by Susan Isaacs
What could I do for my kids that I wasn’t doing? That second, I wanted to embrace them, soothe them, though truthfully, part of me wished they could go visit Norway with Ida and Ingvild and milk reindeer until this nightmare blew over.
Except if Jonah didn’t come back, it would never blow over. At that moment, I had a selfish or even depraved thought, which was: Did Jonah have enough insurance? I might even have worried that I’d have to sell the house, move to a garden apartment, and buy store-label toilet paper instead of Charmin Ultra, but then I thought, No, my in-laws would help us out, if only for the boys’ sakes, because without them, Babs probably wouldn’t care if I had to cut up The New York Times into four-by-four squares to keep beside the toilet, though without insurance, I wouldn’t be able to afford home delivery anymore.
“Oh my God!” The words burst out of me.
“What? What is it?”
“My in-laws don’t know!” I must have looked both pleading and stricken. I guessed I hoped that Andrea would respond: “Listen, your mother-in-law is not a piece of cake, and I know you work yourself up into a froth over dealing with her. So let me call her and explain what’s going on.”
She exclaimed, “‘Oh my God’ is right! Here you are, calling up everybody who knows Jonah! One of them—shit, so many doctors!—one of them could call Clive. You better call this instant. Which one? Him or her?”
Him, my father-in-law, was infinitely preferable. Clive wasn’t nice, but on the other hand, he wasn’t not nice. I’d never gotten beyond his blah-ness, but maybe that was because there was no beyond. So while no one, including his children and his wife, ever went to Clive looking for love, you could take being with him. You’d never have to fear getting worn down by high-pressure charm. Nor would you have to worry about getting hit with a Babs zinger. With my father-in-law, you never had to be on the lookout for hostility so gracefully disguised it sounded amazingly like flattery.
But with Babs, I never once said goodbye to her without feeling that some small but significant number had been deducted from the sum of my soul during the encounter. “Her,” I said to Andrea. “If I don’t call her, she’ll think I was afraid.”
Which of course I was.
Chapter Six
Babs sat on the dark red leather couch in our den, her elbows resting just above her knees, her hands veiling her eyes and cheeks. Her nails, coated with Gigi de Lavallade’s Crème Caramel, precisely matched the hue of some new liver spots her dermatologist hadn’t gotten to. She uncovered her face and said, “Of course you’re doing everything that can be done, Susie . . .” I nodded, except she wasn’t finished with the sentence. “But we’re always here for you if you have any doubts. Never, ever hesitate to call on us.”
Clive sat beside her looking at me, though I wasn’t sure he was seeing me. He was swaying slowly from side to side, like Ray Charles keeping time to a ballad. I waited for him to add something, but he was silent. Then Babs took a deep breath that looked like preparation for a long sentence. But she didn’t speak.
So I did. “Right before you got here, I called back Detective Sergeant Coleman, the Nassau County cop who came this morning. I hadn’t heard from him again, not even to say they hadn’t gotten any leads. Maybe they don’t do that—call to say they don’t have anything to tell you. But since he’d said he—a detective—had been sent here instead of a regular cop because of Jonah’s ‘position in the community,’ I figured I could push it a little.” Clive stopped his swaying when he was at a 100-degree angle away from Babs. I waited for him to right himself. He didn’t, so I continued. “I told Coleman that since Jonah spent so much time in Manhattan, there was a good chance that if, God forbid, something bad happened to him, it could have happened there. I asked if he’d been in touch with the New York police. He said yes. So then I asked him for a name.”
“Good,” Babs said. I couldn’t tell if she was approving or thinking, How come you didn’t think of this five hours ago, asshole? Not that she would use a word like “asshole.” In a confrontation, I imagined that, since she’d graduated from Vassar, she would more likely say “unmitigated fool.” She cocked her head at the same weird angle as Clive’s upper body, as if they shared a choreographer. “And he gave you the name?”
