As Husbands Go (4 page)

Though no doubt longing to shoot
What the fuck?
glances at each other, they both managed to keep their eyes on me. I forced my shoulders into a more relaxed position, since I realized I must look like I was expecting blows from a blunt instrument. I didn’t want them to think I was out of control. The two of them, at least, should stay calm so as not to communicate any more fear to the boys. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “Please take the boys and give them breakfast. And then—whatever. Keep them busy downstairs.”

“Okay,” Ingvild said.

“Mrs. Gersten,” Ida finished. They divided a lot of what they said into halves. I once told Jonah I worried the boys would assume this was some practice of multiples, and they’d wind up splitting whatever they had to say into thirds. If they went off to separate colleges, they wouldn’t be able to complete a sentence until Thanksgiving vacation.

The triplets were eyeing me, probably hoping what they feared—Mommy thought something
bad
was happening—wasn’t true. They wanted Mommy to be okay and everything to be wonderful. I flashed them my razzle-dazzle smile, the one I employed at medical conventions. It always worked.

Except Evan saw through it. His Mommy radar was picking up
bleeps of phoniness. Now he would be agitated all day. When the girls took them all down to the kitchen, he’d still be so rattled by the mere fact of my falseness that he’d puke up his breakfast. That would set off a chain reaction: Mason would gag at the pink and yellow blobs of Froot Loops on the polyurethaned bamboo kitchen floor, then Dash would have to display how tough he was by mimicking Mason’s retching sounds. Evan would vomit again, this time from overstimulation.

The five of them headed to the stairs. Ida, who had the crowd-control instincts of a collie herding sheep, rushed ahead so she could set the pace of the boys. Ingvild descended slowly, not holding the banister, like a bride making her entrance. Racing back toward the bedroom, I fell down flat as my nightgown slid around my legs and hobbled me. I managed to push myself up to my knees but couldn’t catch my breath to take in enough air and propel myself to a standing position. Alone, I was hit again with panic. Where could Jonah possibly be? I was no longer befuddled from sleep, but my fear so overwhelmed me that I could barely manage to get up off the floor. Thinking things through was beyond me.

When my feet left the sturdy hallway carpeting and felt the soft rug in our bedroom, I relaxed enough to let my mind escape into fantasy:
Oh! Wait! I know: Maybe our phone’s ringer is off.
Yes! That could definitely be it.
Maybe Jonah had an accident, and someone in an emergency room had called to tell me. Not wanting to leave a frightening message, that nurse had left a note for the chief resident on the next shift:
Please notify wife of traumatic brain injury, bed 7. Collapsing scaffolding in front of building on Madison Avenue. (FYI his ID from Sinai/he’s MD!!). Tell her he’s here.
I hiked up my nightgown and hurried around the bed to the phone.

The ringer was on. To double-check, I raced back to my side of the bed and grabbed my BlackBerry from my nightstand. My hands were trembling so uncontrollably, it took me a couple of tries to press the speed dial, H for home. As our phone shrilled its first ring, I jumped, then ran back around the bed, fleetingly forgetting I had just dialed myself.
It’s Jonah, and he feels absolutely terrible because he forgot
—then I glanced down and saw my cell number on the regular phone’s caller ID readout.

I wanted to heave my BlackBerry across the room, hard, and create a vicious bruise on the Venetian-plaster finish on the wall opposite the bed. But my shaking hands decided to obey some barely conscious command from my brain: I brought up Recent Calls on the little screen of the phone. Hope lived under a second. My last incoming call had come at 6:47
P.M
. the night before: Aurora Hartman saying, “It would be a major blessing for the community if you’d co-chair the Trike-a-thon event for Tuttle Farm nursery school, because this could be a huge, huge fund-raiser for Tuttle, and you do
everything
with such style, and oh my God, your energy—I’m always in awe—and, Susie, this is our chance to make a major difference in our kids’ lives.”

