As Husbands Go (9 page)

“Of course we’ll work together on this,” I told him. “That’s why I telephoned you as soon as I saw . . . the lay of the land. I mean, I didn’t call my parents. I only checked with Jonah’s office manager to make sure he hadn’t been called in for some emergency. Then I notified the police.” I didn’t mention I’d been at Florabella making calls and talking through everything with Andrea. “Then I immediately called you.”

“What we are trying to say,” Babs said carefully, “is that perhaps going to the police so very soon might not have been—how can I express it?—the quickest way to get an answer. It’s not that I’m questioning your judgment, Susie. It’s that they are a bureaucracy. And bureaucracies are notoriously inefficient.” Standing straighter, she kicked out one leg, then the other, to align the pleats in her black pants. For an instant, she teetered on one of her black alligator boots with its four-inch heel, but she quickly righted herself.

“In this case, they seem to be responding pretty well,” I said. “Nassau County sent a detective, and he got the NYPD on to it right away. I called the police in because”—I wanted to sound authoritative, or at least like I wasn’t a total screw-up—“the cops have the power to get information from hospitals and police departments, their own and in other places.” The boys would be racing around the house any second, searching for me, calling out, “Mommy.” I talked faster: “Were you thinking along the lines of the investigative agency?” They nodded. “I agree with you completely. It’s something we should consider. As far as I’m concerned, we should look into it today.”

“One of my patients—” Clive began.

But he was cut off as Dashiell careened around the doorway of the den. Dash’s hazel eyes with their awning of thick brown lashes opened wide:
Wow! So great that you’re here!
their sparkle seemed to say. I’d trained the boys not to demand “Got a present?” each time
Babs and Clive arrived, even though my in-laws came bearing gifts on every visit. Naturally, I’d asked them not to. “Just little tokens,” Babs had explained the next time as she handed out packages artfully wrapped in high-end silver foil to look like a giant Hershey’s kiss. But the last time they were over, Dash had hinted not at all subtly for a Webkinz bulldog. This time he knew not to ask. He blinked once, then twice, trying to come up with something interesting to say, a simple “Hi” obviously not occurring to him. I shook my head at him:
No. No presents today. Don’t expect
. . . But he cut off my silent protest with a grin toward his grandparents. “I got a riddle!” he told them.

“You’ve got a riddle?” Babs said. “Tell me, Dash.”

“Guess who didn’t go to bed last night?” he asked. He gave her no time to answer. “My daddy!”

Chapter Seven

Other than sighing “Heaven!” over a hot fudge sundae or a great orgasm, ordinary people don’t talk about paradise much. But everyone’s heard a million definitions of hell. I remembered one of Jonah’s fraternity brothers at Yale, drunk out of his mind, sweat streaming through his sideburns, across his jaw, and down his neck, yelling, “You know what the existentialists say hell is, cocksuckers? Other people! That means you!” And someone famous enough that I vaguely recognized the name wrote about hell being the torture of a bad conscience. Et cetera. But every hour or so over the next couple of days, I wanted to cry out, “Those definitions are crap. Hell is what I am living.”

Not knowing if my husband was alive or dead. If he was pinned inside the smashed metal skeleton of his car after an accident,
screaming in pain from crushed bones. If he was being held in a stinking basement, tortured by some psychopath like a victim on
Dexter
.

Once or twice I felt temporarily normal, like when I helped the boys make zebra cookies with chocolate and vanilla stripes for the Tuttle Farm school’s zoo carnival. Then I’d be back to hell, picking up (or making up) Jonah’s screams of unspeakable pain. I’d calm down, though only slightly, picturing him in an East Sixty-fifth Street town house sipping martinis with the shockingly rich, once-homely, now-stunning former patient he’d decided to leave me for.

