Bad Connections (4 page)

F
IRST IMPRESSIONS HAVE
a curious strength. They grip the imagination tenaciously. They are half-composed of physical bits of evidence—a warm voice, an understanding word, a soft look in the eyes—and half the creatures of our own minds entirely, our own desires and needs at a given moment. We tend to make up the people we fall in love with.

I still remember with some wistfulness the initially appealing boyish irresponsibility of Fred, just as I remember the day an outrageously brash person named Conrad Schwartzberg walked into the office of
New Thought,
talked to me for two hours about how the magazine could be made more politically relevant, made several long distance phone calls without asking my permission, and finally fell silent and stared at me and said, “I'm going to see you again. I like your sensibility.” I see us hurrying around a certain corner in the Village only a few weeks afterward and falling upon each other in a kind of desperate passion—knowing­ we have exactly twenty minutes to be together before I must pick up my groceries and go home, arriving a little later than usual, which I will blame on the subway. We cling together and kiss right there on Eleventh Street off Seventh Avenue between a barbershop and a bakery. I think that was the day Conrad said he couldn't stand to think of me going back to Fred each time, and he asked if I'd ever think of living with him in the country or having another child. And I told him I could if everything were right—although the truth was that the idea of living in the country, even with Conrad, scared the hell out of me. I knew that after a few months with the trees, I'd have a perverse craving for cement. But naturally the invitation meant everything to me, and I probably would have gone and tried it out if he'd really meant it and become a bread-baker and raised my own zucchini and produced as many redheaded babies as he wanted. I think it was Vermont that he had in mind.

It was, however, to a four-room apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street that I moved myself and Matthew, my five-year-old son, much sooner than either Conrad or I had ever expected. Too soon, perhaps. It's hard to say. Timing is an important but mysterious factor in relationships.

There were eight blocks between Conrad's apartment and mine. You walked to Columbus Avenue and turned right, passing the rear of the Museum of Natural History, various secondhand carpet stores and vegetable stands where the vegetables also had a certain secondhand look, a bicycle shop, the laundromat where Conrad was said to do his laundry, and then turned right again on Seventy-eighth Street. You could do it in fifteen minutes. By car we were exactly five minutes apart—with maybe another twenty to find a parking space. In other words, we were not widely separated geographically. We were close enough for Conrad to get out of bed at my place and go home for a clean shirt, close enough for spur-of-the-moment walks, for hot impulsive midnight visits. I realized almost immediately, though, that Conrad was in a state of retreat.

Fortunately, I was too distracted to dwell upon it much. If running way from home were a simpler matter, I am sure many more people would do it. If you are thirty-five years old and the mother of a small precocious boy with a collection of three hundred comics, eight shoeboxes of baseball cards, five hundred Wacky Package stickers, four ventriloquist dolls, a turtle, two cats and a complete set of electric trains, you are not exactly free as a cloud. The fact is, you must speedily live in a reasonable facsimile of the place you have just left, and must rapidly acquire a landlord, a moving van and accounts with the phone and electric companies. I accomplished all of the above in two days flat just before Matthew came back from his vacation in the Catskills with my mother.

Conrad came over in the evening of the day I moved in. I hadn't seen him since the morning I'd gone home to Fred. He seemed strangely subdued, walking around the premises warily like a cat inspecting a new environment. I'd been up since five o'clock that morning and was covered with plaster dust. Even while he was there, I kept on frantically spackling holes and cracks, since it was my intention to paint the entire apartment myself that weekend, excluding the ceilings because I was too short to reach them with a roller and the highest step on the ladder has always made me nervous.

“Well, you really did it,” he said.

“You sound as though you don't quite believe it.”

“It's just that I need time to assimilate so much change.” He sat down upon a box.

I laughed. I was feeling pleased with myself. “
You
need time!”

“I suppose I was the catalyst,” he observed gloomily.

