Bad Connections Page 10

  I remember ordering an omelette for lunch, even though I’d had scrambled eggs for breakfast. It was the least expensive item on the menu in the French restaurant where Malcolm had insisted on taking me. For himself he ordered pâté and brochette of veal, an endive salad. “I’ve managed to hang on to my American Express card,” he informed me. “A useful relic.” He signaled to the waiter to bring us white wine.

  “A carafe, M’sieu?”

  “No, make it a whole bottle. You’re not eating very much,” he said to me.

  “I’m trying to give up eating.”

  I felt protective of Malcolm’s austerity, touched by his desire to show me that he could be expansive. He did not have to woo me that way. His spareness seemed the welcome antithesis of Conrad’s abundance that overflowed all too often into sloppiness and chaos. Conrad’s clothes never grew old and soft like Malcolm’s; he’d buy them new and wear them out completely in a few weeks.

  Since I could not dislodge Conrad from my consciousness, I included him as a witness now. He was the invisible third party at the table, like the prophet who visits the Passover Feast. He watched me enjoy myself with this delightful man, my new lover, watched me drink the pale wine Malcolm had bought for me, watched us lean toward each other, our foreheads almost touching, as Malcolm fed me a morsel of veal from his plate, popping it into my mouth with the casualness of intimacy—a gesture which belied the careful avoidance of the personal in his conversation.

  For though I awaited words from Malcolm in the same vein as those I had heard on the phone, today it was his work in the prison that seemed to preoccupy him totally. Occasionally, in his descriptions of life in Greenhaven, his voice would drop into the low and passionate tone that had had such an instantaneous effect upon me previously. He spoke of the eagerness of his students, the confidences they entrusted to him now that he had been tested, how he had to struggle constantly to communicate that he was no different from any of them, that his rage against society was almost equal to theirs. He had only been more privileged, that was all.

  “You sound almost as though you’re envious,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m envious. I’ve never lived an honest life.”

  “Not even now?”

  “I come to them as the teacher. The white teacher. Paid by the state. That’s bullshit, isn’t it?”

  I pointed out that it wasn’t entirely bullshit. After all, wasn’t he giving them something?

  “I’m helping them pass time. I read Rilke with them, Blake, Dostoievsky. Imagine interpreting Dostoievsky to them. I’m an embarrassment to myself—a middle-class white dude. Yesterday I spent five hours within those walls. Today I’m sipping wine in a fancy restaurant. With a woman yet!”

  “What’s wrong with being with a woman?” I said gaily, although it disturbed me to be referred to so abstractly.

  He seemed to have to think before he answered. “It’s just that I know where they are at this moment.”

  “Is that what you really meant?”

  “You think I’m not glad to be with you?” There was that word again. Glad. “Fortunate, in fact?” I shook my head, trying to laugh. “Shouldn’t I be considered fortunate?” he persisted.

  “Only if that’s what you consider yourself.”

  He was looking at me very intently. I reached for more wine.

  “I’m wondering whether you’d like to read something,” he said.

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “Something by one of my students—Arnold. Arnold Lewis. I don’t know, you might find it offensive.”

  “I’m not so easily offended.”

  He took some folded pages out of his pocket, smoothed them out on the table in front of him before he handed them to me.

  It was meant to be a poem, I think, although the writer hadn’t broken it down into lines. At first, I thought it was a love poem—the writer in his cell imagining “a tall woman walking out in the world,” desiring to be loved and held by her. But then he killed her in his mind, systematically mutilating the parts of her that had stirred his fantasies. I read it through with some difficulty to the end.

  “Who is Arnold Lewis?” I said. There was a tight, dry feeling in my throat.

  “Arnold Lewis is serving twenty years for armed robbery. He’s twenty-seven years old.” He took the sheets of paper out of my hands. “You look upset,” he said.

  “It’s rather overwhelming. Actually, I hated it.”

  “But you felt the power in it.”

  “I’m not sure that it isn’t pornography.”

  “You can’t judge someone like Arnold,” he said.

  “I’m not judging him. When I begin to recover, perhaps I’ll feel sorry for him”

  “It’s only fantasy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Arnold is one of the sanest people I know. If you met him, you’d probably be charmed by him.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said bitterly.

  “It’s a mistake women make, deciding to be sorry for certain men. Perhaps it’s a way of cutting them down to size.

  I laughed uncomfortably.

  “Caught you at it,” he said, smiling.

  “Should I promise never to feel sorry for you?”

  He stared down at the pages he had taken back. “There is something,” he said, “I feel I should explain. I showed you Arnold’s poem for a reason—aside from the fact that he’s important to me. I think we’re very similar. I feel that about him more than any of the others. He and I are each locked up in different ways. Arnold manages to express his rage. I respect his rage. It’s all he has. He stays alive on it. Mine is something more destructive, something that keeps turning inward if I let it … ”

  “I think you tend to be too self-critical,” I suggested.

