by Nora Ephron
“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”
But where in Sweden were they? There was no way to know, especially if you’d never been to Sweden. A few chapters ago, for example, an unscrupulous agent from Swedish Intelligence had tailed Blomkvist by taking Stora Essingen and Gröndal into Södermalm, and then driving down Hornsgatan and across Bellmansgatan via Brännkyrkagatan, with a final left onto Tavastgatan. Who cared, but there it was, in black-and-white, taking up space. And now Blomkvist was standing in her doorway. Someone might still be following him—but who? There was no real way to be sure even when you found out, because people’s names were so confusingly similar—Gullberg, Sandberg, and Holmberg; Nieminen and Niedermann; and, worst of all, Jonasson, Mårtensson, Torkelsson, Fredriksson, Svensson, Johansson, Svantesson, Fransson, and Paulsson.
“I need my umlaut,” Blomkvist said. “What if I want to go to Svavelsjö? Or Strängnäs? Or Södertälje? What if I want to write to Wadensjö? Or Ekström or Nyström?”
It was a compelling argument.
She opened the door.
He handed her the computer and went to make coffee on her Jura Impressa X7.
She tried to get the umlaut to work. No luck. She pinged Plague and explained the problem. Plague was fat, but he would know what to do, and he would tell her, in Courier typeface.
She went to the bathroom and got a Q-tip and gently cleaned the area around the ALT key. It popped into place. Then she pressed “U.” An umlaut danced before her eyes.
Finally, she spoke.
“It’s fixed,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said.
She thought about smiling, but she’d smiled three hundred pages earlier, and once was enough.
—July 2010
The Novelist
Heartburn
One
THE FIRST DAY I did not think it was funny. I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it. “The most unfair thing about this whole business,” I said, “is that I can’t even date.” Well, you had to be there, as they say, because when I put it down on paper it doesn’t sound funny. But what made it funny (trust me) is the word “date,” which when you say it out loud at the end of a sentence has a wonderful teenage quality, and since I am not a teenager (okay, I’m thirty-eight), and since the reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant, I got a laugh on it, though for all I know my group was only laughing because they were trying to cheer me up. I needed cheering up. I was in New York, staying in my father’s apartment, I was crying most of the time, and every time I stopped crying I had to look at my father’s incredibly depressing walnut furniture and slate-gray lamps, which made me start crying again.
I had gotten on the shuttle to New York a few hours after discovering the affair, which I learned about from a really disgusting inscription to my husband in a book of children’s songs she had given him. Children’s songs. “Now you can sing these songs to Sam” was part of the disgusting inscription, and I can’t begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall, the idea of my two-year-old child, my baby, involved in some dopey inscriptive way in this affair between my husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.
My father’s apartment was empty, my father having been carted off to the loony bin only days before by my sister Eleanor, who is known as the Good Daughter in order to differentiate her from me. My father leads a complicated psychological life along with his third wife, who incidentally happens to be my former best friend Brenda’s sister. My father’s third wife had been wandering up Third Avenue in a towel the week before, when she was spotted by Renee Fleisher, who went to high school with Brenda and me. Renee Fleisher called my father, who was in no position to help since his crack-up was halfway there, and then she called me in Washington. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just bumped into Brenda’s big sister and she says she’s married to your father.” I myself had found it hard to believe when it happened: to have your father marry your mortal enemy’s older sister is a bit too coincidental for my taste, even though I go along with that stuff about small worlds. You have no choice if you’re Jewish. “It’s fine with me if you marry Brenda’s sister,” I had said to my father when he called to say he was about to, “but please have her sign a prenuptial agreement so that when you die, none of your fortune ends up with Brenda.” So Brenda’s big sister signed the agreement, that was three years ago, and now here’s Renee Fleisher on the phone to say, hi ho, Brenda’s sister married your father and by the way she’s wandering up Third Avenue wearing a towel. I turned all this over to my sister Eleanor, who put on her goodness and went over to my father’s apartment and got some clothes onto Brenda’s sister and sent her to her mother in Miami Beach and took my father to a place called Seven Clouds, which is not an auspicious name for a loony bin, but you’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins. Off went my father to dry out and make ashtrays out of leaves, and there sat his apartment in New York, empty.
I had the keys to my father’s apartment; I’d stayed there often in the past year because we were broke. When Mark and I got married we were rich and two years later we were broke. Not actually broke—we did have equity. We had a stereo system that had eaten thousands of dollars, and a country house in West Virginia that had eaten tens of thousands of dollars, and a city house in Washington that had eaten hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had things—God, did we have things. We had weather vanes and quilts and carousel horses and stained-glass windows and tin boxes and pocket mirrors and Cadbury chocolate cups and postcards of San Francisco before the earthquake, so we were worth something; we just had no money. It was always a little mystifying to me how we had gone from having so much money to having so little, but now, of course, I understand it all a little better, because the other thing that ate our money was the affair with Thelma Rice. Thelma went to France in the middle of it, and you should see the phone bills.
