As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  Then the phone rang. I knew it was Jonah’s office because all the calls from there and his answering service rang with a special bing-bing-bing tone. A little Tinker Bell–ish, I’d told him. Now it sounded beautiful. A burst of hope propelled me to the phone. It wasn’t until I was almost bellowing “Hello” with desperate eagerness that it hit me it might be someone else and not Jonah finally, finally calling to explain why—

  “Susie?” Not Jonah. It was Layne. “I’m here with Gilbert John on speakerphone.”

  Layne Jiménez was from New Mexico, so she had that no-accent all-American accent television journalists have. Her tone, though, was doctor-gentle rather than reporter-crisp. “We hate to bother you, Susie. Donald told us about Jonah,” she said. “We kept going back and forth: Should we call, shouldn’t we call? You’ve got to be waiting for the phone to ring. But we’re so concerned. Have you heard anything?”

  I shook my head for a few seconds until the shuffle of shoes coming through their speakerphone made me realize they were nervously waiting for my response. “No. No calls.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and murmured to Detective Sergeant Coleman, “Jonah’s partners.”

  “Susie?” Gilbert John Noakes this time. He had that gorgeous bass voice you’d expect to be singing “Ol’ Man River,” in his case, without the customary African-American inflection. Gilbert John had a grand accent, slightly more British than Boston. He sounded like he’d been born on some elitist island in the mid-Atlantic. His pronunciation of my name was “Syu-see?” His appearance matched his voice. Handsome, like one of those manly actors with thick white hair who played rich, potent older men on daytime soaps.

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “How are you holding up, dear?” he asked.

  “All right.”

  Over the years, I’d come to believe that Gilbert John’s supercilious delivery was a minor case of snobbishness made much worse by shyness—and dullness. He never had much to say about anything except the most tedious surgical matters—or in migraine-inducing detail, his latest mosaic. He made his compositions from found objects. That had the potential to be interesting, but Gilbert John didn’t understand how not to be boring. Listening to him, you wanted to gasp for air. He’d go on (and on) about smashing up a souvenir plate from the 1989 Philadelphia flower show, and about how half of creating mosaics was getting the right-sized shards. Even if you were backing out of the room, he’d stay with you step for step to give you his secret for getting the proper consistency of grout. The weird thing was, in spite of his aggressive tediousness, his mosaics were fresh, even lively.

  “Has either of you heard anything?” I asked. “Anything at all?”

  “Not a thing,” Layne managed to say. She had a catch in her gentle voice. I tried to think of something to comfort her so she wouldn’t burst into tears and then feel terrible because, by crying, she’d made it harder on me. But she was able to go on. “We have the whole staff calling hospitals, but no one like Jonah has come in,” she said. “You know, Susie, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should call the police. Or Gilbert John says you might want to think about a private investigator. You know, if you don’t want word getting around.”

  “Up to you entirely,” Gilbert John said. “We simply want you to know we’ll do anything we can if you need us.”

  “Absolutely,” Layne said. “Whatever you want done—or not done—you only have to ask.”

  That instant I started second-guessing myself. Had I been stupid to call the Nassau County police when Jonah very well could be in the city? Should I have called the NYPD instead? He could be anywhere.

  Maybe he would wind up being one of those vanishing husbands who turned up decades later, living a different life in some other country. Years from now, when the triplets were in high school, or later, when I was on my deathbed, we’d learn Jonah had been living as Dottore Giovanni Giordano, treating the poorest of the poor in the slums of Naples, not taking even a lira for his work.

  Except that wasn’t what happened.

  Chapter Five

  “I know you came here to keep yourself from staring at the phone, trying to will it into ringing,” Andrea Brinckerhoff said brightly. She picked up a speck of floral foam from our worktable and flicked it into the green plastic trash can. Andrea rarely said anything non-brightly. She seemed to have modeled her personality on one of those debutantes in 1930s movies: a martini in one hand, a cigarette holder in the other, laughing in the face of doom. “Though I’m assuming you call-forwarded so it would ring here.”

  “So it would ring on my cell. Car, bathroom: I could be anyplace and I’d be able to hear it.”

  “Excellent!”