What had sounded so comfortably familiar the night before—Aurora failing to be charming yet again—now, because of its ordinariness, felt like a smack in the face. My heart couldn’t keep up with its own pounding; it slammed against my chest wall so hard . . . how could it not explode? I pictured pieces of cardiac muscle pierced on the shards of my shattered ribs.

Jonah hadn’t come home the night before. He hadn’t reached out to me. Therefore, something unthinkable had happened. Absolutely. Sure, I could imagine him walking in the door and running upstairs shouting, “Susie, Susie, you’re not going to believe what happened to me!” But it was getting harder each minute to take off on any flight into fantasy.

My husband was missing. Then I thought,
Missing? If I’m lucky
.

Chapter Three

I sat on the edge of the mattress. Instead of doing what I meant to—covering my face and sobbing—I started sliding and almost landed on my ass. My nightgown again, and the perils of the good life: Everything was so smooth, there was hardly any friction between the gown and the Egyptian cotton sheet. My bare feet saved me with an up-down, up-down step, like in one of those folk dances performed by people trailing ribbons. When at last I got steady, I was panting, almost gasping, from the effort. This was crazy. I was strong, fit, well coordinated if not brilliantly athletic.

Except the bottom had dropped out of my life. Ninety-nine percent of me believed that. But that other one percent was almost afraid to call Jonah’s cell: He would answer with his cold, busy voice: “For God’s sake, Susie, there’s an emergency here! Dammit, don’t you think if I had a free second—if anyone here had a free second—you’d have gotten a call?”

I called anyway. Three rings and then “This is Dr. Gersten. I can’t answer the phone right now. To leave a message, please wait for the tone. If this is an emergency, please press the number five and the pound key.”

“Jonah, sweetheart, I know something’s happened—your not coming home at all last night—and I’m terribly worried. Please call me as soon as you can, or have someone call me to let me know how you are. I love you.” Right then it hit me. Maybe something had happened in the city during the night and I didn’t know about it yet. I rushed for the remote. But my hands started shaking again, so it took four tries to turn on the TV. I didn’t care whether it would bring
terror or relief. I just needed to know what was out there. That was what I’d done for months after 9/11, turning on the TV every few hours, ready for the worst but hoping for the sight of Nothing Catastrophic. I’d longed for boring weather forecasters standing before maps, McDonald’s commercials. And that was exactly what I got now: normality as presented by News Channel 4. Darlene Rodriguez was asking Michael Gargiulo if he knew why people used to eat oysters only in months that had an R in them. The sports guy glanced up at Darlene and Michael from his papers. From his grin, it looked like he’d been born with double the normal number of teeth; all of them gleamed with pleasure at his knowing the oyster answer.

I switched off the TV and paced back and forth on the carpet, trying for grace under pressure—or at least enough self-control so I wouldn’t howl like a dying animal. I leaned against the footboard. Considering all the crap I’d read in my life, how come I’d never come across a magazine article entitled “What to Do When You Wake Up and Your Husband Isn’t There”? It would have had a bullet-pointed sidebar of suggestions that could flash into my head.

The only information I could imagine in such a sidebar was “Phone police.” No, that probably wasn’t right. I remembered a TV show on which the wife called the cops and the guy on the phone asked, “How long has he been missing?” When she said, “Well, he didn’t come home last night,” the cop told her, “Sorry. We can’t take any action until he’s gone for three days. Try not to worry. Nine times out of ten, they just show up.” The cop had an edge to his voice—world-weary, snide—as if he were picturing a staggering-drunk husband, or one with the lousy luck to fall asleep after having sex with his bimbo girlfriend.

I walked across the bedroom toward the window that faced the front and sat in Jonah’s favorite chair in the world, a Regency bergère with gilded wood arms and legs. It was upholstered in creamy silk with a ribbon motif. When I’d spotted the bergère at an auction house, an embarrassingly loud “Ooh!” had escaped me. It was a beauty, fit for British royalty—and okay, suburban Jewish doctors, too.

