then, most of his trips are so short, they'd hardly be worth the money they'd cost her or the trouble of making arrangements.

They watch the Late Show and go to bed. His eyes start to close almost as soon as he lowers his head to the pillow. He rolls away from her to the far side of the mattress. She contemplates his massive back, the various freckles and moles upon it, the ridge of red hair that runs down the center, and then, finally, turns off the light.

“Have you noticed,” I said one day, “that you and I hardly ever make love any more?”

“Oh, I don't think you could call it hardly ever,” he said. “But I have noticed. When was the last time?”

“Two weeks ago,” I said.

“It wasn't as long ago as that.”

“Well, it was.”

“Do you keep a chart?” he said bitterly.

Tears instantly streamed out of my eyes.

“Molly,” he said tiredly, “I'm going through some kind of transitional period.”

“Are you really sure it's just transitional?”

“For some reason I feel a lack of desire. I don't feel sexual with you right now. If it disturbs you, maybe we should see each other less.”

I said it didn't disturb me violently. It just disturbed me a little.

One night I dreamed about Conrad and Roberta. I dreamed I was walking down the blank and unending corridors of a hotel—sort of a Hilton of the imagination. All the identical doors were closed except one. This one opened upon a room from which music issued. Looking in, I saw that a wedding was in progress. It was the wedding of Conrad and Roberta—a Jewish wedding complete with canopy, chopped liver, and the traditional glass that was to be broken by the groom, which stood elevated and separate on a special little table. The guests, drinking wine and enjoying themselves, were all in olive drab and denim. “Come in,” they urged me. And even Conrad turned for a moment and said, “Why don't you come in, Molly?” But I stood in the doorway and would go no farther.

When I related this dream to Conrad, he said it just proved how deeply our early conditioning was rooted in our subconscious, so that even our dreams took on stereotypical capitalist forms. As to my anxiety relating to his going back to Roberta, he reminded me of his honesty in establishing his original ratio of sixty:forty.

“Seventy-five!”
I cried out in correction.

“A figure of speech, Molly. What are we really talking about anyway? People you've been very close to don't simply drop out of your consciousness—” he paused and gave me a long, deliberate look— “or even out of your life,” he said.

“Oh, have you been seeing her?” I tried to get the words out very evenly.

“We keep in touch. She's decided now that what she really wants to do is go to law school. Naturally, she came to me for advice.”

“Who else?”

“She's calmed down considerably about her relationship to me. A lot was set in motion when you called her, Molly. I was very upset at the time, but actually it forced a great many clarifications to the surface. I see it now as probably constructive for her, although I know that was not your intention.”

“I just wanted everyone to know the truth, Conrad.”

“But you took out your anger on her. I still find that disturbing. Maybe that's why there's blockage now in some of my feelings.”

“Will it go away?” I asked very quietly.

“I certainly hope so. I don't intend to remain in this state indefinitely.”

We talked very openly now about Conrad's state. Once we had named it, it became a subject between us. We no longer called it exhaustion but blockage. It was as if the name gave the condition a certain density. I felt it as something palpable—a perceptibly increasing mass. It took its place among the dishes on the table, located itself in the very center of the bed. I was constantly aware of its presence in the excruciating way I was aware of Conrad himself—his hand brushing against mine when he reached for the salt, the very slight amount of pressure in the quick kiss he gave me late one night when I greeted him at the door and he was tired and forgetful for a moment. I would watch him as he wrote on his long yellow pads or read the newspaper, registering the turning of a page in the pores of my skin, waiting for him to look up across the room.

Gloom settled upon him, bringing with it a certain sweetness I had not seen in him before. He became peculiarly considerate—complimenting me on even the simplest meals, insisting on washing the dishes. Once he amazed me by mopping the bathroom floor, knocking over an entire bucket of water in the process. Almost ritualistically he would ask me about my day at the office. “You know your mother works very hard,” he would remind Matthew, lecturing him from time to time on cooperation and responsibility. It pleased Conrad to view me as a worker—and therefore oppressed.

Perhaps he was afraid I might desert him. He began coming over every night of the week, sometimes turning up without warning or calling me in the small hours of the morning and telling me he was on his way. Now he would want me to hold him before he fell asleep. “Would you like me to make you hard?” I'd whisper. Most of the time I couldn't.

There was one week he didn't go back to his apartment at all. He bought a package of underwear and rinsed the same shirt out every other night. He gave my number to his answering service. Finally on Sunday afternoon he said he thought he'd go and pick up his mail. “Would you mind walking over there with me?” he said. We took Matthew with us. It was a warm day at the very end of winter. Conrad was determinedly gay as we walked, turning his attention toward Matthew. He was teaching him a song—“Solidarity Forever.” “So-li-DAH-rity,” Matthew pronounced it for some reason.

I hadn't been at the apartment for quite a while. It had a desolate look, as if no one really lived there—it was a storage place of castoff clothes, books, unopened correspondence. “We won't stay long,” Conrad said. “I just want to throw out the stuff that's in the refrigerator.” He was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang—one short tentative ring at first and then a long, insistent one.

“Shall I get it?” I called.

“No, I will.” Drying his hands on a dishtowel, Conrad walked to the door. He opened it and stood in the entrance, blocking my view of his visitor. “You shouldn't have come without calling,” I heard him say. “There's someone here with me.”

I knew instantly who it was that was standing outside. I felt the cruelty of that greeting he gave her. But what else could he have done? It would have been worse, I supposed, to have let her in. I wondered why he couldn't bring himself to say my name to her. What was there left to conceal at this point?

I really wanted to see her. I still had no precise face for her in my mind. Her features were always blurry in my memory of our one encounter.

He was standing so that all that was visible from where I sat was a long shank of black hair, the sleeve of a dark brown quilted jacket.

He stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him softly but very fast. I could hear the rise and fall of their voices, hers much fainter than his most of the time, now and then inaudible, once just for a moment a high and piercing tone. I couldn't make out the words.

He rang the doorbell after she was safely gone, and I let him in. He stood there distractedly tugging at his hair, trying to look composed. “That was Roberta,” he said. “She happened to be in the neighborhood, so she biked over. There was something she needed to ask me.”

It's odd to think that's all I ever saw of her.