As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  “Thank you, but I can pay—”

  “Hey, Sus, don’t look a fuckin’ gift horse. You know the exact balance of your checking accounts, what your credit card bills are? You know your net worth like you know your phone number?”

  “No, but I do have some sense of what we have. And Jonah was great at details and on top of everything. So I’m sure—”

  “Look, ninety-nine percent of women avoid reality because it isn’t pretty.” I would have said “That’s such a dumb, narrow-minded remark from such a smart person,” but Fat Boy talked too fast, and I barely had enough energy to think it, much less say it. “But your reality is that less than a week ago, you thought Jonah was Dr. Nice Guy and in a million years he wouldn’t go to a hooker—”

  “Listen to me. I am positive—”

  “—and that he’d live to be a hundred-year-old stud without eye bags. So be positive, if that’s how you want to play it. Believe what you need to believe. But just understand there’s a lot about your life you may not know shit about. I’m telling you that as a friend.”

  He wandered into the kitchen. By the time he came back fifteen minutes later, covered with streaks of confectioners’ sugar, I’d forgotten he was in the house. I’d been concentrating on who could be a family spokesman and was getting nowhere.

  “You had some good cookies in the freezer,” he said.

  I looked at the powdery streaks on his mouth and fingers and said, “Lemon curd cookies.”

  “Hey, I thought they tasted lemony.”

  “They’re better at room temperature,” I murmured. “I was thinking about a spokesperson. I considered calling Jonah’s brother, Theo, asking him to find an appealing older actress, you know, someone with a big, comforting bosom and a lot of authority to play the role. Do you think that’s a possibility?”

  “S-U-X,” Fat Boy said. “Sucks. Let me draw you a picture, Susie. You get an actress who depends on Theo for jobs, and you’ll get someone willing to spout whatever lines he and his parents want to put out there, which could turn out to mean making them look good and you look bad. And don’t ask me”—he raised his voice into a falsetto—“‘why would they want to make me look bad if we’re all family?’”

  “Every time you imitate a woman,” I said, “it comes out sounding like the same profoundly irritating person.”

  “I’m sure that’s a comment fraught with psychoanalytic insight or some shit, but you’re changing the subject. Still, the actress thing isn’t a totally stupid idea.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure. You do need a pro. Don’t even think of your cousin Schnooky or someone who’s going to become an egomaniac after two minutes standing in front of a microphone bank. You need a PR type who’s not in PR, because that went over like a fucking lead balloon with the JonBenét Ramsey parents.” Fat Boy closed his eyes in thought and twisted his watch, which had gotten caught on one of the fat folds on his wrist. Then he looked at me. “Listen, I’ll find someone. If you do it, you’ll make the wrong calls, or start crying and sound like a potential pain in the ass, or try to get them to work for twenty bucks an hour.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you do. I’ll do it better and faster,” Fat Boy said. “You’ll have someone in time for the six o’clock news.”

  Fat Boy was true to his word. Late that afternoon, he actually walked the quarter of a mile to the house. He was exhausted and triumphant, as if he’d just completed the Ironman. His shirt was soaked, like laundry when the spin cycle doesn’t work. I handed him a giant glass of water and even managed my hydration speech, which he seemed to enjoy; I thought it made him feel like a jock. He told me he’d gotten a family spokesperson for me, someone named Kimberly Dijkstra, who had done some freelance writing for his hedge fund. “She was a reporter for BusinessWeek a hundred years ago. Steel-trap mind but comes off as warm and fuzzy—with big, maternal boobs, which is what you said you wanted. I kind of always liked those kind. Anyway, Andrea said you met her at one of our tree-trimming parties, so Kimberly can legitimately say she’s known you for years. Trust me: She’s good. She lives on East Seventy-fifth, in a town house, serious family money—and her parents were nice enough to die young, so it’s all hers. She’ll meet the press, so to speak. Do it in front of her house, which makes a good visual. A tree, window boxes, wealth . . . you will like it.” I told him fine, although right now I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say privately, much less publicly. “You don’t have to think,” Fat Boy said. “Kimberly will. And if she’s stumped, she knows I’ll have the answer.”

