Bad Connections (8 page)

S
HE HAS TAKEN
to her bed, hiding out there under the covers, burning up one minute, cold the next—pretending for Matthew's benefit that she is ill with something real. But the pain is real enough, although the illness is not. She gives him extensive direction on how to make himself a peanut butter sandwich and sinks back against the pillows exhausted, knowing she should be marketing, taking out the laundry. But her whole head is burning, her cheeks are aflame; the fire rises up all the way to her scalp, travels along her hair, singeing it at the edges. She is a person who has been lied to, casually humored then betrayed.

“I have a headache too, Mom.” Matthew's small body plumps down next to her on the bed companionably.

“No you haven't, Matthew.”

“Yes I do. I need a baby aspirin.”

“You're acting like a baby.”

He thinks it over. “Maybe,” he says.

She hears a shrill, unpleasant voice obviously belonging to someone at the end of her tether cry out, “For god's sake! Will you leave me alone!” He lies there quite still, unnaturally solemn. Stricken by guilt, she explains that this desire characteristic of grownups is often hard for children to understand. She asks him if he would please just take her word for it.

Recovering immediately, he argues that this is not necessarily true of children because he, Matthew, understands everything she tells him.

“In that case, would you please go and play in your room for a while.”

He goes away for fifteen minutes, during which she cries and wonders whether in addition to everything else she is turning into a rotten mother—hating Conrad for that, too. Hating him. Yes, that is certainly the emotion she feels and she wants only to tell him that immediately, reach him immediately with the clean, fresh hatred pure and undissipated.
That is what I want to do,
she thinks with one half of her, the other half in anguish thinking that she has lost him, lost him without knowing it because he didn't even have the guts to tell her. All the time he was sitting on her couch looking at her in that concerned way, taking her in his arms, he knew damn well what he was really going to be doing this weekend—not to mention all the obvious connotations of that trip out of town with Roberta. What could that mean except what she thought it did—that formality of going to meet the parents?

And she never even knew it, never suspected—all these weeks everything going on as usual, except for the strain between them for a while, and even that had disappeared. And that is somehow the worst of it—the knife that twists again and again—that she hadn't known, that she has been just as unconscious as she ever thought Roberta was. They have each known different portions of the truth—and in the gap between Conrad swims back and forth with the untroubled ease of a fish, back and forth from one to the other. So that even now if by all the external evidence she thinks she has lost him, that too may be an appearance, nothing more than that, just something she was not supposed to ever find out. He will appear on Tuesday just as usual. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” he will ask.

“Hello. I don't think you know me. But I know who you are.”

I finally settled on that as my opening. If I could just say that much, get that far, I could say the rest—having rejected “We met a couple of years ago in Amagansett, but I don't think you would remember me,” as too much like normal conversation. It was conceivable that, losing nerve, one might go on from there to a discussion of summer houses in Amagansett, mutual friends and other trivia and never get to the point. In “I know who you are” there was a certain undertone of dark suggestion, committing one irrevocably to what was to follow.

It was not that I wanted to frighten Roberta—it was that I distrusted myself. I was afraid of leaving too much room for my cowardice or my scruples—I wasn't sure which might serve to inhibit me. Last minute cowardice probably. There was an unspoken but very strong taboo against certain acts of communication between women—a taboo undoubtedly first invented by men, protecting their sacred prerogative to pick and choose and sample, all in the estimable cause of “finding themselves.” God forbid! What if they didn't! And yet taboos are made to be broken. There are acts almost inconceivable in contemplation that in execution are as simple as picking up a phone and dialing the seven digits of a particular number. The phone rings. One holds on to the receiver, heart beating, and waits. “Hello. I don't think you know me … ” Anyone could say it. Who says that a woman cannot talk to another woman?

The more I thought about making that call during that long and bitter weekend, the more it seemed the only thing to do—if not the right thing. Seen from a distance, the act had a cold and shining hardness about it, drawing me on toward the moment of commission with the silent force of a magnet. And yet could I really do it? Could I become transformed from the depressed and essentially forgiving person I thought I was into someone quite unfamiliar—a sort of terrorist striking with a flaming Biblical sword?
I think it is only fair that you should know the truth, Roberta.

Oh, I was determined to be fair. She was not, after all, my enemy. The real enemy was Conrad's indecision. We were both its victims—although she was a victim more privileged than I, occupying a larger and more comfortable cell. I wondered if even in Philadelphia, at her parents' table, she felt really sure of him—if even there she felt a persistent uncertainty, the sense of inexplicable omissions just below the surface, days and nights unaccounted for, secret transgressions, inconsistencies. Had he promised her he was turning over a new leaf? She would have believed it, of course, just as I would have believed that kind of promise myself—because I wanted to. Conrad himself might even believe it, temporarily. He would come to see me with a reserved and solemn face—“Molly, I have something to tell you … ”

I turned and twisted in my unmade bed. I staggered to the kitchen and heated a can of soup, ladled it into a bowl and ended by pouring it into the sink, clogging the drain with noodles. If I had lost him anyway, there was nothing left to lose. I could make the call or not, it wouldn't matter. I would know only the satisfaction of acting rather than being acted upon. Did the means then justify themselves?

I reached for the kitchen phone and dialed his number—not hers—giving him his last chance to explain, to tell me what was going to happen in my life. I wanted to hear it all now, not Tuesday. How could I wait another three days or even another hour? I almost hoped he would lie to me. That would be a sign he still cared enough to try to keep me. But I would have to be hard on him, tell him what I knew, not allow him to deny it. Holding the receiver slightly away from my ear, I listened to the phone ring eight times. He always picked it up by the third ring if he was home. But it was not yet the end of the weekend, it was only Saturday night. They were still together, unreachable in some private space sacred to couples, “out of town for the holidays” like any more conventional pair, taking a respite from the pressures of the city. No need to hasten their return.

