As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  I could definitely read the alarm on her sister’s face. Ida was standing a little farther back, and I felt her apprehension: Has something awful happened? Did we do anything wrong? Is this some bizarre American holiday nobody told us about that begins with waking people before sunrise on a Tuesday in February? The two of them wore pajama bottoms and T-shirts with the names of bands I’d never heard of.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” I began slowly. But then I couldn’t stop my words from rushing out. “My husband didn’t come home last night! It’s definitely not like him to do something like that. You know him well enough to know that.” The girls seemed to be getting the gist of what I was saying. They weren’t sophisticated Scandinavian types, students whose English was so flawless that they comprehended every nuance, who spoke with such slight accents that they might have come from some far corner of Minnesota. Ida and Ingvild were from a small farming community near the Arctic Circle. As they stared at me—watching my eyes dart insanely from one of them to the other, at my hair, which I suppose was sticking out scarecrow-fashion—they were probably pining for the security of the old chicken coop back home. I tried to slow myself down. “I’m worried about my husband. I need to make a few calls.”

  Though no doubt longing to shoot What the fuck? glances at each other, they both managed to keep their eyes on me. I forced my shoulders into a more relaxed position, since I realized I must look like I was expecting blows from a blunt instrument. I didn’t want them to think I was out of control. The two of them, at least, should stay calm so as not to communicate any more fear to the boys. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “Please take the boys and give them breakfast. And then—whatever. Keep them busy downstairs.”

  “Okay,” Ingvild said.

  “Mrs. Gersten,” Ida finished. They divided a lot of what they said into halves. I once told Jonah I worried the boys would assume this was some practice of multiples, and they’d wind up splitting whatever they had to say into thirds. If they went off to separate colleges, they wouldn’t be able to complete a sentence until Thanksgiving vacation.

  The triplets were eyeing me, probably hoping what they feared—Mommy thought something bad was happening—wasn’t true. They wanted Mommy to be okay and everything to be wonderful. I flashed them my razzle-dazzle smile, the one I employed at medical conventions. It always worked.

  Except Evan saw through it. His Mommy radar was picking up bleeps of phoniness. Now he would be agitated all day. When the girls took them all down to the kitchen, he’d still be so rattled by the mere fact of my falseness that he’d puke up his breakfast. That would set off a chain reaction: Mason would gag at the pink and yellow blobs of Froot Loops on the polyurethaned bamboo kitchen floor, then Dash would have to display how tough he was by mimicking Mason’s retching sounds. Evan would vomit again, this time from overstimulation.

  The five of them headed to the stairs. Ida, who had the crowd-control instincts of a collie herding sheep, rushed ahead so she could set the pace of the boys. Ingvild descended slowly, not holding the banister, like a bride making her entrance. Racing back toward the bedroom, I fell down flat as my nightgown slid around my legs and hobbled me. I managed to push myself up to my knees but couldn’t catch my breath to take in enough air and propel myself to a standing position. Alone, I was hit again with panic. Where could Jonah possibly be? I was no longer befuddled from sleep, but my fear so overwhelmed me that I could barely manage to get up off the floor. Thinking things through was beyond me.

  When my feet left the sturdy hallway carpeting and felt the soft rug in our bedroom, I relaxed enough to let my mind escape into fantasy: Oh! Wait! I know: Maybe our phone’s ringer is off. Yes! That could definitely be it. Maybe Jonah had an accident, and someone in an emergency room had called to tell me. Not wanting to leave a frightening message, that nurse had left a note for the chief resident on the next shift: Please notify wife of traumatic brain injury, bed 7. Collapsing scaffolding in front of building on Madison Avenue. (FYI his ID from Sinai/he’s MD!!). Tell her he’s here. I hiked up my nightgown and hurried around the bed to the phone.

  The ringer was on. To double-check, I raced back to my side of the bed and grabbed my BlackBerry from my nightstand. My hands were trembling so uncontrollably, it took me a couple of tries to press the speed dial, H for home. As our phone shrilled its first ring, I jumped, then ran back around the bed, fleetingly forgetting I had just dialed myself. It’s Jonah, and he feels absolutely terrible because he forgot—then I glanced down and saw my cell number on the regular phone’s caller ID readout.