“He said it might be in the notes he’d typed up, but he wasn’t near a computer.” My in-laws kept their gaze on me, though I sensed they were controlling themselves, aching to exchange a glance, maybe hoping I’d look away. Was I reading something into the situation? I didn’t know. Yet their silence also told me they’d vowed to each other to be gentle: Families could split apart under this kind of pressure, and the Gerstens weren’t that sort. I could hear Babs telling Clive on their drive out from the city, “I want this to be civilized. No recriminations. Even if we have to bite our tongues.” And Clive, hands gripping and pushing against the wheel as if to fuse it to the steering column, murmuring in a choked monotone, “Unless she’s making a complete hash of it and putting Jonah in peril. Then we cannot remain silent. Am I correct?” Clive came from a middle-class New York background, but when he did speak, his vocabulary was kind of grand, as if he had a screenwriter specializing in biblical epics writing his dialogue. He was so worshipful about his wife’s privileged background, I guess he kept wanting to sound like the man he thought she deserved. Now, though, he had nothing to say.
Possibly what I was reading from their silence was my own tale, composed totally in my head, and they were simply waiting for me to talk again. “I got the feeling Coleman’s ‘not near a computer’ might be some kind of delaying tactic. So I asked him, ‘Could you do me a favor and just check that notepad you carry? Maybe you jotted it down.’ And he waited, like, a few seconds too long. It could have been that he was hoping I’d tell him not to bother if it was an inconvenience. But I kept quiet. So he gave me the name.”
“Which was?” Clive asked. He loosened the knot on his tie, an orange Hermès with teeny giraffes all over. Its cheeriness was making me uncomfortable, and I wished he’d worn something in a gray basket weave.
“Lieutenant Paston,” I told him. “Gary McCorkle Paston. From the Nineteenth Precinct detective squad.”
Babs leaned forward. “Did you get a chance to call Lieutenant Paston?” she asked with the sweet neutrality of a social worker, which made it sound like she’d sprouted a second personality.
“Yes, I did call him. He’d already gotten some details and the picture of Jonah I’d given to Detective Sergeant Coleman—I’m not sure whether he’s called Detective or Sergeant or both because he only gave me his card. I don’t think he said, ‘I’m so-and-so.’ Maybe he did. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.” I was starting to sound ditsy, and probably not only to myself. I inhaled one of those conscious diaphragmatic breaths they teach you in yoga to relax. I could have used a few more, but then my in-laws might think I was acting weird or even on drugs. “Anyway, Lieutenant Paston asked if I had any more pictures, so I scanned a couple and e-mailed them to him. He said he’d call Gilbert John and Layne, and whoever else police call. A few of Jonah’s other contacts. But he said the good news was that he’d checked: There weren’t any reports of people resembling Jonah who were, you know. Unidentified.”
Even though the den was the warmest room in the house, all three of us seemed to feel the ice of my unsaid words: “morgue,” “dead body.” In the same instant, we each tried to get warm. Babs pulled the shawl collar of her taupe sweater tighter against her neck. Clive clenched his hands, brought them to his mouth, and breathed hot air on them. I lifted up my cup of tea, but its warmth was gone, and the aroma of the cold, smoky Earl Grey made me shudder.
We were quiet too long. Maybe because they were in my house, I felt obliged to say something, but I’d already gone the “coffee? tea?” route twice since they’d arrived. So I picked up the pad and paper I had ready to make a note or take down an address if I got a call. I wrote down Detective Sergeant Coleman’s and Lieutenant Paston’s names and num
bers. “These are the Nassau County and NYPD detectives I’ve been dealing with. If something pops into your head that could be useful, feel free to call them.”
I hoped they understood I was giving them permission to tell the cops anything they might know that they wouldn’t want me to hear: that Jonah had experienced some bizarre mental disorder in childhood involving running away from home. Or that he had a girlfriend—who didn’t have embarrassing parents—he was planning on leaving me for.
My father-in-law appeared grateful as he took the paper, though given those upturned corners of his mouth, he could be thinking the most horrible thoughts and still appear smiley. My mother-in-law pursed her Bronze Méditerranéen–glossed lips but overdid it. Instead of appearing reflective, she looked like she was about to give me a great big air kiss.