  Chapter Twelve

  By the time of the funeral, I’d broken apart. Now I was two people. Naturally, there was Susie the Wreck, the new widow who slept two or three hours a night, who had to fight herself not to break into hiccupping sobs when she was with her boys. That wound up being twenty hours a day, since besides my not being able to sleep, Evan, Dashiell, and Mason each developed his own brand of insomnia.

  In Evan’s case, insomnia was plain not sleeping. I could see his exhaustion getting worse day by day. His endearing little-boy skinniness—ribs and vertebrae on display—went from healthy to skeletal. His fair, lightly freckled skin grew pale, then took on a greenish undertone. Red smudges appeared under his eyes, then darkened until he looked like a creepy character in a Tim Burton movie. In those rare hours I managed to fall asleep, I’d wake myself. Evan? Is everything okay with Evan? I pictured him lying on his side, eyes wide open, though not really seeing the stuffed animal sharing his pillow. My in-laws had brought one for each boy from their trip to Machu Picchu. I’d done the aren’t-you-marvelous daughter-in-law bit: “What absolutely gorgeous llamas!” Even before the “ma” in “llama” was out of my mouth, Babs was shaking her head. “Actually,” she said, “they’re vicuñas.”

  Dashiell would wake up screaming. No words, just an endless shriek that slashed through the suburban night. One of Jonah’s and my private names for him had been Blabbo the Talking Boy—Dash had been born with no internal shutoff device. But now, at night anyway, he’d become mute. “Dash, sweetie, tell Mommy what the bad dream was about.” He’d suck in his lips and shake his head violently, No! No! as if he were certain an evil Someone was listening in to make sure he didn’t break the code of silence.

  Mason had never completely given up his infant sleep habits. It hadn’t been that terrible; Jonah and I had taken turns getting up whenever he woke, going to his room to kiss his forehead. At worst, we’d have to sit on the edge of his bed for a couple of minutes, saying, “Shhh, go to sleep, Mase.” After that, he’d be fine for another three hours. Maybe we should have Ferberized him early on, but he’d been the easiest of the triplets, so without even discussing it, we’d just allowed him the right to be a little annoying. Besides, our sleep deprivation had been so off the charts that our visits to his room barely registered.

  Now, though, Mason was wide awake for at least a half hour each time he got up. I’d hold him and whisper “Easy, sweetie” or “Shhh.” But no comfort could get him to stop pleading with me to come downstairs with him and wait for Daddy. I knew I had to be patient. I would explain exactly what I’d explained a few hours earlier: Daddy wasn’t coming back. “Remember, honey? We talked about it, that Daddy died. And what did we say?” His head swiveled frighteningly fast. No, no, no. He wanted no part of reality. “When someone dies,” I went on, “they can’t come back. No matter how much we wish they could.” No, no, no.

  So there was that half of me, Susie the Wreck. But beside this exhausted, shaken, grieving mess, another me took form. Enraged Susie. “Enraged Susie” did sound ridiculous, even to me—Premenstrual Barbie meets Bride of Chucky. Except my rage had such power I was frightened by its destructiveness. What I couldn’t deal with was the fury; I was consumed with flaming anger even when I had zero energy to drag myself from room to room. The tabloid headlines could barely get through the wall of my grief, yet at the same time, they sent me
into a frenzy. I wanted to scream louder than any human being ever had. Neighbors, acres away, would call 911 in horror. The cops would hear my shrieks over their sirens as they sped from headquarters.

  Left to myself, shielded by Kimberly the Spokesperson and Fat Boy’s gift of two weeks of security goons watching the house, I wouldn’t have seen those headlines. From the morning I woke up and Jonah wasn’t there, I let the Times and The Wall Street Journal rot in their plastic bags in the driveway. And was I going to drive to the newsstand at the LIRR station to get a look at The New York Post and The Daily News? I saw the headlines because relatives and friends had decided the widow of a murdered thirty-nine-year-old man needed to know what the world had to say about her husband.

  DOC SHOCK PARK AVENUE PLASTIC SURGEON FOUND SLAIN

  UNKINDEST CUT COPS SAY PARK AVENUE “FACE ACE” STABBED.

  NO TRACE OF “FACE ACE” HOOKER COPS STEP UP HUNT FOR MISSING CALL GIRL.

