As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Grandma Ethel said.

  My back was hurting from sitting on the piano bench without any support. My neck ached from the weight of my head. Grandma Ethel, on the other hand, sat straight and looked supremely comfortable. I said, “My mind understands what Jonah probably went to Dorinda Dillon’s apartment for. It has to, because it can’t find any other explanation that it can believe. But you want to know something? My heart will never accept it. It’s contrary to everything I ever knew or felt about him and our relationship.” She nodded. I turned to Sparky. She wasn’t nodding, so I added, “Maybe because not accepting it is the only way I can keep going.”

  “Then let me give you some advice,” Grandma Ethel said. “Fuck logic. Why torment yourself? If your heart says, ‘He was a good and faithful husband,’ go with it. You have every right to tell yourself, ‘Maybe he was in a whore’s apartment, but not for sex.’ Period. End of sentence.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Closer to eleven o’clock than ten, after all the goodbyes, I didn’t feel just exhausted. I felt physically weak. When I got to the staircase, I had to clutch the railing with two hands, lean forward, and pull with all my strength to get up the first step. What kept me from sitting right there, resting my head on the third step, and sleeping like that the whole night was fear that Mason would wake up. Not finding me in bed, he would come rushing downstairs thinking Daddy had come back. Then I heard a scraping sound: footsteps coming out of the kitchen. I’d been sure everyone was gone. A surge of adrenaline I didn’t know was in me rocketed me up. I was ready to grab the boys, lock us all in my bedroom, and call the cops.

  Then I heard “Susie?” Theo’s voice, but he said my name in an odd way. Had he heard me practically crawling up the stairs? I turned. He was holding what was left of my last organic Pink Lady apple; his mouth was full. “Anything wrong?” he asked, the words muffled by apple.

  “No, nothing. I was going to check on the boys.”

  “I was waiting for you in the kitchen.”

  “Sorry, I thought you went back to the city with your parents.”

  “I told them . . .” He flipped back his hand in a get out of here gesture. A piece of apple pulp slipped from his mouth and onto his black silk shirt, but he didn’t notice. “You said we’d talk later. I assumed you still needed to unload after everyone left and that you wanted me to stay late or stay over.”

  “I did!” I lied. I flashed what I hoped was more grateful smile than mere display of teeth. “Let me run up and check on the boys.”

  When I forced myself to come back down, Theo was stretched out on the living room couch. My hope that he’d fallen asleep was dashed when he popped up into a sitting position.

  “Were you in the living room when my neighbor asked if the cops had any lead on the call girl?” I asked. “Lovely moment.”

  “No,” Theo said. “I was hanging in Jonah’s study with my father. But my mother caught it, so naturally, I’ll be hearing ‘Can you believe the unmitigated gall of that tacky, tacky man’ for the next two or three years. What a dumb pièce de shit. Your neighbor—not my mother, who, as you know, is not dumb.”

  “I do know.” Every part of me was so heavy with exhaustion I dreaded moving. If anyone else in the world had been stretched out on my couch, eating my last Pink Lady, I would have been honest and said I was vanquished, beyond fatigue, and—though I was deeply and profoundly sorry—if I didn’t sleep immediately, I would drop dead. We’d have to talk tomorrow.

  The price of Theo’s charm was saying yes to whatever he wanted. He hardly ever got anything but yeses, since nobody could deal with what came after the no. If I gave the slightest indication that I wouldn’t go along with what he wanted, I’d be in for any of fifty different responses, all of them unpleasant. He’d rage out of the room in angry silence, shout “You think you’re the only one who’s exhausted?” Pull a passive-aggressive “I just want to help, but if it’s more than you can handle . . .” hurl the apple across the room, and then stomp out.

  But I hadn’t said “No, I can’t talk,” so he leaned back his head against a pillow and gave one of those half-smiles that people get when recalling a nice moment. “You know,” he said, “when your grandmother walked into the room . . . Amazing! I knew instantly who she was. I mean, God, the resemblance!” His eyes opened wide, and he mouthed a silent “wow.” “And her lover. You’ve got to give both of them credit. It can’t be easy coming into a living room full of suburban types. But your grandmother has, shall we say, a certain chutzpah. Maybe even a kind of courage.”

  “I guess so. But ‘courage’ is such a positive word. Is it courageous to turn your back on an eight-year-old kid, your own flesh and blood?”

  “I don’t know,” Theo said. “How can we judge what the mind-set was pre-feminism? It was a different world. Anyway, what is the deep dish?” He gave me what I guess was meant as an expectant raised-eyebrow look, except, as with most people, both brows lifted. “Come on,” he said. “You and Granny were next to each other on the piano bench with the girlfriend right beside you. Into heavy-duty conversation.” I waited for him to say more, but he sighed, like he was giving up on me.

  “There wasn’t anything special we were talking about,” I said quickly. “Just about Jonah. They really thought he was a wonderful guy. And my grandmother obviously wanted to see me, to say how sorry she was. I’m surprised by how moved I was when I looked up and . . . Grandma Ethel. And I like Sparky a lot. She works very hard—long hours—so it meant a lot that she came, too.”

