Bad Connections (14 page)

L
ATE IN SEPTEMBER
I went to see Malcolm. It was something I'd been thinking about and finally I just did it. I'd walked past his house a hundred times, looked up the stone steps through the glass door, into the little white-tiled hall with the row of mailboxes. It was odd that a person you'd once lain in the same bed with was also someone whose door you could dare to approach only in fantasy. But I had become accustomed to such apparent contradictions.

Earlier that day I had gone to Conrad's apartment for the last time. It was just before Roberta came down from the country. We'd spent the night together, our last whole night for a long while, and in the morning I walked over there with him. I had an oppressive, angry sense of
last
—the last this, the last that—unreasonable, I told myself, because it wasn't as if I were losing Conrad, it was only that certain conditions were changing for the time being. I remember he woke me to make love just before we got up—both of us crying out with the fierce pleasure of it—and then I walked him to Seventy-eighth Street. “Do you want to come up?” he said, as if it were a morning like any other. I said I wouldn't mind. Perhaps I should have said no. Sometimes one decides to do potentially painful things as arbitrary as passing one's hand through the flame of a candle. I thought I needed concrete evidence of the change that was taking place.

She'd already begun to move her stuff in. I'd expected that. Boxes of books. And the bicycle was back. In the living room there was a maple rocker—very homey, I thought—and a large brown pitcher filled with dried ragweed and cattails, which she must have gathered in the country. There was something about the harsh shapes of the ragweed pods that I found exceptionally depressing and dead-looking, but I didn't say so. That pitcher of weeds bothered me more than anything else. It had already made a place for itself. I think I'd felt before that whatever Roberta brought into that apartment could be dismantled and taken out very quickly. Now I wasn't so sure. I tried to remember the exact way Conrad had said those words about things having to fall apart by themselves that had so encouraged me by their pessimism.

He offered to make coffee. “Will instant be all right?” he asked, filling a pot with water. He set two unfamiliar mugs upon the table and began measuring the coffee into them. They were brownish gray stoneware, very smooth, the kind that's made in Vermont. There were four more just like them up on a shelf.

I said I had to leave.

I walked around for a while and ended up in Malcolm's neighborhood. I climbed the front steps of his house, opened the glass door and entered his hall. I pressed the bell marked
JANITOR.
The dog began barking immediately down in the basement. I thought Malcolm would either let me in or he wouldn't. If I'd been capable of asking myself what I was doing, I might have gone away. There is a terrible risk in the exposure of need.

I remember hearing him call my name. He had opened the street door behind me.

“You didn't know I had a private entrance downstairs,” he said.

I told him I happened to be passing by. “I thought I'd like to see where you live.” It was a peculiar thing to be saying to someone at nine o'clock in the morning.

He squinted at me through his glasses, which slid down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them back up again with one long finger. “And why not?” he said.

It was the why-notness of Malcolm that I loved in him, his ability to act upon occasion as the moment demanded, never thinking of consequences as Conrad would have done, or measuring out the precise degree to which he would allow himself to become involved with someone
in extremis.
He was a man you could tell all your troubles to—as long as they had nothing to do with him. Guilt would tend to make him disappear, drop out of sight for considerable periods—during which he'd exhume his entire history of failure the way a dog digs up an old bone, always knowing exactly where to find it to be chewed over once again, no more nourishment in it than a mouthful of dust. Even his guilt I found attractive.

He led me down the steps past a row of trash cans and around to an iron gate. We entered a low, dimly lit passageway, pipes overhead, dusty cartons stacked against the wall. He put his hand beneath my elbow. “Watch where you walk,” he said. The dog Shadow was barking in a frenzy. He bounded forward upon us as Malcolm opened a door into a room whose whiteness took me by surprise. Through barred windows I could see a garden of cobblestones and ivy, ailanthus trees. The dog kept running back and forth between us, jumping up to put his paws upon our chests, panting into our faces. “Later,” Malcolm said, “we'll have to take him out.” I realized he was giving me the day if I wanted it.

I must have looked pretty bad, I guess. He kept talking to me in an amazingly gentle way. Would I like to sit down, even though his bed wasn't made? It was the only comfortable place to sit. Would I like scrambled eggs or just a piece of toast? Coffee? I told him he was the second person to offer me coffee and that therefore I was going to refuse. The dog climbed into my lap, front and back paws sprawling down over my legs. “He's a terrible dog,” Malcolm said. “You push him away if he's bothering you.” He said he was making me tea, since no one had offered me that.

