Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson

did keep trying to get in touch with you before this.”
    â€œI was around,” he said vaguely.
    â€œI even left messages at your office. I suppose I could have reached you last night, but naturally I didn’t try.”
    â€œWhere would you have reached me?”
    â€œAt Roberta’s. I didn’t think you’d appreciate it much.”
    â€œIt would not have been a good idea.”
    â€œI could have pretended to be someone else. I could even have pretended to be me, since she doesn’t know who I am anyway.” Somehow, even in this situation, I ended up as the injured one. Inevitably all our quarrels led to the same place.
    â€œOh come on, Molly!”
    â€œSuppose there ever really was a bad emergency. Could I reach you there?”
    â€œOf course you could,” he said.
    â€œConrad, you really are the limit!”
    â€œWell, in a genuine emergency of course—”
    â€œBut it would have to be a matter of life and death. Not something as trivial as this. Even though in this case it affects her too.” This is not the way, not the way, I told myself—attempting to no avail to hold myself in check.
    â€œIt really does affect her, Conrad.”
    â€œI’m aware of that,” he said grimly.
    â€œYou’re going to have to tell her.”
    â€œI had no thought of doing otherwise.”
    â€œMaybe it’s even for the best. You never know.”
    â€œHow do you figure that?”
    â€œWell, nothing’s ever as bad as whatever it is you dread. Even the clap is just something you cure right away with penicillin. Nobody dies of it. I’m feeling much better since I got my shot.”
    Enacting a tenderness I did not exactly feel, I touched his hair, ran my hand down his impassive cheek.
    We had been sitting next to each other all this time on the living-­room couch and now abruptly he stood up. “I think I should go,” he said.
    â€œYou’re not going to stay over?”
    â€œNot tonight, Molly. Not tonight.”
    Separated by the expanse of the coffee table, they are sitting on their injections in her living room listening to Mahler’s First Symphony—which Conrad has turned up to full volume, making conversation nearly impossible. It is a lack in her that she is not particularly fond of Mahler herself. She would have picked something by Satie for this occasion, or perhaps the Billy Holliday recording of “Don’t Explain.” In any case, she knows that in other more important ways, too, they are out of tune with each other. It is the beginning of a new and more difficult period. Tonight she is irritated by the way she has seen him listen to music so often before—eyes half closed, fingers swaying an imaginary baton. If not for his fascination with the law, his dedication to social justice, he might have become a world-famous conductor or at least a fiddler in the Philharmonic. How intensely he appreciates Mahler’s genius—shutting her out. She remembers the interminable Saturday afternoons of her childhood when there was no one to play with and her parents were listening to the opera.
    It is raining outside, a cold late October downpour that floods the rear courtyard below, setting the garbage can lids afloat. Full of Mahler-gloom, she gets up and stands at the window, staring into a brilliantly lit apartment across the way where a pimp and his two women are smoking grass, passing a communal joint ceremoniously from hand to hand, sometimes stopping to toss a ball to their small communal poodle. She thinks for some reason of some lines of Pound’s that she has not read for a long time:
    And I am happier than you are,
    And they were happier than I am;
    And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing.
    She is nearly overwhelmed by the poignancy, the irony, of the last line. “And the fish swim in the lake … ” One of the women, a tall, spectacular blonde in little satin