  I understood Andrea’s over-the-top brightness on this morning was an effort aimed at keeping up my spirits—though her detractors might claim she simply wasn’t touched by other people’s sorrow.

  She headed for the coffeepot, her head swiveling slowly back and forth as she walked, searching for stray bits of stem or leaf on the concrete floor. Not that I watched her every step. I was flipping through the pocket-sized brown leather phone book I’d brought with me, the one Jonah had used until two years earlier, when he finally surrendered to a BlackBerry. I finished his A’s and B’s and began the C’s, copying down names and numbers of anyone who might be in his life currently, people he could have seen or spoken to in the last couple of weeks.

  Andrea handed me coffee in one of her L’Objet porcelain mugs. She’d chosen the Aegean-green style; its handle was twenty-four-karat gold. “If I might suggest . . .”

  I listened. Andrea was thorough. While we both did the same jobs—floral design, client development, running the business—we both accepted reality and roles. She was the efficient, let’s-create-a-system one. I was the more imaginative and (despite Andrea’s copy of the Social Register that leaned against Contemporary Approaches to Floral Art on the shelf above her desk) had the more upmarket aesthetic. Not that Andrea was Miss Azalea Plant in a Green Plastic Cachepot, but she had too many musts and no-nos to be an exciting designer. She stuck to the old tired-out rules, like no bear grass or carnations ever or that heritage roses and English ivy in Grandmère’s 1780 silver teapot were the ultimate word in elegance.

  “Instead of writing a list,” she said, “put a mark next to each name. That way you can tell at a glance who you need to call.”

  “Good idea,” I murmured. Was it? I hadn’t a clue, but she sounded authoritative. My thoughts were dark and swirling, like a tornado. The mere idea of a system was soothing.

  “See? Make a dot on the left side of the entry. After you speak to that person, put a check mark on the right.”

  I either knew or had heard Jonah mention about half the names I’d gotten to in his phone book. That I didn’t know the others wasn’t particularly meaningful. Like many surgeons, my husband was meticulous to the point of being a pain, or worse. When he hung a tie on his pull-out rack, the pointy bottom of all the ties had to be at the same level. If he was in the kitchen when I was cooking and overheard me mumble to myself, “Where the hell is the dill?” he’d stare at me not just in disbelief but with displeasure, as in How can you go through life and not have a precise place for everything? I’d told him the need for a precise place for things was a definite plus for a guy who reconfigured faces. He had to be finicky about detail: like Where are the sutures? or How many millimeters to the right do I move this nose? And the proof was right there in his phone book. Nearly all the entries I didn’t recognize had a teeny P above the name. Patient. Well, I assumed P meant patient, as Jonah’s universe wasn’t peopled with peony growers or philosophers.

  “One more suggestion?” Andrea said. I nodded. “Drink your coffee. You need some . . . you don’t want to sound so”—she combed her straight blond hair off her forehead with her fingers—“so down.”

  “I am down. I’m terrified.”

  “Susie, I know that. You know that. But if your cell rang and it was Jonah saying, ‘My car went ove
r a cliff—’”

  “Where are there cliffs between Manhattan and Long Island?” I snapped.

  “I’m talking in, you know, whatever that stupid fucky word people always use—something terms.”

  “Metaphorical terms?”

  Andrea was hostile to words over three syllables. “Right,” she said. “So let’s assume he’ll be fine. And if he is fine, you don’t want him saying, ‘I hear you called Dr. Schwartz’—I’m sure there’s always a Dr. Schwartz—‘asking about me. Schwartz said you sounded totally down, like you’d lost all hope.’ I mean, if I know Jonah, he wouldn’t be thrilled.”

  “No. He’d be humiliated.” I came close to smiling at the thought of Jonah clapping his hand to his forehead, jaw dropping, when he heard I’d called the names in his phone book. Then it hit me that he might be not embarrassed but proud I’d taken such initiative. On the other hand . . . Angry, definitely angry. I know you must have been frightened, Susie. But calling everyone . . . God! Can I ask you one simple question? Why couldn’t you have waited twenty-four hours? What the hell am I going to say to all these people?