“Oh Conrad, you're much more than the catalyst.” Holding my trowel of spackle above his head, I kissed him precariously. I felt he needed reassurance. No one likes to be just a catalyst for someone else. The front of him was white where I'd pressed against him. I put down my trowel. “Let me dust you off,” I said tenderly.

“No need.” He got up and paced around for a while. “I suppose it was bound to happen anyway,” he said.

“What was?”

“Your leaving. I suppose it was just a question of time.”

I put a dab of spackle into a hole the size of a quarter and took a long time smoothing it down with a kitchen knife. “What are you trying to say, Conrad?” I asked finally.

“I just don't want to be held responsible.” He laughed uncomfortably.

“You're not responsible. Okay?”

“You would have done it anyway.”

“In time.”

“I did tell you not to stay over. You have an impulsive streak, you know.”

“You disapprove of that?”

He sat down on the box again and began to run his hands through his hair. “I have so many pressures. So many pressures right at this moment.”

“I don't intend to be one of them, Conrad.”

“I have to be in court first thing on Monday and I have to spend all weekend working on the brief. And there's a Marxist study group in Rockaway that's invited me to be a guest speaker. Also, my mother is depressed and I have to go over there for dinner … ”

“Poor Conrad.”

“You don't understand. Your life is relatively simple.”

“Simple!” I exclaimed.

He looked away embarrassed. “Well, it will be—once you get all this moving straightened out.”

“What about Roberta? How's she doing?” I inquired blandly.

“Oh, she's fine this week.”

“So she's not one of your pressures.”

“Molly, there's a tone in your voice when you speak of Roberta—Perhaps it's not a subject that should be open to discussion between us.”

I was careful not to mention Roberta again that evening, or the next time Conrad and I saw each other, which was nearly a week later. When I'd inquired after her health, I wouldn't have been at all sorry to learn that the earth had opened and swallowed her up.

I looked up Roberta's name in the phone book one day. There was a
Holloman, R.
on Central Park West. Further downtown in the Village, on Bank Street, there was a
Holloman, Theodore.
I decided that he must be her ex-husband. I could not imagine her having been married to
Holloman, Oscar,
who lived on Mother Cabrini Boulevard in Washington Heights. I wondered if Theodore's friends called him Ted, just as Conrad called her Bobbie. Bobbie and Ted. I was not surprised she had not put her full name in the phone book; she was prudent enough as a single woman to want to avoid nuisance calls. Despite what Conrad had told me, I felt she was a woman who could ultimately take care of herself. I pictured her striding through Central Park in her dancer's body with her dog, if she had one. She is wearing a leotard, jeans, colorful espadrilles and no makeup; the wind tosses her hair which is probably loose and down at least to her shoulders. She is okay—not beautiful but okay. I see her entering the typical West Side lobby of her building, nodding to the doorman. The dog is somehow no longer with her. She is carrying a shopping bag from the health food store and a plant in a small pot—a fern. She arches and flexes her foot as she waits for the elevator, studies her pointed toe. She goes upstairs to wait for Conrad.

I feel I am guilty of spying on her and since I am already guilty, I call her up.

She picks up the phone in the middle of the second ring, much faster than I expected.

“Hello.” She has a girlish voice, a little breathy. “Hello?”

“Oh. Is this JK5-2643?”

“No it isn't,” she answers crisply.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I think I have the wrong—”

She hangs up before I finish my sentence. I add impatience to what I already know of her.

I am trembling a little. I wonder if I have just done something wicked. I am not entirely displeased at the thought.

An odd thing happened, one of those peculiar crossings of lines that wouldn't have been particularly startling to me except for the circumstances. Having lived in the city all my life, I took it for granted that if you moved in certain intersecting circles you would ultimately learn that everyone was connected to everyone else. You had only to become sensitized to a particular name to find it cropping up even in the most unexpected places.

I had an old friend I hadn't seen for months. I lived very close to Deborah now that I had moved, and I called to give her my new address as well as to tell her about the other developments in my life. I gave her a brief account of the saga of Fred and Conrad and Roberta, and she said, “Oh, but you know her!”

