Heartburn Page 14

  I put the papers back into the files and shut the drawer. Then I sat there, looking out the window. There was a newspaper open on the desk. I glanced down at it and realized that I hadn’t seen that day’s Post. I stared—it wasn’t that day’s Post. It was the Sunday real estate section. I felt a knot in my stomach, and lost my breath for a moment. I opened it to Houses—D.C. Mark had been through the section carefully. He had marked all the houses with four bedrooms or more in decent northwest Washington locations. I closed my eyes to stop the dizziness. So they were looking at houses. Well, why was I surprised? They were looking at blazers and couches; could houses be far behind? There were little scribbled notes next to a few of the listings. Addresses. Information about maids’ rooms. One of the houses appeared to have a pool.

  I went back to the kitchen and sat with Sam while he had lunch. I sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” fourteen times. Sam went up for his nap, and I borrowed Juanita’s car. I drove to Cleveland Park, where the Rices lived. I drove past their house. The shades were drawn in front; it looked as if no one was home. I was about half a block past the house, thinking about tootling over to the Marriott Hotel in Alexandria and bursting in on them with a can of Raid, when I saw our car. I stopped short and backed up. Our car, definitely. I parked and got out and stood on the curb, staring into it. There was Sam’s baby seat, strapped into the back. Sam’s baby seat was always strapped into the back of the car, but somehow, at this moment, it seemed the ultimate obscenity—Mark’s involving even the baby seat in his affair.

  I walked up to the house and looked for signs of life. The Rices lived in a large wood house bordered by rhododendron and azalea bushes. I stepped onto the lawn and tried to see through a crack below a drawn window shade, but the bushes were in the way. I was trying to move quietly, but there were crunching leaves and twigs everywhere I stepped. Suddenly I tripped and fell. I realized I’d twisted my ankle, and for a moment I thought I’d strained my stomach muscles, but the pain went away. I looked to see what I’d tripped on and saw that it was a wire that surrounded the house. I began to follow it to see where it led, turned the corner, and gasped. There was a body lying face down on the ground under a rhododendron bush. Jonathan Rice. Maybe he’s dead, I thought. It crossed my mind as his leg twitched that I had had that thought twice in less than two hours about two completely different men, and I couldn’t decide which of them I was more disappointed to find out I was wrong about.

  Jonathan was lying there wearing a set of earphones. He turned and looked at me. He barely blinked. He took off the earphones and sat up.

  “You really shouldn’t have said that thing about the herpes, you know,” he said. “Thelma was very fond of you.”

  “But now she’s not,” I said.

  “Now she’s not,” said Jonathan. “Now she’s very angry. And they’re looking at houses. And they found something they like on Twenty-first Street, but Thelma thinks they need five bedrooms and Mark thinks they can make do with four.”

  I wondered who was handling the Middle East while Jonathan was out spying in the bushes, but he had put on the earphones again, and now he was shaking his head. “They’re talking about buying it right away and getting it all ready, and a few months after you have the baby Mark and Thelma will move in. He thinks he can get joint custody.”

  I was having trouble breathing again, and I put my hand on my stomach.

  “What’s the matter?” said Jonathan.

  “I tripped on your wire,” I said, “and I think I strained my stomach muscles.”

  A few minutes later, as Jonathan was giving me the next bulletin—something about how Mark and Thelma were going to finance the purchase with a bank loan, which Jonathan took as an occasion to lecture me on rising interest rates—I had another pain.

  “Jonathan,” I said.

  Jonathan put his fingers to his lips, as if something really cosmic were going on in the house.

  I pulled the earphones from his head.

  “Jonathan,” I said. “I’m in labor.”

  I don’t remember very much. I remember that Jonathan sprang to his feet and bounded into the house. I remember that Mark came out a few minutes later. I remember the drive to the hospital: I accused Mark of looking at houses; he accused me of snooping in places I didn’t belong. I remember the labor room, and my obstetrician suddenly appearing, Marvin, my obstetrician, taking charge, being a professor, explaining my labor to a group of interns: the baby is in the transverse position and we can’t risk waiting for it to turn itself, given the prematurity; another Caesarean is indicated. Are there any questions? One of the interns raised his hand. “I really enjoy your column,” he said to Mark. The interns left. “Your husband can watch,” Marvin said to me. “It really isn’t allowed with Caesareans, but we’ll sneak him into the delivery room.” He was so pleased with himself, Marvin was, so pleased that he would be able to give this lovely couple he was on a first-name basis with the opportunity to share in the birth of their second child. Wrong couple, I wanted to say; that was last year’s couple. This year things are different. This year my husband is a stranger. Do not let this stranger see me eviscerated.

  The anesthetist put the needle into my back and I waited for the epidural to grab hold. Mark was standing next to me. One contraction. Two contractions. Three. Then the dullness, the easing off, the mermaid sensation. I watched the fetal monitor bleeping steadily as they wheeled me into the delivery room.

  “Tell me about when Sam was born,” I said to Mark.

  He looked at me.

