by Susan Isaacs
“Thank you so much,” he said.
We had already spent twenty minutes talking at the kitchen table, but then my housekeeper had arrived, toting a bag of her own microfiber cloths. Driven as Bernadine was by her obsessive-compulsive need to empty the dishwasher before she took off her coat, the detective and I couldn’t stay in the kitchen. However, bringing Coleman into the living room hadn’t changed the environment. He stank. And his excessive courtesy was simultaneously exhausting me and making me a nervous wreck. What’s his game? What does he want from me?
“The reason I’m asking for all this information now, ma’am, is so I don’t need to keep having to come back to you for more. I hope you understand and can bear with me.”
“Of course. I appreciate . . .” Besides the dizziness, my mind kept veering off in a hundred directions. It didn’t seem like I’d offered any helpful information about Jonah that Detective Sergeant Coleman could use. Not one single “Good, I see, right” had escaped his lips. So I felt doubly pressured to make a positive impression. I wanted him to think I was a fine, deserving person so he’d work day and night to find my husband. But he wouldn’t think I was so fine if I went berserk, which I felt I could do at any second. If I started screeching hysterically—“I want my husband! I want my husband!”—while grabbing the detective’s lapels and shaking him, he would get sidetracked. Maybe he’d decide I was one of those “She seemed so nice” wives who, three days before her period, axes her husband and shoves him into a calico-covered Container Store box with the croquet set and pool toys—then saunters back to the kitchen to make zucchini bread.
The tension was too much. Also, from the minute I opened the door, I was afraid he’d be hostile because of my height. Tall women get to some short guys, and not in a good way. And Coleman was short, like he’d been zoomed down to 75 percent. With me at five feet nine inches, I didn’t want him to feel I was the type who didn’t take mini-men seriously, even though he’d never see the five-five he probably lied about on his driver’s license. I wasn’t hung up on height. Jonah was shorter, but not dollhousey like Coleman. Jonah was solid and strong.
Then I got upset with myself: It’s not about you or Detective Sergeant Smell-o-rama. It’s about Jonah. I hung my head with shame—not a good idea, because the sudden shift of position made me want to throw up.
Coleman, perched on the edge of the seat of a carved Sri Lankan chair, kept the questions coming. I suppose I answered. Images kept flashing inside my head and overpowered any thought: Jonah writhing on the floor in some obscure men’s room at Mount Sinai, delirious with fever from a superbug he’d caught in the hospital. Jonah carjacked, bound and gagged in the black, near airless trunk of his BMW.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” Detective Sergeant Coleman said, “but has Dr. Gersten ever, uh, not shown up before? Not come home?”
“Never. Jonah is completely reliable. I can always count on . . .” The tears I’d held back in the kitchen started to spill. I wasn’t actually crying; my eyes just became full and overflowed, like a stopped-up sink. “He’s so responsible.” It came out as a froggy sound because I was choked up. “That’s why I think it must be something bad, because . . .” The tears cascaded down my cheeks. Coleman sat there. Instead of averting his eyes, he watched. A tiny spiral-bound notepad rested on his knee. Its size seemed grossly inadequate for recording the huge facts of Jonah’s vanishing.
Finally, I found the energy to propel myself up. “Excuse me,” I said. I rushed into the guest bathroom, blew my nose, wiped my eyes.
When I returned to the living room, Coleman was still at the edge of his chair. “I didn’t know whether to call the police this soon,” I told him. “I remember from movies when detectives say they have to wait forty-eight hours or three days until they can look into a matter.”
“Oh no, ma’am. If someone who keeps a regular pattern suddenly doesn’t show up, we should know about it. A lot of times the local precinct only sends in regular officers to take the initial report, like if it’s a teenager who’s probably with a friend, or if it’s someone with a history of instability. The next day, if that sort of person is still unaccounted for, the department follows up with a detective. But with someone like Dr. Gersten, what with his position in the community, well, you know.”
“Right.”
