As Husbands Go (3 page)

Why am I babbling on like this? Obviously, I don’t want to deal with the story I need to tell. But also because I never bought that business about the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. What’s so great about short? Too often it’s the easy way out. Plus, a straight line is minimalist, and my work is all about embellishment. Any jerk can stick a bunch of thistle into an old mayonnaise jar, but what will people’s reaction be?
Why couldn’t that thistle-pulling bitch leave the environment alone?
But I take the identical thistle and jar, grab a few leaves or blades of grass, and voilà! create an arrangement that makes those same people sigh and say,
Exquisite. Makes you really appreciate nature. And so simple.
It really wasn’t simple, but if your design shouts,
Hey, look how brilliant I am,
it’s not much of a design.

Anyway, after Jonah graduated from college and then finished Yale med school, we moved on from New Haven. With time ticking away like that, a lot of men who marry young start thinking,
Do-over!
Not Jonah. Even after ten years of marriage (along with two failed attempts at in vitro), when some other deeply attractive senior resident in plastic surgery at Mount Sinai might have dropped a starter wife for a more fertile number two (maybe one from a Manhattan family even richer and more connected than the Gerstens, one who could push his practice), Jonah stayed in love with me. Never once, in word or deed, did he communicate,
It’s not my fault you can’t conceive
.

Once we were settled back in New York, I began realizing my chosen career shouldn’t have been chosen by me. I did not love jewelry design: Finding brilliant new ways to display pyrope and tsavorite garnets in Christmas earrings wasn’t a thrill. Living in Manhattan made me want to work with something real, and I yearned for the smell and feel of flowers.

So I wound up with a design job at Bouquet, which billed itself
as “Manhattan’s finest fleuriste.” While I was still finding myself, Jonah was already a success, and not just in the OR. He was surrounded by enamored patients. Housewives and advertising executives, beauties and battle-axes. So many had crushes on him. They would have given anything for a taste of his toned pecs, his status, his obvious decency. Except those women only got what they paid for—a first-rate surgeon and a caring doctor. Not that I was complacent. Throughout our marriage, I saw what happened to other doctors’ wives as well as to some of our neighbors when we moved to the North Shore of Long Island. I understood: Marriage is always a work in progress.

On that particular night, I was too wiped to be inventive about how to turn up the romantic heat. In fact, I was too wiped to do anything. So instead of calling Andrea to discuss what seasonal berries would be right for Polly Kimmel, who wanted ikebana arrangements for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, or exfoliating my heels, or reading
The Idiot
for my book club because Marcia Riklis had said, “Enough with the chick lit,” I flopped onto our Louis XV–style marriage bed without my usual satisfied glance at its noble mahogany headboard and footboard with their carvings of baskets of flowers and garlands of leaves. Almost instantly, I fell into an all-too-rare deep, healing sleep. Sure, some internal ear listened for any sound from the boys’ rooms, but one thing I’m certain of: I would have been deaf to the soft tread of Jonah’s footsteps as he climbed the stairs.

If he had.

Chapter Two

“What?” I mumbled about ten hours later. I didn’t want to exchange the pleasure of French lavender sprayed on my pillowcase for the daily blast of triplet morning breath, which for some reason reminded me of the cheap bottled salad dressing my mother bought, the kind with brown globules and red pepper flecks suspended in a mucous-like vinaigrette. The boys were fraternal, not identical, triplets. Yet not only did they smell alike, they also had that multiple-birth juju, sharing some magical connection, like their triplet alarm clock that rang only for the three of them at the same instant each day, right before five-thirty.

Jonah always said if he’d known about the five-thirty business, he wouldn’t have agreed to get them big-boy beds for their third birthdays. But he knew we really didn’t have any choice. Dash and Evan had inherited my height and all three of them had variations on Jonah’s solid musculature. If we hadn’t gotten the beds, we’d have had to deal with three little King Kongs breaking through the bars of their cribs or climbing over the rails.