I wish I could say that one of us let our humanity shine through long enough to reach over and squeeze a hand, or stand and offer a long, comforting hug. But providing comfort didn’t seem to pop up on any of our to-do lists.
Babs, who had been staring at the bare, dead-looking aerial roots of an Evening Star orchid I had on the end table beside her, turned back to me. Managing to keep any hint of dread out of her voice, she asked, “Are your parents coming over?”
Oh, shit! I thought. The idea of my mother and father—the very fact of their existence—simply hadn’t occurred to me. “I haven’t called them yet.” I was sure Babs was relieved. “I didn’t want to scare them and then have Jonah walk in.”
She nodded and refolded the left cuff of her sweater as if it hadn’t already been precisely folded back the same number of centimeters as the right. Like many Manhattan women, Babs was meticulous in her casualness. Her black hair with silver at the temples and subtle gold and platinum streaks shot through was blown dry, then artfully disarranged by Sabine, her hairdresser, every other day. God could have created my mother-in-law to counterbalance my mother’s denial of adornments. Not that Babs was fussy. Her clothes were Armani and Jil Sander in black, white, and a narrow spectrum of pale browns. Jewelry wasn’t a problem for her, either, as Upper East Side good taste discouraged all gems except diamonds and all metals but gold and platinum. Still, beside the pale green petals and violet red lips of the fully bloomed orchid she’d been staring at, my mother-in-law looked less chic than sick. Just the couple of hours of knowing Jonah was a missing person had been enough to bring out deep beige shadows beneath her eyes. Even her knuckles and wrist bones seemed mysteriously altered in the fading afternoon light in the den, so her hands looked like a crone’s.
We hung out for another fifteen minutes, forcing conversation. At one point, I almost asked if they thought I should hire a detective agency, the way Gilbert John and Layne had suggested. Some mental censor clapped a hand over my mouth just in time. If they said no and I decided I needed one, they’d find out. No detective could call half of Manhattan (the upper half, where Jonah came from and worked) and hide it from my in-laws. And if they did think hiring an investigator was a dandy idea, they’d take over—Clive saying that John Doe of the Doe Agency, you know, international reputation, had a mother who’d been a patient. Then Babs would chime in that she’d gone to Fieldston with Jane Roe, whose husband had formed the Strategic Inquiries Group, or some Washington-esque name, after he left the Department of Justice, where he’d been Janet Reno’s right arm.
Periodically, one of us would glance at the silent phone, which would give the others a millisecond of hope that there had been some kind of pre-ring in a decibel range just below their hearing. But then nothing would happen, so one of us would mutter a sentence or two to cover the embarrassment of our naive optimism.
My ears did pick up what theirs didn’t: the crunch of one of the minivan’s tires as Ida veered slightly off the driveway, which she did about 50 percent of the time, riding the pebbles that protected the bases of the boxwood and lavender shrubs that ran along the driveway from the street all the way up and around to the garage. The triplets coming in—the sudden clomp of Ugg boots, the thud of backpacks on the floor, accompanied by “I gotta pee,” “No, me first! I gotta pee worse!” and “Apple slices with peanut butter!”—startled my in-laws, as if all the time they’d been in the house, they hadn’t remembered they had grandchildren.
I got up to go into the kitchen. Clive and Babs stood also but stayed where they were, in front of the couch. “Do the boys know?” Babs asked.
“They know he wasn’t here this morning. They get up at five-thirty. Jonah’s always there, but they didn’t seem to attach any real importance to it. If any of them had a clue at all, it would be Evan.”
“He is very sensitive,” Babs said, the strain already in her face growing more intense, as if her inner colorist had brushed on another coat of ashen concern. This time, however, she didn’t get a chance for her usual “I do worry about Evan, though I know his sensitivity will be an asset in the long run” or “He’s like my brother Bill, with his nerve endings so close to the surface,” because Clive cleared his throat. He did it so loud that it made her flinch and cry, “Ooh!”