  If I’d had a minute to reflect, I wouldn’t have found the crassness of those front pages such a shock. A young, successful doctor, married, three kids, is stabbed to death in a whore’s apartment. Was that a tabloid story or what? Sure, I would hate it. But no rational person would believe The New York Post would rethink its mission and decide, Oh no, hawking this story would be cruel, to say nothing of tasteless! But I hadn’t had that minute to reflect.

  I could have borne Susie the Wreck better if not for Enraged Susie. Sure, I knew about the connection between depression and anger; I’d had enough therapy to understand that just by pressing Play in my mind, I could hear the placid but breathy voice of my shrink, Dr. Twersky, saying: “Depression is anger turned inward.”

  “For God’s sake,” I told Dr. Twersky five hours before Jonah’s funeral. “I am not turning my anger inward. I’m angry! I know I’m angry.” There she was, in my kitchen, a shrink making a house call and at seven-thirty in the morning, so I could get to Manhattan in time. I’d been to the funeral home before: It was every Jewish doctor’s last stop between New York and eternity, upscale, dowdy, but reassuring. The chapel didn’t have crosses, though the vaulted ceiling had fluffy clouds painted on it. Hey, don’t worry, the azure sky seemed to be reassuring, there actually is a heaven, and you’ll get in.

  “Inward anger is one thing,” I went on. “Mine is outward!” Actually, I shouted it. But it was the sort of whispered shouting you do when you don’t want to be overheard—like by your children. I’d made the mistake of telling Ida and Ingvild it would be okay if the boys raced their Hot Wheels trucks along the upstairs hallway. “What I’m feeling is actual rage!” Except by whispering it, I was coming off more like an angry Muppet than the near-psychotic I was. “Even if I wanted to keep it inward, goddammit, I couldn’t.”

  “You just told me—” She always spoke slowly. Either she weighed her every word or feared making some hideous and eternally mockable Freudian slip. “—that you—” I watched and waited. She was wearing a pantsuit and hadn’t wanted to take off the jacket. Now, as she sat in the straight-backed kitchen chair, the shoulders were riding way up. She looked like one of those overpadded, neckless football linemen, except in heavy navy tweed.

  I didn’t let her finish. “I just told you . . . what? That I’m depressed? Of course I am.” I was on the verge of saying I felt like a dead person, but I stopped myself. She’d say, “Let’s talk about what you mean by ‘dead person.’” Instead, I said, “I feel like shit. Except shit would be an improvement.”

  Dr. Twersky nodded. Some weak sun made it through the window and shone on her reddish-blond hair. It lit up her frizzy corkscrew curls into something painterly. Usually, she looked like Little Orphan Annie’s grandmother. “Feeling like shit . . .” she said carefully. “That sounds like an appropriate response to me.”

  “But if I’m feeling so dead and empty, plus on the verge of hysterical weeping, how can I also have all this rage? It’s almost impossible to control. I’m so exhausted. I need it to stop. I’m afraid I’ll lose it and start screaming. Or hurt everybody.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Well, not the boys. But with everyone else, I get wild with fury at even the dumbest remark. You know, something just thoughtless, not even cruel. Or at least not intentionally cruel. I got crazed by people who were calling here to talk to me. Why the hell can’t they wait for the funeral? Then I get angry at all the others, the ones who don’t call: Do they have to stand on fucking ceremony?”

  “And you say you have none of this anger toward the boys?”

  “No, not toward them.” I smoothed the ribbed cuffs of my sweater. I don’t know how long I’d stood in my dressing room, debating what to wear for a shrink home visit on the day of my husband’s funeral. Wool pants? No, too afternoony for such an early hour. I finally threw on jeans and a black sweater. But when the doorbell rang and I was running down the stairs, I thought, Oh God, what if she thinks I’m going to wear this to the service?

  I hadn’t wanted Dr. Twersky at the house. She’d called a couple of hours after the news of Jonah’s murder got on TV, and started going on and on about how sorry she was. I wanted to pretend the connection was bad; if she thought I couldn’t hear her, I could say “What? What? I can’t hear you” and hang up. I did try to lose her with “I really, really appreciate your calling” and babbling about how I wished I could get over to see her but I really didn’t have time because as soon as the medical examiner released the body—Jonah—we’d have the funeral the next day.

