Bad Connections Page 14

  “Except for this one lady.”

  Francine sighed and then laughed. “Quite original mind you have, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I happen to know someone called Bobbie.” I inserted this revelation as casually as I could. “Did you say you were staying in Saugerties?”

  “No. That’s this side of the river, I think. My friends are in Milton’s Crossing. That’s between Redhook and Rhinebeck. Ever go over there?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Lots of old Dutch architecture. Rhinebeck’s very pretty but awfully conservative. Milton’s Crossing is just a lot of farmers and a general store. Real country, if you like that sort of thing. Of course, it’s lovely in the summer. There’s one couple that’s thinking of staying up there through the winter—which strikes me as a little bit insane.”

  “Ever hear of someone called Conrad Schwartzberg?” I said after a moment.

  “Of course I know Conrad. He’s one of the people I was just … Is he a good friend of yours?”

  “I know him,” I said.

  “And Bobbie … God, that makes me feel a little embarrassed. Sometimes it’s as though I have foot-in-mouth disease.”

  “I can’t say I know her. Years ago I met her once.”

  “Well … I don’t get along with her terrifically. She’s paranoid about Conrad flirting with me. If he says a word to me, she just dies. And Conrad, of course, will always come on—with me or just about any other female. If you know him, you know that’s how he is.”

  “I’m involved with Conrad Schwartzberg,” I said.

  Francine fell silent. “That’s heavy,” she said finally. “Look—I hope I haven’t caused you pain.”

  I looked away. “I’ve been in pain all summer,” I said hoarsely.

  “Rough,” Francine said, shaking her head. “Really rough.”

  “I didn’t even know he wasn’t in Saugerties. That’s how crazy the situation is.”

  “Extreme,” she agreed. “Wow! Just think, if we didn’t happen to be on this bus, it might never have come out. Now I don’t know what to do exactly. Should we continue this conversation or switch to another topic? Are you a person who absolutely disapproves of gossip?”

  “Not in this instance,” I said.

  She was a mine of information.

  Our conversation wound on and on—long past Kingston and New Paltz and the string of small towns above Bear Mountain, persisting through the Sunday night traffic jams in New Jersey and the view of the Manhattan skyline above the oily marshes. The other passengers one by one turned off their lights and dozed in their angled seats. The only voices in the bus were Francine’s and mine, and I wondered sometimes if any of the darkly clad people heard us and what they might have made of what we said. With all their rules and their wigs, their obliviousness to the passage of time and the price they must have paid for it, they at least had the advantage of moral clarity. A person like me was an object lesson in the dangers of too much freedom.

  I wounded myself with details. Conrad sleeping with Roberta on some sort of Japanese mat that you rolled up and put in a corner because she was given to insomnia and required a hard surface under her. Conrad patiently peeling potatoes and shelling peas because Roberta demanded that all domestic work be split fifty-fifty and marked all debits in red upon a chart that she hung out in public view. Conrad devoting the entire Fourth of July weekend to entertaining her family, described by Francine as “the most bougie people you would ever want to meet.”

  Francine had flair as a raconteur, a keen eye for the ridiculous. She was not charitable in her judgments. She condemned Roberta more on grounds of taste and style than anything really substantial. It was Roberta’s “bouginess” that she objected to—more subtle than that of her family but definitely there—often taking the form of “grimness.”

  “Can you imagine someone skinny-dipping grimly? Grimly taking off her clothes and grimly going in the water. And always going on and on about the beauty of the country and getting the poisons out of your system and putting wheat germ on everything and making little references to how you sometimes have to get certain people to abandon their evil ways for their own good. That’s what I mean by grim. I mean the utter boringness of that kind of outlook, which is simply beyond belief.”

  I added her version of Roberta to my own, seizing upon everything negative, which was after all what I wanted to hear, because then it no longer seemed possible that Conrad could actually stay with such a person. Still what also emerged was the picture of Roberta as the one with the power, Conrad as supplicant. Perhaps that positioning was new. Perhaps it had never been the other way around, as I had thought. I wondered if her break with him had somehow caused his inability to make love to me, and if he had then gone back to her in a panic, promising her anything she wanted. He must have felt very safe with Roberta because I did not believe that he could love her. I was the evil she referred to, the reason she wanted to keep him in the country—the risk of winter isolation less than his proximity to me. Apparently she did not believe he would keep all his promises.

  THERE IS A word I detest: interstices. It is the name for certain very small places where one line happens to cross another, mere points on a diagram, the briefest of joinings—the lines continuing on in different directions into infinity, no final convergence indicated. As in: “I only have room for you in the interstices of my life.”

  It was Conrad’s attempt at poetry, an effort to ennoble the situation under discussion with a tone of tragic regret. Was it his tragedy or mine? I wasn’t sure. He could have said, “I’m not going to be able to see you very often,” which is what I took it to mean anyway, since we had agreed already that we would see each other, but not frequently. There was a certain arrogance in the assumption that his life with Roberta would be so full he’d hardly have time in it for anything extra, just one little dot now and then.