Because I wasn’t the only one blown away by its beauty; Jonah had wanted the chair way more than I did. He’d sat on it and noted in his objective clinician’s tone that it wasn’t comfortable. You didn’t see it, but you could feel its back angled in a bizarre way. Instead of sitting straight, you felt pitched slightly forward, as if you were examining your knees. But he added in his deeper-than-usual, I’ve-got-a-refined-aesthetic-sensibility voice, “It’s a splendid piece.” Also a decent investment. But there was more: I could feel the chair’s power over him. It made him feel not just well-off—
Hey, I can afford this exquisite objet—
but incredibly refined. If George the Whatever had needed a court plastic surgeon, Jonah knew he would have been tapped. In a flash of marital ESP, I caught all this in under a second. We bid. We bought. For both of us, sitting in that chair always made us feel elegant and rich. Protected, too:
We’ve made it. We’re upper-class, and therefore things go the way we wish them to go
.

Even in that instant, petrified that life was about to give me the cosmic smack in the face that would make every woman on Long Island tell her best friend, “Thank God I’m not Susie Gersten,” I knew if I were sitting in a repro Regency covered in polyester damask, I would feel worse.

A second later, as I glanced back at my cell phone, the chair vanished from my head. I got up and called information. When the computer said, “City and state, please,” I told it, “New York, New York,” then enunciated “Donald Finsterwald” even while knowing the computer wouldn’t get it, having obviously been programmed not to comprehend New York accents by some hostile Southern Baptist; except for twice in my entire life, I’d always had to wait for an operator.

Even though it was not yet six in the morning, Donald Finsterwald, the administrator of Jonah’s plastic surgery practice, sounded not just alert but primed, up on the toes of his orthopedic loafers, ready and eager to handle the day’s first crisis. “Hello!” His extreme loyalty to Manhattan Aesthetics always creeped me out because it resembled patriotism more than simple dedication to work. Jonah
said I didn’t have an organization mind-set, that every decent-sized office needed a Donald.

“Hi, Donald. Susie Gersten. Sorry to call so early.” My voice came out squeaky; plus, I was still breathless. I tried calming myself by taking a Lamaze breath through my nose and exhaling it through pursed lips as silently as I could so he wouldn’t think,
Partner’s wife breathing hysterically. Watch what you say!
“I’m concerned . . . I am worried about . . . Jonah didn’t come home last night. I didn’t get any messages from him.”

“Oh, I’m sure—” He always strung out his vowels—“Ooooh, Iiii’m suuure”—so even in the best of times, it took practically a week till he got out a sentence. Also, he had one of those unisex voices, so nearly every time he called, if he asked for Dr. Gersten and didn’t say, “Hi, Mrs. Gersten, it’s Donald,” I’d wonder if it was a patient with a question about her new chin implant who’d managed to get Jonah’s home number, or the Irish dermatologist who always sat at the Manhattan Aesthetics table at any Mount Sinai fund-raising gala.

I said, “Listen, Donald, something is really wrong. Jonah doesn’t not come home. And before you think—”

“Mrs. Gersten, I would never think—”

“I know. Of course you wouldn’t.” Truthfully, I had no idea what he would think. Despite his almost pathetic eagerness to please, Donald Finsterwald had always repulsed me. I know I was being unfair, but I couldn’t help it. I saw him as (like antimatter and the Antichrist) the Anti-style, a man who always picked the most heinous clothes and accessories and wore them with total seriousness. What would make someone have his thick prescription lenses stuck into narrow black frames that made him look like he was Peeping
Tom checking out the world? Why would he wear strangulating turtlenecks that pushed up his double chin until it hung like a feed bag? Donald’s inner life—he must have one, since everyone was supposed to—was a mystery. “Sorry. Forgive my manners,” I apologized. “I’m so beside myself, Donald. In all the years we’ve been married, Jonah’s never not come home. I mean, if he’s going to be over a half hour or forty-five minutes late, he calls. Or has someone call.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said. “There have been a fair number of times I got word from Dr. Gersten, ‘Have someone call my wife.’ The very moment I get an order like that, it’s carried out.”