Heartburn

by Nora Ephron

Vera is a wonderful therapist. She is loving, caring, giving and unrelenting. Of course, when I first went to her, I was unhappily married to Charlie, and now nine years had passed and I was unhappily married to Mark, and that might not sound like progress. But trust me.

Myself, I never change a story. I never even change an inflection in a story once it’s working. Mark, on the other hand, changes his stories every time he tells them, by making them longer.

When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was really his father and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister.

(room service! he’d even had room service with her!)

“We have an honest marriage,” Jonathan said, and he glared at me as if I were somehow responsible for this whole mess because my marriage was so hopelessly dishonest. For months I’d been doing nothing but boiling eggs and teaching my child to differentiate between the cat in the hat and the fox in socks, and Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state, was actually angry at me! It’s stuff like this that got us into Cambodia.

“His new office,” Jonathan said. “What new office?” I said. “The new office he wants to rent on Connecticut Avenue,” said Jonathan. “And of course it needs a couch.” He paused for emphasis. “You can’t have a love nest without a couch.” He paused again. “A convertible couch.” “I know I’m slow,” I said, “but I did manage to figure the convertible part out.”

My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from an obscure Dan Dailey movie he’d played a pediatrician in, and partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

Of course, I knew he wasn’t going back to the loony bin at all; he was going to see Frances. Frances is my father’s mistress. She works at a paper company, and she has remained true to my father even though he keeps marrying other women and leaving her with nothing but commissions on his stationery orders.

Why she puts up with him I don’t know. Why any of us puts up with him I don’t know. The truth is that if my father weren’t my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he’s also capable of being a real peach.

(Another thing I like to eat when I’m feeling blue is bacon hash. Cut some bacon into small pieces and start to cook it over a slow flame so that some of the fat is rendered. Then add diced cooked potatoes and cook slowly until the potatoes and bacon are completely crunchy. Eat with an egg.)

Anyone who winks at pregnant women on subways must have something wrong with him, it seemed to me.

Mark’s first wife was named Kimberly. (As he always said, she was the first Jewish Kimberly.)

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets, but I didn’t care. When Charlie and I were married, I was twenty-five years and eleven months old, and I was such a ninny that I thought: Thank God I’m getting married now, before I’m twenty-six and washed up.

“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.

“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.

and dancing off into a sunset of arugola salads.

I must seem to be putting too much emphasis on this vinaigrette of mine, but war is war.

That’s the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there’s something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three.

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.

Perhaps I ought to say that you can love someone—or want to love someone—so much that you don’t see anything at all. You decide to love him, you decide to trust him, you’re in the marriage, in the day-to-dayness of the marriage, and you kind of notice that things aren’t what they were, but it’s a distant bell, it’s through a filter.