  Malcolm shook his head. “There you are being compassionate. I like you, Molly,” he said painfully. “It was very good with you.”

  “I felt the same,” I said.

  “What I have to tell you is that I don’t think it can happen again. I hope you’ll be able to accept that. I hate the necessity of having this conversation.”

  I had trouble focusing on what Malcolm had said to me. It took me a while before I could speak. “Why did you call me if you didn’t want to see me?”

  “You’re someone I wanted to know.”

  I asked him the obvious question, of course, the one I should have originally put to Conrad.

  “Are you involved with another woman?”

  “You don’t understand, Molly. I can only make love with women who are absolute strangers. I’m not someone who gets involved.”

  I DIDN’T SEE much of Malcolm for a while after that. At least, we never met by prearrangement. Maybe because I looked for him, I’d run into him now and then. I’d be walking somewhere in the neighborhood and suddenly there he’d be turning the corner and coming toward me. He’d smile and wave. We’d always touch when we reached each other, and I’d find myself feeling obliged to account to him for my sudden presence in his path—“I’m just on the way to Food Fair to pick up a few things. We seem to have run out of nearly everything.” A couple of times he walked me all the way to the door of my house but wouldn’t come up. He always had his dog with him, a nervous loping creature, given to unpredictable displays of macho ferocity.

  I saw Malcolm with another woman once. I was waiting to cross Broadway and the two of them were standing on the other side engaged in conversation. She was a tall young woman wearing shorts in the middle of winter, a rabbit’s fur jacket, platform shoes. The dog was pulling on the leash and Malcolm kept jerking it back impatiently. I changed my mind about crossing right there and went on a few extra blocks.

  Conrad called me early in February.

  “Hi, Molly.”

  There was all that familiar cheer again, that total assurance. H
ad he ever doubted that he would simply find me there when he was ready—unchanged and waiting. He gave me a full report on his favorite subject, his most recent activities on the left. The progress of the Mahwah Seven trial, the article prominently mentioning him that was about to appear in Newsweek, an invitation to speak at Harvard in the spring. On a somewhat more intimate level, he reported on the declining condition of his car, the current mental health of his mother.

  Nonetheless, there was comfort in this conversation. The calm of neutrality descended upon me like a drug, momentarily robbing me of my defenses. I considered actually confiding in him in the same matter-of-fact tone—telling him how hurtful his two-month silence had been to me, how I had at first counted off the days of our abstinence like a child counting off the days till Christmas, and how I’d felt bereft in a different way ever since I’d met Malcolm, inhabiting a fantasy existence of troubling intensity wherein Malcolm and I bedded down again and again just as we had that first and only time, his movements and mine formalized by now into a slowed-down elaborate dance. It was the kind of conversation I could have had with Felicia. But Conrad was not my friend.

  Finally I said, “But how have you been, Conrad?”

  There was a pause, and then he said in a reluctant voice, “Well, I’ve missed you.”

  I suppose that was what I wanted to hear.

  I got over there fast enough that night. He said his back was hurting and he couldn’t come out, but he wanted very much to see me.

  I left the dinner dishes unwashed in the sink. I phoned a neighbor with whom I had a slight acquaintance. She was a mother of three who’d hardly notice one more child, I thought. I asked her if she’d mind watching Matthew for a couple of hours. How resourceful I was in the service of madness. I told her my fiancé was seriously ill. “Oh dear,” she said. “Do you think he will require hospitalization?” I said I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  I remember Matthew tearful in the elevator we took to her apartment. Above all things, small children desire consistency. It takes maturity to develop a taste for the impossible, as well as the willingness to rush after it at the drop of a hat.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” Conrad said after he had opened the door.

  There was a pleased look on his face that made me wish I had arrived much later.

  “Well, I can’t stay long.”

  Smiling, he kissed me, quick to thrust his tongue between my lips. “Come in,” he said. “I’m on the phone.”

  “Naturally.”

  “There’s just one more call that I’m expecting and then I’ll take it off the hook.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking such a sacrifice.”

  He left me in the front hallway of the apartment, then limping slightly, headed back toward the kitchen. I stood there taking off my coat, all my attention focused upon an object I had never seen before in Conrad’s house—the newest feature, so to speak. It was a female bicycle. An ordinary black bicycle that might have been the twin to the one that Conrad owned himself. Jauntily embellished with a basket, it stood side by side with its male counterpart with an air of complete self-possession, as if they were a pair of long standing. I had an urge to shake it by its handlebars and knock it down.

  Slowly I advanced into the living room, scanning it for further signs of invasion. It looked reassuringly much the same. Only the piles of books and papers had changed their configurations. The dust was as thick as ever. Finally I spotted what I was looking for—a small pepper plant on a window sill. A gift no doubt, since Conrad had very little interest in horticulture. I noted that it had lost three quarters of its leaves. Four remaining purple and magenta peppers clung to its withering stem. Clearly it had been neglected for at least a week.

