Heartburn (10 page)

And what is all this about
picking
, anyway? Who’s picking? When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to
The New Republic
, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn’t bald, who wasn’t fat, who wasn’t covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and a small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn’t. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral.

Is this inevitable, this moment when everything leads to irritation, when you become furious that he smokes, or that he coughs in the morning, or that he sheds crumbs, or that he exaggerates, or that he drives like a maniac, or that he says “Between you and I”? You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy. You fall in love with someone and you say to yourself,
oh, well, I never really cared about politics, bridge, French and tennis; and then you get married and it starts to drive you crazy that you’re married to someone who doesn’t even know who’s running for President. This is the moment when any therapist will tell you that your problem is fear of intimacy; that you’re connecting to your mother, or holding on to your father. But it seems to me that what’s happening is far more basic; it seems to me that it’s just about impossible to live with someone else.

And soon there’s nothing left of the marriage but the moments of irritation, followed by the apologies, followed by the moments of irritation, followed by the apologies; and all this is interspersed with decisions about which chair goes in the den and whose dinner party are we going to tonight. In the end, what’s left is a social arrangement. You are a couple. You go places together. And then you break up, and the moving man tells you yours wasn’t so bad. But it was. Even when you end a marriage you want to end, it’s awful.

I started out telling you all this because I wanted you to understand why I so resisted getting married again. It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge, which is to be single again. But there was Mark. With his big brown eyes and his sweetheart roses. Forever and ever, he said. Forever and ever and ever, he said.
I’ll be loving you always.… Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.

For a long time, I didn’t believe him. And then I believed him. I believed in change. I believed in metamorphosis. I believed in redemption. I believed in Mark. My marriage to him was as willful an act as I have ever committed; I married
him against all the evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn’t work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being. I see all that now. At the time, though, I saw nothing of the sort. I honestly believed that Mark had learned his lesson. Unfortunately, the lesson he learned wasn’t the one I had in mind: what he learned is that he could do anything, and in the end there was a chance I’d take him back.

Y
our husband’s here,” Lucy Mae Hopkins said, as she opened the door to my father’s apartment for me. Then she rolled her eyes. Lucy Mae Hopkins had given up men for Jesus forty years earlier, and she couldn’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t, given the choice. I walked into the living room. Mark was sitting on the couch, reading a book to Sam. He looked up and gave me a nod and went on reading. I sat down in a chair and noticed a blazer Mark had draped over the back of it. A new blazer. The man had broken my heart and then gone out and bought himself a new blazer! To make matters worse, it was a nice blazer. I fingered the material.

“Britches,” said Mark. Britches is a store in Washington where Mark buys his clothes. The man had broken my heart and had then gone out and bought himself a new blazer and the first word out of his mouth was Britches!

Mark finished reading to Sam and sent him off to the kitchen for a cookie. He looked at me. “I’d like you to come back,” he said.

I shook my head no, not because I was refusing but because I couldn’t believe that that was all he had to say. Not a word about Thelma. Not a word about how he must have been crazy. Not a word about how he was sorry. Perhaps this is Mark’s way of being understated, I thought. And then again, perhaps not. In fact, probably not. I kept on shaking my head. I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “I love you,” he said. He said it with the animation of a tree sloth. “I want you to come home,” he said. “You belong at home.”

“I’m not coming home if you’re going to see her anymore,” I said.

“I’m not going to see her anymore,” he said.

There was a long silence. I kept expecting him to reach out for my hand, or touch my face. He didn’t. Rachel, I said to myself, this will not do. You cannot go anywhere, much less home, with a man whose idea of an apology does not include even a hypocritical show of affection. Say no. Tell him to drop dead. Crack one of your father’s atrocious lamps over his head. Go into the kitchen and invent the instant waffle. Anything.

“I know this is difficult for you,” Mark said, “but it’s difficult for me, too.”

And then Mark started to cry.
Mark
started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed to me that if anyone was entitled to cry in this scene, it was going to be me; but the man had run off with my part. “I’m in a lot of pain,” he said.

There has been a lot written in recent years about the fact that men don’t cry enough. Crying is thought to be a desirable thing, a sign of a mature male sensibility, and it is generally believed that when little boys are taught that it is unmanly to cry, they grow up unable to deal with pain and grief and disappointment and feelings in general. I would like to say two
things about this. The first is that I have always believed that crying is a highly overrated activity: women do entirely too much of it, and the last thing we ought to want is for it to become a universal excess. The second thing I want to say is this: beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

Not that I knew this at the time. If I had, I could have stayed in New York with my pathetic dreams of Detective Nolan and six kinds of smoked salmon. What I actually did, though, is that I looked at Mark, sitting there, a picture of misery, and I crumbled. I can’t stand to see a man cry, that’s the truth. I can’t stand to see a woman cry either, but the only woman I ever really see crying to any extent is me, and even though you may think I do an awful lot of it for someone who can’t stand to see it, the fact is that I cry much less now than I used to. When I was young, a rude salesman at the hardware store could make me cry.

“All right,” I said to Mark. “I’ll come home.”

“Good,” said Mark, and he stopped crying. “You can put the ring back on now,” he said.

I shook my head no.

“For God’s sake, Rachel,” he said. “Put the ring back on.”

“I gave it away,” I said.

“You what?” he said.

“I gave it away.”

“To whom?” he said.

“To a celebrity auction,” I said.

“Is this a joke?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “and not a bad one, all things considered.”

