by Nora Ephron
“Stay away from him,” Betty said, when she saw me looking over at him.
“Why?” I said.
“He’s trouble,” she said.
“Please don’t throw me in the brier patch,” I said.
So Mark Feldman and I went out to dinner. He told me the story of his first day in the newspaper business. I told him the story of wanting to play the ukulele in the school orchestra. And then we went to bed. We stayed there for about three weeks. Every so often he got up to write a column, and I got up to call my answering machine in New York to see if there was any reason not to be in Washington for a while longer. There wasn’t.
At some point in those three weeks, we had gotten out of bed for some reason or other, and we were taking a walk near the Pension Building. It’s a huge, block-square structure with a frieze of Civil War soldiers, thousands of soldiers moving cannons and guns and wagons and horses slowly around the perimeter of the building. We went up the stairs to the entrance, and the guard let us into the inner courtyard. It was barely lit. The guard went down the hall and turned on the lights, and suddenly I could see the huge open space in the center of the building, pillars three stories high, leaded glass at the top. For many years, the inaugural balls were held in the Pension Building. We could hear the guard’s radio, with an old Sinatra song coming from it. Mark held out his hands.
“I can’t dance,” I said. “I’ve never been able to.”
“I believe in you, Rachel,” he said.
We started to dance.
“You didn’t believe me,” I said.
“I’m not going to step on your foot,” Mark said.
“I know that,” I said.
“No you don’t,” he said.
He stepped back and put his right hand on the front of his waist and his left hand on the back.
“Right here,” he said. “That part of you is mine for the next three minutes. After that I’ll give it back. But you have to give it to me for now.”
“I have to trust you,” I said.
“Right.”
“I have to follow you,” I said.
“Right.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“You can do it, Rachel,” he said, and he put his arms out again. We started to dance. I closed my eyes. And I relaxed. People are always telling me to relax—the hairdresser tells me to relax, and the dentist, and the exercise teacher, and the dozen or so tennis pros who have attempted to do something about my backhand—but the only time I think I’ve ever really relaxed in my entire life was for three minutes in the Pension Building dancing with Mark Feldman.
“I’m dancing,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
So we were in love. We were madly in love. We flew back and forth on the Eastern shuttle and we called each other on various WATS lines and I became best friends with his best friends and he became best friends with my best friends, and there were presents and concerts and three-pound lobsters at the Palm, and then one day I came down to Washington and walked into his apartment and found a Virginia Slim cigarette butt in an ashtray. Who’s been eating my porridge? Mark said it was the maid’s. I pointed out that the maid smoked Newports. Then he said it was his sister’s. I pointed out that his sister had stopped smoking. Then he said he had bummed it from a copy girl at the office. I said that even copy girls at the office weren’t naive enough to smoke Virginia Slims. Then he got angry and said if he’d wanted to live with a detective he’d live with a detective and why didn’t I trust him? Then I got angry and said if he was going to bum cigarettes he ought to bum Marlboros so I wouldn’t think he was cheating on me, and why didn’t he at least have the decency to empty the ashtray into the garbage disposal.
Next thing you know, we were at a party—a party for his book about Washington—and I looked across the room and saw him talking to a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, and she started laughing, and even her laugh had an Australian accent. I walked over and carefully linked my arm through his. “Oh,” she said, “Mark was just telling me the most amusing story about his first day in the newspaper business.”
Then off he went on his book tour.
“Hi, I’m Irv Kupcinet, and my guests tonight are Mark Feldman, syndicated columnist and author of the new best-seller Return to Power; Toby Bright, director of the Institute of Sexual Analysis and herself the best-selling author of Good in Bed; former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson; and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, who is here today to talk about Jesus Christ.”
A couple of days after I saw the show on television, I was having lunch with my friend Marie, at the omelet place on Sixty-first Street.
“I met Mark,” Marie said.
“When?” I said.
“I was in Chicago a few days ago when he was on his book tour.”
“Where did you meet him?
“Playboy had a party for some book.”
“And?”
“He seemed nice,” Marie said. “I couldn’t really tell that much. It was crowded and all.” She started playing with her ratatouille filling.
“Marie?”
“I keep thinking about it,” Marie said. “You know. If it were reversed, what would I want you to do? What do you think?”
“I think it takes two people to hurt you,” I said. “The one who does it and the one who tells you.”
“I know,” said Marie. “Shit.”
“But I’d want you to tell me,” I said. “Who was she?”
“The one who wrote the sex book,” said Marie.
“They were together at the party,” I said.
“And later,” said Marie. “At the hotel.”
“That bastard,” I said.
“Look,” said Marie, “he’s got a big book, he’s having a fling, it’ll go away.”
“Listen,” I said. “I had a book. I did the Kup show. And I didn’t fuck the Galloping Gourmet, and he wasn’t into Jesus Christ then, either.”
“I feel terrible,” said Marie.
“Don’t you dare steal feeling terrible from me,” I said.