  “Start where the doctor says there’s something wrong,” I said.

  Mark nodded. “The doctor took me outside the labor room and said there was something wrong, they were losing the heartbeat. And we went back in and he told you the baby was in distress. And you said, ‘Is our baby going to die?’ ”

  I had heard this dozens of times.

  Mark went on: “And he said, ‘We’re going to do an emergency Caesarean.’ And they took you away. You were really brave. I was terrified. And I sat out in the waiting room, and the man sitting across from me was eating a sausage pizza. And fifteen minutes later the doctor came out, and took me into the delivery room, and there was Sam, making these funny little noises. They put him into my arms, and you woke up and you said, ‘Is that our baby?’ And I laid him down on you. And I lay down next to you.”

  I was crying.

  “That was a great day,” I said.

  “Can you feel this?” said the doctor. The knife.

  “Yes,” I said. “A little.”

  I turned my head away from Mark. A nurse wiped my face and said, hold on, it’s going to be all right. The pediatrician, our pediatrician, came into the delivery room. “If I am going to be your pediatrician,” he had said when Sam was born, “we are going to have to understand something. You are never to call me and say, ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’ You are never to call me and say, ‘This is probably nothing.’ If you think it’s worth a phone call, I want to hear about it. Got it?” Mark and I had sat there with our floppy little bundle. We were so proud—so proud of ourselves, of our baby, even of our pediatrician’s patter. We marched into parenthood so full of hubris. We were on our second marriages; we had got the kinks out of the machinery; we would bring up our children in a poppy field of love and financial solvency and adequate household help. There would be guns for our daughters and dolls for our sons.

  After Sam was born, I remember thinking that no one had ever told me how much I would love my child; now, of course, I realized something else no one tells you: that a child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different. All those idiotically lyrical articles about sharing child-rearing duties never mention that, nor do they allude to something else that happens when a baby is born, which is that all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field. T
he baby wakes up in the middle of the night, and instead of jumping out of bed, you lie there thinking: Whose turn is it? If it’s your turn, you have to get up; if it’s his turn, then why is he still lying there asleep while you’re awake wondering whose turn it is? Now it takes two parents to feed the child—one to do it and one to keep the one who does it company. Now it takes two parents to take the child to the doctor—one to do it and one to keep the one who does it from becoming resentful about having to do it. Now it takes two parents to fight over who gets to be the first person to introduce solids or the last person to notice the diaper has to be changed or the one who cares most about limiting sugar snacks or the one who cares least about conventional discipline.

  No one ever tells you these things—not that we would have listened had anyone tried. We were so smart. We were so old. We were so happy. We had it knocked.

  “Can you feel this?” the doctor said.

  “No.”

  He was cutting now. Far, far away. A minute passed. Then two. Let the baby be okay, please let him be okay. I opened my eyes and saw a nurse crossing the room to the pediatrician. In her arms I could see the baby’s wet head and spiky black hair. I could see an arm, such a skinny arm. Long skinny legs. Move. Please move. A flutter kick. A noise like a tiny cough. A tiny cry.

  Nathaniel.

  I closed my eyes.

  He was fine, I could hear them saying that.

  He’s fine. He’s going to be fine.

  So. Nathaniel was early. I could hardly blame him. Something was dying inside me, and he had to get out.

  twelve

  It was a complicated Caesarean, and there were complications. Nathaniel was on the eighth floor of the hospital, with tubes and monitors stuck all over his little froggy body, and I was on the fifth, with tubes and monitors all over mine. I lay in bed in a Percodan haze; I spent hours turning my marriage over in my mind. What had happened? What had gone wrong? He was crazy. I kept coming back to that. It was a simple enough answer, but accepting that answer meant accepting that I would never really know what had happened, accepting the mystery. I hate mystery, and I’m not the only one who does. Nature abhors a mystery too.

  Vera flew to Washington. She spent a day with me in the hospital. She rubbed my head and listened while I floated trial balloons at her. I told her I thought I had spent too much time cooking and not enough time paying attention. I told her I thought that having a baby had changed our lives together. I told her I had been impatient and mean and snappish and irritable, and that it was no wonder Mark was drawn to someone who hadn’t heard all his stories before and didn’t shoot him a reproving look every time he uttered an opinion he had stolen from his best friend.

  “All this may be true,” Vera said, “but it isn’t the point. The point is to figure out what you want.”

  “Maybe we just ran out of things to renovate,” I said. “Maybe that was the problem. Maybe if we’d just gone on buying houses and fighting with contractors and arguing over whether to bleach the floor or stain it dark, we would have lived happily ever after.”

  “Did you hear me?” Vera said.

  “I actually believed it was possible to have a good marriage,” I said.

  “It is possible,” said Vera.

  “No it’s not,” I said. “And don’t tell me about your marriage, I don’t want to hear about it. You got the last good one. For the rest of us, it’s hopeless. I know that, but I never really get it. I go right on. I think to myself: I was wrong about the last one, but I’ll try harder to be right about the next one.”