“Put the ring back on,” he said.

“Only part of it was a joke,” I said.

“Which part?” said Mark. Mark used to like the fact that I make jokes in adverse circumstances, but clearly the charm of that had begun to wear thin.

“The part about the celebrity auction was a joke,” I said. “The part about giving it away wasn’t.”

“You gave the ring away,” said Mark.

“Not of my own free will,” I said.

“Someone took it away from you,” said Mark.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want me to guess who it was?” he said.

“My group was robbed,” I said.

“That’s funny,” said Mark. He started to laugh. “By an outsider, or by someone in the group?”

“By an outsider,” I said, “and it’s not funny. He held a gun to my head.”

“Just because you don’t think it’s funny doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s funny,” said Mark. “Maybe I can get a column out of it.” He began to nod slowly, the way he does whenever he gets an idea for a column and it’s just started ticking away. Mark writes three columns a week, and while most of them are about political life, just enough of them are about domestic life that I sometimes felt as if I were living with a cannibal; things barely finished happening before Mark was chewing away at them, trying to string them out, turn them upside down, blow them up into 850 words for tomorrow’s newspaper. Sometimes, when he was really worried about what to write about next, he would sit at dinnertime, his eyes darting desperately around the room. Was there a column in the salt and pepper shakers? In the paper napkins? In the Cuisinart food processor? “Have you noticed how hard it is to peel a hard-boiled
egg?” he’d say. “Yes,” I’d say. “You think there’s anything to it?” he’d say. Or: “Have you noticed that English muffins don’t taste as good as they used to?” he’d say. “Yes,” I’d say. “You think there’s anything to it?” he’d say. I don’t mean to sound innocent and passive about all this; I loved looking for things for Mark to write columns about. I brought home anecdotes about parking lot attendants and supermarket checkers for him to munch on. In fact, it occurs to me that one of the reasons I sometimes felt that nothing had happened to me since my marriage was that every time something
did
happen, Mark got a column out of it and in essence made it all seem as if it had happened to him. You should see the column he got out of Mr. Abbey’s murder.
My
murder, my very own personal murder, and he ran off with it and turned it into an essay on homosexuals and urban crime and practically got us all killed by the Gay Rights League. He even raided Sam’s life. Sam was barely two years old, and the column about the time he swallowed the nail polish remover had run in 109 papers and the one about his first dead guppy was about to be anthologized by the Oxford University Press. Someday Sam was going to grow up and sit down to write about his life and there wouldn’t be anything left of it to write about.

“You can’t get a column out of my group’s robbery,” I said.

“Why not?” said Mark.

“Because it happened to
me
,” I said. “On top of which, it was really awful.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mark. “Did he hurt you?”

“He twisted my arm,” I said.

“Show Daddy where,” said Mark.

“Oh, shut up,” I said. Then I smiled. I couldn’t help it. And so did he.

“I’ll buy you another ring,” said Mark.

“We don’t have the money for another ring,” I said.

“That’s true,” said Mark. “We didn’t even have the money to insure this one.”

We sat and looked at each other for a moment.

“It’s sort of fitting,” I said.

“Meaning what?” said Mark.

“Meaning it was a symbol of how good things were, and now that things aren’t, it’s just as well it’s not here to remind me.”

“I hate it when you say things like that,” said Mark.

“I know,” I said. “Do you still love her?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“But you’re not going to see her anymore,” I said.

“I already said that,” he said.

“And the two of you aren’t going to see that Guatemalan frittata together anymore, either.”

“Rachel.”

“Just say yes or no.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to see Thelma anymore, so obviously we’re not going to see Dr. Valdez together anymore, either.”

“Good,” I said.

“Thelma doesn’t really believe in that stuff anyway,” he said.

“I wouldn’t either,” I said, “if all I had to go on was that refried taco who calls herself a therapist.”

“Rachel.”

“Yes.”

“If we leave now we can make the last plane.”

The last Eastern Airlines shuttle between New York and Washington leaves at nine o’clock at night. When Mark and I were single and he lived in Washington and I lived in New York, we could never have a serious fight late at night, because there was no way to slam out the door and go home. There was something I liked about the fact that our lives and temperaments were controlled by an airline schedule, but the truth is that there were many things I liked about the Eastern shuttle. Not the comfort, and not the courtesy of the flight attendants, both of which were negligible. But the things you were supposed to like. The fact that it tended to leave when it said it was going to and to get there on schedule an hour later. The fact that you didn’t need a reservation and always got a seat. The fact that there was something so utterly no-nonsense about it, just like its passengers. No one ever seemed to be going from one end of the Eastern shuttle to the other for fun. No one ever seemed to be
traveling.
They were all simply going to meetings that were in offices that happened to be in another city. Everyone carried a briefcase. Everyone was dressed for success. Everyone was serious. Indeed, it seems to me that the Eastern shuttle was almost a perfect reflection of the Puritan tradition in its attempt to make a virtue out of suffering, abstinence and plainness; and it always seemed fitting that one Eastern shuttle flies New York to Boston, where the Puritan tradition began, and the other flies New York to Washington, where those produced by that tradition are rewarded with the power to force the rest of the country to heel to its values. I
loved that it took such an austere conveyance to get me to Mark; there was something wonderfully romantic about it. I looked like everyone else on the shuttle, I dressed like everyone else, I carried the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
like everyone else. But everyone else was on their way to work, and I was on my way to Mark.