Heartburn (2 page)

“Senators always talk about condominiums,” I said.

“That’s true,” said Betty, “but who else could it be?”

“I’ll ask Mark,” I said.

“Do you think Thelma Rice is having an affair with Senator Campbell?” I said to Mark that night.

“No,” he said.

“Well, she’s having an affair with someone,” I said.

“How do you know?” he said.

“She’s talking about buying a condominium if Jonathan is sent to Bangladesh,” I said.

“Jonathan’s not going to be sent to Bangladesh,” said Mark.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because we still care about Bangladesh,” said Mark.

“Then Upper Volta,” I said.

Mark shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe he’d been dragged into such a hopelessly girlish conversation, and went back to reading
House & Garden
. Shortly after that, the talk of condominiums stopped.

“Thelma’s not talking about condominiums anymore,” Betty called up to say one day. “What do you think it means?”

“Maybe it’s over,” I said.

“No,” said Betty. “It’s not over.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“She had her legs waxed,” said Betty, and then, very slowly, added, “for the first time.” And then, even more slowly: “And it’s not even summer yet.”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

Betty Searle really was a witch about these things—about
many things, in fact. She could go to a dinner party in Washington and the next day she could tell you who was about to be fired—just on the basis of the seating plan! She should have been a Kremlinologist in the days when everything we knew about Russia was based on the May Day photograph. Twitches, winks and shrugs that seemed like mere nervous mannerisms to ordinary mortals were gale force indicators to Betty. Once, for example, at a cocktail reception, she realized that the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare was about to be canned because the Vice-President’s wife kissed him hello and then patted him on the shoulder.

“Anyone pats you on the shoulder when you’re in the cabinet, you’re in big trouble,” Betty said the next day.

“But it was only the Vice-President’s wife,” I said.

Betty shook her head, as if I would never ever learn. Later that day, she called the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and told him that his days were numbered, but he was so busy fighting with the tobacco lobby that he paid no attention. Two days later, the tobacco lobby rented the grand ballroom of the Washington Hilton to celebrate his ouster, and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare started preparing to go on the lecture circuit.

“So who do you think Thelma’s involved with?” Betty said.

“It could be anyone,” I said.

“Of course it could be anyone,” said Betty, “but who is it?”

“What about Congressman Toffler?” I said.

“You think so?” said Betty.

“She’s always talking about how brilliant he is,” I said.

“And she seated him next to herself at her last dinner party,” said Betty.

“I’ll ask Mark,” I said. “He was seated on her other side.”

“Do you think Thelma Rice is having an affair with Congressman Toffler?” I asked Mark that night.

“No,” said Mark.

“Well, whoever she’s having an affair with, she’s still having it,” I said.

“How do you know?” said Mark.

“She had her legs waxed,” I said. “And it’s only May.”

“The Ladies’ Central is busy this week, isn’t it?” said Mark. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“Betty,” I said.

Mark went back to reading
Architectural Digest
, and shortly thereafter Thelma Rice went to France for a few weeks, and Betty and I moved on to the subject of the President’s assistant, who was calling Betty in the middle of the night and saying, “Meet me in the Rotunda and I’ll tickle your tits,” and other bizarre remarks encompassing Washington and sex.

“What should I do about it?” Betty said one day at lunch.

“Tell him if he does it again you’ll call the newspapers,” I said.

“I did,” said Betty, “and you know what he said? He said, ‘You haven’t lived till you’ve squeezed my Washington Post.’ Then he cackled madly.” She poked at her Chicken Salad Albert Gore. “Anyway, I can’t prove it’s him,” she said, “although Thelma always says he’s a notorious letch.”

“That’s what Mark always says, too,” I said.

I should have figured it out, of course. By the time I did, the thing had been going on for months, for seven months—for exactly as long as my pregnancy. I should have known, should have suspected something sooner, especially since Mark spent so much time that summer at the dentist. There sat Sam and I in West Virginia, making air holes in jars full of caterpillars,
and there went Mark, in and out of Washington, to have root canals and gum treatments and instructions in flossing and an actual bridge, never once complaining about the inconvenience or the pain or the boredom of having to listen to Irwin Tannenbaum, D.D.S., drone on about his clarinet. Then it was fall, and we were all back in Washington, and every afternoon, Mark would emerge from his office over the garage and say he was going out to buy socks, and every evening he would come home empty-handed and say, you would not believe how hard it is to find a decent pair of socks in this city. Four weeks it took me to catch on! Inexcusable, especially since it was exactly the sort of thing my first husband said when he came home after spending the afternoon in bed with my best friend Brenda, who subsequently and as a result became my mortal enemy. “Where were you the last six hours?” I said to my first husband. “Out buying light bulbs,” he said. Light bulbs. Socks. What am I doing married to men who come up with excuses like this? Once, when I was married to my first husband, I went off to meet a man in a hotel room at six in the morning and told my husband I was going out to be on the
Today
show; it never even crossed his mind to turn on the television set to watch. Now, that’s what I call a decent job of lying! Not that it does any good to prove my ingenuity; it doesn’t matter how smart you are if both your husbands manage to prove how dumb you are as easily as mine had.

Of course, my fling with the man in the hotel room happened a long time ago—before my divorce, before I met Mark, before I decided to marry him and become an incorrigible believer in fidelity. It is of course hideously ironic that the occasion for my total conversion to fidelity was my marriage to Mark, but timing has never been my strong point; and in
any case, the alternative, infidelity, doesn’t work. You have only a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can’t remember which one you’ve told which story to, and the next thing you know, you’re moaning, “Oh, Morty, Morty, Morty,” when what you mean is “Oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with both of them simply because you’ve been raised to believe that the only polite response to the words “I love you” is “I love you too,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with only one of them, because you’re too guilty to handle loving them both.