  That was when she offered to come over, which naturally made me wonder, Is she doing this because she just wants to get a look at the house? Because when I’d gone on and on in one session about picking yellow alabaster for the countertop in the downstairs guest bathroom—even though I wasn’t supposed to be, because talking about objects was masking a psychological issue I obviously wanted to avoid—I realized she was leaning forward. Yellow alabaster! Obviously high on Dr. Twersky’s emotional resonance chart.

  Then I kept worrying if this session was going to be a freebie because I definitely didn’t ask her to come. She volunteered. Or would she send me a bill? Fine, it was a professional relationship, but what if she billed me for, like, time and a half because it was so early in the morning, or because it was a house call? Now, sitting with her at the kitchen table, that all-American place for honesty, I realized I couldn’t get away with saying I hadn’t gotten angry at all with the boys. Fine: I admitted to her that I was so wiped that I didn’t have my usual resistance to their noise, and that Mason’s inability to comprehend that dead meant dead after I’d explained it a hundred times was getting to me. It made me want to break down and cry. In fact, one time I did. But I left out how a couple of times I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his head rocked and he cried “What? What do you want, Mommy?” and I’d scream, with spit flying out of my mouth, “Never, ever talk about Daddy coming back again!”

  Then I changed the subject to how, within a few hours of the newspapers coming out, before they even got to the autopsy, I’d picked up the remote in our closet–dressing room area, just out of habit. FOX News came on because Bernadine, our housekeeper, was not only a right-wing nut but had a fixation on Bill Hemmer that went way beyond a crush. Just as I was about to turn off the TV, I glanced up. They were cutting from a reporter in front of the UN back to the news desk.

  Behind the anchor—a woman who’d had serial face-lifts that made her mouth look like it was experiencing major g-forces on blastoff—was a giant screen. On it was Jonah’s photo from Manhattan Aesthetics’ website. And Awful Face-lifts on FOX was telling her male co-anchor, Obvious But Not Terrible Eye Job, that Jonah had been “stabbed to death in the apartment of a notorious Upper East Side prostitute.” She went on about Jonah being known as “king of the tummy tuckers,” which wasn’t true; he did much more face and some breast work. Then she said he was “a well-known Democrat activist,” which was true if that meant someone who’d gone to one cocktail party for Obam
a.

  Then she got to the family: first, Kimberly the Spokesperson, saying, “Mrs. Gersten has no reason to doubt her husband’s love for her and their little boys.” Then they played a video of me and Jonah. It must have come from somebody’s black-tie wedding, or maybe a Mount Sinai benefit, because I was in an Armani, a strapless cobalt taffeta, from about five years before, that had never fit in the bust after my pregnancy. Jonah’s arm was around me, and we were standing in a group, but they’d put our heads in a highlighted oval. It made us not just more visible to TV viewers but look like some golden couple among grayed-out dullards. I couldn’t follow much of what the anchor was saying beyond “wife and triplets, four years old!” as if the boys being four made Jonah’s murder or his being at a prostitute’s—whichever—infinitely worse than if they’d been three or five.

  “And,” I added, “they had a close-up of our 2008 holiday card, with the boys sitting on a beautiful horse. Light chestnut or something. From when we were up in Aspen, in a glen with Ponderosa pines and aspens all around. Well, of course aspens. There’s a . . . I guess it’s a lake in the background. I don’t remember it, but it’s there on the card.”

  Dr. Twersky gave a nod and said something. Maybe “Uh-huh.”

  “It was really strange,” I went on. “I was so shocked at seeing all of us up there that it felt like my heart stopped beating. But I was too stunned to worry Am I getting a heart attack? And I didn’t get at all angry then.”

  “Do you remember anything else you might have felt?” For the second time, I saw her glancing over to the cooking island. I’d hollowed out a giant Savoy cabbage and filled it with white roses and Genista. She was probably thinking how superficial I was, bothering about arranging flowers when I had a dead husband to worry about. To be fair, maybe she was thinking that it was healing that I could lose myself in flowers, even for a couple of minutes.