Heartburn Read online

  When I came to, he was standing next to me. He was wearing a green surgical smock and a mask, and he was crying and laughing, and in his arms was Sam, our beautiful Sam, our sunray, pink and gold and cooing like a tiny dove. Mark laid him on me, and then he lay down next to me on the narrow slab, and held us both until I fell asleep again.

  Two hours later, when I woke up, he gave me the ring. He’d just gone out and bought it. The diamond was in an antique setting surrounded by tiny little diamonds; it looked like a delicate ice flower. The next day Mark took it back to the jeweler and had it engraved: “Rachel and Mark and Sam.”

  I’ve always wondered what I would have done about the diamond ring in my bra under other circumstances. If I’d had a choice. I didn’t have a choice, because the man in the nylon stocking was the man in the plaid shirt, and he’d seen me put the ring in my bra on the subway. But suppose he hadn’t? Would I have handed it over? Would I have risked my life to hold on to the ring? I don’t know. All I know is that when the man in the plaid shirt and nylon stocking said, “Your turn, lady,” he was gesturing toward my bra. So I reached into the bra and gave it to him. He motioned to Eve to put the other things into a bag, and she did.

  “Now everyone lie down on the floor,” he said. He kept the gun pressed against my head and began backing out of the room, holding me against him. “No one calls the police,” he said. “Otherwise I hurt the lady.” He opened the door to the hallway and took off the nylon stocking. We got into the elevator and started down.

  “I’m sorry about your ring,” he said.

  “Don’t say things you don’t mean,” I said.

  He stepped out into the vestibule and ran out the door of the building to the street. I rode back up and walked into Vera’s office. Everyone stood up, looking a little embarrassed, and Vera went to call the police. There was a lot of hugging while she was out of the room. Hugging is against the rules, too, but so is robbery, so no one cared.

  “They’ll be here in a few minutes,” Vera said when she came back. She looked around the room. “You must all feel that I failed to protect you.”

  “Don’t blame Vera,” I said. “It was my fault.”

  “You always think it’s your fault,” said Vanessa. “You’re much too guilty.”

  “Can’t anything ever be Rachel’s fault?” asked Diana.

  “He saw me on the subway,” I said. “He saw me take my ring off and stick it into my bra. He must have followed me here, only I was walking with Ellis so he couldn’t rob me on the way.”

  “I hope you and Ellis weren’t having a conversation outside the group room,” said Dan.

  “We weren’t,” said Ellis, “but if we had been, we probably would have been talking about what a creep you are.”

  There was a long silence.

  “This is going to get into the papers,” said Vanessa. “That’s going to be my fault.” Everything Vanessa did ended up in the papers.

  “Good,” said Diana. “We’re going to find out everyone’s last names.”

  “I have something terrible to say,” said Ellis. “I was attracted to him.” He looked thoroughly ashamed of himself. “He had a nylon stocking over his face and I was attracted to him.”

  “I saw him without the nylon stocking,” I said.

  “And?” said Ellis.

  “And I was attracted to him, too.”

  “But you’re desperate,” said Ellis.

  “That’s true,” I said. “But don’t rub it in.”

  five

  One afternoon, some months before all this happened, I was working in the kitchen in our house in Washington trying to perfect my system for a four-minute egg. Here’s how you make a four-minute egg: Put an egg into cold water and bring it to the boil. Turn off the heat immediately and put the lid on the saucepan. Let it sit. In three minutes, you will have a perfect four-minute egg. It just so happens that the world is not waiting breathlessly for a three-minute way to make a four-minute egg, but sometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop a lot of recipes using capers, and it was weeks of tossing capers into just about everything but milkshakes before I came to terms with the fact that nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.)

  Anyway, there I was, boiling eggs at three-twenty on a Thursday afternoon. I know the exact time, because I looked at the clock as soon as I heard the shout. A man was shouting—screaming, actually. A fight, I thought. A terrible fight, I thought. A fight so terrible that someone is going to get killed, I thought. I went to the front door and opened it. The shouting stopped. I went back to the eggs. That evening, when Mark came home, I said, “If someone was murdered on this block this afternoon, it happened at three-twenty.” Mark paid no attention at all. At the time I thought this was because he thought I was turning into the sort of melodramatic woman who is forced to imagine excitement and romance and intrigue because she’s stuck at home all day; but I realize now that his affair with Thelma was just beginning, and his reaction was simply the one you affect when you’re becoming involved with someone else and you’re determined not to be remotely interested in or amused or touched by the person you’re married to.

  Now that I think about it, perhaps I was turning into a certain kind of melodramatic woman—not the kind who fantasizes because she’s housebound but the kind who’s simply trying to get her husband’s attention because she knows that he’s somewhere else, with someone else. Even then, back when the affair was starting, mustn’t I have had an inkling? I can’t bear that I didn’t, but that’s not the reason I’m telling the story about the man down the block who was murdered, so I’ll get back to it.