That morning, like every other, the boys raced toward our bedroom. Outside our open door, as usual, they merged into a single wild-haired, twelve-limbed creature that climbed up Jonah’s side of the bed. The game never changed: He would grab them one by one and bench-press them up from his chest to arm’s length. Then there would be the usual breathless laughter and shrieks of “Daddy, Daddy, I’m flying!” As he finished with each one, he’d set him down between us.

So I knew that within a minute, Evan, Dash, and Mason would
be climbing all over me, wild from their high flying, to yell into my ear: “Cocoa Krispies!” “My Band-Aid came off! I need a new one!” “Put on
Rescue Heroes
now!” When I wouldn’t respond, one of them, usually Mason, would remember there was a concept called politeness and scream, “Please!” which would bring forth an earsplitting chorus.

Except that morning they woke me with something completely different: a quiet question. “Where’s Daddy?” My mind started to reply,
Probably downstairs getting a cup of coffee,
but before the words made it to my mouth, I turned my head.

The white duvet over Jonah’s side of the bed was like a pre-dawn snowfall, immaculate. The sham on his pillow with its subtle off-white monogram,
SGJ
, was pristine. The hideous plastic digital clock with its cracked red and gray Camp Chipinaw medallion that he insisted on keeping on the hand-tooled leather top of his English Centennial nightstand read 5:28.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Where’s Daddy?”

My gut must have understood something was terribly wrong before I did, because I reacted so primitively. My eyes darted across the white linen field, and an instant later, I took the same path. Like a snake with prey in sight, I slithered over the undisturbed duvet at amazing speed and grabbed the phone on Jonah’s side of the bed. The optimist in me took over. I pressed it to my ear, ready for the beep of a voice-mail signal. I even shushed the children so I could key in our password and hear Jonah’s message. Yet when all I heard was the standard steady dial tone, some small, shadowed thing inside me was not surprised.

“Where’s Daddy?”

Say anything,
I commanded myself. Don’t let them see you panic. Because there’s no reason for panic yet. Cause for discomfort? Yes. Fear? Of course. But say something Mommyish. Lighthearted or at least reassuring, like “Daddy had to—” The sentence would not finish itself in my head, much less emerge. I vaulted out of bed and ran toward the bathroom. The boys followed, calling out, “Mommy?”
With each step, each second without a response, their voices rose.

As I ran, I tried to think what could have happened to Jonah. A freak accident? Maybe last night, when I’d poured my Dramatic Radiance TRF cream into my hand, a tiny blob had dropped on the floor. When he’d gone in there as I slept, he’d slipped on the blob and cracked his head against the white onyx counter! The image was so vivid: him on his back on the Carrara marble floor, eyes closed. No, wait. Eyes open, blinking, because even though he had been unconscious the whole night, he was now coming to. Aside from a slight headache and an ugly red bump on his left temple, he was all right! In my mind I was kneeling beside him, crying out, “Oh Jonah, oh God, oh my God,” then calming myself so I could turn to the boys and say, “See? Daddy’s fine.”

Except Jonah wasn’t there. My mind went blank because fright took over and pushed everything else out. It got hold of my body, too. All I felt was that scary internal vibration from nonstop adrenaline, like a running engine that couldn’t be turned off.

I braced my hands on the strip of countertop in front of the sink. My back was turned to the boys. All of a sudden, some basic animal instinct for keeping the nest intact momentarily overcame my fright. It seized control, forcing me into action, if not rationality. I grabbed the Bio-Molecular firming eye serum I’d left by the faucet the night before and put it back in the medicine cabinet. Then I yanked a hand towel off the rack and polished the fingerprint I’d just made on the mirror. I folded and refolded the towel lengthwise into thirds and hung it up again.

Since Evan, Dash, and Mason rarely asked a question without each of them repeating it at least three times, I was still getting pounded with “Where’s Daddy?” There was no fright in their
voices, maybe discomfort over my leap from the bed, some concern, but mostly bright curiosity over this intriguing change in the morning’s routine.

