As Husbands Go (25 page)

At home, I kept occupied, working with the boys to prepare a Saturday-night dinner party for the four of us. We made pasta by hand, did menus on the computer. I had them create table arrangements from leaves, three dollars’ worth of carnations, and things that should be thrown away from each of their rooms. Evan’s showed actual talent: He entwined leaves and a blue ribbon all around a sneaker he’d outgrown; stuck more leaves, carnations, and two curled-up baseball cards into the shoe; and hung his Johan Santana Mets key chain from one of the Velcro closings. I was amazed: four years old, and somehow he understood you had to have a theme.

Even keeping busy on those Dorinda days, right after she was arrested and brought to New York, were rough. War, famine, economic convulsions: None of them made headlines like Dorinda Dillon. First her perp walk. Then TV and the Web got busy with clips from a couple of soft-core movies she’d been in during the late nineties. Networks and cable stuck shaded ovals or rectangles over tops, tushes, penises, and pudenda. I realized how often I’d watched the clips when I began seeing an abstract dance of geometric shapes.

Maybe Dorinda had once dreamed of a film career. Forget about it. All she got to do was be naked, or almost; not a single line of dialogue. She was one of four pole dancers in a bar, an extra girl at what was supposed to be a Hollywood orgy, the second of two blondes climbing all over a guy in high pimp gear who went for the other girl while shaking off Dorinda as if she were a pesky, leg-humping golden retriever. Dorinda Dillon had played the porn equivalent of a wallflower. But a famous wallflower, at least for those few days.

The scenes took on an almost comforting familiarity. They felt like old family movies you’ve had to watch too often. No more shock, any more than watching (for the fiftieth time) Cousin Mindy curl her lip in disgust as Aunt Edith demonstrates the twist, or watching baby Hannah do absolutely nothing at her first birthday party, an
unsmiling Buddha in a frilly pink dress.

The weird thing is, these home movies always take over and become the truest Truth. There may be a million memories in your head, but your mind’s basic definition of Mindy is
COUSIN WHOSE LIP NEVER STOPS CURLING
. For the rest of her life, Hannah will be
BLAH PUDGY GIRL
. And Dorinda Dillon—Dorinda Before, with long, silky, teased porn hair, and the hay-headed Dorinda After—would, first and forever, come to mind not as prostitute/accused murderer/coke-dealing robber of cash from a dead body who happened to be my husband, but as
FORMERLY BARELY-ATTRACTIVE SLUT WHO FORGOT IMPORTANCE OF GOOD GROOMING WHEN ON THE LAM
. Even weirder, the image with a lifetime lease that now resided somewhere near Mindy and Hannah would make it feel like Dorinda was somehow part of the family.

Weirdest: A week to the day after Lieutenant Corky Paston dropped by to tell me Dorinda had been apprehended, my obsessive curiosity about her simply stopped. When I got back from Florabella after doing a few centerpieces for local dinner parties and sharpening all our knives, pruners, and deleafers, I switched the cable DVR list to find a
Cook’s Country
show I’d recorded. When I saw my endless lineup of local news shows starring Dorinda Dillon, I had one of those
What was I thinking?
flashes. Then I erased them all.

Late that afternoon, my cousin Scott Rabinowitz came over, more to play with the boys than to keep me company. He was a couple of years younger than I was, but he had the social sophistication of a six-year-old. Naturally, that made him a favorite of the boys. The pleasure was mutual. Being an IRS tax examiner, Scott was accustomed to being detested by people. Also, being a pudgy accountant with a juicy lisp, he wasn’t a guy’s guy. As an extra
attraction, he had a unibrow, so he was achingly familiar with the disdain of the glam women he was, unfortunately, attracted to. For a guy like Scott, being considered cool by Evan, Mason, and Dash was an ego-booster. I assumed that for him, a Saturday night building SpongeBob, Patrick, and a bunch of jellyfish from LEGOs was a small triumph and not a defeat.

Since I couldn’t completely abandon my cousin, I put him and the boys at the kitchen table. I kept busy making whole-wheat dough and cutting out five-inch circles to freeze for future pizza nights. Now and then Scott and I would exchange a few sentences on how Cousin Kay, researching the Rabinowitz family tree, had discovered a branch of rogue Rabins in Indianapolis, or how it would take years for the IRS to remake the enforcement division after what the Bushies had done to it. Most of the time, though, the boys kept him too busy to make conversation. A good thing.

