Bad Connections (7 page)

Conrad, I am being hard on you. I am not acknowledging your specialness. I am only drawing conclusions from what I have observed—the inevitable rush of masculine attention when a married woman first “comes out.” Later it markedly drops away. Who can explain it?

I allowed myself to be deflowered. I dragged you into the mud, Conrad. I lost my aura, became less for you. I am sorry.

Roberta was clearly primary after all that. I receded, dropped to second place.

I wonder what he told her. He told her something, but I am almost certain it was not the truth. Since she was given, according to Conrad, to
Sturm und Drang,
I imagine she wept and stormed and reduced him to humiliation. Then, when all seemed most hopeless, perhaps there was a touching scene of forgiveness—no less effective for the fact that she probably knew she was going to forgive him all along.

I finally did ask Conrad what happened.

“By the way, what happened with Roberta?”

“She took it in her stride.”

T
HANKSGIVING WAS
going to be bad that year. I could feel it approaching like a doom by the second week of November, when exhortations went up in supermarket windows to
ORDER YOUR TURKEY NOW
. Conrad was going to spend it with his mother. I had never met that particular lady of mythic needs. “Why don't I make dinner for all of us?” I suggested in a casual tone. “I really wouldn't mind.”

Conrad looked somewhat startled. “No Molly, it's nice of you, but it wouldn't work out. I don't think she'd understand.”

I'd actually had a mad and hopeful vision for a moment of all of us around the dinner table together, a kind of false family—Conrad's mother naturally being somewhat reserved in her feelings toward me as I dished out the turkey (hopefully not too dry), the chestnut stuffing (which she would probably find too heavy) and the spicy cranberry relish (which she would no doubt refuse), but since she was said to be very fond of small male children, she was sure to be enchanted at any rate by Matthew, who would have to submit to a bath, shampoo and cleanup of his room for the occasion. Conrad, never a picky eater, would have seconds and thirds of everything and come back during the week to finish up the leftovers.

“What's there to understand?” I said.

Silence. An embarrassed look.

“Well, I'm not much in the mood for Thanksgiving anyway. If it wasn't for Matthew, I wouldn't make any kind of fuss at all, just eat spaghetti or something or go out to a Chinese restaurant and have Peking Duck.”

“Now, there's a good idea,” Conrad said cheerfully.

“Maybe that's what I'll do.”

I sat very still for a moment. “Excuse me,” I said. I got up and went and locked myself in the bathroom. I cried for several minutes, turning the cold water on so that it rushed loudly into the sink and splashing it all over my face before I came out.

“You look funny,” Conrad said.

“Do I?”

“Flushed.”

I turned my face away from him. He put his hand on my chin and turned it around again. “Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“You've been crying.”

“It's just my annual pre-holiday depression. It's a little bit worse this year.”

“I always have dinner with my mother.”

“It's all right. Really. At my age I should be immune to the holidays.”

“I am,” Conrad said with satisfaction. “Quite immune.”

“Maybe you could come over afterwards.”

“I'd like to very much, but it might be too late. I'll try to call you.” I wondered whether he spent Christmas with his mother, too. What about New Year's? But he was looking at me so kindly now, so warmly. It had been a long time since such warmth had emanated from him. I put my arms around Conrad, burrowed my face into his shoulder and sobbed almost contentedly. I felt him knead the back of my neck; his other hand moved firmly and gently down my thigh, cupped my knee.

“I know a wonderful cure for depression,” he whispered.

Such cures are momentary, and may be more distracting than curative. My depression returned full force the next morning, as did the problem of how to survive Thanksgiving, since Conrad had not succeeded in imparting any of his immunity. It might even be said that his own was debatable, since as far as I know he participated fully in the celebration of every family holiday during the time that I knew him—though never with me. One can only assume, I suppose, a profound attitude of alienation on his part in the very midst of the festivities.

