Bad Connections Read Free

come out of his corner. Characteristically, he is running both of his hands through his hair, that red cherubic tangled curling mass that was once my delight. In a moment he will stand up and turn the whole thing around.
    She is in her office but her mind is still reeling through the city, in transit between Sheridan Square and the Upper West Side. She calls Fred and tells him she had felt the urge to take an early morning walk. She borrows ten dollars from petty cash and goes downstairs to the drugstore in the lobby. She buys a comb, a toothbrush, a pinker lipstick than she usually wears and some green eyeshadow, and puts the change in the small paper bag these articles come in.
    Back at her desk she selects a sharpened pencil and hangs on to it, staring at a paragraph on the proof sheet in front of her. She knows already that it is not going to be a good day for concentration. She is staring at the opening of an essay by an eminent cultural critic:
    There is no doubt that we have experienced in our own lifetimes, even in those rare instances where we are insulateed somewhat
    She does not catch the typo in the spelling of insulated, which will annoy the eminent critic considerably, when he finds insulateed right in the first sentence of his essay on illiteracy in the fall issue of New Thought. She is imagining Conrad walking into his office on West Twenty-first Street any minute now—Conrad back from wherever he has been, rumpled and unshaven, wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday when he called her and said nothing about being out of town.
    against the shocks of the onslaught, the profound and inescapably deleterious effects of mass—
    At her right elbow there is the telephone. She feels slightly nauseated. She knows she is going to end by dialing the number of Conrad’s office. She asks herself not to, but she does.
    A young woman, an ex-girlfriend of Conrad’s who is now a part-time secretary at the People’s Law Collective and is working her way through law school, answers. She says that Conrad isn’t in. “We don’t expect Conrad until later this afternoon. Any message?”
    She almost says, “Tell him Molly called,” but doesn’t. This way if she doesn’t reach him it will be by default as if she hadn’t called him in the first place.
    She hesitates for a moment or two, then calls Conrad at home. The line is busy. She sees a door with nothing in front of it. One copy of the New York Times is in the garbage. The other is spread out in front of Conrad on the kitchen table next to the opened mail.
    She calls back a few minutes later. This time there is no one there.
    â€œHello,” Conrad said to me. “How are you?”
    Since I hadn’t considered the possibility that Conrad might call me before I reached him, I was so thrown off guard I nearly said I was fine.
    â€œNot so good.”
    â€œOh? That’s too bad.” There was the usual good-natured warmth in his voice. “Did something happen?”
    â€œConrad, I was at your house at six-thirty this morning.”
    â€œYou were?”
    â€œBut you weren’t home.”
    â€œI was there. The downstairs buzzer doesn’t work sometimes.”
    â€œNo, I got in. The doorman was on duty.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œI went up to your apartment and rang, Conrad.”
    â€œI feel terrible. I just didn’t hear you.”
    â€œThere was a pile of mail outside your door and two newspapers.”
    There was a pause.
    â€œWhat were you doing there at that hour anyway?” he asked almost indignantly.
    â€œI walked out on Fred today.”
    â€œI guess we should talk.” He lowered his voice to a level suitable to the discussion of intimate affairs in crowded offices.
    â€œYes. We should talk.”
    â€œBut not now,” he said. “I’m just about to go into a meeting.”
    â€œOf course,” I said, trying to sound as sarcastic as I possibly