Heartburn Page 4

  The next morning the doorbell rang. I’d been up all night waiting for Mark to turn up to say it was all a terrible mistake, he really loved me, he must have been crazy, he didn’t know what had gotten into him, and he would never see Thelma again if I would just come back to Washington immediately. I flung open the door to tell him I never wanted to see him again but I might consider coming back under certain circumstances, and who should it be but Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state and my partner in cuckoldom. I burst into tears and we fell into each other’s arms.

  “Oh, Jonathan,” I said, “isn’t it awful?”

  “It’s awful,” he said. “What’s happening to this country?” (Jonathan never takes anything personally; he always sees himself as a statistical reflection of a larger trend in society.)

  Sam toddled into the living room and began methodically removing the books from the bookshelves, and Jonathan and I sat down and started on vodka mixed with Red Cheek apple juice. It turned out that Jonathan had been up half the night discussing the situation with Thelma and Mark, and when he realized neither of them was going to do a thing about it, he’d hopped on the shuttle and come to my father’s, where Mark said I probably was.

  “I had to talk to you,” Jonathan said. “I love my wife.” I’ll skip the direct quotes, because it’s too sickening—in less than twenty-four hours I’d had to listen to two grown men talking like saps about Thelma. He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn’t give a rat’s ass about him and never had. She was a hysteric, Jonathan said, and a hopeless romantic; he’d been through this half a dozen times with her other men—the worst, he said, had been her affair with the undersecretary of the Nationalist Chinese embassy; she’d nearly had a nervous breakdown when Nixon recognized China and the Nationalists had to leave the country. “She got into bed and stayed there for weeks,” said Jonathan. “Imagine my dilemma: there I was, on the Asia desk.” He sighed. “Of course, normalization was psychologically hard on many Americans.”

  Still, Jonathan went on, he’d never seen Thelma quite so smitten with anyone as she was with Mark, and vice versa, and off went Jonathan on a long description of the presents Mark had given Thelma and the restaurants he’d taken her to and the meals they’d ordered and the business trips she’d gone along with him on and the hotels they’d stayed in and the room service (room service! he’d even had room service with her!) and the flowers that had arrived the next day. Just thinking about the flowers made me want to die, just thinking about the flowers he’d sent her while occasionally bringing me home a bunch of wilted zinnias. Mark is such a campaigner; he never just does something, he crusades for it. To realize, as I was suddenly beginning to realize, that all his energy had been going into Thelma Rice for all these months made me so sad I could hardly breathe. Jonathan went rattling on, pouring on detail after detail, to the point that I accused him of bugging his own telephone—he knew so much, he knew actual dialogue—but he claimed that Thelma simply told him everything. “We have an honest marriage,” Jonathan said, and he glared at me as if I were somehow responsible for this whole mess because my marriage was so hopelessly dishonest. For months I’d been doing nothing but boiling eggs and teaching my child to differentiate between the cat in the hat and the fox in socks, and Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state, was actually angry at me! It’s stuff like this that got us into Cambodia. Anyway, since Jonathan knew so much, I asked him if he happened to know exactly what it was that Mark and Thelma had been doing four days earlier, on the day the inscription in the children’s book was dated. I wanted to give you something to mark what happened today, which makes our future so much clearer.… And of course he knew; the man knew everything. Four days earlier, my husband, Mark Feldman, had taken his paramour, Thelma Rice, to the Bloomingdale’s furniture department, where they had looked at couches for his office. Bloomingdale’s! The ultimate perfidy!

  “But his office has a couch,” I said.

  “His new office,” Jonathan said.

  “What new office?” I said.

  “The new office he wants to rent on Connecticut Avenue,” said Jonathan. “And of course it needs a couch.” He paused for emphasis. “You can’t have a love nest without a couch.” He paused again. “A convertible couch.”

  “I know I’m slow,” I said, “but I did manage to figure the convertible part out.”

  The couch Thelma liked was green, Jonathan said, but Mark liked a brown tweed one, and they almost compromised on a pale yellow one but Thelma thought it would show the dirt, and just when I was becoming really sorry I’d asked, Jonathan came to the point—there was a point to his visit, it turned out—and said that he believed that if I came back to Mark, the two of us could wait the two of them out. He’d talked to the Guatemalan whiz-bang, he said—that’s when I found out all three of them were seeing her—and she’d assured him that Mark’s affair with Thelma would never last, because Mark had too much Jewish guilt and would never give up his children.

  “Also,” said Jonathan, “there’s a lot Mark doesn’t know about Thelma, and when he finds it out I’m sure he won’t love her anymore.”

  “There’s a lot Thelma doesn’t know about Mark, too,” I said.

  “Like what?” said Jonathan.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You know all this awful stuff about Thelma and you still love her, and I know all this awful stuff about Mark and I still love him, so what makes you think they’re going to stop loving each other when they find out what we know about them?”

  “Tell me some awful stuff about Mark,” said Jonathan.

