As Husbands Go (6 page)

“Ma’am?” he asked.

“Yes?” I had to raise my head slightly to look at him. Dizzy again, like the floor had switched places with the ceiling.

“When we’re called in on a case, we’re put in the position of having to ask questions that may seem, you know, not polite. But we have to ask them anyway.”

“I understand.” He was going to ask me if Jonah screwed around.

“So I hope you don’t mind if I ask you . . . You said your husband loves you, and I’m sure he does. But some men do have a midlife-crisis thing.”

“Jonah’s thirty-nine. I don’t know if that qualifies, but—”

“Is it possible that there is someone else—”

“I’m absolutely sure there isn’t.”

“Maybe a patient—”

“Jonah says any surgeon who takes up with a patient has a fifty-fifty shot at a malpractice suit, and no sex in the world is worth that.”

He smiled and nodded at Jonah’s remark. But what doctor wouldn’t say that to reassure a suspicious wife? “What I meant to ask was if there has been any patient calling or stalking him in any way. Sometimes with doctors—”

“No. Our home number is unlisted. And he knows how to deal with patients who get emotionally dependent or pushy or a little crazy.”

Coleman flipped to a clean page in his pad. He held the pen against his upper lip, just south of his nostrils, and took a deep
breath, like he was working on an ink-fume high. “Are Dr. Gersten’s parents still alive?” he asked.

“Yes. Clive and Babs—Barbara—Gersten. They’re still very active, professionally, socially. They live in the city.” I saw he wanted more. But I was so wiped from all the frantic hours I’d spent since I’d woken to “Where’s Daddy?” that it was getting too much to think up more words and then push them into speech. Coleman rotated his pen near his nose a few times. Even though I was looking at my wedding ring, I could feel him gazing into my eyes. Finally, I got it together enough to answer.

“His father’s a radiation oncologist in Manhattan. Clive Gersten.” To look at my father-in-law, you wouldn’t think he was in that field. He smiled all the time. Or at least the corners of his mouth turned up. I sometimes wondered if he’d had a stroke early in life because his personality was un-smiley. Not morose. Just bland. If he were ice cream, he wouldn’t even be vanilla. But his patients adored him, clearly taking the rising corners of his mouth as either an optimistic smile or a compassionate one, depending on their diagnosis.

“Oncologist is cancer, right?”

“Right. Jonah’s mother is marketing director of Gigi de Lavallade Cosmetics.” Babs Gersten was the person who, back in the eighties, had convinced millions of white women all over the world that they should wear brown lipstick and bronze blush. In the nineties she got millions of black women converted to maroon cheeks, not red. Currently, she was working on a major campaign to get Asian women out of rose-tinged foundation, to open themselves up to the untapped potential—the actual brilliance!—of much maligned yellow.

“Does your husband get along with his folks?”

“Yes.”

“Does he see a lot of them?”

“We usually see them every couple of weeks. They have a place in Water Mill, in the Hamptons. They sometimes stop here on their way out or back. It’s easier that way. Having the triplets running around their apartment is a little much for my in-laws. They collect pre-Columbian art. Lots of clay figurines. We do visit them at the
beach, but even that’s pretty chaotic if the weather’s not good.”

Coleman wrote what appeared to be a long sentence in his pad, then turned back a page and made what looked like three dots. “Any other children? Your husband, I mean. Does he have any brothers or sisters?”

“He has a younger brother. He’s a casting director.”

“Do they get along?”

“Jonah and Theo?” His brow furrowed, which was what usually happened when people first heard it, because it sounds more like a lisp and diphthong than an actual name. Whenever I had to introduce him, I fought the urge to say “Thith ith Theo.” “T-h-e-o,” I spelled. “They talk on the phone . . . I guess about once a week. Whenever they see each other, they have a good time. It’s a solid relationship.”

He closed his pad and stuck it in the outside pocket of his jacket. “Would you mind taking me for a look around?” he asked as he stood.

