I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron Page A

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 toldher, 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 butthat 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, andtheir 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