by Susan Isaacs
Not knowing if my husband was alive or dead. If he was pinned inside the smashed metal skeleton of his car after an accident, screaming in pain from crushed bones. If he was being held in a stinking basement, tortured by some psychopath like a victim on Dexter.
Once or twice I felt temporarily normal, like when I helped the boys make zebra cookies with chocolate and vanilla stripes for the Tuttle Farm school’s zoo carnival. Then I’d be back to hell, picking up (or making up) Jonah’s screams of unspeakable pain. I’d calm down, though only slightly, picturing him in an East Sixty-fifth Street town house sipping martinis with the shockingly rich, once-homely, now-stunning former patient he’d decided to leave me for.
After my in-laws went back to the city and I whispered, “Thank God,” I had a long phone conversation with Gilbert John and Layne: What to say to Jonah’s patients, especially the ones scheduled for surgery? Layne was totally against trying to take over the surgery themselves because it was too much pressure and they wouldn’t have time to get to know the cases. Gilbert John was most concerned about managing what he called “the situation” in a way that wouldn’t provoke gossip. He kept interrupting himself with a single cough either from something in his throat—peanut speck, post-nasal drip—or overtaxed nerves. Between coughs, his main point was Protect Jonah’s Good Name. That might have been Gilbert John Noakes–ese for Protect the Practice, but it did make sense. So did his suggestion, which we all agreed on, to say simply that Jonah had had an emergency and they had to cancel his appointments for the time being.
The days began to take on a rhythm. Once I caught the beat, I began living a regular life. True, it was in an irregular regular life, like living in some war-ravaged country. You knew a bomb could blow you away a minute from now, but meanwhile, you were out of dishwasher detergent. I did only what needed doing, the basics.
I was responsible for the boys. Funny: One of Jonah’s tender, ironic names for Evan was Killer, because he was such a high-strung kid. I worried he’d be the one most disturbed by his father’s absence, but he didn’t even get teary. On the other hand, Dash, who generally possessed the sensitivity of a dump truck, couldn’t seem to stop talking about how Daddy wasn’t there. Mason, as usual, was Mr. Moderate, neither unglued nor unruffled; a couple of times each day, he asked if Daddy would be home on Saturday to make waffles. I managed a bright “I hope so.”
After the triplets’ day at preschool was finished, I had the twins keep them out of my way. I needed a break from their usual “You’re a poopy head!” shouts at one another. Even the thought of having to holler “No!” when they tried yet again to climb the bookshelves was too much for me. I was so exhausted and overstimulated. I felt one more decibel would kill me.
February was a lousy month for a husband to disappear, with its snowless days of cold wind and rain. The house seemed airless yet bursting, as if it wanted to break open and expel the boys into the fresh air. Me? I still had to deal with my parents. But when I tried to call them, fortified by many deep, relaxing breaths, I couldn’t. The effort of picking up the phone and lifting it to my ear pushed me over the edge—a place I was getting used to.
I ordered myself, Get it over with, but I wound up half sliding onto the kitchen floor and sat there sobbing. My back pressed against the pantry door, my legs splayed out, and I, the Pilates queen, couldn’t summon the strength to haul myself up. I stayed there on that wood floor for nearly thirty minutes, long after the dial tone had changed into the loud, high-pitched cry that signals the receiver is off the hook, my mind whirling in a vicious circle of crazy thoughts all those self-help books urge you to avoid.
First I kept imagining that when I’d been at Florabella the previous morning and sent the boys to preschool—with the twins in the Mommies’ Room—Jonah might have come back briefly. Finding no one home, he’d decided to leave forever. The whys—where had he been? why would he do such a thing?—came fast. Madness, I decided. Madness induced by a hit on the head by a gun butt during a mugging. No, from eating a salad with “wild mushrooms” that were actually never-before-seen hallucinogens. All right, maybe not actual madness. Just a nervous breakdown from four years of mornings with triplets, afternoons operating on patients who were still whining that the cost of genioplasty should include a freebie chin cleft even as they were going under anesthesia. And, of course, evenings with too much of my “I think we should repaint the boiler room floor” and too little sex.
