Heartburn

I talk about Nora Ephron a lot because she's my favorite.  I am so sad that she died last year.  I understaand the way her brain worked because it's the way I think, which makes me even more sad that she's gone.  Last night I was reading Heartburn again and I was giggling under my covers, laughing too hard to fall asleep.  I have to share this....

 This is a fictional story that really isn't fiction at all.  It is about Nora's marriage to one of the Watergate reporters, Carl Berstein.  He had an affair, she tried to work it out, but she ended up leaving because he refused to stop seeing his mistress.  How do you do that, by the way?  How can you say "No, I don't want a divorce from you, but I am not going to stop sleeping with this other person"?  How does one become such a sociopath that this seems acceptable? 

Anyway, in the book, the characters' names are Rachel and Mark.  In this chapter she explains why she didn't originally want to marry Mark.  The reasons: she had been married before to a neurotic freak, and Mark cheated on her before they were married.  Please read it.  It is so funny.  So funny that I typed this entire section for you to read.....

    

   My first husband was stingy, too, but that was the least of it.  My first husband was so neurotic that every time he had an appointment, he erased the record of it from his datebook, so that at the end of the year his calendar was completely blank. My first husband was so neurotic he kept hamsters.  They all had cute names, like Arnold and Shirley, and he was very attached to them and was always whipping up little salads for them with his Slice-O-Matic and buying them extremely small sweaters at a pet boutique in Rego Park.  My first husband was so neurotic he would never eat a fish because he's once choked on a fishbone, and he would never eat onions because he claimed he was allergic to them, which he wasn't.  I know, because I snuck them into everything.  You can't really cook without onions.  "Is this an onion?"  Charlie would say, his eyes narrowing as he held up a small translucent object he had discovered floating in the sauce that covered his boneless dinner.  "No, it's a celery," I would say.  It didn't really fool him; at the end of every meal he would leave a neat little pile of small, translucent objects on his plate.  God, he was neat.  My first husband was so neat he put hospital corners on newspaper he lined the hamster cage with.

        The reason my marriage to Charlie broke up—although by now you're probably astonished that it lasted even a minute—was not because he slept with my oldest friend Brenda or even that he got crabs from her.  It was because Arnold died.  I felt really sad when Arnold died because Charlie was devoted to Arnold and had invented a fairly elaborate personality for Arnold that Arnold did his best to live up to.  Hamsters don't really do that much, but Charlie had built an entire character for Arnold and made up a lot of hamster jokes he claimed Arnold had come up with, mostly having to do with chopped lettuce.  Also, and I'm sorry to tell you this, Charlie often talked in a high, squeaky voice that was meant to be Arnold's, and I'm even sorrier to tell you that I often replied in a high, squeaky voice that was mean to be Shirley's.  You enter 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 married now, before I'm twenty-six and washed up. 

         Anyway, when Arnold the hamster died, Charlie took him to one of those cryogenic places and had him frozen.  It wasn't at all expensive, because the body was so small, on top of which there wasn't any additional charge for storage because Charlie brought Arnold home in a nice Baggie with a rubber band around it and simply stuck him in the freezer.  I could just see Cora Bigelow, the maid, taking Arnold out one Thursday thinking he was a newfangled freeze-dried potato treat in a boil bag; boy, would Charlie be in for a shock the next time he went to put an eensy-weensy bouquet of flowers next to Arnold's final resting place, directly to the right of the ice cube tray.  I mean, what are you supposed to do with a first husband like that?  I’ll tell you what: divorce him.  I'll tell you something else: when you divorce a first husband like that, you never look back.  You never once think: God, I wish Charlie were here, he'd know how to handle this.  Charlie never handled anything if he could help it.  He just made a note of it in his Mark Cross datebook and erased it when the problem had cleared up. 

        I left Charlie after six years, although at least two of those years were spent beating a dead horse.  There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage-buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose-but in the early 1970s there were at least two more.  You could go into consciousness raising and spend an evening a week talking over cheese to seven other women whose marriages were equally unhappy.  And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out in a wildly irrelevant fashion by drawing up a list of household duties and dividing them up all over again.  This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table.  They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal.  They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing.  They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away.  And it did.  The women's movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives.  Their wives went out into the world free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyer's market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women's movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.

        I left Charlie everything-the cooperative apartment, the house in the country, and Shirley, Mendel, Manny and Fletcher.  I took my clothes and my kitchen equipment and two couches I had brought to the marriage.  I asked Charlie for a coffee table, but he wouldn't give it to me.  The moving man sat there reading the section on vaginal self-examination in my spare copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves while Charlie and I fought about furniture.  I said we had three coffee tables; the least he could do was to give me one.  He said I had both couches and where was he supposed to sit anyway.  I said that I'd brought both couches into the marriage, but that all three coffee tables had been accumulated during the marriage and I ought to get something that had been accumulated during the marriage.  He said I could have Mendel.  I said Mendel was a washout, even for a hamster.  He said he'd brought furniture to the marriage, too, but that I'd given it to my mother when she'd run off with the Mel who was God and it had never been seen again.  I said the furniture we'd given to my mother was Swedish modern and revolting and we owed the Mel who was God a big favor for taking it off our hands.  He said he would never give me the coffee table because he'd just realized I'd packed the carrot peeler along with my kitchen equipment and now he had no way to make lunch for Shirley and the boys.  On his way out to buy another carrot peeler, he said he would never forgive me for what I'd said about Mendel.  At the end of the move, the mover shook my hand solemnly and said "I had five others this week just like this one.  Yours wasn't so bad."

        Of course, afterward Vera said I'd set it up so it would happen that way, set it up so that there would be no way Charlie could possibly give me the coffee table and I could therefore walk away from the marriage with the happy knowledge that Charlie was a stingy as I'd always said he was.  "You picked him," Vera said, "because his neuroses meshed perfectly with yours."  I love Vera, truly I do, but doesn't anything happen to you that you don't intend? "You picked him because you knew it wouldn't work out."  "You picked him because his neuroses meshed perfectly with yours."  "You picked him picked him because you knew he'd deprive you the way your mother or your father did."  That's what they're always telling you, one way or another, but the truth is that no matter whom you pick, it doesn't work out; the truth is that no matter whom you pick, your neuroses mesh perfectly and horribly; the truth is that no matter whom you pick, he deprives you the way your mother or your father did." That's what they’re always telling you, one way or another, but the truth is that no matter whom you pick, it doesn't work out; the truth is that no matter who, you pick, he deprives you the way your mother or your father did.  "You picked the one person on earth you could have problems with."  "You picked the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with."  There's nothing brilliant about that-that's life.  Every time you turn around you get involved with the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with.  Robert Browning's shrink probably said it to him.  "So, Robert, it's very interesting, no?  Of all the women in London you pick this hopeless invalid who has a crush on her father."  Let's face it: everyone is with the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with. 

        And what's 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 could I 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 a fear of intimacy; that you're connecting to your mother, or holding on to your father.  But 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; 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 just for an hour, not just for a week, not just for 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 as 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 would take him back.