Bad Connections Read Online Free PDF Page B

avenging archangel, I reflected rapidly upon our history and decided that the epithet he’d given me was undeserved. As was his assault upon a person admittedly so much smaller than himself. We seemed like actors in a Victorian melodrama rather than an average Village couple swept along by the Sexual Revolution. I lay there on the rug rather calmly, considering the shock of his attack. No one had tried to beat me up since I was nine years old.
    He was shouting now, his face fiery and contorted. I had never heard him express such strong emotion. I listened to his enraged description of his tormented, sleepless night, how he’d tossed and turned in the bed I had so cynically deserted, how he’d finally risen and paced, how he’d imagined me in various poses in the lurid embrace of Conrad Schwartzberg. “You fucking lied to me!” he yelled.
    Which was true. While I’d told Fred about Conrad at the very beginning—I suppose because I needed to show him that some other man could desire me—I’d had to promise the affair was over in order to be able to get out of the house on certain nights to carry it on.
    â€œYou weren’t off raising your consciousness somewhere with a bunch of women. You were getting laid! You were getting laid! Right?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “I was getting laid.”
    Fred lifted his fist as if to strike me again, but instead brought it crashing down on the Formica table top. The dishes there made a small but distinct clink of apprehension. With a fierce cry and an impatient sweep of his wrist, he cleared them to the ground.
    I raised myself cautiously on one elbow. “You’re being unreasonable,” I said.
    â€œDon’t tell me what’s unreasonable!”
    â€œBut you don’t even want me,” I reminded him. “You don’t, really.”
    How coolly now I could state the fact that a year ago had immobilized me, left me sobbing into my pillow. I thought my consciousness had indeed undergone a change.
    I regard myself as I was that momentous day, wondering at my dangerous innocence. Even Fred’s blow left nothing more than a bruise upon my chin. I burned with clarity like an incandescent­ bulb. The future I would have with Conrad shimmered almost within reach, lush and inviting. I had only to endure the last bleak stretch of the past and to skirt the small obstacle that Roberta represented. She was not included in my vision of the future.
    I was leaving a desert and entering a swamp. But no one could have persuaded me of that or deflected my path.
    There is such a thin line for women between adventure and misadventure. It is still hard for us to be heroes in the active, external sense of, say, climbing mountains, hopping freights. We tend to be heroes of our own imaginations. I am as much idiot as heroine, perhaps more the former than the latter—an educated dope, as my mother would say, having earned her right to pass judgment by her investment in my tuition.
    Nonetheless, I like to remember how invincible I felt as I left my old life. I was so unquestionably in the right that nothing very bad could happen to me. I had even taken it upon myself to become the bearer of the truth. No more lies to anyone, no more shabby excuses. I had been as guilty of those, for the sake of expedience, as my husband and my lover. How could I ask Conrad not to lie to me if I demonstrated each time I slipped away to see him how well I could lie myself, as well as the strength of the hold my husband still had upon me?
    I got to my feet and brushed myself off. I said something to Fred I will always recall with profound satisfaction: “I’ve had a hundred nights like the one you’ve had. And you’ve had only one.”
    He was silent for a moment as the truth of this observation struck home. I think he knew as well as I did that a hundred was a very low estimate. I wondered how many nights there’d really been, and