Bad Connections Read Online Free PDF Page A

and coffee cups on the table, he has spent a good part of the night. He rushes at her and knocks her to the floor. “Whore!” he yells.

I N MY FIFTH year of marriage I met a man through my work. He was a professor of economies from Milwaukee who was writing a three-part reconsideration of Thorstein Veblen for New Thought. He was an older man, in his late forties, who had a certain blond, perpetually innocent look that I always associate with the Midwest. His sentence structure was beyond belief—dreadful agglutinations of words in which there lurked flashes of theoretical brilliance. I sat with him for days, shearing away dependent clauses that were not attached to anything and suggesting ways they could be made to have independent existences of their own. He was abjectly grateful—particularly so when the essays were published and his colleagues praised his clarity of expression. He was not the first writer I worked with who fell a little bit in love with my pencil. Nor was he the last. He would insist on taking me out to long lunches in the middle of our work sessions. Just before he went back to Milwaukee, he told me I reminded him of his favorite high school English teacher, Miss Metcalf.
    I was depressed by this association. I went to the ladies’ room and inspected my face for signs of severity and age, for any hint of asexuality. I would not have been shocked to have found the latter—such were my relations with my husband at the time.
    I was therefore considerably surprised when the phone in my office rang three weeks later. It was the economist. “Hello, Miss Metcalf,” he said. “I’m back in town.” He asked me if I were free that evening, explaining that he was attending an economists’ convention and was staying at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn, where he wished us to meet and have cocktails. I was so totally unprepared for this kind of invitation, after my years of faithfulness to Fred, that I was thrown into a kind of tongue-tied panic. I collected myself after a moment and invited him home to dinner. He hesitated and then accepted. “That’s real nice of you,” he said.
    It was a rather peculiar evening. First, Fred was very critical of me for allowing my “work” to follow me home. He told me he fully expected to be bored, since most writers he had met socially were both dull and opinionated, and he detested the thought of being trapped into the role of host. Second, my child had an upset stomach and called out to me in heartrending tones all through the meal and finally ran out into the living room and vomited on the flokati rug. I ran back and forth between the kitchen, the dining table and my child with food and buckets of water and hardly got in a word of conversation. Fortunately, the two men discovered they had a mutual interest in football—one that I did not share. By ten o’clock, when I was finally able to sit down, I was exhausted. Meaningless fragments of discussion about the Green Bay Packers buzzed in my ears until my eyes finally closed and I drifted off into a humiliating sleep.
    I thought I’d seen the last of the economist. But he turned up at my office the following day just before noon. He looked flushed and troubled. He implored me to go to lunch with him. As we waited for the elevator he gave me a clumsy kiss, springing away afterward with mumbled apologies. As we sat a few minutes later in the Szechuan restaurant around the corner, he confessed to having contracted a hopeless passion for me, not unlike the one he’d had for Miss Metcalf when he was an adolescent boy. I was touched. I let him squeeze and knead my fingers upon the plastic upholstery of the booth. His tweed-covered leg pressed tentatively against mine beneath the table cloth. I sat stock still and unresistant, feeling only the slightest response—perhaps because it was a relationship in which I so clearly had the upper hand. I told him I