“Now, when we were in the kitchen, you mentioned your last conversation with your husband was yesterday afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“Can you recall what each of you said in that conversation, ma’am?” I was examining a medallion of roses and laurel leaves on the needlepoint rug. He repeated “Ma’am?” louder, which made me jump.
“I don’t know. Let me think. It was a regular late-afternoon phone call. Jonah still had a couple of post-op patients to see. Then he had some odds and ends to do in the city before he came home.”
“Did he happen to say what they were, ma’am?”
“The only thing he mentioned was maybe going to Tod’s. It’s about twenty blocks downtown from his office. A shoe store.”
“To . . . ?”
To have a martini, shmuck. “To try on a pair of shoes,” I said. “Brown suede lace-up shoes. He’d seen them in the window. But he was pretty tired, so chances were he wouldn’t bother.”
“He said he probably wouldn’t bother, or was that your sense of things?”
“He said it.”
“Had he been under any special pressure lately?” I must have given him a Duh look because he added, “That he was tired from a more-than-usual workload? Or maybe family pressure?”
“No. I mean, he’s in a great surgical practice. Well, it’s been less than stellar lately, the economy being what it is, but they’re doing better than most of their colleagues. So far, so good.” Coleman blinked. I noticed he had no sign of beard, as if he used Nair instead of a razor. Imagining stroking a hairless, almost poreless man’s cheek was so repulsive that I forgot I was in the middle of answering his question. When Coleman uncocked his head and looked into my eyes straight-on, I quickly said, “Sorry, I lost my train of thought.”
“You were saying your husband wanted to build up his practice,” he said.
“Right,” I said. Coleman wiped the tip of his pen on the pad. He seemed ready to jot down some significant detail. “A lot of his business comes from referrals from other doctors, so he needs to stay active in the medical community. Like if a woman asks a doctor she knows, ‘Can you recommend someone for . . . ?’” I patted the underside of my chin with the back of my hand to demonstrate. “Jonah says if that doctor has run into him in the last week or two, he’s likely to say, ‘Jonah Gersten. Definitely. He’s first-rate.’ Which he truly is. If you’re not well trained and gifted, no one’s going to risk recommending you. But Jonah knows being out and about is important, too. And he’s big on PR. If he’s quoted somewhere, like in O or Allure, he’ll get calls for the next few months. All that takes time and planning. Plus being a surgeon, he has to keep up professionally. So his hours are incredible. And since the triplets were born—”
“They’re how old again?”
“Four. They’re usually asleep when he gets home. They go to bed at seven. We decided that instead of family dinner, we’d have family breakfast. But I know Jonah wishes he could have more time with them, not just mornings and weekends. I guess you could call that pressure, too.”
“What about financial pressure, ma’am?”
“We’re okay.” Early on in my marriage, I’d overheard my mother-in-law telling one of her friends that it was très LMC—lower-middle-class, a heinous crime—to say “X is rich.” “God in heaven,” she said, “‘rich’ is so crass.” She meant saying it, not being it. Anyway, within a month after moving from New Haven to New York, I’d come to understand that “rich” was fine to describe Rembrandt’s colors or a veal stock. But when it came to even really big bucks, I knew to say “X does nicely.” Detective Sergeant Coleman was fingering his hairless cheek, try
ing to figure out what my “we’re okay” meant. So I added, “Jonah’s making a very good living.”
Coleman’s fast 180 scope of the living room apparently gave him confirmation because he started nodding like a bobblehead. “You mentioned earlier he has partners in his plastic surgery practice,” he said.
“Yes.”
He didn’t hear me because he was busy flipping through his little pad, stopping every couple of pages. Maybe he was fascinated by notes he’d made. Or he couldn’t read his own writing. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do Dr. Gersten and his partners get along?”
“Yes.”
“No financial disagreements? Egos? That sort of thing?”
“They’re fine,” I said.
“If I might ask, how are things within your family?”
“Fine. Great. He loves the children, loves me. And vice versa.”
“The two girls you say are living here?”
“Our au pairs,” I said. His lids fluttered. “Mother’s helpers. They’re here from Norway.” More flutters. “They’re all legal and everything. They have valid work permits and—”
“Dr. Gersten has no issues with them, ma’am?” He wrote something on his pad.
