Bad Connections (2 page)

M
Y RELATIONSHIP WITH
Conrad Schwartzberg was characterized by bad connections—missed appointments, late trains, automotive breakdowns, fogged-in airports, abruptly cut-off phone conversations. I learned early that I would not find Conrad where I thought him to be. I got used to it in the end, got used to it to some extent. No, never really got used to it. He was a man who moved constantly, who could drop out of reach for days or weeks—to reappear without apology. I collected his various phone numbers, even the ones I wasn't supposed to have. These testified to my developing Nancy Drewlike capabilities, my occasional triumph in being one jump ahead of him. I held them in reserve in case I needed them. More and more I became a woman who lived by her wits.

And yet all that tireless motion that Conrad embodied drew me to him, held me enchanted. I wanted only to move with him. I waited for him to invite me to abandon my predictable and sedentary existence—nearly as predictable and sedentary after I left my husband as before, except for the turmoil Conrad had added to it.

There was a blues that was popular for a while in the late fifties, when I came of age. I remember the lyrics to this day with a combination of nostalgia and fury:

Goin to Chicago, baby

Sorry I can't take you.

Ain't nothin in Chicago

That a monkey woman can do.

At thirty-five I was still a romantic, still waiting for an opportunity to go “on the road,” at least figuratively.

Once Conrad took me to Buffalo. Another time we almost went to Cincinnati for the weekend—except his mother went into a severe depression at the last minute, or that's what he said. Twice—both times disastrous—I followed him to California. Still, I owe to Conrad a brief trip across the border into Mexico, as well as my first night—believe it or not—in what he assured me was a prototypical motel, which was even located off a freeway a few miles outside L.A. It had a swimming pool we didn't swim in, a big color TV with special pornographic movies that we didn't watch, a paper bathmat that read
YOUR PERSONAL BATHMAT
, and drinking glasses shrink-packed in plastic. We put down our suitcases and made love on the color-coordinated bedspread for the third-to-last time.

He had a little green Saab when I first knew him, a ridiculously small vehicle for a person of his proportions. He filled almost the whole front seat with his bulk, his belly wedged up against the steering wheel. The Saab was as dusty as his apartment and it was filled with the apartment's overflow of Marxist studies and law journals, stacks of undelivered leaflets that were months obsolete, and discarded articles of clothing. It was my joy to occasionally ride in it with him—to a speaking engagement in Larchmont, a rally in New Paltz, a fundraising dinner in Hempstead. He was at the height of his career as a radical lawyer, having taken on the defense of the Mahwah Seven, and he was much in demand on the Left as a speaker at meetings of all kinds. I would sit unobtrusively in the audience and listen to him proudly—tears would roll down my cheeks when he'd invoke the vision of a “new society.” He had a way of pacing the platform, as if even there he could not be contained in his assigned place behind the podium.

Conrad. He was named that by his working-class father, a fur-cutter who had a lifelong appreciation of the classics. Do names shape personalities? Would Conrad have been different if he had been named Edgar after Poe, another of his father's favorites, or something as prosaic as Howard after no one in particular? Like the famous author of
The Heart of Darkness
and
The Secret Agent,
he has been a restless wanderer as well as a self-made intellectual. About both men there is something mysterious, the sense of a hidden life. And my Conrad too, an enthusiastic starter of so many things, has been prolific in his way. Leaving the personal out of it, I refer to defense groups, collectives, journals, movements and even some writings—not any of which match the fervor of his verbal style. Perhaps at this very moment Conrad is sitting in a meeting of some committee he has just organized, waiting his turn to speak. His head is down, he crouches like a prizefighter waiting to come out of his corner. Characteristically, he is running both of his hands through his hair, that red cherubic tangled curling mass that was once my delight. In a moment he will stand up and turn the whole thing around.

She is in her office but her mind is still reeling through the city, in transit between Sheridan Square and the Upper West Side. She calls Fred and tells him she had felt the urge to take an early morning walk. She borrows ten dollars from petty cash and goes downstairs to the drugstore in the lobby. She buys a comb, a toothbrush, a pinker lipstick than she usually wears and some green eyeshadow, and puts the change in the small paper bag these articles come in.

Back at her desk she selects a sharpened pencil and hangs on to it, staring at a paragraph on the proof sheet in front of her. She knows already that it is not going to be a good day for concentration. She is staring at the opening of an essay by an eminent cultural critic:

There is no doubt that we have experienced in our own lifetimes, even in those rare instances where we are insulateed
somewhat

She does not catch the typo in the spelling of
insulated,
which will annoy the eminent critic considerably, when he finds
insulateed
right in the first sentence of his essay on illiteracy in the fall issue of
New Thought.
She is imagining Conrad walking into his office on West Twenty-first Street any minute now—Conrad back from wherever he has been, rumpled and unshaven, wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday when he called her and said nothing about being out of town.

against the shocks of the onslaught, the profound and inescapably deleterious effects of
mass—

At her right elbow there is the telephone. She feels slightly nauseated. She knows she is going to end by dialing the number of Conrad's office. She asks herself not to, but she does.

