As Husbands Go (29 page)

“Babs.” Andrea made a noise halfway between a snort and a laugh. “What I don’t understand is why her outburst surprised you. You can’t expect good breeding from someone who contours their eyes with three browns for daytime.”

“She went to Vassar.”

“That’s education, not class. By the time you’re eighteen, you can’t even learn how to imitate being polished much less be polished.”

“Speaking of classy behavior,” I said, “guess who said ‘fucking’? I said it right to her face.”

“If I stopped saying it, my mother-in-law would think I got run over by a truck and Fat Boy married someone else. Hand me the roll of cloth-covered wire, please.”

We were in one of those huge echoing lofts in a nowhere section of downtown Manhattan, doing a wedding both of us hated to the same degree, a rarity. The bride’s inspiration was “Make it look like a box from Tiffany!” Andrea’s broad hint that this was not an original concept—some might call it trite—hadn’t made a dent. Neither had my suggestion that the tiniest touch of red could take it to a whole new level. So, along with our part-timer, Marjorie, and Tyrell and Nick, two tall Shorehaven High School seniors who helped us with installations, we were stuck decorating sixteen-feet-high structural columns with leaves, white flowers and tulle, aqua ribbon, and bushels of ivory hydrangea that had touches of greenish-blue. Andrea told the bride it was the
Hydrangea Tiffania
. A lie, of course.

I was making bows from six-inch satin ribbon. “When Theo was
at the shiva,” I said, “he told me I had nothing to worry about from his parents. They’d be good to me if only because I was the gatekeeper to the boys.”

“Did I ever tell you he looks like a metrosexual Munchkin?”

“Many times.”

“‘We represent the Lollipop Guild,’” Andrea sang out in her highest voice. Tyrell and Nick, up on ladders, exchanged looks that said
I’m embarrassed for her
. “Theo was probably right,” she went on. “I think Babs has broken under the strain. Nothing really bad ever happened to her. If you’re sixty-something and have led a charmed life, you assume you have immunity. So Jonah’s death has destroyed her whole view of reality.” Andrea clipped a few lengths of wire, then glanced at me. “Don’t look so stunned that I said something thoughtful.”

“Sorry. I assumed I was hiding it. So, do you think now that my mother-in-law’s hostility is out in the open, things can never be fine again?”

“They were never fine. You know that. But will they be okay? Probably, eventually.”

“Do you think I should call—”

“Absolutely not! First of all, she owes you an apology. At some point she’ll realize it. She’ll go, ‘Horribly, horribly sorry, Susie sweetness, but shock, breakdown, not myself, blah, blah, blah.’ Meanwhile, she’s too angry. And too threatened, probably at the thought of even more publicity. But who knows? Anyway, you’ll have to accept her apology and move on. Even if you remarry, she’ll always be in your life because of the boys.”

I spoke quietly so if the high school boys wanted to eavesdrop—which was dubious, because they assumed Andrea and I had nothing interesting to say—they couldn’t hear me. “Forget the ‘remarry’ business.”

“I’m not suggesting this June,” Andrea said.

“Listen to me: I know what my life is going to be. The accountants called me. It looks like I’ll be okay financially. Jonah had enough insurance and pension stuff that it definitely won’t be the
way it was, but it’ll be like ninety-eight percent of the world would like to live.” I knew she was thinking what I was:
That’s not good enough
. But at least we didn’t say it. “You tell me, Andrea: What reasonably nice, semi-cute, single guy—who’s going to have hundreds of women after him—”

“Unless he’s really poor.”

“—would get involved with a mother of three four-year-old boys? You’ve seen them do it time and again. Evan, Dash, and Mason come in, and they turn a room into a three-ring circus, except ten times noisier. A guy might want me. He might even want them—if he doesn’t have kids and has a zero sperm count. But forget even a long weekend: Three hours with them and he’d run out screaming. And don’t say ‘not necessarily.’” Andrea might have been about to say it, but for once she thought before speaking. “I’ve thought about it,” I went on. “You want to know what the word is for what my life will be? Lonely. My life will be so lonely.”

