Bad Connections (13 page)

“You don't sound so relaxed right now.”

“I assure you that I am. How is Matthew?”

“I understand you're planning to rent the house for the rest of the year.”

“It's a plan that has been under discussion but is very much up in the air. There are certain advantages to living out of the city as well as some real inconveniences.”

“We were going to do it once. Remember, Conrad? We talked about going to Vermont.”

“Molly, you remember everything. It's a little terrifying. I think you keep a catalog inside your head. Everything I've ever said to you and when and where, the precise circumstances—”

She hangs up and cries, then calls again, not bothering to get the operator this time. He picks up the phone immediately as if he had been expecting it to ring.

“Conrad, you have to deal with me! I think you really have to deal with me!”

“I'm doing that as best I can.”

“Don't you think we have to talk about what happened?”

“I'm sure you've worked out a perfect explanation, Molly, but I have to come up with my own. All I know is that I've begun to feel in balance again—whatever that's worth.”

“It's a false solution, Conrad.”

“In that case, sometimes they can be the best kind.”

“Oh God! You know, you really ought to hear yourself!”

“I think I mentioned the problem of the dishwasher and the lack of privacy in this situation. I'd like to ask you to try not to call again here. I'll contact you the middle of next week.”

“I can't promise that, Conrad.”

“Maybe you'd feel better if we made a definite appointment. I'll come in on Wednesday, August twenty-fourth, and we'll get together. I'll set aside an evening. That's seventeen days from now. I'm writing it in my book.”

“Your
book
,”
she says.

“I'll be there at eight. You wouldn't like to tell me how you got this number, would you?”

“No,” she says. “I wouldn't like to tell you.”

There is suddenly the sound of rushing water, the cranking of a machine.

“Wednesday, August twenty-fourth,” he says in a loud, brisk voice and hangs up.

I
REMEMBER THE
Sunday night bus rides back to the city that summer, numbing the dread of returning with a fitful half-sleep from which I'd rouse myself to see if we'd gotten as far as Jersey, breathing the stale, recycled air that smelled of boredom, Matthew's head damp and heavy in my lap. I'd find a melancholy security in those times of suspension between one place and another. At least I was safe from my own expectations. Conrad would neither call nor not call. I knew he would not get on at any of the stops.

It was the Sunday before I was supposed to see Conrad that Matthew and I missed the bus we usually took and had to kill a couple of hours in town. The bus, when it finally came, was crowded with Chasidic Jews. Bearded men in dark suits and black fedoras. Women in stiff long-sleeved dresses, their hair hidden by glistening brown wigs in the beehive styles of the fifties. They carried large solemn-looking pocketbooks and pale infants wrapped in blankets.

I found a seat with Matthew in the back. Across the aisle there was room for just one more passenger. When the bus turned off the highway and made a stop at Kingston, I looked out the window and saw a small green car drive up to the terminal. A tall young woman carrying a basket got out of it. She flagged the busdriver frantically and broke into a run. It was Francine, the newest person in my office. At that time I only knew her slightly. She had never told me where she went on the weekends. I called out to her as she came striding down the aisle. She seemed the antithesis of the other passengers with her waistlength free-swinging hair, her red tie-dye shirt knotted artfully a few inches above the waistband of the cutoff jeans that showed off her long, brown perfect legs.

“This is terrific! We'll share a cab at the other end,” she said as she arranged herself in the empty seat.

“Were you staying in Kingston?”

“No. Across the river with some friends, friends of my boyfriend's. He decided to stay on an extra day or so. That's why I had to come back on this. Don't you hate this ride?”

“I do it every weekend.”

“Look at all these wigs,” she whispered. “Can you
imagine
!”
Tossing her hair, she shuddered theatrically.

“Who are you?” Matthew said.

“I'm Francine. I work in your mommy's office. I think I have a couple of chocolate cherries, if you'd like one.”

“Is it a
real
cherry?”

“Why don't you try one and see? That's my dinner,” she said ruefully. “They were cooking something that was going to take forever, some kind of curry thing that was probably going to be disgusting anyway. It was Bobbie's turn and she always makes a big production out of it. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any tastebuds. So I'm not missing much.”

