As Husbands Go (10 page)

Lizbeth, it turned out when I called her, sounded pretty high-powered herself, with a low-pitched, southern-accented voice that conveyed the confidence born of an earlier life as Miss Tuscaloosa or, more likely, a brigadier general in the army. She had no trace of
the flirty, rising inflection that turns southern women’s sentences into questions. In fact, her actual questions sounded more like commands.

I spent nearly an hour on the phone with her, going over a lot of the same ground I had covered with the police. Was Jonah under stress? Going through a difficult time? She came right out and asked if I thought he could have committed suicide. I told her, “Jonah is the last person in the world who would take his own life.” She wanted even more details than the cops, data on everyone in Manhattan Aesthetics and information on Ida and Ingvild, our housekeeper, Bernadine Pietrowicz, plus people she called vendors, everybody from the guys who picked up the garbage to the plumber. I swallowed hard and agreed to a twenty-thousand-dollar retainer and faxed permission for her to speak with our accountant, lawyer, and stockbroker, and to examine the hard drive on Jonah’s computers at work and at home. She said she would talk to Gilbert John Noakes about getting the names of Jonah’s patients to see whether any of them were suing him (no) or were wack jobs (yes). As we talked, I e-mailed her Jonah’s cell phone number, e-mail address, head shot, and the URL for his biography on the practice’s website.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” she said. “Well, any more than you already are, which is more than enough. So let me be clear that kidnapping is very, very rare in the U.S. Most of the cases we deal with happen abroad. Even so, it’s a good idea that if the police haven’t done it already, we get the FBI on this and also put recording devices on your phone.”

“In case of—” I stopped cold. This conversation was so far away from anything I ever thought I’d be talking about that it felt like I
was being forced to read from a script meant for somebody else. “Are you talking about a ransom demand?”

“Yes. But as I said, that scenario is highly unlikely.”

I didn’t have the courage to ask what scenario she’d put her money on. But by the time we were finished, Lizbeth didn’t scare me anymore. While not exactly in the ninety-ninth percentile for effusiveness, she sounded decent: Two or three times she’d said some version of “You must be going through absolute hell.” And when she opened Jonah’s picture, she’d remarked, “He looks like an absolutely lovely man.”

Fifteen minutes later, I felt the urge to get out and go to Florabella. Andrea told me not to come in, saying that she would call in Marjorie, a retired florist who helped us out during busy times, squeezing us in between her daily Alcoholics and Overeaters Anonymous meetings. Still, I yearned for an hour or two of the mindless comfort that always came to me when I was using my hands, like greening out hunks of floral foam, covering them with leaves or moss as the basis for table arrangements. But now I was too scared to trust call forwarding; I worried that some vital message from the cops would not only go unanswered but not make it to voice mail. And I wanted to be home in case . . . I caught myself in what Jonah would have called “doing a Sherry,” sighing my mother’s
It’s hopeless
sigh. He could do a hilarious imitation of my mother that included shaking his head in despair, followed by an “oy” and a few tsk-tsks, even though she never actually said “oy” and at most gave a single tsk. But how could I not sigh? With each hour he was gone, it got tougher to come up with a Jonah-coming-home fantasy powerful enough to divert me for longer than ten seconds.

Bleak. Every few years, Jonah would tell me I really should read his favorite novel,
Bleak House
. Except it was incredibly long and the title wasn’t exactly a grabber. Also, it was by Dickens, and okay, maybe something was deeply wrong with me, because whenever someone brought up Charles Dickens, everybody else nodded with reverence and got that funny little smile that’s supposed to signal “Literature has added so much meaning to my life.” Except the only
thing in high school I hated more than
A Tale of Two Cities
was
David Copperfield
. So I kept telling Jonah, “You’re right and I’d love to. As soon as I finish whatever for my book club, I’m going to read it. Then we can go out to dinner, just the two of us, and really discuss it. Plus, I’ll finally get to see what makes you so passionate about it.”

