Heartburn Read online

  I realize now that I should have thrown the pie (or at least done the thinking that led to the throwing of the pie) several weeks earlier than I did, but it’s very hard to throw a pie at someone when you’re pregnant, because you feel so vulnerable. Also, let’s face it, I wasn’t ready to throw the pie. I should add that the pie was hardly the first thing I’d thought of throwing at Mark, but every other time I’d wanted to throw something at him, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, for example, right after I found out about him and Thelma, I’d been seized by a violent impulse, but the only thing I could see to throw at the time was a signed Thonet chair, and I am far too bourgeois to throw a signed Thonet anything at anyone. Some time later, especially while I was in the hospital, I gave considerable thought to smashing Mark’s head in with a very good frying pan I had bought at the Bridge kitchenware company, but I always knew I would never do anything of the sort, and in any case, smashing your husband’s head in with a frying pan seems slightly too fraught with feminist content, if you know what I mean.

  (Even now, I wonder if I would have thrown the pie had we been eating in Betty’s dining room. Probably not. On the floor in Betty’s dining room is a beautiful Oriental rug, and I would have been far too concerned about staining it. Fortunately, though, we were eating in the kitchen, and the kitchen has a linoleum floor. That’s how bourgeois I am: at the split second I picked up the pie to throw it at Mark, at the split second I was about to do the bravest—albeit the most derivative—thing I had ever done in my life, I thought to myself: Thank God the floor is linoleum and can be wiped up.)

  On Saturday afternoon, after Betty called, I went out for a walk to buy the pie ingredients. I took Sam with me. We had a long talk about how Nathaniel would be coming home from the hospital on Monday, and how much Sam was going to love him, and how he was going to feed him some delicious spiders. We bought the food at Neam’s. It was a beautiful day, so we decided to walk down to the toy store on M Street. On the way we passed the jewelry store where Mark had bought me the diamond ring, and I remembered that I hadn’t yet taken it in to have it fixed. It was in a little envelope in my purse.

  I could see Leo Rothman, the owner, sitting on a stool behind the counter—Leo, the dear, white-haired man who had marched with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the thirties and been thrown out of the Labor Department in the forties and was now a millionaire jeweler who buzzed only white people through his electronically operated door. He buzzed me in and gave me a big kiss. When Mark was courting me, when he was pursuing me with flowers and balloons and jewels, Leo was the man Mark bought the jewels from, and as a result Leo felt almost proprietary about our marriage: he had outfitted the courtship, the wedding, the birth of the first child, the first child’s silver spoon; and he didn’t seem to mind that except for the diamond ring, none of Mark’s purchases had amounted to more than a few hundred dollars.

  I told Leo about the robbery, and he said it would take just a minute to reset the stone. Sam and I waited while he got out his instruments and went to work. We were making conversation. Chitchat. Nothing much. He said did I know the diamond in the ring was a perfect stone. I said Mark had told me that. He said it wasn’t the kind of diamond I’d ever have trouble selling if I ever wanted to—he had told Mark he’d be glad to buy it back for what Mark had paid for it. I said I was glad to hear that. He asked me how I liked the necklace. The necklace, I said. Leo looked up, and the loup dropped from his eye. “I must be thinking of another customer,” he said.

  “No you’re not,” I said. “I knew Mark had bought something while I was in the hospital.” So he had bought her a necklace for her birthday. I was lying in the hospital with a tube up my nose and he had bought her a necklace. “That rascal,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Leo said.

  “I’m glad you did,” I said. “Now I know what to be prepared for. There’s nothing worse than opening a box with a necklace in it when you’re not in the mood for a necklace.” I kept talking, I couldn’t stop. “Once,” I said, “I was in the mood for a nightgown, and Mark kept dropping hints about what he’d gotten me for my birthday, and finally I said, ‘I don’t care what it is as long as it’s not a suitcase,’ and it was a suitcase. Was my face red.” Leo was focused on the ring again; I’d bored him so thoroughly he barely grunted a response. He finished resetting the stone and handed the ring back to me. It was such a beautiful ring. The diamond caught the afternoon sun and made a rainbow on the wall of the store. Sam ran to the reflection, and I waved the ring this way and that, moving the rainbow while he giggled and leapt and tried to catch it in his hands.

  “How much?” I said.

  “No charge,” Leo said.

  “How much for the ring?” I said. “How much would you give me for the ring?”

  Leo looked at me.

  “You don’t really want to sell it,” he said.

  “I really want to sell it,” I said. “Do you really want to buy it?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I love the ring, Leo,” I said, “but it really doesn’t go with my life. It would never have been stolen in the first place if I hadn’t been wearing it on the subway, and if you’ve got a ring you can’t wear on the subway, what’s the point of having it? It’s sort of like a mink coat. If I had a mink coat, I’d have to take cabs every time I was in New York, and the next thing you know we’d be even broker than we are now. Mark’s so romantic, he probably spent every penny of his savings on the necklace.”

  Leo nodded. “For the down payment,” he said.

  “For the down payment,” I said.

