Bad Connections (6 page)

A
BOUT TEN DAYS
after my birthday, I woke up in the morning with severe pains in the lower part of my abdomen. I thought I had a virus—my diagnosis for all unspecific ailments. I would have stayed in bed if it had been a weekend, but it was a Monday and the proofs for the November issue of
New Thought
were coming in. I sent Matthew to school, took three aspirins and went to the office. I was sitting at my desk nearly doubled over with pain when the phone rang. It was Fred, yelling at me incoherently—something about “you and your goddamn fucking boyfriend.”

“Fred, would you mind calming down and speaking a little more distinctly. I'm not feeling very well today.”

I couldn't imagine why he was having an attack of jealousy at this late date, especially since we had not been in communication since the night he slept over. It was all much more than I was willing to deal with. My head throbbed and so did my belly. I felt close to tears.

“You got it from that rotten motherfucker and gave it to me!

“Gave what, Fred?”

“The clap! Don't you even know what you're walking around with?”

“I'm not walking around with any such thing.”

“I always thought you were a decent woman, Molly. We had our troubles, but I respected you. And now you're just going down the drain—going down the drain in every conceivable way. I'll never touch you again, you can be sure of that. We're finished, Molly. Finished.”

I hung up. I sat at my desk a few moments, then got to my feet and painfully made my way to the cubicle of my friend Felicia, whom I consulted in all matters of catastrophe, both literary and personal. She was a diminutive, high-strung woman who had been book review editor of
New Thought
for fifteen years. During that time she had had three marriages, as well as numerous affairs with some of the best minds of her generation. Her glamorous but unsettled life and the physiological toll it had taken of her, her consuming interest in matters of the flesh, had made her an encyclopedia of valuable information about certain medical emergencies.

Felicia was on the phone when I approached her, the receiver cradled under chin while she made notes on the margins of a manuscript with her right hand and chainsmoked with her left. Always welcoming an opportunity for distraction, gossip or analysis of the personality traits of our colleagues, she smiled at me warmly, enthusiastically waving me to a chair piled high with books stuck with slips of paper. I sat down on the edge.

As my life once again tilted crazily, there was something reassuring about sitting here surrounded by so much familiar disorder—“creative chaos,” Felicia called it. There was an odd comfort in the sight of the dusty proofs and manuscripts going back at least five years bulging precariously on the inadequate shelves, the back issues of journals piled high on the window sill next to the moribund philodendron, the emaciated avocado with its two surviving leaves. It was over this impressive accumulation that my friend reigned in perfect confidence that she alone knew where everything was.

As the conversation went on, Felicia made shrugs of resigned impatience, conveying to me by certain eloquent gestures that the person at the other end was outrageously boring and she couldn't wait to turn her full attention to me. “Logorrhea,” she muttered, replacing the receiver in its cradle. “How are you, ducky?”

“I need to talk to you,” I said portentously.

“Something wrong? Break up with Conrad, that bastard—although it might be all for the good? You don't look so well,” she observed.

“I'm not well at all, Felicia.”

“Oh my god. Not pregnant!”

I leaned toward her and said quietly, “I think I may have a social disease. Of all things.”

“Of all things indeed.”

We both looked in alarm at the doorless entrance to the cubicle. Felicia rose from her desk, grabbed up her cigarettes. “Let's go into the ladies' room,” she said in a low conspiratorial tone. Passing the accounting and subscription departments unobtrusively, we made our way there and locked ourselves in.

“Now tell me,” Felicia said, flicking her ashes into the sink. “Do you think you have any definite symptoms?”

“Pain here,” I said, pointing to my belly. “And I had a phone call from Fred.”

“He gave it to you of course.”

“He says I gave it to him.”

“Nonsense. Or maybe not nonsense, considering the other one you're involved with. But more likely it's Fred. You know his habits.”

“Yes,” I said grimly.

“High promiscuity. I'd say he's been asking for it. And now he's just trying to displace the blame. Very nice.” Felicia scowled.

“I'm just feeling a little overwhelmed,” I said. “I've never experienced anything like this.”

“I have. And various other forms of sexual punishment. Of course you're overwhelmed. And just when you're getting settled in your new apartment.”

