Bad Connections Read Online Free

said.
    He winced.
    â€œI know you’re angry, Molly. But if you could just see this woman, you’d understand.”
    â€œHow do you know?” I said.
    â€œBecause you’re not an unkind person.”
    I laughed painfully. “Maybe I’m not as kind as you think. Maybe I’m selfish, Conrad, about some things.”
    â€œMolly, I feel terribly responsible for Bobbie. I can’t help it. She could be so easily destroyed just when things are beginning to open up for her. I can’t just walk in on her and say, ‘Listen, Bobbie, I’ve met someone else.’”
    Oh yes you can, Conrad, I thought. You can go there tomorrow and say it.
    He was going on now about her problems—some of which he hinted were sexual in nature, although he was unspecific about what they were. She had a tendency to panic, to become hysterical, enraged at the slightest provocations. He spoke of his suffering, the constant pressure he felt. It was hard to see why he stayed with her if she was as dreadful as he said.
    â€œYou haven’t told her about us, I suppose.”
    â€œNo,” he said. “Of course I haven’t. I think she senses something though.”
    â€œSenses something?”
    â€œSometimes she tells me that I seem different to her. I try very hard not to be.”
    â€œIs Bobbie a nickname or something?”
    â€œYes, it’s short for Roberta.”
    â€œRoberta what?” I asked.
    â€œRoberta Holloman. But why would you want to know that?”
    â€œBecause I’m going to be thinking about her a lot and I guess I want to know her name.”
    His face reddened in fury. “You’re making it hard, Molly, harder than it needs to be.” The words came out of him in a clenched kind of way. “Why would you want to think about her? What goes on between you and me has nothing to do with Roberta.”
    â€œYou should have told me about her right at the beginning, Conrad, not kept it a secret! It isn’t fair, Conrad. It isn’t fair at all!”
    â€œWould it have made a difference? Would you have decided to stay away from me?”
    I looked at him. His blue eyes burned into mine. I could feel the heat between us that all this combat had brought on, a live kind of heat that invaded my flesh, vibrated against my skin.
    â€œNo, Conrad. It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
    He pulled me to him then, crushing me against him. “Oh, Molly,” he said.

W HO ISN’T HUMAN?
    Perhaps I should have walked out on Conrad, abandoned him to Roberta. The fact is that now I wanted him more than ever.
    To many women—and I ruefully number myself among them—there is nothing more attractive than a strong man with weaknesses. There is something infinitely compelling in that contradiction. We see the man as an uncompleted work. It is we who will supply the finishing touches. Our belief in our wisdom and forebearance, our female hubris, are all too frequently either fatal or ridiculous—depending on one’s angle of vision.
    Feminists have only brought into the open a view of men that women have shared secretly all along. The truth is that we expect them to be frail creatures, rather than the reverse. And we excuse behavior in our men we would never permit ourselves or pardon in others of our kind. That is our peculiar double standard. We think of this as love.
    Can you imagine the richness of conversation in a harem? Allowing for a certain amount of competition and jealousy among the concubines, imagine the delicious opportunities to pool certain observations about the pasha, to compare his performance with one to his performance with all the others—and perhaps see that they are the same. Surely in the process there would develop a highly sophisticated form of gallows humor. All this—and communal childcare as well!
    But all these observations of course are hindsight. Returning to the scene in the Saab, where one