I heard the name of the person without tastebuds, I remembered the color of the car.

“What are tastebuds?” Matthew asked.

“Little buds all over the tongue.”

“Do
I
have them or just special people?” A drop of wet chocolate dripped down his chin.

“Of course you have them, honey. We all do.”

“Except for this one lady.”

Francine sighed and then laughed. “Quite original mind you have, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“I happen to know someone called Bobbie.” I inserted this revelation as casually as I could. “Did you say you were staying in Saugerties?”

“No. That's
this
side of the river, I think. My friends are in Milton's Crossing. That's between Redhook and Rhinebeck. Ever go over there?”

“No,” I said.

“Lots of old Dutch architecture. Rhinebeck's very pretty but awfully conservative. Milton's Crossing is just a lot of farmers and a general store. Real country, if you like that sort of thing. Of course, it's lovely in the summer. There's one couple that's thinking of staying up there through the winter—which strikes me as a little bit insane.”

“Ever hear of someone called Conrad Schwartzberg?” I said after a moment.

“Of course I know Conrad. He's one of the people I was just … Is he a good friend of yours?”

“I know him,” I said.

“And Bobbie … God, that makes me feel a little embarrassed. Sometimes it's as though I have foot-in-mouth disease.”

“I can't say I know her. Years ago I met her once.”

“Well … I don't get along with her terrifically. She's paranoid about Conrad flirting with me. If he says a word to me, she just dies. And Conrad, of course, will always come on—with me or just about any other female. If you know him, you know that's how he is.”

“I'm involved with Conrad Schwartzberg,” I said.

Francine fell silent. “That's heavy,” she said finally. “Look—I hope I haven't caused you pain.”

I looked away. “I've been in pain all summer,” I said hoarsely.

“Rough,” Francine said, shaking her head. “Really rough.”

“I didn't even know he wasn't in Saugerties. That's how crazy the situation is.”

“Extreme,” she agreed. “Wow! Just think, if we didn't happen to be on this bus, it might never have come out. Now I don't know what to do exactly. Should we continue this conversation or switch to another topic? Are you a person who absolutely disapproves of gossip?”

“Not in this instance,” I said.

She was a mine of information.

Our conversation wound on and on—long past Kingston and New Paltz and the string of small towns above Bear Mountain, persisting through the Sunday night traffic jams in New Jersey and the view of the Manhattan skyline above the oily marshes. The other passengers one by one turned off their lights and dozed in their angled seats. The only voices in the bus were Francine's and mine, and I wondered sometimes if any of the darkly clad people heard us and what they might have made of what we said. With all their rules and their wigs, their obliviousness to the passage of time and the price they must have paid for it, they at least had the advantage of moral clarity. A person like me was an object lesson in the dangers of too much freedom.

I wounded myself with details. Conrad sleeping with Roberta on some sort of Japanese mat that you rolled up and put in a corner because she was given to insomnia and required a hard surface under her. Conrad patiently peeling potatoes and shelling peas because Roberta demanded that all domestic work be split fifty-fifty and marked all debits in red upon a chart that she hung out in public view. Conrad devoting the entire Fourth of July weekend to entertaining her family, described by Francine as “the most bougie people you would ever want to meet.”

Francine had flair as a raconteur, a keen eye for the ridiculous. She was not charitable in her judgments. She condemned Roberta more on grounds of taste and style than anything really substantial. It was Roberta's “bouginess” that she objected to—more subtle than that of her family but definitely there—often taking the form of “grimness.”

“Can you imagine someone skinny-dipping
grimly
?
Grimly
taking off her clothes and
grimly
going in the water. And always going on and on about the beauty of the country and getting the poisons out of your system and putting wheat germ on everything and making little references to how you sometimes have to get certain people to abandon their evil ways for their own good. That's what I mean by
grim.
I mean the utter boringness of that kind of outlook, which is simply beyond belief.”

