As Husbands Go (17 page)

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 Obama.

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.

Once Dr. Twersky left (after an inordinate amount of time in the yellow alabaster guest bathroom), I spent the next hour making brown sugar cookies with the boys, for whoever came back to the house after the cemetery. I figured it would be a good way to get the three of them to calm down after their truck races and also let them feel they were participating in the day. Also, I wanted to give Ida and Ingvild a break; based on their kindness over the last few days, they could qualify for sainthood.

I cried so much that day. Not just from grief, because I’d been
grieving since they found Jonah, and even before, in anticipation. This time my tears were from being in this packed chapel with almost three hundred people demanding face time to tell me “What a terrible, terrible loss.” Many of them meant it. “Susie, I’m so sorry.” It was like someone else’s car radio you couldn’t turn off; I was stuck with listening to their every word. Yet all I heard of the rabbi’s eulogy was “We have a right to ask, ‘Where is God in all this?’” The rabbi probably offered an answer, though I didn’t catch it.

Apparently, he went on for a while. One of Florabella’s best customers, Caddy Demas, came running over—or whatever it’s called in stiletto heels with anorexic ankles—just as I was getting into the limo to go to the cemetery. Her gloved hand tugged at my coat sleeve. “Susie, I just have to tell you. That rabbi may have gone on for what? twenty minutes? but it was so incredibly moving that nobody cared.” Her gloves were persimmon suede with black satin skirtlike things flaring out at the wrists, a look for the woman whose devotion to fashion was so maniacal she was proud to look like the fourth musketeer.

By that time, I was little more than a robot programmed to respond “Thank you” when spoken to. But Caddy had a standing five-hundred-dollar-a-week order with us, and so was capable of overriding my circuitry. I wound up saying, “Oh, Caddy, thank you
so
much for sharing that with me,” a sentence I normally would not only refuse to utter but would make me gag. Maybe it wasn’t that she was a valuable customer; maybe it was dawning on me that I needed to be nicer to people.

With three little kids, I was facing the world as a different person. Whatever points a widow inherited from her husband’s status weren’t going to guarantee me a spot on the A-team anymore. “Stabbed to death” might make for interesting conversation, but Jonah’s demise at a call girl’s apartment would be taken to mean that Susie hadn’t been able to satisfy him. Or that someone like me had managed to score a privileged-attractive-charming-gifted-successful Yale doctor only because he was one deeply twisted dude.

Chapter Thirteen

“How has it been, dealing with her?” my brother-in-law asked. Our heads turned toward the living room and his mother.

“Fine,” I said. Theo gave me a look, so I said, “Doable. But she seems to be avoiding eye contact with me. Normally, that would throw me. But I’m too far gone to be thrown.”

“Let me tell you: When a person comes to the end of her rope and she’s sure there are no more terrors life can hold, that’s only because she hasn’t met my mother yet. You’re never too far gone.”

“Your mother can be a challenge, to put it mildly,” I agreed. “But she loved Jonah so much. She and I are going through the same hell now. The last thing I want is for her to withdraw from me. Trust me, Theo: I understand what your parents—and you—are living through now, what you went through from the minute Jonah was missing. This is just as terrible for you as it is for me.”

Theo flipped his stylishly messy hair off his forehead. “No. Look, they lost a child, but he’d had a life: He accomplished, he gave them grandchildren. I lost a brother who was always great to me, even way back, when I was
the
primo pain in the ass.” Jonah would not have put that completely in the past tense, but I nodded. “For me, a brother like him was a perpetual reminder that you don’t have to be a shit or a bore to get where you want to go. He was such a good man, but he didn’t wear his goodness like, you know, Thomas More in
The Tudors
. He was fun. But for you: We’re not just talking close relative here. We’re talking father of your children, triplets, for God’s sake. And your lover.”

“My dearest friend, too.” My voice might have trembled a little, but by late afternoon, I was cried out, at least until after everybody left. “He understood me so totally, right from the start. And he loved me a hundred percent. He wasn’t looking to make changes.”

“Sucks,” he murmured.

“And then some.”

It was the third night of shiva, the weeklong period of mourning. Theo and I had successfully hidden ourselves in plain sight in the hallway between the guest bathroom and living room. Momentarily, we were safe from the damp kisses and messy condolences from the almost two hundred visitors coming each day.

