Bad Connections Read Free Page B

you than you’ve said.”
    â€œPerhaps,” I said unwillingly.
    â€œNo. Definitely. Don’t think I don’t know what you expect of me, Molly.”
    â€œI asked you a question before.”
    â€œYes, you did. On the basis of what you found this morning when you turned up and I wasn’t there.”
    â€œI can put two and two together.”
    â€œAnd much more than that, much much more. Molly, you’re a thoroughly grown-up woman in most respects.”
    â€œIn what respects am I not?”
    â€œIn your tendency to jump to conclusions.”
    â€œI see nothing ungrownup about that.”
    â€œBut already, you see, you have me involved with someone you don’t even know about.”
    â€œWell, aren’t you?” I cried.
    â€œYes,” he said defiantly, roughly, “I happened to be with a close friend last night. Yes, and the night before that too.”
    â€œOkay, Conrad! Okay!”
    â€œYou’ll note that what I said was with! ”
    â€œWhy couldn’t you just say it in the first place?”
    â€œBecause I cared about how you heard it, goddamn it!”
    We had both been shouting back and forth at each other in the little car. We looked at each other in amazement and fright. Conrad steered to the left and pulled over in front of a hydrant. I noticed beads of sweat on his face. Wet rings of hair were plastered to his forehead. I could see that he was suffering, that he must have felt humiliated. I would have if I had been him. His blue eyes looked at me pleadingly like my kid’s did when I’d scolded him too hard. I almost took my hand and brushed his hair back from his forehead. I thought I was going mad with the anger and love all knotted up inside me and all that had happened to me that day and Conrad’s tortuous logic going round in my head and confusing me further.
    And now he began saying some things that were perfectly true. I couldn’t argue with them. That all of us came into each other’s lives from wherever it was we’d been before. That nothing was ever neat, especially for people who lived fully. We came to each other trailing old relationships, old attachments. “And who should know that better than you, Molly?”
    I had an image of me dragging Fred into Conrad’s life like an old vacuum cleaner gliding along on his little runners.
    He said something too about nothing ever really being over, which didn’t make too much of an impact on me at the time. I wanted only to get to what I thought was the point.
    â€œAnd what about this attachment of yours, Conrad?”
    I was determined that day to get the full story out of Conrad, however painful. Without information, how can one make choices? It was facts that I wanted. I made the mistake, however, of forgetting the importance of context. And Conrad was a master of that. He could spin a context out of himself like a great silken web.
    The context in which he told me about the other woman in his life was an appeal for sympathy, my compassion for another frail and battered human, a sister if you like. I must confess, though, to having difficulties with the word sister in its all inclusive, non-filial sense. It is absolutely clear to me that there are some women who are my sisters and others who are definitely not. In this case I did not feel particularly sisterly, although I tried—guiltily aware of my political shortcomings.
    This woman, my sister, was a modern dancer who’d become a dance therapist, who was now struggling toward a degree in psychology—which was only one of her problems. It was Conrad who had radicalized her, encouraged her to go to graduate school, to overcome the sense of intellectual inferiority that her disastrous marriage to a self-absorbed experimental filmmaker had left her with. Gradually he had been rebuilding her shattered sense of herself. His restoration was almost completed.
    â€œHenry Higgins,” I