After my in-laws went back to the city and I whispered, “Thank God,” I had a long phone conversation with Gilbert John and Layne: What to say to Jonah’s patients, especially the ones scheduled for surgery? Layne was totally against trying to take over the surgery themselves because it was too much pressure and they wouldn’t have time to get to know the cases. Gilbert John was most concerned about managing what he called “the situation” in a way that wouldn’t provoke gossip. He kept interrupting himself with a single cough either from something in his throat—peanut speck, post-nasal drip—or overtaxed nerves. Between coughs, his main point was Protect Jonah’s Good Name. That might have been Gilbert John Noakes–ese for Protect the Practice, but it did make sense. So did his suggestion, which we all agreed on, to say simply that Jonah had had an emergency and they had to cancel his appointments for the time being.

The days began to take on a rhythm. Once I caught the beat, I began living a regular life. True, it was in an irregular regular life, like living in some war-ravaged country. You knew a bomb could blow you away a minute from now, but meanwhile, you were out of dishwasher detergent. I did only what needed doing, the basics.

I was responsible for the boys. Funny: One of Jonah’s tender, ironic names for Evan was Killer, because he was such a high-strung kid. I worried he’d be the one most disturbed by his father’s absence, but he didn’t even get teary. On the other hand, Dash, who generally possessed the sensitivity of a dump truck, couldn’t seem to stop talking about how Daddy wasn’t there. Mason, as usual, was Mr. Mod
erate, neither unglued nor unruffled; a couple of times each day, he asked if Daddy would be home on Saturday to make waffles. I managed a bright “I hope so.”

After the triplets’ day at preschool was finished, I had the twins keep them out of my way. I needed a break from their usual “You’re a poopy head!” shouts at one another. Even the thought of having to holler “No!” when they tried yet again to climb the bookshelves was too much for me. I was so exhausted and overstimulated. I felt one more decibel would kill me.

February was a lousy month for a husband to disappear, with its snowless days of cold wind and rain. The house seemed airless yet bursting, as if it wanted to break open and expel the boys into the fresh air. Me? I still had to deal with my parents. But when I tried to call them, fortified by many deep, relaxing breaths, I couldn’t. The effort of picking up the phone and lifting it to my ear pushed me over the edge—a place I was getting used to.

I ordered myself,
Get it over with,
but I wound up half sliding onto the kitchen floor and sat there sobbing. My back pressed against the pantry door, my legs splayed out, and I, the Pilates queen, couldn’t summon the strength to haul myself up. I stayed there on that wood floor for nearly thirty minutes, long after the dial tone had changed into the loud, high-pitched cry that signals the receiver is off the hook, my mind whirling in a vicious circle of crazy thoughts all those self-help books urge you to avoid.

First I kept imagining that when I’d been at Florabella the previous morning and sent the boys to preschool—with the twins in the Mommies’ Room—Jonah might have come back briefly. Finding no one home, he’d decided to leave forever. The whys—where had he been? why would he do such a thing?—came fast. Madness, I decided. Madness induced by a hit on the head by a gun butt during a mugging. No, from eating a salad with “wild mushrooms” that were actually never-before-seen hallucinogens. All right, maybe not actual madness. Just a nervous breakdown from four years of mornings with triplets, afternoons operating on patients who were still whining that the cost of genioplasty should include a freebie
chin cleft even as they were going under anesthesia. And, of course, evenings with too much of my “I think we should repaint the boiler room floor” and too little sex.

Then I thought that maybe Jonah hadn’t come back when I’d been out. No, it was his kidnappers who’d dropped by to leave a ransom note. Finding no one around, they’d decided not to bother—just to kill him and snatch a richer doctor whose wife didn’t go gallivanting on a day when she should have been home. On and on, sitting motionless on the kitchen floor on the balls of my ass, while my head swirled with frightening what-ifs.

The few seconds of silence between horrific scenarios offered enough clarity for me to glimpse not only the hugeness of Jonah’s absence but its profound and awful mystery. That profundity business lasted only about thirty seconds; I’d never been the plumbing-the-depths type who knew from cosmic despair.