“I could have lived without it.”

“Of course, ducky.” Despite my possibly diseased condition, Felicia put her arm around me and gave me an affectionate squeeze. “Take my advice and go right away—right this minute—to the public health clinic on Twenty-fourth Street. According to the
New York Times,
they've been handling up to three hundred cases a day.”

“As many as that!”

“It's reaching epidemic proportions. Don't you read the papers?”

I confessed with some embarrassment that I usually skipped the medical news.

“Not allergic to penicillin, are you?” I shook my head. “Then you should have absolutely no problem. Of course, there is a particular strain from Indochina that's highly resistant to penicillin and for which there's no known cure. But I think it's quite unlikely you've contracted that. Want me to come with you?” she asked kindly. “I'll cancel my lunch date.”

An offer of support was something I had encountered so rarely that I was thrown into confusion, not knowing whether to accept it or to decline. “No,” I said, “I think I'll be all right.”

I took a taxi only as far as Twenty-second Street and got out in front of a moving and storage company. I walked the rest of the way. A school stood next to my destination. Cutouts of autumn leaves and jack o' lanterns were pasted against its windows and there were the innocent cries of first-graders from the playground.

The lobby of the Public Health Clinic smelled of disinfectant, just as I had anticipated. A pimp in high-heeled silver shoes walked briskly past me. A guard, snapping his fingers to a transistor radio, stood behind a little table.

I walked up to him.

“Which way to the social disease department?” I asked.

He looked me up and down. “Uh
huh,
”
he said with a grin. He pointed left.

The waiting room of the women's section of the social disease department was totally lacking in amenities. Not one copy of the
Ladies' Home Journal,
not one picture of fruit and flowers on its institutional-green walls, not one potted plant. It was thronged with patients waiting on the hard plastic benches—women of every age and description.

Distracting myself from the business at hand by pretending I was more a sociologist than a patient, I studied my fellow afflicted—the tense young student in the corner biting her lips as she bent over her French grammar; the grandmotherly woman with Clairol-red hair, stolidly crocheting; the model in pants suit with perfectly matched accessories; the weary mother anxiously keeping track of the three small children who accompanied her—and across the room from me, clinging to each other in a highly wrought-up state, two young women I recognized from the few times Fred had taken me to Max's Kansas City, who had been described to me as “making all the parties,” as well as being frequently written up in the “scenes” column of the
Village Voice.
In the fluorescent light of the clinic, they looked like two bedraggled night birds, their vintage patchwork finery fluttering limply around their bare skinny thighs, their drugged, painted eyes wide with apprehension as they awaited the results of their tests.

The disease, I reflected, was a great equalizer, cutting across all distinctions of class. (I was sure Conrad would be interested in that particular observation.) It was entirely possible one could sit next to a perfect stranger who had been a crucial link in the chain of one's own infection.

Perhaps unjustly, I studied the girls from Max's with special interest, making certain speculations as to their circle of acquaintanceship. One of them glanced across the room at me with a bemused look that indicated I might have seemed somewhat familiar—but where … ? She looked away again quickly, desiring eye contact as little as I did. I took out some proofs I'd brought with me and listened for my name.

It is her ability to create distance that carries her through many a trying situation. In her twenties, she had worried, even anguished over this tendency to absent the Me at various crucial moments—thus possibly denying herself the full range of human experience. Now she suspects that certain varieties of experience are simply not worth having.

Where is the value in this present one, for example?

The recognition of the extent of the insidious corruption whose outward manifestation is this spreading disease that is nothing if not social?

Conrad often criticizes her for leading an all too privatized existence, for living somewhat aloof from the great social movements of her time. Now she is caught up against her will in this one—and so, by implication, is he.

“Would you mind letting us have a list of your contacts?” the special investigator asks (after she has been examined, pronounced positive and dosed with penicillin). He indicates to her the appropriate spaces on the yellow form where names are to be filled in. He is an ordinary bland young man who could just as well have become an insurance agent or a bank teller. She wonders what quirk of fate has led him into this unusual branch of the Civil Service.

