As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  But with three four-year-olds plus two nineteen-year-old live-in Norwegian au pairs (twins) and a five-day-a-week, eight-hours-a-day housekeeper, our chances for hot sex were close to zero—even when Bernadine wasn’t there and Ida and Ingvild had a weekend off. After “Sleep tight, sweetie” times three, Jonah and I were rarely finished being parents. We still had to deal with Evan’s nightmares about boy-swallowing snakes, Dashiell’s nighttime forays downstairs to play with remote controls, and Mason’s frequent wakenings. So even ho-hum marital hookups weren’t as common as they had been. On those exceptional nights when I still had enough energy to feel a tingle of desire, Jonah was usually too wiped from his ten-hour day of rhinoplasties, rhytidectomies, mentoplasties, genioplasties, office hours, and worrying about what the economy was doing to elective surgery to want to leap into bed for anything more than sleep.

  Even though I was clueless about what my husband was doing when he was actually doing it (though now I can picture Jonah stepping onto the leopard-print carpet of Dorinda’s front hall, his milk-chocolate-brown eyes widening at the awesome display of lightly freckled breasts—which of course he would know weren’t implants—that rose from the scoop neck of her clingy red tank dress), I do remember sighing once or twice over how Jonah’s and my private time lacked . . . something.

  Fire. That’s what was lacking. I knew I—we—had to figure out some way to cut down the noise in our lives so we could once again feel desire. Otherwise? There could be trouble down the road.

  Not that I didn’t trust him. Jonah was a one-woman man. A lot of it was that he had an actual moral code. Not just the predictable DON’T SHOPLIFT AT BERGDORF’S MEN’S STORE. Seriously, how many super-busy, successful guys in their thirties were there who (like Jonah) absolutely refused to weasel out of jury duty because they believed it was a citizen’s obligation to serve?

  Also, Jonah was monogamous by nature, even though I hate the word “monogamous.” It always brings to mind a nature movie from eighth grade about a mongoose that had dried-out red fur and brown eyes. Just as I was thinking, Oh my God, it looks like the Disney version of my mother! the mongoose gave a gut-grinding shriek and whomp! It jumped on a snake and ripped it apart in the most brutal, revolting way.

  Okay, forget mongoose and monogamous. Jonah always had one girlfriend at a time. We met standing on line in a drugstore when he was a senior at Yale. I was a freshman in the landscape architecture program at the University of Connecticut at Storrs but was in New Haven for a party and had forgotten lip gloss. The weekend before, he’d broken up with a music major named Leigh who played the harp. That we actually met, going to schools sixty-five miles apart, was a miracle. Right from the get-go, I became the sole woman in his life. I knew that not only in my head but in my heart.

  And in the years that followed? At medical school, lots of the women students were drawn to him. At five feet eight, Jonah couldn’t qualify as a big hunk, but he was a fabulous package. He looked strong with that squared jaw you see on cowboy-booted politicians from the West who make shitty remarks about immigrants, which of course he never would. Plus, he was physically strong, with a muscled triangle of a body. And the amazing thing was, even though Jonah was truly hot in his non-tall way and had that grown-up-rich-in-Manhattan air of self-possession, he gave off waves of decency. So his female classmates, the nurses, they were into him. But he had me. He never even noticed them. Okay, he knew he was way up there on lots of women’s Ten Most Wanted, which couldn’t have hurt his ego. But my husband was true by nature.

  However, a girl can’t be too careful. Since I wanted Jonah more than I wanted to be a landscape architect (which was a good thing, because with the department’s math and science requirements, my first semester wasn’t a winner), I quit UConn five minutes after he proposed. There I was, eighteen, but I knew it was the real thing. So I moved in with him in New Haven. At the time I was so in love—and so overjoyed at never again having to deal with Intro to Botany or Problem Solving—that dropping landscape architecture seemed all pros and no cons.

  I transferred to Southern Connecticut State in New Haven as an art major and wound up with a concentration in jewelry design, an academic area that evoked double blinks from Jonah’s friends at Yale (as in Could I have heard her right?) followed by overenthusiastic comments of the “That sounds sooo interesting!” variety.

