Bad Connections (15 page)

I
REMINDED CONRAD
from time to time about the trip we were supposed to take. “What about the trip, Conrad?” I'd demand as naked he searched for his clothes in the dim light of the bedroom, the radiator chugging ineffectually as a chill blew in through an inch of open window. “What about the trip?”

I'd ask about it as if I believed it were something that would actually take place, but the question became more and more rhetorical. By the middle of November the longest stretch of time we'd been able to spend together was five and a half hours when Conrad had taken a late flight from Cleveland and phoned Roberta from my house to tell her he was stranded at the airport in a blanket of fog.

One day, though, just as if he'd thought of it for the first time, he called and said, “How would you like to go to California?”

He was going there himself for five days after Thanksgiving and thought I might find it enjoyable to be there with him—if I could arrange to leave on such short notice. He didn't exactly say he wanted me to come, but it was only logical to infer that his own desires played a part in his suggestion. Careful not to alarm him by displaying undue excitement, I said I thought I could make the necessary arrangements.

I'm embarrassed to say I felt joy. I sat in my office afterward unable to work for the rest of the day or even to think coherently at an abstract level.

Malcolm called and remarked that something good must have happened to me.

I said I supposed it was good, that anyway it made me happy.

“I can hear it in your voice.”

I hesitated and then I said, “I'm going to California next week with Conrad,” wishing he'd called later when some second thoughts might have begun to set in, when I might have sounded less buoyant.

“Well, don't ask me to water your plants.” I think he'd meant it to be a joke, but it didn't come out that way.

“I wouldn't think of it,” I said very quickly.

“Of course I will, if there's no one else.”

There was a confusing silence in which I found myself waiting. Just as I would have liked Conrad to say he wanted me to come—to actually say it—I waited for Malcolm to tell me he wanted me to stay.

“You don't have to go, you know,” was what he finally said.

I said it wasn't that I
had
to go—I wanted to. I went on about how much I'd always wanted to see San Francisco.

“As long as you're sure,” he said.

In my collection of mental pictures, there is a tree I saw once from the window of a taxi, flaring up before me red and yellow just as the cab coming out of the park turned onto Fifth Avenue. In one flash I saw it through the bars of an iron fence, much too quickly to identify it. I think now that it might have been a maple. It was an anomalous tree, at any rate—the others around it being either completely brown or quite devoid of leaves of any color. It gave me a strange shock for a moment. It was all that was left of the autumn. I remember thinking that I had lost an entire season.

The taxi was carrying me to Kennedy Airport and I was alone in it. Perhaps I wouldn't have had such a thought if Conrad had been with me. I would have been preoccupied with him, with the elation of the two of us setting out on a journey. The tree, if I had noticed it at all, might have seemed a sign of something hopeful. Perhaps I would have recognized it as a fellow survivor, hanging on like me to its red and yellow.

Wasn't I making something constructive out of what might otherwise have been disappointment—his insistence that we fly out on separate planes? Roberta might offer to drive him to the airport and how could he refuse? Now that they were living together, she was apt to make a point of seeing him off and picking him up. I doubted that her reasons were entirely sentimental, but I knew the danger of dwelling upon trivialities.

My time with Conrad was to be one of reconciliation—intense conversations, lovemaking in strange bedrooms in which our rediscovered passion would reach its peak uninterrupted by the curfews that maintained Roberta's peace of mind in the East or even the awareness of Matthew stirring in his sleep on the other side of the wall.

I'd avoided the anger that could be summoned up in me so easily by deciding to arrive on the Coast two days before Conrad—thus not only escaping Thanksgiving in New York, but allowing me to visit an old friend who'd been living in San Francisco and had often urged me to come and stay with her—making it plain, however, that she would prefer me to visit without Fred, whom she had warned me against marrying in the first place, and without Matthew, whose existence she approved of in theory but who would have made her acutely nervous since she wasn't used to living under the same roof with small children. Unencumbered by either, I'd known, even before I called her, that my welcome would be assured.