  I couldn’t think of much. Mark has to be reminded to clean his nails, and sometimes he says he’s read a book when he’s read only the first fifty pages of it, and he doesn’t visit his Great-Aunt Minnie in the Hebrew Home as much as he should, but the truth is that the only really awful thing I knew about Mark Feldman was that he had betrayed me. That was a terrible thing, I don’t mean to downplay it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing Jonathan was looking for; Jonathan wanted to be told that Mark was a notorious plagiarist, or a shoplifter, or a scofflaw, and then he wanted to take the information home to Thelma like an old bone. Poor Jonathan. Poor pathetic doggie. The man actually believed he was going to argue her out of it. On top of everything else (not that I was going to tell him, although Thelma undoubtedly already had), Jonathan was up against a real piece of work in the sack, and it’s hard to compete with that if you’re the spouse who’s been around for years; it’s hard to compete with anyone new in the sack if you’re the spouse who’s been around for years. I really wanted to say something consoling to Jonathan, but every time the urge came over me to do so, he would drop one more piece of the betrayal into my lap: he was like a six-year-old boy who comes up to you with a shy smile, takes your hand and gently presses a snake into it. No wonder Thelma had fallen in love with Mark; if I’d spent nineteen years with Jonathan Rice, I would have run off with a delivery boy from the Fleet Messenger Service.

  “I’m not going back to Mark,” I said. “I’m not going to sit there while the two of them go on seeing each other on their convertible couch. I’m not going to wait this out.”

  “You’re my only hope,” Jonathan said.

  I started crying again, and Jonathan put his arms around me and began muttering something about how the economy was in bad shape too, and there we were, hugging each other while Jonathan went on about the gross national product, when my father walked into the living room. He’d escaped from the loony bin in a jogging outfit.

  “I’d like you to meet Jonathan Rice,” I said.

  “You’re doing this in front of the kid?” said my father.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “Mark is in love with Jonathan’s wife.”

  “Who’s Mark?” said my father.

  “My husband,” I said.

  “It’s the Thorazine talki
ng,” said my father. “They shoot you up with so much of it you can’t even remember your son-in-law’s name. Who was Charlie?”

  “My first husband,” I said.

  “He’s a fool,” said my father.

  “I thought you liked Charlie,” I said.

  “Not Charlie. Mark. Mark’s a fool.”

  “What am I going to do?” I said. I started to sob. My father gave a little nod to Jonathan Rice, a little move-over-Buster-you’re-in-the-way nod, and Jonathan untangled himself and stood up and my father sat down and tangled himself, and I shook and heaved and wheezed and snorted all over his sweatsuit. My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from an obscure Dan Dailey movie he’d played a pediatrician in, and partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

  “What am I going to do?” I said.

  “There’s nothing you can do, baby,” said my father.

  “Of course there’s something she can do,” said Jonathan. “She can come back to him. If we both stick with it, we can sit this thing out.”

  “Jonathan is the undersecretary of state in charge of Middle Eastern affairs,” I said.

  My father looked at Jonathan. “I suppose they don’t give that job to Jews,” he said.

  “That’s right,” said Jonathan.

  “You want to make a pact with someone,” said my father, “go call up the president of Egypt. Leave Rachel out of this.” Then he told Jonathan to have a nice flight back and showed him to the door. Then he telephoned Lucy Mae Hopkins, the maid, and asked her to move into the apartment for a while to help take care of Sam. Then he called the Chinese restaurant down the block and ordered shrimp fried rice, which is something I love to eat when I’m feeling blue, shrimp fried rice with Chinese mustard and ketchup. Then, after Lucy Mae and the Chinese food arrived, he announced that he was going back to the loony bin because there wasn’t room for all of us to sleep in the apartment.

  “Men,” he said as he left. “I hate them. I’ve always hated them. You wonder why I always hang around with women and never with men, it’s because men do things like this.” He waved his hand vaguely at me and my stomach, and jogged off into the night.

  Of course, I knew he wasn’t going back to the loony bin at all; he was going to see Frances. Frances is my father’s mistress. She works at a paper company, and she has remained true to my father even though he keeps marrying other women and leaving her with nothing but commissions on his stationery orders. He orders an enormous amount of stationery, partly to keep a hand in with Frances, partly to have plenty of pieces of paper on which to write to me and my sister Eleanor about his will. Two or three times a month, my father threatens to cut me out of his will, and then he changes his mind, and each of these developments requires a letter. He also writes a lot of letters to Frances, promising that he’ll end up with her eventually; I know this because once he accidentally put a letter to her into an envelope to me and vice versa. Frances got very excited when she opened the letter meant for me, because it had no salutation and she thought he was cutting her out of his will, which she hadn’t realized she’d been written into in the first place. Why she puts up with him I don’t know. Why any of us puts up with him I don’t know. The truth is that if my father weren’t my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he’s also capable of being a real peach.