  Much later, it hit me how sad it was, my tossing off my life’s dream with so little thought. From the time of my third-grade class trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, when I gaped at the thousands of roses covering arches and climbing lattices, the bushes laid out in a plan that had to one-up the Garden of Eden, and inhaled the mingling of roses and sweet June air, I understood flowers were somehow my ticket to a world of beauty. Those scents transformed me from a shy kid into an eight-year-old live wire: “Hey, lady!” I hollered to the guide. “What do you call someone who thinks all this up?”

  “A landscape architect.”

  Strange, but until I talked to my guidance counselor in my senior year at Madison, I never told anybody this was what I wanted. No big secret; I just never mentioned it. The librarians knew, because two or three days a week, I walked straight from school to sit at a long table and look at giant landscape books. When I got a little older, I took the subway to the garden itself or to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The librarian in the Arts and Music section there, a guy with a face like a Cabbage Patch doll’s, would always ask, “What do you want to look at today, garden girl?”

  Though I did turn out to be a quitter, landscape architecture–wise, I wasn’t a loser. First of all, I snagged Jonah. I got my BA in art from Southern. Also, from the get-go in New Haven, I proved I wasn’t going to become one of those burdensome, useless doctors’ wives. I moved my things into Jonah’s apartment on a Saturday while he fielded hysterical calls from his parents. By late Monday afternoon I had landed a late-afternoon/weekend design job at the crème de la crème of central Connecticut florists by whipping up a showstopping arrangement of white flowers in milk, cream, and yogurt containers.

  Why am I babbling on like this? Obviously, I don’t want to deal with the story I need to tell. But also because I never bought that business about the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. What’s so great about short? Too often it’s the easy way out. Plus, a straight line is minimalist, and my work is all about embellishment. Any jerk can stick a bunch of thistle into an old mayonnaise jar, but what will people’s reaction be? Why couldn’t that thistle-pulling bitch leave the environment alone? But I take the identical thistle and jar, grab a few leaves or blades of grass, and voilà! create an arrangement that makes those same people sigh and say, Exquisite. Makes you really appreciate nature. And so simple. It really wasn’t simple, but if your design shouts, Hey, look how brilliant I am, it’s not much of a design.

  Anyway, after Jonah graduated from college and then finished Yale med school, we moved on from New Haven. With time ticking away like that, a lot of men who marry young start thinking, Do-over! Not Jonah. Even after ten years of marriage (along with two failed attempts at in vitro), when some other deeply attractive senior resident in plastic surgery at Mount Sinai might have dropped a starter wife for a more fertile number two (maybe one from a Manhattan family even richer and more connected than the Gerstens, one who could push his practice), Jonah stayed in love with me. Never once, in word or deed, did he communicate, It’s not my fault you can’t conceive.

  Once we were settled back in New York, I began realizing my chosen career shouldn’t have been chosen by me. I did not love jewelry design: Finding brilliant new ways to display pyrope and tsavorite garnets in Christmas earrings wasn’t a thrill. Living in Manhattan made me want to work with something real, and I yearned for the smell and feel of flowers.

  So I wound up with a design job at Bouquet, which billed itself as “Manhattan’s finest fleuriste.” While I was still finding myself, Jonah was already a success, and not just in th
e OR. He was surrounded by enamored patients. Housewives and advertising executives, beauties and battle-axes. So many had crushes on him. They would have given anything for a taste of his toned pecs, his status, his obvious decency. Except those women only got what they paid for—a first-rate surgeon and a caring doctor. Not that I was complacent. Throughout our marriage, I saw what happened to other doctors’ wives as well as to some of our neighbors when we moved to the North Shore of Long Island. I understood: Marriage is always a work in progress.

  On that particular night, I was too wiped to be inventive about how to turn up the romantic heat. In fact, I was too wiped to do anything. So instead of calling Andrea to discuss what seasonal berries would be right for Polly Kimmel, who wanted ikebana arrangements for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, or exfoliating my heels, or reading The Idiot for my book club because Marcia Riklis had said, “Enough with the chick lit,” I flopped onto our Louis XV–style marriage bed without my usual satisfied glance at its noble mahogany headboard and footboard with their carvings of baskets of flowers and garlands of leaves. Almost instantly, I fell into an all-too-rare deep, healing sleep. Sure, some internal ear listened for any sound from the boys’ rooms, but one thing I’m certain of: I would have been deaf to the soft tread of Jonah’s footsteps as he climbed the stairs.