For a moment she hesitates, confronting the moral issue raised by this unexpected extension of the honor system.

“I have no contacts,” she lies—which the young investigator accepts in perfect faith, since the fact that the disease has in a sense come to her honestly, through her husband, indicates a certain respectability.

He even blushes a little, explaining that this is just a routine question, since it is the practice of the department to follow up all leads relating to contacts, notifying same to report for immediate examination and treatment.

“Of course,” she says pleasantly, handing the form with its unfilled spaces back to him. She knows instinctively that countless others have automatically committed this identical act of civil disobedience. No wonder the disease has flourished. There are areas in human affairs from which the state must be excluded at all costs.

She will have to tell Conrad herself as soon as possible. And he will then have to tell Roberta. And suddenly she sees the disease in a new light entirely. It is a form of communication!

W
HEN I'VE BEEN
injured by someone close to me, I am astonished at first, almost paralyzed. And then I become more and more troubled by whatever is incomprehensible—the opaque and brittle crust that forms over an act, concealing motives, reasons, without which the act itself appears gratuitous, even irrational. I pick away at this crust as if at one of the scabs ever present on my knees during childhood—a bit of it flakes off and then more and I almost stop, anticipating the pain that will be like the ghost of the original wound. And yet I'm drawn to continue to the end, to reveal the contours of whatever lies beneath.

Conrad was not like me. He often made the mistake of interpreting my questioning as vengefulness—not understanding that it was more my wish to gather facts than to sit in judgment upon them. It was a subtle game he played—he the embodiment of good nature, I the embodiment of suspicion and anxiety. His own good nature was certainly his most outstanding feature, shining forth even in the most inappropriate circumstances. Who knew what dark thoughts lurked in the mind of the Great Accepter?

Here, for example, was how he greeted the news of my infidelity and its unfortunate consequences when I saw him that Tuesday evening.

“I'm not going to ask you to explain, Molly. Under the circumstances, I hardly have the right.”

All of this was uttered in the mildest tones. He might have been inquiring why his shirt had not gone to the laundry. I felt abashed in the face of so much generosity. Another man might have indulged in recriminations. I wondered why he felt he didn't have the right.

“I am a little surprised, though,” he admitted. “I know you weren't considering going back to Fred.”

“Will it make any sense if I tell you I honestly don't know why I did it?”

“Why should I expect things to make sense? I just wish you'd picked a better time for your reunion.” He grinned philosophically.

I turned away from him and stared at the rug.

I had spent two days in dread of this meeting—preparing to deal with Conrad's jealousy and rage, to confront him openly even at the risk of being thrust away. As soon as I'd come back from the clinic, I'd called his office. His secretary thought he'd gone away for the weekend and had not yet returned to the city. Intermittently I tried his apartment. In the evening my sense of responsibility drove me to consider leaving a note under his door. But what could I have written?

Feeling a confusing bitterness, I waited for my guilt to return.

“Well, I guess I'll go to the clinic tomorrow,” Conrad said. “Where did you say it was?”

“Twenty-forth Street.”

“I wonder how early they open. I'll have to go before the office. Dammit, I have a ten o'clock appointment.”

“I'm really sorry about this, Conrad,” I said.

“There's absolutely no room in my schedule for getting sick. But who knows?” he reflected cheerfully. “Maybe I don't even have it. I haven't felt any symptoms. What is it for men—a sort of burning sensation?”

“I guess it's still just incubating.”

Conrad frowned. “Let's see. You saw Fred on a Saturday?”

“It was my birthday.”

He ignored the implication. “And when was it we got together after that?”

“Last Tuesday.”

“That's four days' difference … ”

“Maybe you'll get the shot soon enough so you won't come down with it in a bad way.”

“That would be good.” But he was sounding much less optimistic. An anxious look had become visible on his face.

“I really did keep trying to get in touch with you before this.”

“I was around,” he said vaguely.

“I even left messages at your office. I suppose I could have reached you last night, but naturally I didn't try.”

“Where would you have reached me?”

“At Roberta's. I didn't think you'd appreciate it much.”

“It would not have been a good idea.”