I finally got up and took a giant bottle of San Pellegrino and a water goblet from our Baccarat crystal that we’d registered for but never gotten a full set of, and I went into Jonah’s study. Bernadine and her vacuum cleaner were approaching, and I didn’t want to be sitting at the kitchen table when she turned on FOX News and then have to watch her clean between the two wall ovens with a Q-tip dampened with her own saliva even though I’d gently pointed out three times that it wouldn’t be much harder to wet it at the sink. Anyway, Jonah’s study was the most businesslike room in the house. It contained only a desk, computer, phone, and shelves of books on plastic surgery I never looked at because not only were they technical and boring, they were also filled with hideous illustrations of surgical procedures and, even worse, photographs printed on thick, glossy paper.

It was a calm place. I’d made it that way. The walls were covered in a watered silk the same color as the lightest amber in his bird’s-eye-maple desk. The room emitted a golden warmth that avoided the decorator-trying-for-scholarly-humanist ambiance.

I called Manhattan Aesthetics and punched in Gilbert John’s extension, grateful that despite my protests of “tacky” and “user-
unfriendly,” the practice had switched to a voice-mail system and I no longer had to speak to Karen, the receptionist who looked as if she’d been manufactured by the same company that had done Schwarzenegger as the Terminator.

Gilbert John took my call within seconds. Even though my first words were “Sorry. No news,” he didn’t sigh or tsk or indicate any disappointment. In fact, he was pretty compassionate, for Gilbert John. So while he wasn’t oozing empathy, he sounded genuinely concerned, not just about Jonah but about how I was doing.

“Holding together,” I told him. “I’d love to fall apart and have to be heavily sedated, but I can’t.”

“The boys,” he observed.

“Yes, and also . . . I don’t know. Maybe I can think of something, or at least have a working mind, if someone says something that has any potential.”

“I understand. The toughest part for me is the worry,” he said. “No, let me be more precise. The fear. And for you? I cannot begin to imagine.” I could hear him take a deep breath to settle himself. “A nightmare. A heartache.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, then wanted to bite my tongue because I hadn’t said “Yes.” Jonah once told me that when I got emotional, I got Brooklyn, and he hadn’t meant it as a compliment on being myself and not putting on airs. He could take only so much of my authenticity. “You’re right,” I said. “This whole thing is every word for awfulness you can think of. But I’ll tell you what I would like. One or both of you mentioned something about hiring an investigator, detective, whatever. Can you get me a name or two? Obviously, the sooner the better.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Gilbert John said, pronouncing each word as if the survival of properly spoken English rested solely on him. “Is there anything else, Susie?” I told him no and thanked him, probably a little too profusely.

Before I even hung up, I was pulling open the top right-hand drawer of Jonah’s desk. True, I had watched Detective Sergeant Coleman search the desk. And I had seen for myself that he hadn’t
found anything. Then we’d moved upstairs.

During our entire search, neither Coleman nor I had found anything in the room to make me think Jonah was anything other than what I believed him to be. No pieces of paper with mysterious, scribbled phone numbers, no hate mail, no blackmail demands, no charge slips at La Perla for a G-string in size P. But I was hoping to find a clue that might prove at least a beginning. Maybe Coleman and I had overlooked something, the way you finally discover the Advil in your handbag that you’d failed to find after two thorough searches.

But with Jonah being as orderly as he was, there were no surprises. Even his paper clips in the top drawer’s tray all lay on the horizontal, though I doubted he’d consciously arranged them that way. Maybe in the back of my mind was the belief that objects, like people, bent to Jonah’s will. Not that he was a bully: It was just that his way always wound up seeming so reasonable.

I was about to get up and start leafing through his books, shaking them, too. Maybe something would fall to the floor that would make me go “Aha!” But the phone rang. It was Gilbert John with the names of two investigative agencies.

“I’m told these are the crème de la crème,” he said, “although technically, I suppose only one can be the cream of the cream.” I couldn’t tell if he was correcting himself or if he thought I needed a translation. “In any case, I have contact names: David Friedman at InterProbe, though he might be in Dubai this week.” I pictured a Jewish guy with a hundred-dollar haircut at a conference table with a bunch of Arabs in keffiyehs on the eightieth floor of a building overlooking a futuristic city like you see on the covers of science fiction paperbacks. I decided David Friedman might be a little too high-powered. “The other one is Lizbeth—
Lizzz
beth, with a Z, no E, no A—Holbreich at Kroll.”