  “Humiliated?” Andrea said. She had seen Jonah’s flash of temper—rage, almost—when I’d said or done something to hint that maybe he had a flaw or two. “No. He’d be pissed beyond belief. But it’s not just about Jonah getting mad that you called his entire phone book sounding like the ‘Before’ in an antidepressant commercial. You need to get some caffeine into you so you don’t sound like you mainlined Ambien.”

  I picked up the mug. Andrea had paid for them herself because she believed clients should know that Florabella had a profound understanding of what beautiful was. L’Objet mugs were, in her view, irrefutable proof. I’d vetoed them, telling her yes, they were gorgeous, but Bergdorf’s could get four hundred thirty-two bucks for six coffee mugs from someone else, not us. But they did get it: from Andrea herself. Self-indulgence came easy for my partner, because she’d married a hedge fund. Well, technically, she’d married Hugh Morrison, whom most people called Hughie. She called him Fat Boy. I’d pointed out to her that “Fat Boy” was cruel as well as pointless; anyone seeing a three-hundred-pound guy whose ankle flab hung over his Italian driving moccasins could figure out his nickname wasn’t Slim.

  “You might want to start phoning the people you’ve marked off already, because some of them will have to call you back. Especially the doctors.”

  “Do you think I should leave my home phone number when I call? If I’m on my cell getting an important lead, I don’t want to be interrupted by call waiting. But if the police want to reach me, or if Gilbert John or Layne hear something, I need to know right away.” I set the mug on the worktable as a wave of the morning’s dizziness came back. Not a tidal wave, but I pictured myself saying, “I was wondering if you’d spoken to Jonah recently . . .” to some snooty ENT guy while my cell vibrated with another incoming call and I wound up cutting off the ENT and missing the other call, which would turn out to be Jonah, and in the end all I’d have were his final inexplicable words on my voice mail: “I love you, Su—” Then silence. “And there’s another problem. When I’m talking and a call comes in, I know I’m supposed to push the Send button, but half the time that doesn’t work.”

  “Calm down,” Andrea said. She jerked her head back. Apparently, I’d gone from being emphatic to yelling.

  “Why?”

  “Because you need to stop fixating on phones and think clearly.” I found myself nodding slowly, like what she said was wisdom so dazzling it couldn’t be absorbed all at once. “This is what you should do: Give them my cell number, okay? You’ll take my phone. Don’t even think of arguing with me. I want to get a new one anyway. That Vertu Rococo.” I struggled. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it. It would be the Rolls-Royce of cells if the Rolls didn’t suck. Listen, this makes sense for both of us. You take my cell because then I can get a new number and not tell my mother-in-law. She has me on her speed dial as A. Every time she shoves her phone into her handbag—it’s as full of shit as she is—it dials me. Just don’t answer any call that comes from Palm Beach.”

  Andrea lifted her hair with both hands and let it fall back. It covered her shoulders like a short cape made from the fur of a gleaming blond animal. An unkempt animal. Though she’d never admit it, she thought having scraggly ends was cool. She saw herself as an aristocrat and looked down on the nouveau riche as trying too hard with their pricey blunt cuts or exquisitely scissored layers.

  In an era where there were (maybe) a hundred people left in New York to whom pedigree mattered, hardly anyone gave a rat’s ass that one of Andrea’s Brinckerhoff ancestors had come to New York (Nieuw Amsterdam then) in 1559. From the way she sneered at most of humanity, it was clear her lineage was the central fact of her existence. It offered her a reason to feel superior. It gave her (she’d decided) license to transgress any social or moral law—like a lady should have a good haircut. Like it’s tasteless not to mock one’s obese husband in public. Like it’s seemly to refrain from committing adultery with members of your husband’s family, country club, and church.

  “Okay, I’ll take your cell.” Then I remembered to add, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She paused. “Are you going to make those calls?”

  “Now?”

  “Why not now? Do you need six more months of therapy to work through your Brooklyn accent anxiety?”

  I rubbed my forehead as if that would encourage an idea or two. It didn’t. “It’s not about that. It’s that I won’t know what to say if someone takes the call. I’ll end up going, ‘Uuuh, uuuh, I’m Jonah Gersten’s wife. I don’t know if you remember me, but now uuuh, uuuh.’ And if I get their voice mail, do I say, ‘Hate to bother you on a workday, but I’m Susie and my husband, Jonah Gersten, vanished from the face of the earth, and did you . . .’”

