Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson Page A

feels and she wants only to tell him that immediately, reach him immediately with the clean, fresh hatred pure and undissipated. That is what I want to do, she thinks with one half of her, the other half in anguish thinking that she has lost him, lost him without knowing it because he didn’t even have the guts to tell her. All the time he was sitting on her couch looking at her in that concerned way, taking her in his arms, he knew damn well what he was really going to be doing this weekend—not to mention all the obvious connotations of that trip out of town with Roberta. What could that mean except what she thought it did—that formality of going to meet the parents?
    And she never even knew it, never suspected—all these weeks everything going on as usual, except for the strain between them for a while, and even that had disappeared. And that is somehow the worst of it—the knife that twists again and again—that she hadn’t known, that she has been just as unconscious as she ever thought Roberta was. They have each known different portions of the truth—and in the gap between Conrad swims back and forth with the untroubled ease of a fish, back and forth from one to the other. So that even now if by all the external evidence she thinks she has lost him, that too may be an appearance, nothing more than that, just something she was not supposed to ever find out. He will appear on Tuesday just as usual. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” he will ask.
    â€œHello. I don’t think you know me. But I know who you are.”
    I finally settled on that as my opening. If I could just say that much, get that far, I could say the rest—having rejected “We met a couple of years ago in Amagansett, but I don’t think you would remember me,” as too much like normal conversation. It was conceivable that, losing nerve, one might go on from there to a discussion of summer houses in Amagansett, mutual friends and other trivia and never get to the point. In “I know who you are” there was a certain undertone of dark suggestion, committing one irrevocably to what was to follow.
    It was not that I wanted to frighten Roberta—it was that I distrusted myself. I was afraid of leaving too much room for my cowardice or my scruples—I wasn’t sure which might serve to inhibit me. Last minute cowardice probably. There was an unspoken but very strong taboo against certain acts of communication between women—a taboo undoubtedly first invented by men, protecting their sacred prerogative to pick and choose and sample, all in the estimable cause of “finding themselves.” God forbid! What if they didn’t! And yet taboos are made to be broken. There are acts almost inconceivable in contemplation that in execution are as simple as picking up a phone and dialing the seven digits of a particular number. The phone rings. One holds on to the receiver, heart beating, and waits. “Hello. I don’t think you know me … ” Anyone could say it. Who says that a woman cannot talk to another woman?
    The more I thought about making that call during that long and bitter weekend, the more it seemed the only thing to do—if not the right thing. Seen from a distance, the act had a cold and shining hardness about it, drawing me on toward the moment of commission with the silent force of a magnet. And yet could I really do it? Could I become transformed from the depressed and essentially forgiving person I thought I was into someone quite unfamiliar—a sort of terrorist striking with a flaming Biblical sword? I think it is only fair that you should know the truth, Roberta.
    Oh, I was determined to be fair. She was not, after all, my enemy. The real enemy was Conrad’s indecision. We were both its victims—although she was a victim more privileged than I, occupying a larger and more comfortable cell. I wondered if even in Philadelphia, at her