  “That’s not the worst lesson to take through life,” said Vera.

  “But it doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s kreplach. Remember?”

  Vera looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. She does this sometimes, especially when I’m being hateful and difficult; she responds by having all the feelings I’m refusing to have. Now she reached over and took my hand, and we both began to cry.

  Mark came to the hospital every day. Every day except for Thelma’s birthday. On Thelma’s birthday, he called to say he had to go to New York for an interview. I know it was Thelma’s birthday because Betty called the next day to tell me all about it. It seems that Jonathan Rice had planned a surprise birthday lunch for Thelma, and everyone gathered in the restaurant, ready to pop out from under the table when she arrived, but she never turned up.

  “Can you imagine?” said Betty.

  “I’m afraid I can,” I said.

  “I wish I could figure out who she’s sleeping with,” Betty said.

  “It’s probably Mark,” I said.

  Betty laughed. “Rachel, wait till I tell that to Mark,” she said. “It’ll kill him.”

  “I’ll tell him myself,” I said. “He just turned up.”

  “What was that about?” Mark said.

  Stifle yourself, Rachel.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just the Ladies’ Central.”

  I got out of bed and into a wheelchair. Mark wheeled me and my intravenous equipment to the elevator and we went up to see the baby. We were lucky. I kept telling myself that. Nathaniel was on a floor with newborns who had real problems—there were blue babies, babies missing kidneys, babies with holes in their hearts—and there was nothing wrong with him except that he was small. He wasn’t even the smallest. Still, he was ours, and he looked like a sack of bones. They’d shaved his head for the monitors, and there were tiny Band-Aids all over his body, taping the tubes here and there. We couldn’t hold him. All we could do was reach in through the holes with our hexachlorophene-scrubbed hands and feed him, awkwardly propping up his floppy body by the neck. He had weighed four pounds when he was born. He was feeding well, catching up, but he was such a tiny thing. I waved a little red clown we’d put into the Isolette in front of his face. Maybe he saw it. Mark sang him a song. Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep-y, little baby. I wondered where they had gone to celebrate her birthday. When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses. I wondered what he had given her for her birthday. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses. I wish I’d known it was Thelma’s birthday; I would have sent her a present myself. Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep-y, little baby. A garrote.

  Arthur and Julie came to see me. One day while I was in the hospital, they discovered that their decorator had taken the four thousand dollars they had given him for furniture and spent it all on cocaine. The next day, their daughter was suspended from school for flushing six gerbils down the lavatory toilet. The next day, a bat moved into their kitchen. They brought me all of it, every day, and Julie rustled up a hairdresser to come wash my hair, and Arthur made rice pudding the day they took the tube out of my nose and I could eat bland food. Rice pudding is the only thing Arthur cooks, but he cooks it perfectly, with exactly the right proportion of rice to raisins. There’s an awful lot of nursery food in this book already, so I won’t give you the recipe. My feeling about rice pudding is that if you like it, you already have a good recipe; and if you don’t, there’s no way anyone will ever get you to eat it, unless you fall in love with someone who likes rice pudding, which I once did, and then you learn to love it, too.

  My last day in the hospital, Marvin, my obstetrician, took out the stitches. Then he swiped an apple from a big basket of fruit Betty’s boyfriend had sent me, and he sat down in a leatherette chair. I suspected he was going to ask if I was having a postpartum depression, but the last thing I wanted was for my obstetrician to know that in my case a postpartum depression would be superfluous. I am very fond of Marvin, even though he once asked me to endorse his book on premenstrual tension, but I wasn’t up for a heart-to-heart talk with him.

  “Do you believe in love?” said my obstetrician.

  This is what I get for calling him by his first name, I thought. This is the price I pay for insisting that if he’s going to call me by my first name I get to call him by his. Do I ask him if he gets turned on sticking his hands into ladies’ pussi
es? Do I ask him if he gets off feeling their breasts for lumps?

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you believe in love?” he said.

  Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  I went home.

  Nathaniel stayed in the hospital.

  Both of us got stronger.

  I behaved myself.

  I said very little.

  I attempted to follow the budget debate.

  I went to a dinner party and held up my end.

  They took Nathaniel out of the Isolette and I could hold him and feed him.

  I read Sam a lot of stories about baby brothers.

  I did not say, how are you, how are we, do you still love her, do you love me at all, are you still thinking of buying a house with her, what did you get her for her birthday, is it over with her, is it ever going to be over.

  Two weeks passed.

  Betty called. She asked if we wanted to come to dinner. “We have lobsters,” she said. “You bring dessert. Bring one of your Key lime pies.”

  thirteen

  If I had it to do over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma. But Betty said bring a Key lime pie, so I did. The Key lime pie is very simple to make. First you line a 9-inch pie plate with a graham cracker crust. Then beat 6 egg yolks. Add I cup lime juice (even bottled lime juice will do), two 14-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk, and I tablespoon grated lime rind. Pour into the pie shell and freeze. Remove from freezer and spread with whipped cream. Let sit five minutes before serving.