  Three days later. A Sunday. Mark and I were on our way out to lunch. The police. A half-open door to the house across the street. On the floor of the foyer, a huge brownish stain. “If there’s a dead body in there,” I said to the policeman outside, “it happened at three-twenty on Thursday afternoon.” There was. It was Mr. Abbey, a meek little man who had had his last fling with rough trade. And I was the only witness! I don’t mean to get so excited here, but I’ve always wanted to be a witness. I’ve always wanted to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and spar with lawyers and be sketched by courtroom artists. Now my time had come! And I knew nothing. It really was depressing, and not just for me, but for the homicide detective on the case, who kept trying to pry information out of me.

  “You know more than you think,” Homicide Detective Hartman kept saying, as he urged me to search my memory for the additional details he was certain were buried there.

  “No I don’t,” I said.

  A few days after Mr. Abbey’s body was discovered, Homicide Detective Hartman came back to take another crack at my subconscious. He was full of interesting information. He told me that Mr. Abbey had spent the last morning of his life at a furniture auction. Afterward, a friend who was there had asked him to lunch. Mr. Abbey refused. He said he had seen a beautiful black man cruising the bus terminal the night before, and was going back to find him. And that was the last anyone saw of Mr. Abbey.

  I was fascinated by the story. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so sexually driven that he might actually skip lunch—and after an auction! I think of myself as a healthy person with a strong sex drive, but it’s never occurred to me to forgo meals. I said this to Mark later. I said, perhaps this is the difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals, perhaps this relentless priapism is characteristic of the obsessive, casual sex that lasts so much later in the lives of homosexuals than in heterosexuals. And Mark got this look on his face, this incredulous look, that at the time I thought meant he couldn’t believe I could have such a short memory. Had I for
gotten the first months of our courtship? The hours and hours of sex, the smell of it everywhere, in the air, on the sheets, on my hands, in my hair—had I managed to forget all that? (Of course I hadn’t; on the other hand, we never once had less than three meals a day, so there.) Now, of course, I know about Thelma, and I realize that Mark’s incredulity arose simply because I knew so little about him and his relentless priapism, knew so little about men. When will I ever learn? When will I ever understand that what’s astonishing about the number of men who remain faithful is not that it’s so small but that there are any of them at all?

  I see that once again I’ve gotten off the track, that I’ve drifted back to Mark, to Mark and Thelma, but I can’t help myself. When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that’s happened—from the simplest exchange between the two of you at a dinner party to the horrible death of Mr. Abbey—without wondering what was really going on. See the couple. See the couple with the baby. See the couple with the baby having another baby. What’s wrong with this picture? Everything, as it happens.

  But I was telling you about Mr. Abbey’s death for a reason, and it has nothing to do with betrayal. I simply wanted you to understand that when my group was robbed, I was almost grateful: it gave me another shot at being a witness to a crime. And this time I knew stuff, I really knew stuff. I had actually laid eyes on the bugger. I couldn’t wait to be deposed, or whatever it is they call what they do to you.

  They took us to the station house in a paddy wagon. This was fairly insulting, since we were the victims, but the detective in charge of the case had so many statements to take that he wanted to do it with stenographers and typewriters and tape recorders nearby. We spent the afternoon in a small green room and each waited his turn. First the police talked to Vera, because she was in charge of the premises, as they say, and then they talked to Vanessa, because she was the most famous and beautiful (I’ve come to terms with the fact that Vanessa is the most famous and beautiful, but it really irritated me that day since after all I was the one who knew the most about what happened), and then they talked to Diana because she insisted she would hold them responsible if she missed her Supersaver flight to Los Angeles. Finally Detective Nolan got to me.

  I told him everything. I said the robber was about six feet tall. Sandy hair. Watery blue eyes. A little squint. Pinkish complexion. A long, thin nose on a wide, shiny face. Weighed about 165—I can never be sure what men weigh. A fat neck. A red and green plaid cotton shirt, a khaki jacket, jeans and running shoes. I first noticed him when a Japanese man on the subway took my picture. My guess is that the Japanese man has a picture of the robber.

  “What did the Japanese man look like?” asked Detective Nolan.

  “Japanese,” I said. “You know.”

  “I know,” said Detective Nolan. “Small and Oriental and wearing a dark gray suit, with a camera around his neck.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What kind of camera?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I was doing pretty well till we got to this part,” I said.

  “You are doing very well,” said Detective Nolan.

  “You say that to everybody,” I said.

  “No I don’t,” he said.

  “Yes you do,” I said. “I was a witness to something else recently, and the detective kept telling me how well I was doing, but I wasn’t really.”

  “What else were you a witness to?” said Detective Nolan.

  “A murder in Washington,” I said. “I wasn’t actually a witness—I just heard the shouting. Why?”

  “I just wondered,” said Detective Nolan.