  If he had.

  Chapter Two

  “What?” I mumbled about ten hours later. I didn’t want to exchange the pleasure of French lavender sprayed on my pillowcase for the daily blast of triplet morning breath, which for some reason reminded me of the cheap bottled salad dressing my mother bought, the kind with brown globules and red pepper flecks suspended in a mucous-like vinaigrette. The boys were fraternal, not identical, triplets. Yet not only did they smell alike, they also had that multiple-birth juju, sharing some magical connection, like their triplet alarm clock that rang only for the three of them at the same instant each day, right before five-thirty.

  Jonah always said if he’d known about the five-thirty business, he wouldn’t have agreed to get them big-boy beds for their third birthdays. But he knew we really didn’t have any choice. Dash and Evan had inherited my height and all three of them had variations on Jonah’s solid musculature. If we hadn’t gotten the beds, we’d have had to deal with three little King Kongs breaking through the bars of their cribs or climbing over the rails.

  That morning, like every other, the boys raced toward our bedroom. Outside our open door, as usual, they merged into a single wild-haired, twelve-limbed creature that climbed up Jonah’s side of the bed. The game never changed: He would grab them one by one and bench-press them up from his chest to arm’s length. Then there would be the usual breathless laughter and shrieks of “Daddy, Daddy, I’m flying!” As he finished with each one, he’d set him down between us.

  So I knew that within a minute, Evan, Dash, and Mason would be climbing all over me, wild from their high flying, to yell into my ear: “Cocoa Krispies!” “My Band-Aid came off! I need a new one!” “Put on Rescue Heroes now!” When I wouldn’t respond, one of them, usually Mason, would remember there was a concept called politeness and scream, “Please!” which would bring forth an earsplitting chorus.

  Except that morning they woke me with something completely different: a quiet question. “Where’s Daddy?” My mind started to reply, Probably downstairs getting a cup of coffee, but before the words made it to my mouth, I turned my head.

  The white duvet over Jonah’s side of the bed was like a pre-dawn snowfall, immaculate. The sham on his pillow with its subtle off-white monogram, SGJ, was pristine. The hideous plastic digital clock with its cracked red and gray Camp Chipinaw medallion that he insisted on keeping on the hand-tooled leather top of his English Centennial nightstand read 5:28.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  My gut must have understood something was terribly wrong before I did, because I reacted so primitively. My eyes darted across the white linen field, and an instant later, I took the same path. Like a snake with prey in sight, I slithered over the undisturbed duvet at amazing speed and grabbed the phone on Jonah’s side of the bed. The optimist in me took over. I pressed it to my ear, ready for the beep of a voice-mail signal. I even shushed the children so I could key in our password and hear Jonah’s message. Yet when all I heard was the standard steady dial tone, some small, shadowed thing inside me was not surprised.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  Say anything, I commanded myself. Don’t let them see you panic. Because there’s no reason for panic yet. Cause for discomfort? Yes. Fear? Of course. But say something Mommyish. Lighthearted or at least reassuring, like “Daddy had to—” The sentence would not finish itself in my head, much less emerge. I vaulted out of bed and ran toward the bathroom. The boys followed, calling out, “Mommy?” With each step, each second without a response, their voices rose.

  As I ran, I tried to think what could have happened to Jonah. A freak accident? Maybe last night, when I’d poured my Dramatic Radiance TRF cream into my hand, a tiny blob had dropped on the floor. When he’d gone in there as I slept, he’d slipped on the blob and cracked his head against the white onyx counter! The image was so vivid: him on his back on the Carrara marble floor, eyes closed. No, wait. Eyes open, blinking, because even though he had been unconscious the whole night, he was now coming to. Aside from a slight headache and an ugly red bump on his left temple, he was all right! In my mind I was kneeling beside him, crying out, “Oh Jonah, oh God, oh my God,” then calming myself so I could turn to the boys and say, “See? Daddy’s fine.”