  I wanted to heave my BlackBerry across the room, hard, and create a vicious bruise on the Venetian-plaster finish on the wall opposite the bed. But my shaking hands decided to obey some barely conscious command from my brain: I brought up Recent Calls on the little screen of the phone. Hope lived under a second. My last incoming call had come at 6:47 P.M. the night before: Aurora Hartman saying, “It would be a major blessing for the community if you’d co-chair the Trike-a-thon event for Tuttle Farm nursery school, because this could be a huge, huge fund-raiser for Tuttle, and you do everything with such style, and oh my God, your energy—I’m always in awe—and, Susie, this is our chance to make a major difference in our kids’ lives.”

  What had sounded so comfortably familiar the night before—Aurora failing to be charming yet again—now, because of its ordinariness, felt like a smack in the face. My heart couldn’t keep up with its own pounding; it slammed against my chest wall so hard . . . how could it not explode? I pictured pieces of cardiac muscle pierced on the shards of my shattered ribs.

  Jonah hadn’t come home the night before. He hadn’t reached out to me. Therefore, something unthinkable had happened. Absolutely. Sure, I could imagine him walking in the door and running upstairs shouting, “Susie, Susie, you’re not going to believe what happened to me!” But it was getting harder each minute to take off on any flight into fantasy.

  My husband was missing. Then I thought, Missing? If I’m lucky.

  Chapter Three

  I sat on the edge of the mattress. Instead of doing what I meant to—covering my face and sobbing—I started sliding and almost landed on my ass. My nightgown again, and the perils of the good life: Everything was so smooth, there was hardly any friction between the gown and the Egyptian cotton sheet. My bare feet saved me with an up-down, up-down step, like in one of those folk dances performed by people trailing ribbons. When at last I got steady, I was panting, almost gasping, from the effort. This was crazy. I was strong, fit, well coordinated if not brilliantly athletic.

  Except the bottom had dropped out of my life. Ninety-nine percent of me believed that. But that other one percent was almost afraid to call Jonah’s cell: He would answer with his cold, busy voice: “For God’s sake, Susie, there’s an emergency here! Dammit, don’t you think if I had a free second—if anyone here had a free second—you’d have gotten a call?”

  I called anyway. Three rings and then “This is Dr. Gersten. I can’t answer the phone right now. To leave a message, please wait for the tone. If this is an emergency, please press the number five and the pound key.”

  “Jonah, sweetheart, I know something’s happened—your not coming home at all last night—and I’m terribly worried. Please call me as soon as you can, or have someone call me to let me know how you are. I love you.” Right then it hit me. Maybe something had happened in the city during the night and I didn’t know about it yet. I rushed for the remote. But my hands started shaking again, so it took four tries to turn on the TV. I didn’t care whether it would bring terror or relief. I just needed to know what was out there. That was what I’d done for months after 9/11, turning on the TV every few hours, ready for the worst but hoping for the sight of Nothing Catastrophic. I’d longed for boring weather forecasters standing before maps, McDonald’s commercials. And that was exactly what I got now: normality as presented by News Channel 4. Darlene Rodriguez was asking Michael Gargiulo if he knew why people used to
eat oysters only in months that had an R in them. The sports guy glanced up at Darlene and Michael from his papers. From his grin, it looked like he’d been born with double the normal number of teeth; all of them gleamed with pleasure at his knowing the oyster answer.

  I switched off the TV and paced back and forth on the carpet, trying for grace under pressure—or at least enough self-control so I wouldn’t howl like a dying animal. I leaned against the footboard. Considering all the crap I’d read in my life, how come I’d never come across a magazine article entitled “What to Do When You Wake Up and Your Husband Isn’t There”? It would have had a bullet-pointed sidebar of suggestions that could flash into my head.

  The only information I could imagine in such a sidebar was “Phone police.” No, that probably wasn’t right. I remembered a TV show on which the wife called the cops and the guy on the phone asked, “How long has he been missing?” When she said, “Well, he didn’t come home last night,” the cop told her, “Sorry. We can’t take any action until he’s gone for three days. Try not to worry. Nine times out of ten, they just show up.” The cop had an edge to his voice—world-weary, snide—as if he were picturing a staggering-drunk husband, or one with the lousy luck to fall asleep after having sex with his bimbo girlfriend.