I stared out at the garden, the dog breathing rhythmically against me, shedding his long red hairs upon my skirt. Finally I told Malcolm about Conrad—all of it, even about the ragweed in the brown pitcher. He said he understood obsession, that the very nature of passion was the desire to possess, which was perhaps why certain men feared to be the object of it—the fear taking different forms. His own fear—as of course he had already demonstrated—was extreme.

I have no idea what he was really feeling. I was quite conscious that I was giving him license to begin to see me now—letting­ him know he would be free of the burden of my desires, which were so painfully directed toward another, thus enabling us to be friends. That was even what I wanted to believe myself.

He too wanted a friend, he said.

I'm not sure he meant it anymore than I did. Perhaps, like me, he was looking to be rescued.

A sound like a dull crash five blocks to the north. BOOM, as Matthew would say, ramming his truck into a stack of building blocks. A large boom, followed perhaps by several smaller subsidiary ones. The falling apart of the house of Conrad and Roberta.

She lies very still in the mornings listening intently, never hearing what she's waiting for, although she would recognize it instantly, so well has she imagined it. Finally she gets herself up and begins to go through another day, waking Matthew before she walks into the kitchen, where if Conrad has visited her the night before, there will be two wineglasses standing in the sink. She never gets to wash them before Conrad gets her into bed. First there is the overture on the living-room couch. Then, as if taken by surprise, they rush into the bedroom, disheveled and half-unbuttoned, leaving the glasses on the coffee table. He is always careful to leave before midnight, putting on his clothes and stumbling out the door speechless with satisfied weariness. In fact, it is Molly who keeps an eye on the clock, nudging him awake at eleven forty-five. He has pointed out that it is very hard on the person you live with to be put into the position of waiting for your arrival at unpredictable hours. Surely Molly would demand the same consideration. How can his relationship with Roberta be fairly tested if he himself does not obey certain basic rules?

At any rate, after Conrad has gone and she has locked the door, she picks up the glasses on her way back to the bedroom and carries them to the sink but cannot bring herself to turn on the water, so they are there in the morning with their dregs of wine and perhaps a dead cockroach or two drowned alcoholically—a sourness to be dealt with before orange juice and Matthew's innocent bowl of cornflakes and milk.

“What do I need to make you an egg for?”
She actually rehearses herself in lines like that and sometimes succeeds in delivering them to Conrad. The egg line, for example, has a nice New York Jewish inflection, which she admires for its suggestion of hardboiled toughness, suitable to the role of a certain kind of mistress.

“Sometimes I think you only come over here to fuck.”
Said half-indulgently, half-seductively—although it is what she actually sometimes bitterly thinks. Would she trade that, though, for the egg? Would such a trade invariably be necessary? Ironically, it is Roberta who could shed some light on that question.

“What do you do after you leave here?” she asks him once.

“What do you mean what do I do? I go home.”

“But what do you
do
? You just get in bed with her and go to sleep?”

“Sometimes we have conversation.”

“But what if she wants you to make love to her? Do you just excuse yourself?”

“Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“Is it more exciting to make love to her after you've made love to me?”

“Molly, there are nights I get into bed thankful I don't have to make love to anybody. I'm not only a political activist, I also have the small problem of making a living. I've been to Buffalo and back with some lousy dinner in an airport. Every time I make a speech, by the way, there are at least three women offering themselves—”

“That's really terrible, Conrad.”

“I'm explaining to you that my life is not a picnic. You don't have any understanding of the totality of my life. You're entirely focused on one aspect of it.”

“We've spent time together, Conrad. Don't forget that!”

“I'm forgetting nothing. I'm trying to correct a very lopsided impression.”

And then he reminds her that it was
her
choice,
her
choice to go on like this. He always knew how difficult it was going to be. It is hard for him too, this getting up and leaving in the middle of the night. It never feels natural. But what can he do? While Molly can tolerate the knowledge of the existence of Roberta in his life, Roberta cannot tolerate the existence of Molly. So all he can offer, until the situation resolves itself, are these truncated visits and perhaps the hope of a trip somewhere.

The trip is a completely new idea. Where and when, she demands, immediately seizing on it.

He comes up with California, perhaps because it is as far away from New York as they can go. A trip to the Bay Area in some indeterminate week, certainly before Christmas. “I'll try to sandwich it in,” he says, unaware of the contradiction of speaking of sandwiches when his life is not a picnic.

W
E ALL HAVE
our own imagery. If I existed for Conrad sandwiched into the everlasting limbo of interstices, my friendship with Malcolm was an island, a warm, green place unconnected to the mainland of my life. Happiness in the middle of misery—necessary to my survival yet never quite enough to sustain me.