Then I thought that maybe Jonah hadn’t come back when I’d been out. No, it was his kidnappers who’d dropped by to leave a ransom note. Finding no one around, they’d decided not to bother—just to kill him and snatch a richer doctor whose wife didn’t go gallivanting on a day when she should have been home. On and on, sitting motionless on the kitchen floor on the balls of my ass, while my head swirled with frightening what-ifs.
The few seconds of silence between horrific scenarios offered enough clarity for me to glimpse not only the hugeness of Jonah’s absence but its profound and awful mystery. That profundity business lasted only about thirty seconds; I’d never been the plumbing-the-depths type who knew from cosmic despair.
I finally got up and took a giant bottle of San Pellegrino and a water goblet from our Baccarat crystal that we’d registered for but never gotten a full set of, and I went into Jonah’s study. Bernadine and her vacuum cleaner were approaching, and I didn’t want to be sitting at the kitchen table when she turned on FOX News and then have to watch her clean between the two wall ovens with a Q-tip dampened with her own saliva even though I’d gently pointed out three times that it wouldn’t be much harder to wet it at the sink. Anyway, Jonah’s study was the most businesslike room in the house. It contained only a desk, computer, phone, and shelves of books on plastic surgery I never looked at because not only were they technical and boring, they were also filled with hideous illustrations of surgical procedures and, even worse, photographs printed on thick, glossy paper.
It was a calm place. I’d made it that way. The walls were covered in a watered silk the same color as the lightest amber in his bird’s-eye-maple desk. The room emitted a golden warmth that avoided the decorator-trying-for-scholarly-humanist ambiance.
I called Manhattan Aesthetics and punched in Gilbert John’s extension, grateful that despite my protests of “tacky” and “user-unfriendly,” the practice had switched to a voice-mail system and I no longer had to speak to Karen, the receptionist who looked as if she’d been manufactured by the same company that had done Schwarzenegger as the Terminator.
Gilbert John took my call within seconds. Even though my first words were “Sorry. No news,” he didn’t sigh or tsk or indicate any disappointment. In fact, he was pretty compassionate, for Gilbert John. So while he wasn’t oozing empathy, he sounded genuinely concerned, not just about Jonah but about how I was doing.
“Holding together,” I told him. “I’d love to fall apart and have to be heavily sedated, but I can’t.”
“The boys,” he observed.
“Yes, and also . . . I don’t know. Maybe I can think of something, or at least have a working mind, if someone says something that has any potential.”
“I understand. The toughest part for me is the worry,” he said. “No, let me be more precise. The fear. And for you? I cannot begin to imagine.” I could hear him take a deep breath to settle himself. “A nightmare. A heartache.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, then wanted to bite my tongue because I hadn’t said “Yes.” Jonah once told me that when I got emotional, I got Brooklyn, and he hadn’t meant it as a compliment on being myself and not putting on airs. He could take only so much of my authenticity. “You’re right,” I said. “This whole thing is every word for awfulness you can think of. But I’ll tell you what I would like. One or both of you mentioned something about hiring an investigator, detective, whatever. Can you get me a name or two? Obviously, the sooner the better.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Gilbert John said, pronouncing each word as if the
survival of properly spoken English rested solely on him. “Is there anything else, Susie?” I told him no and thanked him, probably a little too profusely.
Before I even hung up, I was pulling open the top right-hand drawer of Jonah’s desk. True, I had watched Detective Sergeant Coleman search the desk. And I had seen for myself that he hadn’t found anything. Then we’d moved upstairs.
During our entire search, neither Coleman nor I had found anything in the room to make me think Jonah was anything other than what I believed him to be. No pieces of paper with mysterious, scribbled phone numbers, no hate mail, no blackmail demands, no charge slips at La Perla for a G-string in size P. But I was hoping to find a clue that might prove at least a beginning. Maybe Coleman and I had overlooked something, the way you finally discover the Advil in your handbag that you’d failed to find after two thorough searches.