Not that I knew about the phone bills the day I found the book of children’s songs with the disgusting inscription in it. “My darling Mark,” it began, “I wanted to give you something to mark what happened today, which makes our future so much clearer. Now you can sing these songs to Sam, and someday we will sing them to him together. I love you. Thelma.” That was it. I could hardly believe it. Well, the truth is I didn’t believe it. I looked at the signature again and tried to make it come out some other name, a name of someone I didn’t know as opposed to someone I did, but there was the T and there was the a plain as day, even if the letters in the middle were a little squishy, and there’s not much you can do with a name that begins with a T and ends in an a but Thelma. Thelma! She had just been to our house for lunch! She and her husband Jonathan—actually, they hadn’t come for lunch, they’d stopped by afterward for dessert, a carrot cake I’d made that had too much crushed pineapple in it but was still awfully good compared to Thelma’s desserts. Thelma always makes these gluey puddings. Thelma, her husband Jonathan (who knew all about the affair, it turned out), my husband Mark—all three of them sat there while I waddled around in a drip-dry maternity dress serving carrot cake to the rest of the guests and apologizing about the crushed pineapple.
It may seem odd to you that their coming to lunch bothers me as much as it does, but one of the worst things about finding out about a thing like this is that you feel stupid, and the idea that I actually invited them over and they actually accepted and all three of them actually sat there thinking I was some sort of cheese made it that much worse. The most mortifying part of it all is that the
next day Thelma called to say thank you and asked for the carrot cake recipe and I sent it to her. I removed the crushed pineapple, of course. “Here is the carrot cake recipe,” I wrote on a postcard, “with the kinks out of it.” I’m afraid I put a little face with a smile next to the recipe. I am not the sort of person who puts little faces on things, but there are times when nothing else will do. Right now, for instance, I would like to put a little face at the very end of this sentence, only this one would have a frown on it.
I should point out that although I could hardly believe Mark was having an affair with Thelma, I knew he was having an affair with someone. That was how I came upon the songbook in the first place: I was poking around in his drawers, looking for clues. But Thelma! It made me really angry. It would have been one thing if he’d gotten involved with a little popsy, but he’d gone off and had an affair with a person who was not only a giant but a clever giant. I cannot tell you how many parties we’d come home from while this affair was being secretly conducted and I’d said, while taking off my clothes, “God, Thelma said such an amusing thing tonight.” Then I would repeat it, word for word, to Mark. Talk about being a fool! Talk about being a fool! I even knew Thelma was having an affair! Everyone did. She had taken to talking indiscriminately and openly about the possibility that her husband Jonathan would be dispatched to some faraway State Department post and she would stay behind in Washington and buy a condominium.
“She’s talking about condominiums,” my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. “Obviously she’s involved with someone.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Betty. “The question is who.” She thought for a minute. “Maybe it’s Senator Campbell,” she said. “He’s talking about condominiums, too.”
“Senators always talk about condominiums,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Betty, “but who else could it be?”
“I’ll ask Mark,” I said.
“Do you think Thelma Rice is having an affair with Senator Campbell?” I said to Mark that night.
“No,” he said.
“Well, she’s having an affair with someone,” I said.
“How do you know?” he said.
“She’s talking about buying a condominium if Jonathan is sent to Bangladesh,” I said.
“Jonathan’s not going to be sent to Bangladesh,” said Mark.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because we still care about Bangladesh,” said Mark.
“Then Upper Volta,” I said.
Mark shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe he’d been dragged into such a hopelessly girlish conversation, and went back to reading House & Garden. Shortly after that, the talk of condominiums stopped.
“Thelma’s not talking about condominiums anymore,” Betty called up to say one day. “What do you think it means?”
“Maybe it’s over,” I said.
“No,” said Betty. “It’s not over.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“She had her legs waxed,” said Betty, and then, very slowly, added, “for the first time.” And then, even more slowly: “And it’s not even summer yet.”
“I see what you mean,” I said.
Betty Searle really was a witch about these things—about many things, in fact. She could go to a dinner party in Washington and the next day she could tell you who was about to be fired—just on the basis of the seating plan! She should have been a Kremlinologist in the days when everything we knew about Russia was based on the May Day photograph. Twitches, winks, and shrugs that seemed like mere nervous mannerisms to ordinary mortals were gale force indicators to Betty. Once, for example, at a cocktail reception, she realized that the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare was about to be canned because the vice president’s wife kissed him hello and then patted him on the shoulder.
“Anyone pats you on the shoulder when you’re in the cabinet, you’re in big trouble,” Betty said the next day.
“But it was only the vice president’s wife,” I said.