  Except Jonah wasn’t there. My mind went blank because fright took over and pushed everything else out. It got hold of my body, too. All I felt was that scary internal vibration from nonstop adrenaline, like a running engine that couldn’t be turned off.

  I braced my hands on the strip of countertop in front of the sink. My back was turned to the boys. All of a sudden, some basic animal instinct for keeping the nest intact momentarily overcame my fright. It seized control, forcing me into action, if not rationality. I grabbed the Bio-Molecular firming eye serum I’d left by the faucet the night before and put it back in the medicine cabinet. Then I yanked a hand towel off the rack and polished the fingerprint I’d just made on the mirror. I folded and refolded the towel lengthwise into thirds and hung it up again.

  Since Evan, Dash, and Mason rarely asked a question without each of them repeating it at least three times, I was still getting pounded with “Where’s Daddy?” There was no fright in their voices, maybe discomfort over my leap from the bed, some concern, but mostly bright curiosity over this intriguing change in the morning’s routine.

  I was about to charge over to the linen closet and get a fresh bottle of L’Essence de Soleil liquid hand soap when the endangered-animal-trying-to-get-control nesting instinct exhausted itself and the terror returned. I whimpered, a high sound in my throat. In the movies it would have built into a shriek of pure terror, but since it was me in my bathroom, I made myself turn and face the boys. “I’m not sure where Daddy is.” Evan, more fearful than his brothers, always on guard against any monster beyond a closed door or inside a toy chest, cocked his head and watched me through narrowed eyes. “Probably . . .” I threw out the word, stalling until I could come up with something that would pacify not just Evan but me. “There was an emergency at the hospital and he had to go there. Maybe he was in the operating room all night. He could still be there.” The marble floor was ice that rose through my feet. I knew I hadn’t been standing there that long, but the bones of my feet felt frozen; my ankles ached from the cold. At the same time, my hands perspired. I wiped them on my nightgown, but the apricot silk charmeuse wouldn’t accept anything as déclassé as sweat. “Breakfast time!” I announced in an upbeat tone. I guess I was trying to come off confident, like one of those TV-commercial microwaving moms whose brains lack despair neurons.

  Instead of following the boys downstairs to pour out Evan’s and Maso
n’s usual additive-rich, dye-laden cereal (for which, truly, I did feel guilty) and hand Dash his unvarying choice, a container of vanilla yogurt, I rushed past them, through the bedroom, down the long hall to the other side of the house, and banged on the door of our au pairs. “Ida! Ingvild!” My voice ascended to whatever pitch was one notch below hysteria. I tried to pull it down an octave. “I need both of you right away!”

  I commanded myself, Stop overreacting. A normal woman discovering her husband had not spent the night at home wouldn’t be on the brink of psychosis. She wouldn’t be so sick with dread that she wanted to puke up last night’s fusilli primavera: wanted to, as a purge from the horror poisoning her. At most, a normal wife would be frantic—Oh my God, maybe he was in a terrible car crash! Or super pissed off—How stupid is he that he thinks I’ll believe some stupid excuse: He got so sick from E. coli nachos at a sports bar that he passed out for eight hours? Already I was miles beyond that. I pounded on the girls’ door as if my clenched fists were racing each other. “Ida! Ingvild!”

  Every other second it hit me how important it was that I didn’t lose control. The boys, right behind me, would absorb my fright. I couldn’t hold back: Terror was appropriate. Jonah was unfailingly dependable: the ever-responsible Dr. Gersten. A man of routine. A man of decency, too. Would he ever willingly leave me open to this kind of fright? Not in a billion years.

  If there had been some horrific urban emergency that had pulled Jonah into Mount Sinai for unscheduled surgery, he’d have had someone call me. Later, right from the OR—surgical mask in place, skin hook in hand—he’d have demanded someone double-check that the call to his wife had been made. If he’d been in an accident, it would have occurred hours before, on his way home, and someone would have phoned.

  Ingvild, who had plucked away her nearly invisible blond eyebrows and who, by day, replaced them with penciled circumflex accents, opened the door so fast she nearly got punched by my pounding fists. Fresh from sleep, her round, browless face showed about as much emotion as a picture drawn by one of the boys in the first year of preschool: a big circle with minuscule circle eyes and nose plus a crooked line for a mouth.