A young woman, an ex-girlfriend of Conrad's who is now a part-time secretary at the People's Law Collective and is working her way through law school, answers. She says that Conrad isn't in. “We don't expect Conrad until later this afternoon. Any message?”

She almost says, “Tell him Molly called,” but doesn't. This way if she doesn't reach him it will be by default as if she hadn't called him in the first place.

She hesitates for a moment or two, then calls Conrad at home. The line is busy. She sees a door with nothing in front of it. One copy of the
New York Times
is in the garbage. The other is spread out in front of Conrad on the kitchen table next to the opened mail.

She calls back a few minutes later. This time there is no one there.

“Hello,” Conrad said to me. “How are you?”

Since I hadn't considered the possibility that Conrad might call me before I reached him, I was so thrown off guard I nearly said I was fine.

“Not so good.”

“Oh? That's too bad.” There was the usual good-natured warmth in his voice. “Did something happen?”

“Conrad, I was at your house at six-thirty this morning.”

“You were?”

“But you weren't home.”

“I was there. The downstairs buzzer doesn't work sometimes.”

“No, I got in. The doorman was on duty.”

“Ah.”

“I went up to your apartment and rang, Conrad.”

“I feel terrible. I just didn't hear you.”

“There was a pile of mail outside your door and two newspapers.”

There was a pause.

“What were you doing there at that hour anyway?” he asked almost indignantly.

“I walked out on Fred today.”

“I guess we should talk.” He lowered his voice to a level suitable to the discussion of intimate affairs in crowded offices.

“Yes. We should talk.”

“But not now,” he said. “I'm just about to go into a meeting.”

“Of course,”
I said, trying to sound as sarcastic as I possibly could.

“Why don't you just go on up to my house after work?”

“No, I'm not going to your house. I don't want to.”

“You don't want to?”

“I think we'd better meet on neutral ground.”

“I can tell you're very angry,” he said sadly, “and very very upset. This is the first time I've made you angry. We could talk much better at my house really.”

“No.”

Somehow hearing from Conrad that I was angry and upset had made me begin to cry. I have always been undone by sympathy.

“I'll meet you in front of your building after work then.” He was brisk now, all business. “Hi, Dianne. I'll be right with you.” I could hear a commotion in the background, muffled voices. “Is that neutral enough?” he said.

Before I could answer he had hung up.

I
WAITED FOR
Conrad looking anxiously up Fourth Avenue, trying to catch sight of the Saab. I was amazed by the number of small green cars of various makes that passed me. I had never been aware there were so many of that particular shade. It reminded me of being pregnant and suddenly seeing other pregnant women all over the place—bellies moving toward me down every street.

He arrived slightly late, pulling over smoothly to the curb. “Heavy traffic,” he said, opening the door for me. I got in next to him, displacing a pile of books and a half-eaten hero sandwich and putting them down on the floor behind my feet. “Why don't you throw those in the back?” Conrad said.

“It's okay.”

He was studying me. I looked just once very quickly at his wonderfully blue eyes that were so richly fringed with dark lashes. I looked away, clutching my small paper bag.

“Been shopping?” he said.

“Not exactly.”

He smiled brilliantly for a moment. His hand brushed my knee as he started the car. I felt a flash of incongruous joy at being with him. I struggled to keep my anger intact, uninvaded.

He asked me if I wanted to go any place in particular.

“Anywhere,” I said coldly.

“Let's just drive around then. I have another meeting in a couple of hours.” He turned the corner and headed uptown. “Want to go through the park?”

“You sound like a cabdriver.”

“I drove a cab for a while in '65. You didn't know that.”

“Just one of the many things you've done.”

“What's eating you, Molly?”

“I hate being lied to.”

He sighed.

“You're not even good at it.”

“That's true. Actually, I have a great respect for the truth. If I didn't, I'd be a much better liar, believe me. In some situations a lie is necessary.”

“For example?” I said bitterly.

“For
example
,”
he said chidingly, shaking his head. “Do you know how much regard I have for you?” His voice was husky, slightly choked.

Tears rushed into my eyes, although it was love I would have preferred him to say.

He was looking straight at the traffic now. His hand moved on the wheel in a myriad of small adjustments.

“Conrad,” I said, “are you involved with someone?”

“Involved?” With a deft swerve, the car shot ahead of a slow-moving bus.
“Involved,”
Conrad said, “is a term that hardly has any meaning. There are degrees of involvement. Are we involved—you and I?”

“Yes, I think we are.”

“But what does that mean to you, Molly?”

“It means,” I said with difficulty, the words catching in my throat, “that we care for each other.”

“That is certainly the case.” He turned now and beamed his smile at me. “Even though you care less for me right at this moment than you have at times in the past.” His eyes changed from tender to slightly mischievous. “At any rate, I think involvement means more to you than you've said.”

