Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson Page A

hotpants, comes to the window and stares aggressively into the night. Perhaps she sees Molly standing at her own window. The front paws and head of the poodle appear beside her. The woman pulls a cord and draws the drapes, which are of some heavy dull golden silk, probably synthetic. A pinkish light glows behind them for a few moments and then goes out.
    She turns and finds Conrad watching her—not warmly but with a kind of guarded objectivity, the way one might watch an attractive but unpredictable wild animal from a distance as one wonders what it will conceivably do next.
    He never mentioned Roberta. It was as if I had dropped a pebble into a pool and it had sunk straight to the bottom without a trace of that expected pattern of concentric spreading rings. Now I was left on the shore staring at the smooth surface of the water which gave me back only my own reflection.
    I didn’t mention her either. Things were much too fragile for that.
    Some people can never admit to being angry. They will sit in stony silence, they will pretend to be affable, they will engage in meaningless civilities, they will physically remove themselves from the premises if they have to—anything but reveal that they are gripped by strong emotion.
    Conrad seemed determined not to react except obliquely. He continued to come around to see me the same two nights of the week just as if nothing had happened. There was no repetition of the time he had fled. His references to his experiences in the clinic, to the discomfort he was prepared to gallantly and stoically endure as the price of our association, were wryly humorous. He drank the tea I made for him in lieu of the wine that was forbidden, but impatiently dismissed any other ministering efforts on my part—as if in some way they might mock him. He wasn’t quite sure of me now that I had become the transgressor and he the victim.
    There was no doubt that I had inflicted a wound upon him where he was most vulnerable—the locus of his pride and anxiety, that bit of flesh he employed with such wonderful dexterity, that unfailing flesh that imperiously ruled him, that was in a sense his Achilles’ heel. He concealed it from me, on the nights when we retired together, under a layer of stretched white cotton—as if even my gaze might contaminate it further. Not wishing to be naked where he was not, I took to undressing in the bathroom and covering myself with my flannel nightgown. We would sleep with a cold breadth of sheet between us—although we might have held each other, there would have been no harm in that. Nothing but affection would have been transmitted by our kisses.
    In the past we had invariably reached temporary settlements of our differences in bed—there was always that attraction that seemed to have a life of its own, so that even in the midst of the most profound verbal rift, there was the implicit knowledge that shortly we would be physically joined. But now the pleasure that had initially caused our fall from grace was denied to us just when we needed it to fall back on.
    It was small consolation to me that in my ex-husband’s eyes, at least, I was vindicated. He eventually called me and confessed with some embarrassment that he’d totally forgotten a passing encounter with a certain young lady from an East Side discotheque a few nights before we slept together. She had since left for Paris with a rock group, so there had been no way of verifying his suspicions, but still it seemed to him now that she must have been the source, and he was glad because he would not have wanted to have thought of me without respect, since after all he had been joined in wedlock to me and I would always be the mother of his child, that fine little guy whom he intended to see every other Sunday if he could manage it. He humbly hoped that I had not been seriously inconvenienced, etc. It was one of Fred’s finest moments. He had never been a man given to