  I walked across the bedroom toward the window that faced the front and sat in Jonah’s favorite chair in the world, a Regency bergère with gilded wood arms and legs. It was upholstered in creamy silk with a ribbon motif. When I’d spotted the bergère at an auction house, an embarrassingly loud “Ooh!” had escaped me. It was a beauty, fit for British royalty—and okay, suburban Jewish doctors, too.

  Because I wasn’t the only one blown away by its beauty; Jonah had wanted the chair way more than I did. He’d sat on it and noted in his objective clinician’s tone that it wasn’t comfortable. You didn’t see it, but you could feel its back angled in a bizarre way. Instead of sitting straight, you felt pitched slightly forward, as if you were examining your knees. But he added in his deeper-than-usual, I’ve-got-a-refined-aesthetic-sensibility voice, “It’s a splendid piece.” Also a decent investment. But there was more: I could feel the chair’s power over him. It made him feel not just well-off—Hey, I can afford this exquisite objet—but incredibly refined. If George the Whatever had needed a court plastic surgeon, Jonah knew he would have been tapped. In a flash of marital ESP, I caught all this in under a second. We bid. We bought. For both of us, sitting in that chair always made us feel elegant and rich. Protected, too: We’ve made it. We’re upper-class, and therefore things go the way we wish them to go.

  Even in that instant, petrified that life was about to give me the cosmic smack in the face that would make every woman on Long Island tell her best friend, “Thank God I’m not Susie Gersten,” I knew if I were sitting in a repro Regency covered in polyester damask, I would feel worse.

  A second later, as I glanced back at my cell phone, the chair vanished from my head. I got up and called information. When the computer said, “City and state, please,” I told it, “New York, New York,” then enunciated “Donald Finsterwald” even while knowing the computer wouldn’t get it, having obviously been programmed not to comprehend New York accents by some hostile Southern Baptist; except for twice in my entire life, I’d always had to wait for an operator.

  Even though it was not yet six in the morning, Donald Finsterwald, the administrator of Jonah’s plastic surgery practice, sounded not just alert but primed, up on the toes of his orthopedic loafers, ready and eager to handle the day’s first crisis. “Hello!” His extreme loyalty to Manhattan Aesthetics always creeped me out because it resembled patriotism more than simple dedication to work. Jonah said I didn’t have an organization mind-set, that every decent-sized office needed a Donald.

  “Hi, Donald. Susie Gersten. Sorry to call so early.” My voice came out squeaky; plus, I was still breathless. I tried calming myself by taking a Lamaze breath through my nose and exhaling it through pursed lips as silently as I could so he wouldn’t think, Partner’s wife breathing hysterically. Watch what you say! “I’m concerned . . . I am worried about . . . Jonah didn’t come home last night. I didn’t get any messages from him.”

  “Oh, I’m sure—” He always strung out his vowels—“Ooooh, Iiii’m suuure”—so even in the best of times, it took practically a week till he got out a sentence. Also, he had one of those unisex voices, so nearly every time he called, if he asked for Dr. Gersten and didn’t say, “Hi, Mrs. Gersten, it’s Donald,” I’d wonder if it was a patient with a question about her new chin implant who’d managed to get Jonah’s home number, or the Irish dermatologist who always sat at the Manhattan Aesthetics table at any Mount Sinai fund-raising gala.