  “She’s a civil rights lawyer?”

  “Civil liberties. First Amendment stuff, keeping government out of people’s personal lives.”

  “Does it pay?” Theo asked. “Not keeping government out of people’s lives. I mean does it pay financially?”

  “Probably not a bundle. But if you remember, no one has to hold a fund-raiser for Grandma Ethel.” Theo nodded. I continued, “Two really profitable divorces. Highest-paid TV personality in Miami for years.”

  “I remember you guys talking about it.”

  Jonah and I had described going up to my grandmother’s endless white fifties-style ranch house on some elegant little island off Miami Beach. It had high double front doors with double knobs right in the middle. The brass back plates formed a two-foot sunburst. “When Grandma Ethel and Sparky walked in tonight, it was such perfect timing,” I said. Theo nodded again. I could tell I had become boring with a couple of sentences. But he wasn’t getting up to go, so I added, “Actually, I was talking to them about Dorinda Dillon.” Theo exhaled a long “oh.” I had stopped being boring. “This may sound hopelessly naive, but do you know what I was telling them?”

  “What?”

  “That I still can’t get my mind around the fact that Jonah went to someone like her.” Maybe Theo murmured a response. It was difficult to tell, because he sat up, taking so long to change positions that it became the Theo Slo-Mo Demo and I was momentarily distracted.

  Finally, he turned his head toward me and said, “I hear you, Susie.” Too many seconds—maybe three—went by before he found something better to say: “He really, really loved you.”

  “The thing of it is,” I told him, “he never turned off me the way some husbands do over time. We couldn’t have kids right away because he was in med school and I had to work. Then I had all those fertility problems. So we had more years to be honeymoonish than most couples. There aren’t lots of opportunities for intimacy when you have triplets, active boys, but I never doubted that Jonah was, you know, drawn to me. Even when he looked at other women, he was appreciating them, like Hey, she is really spectacular, but it was more as a connoisseur than a guy actively lusting. Or sometimes he’d look at them clinically, like someone would think he was gazing into their eyes while he was saying to himself, I could make her look so much better with a brow lift.”

  “I hear you,” Theo said again. “Let’s put it this way: If you had exactly y
our personality and looked like a dog, I don’t know if Jonah . . . you know how he was. About clothes, decoration, art. He had a strong aesthetic opinion about, really, everything. And for him, you were the best. My parents finally accepted they could never change his mind about you because his attraction was so strong.”

  “Were they hoping he’d get bored with me and see me as I really was—not an aristocrat?” You Gerstens aren’t exactly bluebloods, I so wanted to say. What do you have that I don’t? A two-generation head start on my family in upward mobility and maybe an extra twenty-five IQ points?

  “I don’t know what they thought,” Theo said. “I didn’t ask. The way I saw it was I loved my brother and you made him happy.”

  “I did. Listen, I admit I want to believe that he wasn’t at Dorinda Dillon’s for sex. And I do believe it. But what I’m after is the truth, even if it’s an ugly truth that forces me to face something about Jonah or our relationship that I don’t want to look at. Theo, the times you talked to him, did you get the impression that anything was wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” He caressed the gold band of his thirtieth-birthday Rolex, but he couldn’t check the time because the watch face was hanging down now that it was hip to wear watches loose. “I don’t think anything was wrong with him, but I think he felt pressured.”

  “Pressure from me? Supporting me, the whole house and everything, in the style—”

  “No. Possibly that’s my mother’s theory, but not mine.”

  “I wasn’t that terrible a drain. I mean, for all that I’m high-maintenance, I’m doing part of the maintaining. I work. Florabella isn’t making a fortune, but it’s doing all right. So even with the economy and people cutting back on elective surgery, I didn’t feel like I had to put the thermostat down to sixty-five degrees or buy Vanity Fair panties.”

  “He never complained to me about you. Period.”

  “The kids?”

  “Well, they are a handful. As far as they went, all he ever complained about—and it wasn’t in any really bad way—was their noise level. He said there were never five consecutive seconds of silence from the minute they got up to when they fell asleep. But he said it in kind of an amused way or a fond way, like ‘They are so fucking noisy, but they’re mine, and aren’t they adorable?’”

  “Then what do you think caused the pressure?”

  Theo turned up his hands in an I don’t know gesture. “I’m trying to think. Maybe he felt pressure about work. He never came right out and said it, but I sensed he didn’t feel he was getting enough support from his partners. He had all the responsibility, making all the business decisions, following up on everything. Does that sound right to you?”

  “It does. I mean, I don’t know how much pressure he was feeling, because Jonah never was one of those husbands who took up the whole night telling you about his day. But he did feel he had too much on his plate. Gilbert John was doing his Grand Old Man thing on the international conference circuit, plus his pro bono work and philanthropy stuff. And when he wasn’t busy with his usual grandness, he was getting ready for a gallery show of his mosaics. Jonah said Gilbert John was taking out the most money but working as though someone had named him surgeon emeritus. And Layne? She’s the ultimate sweetie. Great with patients, but she can’t or won’t exert any authority over the staff.”

  I had to get upstairs. I suppressed a yawn so enormous, my eyes began to water.