“Of course. I mean, I’ll be glad to show you.” Coleman didn’t seem the house-and-garden type. I assumed he had some sort of checklist he needed to go through in a missing-person case. Suddenly, those words, “missing person,” hit home. They ricocheted around my brain and grew more powerful with each repetition as they brought home the reality: I not only didn’t know where Jonah was, I couldn’t even guess.

Now that Coleman was no longer seated, some hostess gene made me pop up from the couch. Not the best idea. I swayed sideways and made a stupid grabbing gesture with each hand as I tried to get hold of something to steady me. There was only air. It was scary, not being able to distinguish between up and down.

He rushed over and braced my elbows until he was sure I could stand perpendicular to the floor. We spoke at the same time: “Are you okay?” “Sorry, I got dizzy.”

That was followed by a couple of eternal seconds of silence. Coleman moved himself out of the narrow space between couch and coffee table with the klutzy sidestep slide of someone who should not bother trying tennis. “Are you okay to take me around
the house?” he asked.

“Yes. It’ll be fine.”

I’d sent the boys off to preschool to get them out of the way. Ida and Ingvild would hang out there in the mommies’ room in case of—whatever.

So it was just the two of us, me and Detective Sergeant Coleman. The dizziness was gone, but I definitely didn’t feel normal. Every few minutes my heart banged with an almost audible boom.
But listen,
I told myself,
considering everything, I’m functioning.
Leading him to the basement, then through all the rooms on the first floor, I was at least reassured I could control myself sufficiently to go through the motions.

Only after we climbed the stairs and he opened the linen closet outside our bedroom did I comprehend that he wasn’t just hunting for some subtle clue to Jonah’s whereabouts. When Coleman had peered in cabinets and armoires and opened the tops of the benches that ran across one wall in the basement playroom, he’d been searching for Jonah’s dead body.

“Do you ever find the person somebody says is missing right there, in the house?” I asked. “Or do you just find clues?”

“Sometimes an individual writes a note,” Coleman said carefully. “He’s in a rush and winds up leaving it in the weirdest place.” He must have decided I was thinking,
Note? Does he mean suicide note?
Not wanting me to tilt and maybe pass out, he said real fast, “‘Dear So-and-so, I have to go to . . . whatever, someplace . . . for a few days’ and so forth.” I noticed he wasn’t answering my question about discovering the missing person right there at home.

We went through Jonah’s closet and then the bedroom. Other than gaping at the lineup of Jonah’s tassel loafers—which admittedly was a little excessive, the same shoe over and over, as if some weird form of asexual reproduction were going on—Coleman didn’t seem to find anything worth noting. In the bedroom, he didn’t cringe at the plastic Camp Chipinaw clock on Jonah’s nightstand the way I did, and completely ignored the book lying beside it,
Einstein: His Life and Universe,
not even saying something like “Hey, Dr. Gersten
really must be a genius to be reading about a genius.” He didn’t pick it up and shake it the way detectives do on TV—where paper falls out that’s inevitably a clue. So I picked up the book and pretended to be paging through it. Nothing fell out because Jonah didn’t even use a bookmark, just bent down pages. He was up to page 104. I held it against my chest, closed my eyes, and told myself,
He’s going to get to finish this book,
even though I dreaded he wouldn’t. But I didn’t say that out loud because I wasn’t the plucky-heroine type. As I was laying it down again, I quickly leafed through it. Nothing: just his name, written in his graceful, non-doctorish script, and his usual underlinings and margin notes, as if he’d never gotten out of Yale. Inside the back cover, he’d even written a shopping list:
Mach3,
his razor blades,
black shoe polish,
and
check red cap,
probably something to do with capsules.

