Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson

was losing valuable seconds. The phone rang insistently in my mind. Felicia gave Matthew a kiss and a fistful of nuts and we descended into the dark and empty street and I hailed a cab. We were home by eleven-fifteen. And then I sat up for the next two hours and waited.
    I used to do that very often, Conrad—rush away from somewhere because I thought you might be going to call me. Who knows what I missed on those truncated evenings of my life? Once I was at a delightful party engaged in an intense and promising conversation with an immensely attractive man I’d just met. I walked away from him in the middle of a sentence—and you didn’t call that night, after all. You were never tied to me like that— wired would be more accurate—wired to me with invisible telephone wire. I thought I could actually feel the calls trying to come through sometimes, getting short-circuited—although the line was always open.
    Felicia once told me she’d had a special phone installed with a number known only to her lover, so that he could always reach her, even at the very moment she was talking to someone else on the other phone. Although it would have embarrassed me to have gone that far for anyone, I admired her ingenuity. It was only a small additional charge on her bill and for her it was a solution. I understood her anxiety perfectly. He used it three or four times, I think, and then they broke up. Maybe it was too much for him—the significance of such unabashed availability. Never personally having been on the other end of it, I cannot imagine what it would be like.
    Conrad was not even in town that Thanksgiving or for the rest of that weekend, as it turned out. He was in Philadelphia with Roberta and her family.
    It was Deborah who told me. Perceiving me clearly on this occasion as the underdog, the victim, she broke silence at last and phoned to tell me of running into Roberta at the exercise class earlier that week. She described to me Roberta’s joy and self-congratulatory sense of accomplishment—Conrad had been so difficult recently, so moody and unpredictable, but now it seemed, under the ascendancy of her influence, he was straightening out.

S HE HAS TAKEN to her bed, hiding out there under the covers, burning up one minute, cold the next—pretending for Matthew’s benefit that she is ill with something real. But the pain is real enough, although the illness is not. She gives him extensive direction on how to make himself a peanut butter sandwich and sinks back against the pillows exhausted, knowing she should be marketing, taking out the laundry. But her whole head is burning, her cheeks are aflame; the fire rises up all the way to her scalp, travels along her hair, singeing it at the edges. She is a person who has been lied to, casually humored then betrayed.
    â€œI have a headache too, Mom.” Matthew’s small body plumps down next to her on the bed companionably.
    â€œNo you haven’t, Matthew.”
    â€œYes I do. I need a baby aspirin.”
    â€œYou’re acting like a baby.”
    He thinks it over. “Maybe,” he says.
    She hears a shrill, unpleasant voice obviously belonging to someone at the end of her tether cry out, “For god’s sake! Will you leave me alone!” He lies there quite still, unnaturally solemn. Stricken by guilt, she explains that this desire characteristic of grownups is often hard for children to understand. She asks him if he would please just take her word for it.
    Recovering immediately, he argues that this is not necessarily true of children because he, Matthew, understands everything she tells him.
    â€œIn that case, would you please go and play in your room for a while.”
    He goes away for fifteen minutes, during which she cries and wonders whether in addition to everything else she is turning into a rotten mother—hating Conrad for that, too. Hating him. Yes, that is certainly the emotion she