I am certainly still in total agreement with him that the emotionally laden American Holiday Season has deteriorated into little more than a capitalist potlatch based upon the appallingly dishonest assumption that everybody in this basically fragmented and troubled society either is or should suddenly be feeling terrific for at least a month.

I could do without the whole damn period myself except for the long weekends. It embarrasses me considerably that just as if I am no older than Matthew, I feel it is my due to be happy on certain days of the year—and that I am therefore particularly unhappy in the knowledge that I will be feeling as rotten, as shut out in the cold as the Little Match Girl. On the chilly dawn of Christmas morning, I will be alone in my empty bed trying to assemble the G.I. Joe helicopter that is the heart's desire of my child, tears running out of my eyes and curses streaming from my lips as I struggle with the brittle plastic parts that will not snap together. On Thanksgiving it's always the Macy's Parade and having to stand among all the families—the mommies and daddies, stepfathers and lovers—shivering in the November cold on Central Park West, awaiting the ancient, patched balloons that floated through my own childhood. And I grip Matthew's little hand that is like a soft anchor, because I don't like to stand there manless, childless. But of course I let him pull away from me. For isn't he entitled to crawl under the police barrier to the curb, to see everything, to talk to the clowns?

“I assume, naturally,” Felicia said, appearing suddenly one morning in the entrance to my cubicle at the office, “that you are otherwise engaged—but in case you aren't, I've decided to have a few friends come over on Thanksgiving. I detest turkey, so I'm making a goose. There's an excellent recipe in Julia Child, much better than the one in
Larousse Gastronomique.
I don't know whether you've ever tried it.”

“No I haven't.” I was staring at her with astonished gratitude. “I'd love to come,” I said. “I am not otherwise engaged.”

Felicia sighed. “I somehow thought you might not be. You must bring Matthew,” she said. “I adore that child, that intelligent, wonderful face.”

“Can I bring anything else?”

“Spinach greens. Five pounds. Snip off the stems and give them three rinsings to get out the sediment. But maybe you don't really want to wash all that spinach—it's an onerous task at best.”

“I don't mind at all. Felicia, I feel rescued.”

“That's what we all must do. We must rescue ourselves and others. Well, I'm delighted you're coming and I assure you you won't find it dull. It's going to be entirely a gathering of women.”

A gathering of women. I remember the defiant elegance of the menu. It was pumpkin soup that we started with. “It should have been a pie, Felicia!” Matthew said sternly. He was too young to accept such reversals. The grownups had had more practice—having­ experienced not only the transformations of pumpkins into the unexpected but desire into distaste, marriage­ into divorce, parenthood into custody, love into separation­. Farther­ uptown or downtown, east or west, the ears of the uninvited absent burned perhaps, or perhaps not, in the consoling­ presences of other women—yes, they had all probably found new women by now. There was an oversupply of women, a surplus. The sadistic husband of forty-four could find an eager girl of twenty-two. The alcoholic could find sympathy. The relentless bore was in demand for mixed dinners.

On and on the women talked, getting quite loud sometimes, each eager to succeed the next, hold the floor for a moment with tales of even more outrageous atrocities suffered and survived. I contributed reminiscences of my marriage, warming up with the chicken pox episode and going on to a spirited description of the summer Fred had rented a bungalow without indoor plumbing on the Jersey Shore for me and Matthew to go away to every weekend so that he could have an affair with someone in our air-conditioned apartment.

One strikingly attractive woman whose psychiatrist husband had always mercilessly criticized her appearance, her cooking, her lack of interest in current affairs, her inability to balance the checking account and to be gay at cocktail parties, now offered him up to the other assembled guests, as if on auction. Gray and distinguished, she said, good tennis player, lucrative practice. Jolly, she said, though we all looked at her dubiously. Yes, jolly. “Very ho ho ho,” she said, holding her rounded arms in front of her as if to indicate a Santa Claus-shaped figure. “Any takers?”