“I know her?”

“Don't you remember? I introduced you. It was two summers ago, when you and Fred were in Amagansett. You came over to the house and visited.”

“I can remember that much.”

“Well, Bobbie was there. She was one of the people I was sharing the house with. Don't you remember the woman who was very depressed because her husband had just gone off to Brazil with someone else?”

I thought suddenly that I did. It was the word
Brazil
that began to summon her up again for me.

“Do you ever run into her?” I asked.

“Actually I see her every week. We're in the same exercise class. She seems very different lately, much more outgoing, talks a lot about being radicalized.”

“Conrad's influence,” I said. “Does she talk much about him?”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “Listen,” Deborah said, “Bobbie's sort of a friend of mine, not a close friend, but still … I mean it isn't quite fair … ”

“You're right,” I said quickly.

“I'm sorry, Molly. It sounds like both of you are in a messy situation, which is not exactly what either of you needs.
Men!
”
she said bitterly. “I just don't want to be in the middle. Okay?”

I told her I understood.

The conversation remained in my mind. I went over everything Deborah had said, combing it for significance. Conrad's involvement with Roberta seemed more of a fact to me now, more fleshed out and tangible, not just something I had heard about. It existed as a fact for others, too, it commanded its own loyalties. Deborah had favored neither of us—her old tie to me was counterbalanced by her desire to behave correctly. Perhaps she even disapproved of me, thought I was in the wrong, that I should give Conrad up. I had thought of Roberta as the Other Woman, the interloper, even though it was she who had known Conrad first. Perhaps I was the interloper myself. It was not a role I wished to play. I wanted to be right. It was disturbing to think that I might not be, that as much as I wanted and needed Conrad I perhaps had no claim to him. And yet it was Conrad who had come to me, not I who had lured him away. He had his needs as well. His mistake had been his attempt to keep me from the truth.

I tried to remember Roberta as I'd seen her that day two summers ago when she'd seemed so incidental to my life I'd forgotten even her name immediately. I attempted to reconstruct the scene of our meeting—the knotty pine walls of that living room in Amagansett, the white cane furniture, the orange Indian print spread on the couch. I remembered eating a pumpernickel bagel. Had it been a Sunday brunch Fred and I had gone to? Yes, people were sitting on the floor in bathing suits with plates in their laps, talking and drinking coffee. And someone said, “Where's Bobbie?” And a woman in a purple caftan said, “I don't think she wants to get up.” And I heard someone else say something about Brazil. But at some point later she came out of one of the bedrooms, and the woman in the purple caftan rushed over to her and asked her how she was and led her to the couch with the Indian print spread and got a plate of food for her which she didn't eat.

I remembered all that now, and how I tried not to look at her much because she looked so awful. I remembered a reddened, tear-sodden face and long tangled black hair which the woman in the purple caftan insisted on brushing, and some other people coming over to Bobbie and insisting that she go sailing with them. But she remained just as miserable. And when someone—Deborah—introduced us, she'd looked off into the distance as though she didn't see me.

I wondered if I would even recognize her now that she was outgoing and radicalized—more like the dancer I had imagined but still with that core of misery that commanded such solicitude from others, that bound Conrad to her in a way it was difficult to understand, the buoyancy and energy in him drawn to that inert figure I'd seen on the couch—which was the side of herself I was sure she consistently showed him.

S
HE IS HAPPY
on Tuesdays and Fridays and anxious the rest of the week. It is on Tuesdays and Fridays that she sees him. Sometimes a late Sunday night becomes free at the last minute. He says they are seeing each other two or three times as much as they did before.

She would like to be like a friend of hers whose idea of a perfect relationship is to have an affair with a man who lives in a different part of the country and to meet with him once a month in a city somewhere in between. Another friend rides around on a bicycle picking up an occasional stranger. It would embarrass her if either of them knew how much time she spends waiting for Conrad. Even on the nights when she is not going to see him, she feels in a state of suspension, as if she is not quite real to herself. Why should she need his presence to animate her?