  “It’s a beautiful necklace,” said Leo.

  “Now I’ll have a necklace I won’t be able to wear on the subway either,” I said. “How much for the ring?”

  “Fifteen thousand,” Leo said.

  “Fifteen thousand,” I said.

  “That’s what Mark paid for it,” Leo said.

  Right after my mother left my father and ran off to New Mexico with Mel, my father gave me some money. It was quite unexpected. I had gone over to visit him—I was married to Charlie at the time—and in the middle of a long and rather sentimental conversation about how termites had once eaten the entire garage door of our house in Beverly Hills one Sunday when we weren’t looking, my father whipped out his checkbook and wrote me a check for three thousand dollars. “But why?” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice I had snatched it from his hands and stuffed it into my back pocket. “Because you’re a good girl,” said my father. I put my hand over the pocket, as if the check were going to fly right out and back into the checkbook and erase itself. I could feel the paper through the cloth; I kept running my finger over the outside of the pocket and feeling the check crinkle inside. My heart started to pound: I realized I had just been given the means to walk out of my marriage.

  “Fifteen thousand it is,” I said to Leo. Ten years had passed; the cost of walking out of a marriage had gone up.

  I went home with Leo’s check and made the pie. I was in a trance. Well, perhaps it wasn’t a trance, but it was as close to a trance as I’ll ever get: I was speechless. I said nothing—nothing at all—for several hours. At eight, Mark and I took the pie to Betty’s. It was just us—me, Mark, Betty and Dmitri, whom Betty lives with. Dmitri used to be the Yugoslavian ambassador to the United States. When his tour ended, he went back to Belgrade and opened a chain of laundromats. Then he moved back to Washington and went into high-priced sherbet. Mark always used to throw Dmitri in my face as an example of someone who managed to be interested in food and politics simultaneously, but the truth is that what Dmitri was really interested in was money; to the extent that he was at all political, it lay in his understanding that in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries. Dmitri is the most good-natured man I have ever known, which infuriates Betty, which makes Dmitri laugh, which makes Betty laugh. They seem very happy
together. Not that you can tell. Look at all the people who thought Mark and I were happy. Me included.

  When we got to Betty’s, Mark and Dmitri went into the kitchen to boil the lobsters, and Betty and I sat in the living room while Betty talked about the dance she and Thelma and I were apparently giving. Apparently we were giving it at the Sulgrave Club. Apparently the crepe man had already been booked. Apparently all that was lacking was my guest list: Thelma and Betty had already drawn up theirs. Apparently the Kissingers were on Thelma’s list, just as I’d predicted. I sat and listened and drank an entire bottle of white wine as Betty went on and on, and by the time I got to dinner, I was tipsy. We ate the lobsters. I don’t remember the conversation. I do remember realizing that no one seemed to be noticing that I hadn’t said anything the entire evening, and that no one seemed to mind. I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I’m dead.

  After the lobsters, I took the Key lime pie out of the freezer and put the whipped cream on it and sat it in front of me. I was going to give it five minutes to thaw slightly (see recipe). And that’s when Betty turned to me and said, “Rachel, you didn’t tell me about Richard and Helen!”

  “What about Richard and Helen?” said Mark.

  “They’re getting a divorce,” said Betty. “I bumped into him this week in New York.”

  “I always hated that woman,” said Mark.

  “I sort of liked her,” said Dmitri.

  “When did you meet her?” said Betty.

  “Here,” said Dmitri. “Rachel and Mark brought them over one night. No one else would talk to her, so I did. She wasn’t so bad.”

  “You’re the only person on this earth who’s ever found anything even halfway nice to say about her,” said Betty.

  “I did think she was a dyke,” said Dmitri.

  “That makes me so furious!” Betty screamed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did tell you,” said Dmitri, “and you said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ”

  “Goddammit,” said Betty.

  “Why are you angry at Dmitri?” said Mark.

  “Because she is a dyke,” said Betty.

  “No shit,” said Mark.

  “And if Dmitri wasn’t so good-natured about everything, he would have put it more forcefully, and I might have believed him, and then none of this would have come as a surprise to me.” She glared at Dmitri. “I hate surprises,” she said.

  Dmitri stood up to go make the coffee and on his way he kissed Betty on the neck. “Don’t try to make up to me,” said Betty. She was smiling.

  “Helen’s a dyke?” said Mark.

  “She left Richard for her secretary,” said Betty.

  “Did you know this, Rachel?” said Mark.

  I nodded.

  “I couldn’t get over it,” said Betty. “I kept thinking about it on the shuttle on the way home. How could you know someone for that long … how long have they been together?”

  “As long as Rachel and I have,” said Mark.

  “Exactly,” said Betty. “How could you be with someone that long, be married to them, and not know?”

  “He has to have known,” said Dmitri. “I knew.”

  “He says he didn’t know,” said Betty. “But how could he not? How could you be married to someone and not know something like that?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t true when he first met her,” said Dmitri.

  “Of course it was true,” said Betty. “You don’t just become a dyke, bang, like that.”