But with Jonah being as orderly as he was, there were no surprises. Even his paper clips in the top drawer’s tray all lay on the horizontal, though I doubted he’d consciously arranged them that way. Maybe in the back of my mind was the belief that objects, like people, bent to Jonah’s will. Not that he was a bully: It was just that his way always wound up seeming so reasonable.
I was about to get up and start leafing through his books, shaking them, too. Maybe something would fall to the floor that would make me go “Aha!” But the phone rang. It was Gilbert John with the names of two investigative agencies.
“I’m told these are the crème de la crème,” he said, “although technically, I suppose only one can be the cream of the cream.” I couldn’t tell if he was correcting himself or if he thought I needed a translation. “In any case, I have contact names: David Friedman at InterProbe, though he might be in Dubai this week.” I pictured a Jewish guy with a hundred-dollar haircut at a conference table with a bunch of Arabs in keffiyehs on the eightieth floor of a building overlooking a futuristic city like you see on the covers of science fiction paperbacks. I decided David Friedman might be a little too high-powered. “The other one is Lizbeth—Lizzzbeth, with a Z, no E, no A—Holbreich at Kroll.”
Lizbeth, it turned out when I called her, sounded pretty high-powered herself, with a low-pitched, southern-accented voice that conveyed the confidence born of an earlier life as Miss Tuscaloosa or, more likely, a brigadier general in the army. She had no trace of the flirty, rising inflection that turns southern women’s sentences into questions. In fact, her actual questions sounded more like commands.
I spent nearly an hour on the phone with her, going over a lot of the same ground I had covered with the police. Was Jonah under stress? Going through a difficult time? She came right out and asked if I thought he could have committed suicide. I told her, “Jonah is the last person in the world who would take his own life.” She wanted even more details than the cops, data on everyone in Manhattan Aesthetics and information on Ida and Ingvild, our housekeeper, Bernadine Pietrowicz, plus people she called vendors, everybody from the guys who picked up the garbage to the plumber. I swallowed hard and agreed to a twenty-thousand-dollar retainer and faxed permission for her to speak with our accountant, lawyer, and stockbroker, and to examine the hard drive on Jonah’s computers at work and at home. She said she would talk to Gilbert John Noakes about getting the names of Jonah’s patients to see whether any of them were suing him (no) or were wack jobs (yes). As we talked, I e-mailed her Jonah’s cell phone number, e-mail address, head shot, and the URL for his biography on the practice’s website.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” she said. “Well, any more than you already are, which is more than enough. So let me be clear that kidnapping is very, very rare in the U.S. Most of the cases we deal with happen abroad. Even so, it’s a good idea that if the police haven’t done it already, we get the FBI on this and also put recording devices on your phone.”
“In case of—” I stopped cold. This conversation was so far away from anything I ever thought I’d be talking about that it felt like I was being forced to read from a script meant for somebody else. “Are you talking about a ransom demand?”
“Yes. But as I said, that scenario is highly unlikely.”
I didn’t have the courage to ask what scenario she’d put her money on. But by the time we were finished, Lizbeth didn’t scare me anymore. While not exactly in the ninety-ninth percentile for effusiveness, she sounded decent: Two or three times she’d said some version of “You must be going through absolute hell.” And when she opened Jonah’s picture, she’d remarked, “He looks like an absolutely lovely man.”
Fifteen minutes later, I felt the urge to get out and go to Florabella. Andrea told me not to come in, saying that she would call in Marjorie, a retired florist who helped us out during busy times, squeezing us in between her daily Alcoholics and Overeaters Anonymous meetings. Still, I yearned for an hour or two of the mindless comfort that always came to me when I was using my hands, like greening out hunks of floral foam, covering them with leaves or moss as the basis for table arrangements. But now I was too scared to trust call forwarding; I worried that some vital message from the cops would not only go unanswered but not make it to voice mail. And I wanted to be home in case . . . I caught myself in what Jonah would have called “doing a Sherry,” sighing my mother’s It’s hopeless sigh. He could do a hilarious imitation of my mother that included shaking his head in despair, followed by an “oy” and a few tsk-tsks, even though she never actually said “oy” and at most gave a single tsk. But how could I not sigh? With each hour he was gone, it got tougher to come up with a Jonah-coming-home fantasy powerful enough to divert me for longer than ten seconds.