Suddenly, Dashiell began yelling at Mason for hiding some green LEGOs in his room. As the two of them stomped off to search, Evan sat quietly, ignoring us, balancing LEGO pieces on the backs of his outstretched fingers. Scott got up, looked in my refrigerator, and asked, “Don’t you ever eat unhealthy food?”

“Of course. If I kept it in the house, I could eat pounds of it.”

“But you don’t really
desire
salty pretzel rods, do you? I mean, like, you want one so bad you would go out at three in the morning to a 7-Eleven . . . except they’d probably only have those twisty ones that don’t crunch.”

“Listen, you pick your poison. If someone said, ‘They’re selling English florists’ bulbs from the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society on a street corner in the Bronx at three
A.M.,
but you’ll have to fight off a gang of crackheads—trust me, I’d be there.”

“Bulbs for planting, not eating, right?” Scott asked.

“Right. People don’t generally . . . Well, onions are bulbs.”

Times like this, I missed Jonah even more than I did at night when I was alone. I could cry then over my loneliness, though I’d be so exhausted from the day that no matter how bad the desolation was, sleep knocked me out. Talking about pretzels with someone
who was nice enough but could disappear off the face of the earth and I might not remember he’d existed or been nice to the boys was a worse kind of loneliness.

Right after dinner, I sent Scott
time-to-go
thought waves, but he didn’t receive them. Instead, he came upstairs while I bathed the boys—the fast bath, which meant they all stood in the tub while I soaped them, sprayed off the soap, dried them, and gave them each a star stamp on their separate Clean Guy charts, then did the hurry-up toothbrushing with all three around the sink at the same time, which got them another star stamp because they kept to the no-spitting-toothpaste-or-water-at-your-brothers rule.

“How do you do it night after night?” Scott asked after we put them all to bed. “Aren’t you completely wiped?”

I took his question as a positive sign, that the boys had worn him out. So I censored “Not completely wiped, just your basic wiped,” and offered him what I hoped was a weary smile as I led him downstairs. I made the mistake of turning on a lamp in the living room. He took that as an invitation to stay, plopping down in a club chair, leaning his head back, closing his eyes, and letting his arms dangle over the sides.

In defeat, I grabbed a fringed throw from the arm of the couch, wrapped myself in it, and sat in the corner of the couch. The throw had a pleasing verbena smell from a delicate-fabric wash I’d forgotten I’d bought.

Scott lifted his head and opened his eyes. Then he realized he had nothing to say but couldn’t very well close his eyes again. So I told him, “You put on your sincerest voice and say, ‘Tell me, Susie. Really. How are you doing?’ Put a lot of concern into the ‘how.’”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll know for next time. So?”

“So, I don’t know. Up, down, up, down. Never really up, actually. There’s just low-key down and deep down.” He nodded, which was fine because there was really nothing to say. “Sometimes I think it can’t get any worse, but then I realize it can and probably will.”

“Scary.” He rubbed his nose with the back of his index finger. I pictured his knuckle hair rubbing against his nose hair.

“Scary on its own,” I said. “But with the boys . . . and don’t tell me I’m stronger than I think I am. I’m afraid I’ll be in the middle of a normal moment a few months or a year from now, doing whatever but thinking about Jonah, and I’ll break from the cumulative effect of all the memories.”

“When people break down—”

“I’m not talking about breaking down. Breaking, period. As in shattering. Like a champagne flute.”

Scott laughed. “A champagne flute?”

I got up, pissed at how he’d pronounced “champagne” with a French accent, as if my mere use of the word was pretentious. But I tripped on the long fringe of the throw, and I wound up right back on the couch. “Dammit! I was talking to you, one human being to another, opening up.”

“Susie, listen, I know. I’m sorry. Honestly, I was listening, one human being to another. But we’re Brooklyn human beings, and ‘champagne flute’ was never a word combination in Flatbush.”

“Your part of Flatbush.”

“Like your parents knew from champagne flutes. Anyway, it just struck me. Believe me, I wasn’t—you know—making light of your troubles. Your pain.”

“It’s okay, Scott. Forget it.”