She didn’t say I was wrong.

True to what Andrea had predicted, my mother-in-law called to apologize four days after she exploded. She said it had happened because she was a wreck, “an utter wreck,” and also had an adverse drug reaction from a new antidepressant that didn’t get along with her medication for arrhythmia. There was no way, she told me, to tell me how sorry she was; she only hoped that I would be generous enough to understand and, hopefully, forgive. I did the expected “I understand totally and there’s no need to ask for forgiveness.” Then I gave what I thought was a pretty moving speech on how I not only treasured my relationship with her and Clive but had always looked up to her as the model of what a wife, mother, and working woman should be. Of course I kept “except that you’re a snob and a cold bitch” to myself.

I was trying to move back into the world. At home, whenever someone called, I tried not to think that he or she had put me on their Outlook calendar right after the funeral and forgotten me until—
Oh, dammit!
—the day popped up with
Call Susie Gersten
. When people left messages, I made myself call back, even a woman in
my cousin Marcia’s mah-jongg group with a terrible stammer who called everyone because in 1962 a speech therapist had told her that was the way to get over it.

I was so busy. I had tried to put Dorinda Dillon out of my head. Maybe the cops and the DA and Babs were all right about her.
The NewsHour,
which I still watched so I wouldn’t get caught saying “Huh? Wha?” the next time a teeny country suddenly became important, didn’t carry reports on killer whores. The
Times
might have had something on the case, but since the only section I read regularly was Style, I might have missed it. Since those first few days after Dorinda’s capture, when I’d watched her perp walk about a thousand times, I hadn’t Googled her or looked on YouTube: too addictive, too tempting to stay in that world and forget my own. Also, there was no one shoving a tabloid into my hands while telling me, “You need to see this.” For all I knew, maybe some fact or new piece of evidence had come out that really sealed the deal on Dorinda’s guilt. But I didn’t read about it or see it. And there were definitely no calls from the DA’s office or Gersten super-lawyer Christopher Petrakis.

One day, studying the olive oils at Whole Foods, I heard a woman in the next aisle tell someone, “I saw her! Dr. Gersten’s wife! The plastic surgeon who got killed. No,
here,
in the store, a minute ago.” I thought I’d gotten good at stuff like that, but I left my cart—with all its plastic bags of fruit and vegetables, Greek yogurt, and yet another box of organic cereal to challenge Froot Loops—and walked out.

Once I got the kids to bed that night, I filled my tub with the hottest water I could stand, determined to unwind until the water got cold or my finger pads turned to corduroy. I even dimmed the bathroom lights and lit a jasmine candle. I did succeed in forgetting “Dr.
Gersten’s wife!” Unfortunately, that left enough room in my mind to think about the photo of Dorinda that I’d seen in a magazine at the pediatrician’s office.

It was a head shot with her looking into the camera, unsmiling. She was wearing heavy eyeliner and chandelier earrings, so it wasn’t a mug shot. What struck me again was how dumb she looked, like someone who’d gotten lower than 400 on her combined SATs because she’d made too many wrong guesses. I opened my eyes and stared at the candle flame to hypnotize myself and clear my brain. But I couldn’t not think. She might be dumb, but was she someone who could as easily stab her way out of a situation than think her way out? After all, she did have enough smarts to slip out the side door of her building and pass on taking a taxi to Port Authority because taxis keep records. She’d stopped in Times Square to buy a wig. True, maybe she’d stabbed Jonah in one insane moment and then was able to think clearly again. But was the DA’s case really so solid, so beyond a reasonable doubt, the way Eddie Huber seemed so sure it was?

But where was Dorinda Dillon’s lawyer? I wanted to know. If people can’t afford a lawyer, they can only get Legal Aid. Dorinda, though, had hired her own lawyer, a guy named Joel Winters. Even if he wasn’t any great shakes, and even without me sitting at the computer ten times a day to Google Dorinda Dillon, I should have heard something about Dorinda’s side of the story. Okay, she was going to plead not guilty. The case would be going to trial. So why wasn’t the lawyer out there defending her? All he had to do was go to the media, talk up some of the issues I’d been wondering about, like her not having a history of violence, like Jonah’s personality: nonconfrontational, generous rather than cheap, a man used to putting women at ease and dealing with them directly.