Then the phone rang. I knew it was Jonah’s office because all the calls from there and his answering service rang with a special
bing-bing-bing
tone. A little Tinker Bell–ish, I’d told him. Now it sounded beautiful. A burst of hope propelled me to the phone. It wasn’t until I was almost bellowing “Hello” with desperate eagerness that it hit me it might be someone else and not Jonah finally, finally calling to explain why—

“Susie?” Not Jonah. It was Layne. “I’m here with Gilbert John on speakerphone.”

Layne Jiménez was from New Mexico, so she had that no-accent all-American accent television journalists have. Her tone, though, was doctor-gentle rather than reporter-crisp. “We hate to bother you, Susie. Donald told us about Jonah,” she said. “We kept going back and forth: Should we call, shouldn’t we call? You’ve got to be waiting for the phone to ring. But we’re so concerned. Have you heard anything?”

I shook my head for a few seconds until the shuffle of shoes coming through their speakerphone made me realize they were nervously waiting for my response. “No. No calls.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and murmured to Detective Sergeant Coleman, “Jonah’s partners.”

“Susie?” Gilbert John Noakes this time. He had that gorgeous bass voice you’d expect to be singing “Ol’ Man River,” in his case, without the customary African-American inflection. Gilbert John had a grand accent, slightly more British than Boston. He sounded like he’d been born on some elitist island in the mid-Atlantic. His pronunciation of my name was “Syu-see?” His appearance matched his voice. Handsome, like one of those manly actors with thick white hair who played rich, potent older men on daytime soaps.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“How are you holding up, dear?” he asked.

“All right.”

Over the years, I’d come to believe that Gilbert John’s supercilious delivery was a minor case of snobbishness made much worse by shyness—and dullness. He never had much to say about anything except the most tedious surgical matters—or in migraine-inducing detail, his latest mosaic. He made his compositions from found objects. That had the potential to be interesting, but Gilbert John didn’t understand how not to be boring. Listening to him, you wanted to gasp for air. He’d go on (and on) about smashing up a souvenir plate from the 1989 Philadelphia flower show, and about how half of creating mosaics was getting the right-sized shards. Even if you were backing out of the room, he’d stay with you step for step to give you his secret for getting the proper consistency of grout. The weird thing was, in spite of his aggressive tediousness, his mosaics were fresh, even lively.

“Has either of you heard anything?” I asked. “Anything at all?”

“Not a thing,” Layne managed to say. She had a catch in her gentle voice. I tried to think of something to comfort her so she wouldn’t burst into tears and then feel terrible because, by crying, she’d made it harder on me. But she was able to go on. “We have the whole staff calling hospitals, but no one like Jonah has come in,” she said. “You know, Susie, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should call the police. Or Gilbert John says you might want to think about a private investigator. You know, if you don’t want word getting around.”

“Up to you entirely,” Gilbert John said. “We simply want you to know we’ll do anything we can if you need us.”

“Absolutely,” Layne said. “Whatever you want done—or not done—you only have to ask.”

That instant I started second-guessing myself. Had I been stupid to call the Nassau County police when Jonah very well could be in the city? Should I have called the NYPD instead? He could be anywhere.

Maybe he would wind up being one of those vanishing husbands who turned up decades later, living a different life in some other country. Years from now, when the triplets were in high school, or later, when I was on my deathbed, we’d learn Jonah had been living as Dottore Giovanni Giordano, treating the poorest of the poor in the slums of Naples, not taking even a
lira
for his work.

Except that wasn’t what happened.

Chapter Five

“I know you came here to keep yourself from staring at the phone, trying to will it into ringing,” Andrea Brinckerhoff said brightly. She picked up a speck of floral foam from our worktable and flicked it into the green plastic trash can. Andrea rarely said anything non-brightly. She seemed to have modeled her personality on one of those debutantes in 1930s movies: a martini in one hand, a cigarette holder in the other, laughing in the face of doom. “Though I’m assuming you call-forwarded so it would ring here.”

“So it would ring on my cell. Car, bathroom: I could be anyplace and I’d be able to hear it.”

“Excellent!”