Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Not a word about how he must have been crazy. Not a word about how he was sorry. Perhaps this is Mark’s way of being understated, I thought. And then again, perhaps not. In fact, probably not. I kept on shaking my head. I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “I love you,” he said. He said it with the animation of a tree sloth. “I want you to come home,” he said. “You belong at home.”
    “I’m not coming home if you’re going to see her anymore,” I said.
    “I’m not going to see her anymore,” he said.
    There was a long silence. I kept expecting him to reach out for my hand, or touch my face. He didn’t. Rachel, I said to myself, this will not do. You cannot go anywhere, much less home, with a man whose idea of an apology does not include even a hypocritical show of affection. Say no. Tell him to drop dead. Crack one of your father’s atrocious lamps over his head. Go into the kitchen and invent the instant waffle. Anything.
    “I know this is difficult for you,” Mark said, “but it’s difficult for me, too.”
    And then Mark started to cry.
Mark
started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed to me that if anyone was entitled to cry in this scene, it was going to be me; but the man had run off with my part. “I’m in a lot of pain,” he said.
    There has been a lot written in recent years about the fact that men don’t cry enough. Crying is thought to be a desirable thing, a sign of a mature male sensibility, and it is generally believed that when little boys are taught that it is unmanly to cry, they grow up unable to deal with pain and grief and disappointment and feelings in general. I would like to say twothings about this. The first is that I have always believed that crying is a highly overrated activity: women do entirely too much of it, and the last thing we ought to want is for it to become a universal excess. The second thing I want to say is this: beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.
    Not that I knew this at the time. If I had, I could have stayed in New York with my pathetic dreams of Detective Nolan and six kinds of smoked salmon. What I actually did, though, is that I looked at Mark, sitting there, a picture of misery, and I crumbled. I can’t stand to see a man cry, that’s the truth. I can’t stand to see a woman cry either, but the only woman I ever really see crying to any extent is me, and even though you may think I do an awful lot of it for someone who can’t stand to see it, the fact is that I cry much less now than I used to. When I was young, a rude salesman at the hardware store could make me cry.
    “All right,” I said to Mark. “I’ll come home.”
    “Good,” said Mark, and he stopped crying. “You can put the ring back on now,” he said.
    I shook my head no.
    “For God’s sake, Rachel,” he said. “Put the ring back on.”
    “I gave it away,” I said.
    “You what?” he said.
    “I gave it away.”
    “To whom?” he said.
    “To a celebrity auction,” I said.
    “Is this a joke?” he said.
    “Yes,” I said, “and not a bad one, all things considered.”
    “Put the ring back on,” he said.
    “Only part of it was a joke,” I said.
    “Which part?” said Mark. Mark used to like the fact that I make jokes in adverse circumstances, but clearly the charm of that had begun to wear thin.
    “The part about the celebrity auction was a joke,” I said. “The part about giving it away wasn’t.”
    “You gave the ring away,” said Mark.
    “Not of my own free will,” I said.
    “Someone took it away from you,” said Mark.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Do you want me to guess who it was?” he said.
    “My group was robbed,” I said.
    “That’s funny,” said Mark. He started to laugh. “By an outsider, or by someone in the group?”
    “By an outsider,” I said, “and it’s not funny. He held a gun to my