It was indicative of our limited relationship that Malcolm liked especially to visit me at my office. Often, having walked all the way down from the Upper West Side, he'd turn up late in the afternoon on a day he wasn't teaching at Greenhaven. The receptionist thought the whole thing was romantic. “Your young man is here,” she'd say, even though Malcolm was neither young nor mine in the precise sense of that term of expression. He'd walk back with me to my cubicle, past the long row of women in the subscription department working at their gray metal desks. They'd look up at him—this erect, long-legged person in frayed jeans, bearing with him the chill of the outside. Malcolm would smile back in amused sympathy, nod to them in greeting, answer questions about the weather from which they were cut off by the absence of windows. “Is it still raining?” “Just a little.” “Think it'll be over by five?” “Sure,” he'd say. Sometimes one of them would flirt a bit—“Is that a promise now?” “An absolute guarantee”—laughing, the glasses slipping as they always did. A fine figure of a man. “A regular lady-killer,” he once described himself ruefully.

I think he felt safer with me during those brief visits than at any other times—the bounds of possible behavior being so circumscribed. I was the prisoner in need of distraction who could be liberated only by the clock. He, on the other hand, could come and go as he pleased, thus taking the measure of his own uneasy freedom. Sitting in the visitor's chair, he'd watch me as I put the last red marks of the day upon a long proof sheet, listen gravely as I made phone calls to the printer or the author of an article. Often he'd bring with him papers from the other prison to which he had access—poems by Arnold Lewis in the same disturbing vein as the first ones he'd shown me, a newsletter also by Arnold that was to be smuggled back in and passed secretly from hand to hand. We'd stay after hours, let ourselves into the Xerox room and make illicit copies together.

“My
friend
,”
Malcolm used to call me, with a sadness but with a definite insistence—assuring me I was the only woman he knew with whom his relationship was not disastrous. He'd tell me about the others just so I would not be jealous. His latest disaster involved one of his most brilliant and sensitive former students, now married and studying comparative literature at Yale. She had taken the train down to New York one day for the purpose of showing Malcolm some poems by her young husband. After an hour or so of grass and intense conversation, during which she revealed to Malcolm the secret of her undergraduate passion for him—now to be safely regarded as ancient history—they ended up in his bed in the historical present, thus rounding off her education with a lesson in the inevitability of disillusionment. Her subsequent offers to leave her husband, the poet, and devote her life to her former instructor had been greeted with a silence that drove her frantic—spurring further trips to the city, letters on thin blue paper, midnight phone calls.

There was something familiar in her style. I felt a certain guilty sympathy for her desperate determination, even as I tried to relieve Malcolm's gloom. Culpability overwhelmed him. Every fresh analysis of the incident only led him back to the conclusion that he had behaved unconscionably to someone almost childlike in her openness and trust.

I told him there was no such thing as such innocence—although that was more for the purpose of argument than absolute conviction on my part. I believed in Malcolm's peculiar kind of innocence, for example—even to some extent in my own.

I railed at him in a way that he always seemed to appreciate, scolding him for what I termed his masculine presumption. “Why do you assume that everything flows from you and nothing from the other person? Do you really believe that women have no active desires—and are only acted upon by you? No wonder you can only deal with them by keeping your distance. Who could want such responsibility?”

I suppose there was a lot of truth in what I said. I remember he laughed painfully. “You know me very well, but not completely.”

“Malcolm, I'm guessing, I'm improvising.”

“Do your theories apply to what happened with us?”

“Probably. Though maybe not as much,” I added quickly. “We seem to have managed to make an exception.”

“Still,” he said, “there's the physical distance. There's the distance between friendship and love.”

I made an awkward joke at that point. “Well, if you can't go to bed with your friends, you go to bed with your enemies.”

He looked at me with an ironic glint in his eyes without saying anything, sparing me the obvious question that would have had to do with Conrad.

We cultivated an honesty that never drew blood—and thus all our exchanges fell slightly short of the mark. We touched each other constantly—all within the bounds of friendship—walking Shadow for blocks with our arms around each other, lying sprawled for hours on Malcolm's bed listening to music, passing a joint ceremoniously back and forth. Toward the end, as it diminished, he would take it from between his own lips and hold it against mine. We had a comedy routine that went—

Malcolm (looking at me with mock severity): Sometimes I think that if you weren't involved with Conrad, you'd have designs on me.

Me (very warmly and reassuringly): Malcolm, you are a hopeless case of hopelessness.

(To cement this understanding they kiss, Molly deliberately pulling away before he does, Malcolm laughing.)