There were none, of course. In this context we all had the highest standards. At least Conrad was not critical, I thought. The woman who'd had the psychiatrist husband also had a lover now—someone much younger than she was who adored her. She admitted she lived in so much terror the affair would end, she could not allow herself to be happy.

We laughed with her at that paradox. More wine was passed around. Matthew wandered away from the table and turned on the television, where an impoverished family of eight during the depression had just won a turkey on a church raffle ticket bought by the thirteen-year-old daughter who was dying of leukemia. He lay on the rug dreamily eating a cupcake with orange frosting that had been specially purchased for him. It was way past his bedtime. He had no interest in the soufflé Grand Marnier that had now been brought in from the kitchen. By the time the commercial came on, he was asleep. I tiptoed across the room and turned off the set, the women's voices, the laughter, rising now to an even higher pitch over the extravagant sweetness, the seductive texture of the dessert, the forbidden caloric pleasure. Felicia, released finally from culinary responsibility, was holding forth, quoting a line from Hemingway: “If a woman is good, she doesn't need a pillow.” “Oh that's too wonderful, he couldn't have written that,” someone said. But it appeared that he had, it was somewhere in
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
and the rest of us wondered how we had ever missed it. But the point of mentioning it at all, Felicia said, the important point was the seriousness with which she, intellectually and sexually precocious at fifteen, had originally taken it, having only the vaguest idea of its meaning. “I was quite determined that (a) I was going to be good and (b) I was never going to need a pillow.” “And have you?” the woman who had been married to the jolly psychiatrist called out. “Never,” she responded grandly. “Never in thirty years.”

I laughed with the others until my throat ached and my eyes smarted. But I was suddenly anxious. It was nearly eleven and what if Conrad was trying to reach me? Any minute now he might be saying good night to his mother, going to the phone—even though he hadn't promised. He'd only said he'd try.

I ended up being the first one to leave, shamelessly rushing away from there toward the arms of the enemy, refusing cognac and coffee, using Matthew as an excuse—the child needed his sleep—although everyone could see he was sleeping very comfortably. He cried when I woke him to put on his shoes and jacket—I struggled fiercely with the zipper of the latter which always stuck just when you were in a hurry—besides which, it is very hard to zip another person. “Goddamn crumby zipper,” I said, because it was late, it was late, I was losing valuable seconds. The phone rang insistently in my mind. Felicia gave Matthew a kiss and a fistful of nuts and we descended into the dark and empty street and I hailed a cab. We were home by eleven-fifteen. And then I sat up for the next two hours and waited.

I used to do that very often, Conrad—rush away from somewhere because I thought you might be going to call me. Who knows what I missed on those truncated evenings of my life? Once I was at a delightful party engaged in an intense and promising conversation with an immensely attractive man I'd just met. I walked away from him in the middle of a sentence—and you didn't call that night, after all. You were never tied to me like that—
wired
would be more accurate—wired to me with invisible telephone wire. I thought I could actually feel the calls trying to come through sometimes, getting short-circuited—although the line was always open.

Felicia once told me she'd had a special phone installed with a number known only to her lover, so that he could always reach her, even at the very moment she was talking to someone else on the other phone. Although it would have embarrassed me to have gone that far for anyone, I admired her ingenuity. It was only a small additional charge on her bill and for her it was a solution. I understood her anxiety perfectly. He used it three or four times, I think, and then they broke up. Maybe it was too much for him—the significance of such unabashed availability. Never personally having been on the other end of it, I cannot imagine what it would be like.

Conrad was not even in town that Thanksgiving or for the rest of that weekend, as it turned out. He was in Philadelphia with Roberta and her family.

It was Deborah who told me. Perceiving me clearly on this occasion as the underdog, the victim, she broke silence at last and phoned to tell me of running into Roberta at the exercise class earlier that week. She described to me Roberta's joy and self-congratulatory sense of accomplishment—Conrad had been so difficult recently, so moody and unpredictable, but now it seemed, under the ascendancy of her influence, he was straightening out.