  He was going to spend it with her not in the country but in New York, in his apartment. That was what he came to tell me on the 24th, wearing a straw sombrero that Roberta had picked up in a barn sale. “How do you think this looks?” he said, preening a bit. “Awful,” I said. Men like to have images of themselves in certain hats. He took it off and didn’t put it on again, leaving it on the table in the hall when he took me out to dinner. He asked me if he didn’t look very brown—which he was all over, as I was later to discover. I told him I thought he was looking younger, and then he wanted to know if he’d been looking old. His beard, he confessed to me, would be quite gray if he ever allowed it to grow in. I told him I’d noticed that on the days when he didn’t shave.

  In that disarming way he had of taking certain things for granted, he took for granted my friendship and goodwill. He was happy and therefore I would be happy for him. He couldn’t help bragging a bit about his current lifestyle. His house, he informed me—as if it were truly his house, not just one he’d rented a share of until the end of September—was on a tract of one hundred acres. It had belonged to a wealthy gentleman farmer, who until his death five years before used to arrive for weekends in a private plane that would land in the meadow. He spoke of walks in the woods—his woods, blackberry picking and mushroom gathering, the joyous communal dinners.

  “I’ll bet you had curry on Sunday night.”

  He looked a little startled. “As a matter of fact, we did.” He seemed amused by my extrasensory powers. “I’d like to keep seeing you in this casual way, Molly. I don’t like to lose people altogether.”

  I finally let myself say what I’d been thinking. “I don’t think we could possibly be casual.”

  “I know I can,” he said confidently.

  “Liar,” I said brightly. “Liar. Liar.”

  “Don’t you understand how wrong it would be for me to jeopardize the commitment Roberta and I have made to each other just because I cared for someone else as well?”


  “Live with neither of us then.”

  “What? And go back and forth? Molly, I want peace. I want monogamy. I want to know that if something falls apart, it does so on its own terms.”

  “But we didn’t fall apart, Conrad. That isn’t what happened. You pulled out—we didn’t fall apart. You ran, you hid.”

  “It amounts to the same thing.”

  “I can’t accept that for a minute.”

  “I didn’t hide, by the way. I retreated.”

  “Conrad, your house is in Milton’s Crossing, not Saugerties. You and Roberta sleep on a Japanese mat because she has so much tension and she tells everybody about how she’s reforming you.”

  He turned white. “You amaze me, Molly.”

  “I know a lot about your idyll.”

  “I never said it was an idyll. It’s a rewarding and difficult relationship.”

  “Mostly difficult.”

  “That remains to be seen. I doubt that you get your information from very reliable sources.”

  “Only one. I’m not so powerful that I have a network.”

  “The person who gave you the phone number?”

  “No. Actually I got that in another way.”

  He was staring at me bewildered, attracted, still angry. “You haven’t been able to let go of me, have you?”

  “Does that disturb you, Conrad?”

  “It creates conflict. I think you’d actually consider sleeping with me even if I were living with someone else.”

  I said, “You could always refuse.”

  “I refuse,” he said.

  “Because you don’t want to or because you’re afraid it won’t work.”

  “Oh it would work, but it wouldn’t change anything.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We stood up and left the restaurant. In the street outside we embraced.

  “Oh Jesus Christ!” he said.

  LATE IN SEPTEMBER I went to see Malcolm. It was something I’d been thinking about and finally I just did it. I’d walked past his house a hundred times, looked up the stone steps through the glass door, into the little white-tiled hall with the row of mailboxes. It was odd that a person you’d once lain in the same bed with was also someone whose door you could dare to approach only in fantasy. But I had become accustomed to such apparent contradictions.

  Earlier that day I had gone to Conrad’s apartment for the last time. It was just before Roberta came down from the country. We’d spent the night together, our last whole night for a long while, and in the morning I walked over there with him. I had an oppressive, angry sense of last—the last this, the last that—unreasonable, I told myself, because it wasn’t as if I were losing Conrad, it was only that certain conditions were changing for the time being. I remember he woke me to make love just before we got up—both of us crying out with the fierce pleasure of it—and then I walked him to Seventy-eighth Street. “Do you want to come up?” he said, as if it were a morning like any other. I said I wouldn’t mind. Perhaps I should have said no. Sometimes one decides to do potentially painful things as arbitrary as passing one’s hand through the flame of a candle. I thought I needed concrete evidence of the change that was taking place.

  She’d already begun to move her stuff in. I’d expected that. Boxes of books. And the bicycle was back. In the living room there was a maple rocker—very homey, I thought—and a large brown pitcher filled with dried ragweed and cattails, which she must have gathered in the country. There was something about the harsh shapes of the ragweed pods that I found exceptionally depressing and dead-looking, but I didn’t say so. That pitcher of weeds bothered me more than anything else. It had already made a place for itself. I think I’d felt before that whatever Roberta brought into that apartment could be dismantled and taken out very quickly. Now I wasn’t so sure. I tried to remember the exact way Conrad had said those words about things having to fall apart by themselves that had so encouraged me by their pessimism.

