I Remember Nothing (11 page)

I got out of the bathtub and wrote an e-mail in reply to Phoebe. It said, simply, “WHAT?” I thought it was understated and brilliant and would get her attention.

Minutes later the phone rang. It was Phoebe. She wasn’t calling about my e-mail at all.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I just got an e-mail from Priscilla in England saying that she’s not making dessert. Instead, Walter has gone to London and bought mince pies. He’s bringing them to New York. I
hate mince pies. I absolutely hate them. Didn’t you once make a mince pie that no one ate?”

“It was a raisin pie,” I said. “And I liked it.”

“Mince pies!” Phoebe said. “Who’s going to eat mince pies?”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“I’ve already done it,” Phoebe said. “I e-mailed her back and told her the mince pies were out of the question and that she should order a Yule log and a coconut cake from Eli’s and just have them delivered to me. Mince pies. Really.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I think we must be talking about the cruelest woman on the planet.”

“Who?” Phoebe said.

“You,” I said. “Why am I not doing the desserts? I liked doing desserts. Last year my peppermint pie was a huge hit.”

“I remember that pie,” Phoebe said.

“This year I ordered cherries from Wisconsin,” I said. “The shipping alone cost fifty-two dollars.”

“If you want to bring dessert, bring dessert,” said Phoebe.

“But we don’t need dessert because there are mince pies and a Yule log—”

“And a coconut cake,” said Phoebe. “We’ve got to have a coconut cake. But you can bring anything else you want.”

I hung up the phone. I was reeling. To make matters worse, I’d already gone out and bought four pints of peppermint stick ice cream for the peppermint pie I was
now not going to make unless I wanted to prove that I was the all-time world champion in the can’t-take-a-hint department of life. I stood there, missing Ruthie desperately. If she were alive, none of this would ever have happened. She was the glue, she was the thing that gave us the illusion that we were a family, she was the mother who loved us all so much that we loved one another, she was the spirit of Christmas. Now we were a group of raging siblings; her death had released us all to be the worst possible versions of ourselves.

I went to my computer and pulled up the pictures from the last Christmas we’d all been together. There we were, so happy, crowded together, overlapping. There was Ruthie. She had the most beautiful smile.

The next day, Walter called. He’d just arrived in New York with fourteen mince pies, and he was bringing them to Christmas dinner come hell or high water. “I love mince pie,” he said. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without mince pie.”

I know how he feels.

Ruthie’s Bread and Butter Pudding

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a shallow two-quart baking dish.

Gently beat the eggs, egg yolks, granulated sugar, and salt until thoroughly blended.

Scald the milk and cream in a saucepan over high heat. Don’t boil. When you tip the pan and the mixture spits or makes a sizzling noise, remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. STIR GENTLY, don’t beat, into the egg mixture until blended.

Overlap the bread, butter side up, in the prepared baking dish and pour the egg mixture over the bread. Set in a larger pan with enough hot water to come halfway up the side of the dish. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the bread is golden-brown and a sharp knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. The bread should be golden and the pudding puffed up. This can be done early in the day. Do not chill.

Before serving, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar and place under the broiler. Don’t walk away; this takes only a minute or so. Or you can use one of those crème brûlée gadgets to brown the sugar.

Serve with a pitcher of heavy cream.

The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true. I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

Of course, there are good divorces, where everything is civil, even friendly. Child support payments arrive. Visitations take place on schedule. Your ex-husband
rings the doorbell and stays on the other side of the threshold; he never walks in without knocking and helps himself to the coffee. In my next life I must get one of those divorces.

One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.

Another good thing about divorce is that it makes clear something that marriage obscures, which is that you’re on your own. There’s no power struggle over which of you is going to get up in the middle of the night; you are.

But I can’t think of anything good about divorce as far as the children are concerned. You can’t kid yourself about that, although many people do. They say things like, It’s better for children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage. But unless the parents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Children are much too young to shuttle between houses. They’re too young to handle the idea that the two people they love most in the world don’t love each other anymore, if they ever did. They’re too young to understand that all the wishful thinking in the world won’t bring their parents back together. And the newfangled rigmarole of joint custody doesn’t do anything to ease the cold reality: in order to see one parent, the divorced child must walk out on the other.

The best divorce is the kind where there are no children. That was my first divorce. You walk out the door and you never look back. There were cats, cats I was wildly attached to; my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters).

A few months before my first husband and I broke up, I had a magazine assignment to write about the actors Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom and their fabulous marriage. I went to see them at their Fifth Avenue apartment, and they insisted on being interviewed separately. This should have been some sort of clue. But I was clueless. In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old. Anyway, I interviewed the two of them in separate rooms. They seemed very happy. I wrote the piece, I turned it in, the magazine accepted it, they sent me a check, I cashed the check, and a day later, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom announced they were getting a divorce. I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had they gone forward with a magazine piece about their marriage when they were getting a divorce?