Women like Tessa always remind me that there are distances I will never travel. Up ahead like markers, indicators of change, they advance too quickly to be overtaken, flashing their brilliant, multicolored lights. There was always that feeling of speed about Tessa, even when we were in college, where I met her. She was always the first to do certain things—to stay out of the dorms all night on a phony pass, to lose her virginity and acquire a diaphragm, to march on a picket line and go to jail in Mississippi, to spend a summer on Bali, a winter in Tangiers, a weekend in Corsica with a French film director whom she met in Ireland when she was doing a photo essay on the IRA and who later turned out to be bisexual, although they still corresponded several times a year. She was always shedding lovers like outgrown clothes, each one reputedly more gorgeous than the last, yet ultimately lacking some vital quality; she'd try them on in different disciplines as well as languages, in varying degrees of accomplishment, of hipness, straightness, of sexual proficiency or eagerness to be instructed in the mysteries of the clitoris, the rhythms of the vagina—all to be turned loose at the slightest sign of restlessness on either part, let go without recrimination or regret. She told me once she was probably afraid of rejection, mocking herself the next moment with that generous, wide-mouthed laugh of hers in which you could see all her beautiful white teeth. We both, after all, knew she was fearless.

I was her willing audience rather than her pupil. Although I admired her style, I could no more have emulated it successfully than I could have set myself on growing taller. She liked that. She was disparaging of imitators. What I'd have borrowed from her if it had been possible was some of her ability to cut out immediately from what promised to be painful on the assumption there was always something better up ahead. I was never as optimistic. Out of an affectionate sense of duty she'd often criticize me for my tendency to get bogged down. I'm not sure she didn't prefer me that way. In the world of most of the people she knew, I must have seemed an exotic, a representative of a dying species.

She had settled into the ground floor of an old shingled and gabled house in the Mission District—an apartment decorated with tribal masks and embroidered wall hangings, beaded lampshades suitable to lovenests of the roaring twenties, Moroccan rugs, an antique black marble bathtub with gilded legs in the bathroom where she developed her photos. She took me there after she picked me up at the airport.

Sitting in the living room among the pillows of the couch on which I was to sleep, we spent some time catching up with each other. Tessa's account of her current life involved the logistics of juggling a trio of lovers, two of whom were annoyingly beginning to demand exclusivity—the journalist offering a summer in China, the stockbroker a cruise of the Pacific islands on a windjammer; while the third, the one she really cared for, a painter who peddled a little dope on the side, was thinking of renting a cabin in Mendocino, moving into it with his “old lady” and only coming down to the city once a month. All things considered, Tessa said, it might be just as well. She would have to think very seriously about the trip to China; the journalist was a “beauty” in his way. The stockbroker had his sweetness, but an extended cruise with him might pall.

“Now tell me about this person Conrad.”

I tried to do full dramatic justice to my own situation—which in its way, I thought, was no less intricate than hers, no less rich in its weirdness, its ironic aspects, though there was less external action as well as a lack of variety in location. Surely, with the right point of view, the whole thing could be presented as an adventure.

I failed, though. The narrative kept verging too much upon feeling and I could see Tessa growing inattentive. She had a white cat, an enchanting slender animal that she'd tease with a long feather, making it jump from the floor to the bookcase to the wooden molding that went all around the room. It would run along it with exquisite sure-footedness before thudding down again, rather loudly for such a small cat. “Oh, Sascha!” Tessa would affectionately exclaim.

My voice sounded thinner and thinner in my ears as I kept talking. I could feel the meanings I had attached to things snapping like overstretched rubber bands. What were these people, Conrad and Malcolm and Roberta? What had I accomplished by leaving Fred or even now, by coming to California? All this running after expectations anyone could have told me would come to nothing—except I always preferred finding out for myself.

