Heartburn (17 page)

The police left, and Sam came rushing downstairs, shouting, “Mommy, Mommy,” and jumped into my lap.

“Thelma called yesterday,” Mark said, “and she’s very angry at you, and I am, too.”

“Where were you, Mommy?” said Sam.

“New York City,” I said, “but I’m back now.”

“She had lunch with Betty yesterday,” said Mark, “and Betty told her you said she had herpes.”

“I never said herpes,” I said.

“You must have said something,” said Mark.

“I said she had an infection,” I said.

“Well, she’s furious at you,” said Mark.

“
She’s
furious at
me
,” I said. “That’s rich.” All my life I had wanted to say, “That’s rich.” Now I finally had gotten my chance. “That’s really rich,” I said. “Listen, you bastard. You
tell Thelma that if she keeps calling here, I’ll tell Betty she has the clap.”

“Clap hands,” said Sam, and clapped his together.

“I’ll get it into the Ear, too,” I said. “ ‘What hopelessly tall and ungainly Washington hostess has a social disease, and we don’t mean her usual climbing?’ ”

Mark stood up and strode out of the room and slammed the door behind him. I heard the car start, and he drove off.

I read Sam a story, but I could barely concentrate. When is this going to stop hurting? I wondered. How was I ever going to get through? There was one bright spot in my life, my child, and I couldn’t even focus on him. I’ve been shot in the heart, I thought. I’ve been shot in the brain, I thought, and all I can come up with are clichés about being shot in the heart. I knew there were women who understood these things, who could walk around as if they were under water until the smoke cleared, who could keep their big mouths shut, who could even manage the delicate moment when they confronted their rivals at a dinner or the supermarket or the Saks Jandel winter clearance sale, but I clearly wasn’t one of them. My mother once caught my father kissing someone at a party, and she never forgot it; every time she got tanked she brought it up. A mere kiss. What would she have done with a full-fledged love affair during a pregnancy?

I knew it wasn’t Thelma’s fault that any of this had happened. She was never my friend. We had never even had lunch! And I had long since ceased to believe in the existence of that mystical sisterly loyalty women are alleged to feel toward one another. But knowing all this, I nonetheless hated her with every swollen inch of my being. I hated her for
turning Mark from the man I had fallen in love with into a cold, cruel stranger; it was almost as if he had become her mirror image, and was treating me the same way Thelma treated her husband Jonathan.

I could just imagine the next Washington evening all four of us were invited to. I could just imagine Thelma doing her gracious lady number, holding out her hand like the Queen of England ready to mend a fence with an unruly colonial nation, paying me a totally hypocritical compliment about the black
schmatta
I had been stuck wearing since my fifth month of pregnancy. “Oh, Rachel,” she would say, “I always find that dress so very becoming.” I wanted more than anything to be a good girl under those circumstances. To button my lip. To let one go by. I wanted more than anything to be the kind of cool and confident person who could treat her as if she were no more trouble to me than an old piece of chewing gum I had accidentally stepped in. But clearly I wasn’t cut out to be that kind of person.

And what would happen if everyone found out? What would happen if this tacky little mess became common knowledge; what would happen when the four of us became that year’s giggle, or gossip, or simply what Walter Winchell used to call a Dontinvitem? It was hard enough putting a marriage back together without becoming known publicly as a marriage-in-trouble; a marriage-in-trouble is welcomed with about as much warmth as cancer.

I took Sam into the kitchen and handed him over to Juanita. Then I went out the back door and over to Mark’s office. The door to it was open, as I’d expected; he’d left the house in such a hurry he hadn’t locked it. I sat down in his desk chair and opened the drawer and pulled out the file with the phone bills
in it. It was all there, as I knew it would be: local phone calls that Mark had charged to our home number; long-distance calls to France in May; calls in August to Martha’s Vineyard. I pulled out the American Express bills. (What did masochistic women do before the invention of the credit card?) I went through the receipts: the Marriott Hotel in Alexandria, the Plaza Hotel in New York, the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. And the flowers—so many flowers.

I felt like a character in a trashy novel; I even knew which trashy novel I felt like a character in, which made it worse:
The Best of Everything
. At least I wasn’t going through the garbage, but that was only because it hadn’t turned out to be necessary. The first flowers were sent in mid-March. Mid-March. I suddenly remembered: in mid-March, when the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island overheated, I had become so worried about its blowing contaminated air in our direction that I had taken Sam with me to a food demonstration in Atlanta. For years, Mark had been haranguing me about my total lack of interest in politics, and finally I had got interested—so interested I had actually left town—and where had it got me? It had got me and Sam to Atlanta, and my husband and Thelma to bed. That would teach me to be political.

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. The 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.