Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

Matthew who has insisted on staying up for Conrad’s visit and is by that time nearly hysterical with exhaustion and will not go to sleep even after Conrad has wrestled him a few times and carried him slung over his shoulders to his bed. But she likes the way that he is with the boy. It’s one of the things she likes best about him now—and he knows it, grinning at her over Matthew’s head when he catches her noticing the way they are together. Matthew always asks her whether Conrad is coming over. “Well, why isn’t he here yet? ”heasks indignantly.
    Sometimes by the time Conrad comes, she’s very angry. Although she’s spent three days waiting for him, the extra hour or so added on by his lateness is almost unendurable. Sometimes she nearly hates him and contemplates not answering the doorbell, letting him ring and ring. If it wasn’t for Matthew, she’d certainly go out. Yes, she’d go out and walk, visit a friend, have a drink somewhere, leave a terse and pointed note:
    Too bad you’re too late this time.
    M.
    Fuck him anyway. She’d walk off into the night and take a taxi to another part of town.
    But when he is actually there in all his smiling bigness, she is just mostly very glad to see him. That is the paradox. And she ends up feeling so sorry for him too on certain nights when he arrives on her doorstep exhausted and pale, breathing hard—with tales of a meeting that went on for six hours, or a flat tire on the Jersey Turnpike, and it turns out the poor man has not even had dinner. She rushes to the kitchen eager to nourish him. “Just something light,” he sighs, sinking down onto one of her rickety kitchen chairs, and ends up eating all her leftovers—half a chicken, an entire bowl of potato salad, the remains of a brie.
    Sometimes, singing union songs, he takes a shower in her bathroom and washes his hair with her shampoo, Dr. Brunner’s Peppermint Soap—the label of which shows a fiercely bearded man and says you can use Dr. Brunner’s for cleaning your teeth or washing your dog and any other known hygienic purpose.
    It is a few weeks before she dares to buy him a toothbrush. It is a red one that she selects for him, and she presents it to him rather shyly: “Here’s something I think you need.” “Oh thanks,” he says matter-of-factly, without much interest. It is clear that this is just a toothbrush to him rather than a significant toothbrush. She puts it in the holder with her yellow one and Matthew’s green one and looks on it with pleasure on the mornings when he has stayed over and with bitter regret when it is unused.
    Sometimes I asked myself what I wanted—which I knew wasn’t the same as what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want freedom. The runaway wife was the new cultural phenomenon, celebrated in everything from poems whose lines mixed kitchen imagery with menstrual blood to how-to articles in the women’s magazines. Now I was free—free to have as many lovers as I wanted of whichever sex or to live with a vibrator in celibacy, free to go to rap sessions any night of the week if I could afford a baby-sitter, or to develop my mind in night classes at the New School for Social Research and my dormant strength in Roberta’s exercise classes, free to start an exciting career—but I had already been working all of my adult life.
    What I did was eat out a lot—sampling the various restaurants up and down Broadway with my son. For a while almost every evening that I wasn’t expecting Conrad we were out à deux, my patient child with his shopping bag of comics and small plastic monsters with which he would relieve the boredoom of a televisionless dinner and I with whatever manuscript I happened to be reading. We would look around us and invariably see a number of similar couples at other tables even on weekdays. I taught Matthew to eat with chopsticks and