  “I think there might have been something else getting to Jonah,” Theo said. “I’m not saying it was a conscious thing. I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “At some level, he may have been angry at not being able to live life as graciously as he wanted to.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sensing that I was going to hear something I wouldn’t like.

  “You know, he loved beautiful things. He wanted beautiful things. And with him being the first child, and the most gifted, the fact of all the pressures in his practice and of earning enough to sustain the lifestyle he wanted . . . It pissed him off, having to work so hard and still not be able to get what he dreamed of.”

  Everything seemed to go silent except the ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, which I could suddenly hear. “What did he want that he didn’t have?” My fatigue gave my question a flatness I wasn’t feeling, but I was grateful for being able to sound as cool as Theo.

  “He said it would be great to be able to afford a driver so he could have some downtime between home and work. And he really wanted to get rid of those au pair twins who had to be treated like family and were always around—going out to dinner with all of you, even—and get a top-drawer nanny.”

  “He was angry over that?” I asked. The flatness was gone. If any word could describe my tone, it was disbelief. Yes, Jonah could get angry, but he wasn’t the type to seethe over the injustice of our not having upscale servants. Theo’s shrug meant either I’m not sure or I won’t push it because you’re in total denial.

  He left a minute later. It was nearly midnight. I had to sleep fast. Given the boys’ recent insomnia, along with their usual five-thirty rise-and-shine, I’d be lucky to get four hours. I would have been asleep before my head hit the pillow, but as I was pulling down the duvet, I noticed Lieutenant Paston’s card. I’d stuck it among the pinkish-white Rosalind roses I’d arranged in Jonah’s Yale tenth-reunion mug on my nightstand. Paston had said to call him any time if I thought of something. Midnight was definitely any time, but the number wasn’t his cell, so it wouldn’t be like I was waking him. And if he wasn’t working the late shift, he’d told me someone familiar with the case would be on duty.

  After a couple of minutes on hold, a woman’s voice came on. “Mrs. Gersten, Sergeant Maureen Ferrari. I’m sorry about your loss.”

  “Thank you. I know it’s late, but I haven’t heard anything in a couple of days. Maybe I should have waited until the morning to speak to Lieutenant Paston, but—”

  “No problem.” Her voice was smoky, like one of those babes in old detective movies whose hair dips over an eye. But she spoke in a fast staccato, so she didn’t come across as babelike. “I wish I had something solid to report. So far, none of our leads to Dorinda Dillon has panned out.”

  “She’s the only one you’re looking for?” I asked. “I mean, was there any evidence that somebody else was involved? Her just disappearing: You don’t think she had an accomplice to help her get away? Or else—this may sound far-fetched—maybe somebody did her in because”—even to myself, I was coming across like an overambitious rookie detective on Touching Evil—“if she was caught, she could be persuaded to talk?”

  “There’s really nothing to make us think anyone else was involved,” Sergeant Ferrari said. “But I promise you, Mrs. Gersten, this case is our top priority. We’ll find her. She left in a hurry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we found a salable amount of drugs, cocaine. In a plastic bag in a frozen pizza box. She glued the box shut, so it looked unopened.” She took a deep breath. I sensed an announcement. “If Dorinda had a personal phone book or a PDA, she took it. But she did have a pad in the kitchen with a list of her . . . appointments for that day. It said six-forty-five Jonah. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s written in the same way as with all her clients—first names and the time they were coming.”

  I closed my eyes. “How many names were on the list for that day?”

  “Dr. Gersten was her third,” she said. “Third and last.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The end of the week of mourning coincided with the travel agent calling to remind me that Presidents’ Week was two days away and, “Heavens,” she said, “this is sooo awkward to have to say, but did you happen to remember that Dr. Gersten got plane tickets and put down a deposit for a ski vacation in Utah?”

  “Oh my God, I forgot! And he kept reminding me about some new ski wax with Teflon . . .”

  Every time I was doing something ordinary and mindless—like at
that moment, making tea and answering the phone—and Jonah’s name came up, my heart stopped. It beat lub, but then I kept waiting for the dub, except it felt like it was never going to happen and my life wouldn’t go on. My final act on earth—in this case, bobbing a Dragon Pearl jasmine tea bag in and out of hot water—seemed both commonplace and so magical that Vermeer should have captured it: Woman Dunking Tea Bag. I held the phone between my ear and shoulder and wrapped my hands around the hot mug. As I lifted it, the jasmine went straight up from my nostrils and saturated my brain with sweetness.

  Utah? It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to get away for a few days, give the boys a change of scene. Maybe I’d be smart to take some of the unasked-for advice people kept giving me: Do a Variety of Activities with the Kids to Create a More Meaningful Bond; No Major Challenges the First Year, but Do Take on Small Ones; Time Heals; Don’t Let Your Exercise Routine Go Because You Need Those Endorphins.

  In the time it took to tear open a packet of Splenda, I decided the combination of a twelve-hour-long altitude headache, seven days of anxiety over Evan feeling abandoned in ski school, and me schussing down a mountain, sobbing so hard I wouldn’t see the ponderosa pine four feet ahead and—whoops!—leaving