  Attached to the telephone cord by the receiver cradled under his chin, Conrad emerged in the small archway that led from the kitchen. He held up a bottle of beer and a glass and made pouring gestures. I nodded affirmatively and again he disappeared from view. Finally I heard the click of the receiver, the slamming of the refrigerator door and various clinking and rummaging sounds, followed by the vision of Conrad himself slowly bearing in a battered tin tray on which there were two glasses of beer and a bag of pretzels. He had a look on his face of rather consciously boyish charm, as if he knew there is nothing more endearing to a woman than a large helpless man struggling with the little chores of domesticity.

  “Your plant needs watering,” I said, thinking we might as well get down to basics.

  “Oh, that’s right. I seem to keep forgetting it.” He set the tray down on the coffee table in front of me, wincing as he straightened up.

  “I think they need watering every two days.”

  He smiled at me through his pain in innocence and tenderness. “I’ll try to remember,” he said.

  “But that one looks as though it’s too far gone.”

  He sat down next to me on the couch and took my hand. His round and cheerful face descended toward mine, then momentarily veered. Very deliberately he breathed into my ear. “Do you think I should throw it out?”

  I was a little shocked by his lack of sentiment.

  “I would if I were you.”

  “You have a strain of ruthlessness, Molly,” he sighed.

  “Along with my capacity to be vindictive.”

  “I think I might be able to live with that.”

  I made note of that choice of words. Live with.

  “But could you live with the rest of me? Isn’t that the question?”

  I noted that I was being terrifically direct—and wondered what all this noting signified. Perhaps a change in the way in which I cared for Conrad. A real diminishment.

  “That’s a more difficult one,” I heard him say.

  I smiled at his predictability.

  Turning away from him, I stared at the plant on the window sill. As if it withered under my gaze, a pepper dropped off and fell into the pot with a small dry sound. I found myself laughing. “You’ve lost another pepper,” I said.

  He moved closer to me. “Forget the goddamn peppers.”

  “You know what I wish, Conrad?”

  “What do you wish?” he said patiently, as if to a child.

  “I wish you were just an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while. I wish we could just be—restful.”

  “The desire to be restful is one that I share. It makes me happy to see you, Molly. I have very warm feelings toward you. I thought we could have a quiet drink, a good talk, see where we’re going from here.”

  “Where are we going, Conrad?”

  “Well, there’ve been certain changes.”

  “There’ve been certain changes in my life, too,” I said quickly. “Certain additions. There’s someone I’ve become preoccupied with.” I thought that was the most accurate way of describing my relationship with Malcolm without going into further detail.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said after a moment. “I’m sure you could have a lot of additions in your life if that was what you wanted. I don’t think you even know how attractive you are.”

  “I have short legs,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what Fred always used to tell me.”

  “Well, Fred is a fool.”

  “Actually, I look like my grandmother. They’re the kind of legs that run in the family.”

  “Molly, certainly you’ve never doubted that I found you attractive.”

  I could feel happiness about to sneak up on me any minute. I tried to steel myself against it. “No,” I said. “There’ve been different problems.”

  Closing his eyes wearily, Conrad sank back against the pillows at the other end of the couch. “My back happens to be killing me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” Reaching out slowly, I put my hand on his forehead, covered his closed eyes.
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  “That’s friendlier,” he murmured.

  “Did you do something to it? Or is it tension?”

  “Tension,” he said.

  “Are these changes you mentioned before making you tense?”

  “Yes,” he said grimly.

  “I told my neighbor you were seriously ill. That was how I got out.” I moved my hand down his face, gently rubbed the side of his neck. “Does that make you feel any less tense?”

  “To tell you the truth, my back hurts like hell at the moment. But it’s nice you’re doing what you’re doing.”

  “Oh, I can be nice.”

  “I know you can, Molly.”

  “May I ask you just another small question?”

  “If it’s a nice question.”

  “Is the bicycle a permanent fixture?”

  “The bicycle?”

  “The one that isn’t yours, the one in the hallway. I’m really trying to forget the peppers, but I keep remembering the bicycle.”

  “Roberta thought it would make sense to leave it here for a while. She goes riding a lot in Central Park even at this time of the year.”

  “I see. Maybe I’ll get one myself and leave it here too if there’s room. Except mine will probably be yellow.”

  “Molly, you’ve told me you don’t even know how to ride.”

  “Well, you could teach me. Is the bicycle going to be followed by anything else I should know about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean other possessions of Roberta’s. Roberta herself.”

  He sighed—more heavily this time. “I was getting to that,” he said. “What’s actually happening is that Roberta’s bicycle is going to go away. It won’t be here the next time you come. She’s picking it up tomorrow. She’s very angry with me.”