“Susie,” he said, “we are not in any way criticizing you. But we should be working together on this.” Standing, I was taller than either of them. My height never bothered Jonah: One of his nicknames for me was Stretch. But I could tell Clive wasn’t so crazy about it.
What did he mean, “working together”? Sometimes I didn’t understand the dialect the Gerstens spoke. I got all the words, but it was like one of those communiqués you hear on the news about the State Department, where they say, “We had a full and frank exchange of views, and warm wishes were exchanged over cups of tea and the traditional almond cakes.” The only way you could comprehend what was going on was if you were an insider and knew the lingo. We shared the last name, but I often found myself longing for subtitles. “Working together?” The way he used that phrase made me feel like something had grabbed the intestines behind my belly button and twisted. But I knew I had to be cool. I couldn’t get elbowed out of the way in the search for Jonah, yet I needed his parents to stay on my side.
“Of course we’ll work together on this,” I told him. “That’s why I telephoned you as soon as I saw . . . the lay of the land. I mean, I didn’t call my parents. I only checked with Jonah’s office manager to make sure he hadn’t been called in for some emergency. Then I notified the police.” I didn’t mention I’d been at Florabella making calls and talking through everything with Andrea. “Then I immediately called you.”
“What we are trying to say,” Babs said carefully, “is that perhaps going to the police so very soon might not have been—how can I express it?—the quickest way to get an answer. It’s not that I’m questioning your judgment, Susie. It’s that they are a bureaucracy. And bureaucracies are notoriously inefficient.” Standing straighter, she kicked out one leg, then the other, to align the pleats in her black pants. For an instant, she teetered on one of her black alligator boots with its four-inch heel, but she quickly righted herself.
“In this case, they seem to be responding pretty well,” I said. “Nassau County sent a detective, and he got the NYPD on to it right away. I called the police in because”—I wanted to sound authoritative, or at least like I wasn’t a total screw-up—“the cops have the power to get information from hospitals and police departments, their own and in other places.” The boys would be racing around the house any second, searching for me, calling out, “Mommy.” I talked faster: “Were you thinking along the lines of the investigative agency?” They nodded. “I agree with you completely. It’s something we should consider. As far as I’m concerned, we should look into it today.”
“One of my patients—” Clive began.
But he was cut off as Dashiell careened around the doorway of the den. Dash’s hazel eyes with their awning of thick brown lashes opened wide: Wow! So great that you’re here! their sparkle seemed to say. I’d trained the boys not to demand “Got a present?” each time Babs and Clive arrived, even thou
gh my in-laws came bearing gifts on every visit. Naturally, I’d asked them not to. “Just little tokens,” Babs had explained the next time as she handed out packages artfully wrapped in high-end silver foil to look like a giant Hershey’s kiss. But the last time they were over, Dash had hinted not at all subtly for a Webkinz bulldog. This time he knew not to ask. He blinked once, then twice, trying to come up with something interesting to say, a simple “Hi” obviously not occurring to him. I shook my head at him: No. No presents today. Don’t expect . . . But he cut off my silent protest with a grin toward his grandparents. “I got a riddle!” he told them.
“You’ve got a riddle?” Babs said. “Tell me, Dash.”
“Guess who didn’t go to bed last night?” he asked. He gave her no time to answer. “My daddy!”
Chapter Seven
Other than sighing “Heaven!” over a hot fudge sundae or a great orgasm, ordinary people don’t talk about paradise much. But everyone’s heard a million definitions of hell. I remembered one of Jonah’s fraternity brothers at Yale, drunk out of his mind, sweat streaming through his sideburns, across his jaw, and down his neck, yelling, “You know what the existentialists say hell is, cocksuckers? Other people! That means you!” And someone famous enough that I vaguely recognized the name wrote about hell being the torture of a bad conscience. Et cetera. But every hour or so over the next couple of days, I wanted to cry out, “Those definitions are crap. Hell is what I am living.”