“Perhaps,” I said unwillingly.

“No. Definitely. Don't think I don't know what you expect of me, Molly.”

“I asked you a question before.”

“Yes, you did. On the basis of what you found this morning when you turned up and I wasn't there.”

“I can put two and two together.”

“And much more than that, much much more. Molly, you're a thoroughly grown-up woman in most respects.”

“In what respects am I not?”

“In your tendency to jump to conclusions.”

“I see nothing ungrownup about that.”

“But already, you see, you have me
involved
with someone you don't even know about.”

“Well, aren't you?” I cried.

“Yes,” he said defiantly, roughly, “I happened to be with a close friend last night. Yes, and the night before that too.”

“Okay, Conrad! Okay!”

“You'll note that what I said was
with!
”

“Why couldn't you just say it in the first place?”

“Because I cared about how you heard it, goddamn it!”

We had both been shouting back and forth at each other in the little car. We looked at each other in amazement and fright. Conrad steered to the left and pulled over in front of a hydrant. I noticed beads of sweat on his face. Wet rings of hair were plastered to his forehead. I could see that he was suffering, that he must have felt humiliated. I would have if I had been him. His blue eyes looked at me pleadingly like my kid's did when I'd scolded him too hard. I almost took my hand and brushed his hair back from his forehead. I thought I was going mad with the anger and love all knotted up inside me and all that had happened to me that day and Conrad's tortuous logic going round in my head and confusing me further.

And now he began saying some things that were perfectly true. I couldn't argue with them. That all of us came into each other's lives from wherever it was we'd been before. That nothing was ever neat, especially for people who lived fully. We came to each other trailing old relationships, old attachments. “And who should know that better than you, Molly?”

I had an image of me dragging Fred into Conrad's life like an old vacuum cleaner gliding along on his little runners.

He said something too about nothing ever really being over, which didn't make too much of an impact on me at the time. I wanted only to get to what I thought was the point.

“And what about this attachment of yours, Conrad?”

I was determined that day to get the full story out of Conrad, however painful. Without information, how can one make choices? It was facts that I wanted. I made the mistake, however, of forgetting the importance of context. And Conrad was a master of that. He could spin a context out of himself like a great silken web.

The context in which he told me about the other woman in his life was an appeal for sympathy, my compassion for another frail and battered human, a sister if you like. I must confess, though, to having difficulties with the word
sister
in its all inclusive, non-filial sense. It is absolutely clear to me that there are some women who are my sisters and others who are definitely not. In this case I did not feel particularly sisterly, although I tried—guiltily aware of my political shortcomings.

This woman, my sister, was a modern dancer who'd become a dance therapist, who was now struggling toward a degree in psychology—which was only one of her problems. It was Conrad who had radicalized her, encouraged her to go to graduate school, to overcome the sense of intellectual inferiority that her disastrous marriage to a self-absorbed experimental filmmaker had left her with. Gradually he had been rebuilding her shattered sense of herself. His restoration was almost completed.

“Henry Higgins,” I said.

He winced.

“I know you're angry, Molly. But if you could just see this woman, you'd understand.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“Because you're not an unkind person.”

I laughed painfully. “Maybe I'm not as kind as you think. Maybe I'm selfish, Conrad, about some things.”

“Molly, I feel terribly responsible for Bobbie. I can't help it. She could be so easily destroyed just when things are beginning to open up for her. I can't just walk in on her and say, ‘Listen, Bobbie, I've met someone else.'”

Oh yes you can, Conrad, I thought. You can go there tomorrow and say it.

He was going on now about her problems—some of which he hinted were sexual in nature, although he was unspecific about what they were. She had a tendency to panic, to become hysterical, enraged at the slightest provocations. He spoke of his suffering, the constant pressure he felt. It was hard to see why he stayed with her if she was as dreadful as he said.

“You haven't told her about us, I suppose.”

“No,” he said. “Of course I haven't. I think she senses something though.”

“Senses something?”

“Sometimes she tells me that I seem different to her. I try very hard not to be.”

“Is Bobbie a nickname or something?”

“Yes, it's short for Roberta.”

“Roberta what?” I asked.

“Roberta Holloman. But why would you want to know that?”

“Because I'm going to be thinking about her a lot and I guess I want to know her name.”

His face reddened in fury. “You're making it hard, Molly, harder than it needs to be.” The words came out of him in a clenched kind of way. “Why would you want to think about her? What goes on between you and me has nothing to do with Roberta.”

“You should have told me about her right at the beginning, Conrad, not kept it a secret! It isn't fair, Conrad. It isn't fair at all!”

“Would it have made a difference? Would you have decided to stay away from me?”

I looked at him. His blue eyes burned into mine. I could feel the heat between us that all this combat had brought on, a live kind of heat that invaded my flesh, vibrated against my skin.

“No, Conrad. It wouldn't have made any difference.”

He pulled me to him then, crushing me against him. “Oh, Molly,” he said.