  “You just wondered if I was the kind of woman who attracts criminals the way other women attract alcoholics or sadists.” (I have a friend who attracts dwarfs. Every time she turns around, a dwarf is following her. It’s very disturbing.)

  “No,” said Detective Nolan. “What made you notice the man on the subway?”

  “He winked at me,” I said.

  “I see,” said Detective Nolan.

  “It was probably my fault,” I said, “because I was smiling at the Japanese man, because I’d rather have my picture taken when I’m smiling because when I’m not smiling I look as if I’m frowning, and that’s when the robber winked at me, so I wondered if he was single, and then he winked again and I wondered if he was a mugger, and that’s when I put my diamond ring into my bra.”

  “You mean you just looked at him and automatically wondered if he was single?”

  “Well, he winked at me,” I said.

  “What made you think he might be a mugger?”

  “I didn’t really believe he was a mugger,” I said. “I just realized that he might not be a suitable object for fantasy. I didn’t even know if he’d gone to college.”

  “Are you sure there wasn’t some detail you can’t quite remember that alerted you in some way?”

  “Like the bulge of his revolver under his jacket?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Detective Nolan.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “but it’s possible that he was looking at my ring before I twisted it backwards, and I knew that. Subconsciously, I mean.”

  “Subconsciously,” said Detective Nolan.

  “I just remembered something,” I said. “The Japanese man was wearing a little identification card. The kind they give you at conventions.”

  “Excellent,” said Detective Nolan, and left the room. A few minutes later he came back and sat down.

  “How long do you think it would take me?” he said.

  “To find the Japanese man?” I said.

  “To have therapy,” he said. “How long would it take?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said.

  “Nothing much,” he said.

  “Nine years,” I said.

  “How long did it take you?” he said.

  “Nine years,” I said. “Of course, I’ve had two years off for good behavior, but now I’m back. And there was nothing much wrong with me, either. That’s why I graduated in the first place. The ones there’s really something wrong with are in forever.”

  “Why did you start nine years ago?” asked Detective Nolan.

  “I wanted a divorce,” I said.

  “From this guy who’s being so terrible to you now?”

  “From the first one,” I said. I looked at him. “Diana told you, didn’t she? I know she did. That bitch.”

  “I’m sorry to bring it up,” said Detective Nolan. “It’s not even relevant. Although it might explain why you were wondering whether the guy on the subway was single.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “I was thinking of going into therapy because I can’t decide whether to have a hair transplant,” said Detective Nolan.

  “You already have an awful lot of hair,” I said.

  “It’s not mine,” said Detective Nolan.

  “It looks pretty good,” I said.

  “You think so?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m just telling you that so you know something about me, and since I know something about you, we’re even.”

  “I don’t think you need therapy,” I said. “You might be the only person in America who doesn’t.”

  I finished being interviewed by Detective Nolan, and gave him my father’s telephone number and my number at home in Washington just in case. It wasn’t until I was past the newspaper photographers and on the subway that I wondered whether Detective Nolan was single. He wasn’t exactly my type, but look where my type had gotten me. Then I wondered if he was uncircumcised. Then I wondered if I could be happily married to a policeman. Then I wondered why I was so hopelessly bourgeois that I couldn’t even have
a fantasy about a man without moving on to marriage. Then I stopped wondering. For one thing, the subway arrived at my stop and I got off. For another, it seemed clear to me that it would never matter. When I got to my father’s apartment, I was sure, Mark would be there.

  And he was.

  six

  I met Mark Feldman at a party in Washington at my friend Betty’s. Betty Searle and I went to college together, and we always used to talk about living together afterward; but one day Betty said that I was a brunette and belonged in New York and she was a blonde and belonged in Washington, and she was right. Betty went off to Washington and became famous for her local television show, her dinner parties, and her affairs with a first-rate cross section of the American left wing. Every Christmas she had a party that everyone in Washington came to, and there, one Christmas, was Mark. I recognized him the minute he walked in because I’d seen him on Meet the Press, and once you see that beard you never forget it. He has a black beard, but the part of it that’s on the left side of his chin has a little white stripe in it, where the skin underneath has no pigment. Just like a skunk is what you’re thinking, and you’re right, but it can look very odd and interesting. I’ve always liked odd and interesting-looking men because I’m odd and interesting-looking myself, and I always figured I had a better shot at them than at the conventionally good-looking ones. (Water seeks its own level, et cetera.) My mother would have loved Mark Feldman’s beard. “A scar but not” is what she would have called it.

  Mark is a syndicated columnist, that’s why I’d seen him on television. He writes about Washington as if it’s a city like any other (it’s not), filled with rich and interesting characters (it’s not). He’s known for being chronically perverse about politics. For instance, some people think it’s terrible that Washington doesn’t work, but Mark thinks it’s wonderful, because if it worked, something might actually be accomplished and then we’d really be in bad shape. This is a very clever way of being cynical, but never mind.