After I found the book with the disgusting inscription in it, I called Mark. I’m embarrassed to tell you where I called him—okay, I’ll tell you: I called him at his shrink’s. He goes to a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria who looks like Carmen Miranda and has a dog named Pepito. “Come home immediately,” I said. “I know about you and Thelma Rice.” Mark did not come home immediately. He came home two hours later because—are you ready for this?—THELMA RICE WAS ALSO AT THE SHRINK’S. They were having a double session! At the family rate!! I did not know this at the time. Not only did Thelma Rice and Mark see Dr. Valdez and her Chihuahua, Pepito, once a week, but so did Thelma’s husband, Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs. Mark and Thelma saw Chiquita Banana together, and Jonathan Rice saw her alone—and that man has something to do with making peace in the Middle East!

When Mark finally came home, I was completely prepared. I had rehearsed a speech about how I loved him and he loved me and we had to work at our marriage and we had a baby
and we were about to have another—really the perfect speech for the situation except that I had misapprehended the situation. “I am in love with Thelma Rice,” he said when he arrived home. That was the situation. He then told me that although he was in love with Thelma Rice, they were not having an affair. (Apparently he thought I could handle the fact that he was in love with her but not the fact that he was having sex with her.) “That is a lie,” I said to him, “but if it’s true”—you see, there was a part of me that wanted to think it was true even though I knew it wasn’t: the man is capable of having sex with a venetian blind—“if it’s true, you might as well be having an affair with her, because it’s free.” Some time later, after going on saying all these lovey-dovey things about Thelma, and after saying he wouldn’t give her up, and after saying that I was a shrew and a bitch and a nag and a kvetch and a grouse and that I hated Washington (the last charge was undeniably true), he said that he nonetheless expected me to stay with him. At that moment, it crossed my mind that he might be crazy. I sat there on the couch with tears rolling down my face and my fat belly resting on my thighs, I screwed up my courage, and when Mark finished his sixteenth speech about how wonderful Thelma Rice was compared to me, I said to him, “You’re crazy.” It took every ounce of self-confidence I had.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

He’s right, I thought. I’m wrong.

Well, we went around in circles. And then he asked me if I wanted to be alone for a while. I guess he wanted to drive over to Thelma’s to tell her he had held fast to their love. It didn’t matter. He drove off and I scooped up Sam and a suitcase full of Pampers, called a taxi, and left for the airport.

O
ne thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what’s for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. The whole summer Mark was secretly seeing Thelma Rice while pretending to be at the dentist, I was cooking. That’s what I do for a living—I write cookbooks. And while I did discover a fairly revolutionary and absolutely foolproof way to make a four-minute egg, and had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don’t bump into vinaigrettes that good.) Before that, there had been a lot of time spent on swatches and couches and floor
plans. It was almost as if Mark had a career as a columnist and I had a career as a food person and our marriage had a career as a fighter with contractors. First we fought with the Washington contractor, who among other atrocities managed to install our carpet on the sixth floor of a Washington department store; then we fought with the West Virginia contractor, who forgot the front door. “No one uses front doors in the country anyway,” he said when we pointed it out, which was also what he said about the paper-towel rack and the medicine cabinet. Then we hired Laszlo Pump, a Hungarian trouble-shooter, to clean up the mess the other two contractors had made, and that was when the real trouble began. Laszlo ripped out the living room wall and vanished. We called him at home and got his wife. She said his father had died. A week later she said his dog had died. A week later she said his analyst had died. Finally we reached Laszlo. He said he had cancer.

“He has cancer,” I said when I hung up the phone.

“Bullshit,” said Mark.

“People don’t lie about that,” I said.

“Yes they do,” said Mark. “Contractors do. They lie about everything. Look, we’ll go to his house. We’ll see how he looks. If he looks okay I’ll kill him.”

“We can’t go to his house,” I said.

“Why not?” said Mark.

“Because we don’t know where he lives.”

“We’ll look it up,” said Mark.

“We can’t look it up,” I said. “He has an unlisted address.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mark.

“It’s the latest thing,” I said.

“What kind of person has an unlisted address?” Mark said.
“I’ll tell you what kind. The kind that doesn’t want to be dead. The kind that people are trying to kill all the time.”

“Why are you angry at me?” I said.

“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark.

“Then why are you shouting at me?” I said.

“Because you’re the only one who’s here,” said Mark.

I burst into tears. “I hate it when you get angry,” I said.

“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark. “I love you. I’m not angry at you.”

“I know,” I said, “but it scares me. It reminds me of my father.”

“I’m not your father,” said Mark. “Repeat after me, ‘Mark Feldman is not my father.’ ”

“Mark Feldman is not my father,” I said.

“Am I fat?” said Mark.

“No,” I said.

“Am I bald?”

“No.”

“Do I smell of Dr. Scholl’s foot pads?”

“No,” I said.

“I rest my case,” said Mark.

It always ended up like that in the end—us against the world, Washington’s bravest couple in combat with the entire service industry and their answering machines—but the point I want to make is this: I sat on that plane to New York in a state of total misery, yet part of me was secretly relieved to be done with swatches and couches and fights with contractors, and that part of me was thinking: Okay, Rachel Samstat, finally something is happening to you.

That’s my name—Rachel Samstat. It’s always been Rachel Samstat. I held on to it through both my marriages—through
the first because I never liked my first husband’s last name enough to change mine to it, and through the second because I was by then known in a small and modest way as Rachel Samstat. The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty—they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally. Then, of course, the television show came along, which made the books sell even better.