  I said, “Listen, Donald, something is really wrong. Jonah doesn’t not come home. And before you think—”

  “Mrs. Gersten, I would never think—”

  “I know. Of course you wouldn’t.” Truthfully, I had no idea what he would think. Despite his almost pathetic eagerness to please, Donald Finsterwald had always repulsed me. I know I was being unfair, but I couldn’t help it. I saw him as (like antimatter and the Antichrist) the Anti-style, a man who always picked the most heinous clothes and accessories and wore them with total seriousness. What would make someone have his thick prescription lenses stuck into narrow black frames that made him look like he was Peeping Tom checking out the world? Why would he wear strangulating turtlenecks that pushed up his double chin until it hung like a feed bag? Donald’s inner life—he must have one, since everyone was supposed to—was a mystery. “Sorry. Forgive my manners,” I apologized. “I’m so beside myself, Donald. In all the years we’ve been married, Jonah’s never not come home. I mean, if he’s going to be over a half hour or forty-five minutes late, he calls. Or has someone call.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he said. “There have been a fair number of times I got word from Dr. Gersten, ‘Have someone call my wife.’ The very moment I get an order like that, it’s carried out.”

  “Jonah tells me about the great job you’re doing,” I said. “And I know if you’d heard from him, you’d call me immediately. What I’m wondering, though, is if you heard . . .” The phone was in my right hand; I used my left to massage my temples with my thumb and middle finger. “Have there been any calls from the police? Or from the office’s alarm company? Maybe a hospital? I mean, not about one of his patients but about something happening to Jonah?”

  “No. Of course not. I would have called you immediately, Mrs. Gersten.”

  “I know, but I just wanted to be sure you weren’t, whatever, protecting me or waiting until, like, around seven o’clock, before calling me or Dr. Noakes or Dr. Jiménez.” Jonah’s partners, Gilbert John Noakes and Layne Jiménez, would have called me right away if they’d heard anything.

  “Oh no, no. I wouldn’t have waited to get in touch.”

  “Okay, fine. I just wanted to be sure before I started making any other calls.”

  “Oh. Who were you thinking of calling? I mean, could it be better to wait, it being so early? Dr. Gersten, maybe if he had some sort of emergency at Sinai, he might have gone to one of those rooms where residents can rest, because he wouldn’t want to disturb you at this hour.”

  I was on the verge of saying, “Oh no, he knows I’d be up because the boys always wake us at five-thirty.” Then I realized Donald was buying time so he could figure out if Jonah’s not coming home could be a potential catastrophe for the practice. Was Jonah sick or dead or God knows what? Or was his absence the result of some marital misunderstanding that could end in either tears and kisses (“Oh, sweetie, I was so worried!”) or else in a gargantuan retainer to a matrimonial lawyer? Maybe Donald was stalling so he could call Gilbert John Noakes, the practice’s senior partner, and get some guidance on dealing with a hysterical wife.

  Except I wasn’t hysterical. In talking with Donald Finsterwald, I had concentrated on sounding calm. Calm was good, wasn’t it? Under normal circumstances, I came ac
ross like a calm person. Pleasant, friendly. An excellent doctor’s wife, with just enough sex and sparkle to keep me out of the ranks of Xanaxed zombie ladies or sugarplum spouses who smiled in lieu of talking. I had my own career, but I didn’t bore the crap out of people by carrying on as if floral design were the answer to the world’s prayers.

  And just now with Donald, I’d been courteous, balanced. Totally nonhysterical. Good, I’d paid my dues to Manhattan Aesthetics. So instead of agreeing to wait before making any calls, or telling Donald that I appreciated his input and would give it the serious consideration it deserved, I dropped the nice and snapped, “I’ve got to go.”

  Then I hung up and called the police.

  Chapter Four

  It wasn’t only that I had what in the flower business is called “a great nose,” a highly sensitive sense of smell: Anyone with two nostrils would instantly know that Detective Sergeant Timothy Coleman’s body odor was over-the-top. And his generous application of synthetic lime cologne did nothing to camouflage it.

  “Please excuse me, Mrs. Gersten,” Nassau County’s finest said after he cleared his throat. His manners were exquisite, as if to apologize for his pungency. Maybe as a child he’d been beaten and forced to memorize Emily Post’s Etiquette; his politeness was as aggressive as his BO. “Are you sure it’s all right if I sit down?”

  “Of course,” I said, fast as I could. “Please.” I couldn’t wait to get to the couch. The chemical reaction of his smell added to my ever escalating fear was so explosive that—ka-boom!—I got dizzy two seconds after I’d opened the door for him. Now I almost dove onto the couch so I wouldn’t risk swooning into it.