Heartburn (7 page)

“She makes jokes even when she’s feeling terrible,” said Vera. “Don’t let her fool you.”

“Why do you have to make everything into a joke?” asked Diana.

“I don’t have to make everything into a joke,” I said. “I have to make everything into a story. Remember?”

“How do you feel?” asked Eve.

“Hurt. Angry. Stupid. Miserable.” I thought for a minute. “And guilty.”

“You didn’t do this,” said Eve. “
He
did.”

“But I picked him,” I said.

“Anyone would have picked Mark Feldman,” said Vanessa.

“No last names in group,” said Vera.

“Anyway, it’s not over,” said Eve. “He’ll be back.”

“And then what?” I said. “It’s like a beautiful thing that suddenly turns out to be broken into hundreds of pieces, and even when you glue it back together it’s always going to have been horribly broken.”

“That’s what a marriage is,” said Sidney. “Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.”

“Look at it this way,” said Vanessa, “it’s not a total loss. At least you got Sidney to say something.”

Sidney looked quite pleased with himself.

“Are you done, Sidney?” asked Ellis.

“Yes,” said Sidney.

“Because if you are,” said Ellis, “I just want to say that I don’t think that’s what a marriage is.”

“That
is
what a marriage is,” said Dan. “After a certain point it’s just patch, patch, patch.”

“That’s not what Vera and Niccolo’s marriage is,” said Eve.

Everyone nodded glumly again.

“Sometimes I wish you and Niccolo would get a divorce,” I said to Vera. “Your marriage is very hard on the rest of us.”

“I saw Niccolo last week,” said Vanessa, “and he told me that occasionally at the end of the day he and Vera get irritable with each other.”

“I would kill for merely irritable,” I said.

“Under what circumstances did you see Niccolo last week?” Diana asked.

“He and Vera came to a screening of my new movie,” said Vanessa.

“And when you become a movie star, Diana, I’ll come to a screening of your new movie, too,” said Vera.

“Thanks a lot,” said Diana. Diana is a computer programmer.

“What do you want?” said Vanessa. “Mark is going to turn up, and you have to know what you want when he does.”

I thought about it.

“I want him back,” I said.

“What do you want him back for?” said Dan. “You just said he was a schmuck.”

“I want him back so I can yell at him and tell him he’s a schmuck,” I said. “Anyway, he’s my schmuck.” I paused. “And
I want him to stop seeing her. I want him to say he never really loved her. I want him to say he must have been crazy. I want her to die. I want him to die, too.”

“I thought you said you wanted him back,” said Ellis.

“I do,” I said, “but I want him back dead.”

I smiled. It was the first time I’d smiled about the situation. I looked around the room, expecting everyone to be smiling back, but they were all looking in my direction as if something strange was going on. Ellis was the first to speak. “You haven’t by any chance hired an assassin without telling us first, have you?”

I turned to look behind me. A man wearing a nylon stocking over his head was standing at the door, holding a snub-nosed revolver. He grabbed me around the neck, pulled me to my feet, and pressed the gun against my temple. “On the table,” he said. “Money, jewelry, anything you’ve got that I want. Hold anything back and I’ll kill the lady just like this—” And for an instant, he aimed the gun at the wall, pulled the trigger and fired. Everyone jumped at the explosive crack and turned to watch a framed photograph of Theodor Reik break into shards and fall to the floor. A second later, a framed Chivas Regal ad with a caption that said “The bottle is either half empty or half full depending on how you look at it” fell off the wall, too.

“I always hated that picture,” said Sidney.

“This is not the time to talk,” said Vera.

She took off the strands of antique beads from around her neck, and her three lacy wedding bands, and put them into the middle of the table. Everyone started to throw money onto the pile. Vanessa unsnapped the gold necklace she’d been given after something (though not that much) had happened between
her and John Wayne in Mexico. Diana made a great show of removing her plastic bracelets and throwing them ceremoniously into the taramasalata.

The man in the nylon stocking pressed the gun into my temple so hard that I almost cried out. I closed my eyes. “Your turn, lady,” he said.

I could feel the diamond ring I had slipped into my bra pressing against my breast. Mark had given me the ring when Sam was born. We had gotten to the hospital when the contractions were coming only five minutes apart, and Mark sat in the labor room, next to me, holding my arm, whispering, singing, making little jokes, doing everything right. I’d been absolutely positive that he wouldn’t—that he’d turn into the kind of hopeless father who goes through the whole business under the delusion that it’s as much his experience as it is yours. All this starts in Lamaze classes, where your husband ends up thinking he’s pregnant, and let me tell you he’s not. It’s not his body, it’s not his labor, it’s not his pain—it’s yours, and does any man give you credit or respect for it? No. They’re too busy getting in on the act, holding their stopwatches and telling you when to breathe and when to push and taking pictures of the kid coming out all covered with goo and showing them to your friends at dinner parties and saying what a beautiful and moving experience it was. Not Mark. He just sat there helping me to get through, and he stayed completely calm when the doctor said there was something wrong, perhaps the umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck; and he looked so impassive when he glanced over at the fetal monitor and saw that the baby had stopped breathing that I didn’t even realize how serious the situation was; he just kept on whispering and singing and making little jokes as they rushed me into
the operating room and knocked me out for the emergency Caesarean.

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.”

O
ne 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 forgotten 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?