I added her version of Roberta to my own, seizing upon everything negative, which was after all what I wanted to hear, because then it no longer seemed possible that Conrad could actually stay with such a person. Still what also emerged was the picture of Roberta as the one with the power, Conrad as supplicant. Perhaps that positioning was new. Perhaps it had never been the other way around, as I had thought. I wondered if her break with him had somehow caused his inability to make love to me, and if he had then gone back to her in a panic, promising her anything she wanted. He must have felt very safe with Roberta because I did not believe that he could love her. I was the evil she referred to, the reason she wanted to keep him in the country—the risk of winter isolation less than his proximity to me. Apparently she did not believe he would keep all his promises.

T
HERE IS A
word I detest:
interstices.
It is the name for certain very small places where one line happens to cross another, mere points on a diagram, the briefest of joinings—the lines continuing on in different directions into infinity, no final convergence indicated. As in: “I only have room for you in the interstices of my life.”

It was Conrad's attempt at poetry, an effort to ennoble the situation under discussion with a tone of tragic regret. Was it his tragedy or mine? I wasn't sure. He could have said, “I'm not going to be able to see you very often,” which is what I took it to mean anyway, since we had agreed already that we would see each other, but not frequently. There was a certain arrogance in the assumption that his life with Roberta would be so full he'd hardly have time in it for anything extra, just one little dot now and then.

He was going to spend it with her not in the country but in New York, in his apartment. That was what he came to tell me on the 24th, wearing a straw sombrero that Roberta had picked up in a barn sale. “How do you think this looks?” he said, preening a bit. “Awful,” I said. Men like to have images of themselves in certain hats. He took it off and didn't put it on again, leaving it on the table in the hall when he took me out to dinner. He asked me if he didn't look very brown—which he was all over, as I was later to discover. I told him I thought he was looking younger, and then he wanted to know if he'd been looking old. His beard, he confessed to me, would be quite gray if he ever allowed it to grow in. I told him I'd noticed that on the days when he didn't shave.

In that disarming way he had of taking certain things for granted, he took for granted my friendship and goodwill. He was happy and therefore I would be happy for him. He couldn't help bragging a bit about his current lifestyle. His house, he informed me—as if it were truly his house, not just one he'd rented a share of until the end of September—was on a tract of one hundred acres. It had belonged to a wealthy gentleman farmer, who until his death five years before used to arrive for weekends in a private plane that would land in the meadow. He spoke of walks in the woods—
his
woods, blackberry picking and mushroom gathering, the joyous communal dinners.

“I'll bet you had curry on Sunday night.”

He looked a little startled. “As a matter of fact, we did.” He seemed amused by my extrasensory powers. “I'd like to keep seeing you in this casual way, Molly. I don't like to lose people altogether.”

I finally let myself say what I'd been thinking. “I don't think we could possibly be casual.”

“I know I can,” he said confidently.

“Liar,” I said brightly. “Liar. Liar.”

“Don't you understand how wrong it would be for me to jeopardize the commitment Roberta and I have made to each other just because I cared for someone else as well?”

“Live with neither of us then.”

“What? And go back and forth? Molly, I want peace. I want monogamy. I want to know that if something falls apart, it does so on its own terms.”

“But we didn't fall apart, Conrad. That isn't what happened. You pulled out—we didn't fall apart. You ran, you hid.”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

“I can't accept that for a minute.”

“I didn't hide, by the way. I retreated.”

“Conrad, your house is in Milton's Crossing, not Saugerties. You and Roberta sleep on a Japanese mat because she has so much tension and she tells everybody about how she's reforming you.”

He turned white. “You amaze me, Molly.”

“I know a lot about your idyll.”

“I never said it was an idyll. It's a rewarding and difficult relationship.”

“Mostly difficult.”

“That remains to be seen. I doubt that you get your information from very reliable sources.”

“Only one. I'm not so powerful that I have a network.”

“The person who gave you the phone number?”

“No. Actually I got that in another way.”

He was staring at me bewildered, attracted, still angry. “You haven't been able to let go of me, have you?”

“Does that disturb you, Conrad?”

“It creates conflict. I think you'd actually consider sleeping with me even if I were living with someone else.”

I said, “You could always refuse.”

“I refuse,” he said.

“Because you don't want to or because you're afraid it won't work.”

“Oh it would work, but it wouldn't change anything.”

We looked at each other.

“Okay,” I said.

We stood up and left the restaurant. In the street outside we embraced.

“Oh Jesus Christ!” he said.