Betty shook her head, as if I would never ever learn. Later that day, she called the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and told him that his days were numbered, but he was so busy fighting with the tobacco lobby that he paid no attention. Two days later, the tobacco lobby rented the grand ballroom of the Washington Hilton to celebrate his ouster, and the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare started preparing to go on the lecture circuit.
“So who do you think Thelma’s involved with?” Betty said.
“It could be anyone,” I said.
“Of course it could be anyone,” said Betty, “but who is it?”
“What about Congressman Toffler?” I said.
“You think so?” said Betty.
“She’s always talking about how brilliant he is,” I said.
“And she seated him next to herself at her last dinner party,” said Betty.
“I’ll ask Mark,” I said. “He was seated on her other side.”
“Do you think Thelma Rice is having an affair with Congressman Toffler?” I asked Mark that night.
“No,” said Mark.
“Well, whoever she’s having an affair with, she’s still having it,” I said.
“How do you know?” said Mark.
“She had her legs waxed,” I said. “And it’s only May.”
“The Ladies’ Central is busy this week, isn’t it?” said Mark. “Who’d you hear that from?”
“Betty,” I said.
Mark went back to reading Architectural Digest, and shortly thereafter Thelma Rice went to France for a few weeks, and Betty and I moved on to the subject of the president’s assistant, who was calling Betty in the middle of the night and saying, “Meet me in the Rotunda and I’ll tickle your tits,” and other bizarre remarks encompassing Washington and sex.
“What should I do about it?” Betty said one day at lunch.
“Tell him if he does it again you’ll call the newspapers,” I said.
“I did,” said Betty, “and you know what he said? He said, ‘You haven’t lived till you’ve squeezed my Washington Post.’ Then he cackled madly.” She poked at her Chicken Salad Albert Gore. “Anyway, I can’t prove it’s him,” she said, “although Thelma always says he’s a notorious letch.”
“That’s what Mark always says, too,” I said.
I should have figured it out, of course. By the time I did, the thing had been going on for months, for seven months—for exactly as long as my pregnancy. I should have known, should have suspected something sooner, especially since Mark spent so much time that summer at the dentist. There sat Sam and I in West Virginia, making air holes in jars full of caterpillars, and there went Mark, in and out of Washington, to have root canals and gum treatments and instructions in flossing and an actual bridge, never once complaining about the inconvenience or the pain or the boredom of having to listen to Irwin Tannenbaum, D.D.S., drone on about his clarinet. Then it was fall, and we were all back in Washington, and every afternoon, Mark would emerge from his office over the garage and say he was going out to buy socks, and every evening he would come home empty-handed and say, you would not believe how hard it is to find a decent pair of socks in this city. Four weeks it took me to catch on! Inexcusable, especially since it was exactly the sort of thing my first husband said when he came home after spending the afternoon in bed with my best friend Brenda, who subsequently and as a result became my mortal enemy. “Where were you the last six hours?” I said to my first husband. “Out buying light bulbs,” he said. Light bulbs. Socks. What am I doing married to men who come up with excuses like this? Once, when I was married to my first husband, I went off to meet a man in a hotel room at six in the morning and told my husband I was going out to be on the Today show; it never even crossed his mind to turn on the television set to watch. Now, that’s what I call a decent job of lying! Not that it does any good to prove my ingenuity; it doesn’t matter how smart
you are if both your husbands manage to prove how dumb you are as easily as mine had.
Of course, my fling with the man in the hotel room happened a long time ago—before my divorce, before I met Mark, before I decided to marry him and become an incorrigible believer in fidelity. It is of course hideously ironic that the occasion for my total conversion to fidelity was my marriage to Mark, but timing has never been my strong point; and in any case, the alternative, infidelity, doesn’t work. You have only a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can’t remember which one you’ve told which story to, and the next thing you know, you’re moaning, “Oh, Morty, Morty, Morty,” when what you mean is “Oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with both of them simply because you’ve been raised to believe that the only polite response to the words “I love you” is “I love you too,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with only one of them, because you’re too guilty to handle loving them both.
After I found the book with the disgusting inscription in it, I called Mark. I’m embarrassed to tell you where I called him—okay, I’ll tell you: I called him at his shrink’s. He goes to a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria who looks like Carmen Miranda and has a dog named Pepito. “Come home immediately,” I said. “I know about you and Thelma Rice.” Mark did not come home immediately. He came home two hours later because—are you ready for this?—THELMA RICE WAS ALSO AT THE SHRINK’S. They were having a double session! At the family rate!! I did not know this at the time. Not only did Thelma Rice and Mark see Dr. Valdez and her Chihuahua, Pepito, once a week, but so did Thelma’s husband, Jonathan Rice, the undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs. Mark and Thelma saw Chiquita Banana together, and Jonathan Rice saw her alone—and that man has something to do with making peace in the Middle East!
