Read Online Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

satisfied if nothing more. I didn’t think to mention it to Conrad, since I was entitled to my own secrets. Not that I was hiding it, particularly. It just seemed to have very little to do with him—although I have little doubt in retrospect that it would not have occurred at all if our own relationship had been less tenuous.
    It was an act, however, that had far-reaching repercussions. It was, in a sense, the accident I had been waiting for.

A BOUT TEN DAYS after my birthday, I woke up in the morning with severe pains in the lower part of my abdomen. I thought I had a virus—my diagnosis for all unspecific ailments. I would have stayed in bed if it had been a weekend, but it was a Monday and the proofs for the November issue of New Thought were coming in. I sent Matthew to school, took three aspirins and went to the office. I was sitting at my desk nearly doubled over with pain when the phone rang. It was Fred, yelling at me incoherently—something about “you and your goddamn fucking boyfriend.”
    â€œFred, would you mind calming down and speaking a little more distinctly. I’m not feeling very well today.”
    I couldn’t imagine why he was having an attack of jealousy at this late date, especially since we had not been in communication since the night he slept over. It was all much more than I was willing to deal with. My head throbbed and so did my belly. I felt close to tears.
    â€œYou got it from that rotten motherfucker and gave it to me!
    â€œGave what, Fred?”
    â€œThe clap! Don’t you even know what you’re walking around with?”
    â€œI’m not walking around with any such thing.”
    â€œI always thought you were a decent woman, Molly. We had our troubles, but I respected you. And now you’re just going down the drain—going down the drain in every conceivable way. I’ll never touch you again, you can be sure of that. We’re finished, Molly. Finished.”
    I hung up. I sat at my desk a few moments, then got to my feet and painfully made my way to the cubicle of my friend Felicia, whom I consulted in all matters of catastrophe, both literary and personal. She was a diminutive, high-strung woman who had been book review editor of New Thought for fifteen years. During that time she had had three marriages, as well as numerous affairs with some of the best minds of her generation. Her glamorous but unsettled life and the physiological toll it had taken of her, her consuming interest in matters of the flesh, had made her an encyclopedia of valuable information about certain medical emergencies.
    Felicia was on the phone when I approached her, the receiver cradled under chin while she made notes on the margins of a manuscript with her right hand and chainsmoked with her left. Always welcoming an opportunity for distraction, gossip or analysis of the personality traits of our colleagues, she smiled at me warmly, enthusiastically waving me to a chair piled high with books stuck with slips of paper. I sat down on the edge.
    As my life once again tilted crazily, there was something reassuring about sitting here surrounded by so much familiar disorder—“creative chaos,” Felicia called it. There was an odd comfort in the sight of the dusty proofs and manuscripts going back at least five years bulging precariously on the inadequate shelves, the back issues of journals piled high on the window sill next to the moribund philodendron, the emaciated avocado with its two surviving leaves. It was over this impressive accumulation that my friend reigned in perfect confidence that she alone knew where everything was.
    As the conversation went on, Felicia made shrugs of resigned impatience, conveying to me by certain eloquent gestures that the person at the other end was outrageously boring and she couldn’t wait to turn her full attention to me. “Logorrhea,” she muttered, replacing the receiver in its cradle. “How are