The dizziness that had eased sneaked back, maybe because I could almost hear Coleman thinking, Two Scandinavian girls. Blondes, I bet. True, they were blondes. But Ida and Ingvild bore such a resemblance to Miss Piggy that I was waiting for their visas to expire before buying the DVD of The Muppets Take Manhattan for the boys. “No issues at all. Jonah thinks they’re great with the boys. Listen, my husband is, you know, easygoing. Friendly but polite. Respectful.” He underlined whatever he had just written.
“Ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes?” I had to raise my head slightly to look at him. Dizzy again, like the floor had switched places with the ceiling.
“When we’re called in on a case, we’re put in the position of having to ask questions that may seem, you know, not polite. But we have to ask them anyway.”
“I understand.” He was going to ask me if Jonah screwed around.
“So I hope you don’t mind if I ask you . . . You said your husband loves you, and I’m sure he does. But some men do have a midlife-crisis thing.”
“Jonah’s thirty-nine. I don’t know if that qualifies, but—”
“Is it possible that there is someone else—”
“I’m absolutely sure there isn’t.”
“Maybe a patient—”
“Jonah says any surgeon who takes up with a patient has a fifty-fifty shot at a malpractice suit, and no sex in the world is worth that.”
He smiled and nodded at Jonah’s remark. But what doctor wouldn’t say that to reassure a suspicious wife? “What I meant to ask was if there has been any patient calling or stalking him in any way. Sometimes with doctors—”
“No. Our home number is unlisted. And he knows how to deal with patients who get emotionally dependent or pushy or a little crazy.”
Coleman flipped to a clean page in his pad. He held the pen against his upper lip, just south of his nostrils, and took a deep breath, like he was working on an ink-fume high. “Are Dr. Gersten’s parents still alive?” he asked.
“Yes. Clive and Babs—Barbara—Gersten. They’re still very active, professionally, socially. They live in the city.” I saw he wanted more. But I was so wiped from all the frantic hours I’d spent since I’d woken to “Where’s Daddy?” that it was getting too much to think up more words and then push them into speech. Coleman rotated his pen near his nose a few times. Even though I was looking at my wedding ring, I could feel him gazing into my eyes. Finally, I got it together enough to answer.
“His father’s a radiation oncologist in Manhattan. Clive Gersten.” To look at my father-in-law, you wouldn’t think he was in that field. He smiled all the time. Or at least the corners of his mouth turned up. I sometimes wondered if he’d had a stroke early in life because his personality was un-smiley. Not morose. Just bland. If he were ice cream, he wouldn’t even be vanilla. But his patients adored him, clearly taking the rising corners of his mouth as either an optimistic smile or a compassionate one, depending on their diagnosis.
“Oncologist is cancer, right?”
“Right. Jonah’s mother is marketing director of Gigi de Lavallade Cosmetics.” Babs Gersten was the person who, back in the eighties, had convinced millions of white women all over the world that they should wear brown lipstick and bronze blush. In the nineties she got millions of black women converted to maroon cheeks, not red. Currently, she was working on a major campaign to get Asian women out of rose-tinged foundation, to open themselves up to the untapped potential—the actual brilliance!—of much maligned yellow.
“Does your husband get along with his folks?”
“Yes.”
“Does he see a lot of them?”
“We usually see them every couple of weeks. They have a place in Water Mill, in the Hamptons. They sometimes stop here on their way out or back. It’s easier that way. Having the triplets running around their apartment is a little much for my in-laws. They collect pre-Columbian art. Lots of clay figurines. We do visit them at the beach, but even that’s pretty chaotic if the weather’s not good.”
Coleman wrote what appeared to be a long sentence in his pad, then turned back a page and made what looked like three dots. “Any other children? Your husband, I mean. Does he have any brothers or sisters?”
“He has a younger brother. He’s a casting director.”
“Do they get along?”