But then my own marriage ended, and about a week later a photographer turned up at my former apartment to take a picture of my husband and me for an article about our kitchen. I wasn’t there, of course. I’d moved out. What’s more, I’d forgotten the appointment. The reporter involved with the article was livid that I hadn’t remembered, hadn’t called, hadn’t told
her, and was no doubt angry that I’d agreed to do the interview about my marital kitchen when I had to have known I was getting a divorce. But the truth is you don’t always know you’re getting a divorce. For years, you’re married. Then, one day, the concept of divorce enters your head. It sits there for a while. You lean toward it and then you lean away. You make lists. You calculate how much it will cost. You tote up grievances, and pluses and minuses. You have an affair. You start seeing a shrink. The two of you start seeing a shrink. And then you end the marriage, not because anything in particular happened that was worse than what had happened the day before, but simply because you suddenly have a place to stay while you look for an apartment, or $3,000 your father has unexpectedly given you.

I don’t mean to leave out the context. My first marriage ended in the early 1970s, at the height of the women’s movement. Jules Feiffer used to draw cartoons of young women dancing wildly around looking for themselves, and that’s what we were all like. We took things way too seriously. We drew up contracts that were meant to divide the household tasks in a more equitable fashion. We joined consciousness-raising groups and sat in a circle and pretended we weren’t jealous of one another. We read tracts that said the personal is political. And by the way, the personal
is
political, although not as much as we wanted to believe it was.

But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but
that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably.

A thing I remember from my consciousness-raising group is that one of the women in it burst into tears one day because her husband had given her a frying pan for her birthday.

She, somehow, never got a divorce.

But the rest of us did.

We’d grown up in an era when no one was divorced, and suddenly everyone was divorced.

My second divorce was the worst kind of divorce. There were two children; one had just been born. My husband was in love with someone else. I found out about him and his affair when I was still pregnant. I had gone to New York for the day and had had a meeting with a writer-producer named Jay Presson Allen. I was about to go to LaGuardia to take the Eastern shuttle back to Washington when she handed me a script she happened to have lying around, by an English writer named Frederic Raphael. “Read this,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

I opened it on the plane. It began with a married couple at a dinner party. I can’t remember their names, but for the sake of the story, let’s call them Clive and Lavinia. It was a very sophisticated dinner party and everyone at it was smart and brittle and chattering brilliantly. Clive and Lavinia were particularly clever, and they bantered with each other in a charming, flirtatious way. Everyone in the room admired them, and
their marriage. The guests sat down to dinner and the patter continued. In the middle of the dinner, a man seated next to Lavinia put his hand on her leg. She put her cigarette out on his hand. The glittering conversation continued. When the dinner ended, Clive and Lavinia got into their car to drive home. The talk ceased, and they drove in absolute silence. They had nothing to say to each other. And then Lavinia said: “All right. Who is she?”

That was on page 8 of the screenplay.

I closed the script. I couldn’t breathe. I knew at that moment that my husband was having an affair. I sat there, stunned, for the rest of the flight. The plane landed, and I went home and straight to his office in our apartment. There was a locked drawer. Of course. I knew there would be. I found the key. I opened the drawer and there was the evidence—a book of children’s stories she’d given him, with an incredibly stupid inscription about their enduring love. I wrote about all this in a novel called
Heartburn
, and it’s a very funny book, but it wasn’t funny at the time. I was insane with grief. My heart was broken. I was terrified about what was going to happen to my children and me. I felt gaslighted, and idiotic, and completely mortified. I wondered if I was going to become one of those divorced women who’s forced to move with her children to Connecticut and is never heard from again.

I walked out dramatically, and I came back after promises were made. My husband entered into the usual cycle for this sort of thing—lies, lies, and more
lies. I myself entered into surveillance, steaming open American Express bills, swearing friends to secrecy, finding out that the friends I’d sworn to secrecy couldn’t keep a secret, and so forth. There was a mysterious receipt from James Robinson Antiques. I called James Robinson and pretended to be my husband’s assistant and claimed I needed to know exactly what the receipt was for so that I could insure it. The receipt turned out to be for an antique porcelain box that said “I Love You Truly” on it. It was presumably not unlike the antique porcelain box my husband had bought for me a couple of years earlier that said “Forever and Ever.” I mention all this so you will understand that this is part of the process: once you find out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.

When my second marriage ended, I was angry and hurt and shocked.

Now I think, Of course.

I think, Who can possibly be faithful when they’re young?

I think, Stuff happens.

I think, People are careless and there are almost never any consequences (except for the children, which I already said).

And I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.

People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.

Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband. The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over.

Enough about that.

The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.

And now it’s not.

Now the most important thing about me is that I’m old.