The house was silent except for the occasional gust of wind that rattled the shutters. I walked purposefully from Jonah’s study to the den, thinking that I would find his leather-bound copy. Maybe in the back of my mind I was picturing him coming home so quietly I didn’t even hear his key in the lock. He’d find me reading
Bleak House
and be incredibly moved.

Except I passed the den, went into the kitchen, and made myself a sugar-free hot chocolate. I drank it standing up, leaning against the island where the stovetop was, thinking,
Bleak House? You want fucking
Bleak House
? I’m in it.
But I was barely halfway through the thought when I realized there was a house even bleaker, the one I’d grown up in. Not bleak from tragedy. Bleak from perpetual simmering, silent resentment. I decided I really had to call my parents.

Chapter Eight

My mother answered the phone. She always did. Her “hello,” as usual, came across as a challenge, as if she expected every call to be a fund-raiser from some organization whose position she’d once been passionate about and then lost interest in: NOW, NARAL, Emily’s List, Americans United Against Gun Violence, Greenpeace. She’d bought a T-shirt from No God 4 Me at an atheist street fair on Amsterdam Avenue, but she’d never gotten on any sucker list because she’d switched to her most recent cause, libertarianism, which she seemed to define as being at liberty not to do anything for anybody and listening to deeply unattractive people on C-SPAN talk about abolishing the Federal Reserve.

“Mom, it’s me.”

“Susan?” I was an only child. Her voice was frosty; I hadn’t called her in over a week. Not that she ever called me, apparently being under the impression that the telephone was a one-way instrument.

“Yes. Listen, I have some . . . not-good news.” Why did I expect a nervous intake of breath or a terrified “Are the boys all right?” Beats the hell out of me. I definitely shouldn’t have, because after a lifetime of phone calls, I knew it was my job to set the tone of our conversations. I usually tried to be affectionate (extending an invitation to a Mother’s Day barbecue) unless the occasion called for a little dab of melancholy (inquiring where Cousin Ira’s funeral services would be held).

I’d always low-keyed it around my parents, even during my years of the usual teenage derangement, because their emotional gamut
ranged from a high of not unhappy to a low of vaguely depressed. On the rare occasion when they were directly confronted with someone else’s hilarity or heartache, they’d practically stagger, as if they’d been hit with a Category 4 hurricane. So I kept my hysterics to myself. Still, when I blurted, “Jonah’s been missing for two days,” I couldn’t subdue my agitation vibes.

“Two days?”

“Yes.”

She burped, and I let myself think the news was a shock to her system. “You don’t have any idea where he is?” she asked.

“No. Nobody has any idea.”

“Are you going to call the police?”

“I already did. So far I haven’t heard anything.”

“That’s not like him,” she observed. “Two days?”

“Yes.”

The ball was in my mother’s court, but she couldn’t do any more than stand there and watch it bounce. “Effectual” wasn’t a definition for either of my parents. Even when they sensed something was expected, they rarely managed to figure out what it was. If there had been a Rabinowitz family crest,
Think on your feet
would not have been its motto.

Now, however, my mother’s silence lasted longer than usual. Another time (more in the interest of “Let’s move it along” than out of kindness) I would have offered a hand to pull her out of her emotional hole. Why not? I’d been doing it most of my life, once I decided that, through either the grace of God or recessive genes, I had what they lacked: sense.

I’d grown up being their guide around Normalville. This time, though, all I could do was get angry and think,
Can’t you even ask me, “Is there anything I can do?” Aren’t there any limits to your insecurity? You’re my mother, for crissakes!
Just then she asked, “Would you like us to come over?” I decided she was hoping I’d say, “No, don’t bother.” Before I could stop myself, I told her it would be great if they could. Maybe I was thinking that someday in the future, I’d be saying, “Listen, my parents are far from perfect, but when the
chips were down, they were really there for me!”

