Bad Connections Read Online Free PDF

would never be unfaithful to my husband. He said he understood. He wanted only to keep seeing me under any circumstances.
    The affair, if you can call it that, went on for nearly nine months. The economist and I would meet whenever he came to town and have lunch in various ethnic restaurants, where we would enjoy the limited physical contact permitted by the decor. He never asked me to the Howard Johnson Motor Inn again. In a way I was disappointed by this lack of spirit on his part as much as I was relieved. In between his visits I tended to forget him—being reminded of the fact that I lived in his imagination by an occasional picture postcard addressed to Miss Metcalf and signed “Fondly, Stewart.” At any rate, he was adequate in his role as my secret admirer. A more tangible and demanding one would have terrified me. At the time I still had thoughts of saving my marriage.
    In the spring of that year an epidemic of chicken pox swept like wildfire through the Robin Dell nursery school. My son succumbed early with a mild case, requiring incessant doses of apple juice and television. I was not so fortunate. When the incubation period ended, itching blisters burst forth on every inch of my flesh. My husband shunned me as if I were a leper, averting his eyes as I sat across from him at meals and even suggesting we eat at separate tables. His offended esthetic sensibility drove him to the bars earlier in the evenings­ than ever before and often kept him out until dawn. I would paint myself with calomine lotion and lie itching and weeping upon my bed, questioning my very existence. It was one of several times in my life that I have reached almost absolute despair in circumstances that others might objectively consider­ ludicrous­. But my sufferings, my grief, as I lay in that lonely apartment, were very real. I knew without a doubt that my husband did not love me, that if my affliction were permanent Fred would disappear from my life. I looked in the mirror at my pocked and swollen face that seemed to belong to a stranger and imagined myself irrevocably scarred, abandoned by my husband without so much as a get-well card. I knew I would heal and that our normal life together would resume with its attendant­ apathy—but I no longer had hope of anything more. It is in the death of hope that one begins finally to let go—in the perception of an underlying pattern that repeats and repeats and will repeat again.
    It seems odd to me now that I ever shed a tear for Fred or for the kind of life that we had together. Perhaps I was really mourning the approaching end of my own inertia, and my tears were those of a coward. At any rate, for days they flowed from me like recycled water from a fountain, running down my loathsome blistered cheeks and making them itch all the more from the salt they left behind them.
    It was in such a mood that I heard the doorbell ring one afternoon. Hurriedly wiping my eyes on the edge of my sheet and throwing my decrepit quilted bathrobe around me, I went to the door to let in what I thought was the delivery man from the A&P. Instead I found the economist. I learned later that he’d turned up at the office that morning and was told I was sick, but not the nature of my illness. Perhaps the thought of appearing on my doorstep as I lay on my sickbed in slightly feverish déshabillé had inflamed in him the last flickering of his original intention. He was carrying what looked like a bottle of wine in a paper bag and a small bouquet of anemones. He stared at me in dismayed confusion as if he were trying to place me. “Go away,” I croaked. “I have the chicken pox.” I closed the door in his face and sank laughing wildly into the nearest chair until once more I began to weep.
    I never saw the economist again, except in my most strictly professional capacity.
    As I lay sprawled on the floor that morning, with my husband towering above me like a righteous and