  He offered to make coffee. “Will instant be all right?” he asked, filling a pot with water. He set two unfamiliar mugs upon the table and began measuring the coffee into them. They were brownish gray stoneware, very smooth, the kind that’s made in Vermont. There were four more just like them up on a shelf.

  I said I had to leave.

  I walked around for a while and ended up in Malcolm’s neighborhood. I climbed the front steps of his house, opened the glass door and entered his hall. I pressed the bell marked JANITOR. The dog began barking immediately down in the basement. I thought Malcolm would either let me in or he wouldn’t. If I’d been capable of asking myself what I was doing, I might have gone away. There is a terrible risk in the exposure of need.

  I remember hearing him call my name. He had opened the street door behind me.

  “You didn’t know I had a private entrance downstairs,” he said.

  I told him I happened to be passing by. “I thought I’d like to see where you live.” It was a peculiar thing to be saying to someone at nine o’clock in the morning.

  He squinted at me through his glasses, which slid down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them back up again with one long finger. “And why not?” he said.

  It was the why-notness of Malcolm that I loved in him, his ability to act upon occasion as the moment demanded, never thinking of consequences as Conrad would have done, or measuring out the precise degree to which he would allow himself to become involved with someone in extremis. He was a man you could tell all your troubles to—as long as they had nothing to do with him. Guilt would tend to make him disappear, drop out of sight for considerable periods—during which he’d exhume his entire history of failure the way a dog digs up an old bone, always knowing exactly where to find it to be chewed over once again, no more nourishment in it than a mouthful of dust. Even his guilt I found attractive.

  He led me down the steps past a row of trash cans and around to an iron gate. We entered a low, dimly lit passageway, pipes overhead, dusty cartons stacked against the wall. He put his hand beneath my elbow. “Watch where you walk,” he said. The dog Shadow was barking in a frenzy. He bounded forward upon us as Malcolm opened a door into a room whose whiteness took me by surprise. Through barred windows I could see a garden of cobblestones and ivy, ailanthus trees. The dog kept running back and forth between us, jumping up to put his paws upon our chests, panting into our faces. “Later,” Malcolm said, “we’ll have to take him out.” I realized he was giving me the day if I wanted it.

  I must have looked pretty bad, I guess. He kept talking to me in an amazingly gentle way. Would I like to sit down, even though his bed wasn’t made? It was the only comfortable place to sit. Would I like scrambled eggs or just a piece of toast? Coffee? I told him he was the second person to offer me coffee and that therefore I was going to refuse. The dog climbed into my lap, front and back paws sprawling down over my legs. “He’s a terrible dog,” Malcolm said. “You push him away if he’s bothering you.” He said he was making me tea, since no one had offered me that.

  I stared out at the garden, the dog breathing rhythmically against me, shedding his long red hairs upon my skirt. Finally I told Malcolm about Conrad—all of it, even about the ragweed in the brown pitcher. He said he understood obsession, that the very nature of passion was the desire to possess, which was perhaps why certain men feared to be the object of it—the fear taking different forms. His own fear—as of course he had already demonstrated—was extreme.

  I have no idea what he was really feeling. I was quite conscious that I was giving him license to begin to see me now—letting­ him know he would be free of the burden of my desires, which were so painfully directed toward another, thus enabling us to be friends. That was even what I wanted to believe myself.

  He too wanted a friend, he said.

  I’m not sure he meant it anymore
than I did. Perhaps, like me, he was looking to be rescued.

  A sound like a dull crash five blocks to the north. BOOM, as Matthew would say, ramming his truck into a stack of building blocks. A large boom, followed perhaps by several smaller subsidiary ones. The falling apart of the house of Conrad and Roberta.

  She lies very still in the mornings listening intently, never hearing what she’s waiting for, although she would recognize it instantly, so well has she imagined it. Finally she gets herself up and begins to go through another day, waking Matthew before she walks into the kitchen, where if Conrad has visited her the night before, there will be two wineglasses standing in the sink. She never gets to wash them before Conrad gets her into bed. First there is the overture on the living-room couch. Then, as if taken by surprise, they rush into the bedroom, disheveled and half-unbuttoned, leaving the glasses on the coffee table. He is always careful to leave before midnight, putting on his clothes and stumbling out the door speechless with satisfied weariness. In fact, it is Molly who keeps an eye on the clock, nudging him awake at eleven forty-five. He has pointed out that it is very hard on the person you live with to be put into the position of waiting for your arrival at unpredictable hours. Surely Molly would demand the same consideration. How can his relationship with Roberta be fairly tested if he himself does not obey certain basic rules?

  At any rate, after Conrad has gone and she has locked the door, she picks up the glasses on her way back to the bedroom and carries them to the sink but cannot bring herself to turn on the water, so they are there in the morning with their dregs of wine and perhaps a dead cockroach or two drowned alcoholically—a sourness to be dealt with before orange juice and Matthew’s innocent bowl of cornflakes and milk.

  “What do I need to make you an egg for?” She actually rehearses herself in lines like that and sometimes succeeds in delivering them to Conrad. The egg line, for example, has a nice New York Jewish inflection, which she admires for its suggestion of hardboiled toughness, suitable to the role of a certain kind of mistress.