He's always later than he says he's going to be. If it's at ten that she expects him, he will arrive at midnight; if it's at eight, he will come at nine-thirty and then she'll have to contend with Matthew who has insisted on staying up for Conrad's visit and is by that time nearly hysterical with exhaustion and will not go to sleep even after Conrad has wrestled him a few times and carried him slung over his shoulders to his bed. But she likes the way that he is with the boy. It's one of the things she likes best about him now—and he knows it, grinning at her over Matthew's head when he catches her noticing the way they are together. Matthew always asks her whether Conrad is coming over. “Well, why isn't he here
yet?
”
he
asks indignantly.

Sometimes by the time Conrad comes, she's very angry. Although she's spent three days waiting for him, the extra hour or so added on by his lateness is almost unendurable. Sometimes she nearly hates him and contemplates not answering the doorbell, letting him ring and ring. If it wasn't for Matthew, she'd certainly go out. Yes, she'd go out and walk, visit a friend, have a drink somewhere, leave a terse and pointed note:

Too bad you're too late this time.

M.

Fuck him anyway. She'd walk off into the night and take a taxi to another part of town.

But when he is actually there in all his smiling bigness, she is just mostly very glad to see him. That is the paradox. And she ends up feeling so sorry for him too on certain nights when he arrives on her doorstep exhausted and pale, breathing hard—with tales of a meeting that went on for six hours, or a flat tire on the Jersey Turnpike, and it turns out the poor man has not even had dinner. She rushes to the kitchen eager to nourish him. “Just something light,” he sighs, sinking down onto one of her rickety kitchen chairs, and ends up eating all her leftovers—half a chicken, an entire bowl of potato salad, the remains of a brie.

Sometimes, singing union songs, he takes a shower in her bathroom and washes his hair with her shampoo, Dr. Brunner's Peppermint Soap—the label of which shows a fiercely bearded man and says you can use Dr. Brunner's for cleaning your teeth or washing your dog and any other known hygienic purpose.

It is a few weeks before she dares to buy him a toothbrush. It is a red one that she selects for him, and she presents it to him rather shyly: “Here's something I think you need.” “Oh thanks,” he says matter-of-factly, without much interest. It is clear that this is just a toothbrush to him rather than a significant toothbrush. She puts it in the holder with her yellow one and Matthew's green one and looks on it with pleasure on the mornings when he has stayed over and with bitter regret when it is unused.

Sometimes I asked myself what I wanted—which I knew wasn't the same as what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want freedom. The runaway wife was the new cultural phenomenon, celebrated in everything from poems whose lines mixed kitchen imagery with menstrual blood to how-to articles in the women's magazines. Now I was free—free to have as many lovers as I wanted of whichever sex or to live with a vibrator in celibacy, free to go to rap sessions any night of the week if I could afford a baby-sitter, or to develop my mind in night classes at the New School for Social Research and my dormant strength in Roberta's exercise classes, free to start an exciting career—but I had already been working all of my adult life.

What I did was eat out a lot—sampling the various restaurants up and down Broadway with my son. For a while almost every evening that I wasn't expecting Conrad we were out
à deux,
my patient child with his shopping bag of comics and small plastic monsters with which he would relieve the boredoom of a televisionless dinner and I with whatever manuscript I happened to be reading. We would look around us and invariably see a number of similar couples at other tables even on weekdays. I taught Matthew to eat with chopsticks and he was soon on intimate terms with the waiters in our favorite Szechuan restaurant, who put cherries in his cokes and plied him with fortune cookies. Even so he yearned for Burger King and a power struggle developed between us, which he won.

After a few nights of concession, I went back to standing on line at the supermarket after work and home cooking accompanied by the shrieks and grunts of the Flintstones.