  “Sure you do,” said Dmitri. “It’s like being allergic to strawberries. You eat strawberries all your life and then one day, bang, you get hives.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Betty.

  “The last time you said ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ to me, I was trying to tell you that Richard’s wife was a dyke,” said Dmitri.

  “And now you’re trying to tell me she was merely an incipient dyke,” said Betty. “Which is it?”

  “I have no idea,” said Dmitri. “I’m just trying to drive you crazy.” He kissed her again.

  “I don’t believe people change that much,” said Betty. “And don’t tell me they do, Rachel. Don’t give me that New York psychological bullshit about how people are capable of it. They aren’t. Which brings me back to my question: how is it possible to be married to someone and not know something so fundamental?”

  I was starting to get dizzy.

  Perhaps I ought to say something, I thought. Either that or I’m going to fall into the pie. Perhaps I ought to say that it is possible. I could hear Mark changing the subject. He was saying something about Zbigniew Brzezinski. Perhaps I ought to say that you can love someone—or want to love someone—so much that you don’t see anything at all. You decide to love him, you decide to trust him, you’re in the marriage, in the day-to-dayness of the marriage, and you kind of notice that things aren’t what they were, but it’s a distant bell, it’s through a filter. And then when something does turn out to be wrong, it isn’t that you knew all along, it’s that you were somewhere else.

  “He must have been living in a dream,” said Betty. She stood up to get the coffee cups. Mark and Dmitri were discussing détente.

  In a dream. I suppose so. And then the dream breaks into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

  I looked across the table at Mark. I still love you, I thought. I still look at that dopey face of yours, with that silly striped beard, and think you are the handsomest man I’ve ever known. I still find you interesting, even if right now you are being more boring than the Martin Agronsky show. But someday I won’t anymore. And in the meantime, I’m getting out. I am no beauty, and I’m getting on in years, and I have just about enough money to last me sixty days, and I am terrified of being alone, and I can’t bear the idea of divorce, but I would rather die than sit here and pretend it’s okay, I would rather die than sit here figuring out how to get you to love me again, I would rather die than spend five more minutes going through your drawers and wondering where you are and anticipating the next betrayal and worrying about whether my poor, beat-up, middle-aged body with its Caesarean scars will ever turn you on again. I can’t stand feeling sorry for myself. I can’t stand feeling like a victim. I can’t stand hoping against hope. I can’t stand sitting here with all this rage turning to hurt and then to tears. I CAN’T STAND NOT TALKING!

  I looked at the pie sitting right there in front of me and suddenly it began to throb. They were talking about the State Department now. If I throw this pie at him, I thought to myself, he will never love me. And then it hit me: he doesn’t love me. It hit me with a shimmering clarity: that was all there was to it. It didn’t matter if he was crazy. It didn’t matter if I was innocent or guilty. Nothing mattered except that he didn’t love me. If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn’t love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to. I picked up the pie, thanked God for the linoleum floor, and threw it. It landed mostly on the right side of Mark’s face, but that was good enough. The cream and the lime filling clung to his beard and his nose and his eyelashes, and pieces of crust dropped onto his blazer. I started to laugh. Mark started to laugh, too; I must say he handled it very well. He laughed as if all this were part of a running joke we’d forgotten to let Betty and Dmitri in on. He wiped himself off. He said, “I think it’s time for us to go home.” He stood up. So did I. I turned to Betty, who was staring wide-eyed at the two of us. “By the way,” I said, “I’m not coming to the dance.” And we went home.

  Of course I’m writing this later, much much later, and it worries me that I’ve done what I usually do—hidden the anger, covered the pain, pretended it wasn’t there for the sake of the story. “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” Vera once asked me. I remember when she asked me, in fact. It was right after my marriage to Charlie b
roke up, and I was living in an apartment where everything made into something else—the couch made into a bed, the coffee table made into a dining table, the end table made into a stool. “How are you?” people would ask me, in that intimate way people asked the question in those days. How are you. I couldn’t bear it. So I told them about my apartment where everything made into something else. Then a friend called and said, “I have one piece of advice for you. I give it to all my friends whose marriages break up: Don’t buy anything at Azuma.” I added that to my repertoire.

  Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”

  So I told her why:

  Because if I tell the story, I control the version.

  Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.

  Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.

  Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

  My last day in Washington I read the Sunday papers. I made French toast for Sam. I went to the hospital to see Nathaniel. I asked the pediatrician if Nathaniel could go to New York when he got out of the hospital the next day. The pediatrician said he could if he took the train. I called Nathaniel’s baby nurse and told her we would be going to New York on the train the next day. I called Richard in New York and told him we would be moving in for a few weeks, until I found an apartment. I came home and started dinner. I made a bouillabaisse, and crème brulée, and in between there was a salad. I taught Mark to make the vinaigrette. Mix 2 tablespoons Grey Poupon mustard with 2 tablespoons good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly with a fork, slowly add 6 tablespoons olive oil, until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy; this makes a very strong vinaigrette that’s perfect for salad greens like arugola and watercress and endive.