“This isn’t fair,” said Marie. “You’re so much better at this than I am. You’ve been in group.”
Of course, we could talk for days about why Marie told me. I’m glad she told me—it saved me from finding out at a later time—but still you have to wonder. Anyway, Mark and I broke up. I flew down to Washington and collected my things and had a big fight with Mark in which he accused me of the thing men think is the most insulting thing they can accuse you of—wanting to be married—and he took me to the airport and my duffel bag burst in the middle of the National Airport parking lot and all the whisks and frying pans and cookbooks fell out on the ground and then we had another big fight over whether it was his Julia Child or mine that I was taking back to New York (it was his) and that was that.
“Well, you knew he was trouble from the very beginning, didn’t you?” said Vera after it was over. Which is the kind of thing Vera is always saying, and which I fundamentally agree with but nonetheless get extremely irritable about.
“Of course I knew that,” I said. “I told it to you right after I met him. And you know what you said? You said, ‘Everybody has a past.’ ”
“I never said that,” said Vera.
“You certainly did say that,” I said.
“What I said was that people are capable of change,” said Vera. “If you don’t think people can change, what are you doing here?”
“Investing my money in caftans,” I said.
The telephone rang and Vera answered it. “What’s the split on the paperback?” she said to whoever was calling. “What does your agent say?” She nodded. “Well, hold out for sixty-forty over two hundred fifty thousand.” She hung up and looked at me.
“You think I picked Mark because I knew what was going to happen,” I said.
“Did I say that?” said Vera.
“You don’t have to say it, Vera.”
“Well?” she said.
“An old man goes to buy a horse,” said Vera. “Have I told you this story?”
“I can’t tell yet,” I said. “They all sound alike in the beginning.”
“Goes to buy a horse,” said Vera. “The horse trader says, ‘I can sell you a very nice horse for five hundred rubles.’ ‘What else do you have?’ says the old man. The horse trader says, ‘Well, for one hundred fifty rubles I can sell you a donkey. He won’t live as long, but he’ll get you from Kiev to Vilna.’ The old man buys the donkey, and two weeks later it drops dead. So he goes back to the horse trader and says, ‘How was I to know?’ ”
“Is that a story about how smart you are, or how dumb I am?” I said.
“Both,” said Vera.
“Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.”
There was a long pause.
“Well?” said Vera.
“It’s not as simple as that, Vera,” I said. “You want everything to be simple. You think I’m just standing there, and this army of men is walking by, shouting, ‘Choose me, choose me,’ and I always pick the turkey. Life’s not like that. I can’t even find a man who lives in the same city I do.”
“Of course you can,” said Vera.
Well, of course I couldn’t. The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him. There was another man in my life when I was younger who taught me to put sour cream into scrambled eggs, and since I never ever put sour cream into scrambled eggs I never really think of him at all.
Two months passed. I flew to Boston every other weekend. The man in Boston flew to New York every other weekend. I was deeply involved in piecrust. I was perfectly happy. And Mark turned up. Mark turned up full of repentance and bearing gifts. He sent flowers. He sent jewelry. He sent chocolates, and not those overly refined Swiss ones either—nice chewy, nutty American ones. He called up and said psychoanalytic things on the phone. He said he had made the worst mistake of his life and he wanted me back and he would love me forever and he would never hurt me again. He said he wanted to marry me. He said he was going to marry me. He said I might as well get used to the idea. He asked me to marry him on the IRT downtown local, and he asked me to marry him on the Forty-ninth Street crosstown bus. He asked me to marry him so often—and I refused so often—that when he failed to ask me for a day or so, I started to worry. He campaigned for me. He spoke of babies. Forever and ever. “Let’s sing all the songs we know about marriage,” he said to me one morning. Picture a little love nest, he sang, out where the roses cling. Picture the same sweet love nest, I sang back, think what a year can bring.
There were two reasons I didn’t want to marry Mark. First of all, I didn’t trust him. And second of all, I’d already been married. Mark had already been married, too, but that didn’t really count; it certainly didn’t count in the way it usually counts, which is that it makes you never want to get married again. Mark’s first wife was named Kimberly. (As he always said, she was the first Jewish Kimberly.) Mark and Kimberly were married for less than a year, but he had enough material from her to last a lifetime. “My wife, the first Jewish Kimberly,” Mark would begin, “was so stingy that she made stew out of leftover pancakes.” Or: “My wife, the first Jewish Kimberly, was so stingy she once tried to sell a used nylon stocking to a mugger.” In truth, the first Jewish Kimberly really was stingy, she recycled everything, and she once blew up their apartment and most of what was in it while making brandy out of old cherry pits.
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 fish because he’d 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, was he neat. My first husband was so neat he put hospital corners on the 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 meant to be Shirley’s. 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.
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 into 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. 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 buyers’ 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 to 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 as 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 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. “You picked the one person on earth you could have problems with.” “You picked the one person on earth you shouldn’t be 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 the one person on earth you shouldn’t get involved with.