As delightful as small children are, they are not necessarily the best companions for adults. Our tastes and preoccupations are not the same. I had, for example, no appreciation for the monsters that were Matthew's passion at the time. As much as he sought my opinions as to their respective merits, I could tell him only that I preferred the elegance of Dracula to the essential klutziness of Frankenstein and felt total indifference as to Hulk. This was my unchanging position on the subject.

“But what about Godzilla?” he asked me one evening for the forty-first time as I brooded upon my life as a single parent, my accumulation of debts, my suspicion that Roberta was as firmly fixed in Conrad's life as ever.

“I'm afraid I just don't think about him at all.”

“So you like Hulk more?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You're not even listening, Mom! You're not even listening! You said you didn't
like
Hulk last week.”

His small face trembled with hurt and indignation and I gathered him in my arms. “Listen,” I said, rubbing my cheek against his silky hair, “I've got things on my mind.”

“What things?”

“Nothing you'd understand, honey.”

“Well, I've got a right to know everything you're thinking because you're my mother.”

“No,” I said firmly, “nobody has that right about anybody else.”

“You wanna know what I'm thinking?” he offered.

“If you want to tell me.”

“Well, I'm thinking that you're thinking that Conrad isn't your best friend enough. Otherwise he'd have more sleepovers at our house.”

I hastily abandoned my introspection, got out a monster comic and read it to him until Conrad arrived, on time for a change. “Oh Conrad!” Matthew said, running up and giving him a little kiss. “What on earth are you doing here so early?”

I remember it was a Friday night in October and I'd been living on Eighty-sixth Street a little over a month. Conrad was just back from a trip and seemed particularly cheerful, more relaxed than I'd seen him for a while. He insisted on taking over the reading of the comic, which he read with far more dramatic effect than I had ever attempted, and afterward he agreed to be Frankenstein for ten minutes and chased Matthew around the apartment while Matthew fended him off with the plant-mister.

I sat in the living room as the chase went on, listening to Conrad's heavy footsteps and Matthew's light, running ones, his screams of delight. I felt an odd sadness, a suspicious teariness of the kind that comes over me sometimes when I watch reruns of
The Wizard of Oz
or
Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.
It is the theme of reunion or reintegration that I identify with so strongly, the orphan coming home at last. I remember thinking, “Why can't things be like this?”—which was absurd, because things were indeed “like this” at that particular moment. It was real life I was watching this time.

There is no doubt in my mind that what I was experiencing just then was an attack of nostalgia for the nuclear family—that it was this outmoded configuration I wished to impose on my relationship with Conrad. Despite the lessons of my recent history, I was only waiting for the opportunity to make the attempt again. It was not so much an image of traditional marriage and family that I had but one of an idealized unity—a stubborn vision that I had never lost, that I pursued then and always will pursue.

I remember we put Matthew to bed together, making him ready like a small pharaoh for his journey into the night, his ventriloquist dolls on either side of his pillow, the bear he'd had nearly all his life propped up against the wall, his Batman cape folded at the foot of his bed in case he should need it. After I had kissed him, he pulled Conrad's head down to him with his strong little pajamaed arms, and not too long after that we went to bed ourselves.

Something gave way in me that night—as if there'd been a small barrier inside me that I'd been almost unaware of until Conrad broke through, reaching now into the deepest places, exploring my most secret caverns with a freedom I had somehow never permitted him before. “That was fantastic,” he whispered afterward, as I lay weeping for joy beside him. “I love you,” I said. He didn't answer, just lay there very quietly. It was so nearly dark in the room that I could hardly see his face. After a while he took my hand and squeezed it, crushing my fingers until I thought the bones would snap.

He was asleep before I even realized it. I lay still feeling him inside me, as if my body, my sex, had its own kind of memory. I only wanted him again. I put my hand on him at last, almost guiltily, because I knew he was a man who needed his sleep, holding and caressing the part of him I loved so much until it swelled and grew firm and he turned to me and put it in me.

Perhaps I was too conscious of what I wanted to repeat. It wasn't quite as good the second time. Nonetheless, I woke up as soon as it became light the next morning with the conviction that everything was about to change.