True to form, Conrad didn't come on Friday as he was supposed to. He called from New York about an hour before I would have gone to the airport to meet him. He said he was in a phone booth on Columbus Avenue and it was freezing, and that there were some Movement friends in town for the weekend whom he absolutely had to see, and so he would be arriving late Sunday afternoon. After all, he didn't have any appointments set up until the next morning. That would still give us three days together, but maybe he could arrange to stay an extra day or so at the end.

“It's like sixty-forty!” I cried. “Remember sixty-forty, Conrad?”

“Molly, I swear to you this was unavoidable. Please don't let your feelings of bitterness ruin the little time we have to spend together.”

Who could say no to such a plea?

Tessa assured me she would have shot him—“Right between the eyes, my dear, just as the fat bastard came down the ramp at the airport.” I had told her that Conrad was large in response to her request for a physical description, mentioning also his blue eyes, his mass of red hair. “I've never been able to get it on with a man who had a big gut,” she said reflectively. Esthetic considerations were very important to Tessa. Spending considerable effort upon the cultivation of her own body, she expected those she admitted into her bed to do the same, suggesting diets and regimens of yoga and track-running for those who fell short of her standards. “At least I always send them away in perfect condition,” she'd brag. Never would she own up to the possibility that this was her way of attempting to take care of a man. Ever since I'd known her, she had quite vehemently eschewed the nurturing role of the female.

I remember something she said to me during one of the days I spent waiting for Conrad in her house. I realize now it was one of those statements people make from time to time in order to demonstrate that they are capable of an almost brutal frankness. Delivered more for the benefit of the speaker than the listener, they belong in the category of what Felicia once called false confessions.

In this case, Tessa thought it only fair to tell me that since she never allowed any man to hurt her, she always felt somewhat at a loss to identify with women like me, tending to feel impatience rather than sympathy—although I was not to think she couldn't be fond of someone so different from herself. Wasn't our long friendship proof of that?

I said politely that I understood.

I was very conscious of not being an amusing guest for Tessa, particularly after my stay with her was extended. I was another complication in her already complicated life—a presence on the couch perhaps inhibiting the degree of abandonment in the adjoining bedroom.

Or maybe I felt that way because I was such bad company for myself, existing in a more and more anxious state of suspension from which I could only be released by Conrad's arrival. Just as I had lost the sense of one season passing into another, I knew I would go back to New York without having truly seen California—taking with me only a blur of redwood trees and gingerbreaded houses, the first names of strangers whose faces I would instantly forget, Tessa's hand heavy with silver rings upon the steering wheel of her Volkswagen as we drove to another gathering, where I would invariably be introduced as “my old school friend from the East,” as if she felt it necessary to explain me.

She had made a date with her stockbroker for the Friday night I was originally supposed to have spent with Conrad. Considerately, but with implicit half-heartedness, she invited me to join them. He was making reservations at one of the most expensive restaurants in Sausalito, but why should he mind taking two women to dinner? Perhaps a male friend of his could be dredged up—although most of them were married and considerably duller than he was. I knew she was relieved when I told her I really felt like being alone.

I remember her elaborate preparations for the evening—every element in the
gestalt
she was constructing carefully chosen—the scent she put in her bathwater, the precise coloration of her lips, the decision not to give in to his conservatism by shaving her armpits, the silk shirt that showed the rounded outlines of her breasts, the mauve velvet jacket worn unbuttoned as a frame for the discreet bas-relief of her nipples. Only her short fine blonde hair displeased her by lying too flat upon her skull. “Men like big hair,” she said ruefully, squinting at herself in the mirror. She had the inspiration of wearing a purple hat at the last minute, but thought better of it. She smoked a joint and then kissed me good-bye. “You won't mind if I'm not back until tomorrow morning. It might be easier to stay at Roger's.” I assured her that this was my choice and I wasn't going to feel deserted by her, however late she stayed out.