There for me? Maybe I was fantasizing my mother calling my father at work and saying “Susie needs us!” then grabbing a cab out to Long Island and him driving eighty-five miles an hour from Queens to comfort me. Maybe—though I knew that despite her fifteen-year flirtation with feminism, she never went anywhere without my father. She’d flunked her driving test forty years earlier and found taxis too filthy and obscenely expensive. Public transportation was, in her view, too public: crowded with male riders who saw buses and subways as prime turf for humiliating women via the rush-hour penis prod.

Anyway, by the time my father left work, drove back to Brooklyn to pick her up, and crept out in rush-hour traffic to the house via the expressway, since side roads could still have ice from January, they arrived after six.

“Maybe he’s at a medical conference,” my father, Stanley Rabinowitz, suggested, “and just forgot to mention it to you.” He was sitting at the kitchen table wearing one of his Mr. Rogers cardigans, this one a weary green covered with decades of pilling. Very little actual sweater remained, yet the tiny pill balls somehow hung together and seemed to have acquired balls of their own. I set a large plate of grilled cheese sandwiches on the kitchen table because naturally, they had shown up at dinnertime expecting to be fed. When I sat, they seemed taken aback that there was no soup or salad. My mother, glancing around at the place mats and finding neither forks nor spoons, reluctantly took a half sandwich.

The boys and Ida and Ingvild were in the den with their cheese sandwiches, apparently charmed by the sophisticated wit of Lenny the Wonder Dog, giving me time to bask in the warmth of my parents’ company. My father always ate sandwiches from the outside in: His grilled cheese sat on his plate with even denture marks all around the perimeter, like a decorative scalloped edge. He picked it up and took another bite.

“He’s not at a medical conference,” I replied calmly. “First of all, Jonah wouldn’t forget to tell me he was going someplace. Even if
he did, he would have had to plan for going out of town. There isn’t any sign of planning. He had operations scheduled, appointments at the office. He just disappeared. Didn’t come home, didn’t show up at his office or the hospital. His partners are as mystified as I am.”

My father shrugged to show he was stumped, too. When no one else spoke up, he added, “Maybe foul play?”

“Maybe.” Just those two syllables used up all the energy I had left.

My mother shook her head, a movement that communicated
Gee, too bad
rather than
Catastrophic
. When she’d come in, she’d given me her usual awkward hug, where her upper arms performed the actual hugging and everything else, from elbows to fingertips, hung awkwardly in the air behind me. Now, though, she seemed to realize some comforting maternal gesture was in order, so she reached across the big round table to squeeze my hand. However, her arms were short. In order to do my part and get my hand squeezed for comforting, I wound up stretching forward until, from the waist up, I was almost flat on the table.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

She muttered something into her sandwich. It could have been “No problem.”

My mother was short and chunky. Not a stylish combo, but short, chunky women can be tough/adorable or else little dynamos throwing off sparks of energy. Sherry was neither. She was belligerently unattractive, almost as if she’d been created in the late sixties by a male-chauvinist cartoonist as a malicious caricature of a feminist.

Periodically, one of my friends would tell me I was too harsh about her; that, okay, she would never win any awards in the mother-love department, but wasn’t that because she thought herself less than lovable? Probably. Her own mother, Ethel, had walked out when she was eight. Little Sherry had been raised by her father, my grandfather, Lenny “the Loser” Blechner. After failing early on to be a nightclub singer, probably because he had a mediocre voice and kept forgetting to smile between songs, he’d become a bookkeeper for Calabro Brothers Flounder in the Fulton Fish Market.

“So,” my father said, “where do you go from here?” An outsider would think he was wracked with emotion because his voice quavered so much, but I knew better. For as long as anyone who knew him could recall, he’d always talked as if the section of floor he was standing on were vibrating. Now and then some less than diplomatic soul would ask, “Hey, uh, what’s with your voice? You got Parkinson’s or something?” He’d reply, “Huh?” He never got it.