“When I said ‘breaking down,’ I wasn’t talking about you having a nervous breakdown and going to a psych ward or anything. For all I know, that could happen. Except you really are so strong. I was thinking that you got to be what you are not from marrying Jonah, who was a wonderful, wonderful guy. You know I always thought that. He was so nice to me. But you didn’t become what you are now just through your looks or your talent or marrying a doctor. Look, I’m a tax examiner. I deal with some rich people. You know what I see? Some of them got where they are through inheritance or brains. Or dumb luck. Or embezzlement, tax evasion. There are loads of ways to make it. But you: You got what you wanted because you had a powerful vision of how you wanted to live. And you got there because of whatever gifts you have—and your strength. You didn’t
sit around eating bonbons and fantasizing. You worked your ass off. You built a business. You kept up with that fertility business for years, and everyone is in awe of how you deal with the little guys. You were a huge asset to Jonah in his practice.”

“Then why would he . . .” I didn’t even bother to finish.

“I don’t know,” Scott said. “But if you’re clueless, maybe there’s a reason. Maybe it had nothing to do with you.” I shrugged. He went on, “What? It sucks if you can’t blame yourself? Listen, you’ve always been the creative type. If you’re looking to blame yourself, you’ll invent a way. But come on. Was Jonah a shit who always screwed around?”

“No. Of course not. Well, it’s possible, but it’s so totally against everything I knew about him. He was so dependable. And moral. Also, I can’t see where he could have found the time.”

“Maybe he had some secret kink he managed to hide from the whole world, including you, that he could satisfy in five minutes.”

I had to laugh. Maybe I even did. “Scott, give me a break.”

He scratched his jaw. Even though he was in his early thirties, a pear-shaped man in unfashionably baggy jeans and loafers with black tire-tread soles, I still saw him as my kid cousin, so the rasping sound of his fingernails on his five o’clock shadow surprised me. “I don’t know if I should be saying this,” he began. “Probably not. But anyway, about being duped: People meet some slicko with a ton of hair gel and a bullshit story, and they say, ‘That guy is a con man.’ But that’s not a con man, that’s a loser with too much crap on his hair. The successful con man, white-collar criminal, guy who leads a secret life—someone with a big sex secret, or a spy—gives off waves of normalcy. They’re nice guys, but not so nice that it calls attention to their niceness. I’ve been with the IRS for ten years, and you know when my antenna goes up? When someone comes in, tells his story, and my reaction is ‘Whoever looked at your returns made a big mistake. I apologize that we wasted so much of your time and energy.’”

I leaned back to mull over what Scott had said. I tried putting my feet up on the coffee table, but Bernadine had moved it far
ther from the couch, where she believed it belonged, and my heels slipped off the edge. I sat straighter and said, “You’re right, and it’s the perfect viewpoint for someone working for the government looking for really clever tax cheaters. But it’s different living with somebody. I know there are lots of wives who go into shock when they find out their husbands have been fooling around with another woman, or with a guy, for that matter, or that they’re involved in some giant fraud. They’re always saying, ‘I can’t believe it!’ But almost all the time, if they’ve missed the signals, it’s because they didn’t want to pick them up.”

“So you’re saying you’re not that way,” Scott said. He sounded more matter-of-fact, as if making an observation, than doubting.

“Scott, I’ve thought this through again and again, and I can’t remember any signals or signs of distress that made me draw back and tell myself,
Uh-oh, I don’t want to deal with that because it would jeopardize the marriage or my lifestyle
. And okay, maybe I wasn’t well-bred enough for him, or interesting on intellectual subjects, but I don’t think it was anywhere near a deal-breaker. Even if it was, does a guy who wants to talk about history cycles go to a prostitute for conversation?”

“No. If Jonah was hostile that you weren’t into history cycles, I can’t see him taking that route.”

“You know what I wish?” I said.

“What?”

“I wish there was someone who’d been Jonah’s best friend, someone he really confided in, and that guy could say to me, ‘Susie, I swear to God, that one night was the only time Jonah ever cheated on you. We told each other everything, and trust me, I would have known. It was just one stupid moment of weakness in a whole lifetime of love.’”

I could see Scott felt sad for me. Usually, that would have pissed me off, being the object of pity, but I didn’t feel any condescension of the “naive little fool” variety that had been coming my way since the cops found Jonah. “Maybe there’s something to say that would make you feel better,” Scott finally said, “but I don’t know what it
is.”