Heartburn (11 page)

Then, one day, Mark and I were on the Eastern shuttle and he asked me to marry him. This was when he was asking me to marry him a couple of times a week, but he had never asked me on the Eastern shuttle.

“This is your chance to say yes on the Eastern shuttle,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“This is your chance at a really bad metaphor,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“This is your last chance,” he said. “I’ll ask you to marry me again and again, but I’ll never again ask you on the Eastern shuttle.”

So I said yes.

Our friends the Siegels gave us ten shares of Eastern Airlines stock for a wedding present. Ha ha. The fare on the shuttle went to fifty dollars. And to fifty-four dollars. And to fifty-eight dollars. Arthur Siegel said: “It’s a good thing you two met before the fare went up, because no fuck is worth $116 round trip.” Ha ha. I moved to Washington and Sam was born and Arthur said that the money I saved not taking the Eastern shuttle almost paid for the baby’s diapers. Ha ha. Eastern shuttle jokes. Not particularly funny jokes, but what do you expect?

Anyway, just try flying the Eastern shuttle with a baby. Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it
must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century, but try the shuttle for the ultimate in shunning. All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts; all those men in suits who used to look at me with respect when I pulled out my American Express gold card, now barely able to conceal their contempt for me and my portable Wet Ones.

And just try flying the Eastern shuttle with a baby
and
with a husband who is barely speaking to you. Mark deserted me the minute we got to the terminal at La Guardia and went off to buy magazines and newspapers and to call the office to make sure something important hadn’t happened while he was off in New York on a trivial personal errand. I got on line for the plane. Sam was cranky and tired, and I was holding him and the duffel bag and the shopping bag full of Pampers and trying to write out my boarding pass with a pencil stub and my glasses fell off my nose and when I leaned over to pick them up, a stack pack of Ritz crackers fell out of my pocket onto the floor. The man next to me in line picked them up and asked me if he could help. I almost cried; I wanted to cry, but I was afraid crying would make my glasses fall off my nose again. He was a dark-skinned man with a rather thrilling foreign accent I couldn’t place. Gratefully I handed him the shopping bag, and he carried the duffel bag to the baggage conveyor belt. When he came back, he smiled, and I noticed he had three subcutaneous cysts on his face—those little lumps that save Robert Redford from being too handsome. I wondered if he’d consider having his subcutaneous cysts removed if we got married. I wondered if I could live with someone with a foreign accent. I wondered where he was from, and how his family would feel about his marrying a Jew. I wondered
if wherever he was from was the kind of place where they refer to Jewish women as Jewesses.

“Where are you from?” I said.

“From?” he said.

“What country are you from?” I said.

“My cauntry,” he said with a smile, “ees bery beautiful.”

I nodded. He nodded. I nodded. He nodded. So much for marrying foreigners, I thought. So much for my vow not to have marital fantasies about strangers.

I took an aisle seat on the plane, put Sam in the middle, and saved the window for Mark. He turned up a few minutes later and handed me the early edition of the
Daily News.
There was Vanessa, on page one, coming out of the police precinct; she looked wonderful. Inside was a riveting story about the glamorous group and the robbery. The story identified me as a “cookbook author,” which always irritates me a little bit since they aren’t merely cookbooks, but at least it didn’t say that I was a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess. According to the article, Sidney and Dan not only discovered each other’s last names at the police precinct but also discovered that they were distant cousins. I wasn’t sure what the readers of the
Daily News
were going to make of that detail, but I was positive my group would waste hours discussing its possible relevance. In fact, it seemed to me it might make sense to disband the group entirely, since we were bound to be spending so much time in the next year talking about the robbery and its effect that we would never again have time to discuss anyone’s actual life. I wondered whether Mark had read the story, but I knew that if I asked him what he thought of it he would simply use it as yet another occasion to insult my adventures in psychoanalysis
in order to punish me for insulting his. I looked over at him. He was immersed in
Casa Vogue.
It was as if he were pretending he wasn’t with me, that I was just some hopeless woman who didn’t even bother to space her pregnancies, much less respond properly to sitting in the same row with important Washington journalists who are trying to concentrate on home-decorating tips. And I’ll tell you the capper. The stewardess came down the aisle to collect the fares. Now, Mark and I always split things up. I paid my way; I always paid my way. We both earned money, and the money we earned went to pay for what we did. But wouldn’t you think that on this night of all nights he ought to have put my shuttle fare on his credit card? Well, he didn’t.