  “Go on,” Andrea said. “Did you what?”

  “I don’t know. Speak to him recently? Have any idea where he might be? Listen, calling people is stupid. God knows why I even thought of it. Everything was fine with Jonah. No one out there knows anything about him I don’t know. He’s not a secret-life kind of guy.”

  “You believe that.”

  “Yes!”

  “I do, too, actually,” Andrea said. She spoke so slowly that for two seconds she forgot her brightness. “But some men with a secret life really want to keep it that way—not like the assholes who leave Amex receipts on top of their dresser. Fat Boy used to do that, before he got too fat to fuck anybody but me, probably because he’s afraid he’ll drop dead from excitement and crush the girl and it’ll make The Financial Times. Anyway, if Jonah wanted to keep a secret, you wouldn’t know, and neither would I. And no, I don’t think he has any secrets worthy of the name.”

  “He paid a scalper a fortune for Giants play-off tickets. But then he told me about it.”

  “But someone in here”—Andrea tapped his phone book with her index finger—“might know something you don’t. Or it doesn’t even have to be a secret. Maybe someone heard him say, ‘There’s a store up in Litchfield that has fabulous antique chronographs—’”

  “What?”

  “Those watches with all the little dials on the faces. Classics. Très popular right now. And maybe that means you should be calling hospitals in Connecticut because—”

  “Do you honestly think that after a hideously long day, he’d drive up to Connecticut?”

  “No. I was just making up an example.”

  “Jonah would never collect—”

  “Susie, listen to me.” She set her elbow on the table. Instead of resting her chin on her hand, like most people do, she stuck out her thumb and put the deep cleft of her chin on it: Andrea’s “I’m deep in thought” pose. Finally, she said, “If you keep saying Jonah wouldn’t do this or that, you’re closing your mind. Am I right?” I didn’t answer. “Am I being logical?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you shouldn’t decide not to listen
to something that could be useful simply because it doesn’t jive with your version of your husband.”

  “But my version is the right one.” I said it in almost a whisper.

  I shuffled into the small office that took up part of the space between our reception area and the workroom. Then I returned with a pen and a piece of our billing stationery. Make it first-rate with Florabella, it said along the bottom. When I got back, I jotted down a few talking points along with Andrea’s cell number. I knew I’d be needing a script.

  After a half hour, I got good at leaving voice mails and getting past secretaries and nurses by saying, “This is an urgent call about Jonah Gersten, and I need to speak with whoever now.” Then I’d immediately add, softening my voice from powerful to genteel, “if that’s possible.” I got through right away to a fair number of the names, but by the time I began the D’s, I’d learned only two things I hadn’t known before. Jonah wished he’d taken clarinet instead of piano lessons as a kid. And about a month earlier, when he’d run into a friend from Yale, he’d said the biggest change with having triplets was that there never was a time he wasn’t exhausted. I chewed on my knuckles for half a second as I listened to this, then got up the courage to ask, “Did he sound depressed?” Not at all. In good humor, actually, accepting perpetual fatigue as a fact of life.

  Between each call, I’d close my eyes to blank out reality, but it was there anyway: I kept picturing the boys. Today would be all right, not counting the trauma I could be inflicting on them by playing down the terror I’d felt about Jonah not being in bed and them seeing through my act. Everyone said kids were so smart that even toddlers knew when their parents were faking emotion. They’d grow up not trusting me.

  I worried about them in triplicate: as a threesome, as individual boys, and how each would affect the others. Closing my eyes, I got an image of Jonah and me making triplet sandwiches, snuggling the boys between us. If he didn’t come back, would I have to explain those open-faced sandwiches with teeny fronds of dill they always serve at Wasp weddings, and wouldn’t a Mommy canapé be fun? Would they think I was pathetic? I pictured furrowed-brow Evan growing closer with Mason, who would resume his thumb-sucking but still have enough security to give Evan a little boost, and Dashiell, who’d try to swagger through it all, being ostracized by the other two because they’d think he didn’t care.