I was about to charge over to the linen closet and get a fresh bottle of L’Essence de Soleil liquid hand soap when the endangered-animal-trying-to-get-control nesting instinct exhausted itself and the terror returned. I whimpered, a high sound in my throat. In the movies it would have built into a shriek of pure terror, but since it was me in my bathroom, I made myself turn and face the boys. “I’m not sure where Daddy is.” Evan, more fearful than his brothers, always on guard against any monster beyond a closed door or inside a toy chest, cocked his head and watched me through narrowed eyes. “Probably . . .” I threw out the word, stalling until I could come up with something that would pacify not just Evan but me. “There was an emergency at the hospital and he had to go there. Maybe he was in the operating room all night. He could still be there.” The marble floor was ice that rose through my feet. I knew I hadn’t been standing there that long, but the bones of my feet felt frozen; my ankles ached from the cold. At the same time, my hands perspired. I wiped them on my nightgown, but the apricot silk charmeuse wouldn’t accept anything as déclassé as sweat. “Breakfast time!” I announced in an upbeat tone. I guess I was trying to come off confident, like one of those TV-commercial microwaving moms whose brains lack despair neurons.

Instead of following the boys downstairs to pour out Evan’s and Mason’s usual additive-rich, dye-laden cereal (for which, truly, I did feel guilty) and hand Dash his unvarying choice, a container of vanilla yogurt, I rushed past them, through the bedroom, down the long hall to the other side of the house, and banged on the door of our au pairs. “Ida! Ingvild!” My voice ascended to whatever pitch was one notch below hysteria. I tried to pull it down an octave. “I need both of you right away!”

I commanded myself,
Stop overreacting
. A normal woman discovering her husband had not spent the night at home wouldn’t be on the brink of psychosis. She wouldn’t be so sick with dread that
she wanted to puke up last night’s fusilli primavera:
wanted
to, as a purge from the horror poisoning her. At most, a normal wife would be frantic—
Oh my God, maybe he was in a terrible car crash!
Or super pissed off—
How stupid is he that he thinks I’ll believe some stupid excuse: He got so sick from E. coli nachos at a sports bar that he passed out for eight hours?
Already I was miles beyond that. I pounded on the girls’ door as if my clenched fists were racing each other. “Ida! Ingvild!”

Every other second it hit me how important it was that I didn’t lose control. The boys, right behind me, would absorb my fright. I couldn’t hold back: Terror was appropriate. Jonah was unfailingly dependable: the ever-responsible Dr. Gersten. A man of routine. A man of decency, too. Would he ever willingly leave me open to this kind of fright? Not in a billion years.

If there had been some horrific urban emergency that had pulled Jonah into Mount Sinai for unscheduled surgery, he’d have had someone call me. Later, right from the OR—surgical mask in place, skin hook in hand—he’d have demanded someone double-check that the call to his wife had been made. If he’d been in an accident, it would have occurred hours before, on his way home, and someone would have phoned.

Ingvild, who had plucked away her nearly invisible blond eyebrows and who, by day, replaced them with penciled circumflex accents, opened the door so fast she nearly got punched by my pounding fists. Fresh from sleep, her round, browless face showed about as much emotion as a picture drawn by one of the boys in the first year of preschool: a big circle with minuscule circle eyes and nose plus a crooked line for a mouth.

I could definitely read the alarm on her sister’s face. Ida was standing a little farther back, and I felt her apprehension:
Has something awful happened? Did we do anything wrong? Is this some bizarre American holiday nobody told us about that begins with waking people before sunrise on a Tuesday in February?
The two of them wore pajama bottoms and T-shirts with the names of bands I’d never heard of.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I began slowly. But then I couldn’t stop my words from rushing out. “My husband didn’t come home last night! It’s definitely not like him to do something like that. You know him well enough to know that.” The girls seemed to be getting the gist of what I was saying. They weren’t sophisticated Scandinavian types, students whose English was so flawless that they comprehended every nuance, who spoke with such slight accents that they might have come from some far corner of Minnesota. Ida and Ingvild were from a small farming community near the Arctic Circle. As they stared at me—watching my eyes dart insanely from one of them to the other, at my hair, which I suppose was sticking out scarecrow-fashion—they were probably pining for the security of the old chicken coop back home. I tried to slow myself down. “I’m worried about my husband. I need to make a few calls.”