I looked at him and was about to say something, when Meg Roberts poked her head over the back of the seat in front of us.

“I thought I was going to see you at Betty’s the other night,” she said.

“Fare, please,” said the stewardess.

I fished in my bag for my credit card and handed it to her.

“At Betty’s?” I said.

“At her birthday party,” Meg said.

“Omigod,” I said. I looked at Mark. He shook his head; he had forgotten, too. I was off in New York crying my eyes out, and he was in Washington fucking his brains out, and we had both forgotten Betty’s thirty-ninth birthday party. The only way Betty would ever forgive me would be for me to tell her why, and if I told her why she’d tell everyone in Washington, and then everyone in town would know something about our marriage that I didn’t want them to know. I know all about
Meg Roberts’ marriage, for example, because Meg confides in her friend Ann, who confides in Betty, who confides in me. What I know is that Meg Roberts sleeps with presidential candidates, and her husband sleeps with presidential candidates’ press secretaries’ secretaries. They seem very happy.

“How was the party?” said Mark.

“Wonderful,” said Meg, and popped back down.

Actually, there is no possible way a seated dinner party in Washington can ever be wonderful. After only half an hour of drinks, you are seated, seated forever, trapped between two immensely powerful men who think it’s your function as their dinner partner to draw them out. You draw them out. You ask them about the Salt talks. You ask them about the firearms lobby. You ask them about their constituencies. You ask them about the next election. Dinner ends and everyone goes home. It always amazes me that women like Meg Roberts ever manage to get anything sexual going in Washington, although obviously she knows something about drawing men out that I don’t.

Sam threw up on Mark’s new blazer.

“Shit,” said Mark.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Sam started to cry. There was a kind of odd murmur in the seats around us, as the smell began to penetrate to the adjoining rows. At any moment the murmur would probably build to a hiss, and then to a chorus of boos, and ultimately Sam and I would be stoned to death with Bic pens.

“What am I apologizing for?” I said. “It’s not my fault.”

“I know it’s not,” said Mark. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault either,” I said.

“This whole thing is my fault,” he said.

“If you really believed that, you would have paid my shuttle fare,” I said.

I picked up Sam and stood up to go to the bathroom with him. Mark began to wipe off his blazer with his handkerchief.

“You bought that blazer with Thelma Rice, didn’t you?” I said, and started for the back. I didn’t even have to hear the answer. Mark’s impulse to fall in love is always accompanied by his impulse to purchase clothes with the loved one looking on. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had spent half my marriage in the men’s department watching small white-haired tailors on their knees making chalk marks on Mark’s trouser cuffs.

I went back to the bathroom and laid Sam on the top of the toilet seat to change his clothes. Toilet seats in airplane bathrooms are not even big enough to change baby piglets on. Sam’s head kept flopping off the cliff sides of the toilet seat as I changed his overalls and T-shirt and diaper. When I finished, I checked out the mirror to see if I looked older, or sadder, or wiser. I didn’t; I just looked tired. Well, I was going home. I was going home with my husband. I loved my husband. The city of New York was a wonderful place, but it seemed terribly unimportant next to my marriage. So much for sorrel soup. I had never thought my marriage could survive an infidelity, but it would. It had been unrealistic of me to expect that the situation would never come up. They say all marriages go through something like this. I became dizzy as the clichés raced through my head. I put Sam on the bathroom floor and threw up. In the main cabin, the pilot was announcing our descent to the Washington area. Yes indeed, I thought. I wiped myself off and went back to my seat.