They came back on Sunday. Around eight there was a busy signal on Conrad's line. Perhaps at that moment he was trying to reach me. I never asked him. After I hung up, I picked up the phone and dialed again. By this time I knew the other number by heart.

“Hello,” she said in the flat, little girl's voice that I remembered.

“Hello. Is this Roberta?” I recognized the crisp, civil tone as the one I used in the office when talking to strangers.

“Yes?”

“My name is Molly Held. I know who you are but you don't know me.” I realized after I had spoken that I had reversed the order of my original statement, given it a baldness, a bluntness, it had not had before.

“Am I supposed to?” she asked rather coldly.

“No. We are not—either of us—supposed to know each other. I'm calling because I felt there was something you ought to be aware of.”

“And what is that?” she asked after a moment.

“I am a person whom Conrad has been seeing. He has been seeing me rather seriously for several months now.”

There was a silence.

“I suppose he never mentioned it. I thought he would have told you himself. Anyway, I'm tired of being the person who knows everything. We both should know all sides.”

“Look,” she said, “I don't understand how Conrad could be seeing you. He's with me every night of the week.”

I had to ponder the logic of what she had just told me. I wondered—if it was true that I could not be seen—whether I existed, whether Conrad existed. “Well,” I said clumsily, all my adroitness, my desire to maintain a certain delicacy, having deserted me, “someone must be lying. Why don't you think about it? Goodbye,” I said and hung up.

Felicia, whose wisdom about the nuances of human relationships I trust absolutely, has often warned me about the unreliability of dialogues imagined in advance of their occurrence—a lesson learned through her own tendency to endlessly project and rehearse, taking both parts—her own and that of her adversary. “It always comes out very differently from what you expected, Molly. That's the only certainty you can count on.”

I think I had expected anything but a denial. Hurt, certainly. Rage—directed against Conrad rather than at me, although I might have borne the brunt of it at first. But finally she would have recognized the essential morality of what I had done. The bringer of the truth is always in the right.

I believed that then, but since I've come to question it. Was I not also punishing Roberta in deliberately depriving her of her illusion of happiness—the truth then being not merely itself, gratuitously delivered, but the instrument of a less admirable motive? I did not want her to be happier than I was, even if that happiness was based upon a deception and therefore not objectively real. I wanted her to suffer as I was suffering, and only in that sharing was I prepared to be generous, fantasizing a commiseration that Conrad would have abhorred between two women who had so much in common.

He called me about twenty minutes later. “Are you expecting to be in for a while, Molly?”

“As far as I know.”

“I'd like to come over to talk to you.”

“Do as you please, Conrad!” I shouted. “Do as you please!”

“I'm coming over.” There was a click.

How dare he ask if I was going to be in? Wasn't I almost always in, there at his convenience? Didn't he always know just exactly where I was? But that was going to change, I thought wildly, that was going to change. Tomorrow I was going to start a whole new life, become a person who went out a lot. Energized by rage, I whirled through the apartment, straightening, tidying, sweeping the accumulated mess of the weekend into corners and drawers—a rampage of order. “Get your things out of the living room!” I yelled to Matthew, locking myself into the bathroom to strip off the nightgown I had worn for two days and change into sweater and jeans, brush my hair—my hands shaking as I put on makeup, mascara burning into my eyes, smudging my cheeks so that I looked as if I had been shoveling coal in a basement. I was scrubbing if off when the doorbell rang.

“The door, Mom!”

“Get it, Matthew!”

“What?”

“Get it!”

Drying my face on a towel, I heard Conrad come in.

“Where's your mother, Matthew?”

“Oh, she's here.”

I felt sick with a watery sickness, my life flowing away from me. Gone almost gone. I stepped out of the bathroom into the hall that ran from the living room into the rest of the apartment. It was a narrow place, a close, constricted little passageway. Conrad stood facing me in the entrance to the living room. He seemed jammed into that space, filling it up almost completely. It was as if he had become huge, all his S familiar proportions suddenly swollen.

“Why did you do it, Molly?”

“Because I've had enough, Conrad! I've had enough—do you understand?”

In fact, I hadn't had enough. No, not even by then. Neither enough to sustain me, nor to force me to the point where I could contemplate giving Conrad up—both my need to be loved and my capacity to hang on without proof of it being larger than I ever would have suspected at the time.

So if I remember screaming various things at him in that hallway—all the bitter accusations one is supposed to give vent to in such circumstances—I also must acknowledge the lack of conviction behind those utterances, the sense of all my words somehow falling short of the mark. It was only a false showdown in the end. I could not bring myself to make the ultimate threat—the removal of my person, my physical and psychic self, from his life.

Oh, he had me there, Conrad did—and he knew it. Nor did he hestitate to seize the advantage this gave him. Now was when he chose to inform me, for example, that my brief defection to Fred had hurt him severely—quite apart from its consequences. Since I'd been married to the man in question, he'd felt it wasn't his proper role to call me to account for what I'd done. But the incident had made him wonder whether he could ever rely on me absolutely. Perhaps our sensibilities weren't as well matched as he'd once thought.

“You're much too volatile, Molly. I can see how you can even be vengeful. In this instance you acted without consulting me and hurt a person whose feelings I consider terribly important.”

“Fuck you, Conrad! I wasn't about to consult you!”

“You see, Molly—you see how given to extremes you are! I know you're not in a state to believe this, but I was about to talk to Roberta myself. I thought she was almost ready to hear what I had to say about the situation and even come to where she could accept it.”

“What situation did you mean her to accept? You said months ago,
months ago,
Conrad, that you and I would be together.”