Bleak. Every few years, Jonah would tell me I really should read his favorite novel, Bleak House. Except it was incredibly long and the title wasn’t exactly a grabber. Also, it was by Dickens, and okay, maybe something was deeply wrong with me, because whenever someone brought up Charles Dickens, everybody else nodded with reverence and got that funny little smile that’s supposed to signal “Literature has added so much meaning to my life.” Except the only thing in high school I hated more than A Tale of Two Cities was David Copperfield. So I kept telling Jonah, “You’re right and I’d love to. As soon as I finish whatever for my book club, I’m going to read it. Then we can go out to dinner, just the two of us, and really discuss it. Plus, I’ll finally get to see what makes you so passionate about it.”
The house was silent except for the occasional gust of wind that rattled the shutters. I walked purposefully from Jonah’s study to the den, thinking that I would find his leather-bound copy. Maybe in the back of my mind I was picturing him coming home so quietly I didn’t even hear his key in the lock. He’d find me reading Bleak House and be incredibly moved.
Except I passed the den, went into the kitchen, and made myself a sugar-free hot chocolate. I drank it standing up, leaning against the island where the stovetop was, thinking, Bleak House? You want fucking Bleak House? I’m in it. But I was barely halfway through the thought when I realized there was a house even bleaker, the one I’d grown up in. Not bleak from tragedy. Bleak from perpetual simmering, silent resentment. I decided I really had to call my parents.
Chapter Eight
My mother answered the phone. She always did. Her “hello,” as usual, came across as a challenge, as if she expected every call to be a fund-raiser from some organization whose position she’d once been passionate about and then lost interest in: NOW, NARAL, Emily’s List, Americans United Against Gun Violence, Greenpeace. She’d bought a T-shirt from No God 4 Me at an atheist street fair on Amsterdam Avenue, but she’d never gotten on any sucker list because she’d switched to her most recent cause, libertarianism, which she seemed to define as being at liberty not to do anything for anybody and listening to deeply unattractive people on C-SPAN talk about abolishing the Federal Reserve.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Susan?” I was an only child. Her voice was frosty; I hadn’t called her in over a week. Not that she ever called me
, apparently being under the impression that the telephone was a one-way instrument.
“Yes. Listen, I have some . . . not-good news.” Why did I expect a nervous intake of breath or a terrified “Are the boys all right?” Beats the hell out of me. I definitely shouldn’t have, because after a lifetime of phone calls, I knew it was my job to set the tone of our conversations. I usually tried to be affectionate (extending an invitation to a Mother’s Day barbecue) unless the occasion called for a little dab of melancholy (inquiring where Cousin Ira’s funeral services would be held).
I’d always low-keyed it around my parents, even during my years of the usual teenage derangement, because their emotional gamut ranged from a high of not unhappy to a low of vaguely depressed. On the rare occasion when they were directly confronted with someone else’s hilarity or heartache, they’d practically stagger, as if they’d been hit with a Category 4 hurricane. So I kept my hysterics to myself. Still, when I blurted, “Jonah’s been missing for two days,” I couldn’t subdue my agitation vibes.
“Two days?”
“Yes.”
She burped, and I let myself think the news was a shock to her system. “You don’t have any idea where he is?” she asked.
“No. Nobody has any idea.”
“Are you going to call the police?”
“I already did. So far I haven’t heard anything.”
“That’s not like him,” she observed. “Two days?”
“Yes.”
The ball was in my mother’s court, but she couldn’t do any more than stand there and watch it bounce. “Effectual” wasn’t a definition for either of my parents. Even when they sensed something was expected, they rarely managed to figure out what it was. If there had been a Rabinowitz family crest, Think on your feet would not have been its motto.