And a couple of new thoughts. A prostitute and convicted drug offender probably wouldn’t call 911. But if Dorinda really had killed Jonah, why did she bother calling that first lawyer, the woman who had once represented her for drugs? Why bother waiting around for a callback before getting out of her apartment? Why not just run?
She’d waited an hour. Was she so stupid that it would take her that long to figure out to put on gloves, take the cash in Jonah’s wallet, and decide it wasn’t a cool idea to hang around with a dead body?

And what about the scissors? If you’re crazy or threatened or in the mood to commit murder, wouldn’t you go to the kitchen and grab a knife? Okay, maybe she didn’t have a big set of Wüsthof, but she must have had at least one killer knife. Why would she instead think to go into the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, and take out haircutting scissors she may have used—how often?—only every two, three, four weeks?

Dorinda probably wasn’t paying Joel Winters enough to put a lot of time in. But this had been a high-profile case, all over the news. Wouldn’t even a third-rate criminal lawyer recognize that it was a chance to get himself out there? Even if he didn’t believe he could get his client off, why wouldn’t he grab all that free airtime?

The water was still pretty hot, but I got out of the tub. When I blew out the candle, I was so upset that it was half air, half spit. I’d forgotten to take out a bath sheet, so, shivering, I wrapped myself in a regular towel and thought,
Why is Dorinda my problem?

Chapter Twenty-Two

“I knew you’d be happy to see me!” Grandma Ethel announced, a display of either her self-confidence or her self-delusion, since all I was doing was standing in my doorway, my mouth hanging open in surprise. I hadn’t asked to be made happy by my grandmother flying up to New York.

Just like before, she again showed up at my house without calling. Granted, we’d been speaking pretty often. I’d filled her in on both the briefing inside the DA’s office and the drama outside. Sure, I’d wanted her take on it, but more than that, I simply couldn’t stop talking about the People of the State of New York against Dorinda Dillon, aka Cristal Rousseau. Too often I found myself alternately fixated on the Meeting with Eddie Huber and the Big Babs Explosion.

Frizzy Francine Twersky definitely thought they were topics worth discussing—and better at two sessions a week. Now that I’d heard from the accountants that my budget could handle psychotherapy, I had no good reason to put Dr. Twersky off. Andrea was glad to talk about my obsessions, in part to satisfy me, but mostly because they appealed to her need for excitement. Entertainment, too. She gave it all her own spin, so instead of it being an episode of
Law & Order
with a gut-wrenching family subplot, she made it into a British drawing-room comedy, the kind on PBS. This one was complete with a social-climbing, overdressed mother-in-law, a charming and virtuous young widow, and a she-devil who happened to be the chief of the DA’s Homicide Bureau. Clive and Christopher Petrakis weren’t in Andrea’s version. In fact, the only man in her
cast was the one actor who couldn’t make an appearance: Jonah.

Unloading to both your shrink and your best friend generally makes a good one-two combo, but I needed to explain things to someone more objective or maybe more distant. I wasn’t looking for insights into my behavior or “You were right but much too nice to Babs.” I hoped to analyze what I’d gotten, and not gotten, from my meeting at the DA’s.

Maybe my phone calls made it sound like I wasn’t so good at analyzing. All I knew was in the early evening of the day following my fourth or fifth phone call with Grandma Ethel, there she was, standing in my doorway—surprise!—telling me not to worry, she was staying in the city at the Regency because she genuinely enjoyed room service. Sometimes she loved going downstairs to the restaurant and seeing who was having a power breakfast. To be totally honest, she didn’t particularly care for being a houseguest unless it was in a house with other houseguests and many servants. But I shouldn’t take that personally, because when she’d gone to the bathroom during the shiva, she’d been struck with how perfect everything was and how clean—even with all that company!