  (Another thing I like to eat when I’m feeling blue is bacon hash. Cut some bacon into small pieces and start to cook it over a slow flame so that some of the fat is rendered. Then add diced cooked potatoes and cook slowly until the potatoes and bacon are completely crunchy. Eat with an egg.)

  four

  The shock of catapulting from the peanut-butter-and-jellyness of my life into High Drama was so great that the first morning I woke up, I was honestly stunned to discover it wasn’t all a bad dream. That’s a hopelessly banal metaphor, but that’s just what it felt like, one of those bad dreams in which you realize you’re having a bad dream and then you wake up in the dream to the same old bad dream—the dream equivalent of the cereal box with the baby on it eating breakfast next to the cereal box with the baby on it eating breakfast, forever and ever.

  By the second morning, I’d given up on that. I woke up and lay there, watching the baby inside me make waves on my belly, and wondered what would become of me. Mark would turn up eventually, of course—but what if he didn’t? What would I do? Where would I live? How much money would I need? Who would sleep with me? This last question interested me deeply, because I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever be my normal shape again. I will be seven months pregnant forever, I thought, as the tears started to drip slowly into my ears, and after that I will be eight months pregnant forever, and after that I will be nine months pregnant forever. The only men I’d have a shot at would have to be used to thoroughly misshapen women, and that pretty much ruled out everyone but doctors. Under other circumstances, doctors would never have crossed my mind. I went out with one when I was in college. I was suffering from a finger that got abscessed when I stuck a ballpoint pen into a hangnail. He took one look at it and said, “Abscesses. Diabetes.” This terrified me, because it’s always seemed to me that there’s a lot of diabetes among Jews, even though it’s hard to pin anyone down on the question. Once, in fact, I tried to; I met a diabetes specialist, and I said to him, “May I ask you a question?”

  He replied: “You want to ask me if Jews have more diabetes than anyone else.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Everyone asks me that,” he said. “They don’t. There’s a sect in India that has more diabetes than Jews.”

  This reminded me of those feminists who are always claiming that male domination is not the natural state because there’s one tribe in New Guinea where the men lie around weaving and the women hunt bears. Anyway, I didn’t have diabetes, I merely had an abscessed finger. I have never since been remotely interested in doctors. But who else would bother with me? There I was, seven months gone, swaybacked, awkward, bloated, logy, with a belly button that looked like a pumpkin stem and feet that felt like old cucumbers. If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you’re lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you’ve had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you’ve got them, you’ve really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce. You find yourself staring in the mirror for long stretches of time, playing with them, cupping them in your hands, pushing them this way and that, making cleavage, making cleavage vanish, standing sideways, leaning over, sticking them out as far as they’ll go, breasts, fantastic tender apricot breasts, then charming plucky firm tangerines, and then, just as you were on the verge of peaches, oranges, grapefruit, cantaloupes, God knows what other blue-ribbon county-fair specimens, your stomach starts to grow, and the other fruits are suddenly irrelevant because they’re outdistanced by an honest-to-God watermelon. You look more idiotically out of proportion than ever in your life. You feel such nostalgia for the scrawny, imperfect body you left behind; and the commonsense knowledge that you will eventually end up shaped approximately the way you began is all but obliterated by the discomfort of not being able to sleep on your stomach and of peeing ever so slightly every time you cough and of leaking droplets from your breasts onto your good silk blouses and of suddenly finding yourself expert in mysteries you hadn’t expected to comprehend until middle age, mysteries like swollen feet, varicose veins, neuritis, neuralgia, acid indigestion and heartburn.

  Heartburn. That, it seemed to me as I lay in bed, was what I was suffering from. That summed up the whole mess: heartburn. Compound heartburn. Double-digit heartburn. Terminal heartburn. The tears poured from my eyes as I lit on the image, and the only thing that might have m
ade it even more satisfyingly melodramatic and masochistic would have been to be lying in the bathtub; nothing like crying in the tub for real self-pity, nothing like the moment when every last bit of you is wet, and wiping the tears from your eyes only means making your face even wetter.

  I considered staying in bed all day. I considered getting out of bed and into the bathtub and staying there all day. I wondered if even considering these two alternatives constituted a nervous breakdown. (Probably not, I decided.) I contemplated suicide. Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all. There was a time when I worried about this, when I thought galloping neurosis was wildly romantic, when I longed to be the sort of girl who knew the names of wildflowers and fed baby birds with eyedroppers and rescued bugs from swimming pools and wanted from time to time to end it all. Now, in my golden years, I have come to accept the fact that there is not a neurasthenic drop of blood in my body, and I have become very impatient with it in others. Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.

  I picked up the remote control unit and turned on the television set. There was Phil Donahue. He was interviewing five lesbians, who had chosen the occasion of their appearance on Donahue to come out of the closet. I could just imagine the five of them, waiting through the years for the right offer, turning down Merv, turning down Kup, turning down Cavett, watching contemptuously as their friends chose mundane occasions like Thanksgiving with Mom and Dad for the big revelation, waiting for the big one, Phil himself, to finally come clean. I contemplated lesbianism. Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to the shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble. It occurred to me that if I stayed in bed much longer, I would be forced to watch a soap opera. That seemed redundant, so I got up and went to group.