“I could have pretended to be someone else. I could even have pretended to be me, since she doesn't know who I am anyway.” Somehow, even in this situation, I ended up as the injured one. Inevitably all our quarrels led to the same place.

“Oh come on, Molly!”

“Suppose there ever really was a bad emergency. Could I reach you there?”

“Of course you could,” he said.

“Conrad, you really are the limit!”

“Well, in a
genuine emergency
of course—”

“But it would have to be a matter of life and death. Not something as trivial as this. Even though in this case it affects her too.” This is not the way, not the way, I told myself—attempting to no avail to hold myself in check.

“It really does affect her, Conrad.”

“I'm aware of that,” he said grimly.

“You're going to have to tell her.”

“I had no thought of doing otherwise.”

“Maybe it's even for the best. You never know.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, nothing's ever as bad as whatever it is you dread. Even the clap is just something you cure right away with penicillin. Nobody dies of it. I'm feeling much better since I got my shot.”

Enacting a tenderness I did not exactly feel, I touched his hair, ran my hand down his impassive cheek.

We had been sitting next to each other all this time on the living-­room couch and now abruptly he stood up. “I think I should go,” he said.

“You're not going to stay over?”

“Not tonight, Molly. Not tonight.”

Separated by the expanse of the coffee table, they are sitting on their injections in her living room listening to Mahler's First Symphony—which Conrad has turned up to full volume, making conversation nearly impossible. It is a lack in her that she is not particularly fond of Mahler herself. She would have picked something by Satie for this occasion, or perhaps the Billy Holliday recording of “Don't Explain.” In any case, she knows that in other more important ways, too, they are out of tune with each other. It is the beginning of a new and more difficult period. Tonight she is irritated by the way she has seen him listen to music so often before—eyes half closed, fingers swaying an imaginary baton. If not for his fascination with the law, his dedication to social justice, he might have become a world-famous conductor or at least a fiddler in the Philharmonic. How intensely he appreciates Mahler's genius—shutting her out. She remembers the interminable Saturday afternoons of her childhood when there was no one to play with and her parents were listening to the opera.

It is raining outside, a cold late October downpour that floods the rear courtyard below, setting the garbage can lids afloat. Full of Mahler-gloom, she gets up and stands at the window, staring into a brilliantly lit apartment across the way where a pimp and his two women are smoking grass, passing a communal joint ceremoniously from hand to hand, sometimes stopping to toss a ball to their small communal poodle. She thinks for some reason of some lines of Pound's that she has not read for a long time:

And I am happier than you are,

And they were happier than I am;

And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing.

She is nearly overwhelmed by the poignancy, the irony, of the last line. “And the fish swim in the lake … ” One of the women, a tall, spectacular blonde in little satin hotpants, comes to the window and stares aggressively into the night. Perhaps she sees Molly standing at her own window. The front paws and head of the poodle appear beside her. The woman pulls a cord and draws the drapes, which are of some heavy dull golden silk, probably synthetic. A pinkish light glows behind them for a few moments and then goes out.

She turns and finds Conrad watching her—not warmly but with a kind of guarded objectivity, the way one might watch an attractive but unpredictable wild animal from a distance as one wonders what it will conceivably do next.

He never mentioned Roberta. It was as if I had dropped a pebble into a pool and it had sunk straight to the bottom without a trace of that expected pattern of concentric spreading rings. Now I was left on the shore staring at the smooth surface of the water which gave me back only my own reflection.

I didn't mention her either. Things were much too fragile for that.

Some people can never admit to being angry. They will sit in stony silence, they will pretend to be affable, they will engage in meaningless civilities, they will physically remove themselves from the premises if they have to—anything but reveal that they are gripped by strong emotion.

Conrad seemed determined not to react except obliquely. He continued to come around to see me the same two nights of the week just as if nothing had happened. There was no repetition of the time he had fled. His references to his experiences in the clinic, to the discomfort he was prepared to gallantly and stoically endure as the price of our association, were wryly humorous. He drank the tea I made for him in lieu of the wine that was forbidden, but impatiently dismissed any other ministering efforts on my part—as if in some way they might mock him. He wasn't quite sure of me now that I had become the transgressor and he the victim.

