Heartburn

Nora Ephron
HEARTBURN

T
he first day I did not think it was funny. I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it. “The most unfair thing about this whole business,” I said, “is that I can’t even date.” Well, you had to be there, as they say, because when I put it down on paper it doesn’t sound funny. But what made it funny (trust me) is the word “date,” which when you say it out loud at the end of a sentence has a wonderful teenage quality, and since I am not a teenager (okay, I’m thirty-eight), and since the reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant, I got a laugh on it, though for all I know my group was only laughing because they were trying to cheer me up. I needed cheering up. I was in New York, staying in my father’s apartment, I was crying most of the time, and every time I stopped crying I had to look at my father’s incredibly depressing walnut furniture and slate-gray lamps, which made me start crying again.

I had gotten on the shuttle to New York a few hours after discovering the affair, which I learned about from a really disgusting inscription to my husband in a book of children’s songs she had given him.
Children’s
songs. “Now you can sing these songs to Sam” was part of the disgusting inscription, and I can’t begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall, the idea of my two-year-old child, my baby, involved in some dopey inscriptive way in this affair between my husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.

My father’s apartment was empty, my father having been carted off to the loony bin only days before by my sister Eleanor, who is known as the Good Daughter in order to differentiate her from me. My father leads a complicated psychological life along with his third wife, who incidentally happens to be my former best friend Brenda’s sister. My father’s third wife had been wandering up Third Avenue in a towel the week before, when she was spotted by Renee Fleisher, who went to high school with Brenda and me. Renee Fleisher called my father, who was in no position to help since his crack-up was halfway there, and then she called me in Washington. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just bumped into Brenda’s big sister and she says she’s married to your father.” I myself had found it hard to believe when it happened: to have your father marry your mortal enemy’s older sister is a bit too coincidental for my taste, even though I go along with that stuff about small worlds. You have no choice if you’re Jewish. “It’s fine with me if you marry Brenda’s sister,” I had said to my father when he called to say he was about to, “but please have her sign a prenuptial agreement so that when you
die, none of your fortune ends up with Brenda.” So Brenda’s big sister signed the agreement, that was three years ago, and now here’s Renee Fleisher on the phone to say, hi ho, Brenda’s sister married your father and by the way she’s wandering up Third Avenue wearing a towel. I turned all this over to my sister Eleanor, who put on her goodness and went over to my father’s apartment and got some clothes onto Brenda’s sister and sent her to her mother in Miami Beach and took my father to a place called Seven Clouds, which is not an auspicious name for a loony bin, but you’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins. Off went my father to dry out and make ashtrays out of leaves, and there sat his apartment in New York, empty.

I had the keys to my father’s apartment; I’d stayed there often in the past year because we were broke. When Mark and I got married we were rich and two years later we were broke. Not actually broke—we did have equity. We had a stereo system that had eaten thousands of dollars, and a country house in West Virginia that had eaten tens of thousands of dollars, and a city house in Washington that had eaten hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had
things
—God, did we have things. We had weather vanes and quilts and carousel horses and stained-glass windows and tin boxes and pocket mirrors and Cadbury chocolate cups and postcards of San Francisco before the earthquake, so we were worth something; we just had no money. It was always a little mystifying to me how we had gone from having so much money to having so little, but now, of course, I understand it all a little better, because the other thing that ate our money was the affair with Thelma Rice. Thelma went to France in the middle of it, and you should see the phone bills.

Not that I knew about the phone bills the day I found the book of children’s songs with the disgusting inscription in it. “My darling Mark,” it began, “I wanted to give you something to mark what happened today, which makes our future so much clearer. Now you can sing these songs to Sam, and someday we will sing them to him together. I love you. Thelma.” That was it. I could hardly believe it. Well, the truth is I didn’t believe it. I looked at the signature again and tried to make it come out some other name, a name of someone I didn’t know as opposed to someone I did, but there was the
T
and there was the
a
plain as day, even if the letters in the middle were a little squishy, and there’s not much you can do with a name that begins with a
T
and ends in an
a
but Thelma. Thelma! She had just been to our house for lunch! She and her husband Jonathan—actually, they hadn’t come for lunch, they’d stopped by afterward for dessert, a carrot cake I’d made that had too much crushed pineapple in it but was still awfully good compared to Thelma’s desserts. Thelma always makes these gluey puddings. Thelma, her husband Jonathan (who knew all about the affair, it turned out), my husband Mark—all three of them sat there while I waddled around in a drip-dry maternity dress serving carrot cake to the rest of the guests and apologizing about the crushed pineapple.

It may seem odd to you that their coming to lunch bothers me as much as it does, but one of the worst things about finding out about a thing like this is that you feel stupid, and the idea that I actually invited them over and they actually accepted and all three of them actually sat there thinking I was some sort of cheese made it that much worse. The most mortifying part of it all is that the next day Thelma called to say
thank you and asked for the carrot cake recipe and I sent it to her. I removed the crushed pineapple, of course. “Here is the carrot cake recipe,” I wrote on a postcard, “with the kinks out of it.” I’m afraid I put a little face with a smile next to the recipe. I am not the sort of person who puts little faces on things, but there are times when nothing else will do. Right now, for instance, I would like to put a little face at the very end of this sentence, only this one would have a frown on it.

I should point out that although I could hardly believe Mark was having an affair with Thelma, I knew he was having an affair with someone. That was how I came upon the song-book in the first place: I was poking around in his drawers, looking for clues. But Thelma! It made me really angry. It would have been one thing if he’d gotten involved with a little popsy, but he’d gone off and had an affair with a person who was not only a giant but a clever giant. I cannot tell you how many parties we’d come home from while this affair was being secretly conducted and I’d said, while taking off my clothes, “God, Thelma said such an amusing thing tonight.” Then I would repeat it, word for word, to Mark. Talk about being a fool!
Talk about being a fool!
I even knew Thelma was having an affair! Everyone did. She had taken to talking indiscriminately and openly about the possibility that her husband Jonathan would be dispatched to some faraway State Department post and she would stay behind in Washington and buy a condominium.

“She’s talking about condominiums,” my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. “Obviously she’s involved with someone.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Betty. “The question is who.” She thought for a minute. “Maybe it’s Senator Campbell,” she said. “He’s talking about condominiums, too.”