“Jonah and Theo?” His brow furrowed, which was what usually happened when people first heard it, because it sounds more like a lisp and diphthong than an actual name. Whenever I had to introduce him, I fought the urge to say “Thith ith Theo.” “T-h-e-o,” I spelled. “They talk on the phone . . . I guess about once a week. Whenever they see each other, they have a good time. It’s a solid relationship.”
He closed his pad and stuck it in the outside pocket of his jacket. “Would you mind taking me for a look around?” he asked as he stood.
“Of course. I mean, I’ll be glad to show you.” Coleman didn’t seem the house-and-garden type. I assumed he had some sort of checklist he needed to go through in a missing-person case. Suddenly, those words, “missing person,” hit home. They ricocheted around my brain and grew more powerful with each repetition as they brought home the reality: I not only didn’t know where Jonah was, I couldn’t even guess.
Now that Coleman was no longer seated, some hostess gene made me pop up from the couch. Not the best idea. I swayed sideways and made a stupid grabbing gesture with each hand as I tried to get hold of something to steady me. There was only air. It was scary, not being able to distinguish between up and down.
He rushed over and braced my elbows until he was sure I could stand perpendicular to the floor. We spoke at the same time: “Are you okay?” “Sorry, I got dizzy.”
That was followed by a couple of eternal seconds of silence. Coleman moved himself out of the narrow space between couch and coffee table with the klutzy sidestep slide of someone who should not bother trying tennis. “Are you okay to take me around the house?” he asked.
“Yes. It’ll be fine.”
I’d sent the boys off to preschool to get them out of the way. Ida and Ingvild would hang out there in the mommies’ room in case of—whatever.
So it was just the two of us, me and Detective Sergeant Coleman. The dizziness was gone, but I definitely didn’t feel normal. Every few minutes my heart banged with an almost audible boom. But listen, I told myself, considering everything, I’m functioning. Leading him to the basement, then through all the rooms on the first floor, I was at least reassured I could control myself sufficiently to go through the motions.
Only after we climbed the stairs and he opened the linen closet outside our bedroom did I comprehend that he wasn’t just hunting for some subtle clue to Jonah’s whereabouts. When Coleman had peered in cabinets and
armoires and opened the tops of the benches that ran across one wall in the basement playroom, he’d been searching for Jonah’s dead body.
“Do you ever find the person somebody says is missing right there, in the house?” I asked. “Or do you just find clues?”
“Sometimes an individual writes a note,” Coleman said carefully. “He’s in a rush and winds up leaving it in the weirdest place.” He must have decided I was thinking, Note? Does he mean suicide note? Not wanting me to tilt and maybe pass out, he said real fast, “‘Dear So-and-so, I have to go to . . . whatever, someplace . . . for a few days’ and so forth.” I noticed he wasn’t answering my question about discovering the missing person right there at home.
We went through Jonah’s closet and then the bedroom. Other than gaping at the lineup of Jonah’s tassel loafers—which admittedly was a little excessive, the same shoe over and over, as if some weird form of asexual reproduction were going on—Coleman didn’t seem to find anything worth noting. In the bedroom, he didn’t cringe at the plastic Camp Chipinaw clock on Jonah’s nightstand the way I did, and completely ignored the book lying beside it, Einstein: His Life and Universe, not even saying something like “Hey, Dr. Gersten really must be a genius to be reading about a genius.” He didn’t pick it up and shake it the way detectives do on TV—where paper falls out that’s inevitably a clue. So I picked up the book and pretended to be paging through it. Nothing fell out because Jonah didn’t even use a bookmark, just bent down pages. He was up to page 104. I held it against my chest, closed my eyes, and told myself, He’s going to get to finish this book, even though I dreaded he wouldn’t. But I didn’t say that out loud because I wasn’t the plucky-heroine type. As I was laying it down again, I quickly leafed through it. Nothing: just his name, written in his graceful, non-doctorish script, and his usual underlinings and margin notes, as if he’d never gotten out of Yale. Inside the back cover, he’d even written a shopping list: Mach3, his razor blades, black shoe polish, and check red cap, probably something to do with capsules.