There was no doubt that I had inflicted a wound upon him where he was most vulnerable—the locus of his pride and anxiety, that bit of flesh he employed with such wonderful dexterity, that unfailing flesh that imperiously ruled him, that was in a sense his Achilles' heel. He concealed it from me, on the nights when we retired together, under a layer of stretched white cotton—as if even my gaze might contaminate it further. Not wishing to be naked where he was not, I took to undressing in the bathroom and covering myself with my flannel nightgown. We would sleep with a cold breadth of sheet between us—although we might have held each other, there would have been no harm in that. Nothing but affection would have been transmitted by our kisses.

In the past we had invariably reached temporary settlements of our differences in bed—there was always that attraction that seemed to have a life of its own, so that even in the midst of the most profound verbal rift, there was the implicit knowledge that shortly we would be physically joined. But now the pleasure that had initially caused our fall from grace was denied to us just when we needed it to fall back on.

It was small consolation to me that in my ex-husband's eyes, at least, I was vindicated. He eventually called me and confessed with some embarrassment that he'd totally forgotten a passing encounter with a certain young lady from an East Side discotheque a few nights before we slept together. She had since left for Paris with a rock group, so there had been no way of verifying his suspicions, but still it seemed to him now that she must have been the source, and he was glad because he would not have wanted to have thought of me without respect, since after all he had been joined in wedlock to me and I would always be the mother of his child, that fine little guy whom he intended to see every other Sunday if he could manage it. He humbly hoped that I had not been seriously inconvenienced, etc. It was one of Fred's finest moments. He had never been a man given to making apologies. Perhaps the shifting fortunes he'd experienced recently had begun to have a humanizing effect.

I told him I had no hard feelings. “Well, live and let live,” I said. It costs nothing to be forgiving when one no longer loves.

And yet if Fred had been seeking vengeance, he could not have chosen a more effective form.

I think Conrad was always a little afraid of me after that. The anger he never expressed remained with him, a secret hidden even from his conscious self. I am guessing, of course. Certainly his behavior was entirely in keeping with his ideology. If he believed in perfect freedom for himself, how could he deny the same freedom to a woman without being sexist? Roberta, I suppose, was as free in his mind as I was. And since she and I and he were all equally free, we all could do as we pleased in respect to each other. From a theoretical standpoint it worked perfectly. Fred, needless to say, never thought about such questions at all. And I am not sure myself that emotions are subject to theory.

Even in Conrad's realm of theoretical freedom, there were boundaries as well as a definite hierarchy. Conrad was on top, of course. Just below him there was Roberta and sometimes me—our positions kept fluctuating. There were times when she was what he called “the primary relationship” and times when I was. Or maybe I never was more than secondary. I
felt
primary in the beginning—if one can trust one's feelings. Later I felt entitled-to-be-primary—which is not quite the same. Let me see if I can define “primary relationship.” It is the one that is considered the objective rather than the obstacle to the objective. It is the one that is to be worked out in the future, the obstacle having been dealt with and laid to rest. It is the one that is rational, that is consciously chosen, the secondary being considered a neurotic attachment.

What I had lost forever in Conrad's eyes, I think, was the peculiarly virginal status of a woman just liberated from marriage. Conrad would be the first to disagree with me on this point, since virgins have no place at all in his theoretical system. An encounter with a real virgin and the responsibilities thereof would almost be too much for him—and I think he would wisely abstain. However, the virgin, rare as she has come to be in our culture above a certain age group, still occupies an exalted place in the hearts of men, still is highly prized, is in fact the ultimate possession, the fulfillment of that masculine desire to go where no man has gone before. I cannot believe that Conrad was that different from men in general, that the mask of the libertarian did not conceal the stern visage of the puritan. How else to explain his consistent passion for the newly separated—Roberta, for example, and then me, and I can recall hearing him speak of other women in that condition with an unmistakable flickering of erotic interest. Was it merely coincidence, was it really nothing more than his attraction to someone's particular qualities in each case? Was it not that we were all as close as he could come to the real thing, women just out of the convent, our innocence restored by years of separation from the world of casually traded sex, ready for his imprinting.