I
see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward. Not that this book has an enormous amount of plot, but it has more plot than I’ve ever dealt with before. My other books just meandered from one person to the next, whereas this one has a story with a beginning and an end. That’s one of the things that makes it different from most of what has happened to me in my life: I know when it began and when it ended. When my first marriage collapsed, I made a lot of notes about the hamsters and the fight over the coffee table, but I could never be sure whether the end of my marriage to Charlie was the beginning of a story or the end of one. But the story I’m telling here began the day I discovered the affair between Mark and Thelma, and it ended exactly six weeks later. It has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask.
Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life.

In any case, all I meant to say was that because this book tells a story, there aren’t as many recipes in it as there are in my other books, so if you bought it because you thought there were going to be lots of recipes in every chapter, I’m sorry.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten to the point in the story where I return to Washington, and that brings me to the Siegels, finally to the Siegels; and therefore it brings me to the linguine alla cecca recipe. The four of us went to Italy a few years ago, and Julie Siegel and I managed to wangle the recipe from the proprietor of a restaurant in Rome. We also spent quite a lot of time after that trip working in pesto, because we went to Italy in 1977, and in 1977 everyone was eating pesto. As Arthur Siegel said one day: “Pesto is the quiche of the seventies.” Arthur had a way of saying things like that—of summing up the situation so perfectly that you never wanted another spoonful of pesto again—and whenever he said something like that, Mark always ran off with it and turned it into a column. Arthur used to complain bitterly about having his best remarks stolen, but the truth is he rather liked it; he was a running character in Mark’s columns, and he enjoyed a certain notoriety at Georgetown Law School, where he taught criminal law while waiting for the Kennedys to return to power. As for the linguine alla cecca, it’s a hot pasta with a cold tomato and basil sauce, and it’s so light and delicate that it’s almost like eating a salad. It has to be made in the summer, when tomatoes are fresh. Drop 5 large tomatoes into boiling water for one full minute. Peel and seed and chop. Put into a large bowl with ½ cup olive oil, a garlic clove sliced in two, 1 cup chopped fresh basil leaves, salt and hot red pepper flakes.
Let sit for a couple of hours, then remove the garlic. Boil one pound of linguine, drain and toss with the cold tomato mixture. Serve immediately.

Arthur and Julie and Mark and Rachel. The Siegels and the Feldmans. It’s not just that we were best friends—we dated each other. We went steady. That’s one of the things that happens when you become a couple: you date other couples. We saw each other every Saturday night and every Sunday night, and we had a standing engagement for New Year’s Eve. Our marriages were tied together. We went to Italy, we went to Ireland, we went to Williamsburg, we went to Montreal, we went to St. Martin, and Mark drove and I navigated and Julie suggested wrong turns and Arthur fell asleep. Then, when we got to wherever we were going, Mark wanted to eat and I wanted to see the market and Julie wanted to go to the museum and Arthur wanted to take a crap. We had flat tires together and we ran out of gas together; in some fundamental sense, we were always on the road, merrily on our way to nowhere in particular. Two of us liked dark meat and two of us liked light meat and together we made a chicken.

I suppose that I honestly believed that if I couldn’t save our marriage, the Siegels could. Which is why I called them from New York the night I discovered Mark’s affair. They were shocked. They were astonished. There was consternation in every syllable they uttered. All of this was a relief to me—suppose they’d known! Suppose they’d known and hadn’t told me! Suppose they’d known and told me!

“With Thelma Rice?” Julie said on the phone. “Omigod.”

“Julie, what am I going to do?” I said.

“Pick up the phone, Arthur,” said Julie. “It’s Rachel.”

“Hello,” said Arthur.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” I said.

“That’s okay,” said Arthur. “Obviously you’ve finally figured out who Thelma Rice is having the affair with and you’re calling to tell us, and I appreciate it even if it is one in the morning.”