The seven-day grieving period probably had been a brilliant custom for a sixteenth-century Polish village, where you could spend a whole lifetime meeting fewer than two hundred people. But in the twenty-first century, Babs, Clive, Theo, and I were overwhelmed with visitors from the different universes we inhabited. We had doctors, of course, smooth-browed plastic surgeons and rumpled oncologists. Babs’s crew of cosmetic-industry executives was discernible because they looked like they’d inherited their eyelashes from a mink. The theater and New York movie types from Theo’s casting life reminded me of academics—the only other group I knew who wore their scarves indoors.

From my life, floral types set down flowers that could have been plucked from the Garden of Eden when God’s back was turned. Event planners came bearing excessively inventive sympathy baskets. Someone brought French preserves, a wheel of Reblochon, and baguettes tied around and around with tricouleur ribbon probably left over from a Bastille Day party. Another came with a Limoges plate on which she’d arranged gargantuan dried apricots and pears into a giant rose.

Neighbors came, too, from all the Gersten territories, suburban Long Island, Manhattan, the Hamptons. So did our best friends from high school, college, and the present. Obscure third cousins appeared, insisting on drawing family trees on the backs of business cards. It was all too much.

Every few sentences, Theo or I would glance over at Babs. She sat so far back in the wing chair—Jonah’s chair—that her black lizard Manolo flats weren’t touching the floor. I kept waiting for her to inch forward, as she was in deep dialogue with her blue-eyed rabbi. It seemed like a one-way conversation—she talked, he leaned in to listen. But she sat straight, speaking slowly but intensely, her head pressing against the chair’s high back.

“I’m glad I’m not a fly on that wall,” Theo remarked. “I’m sure she’s saying something that would infuriate me.” He shuddered in a way that made his glossy, longish hair flop charmingly. “Or humiliate me beyond belief.”

“Maybe just embarrass you,” I countered.

“Not that ‘embarrass’ is a natural segue, but are your parents coming tonight?” Even when trying to hide distaste, a lot of people broadcast it through small gestures—nose wrinkling or corner-of-mouth twisting. Theo’s giveaway was always over the top in its lack of subtlety. He would jerk back his head in distaste as if he’d just spotted a conga line of cockroaches. I thought it was hilarious, though Jonah had a theory that Theo’s hostility level was so off the charts that while politeness required everyone else to hide their “What a loser” or “Outrageously cheap wine” comments, Theo had to let it out. His “your parents” and head jerk occurred in the same instant.

“No, they’re not coming,” I told him. “My mother had a sinus attack. From my flowers, she said. She disapproves of flowers inside houses. Right after I dropped out of school and moved to New Haven, she went through an environmental-activist phase. It lasted about three weeks. But that was just when I moved in with Jonah and landed a designer job with
the
best florist in New Haven. When
I told her about it, she did her quiet ‘oh’ first. She just says ‘oh,’ then stops. Gives you enough time for your heart to sink. Then she said, ‘There are some of us who believe nature is a not-for-profit corporation.’ I had some brilliant response, like ‘Huh?’ She got this really huffy tone: ‘Some of us might ask if the florist business is ethical. You have to admit it does rip off nature.’ So I asked her, ‘What about farmers?’ She couldn’t think of an answer, so she backed down.

“But a couple of months later, she was sitting next to a basket of dahlias and bittersweet I’d done. All of a sudden she started clearing her throat about a million times. Then she said, ‘The doctor thinks I may have developed an allergy to flowers indoors, when there’s no ventilation.’ She still does her allergy act whenever she remembers. Sometimes she rubs where her sinuses hurt. Except Jonah said where she’s rubbing would be for TMJ pain, not sinusitis. Anyway, my father offered to come by himself tonight, but I could hear the relief in his voice when I told him he should stay home, rest up.”

A minute later, we glanced back into the living room. Babs had fallen silent. The rabbi looked like he was trying to recall Pastoral Relations 101, the lecture called “When Communication Is Awkward.” Suddenly, Babs burst into tears. She patted her lap, blindly searching for her handkerchief, unfolded it, and pressed it against her eyes with both palms.