As Husbands Go (5 page)

“Jonah tells me about the great job you’re doing,” I said. “And I know if you’d heard from him, you’d call me immediately. What I’m wondering, though, is if you heard . . .” The phone was in my right hand; I used my left to massage my temples with my thumb and middle finger. “Have there been any calls from the police? Or from the office’s alarm company? Maybe a hospital? I mean, not about one of his patients but about something happening to Jonah?”

“No. Of course not. I would have called you immediately, Mrs. Gersten.”

“I know, but I just wanted to be sure you weren’t, whatever, protecting me or waiting until, like, around seven o’clock, before calling me or Dr. Noakes or Dr. Jiménez.” Jonah’s partners, Gilbert John Noakes and Layne Jiménez, would have called me right away if they’d heard anything.

“Oh no, no. I wouldn’t have waited to get in touch.”

“Okay, fine. I just wanted to be sure before I started making any other calls.”

“Oh. Who were you thinking of calling? I mean, could it be better to wait, it being so early? Dr. Gersten, maybe if he had some sort of emergency at Sinai, he might have gone to one of those rooms where residents can rest, because he wouldn’t want to disturb you at this hour.”

I was on the verge of saying, “Oh no, he knows I’d be up because the boys always wake us at five-thirty.” Then I realized Donald was
buying time so he could figure out if Jonah’s not coming home could be a potential catastrophe for the practice. Was Jonah sick or dead or God knows what? Or was his absence the result of some marital misunderstanding that could end in either tears and kisses (“Oh, sweetie, I was so worried!”) or else in a gargantuan retainer to a matrimonial lawyer? Maybe Donald was stalling so he could call Gilbert John Noakes, the practice’s senior partner, and get some guidance on dealing with a hysterical wife.

Except I wasn’t hysterical. In talking with Donald Finsterwald, I had concentrated on sounding calm. Calm was good, wasn’t it? Under normal circumstances, I came across like a calm person. Pleasant, friendly. An excellent doctor’s wife, with just enough sex and sparkle to keep me out of the ranks of Xanaxed zombie ladies or sugarplum spouses who smiled in lieu of talking. I had my own career, but I didn’t bore the crap out of people by carrying on as if floral design were the answer to the world’s prayers.

And just now with Donald, I’d been courteous, balanced. Totally nonhysterical. Good, I’d paid my dues to Manhattan Aesthetics. So instead of agreeing to wait before making any calls, or telling Donald that I appreciated his input and would give it the serious consideration it deserved, I dropped the nice and snapped, “I’ve got to go.”

Then I hung up and called the police.

Chapter Four

It wasn’t only that I had what in the flower business is called “a great nose,” a highly sensitive sense of smell: Anyone with two nostrils would instantly know that Detective Sergeant Timothy Coleman’s body odor was over-the-top. And his generous application of synthetic lime cologne did nothing to camouflage it.

“Please excuse me, Mrs. Gersten,” Nassau County’s finest said after he cleared his throat. His manners were exquisite, as if to apologize for his pungency. Maybe as a child he’d been beaten and forced to memorize
Emily Post’s Etiquette;
his politeness was as aggressive as his BO. “Are you sure it’s all right if I sit down?”

“Of course,” I said, fast as I could. “Please.” I couldn’t wait to get to the couch. The chemical reaction of his smell added to my ever escalating fear was so explosive that—
ka-boom!
—I got dizzy two seconds after I’d opened the door for him. Now I almost dove onto the couch so I wouldn’t risk swooning into it.

“Thank you
so
much,” he said.

We had already spent twenty minutes talking at the kitchen table, but then my housekeeper had arrived, toting a bag of her own microfiber cloths. Driven as Bernadine was by her obsessive-compulsive need to empty the dishwasher before she took off her coat, the detective and I couldn’t stay in the kitchen. However, bringing Coleman into the living room hadn’t changed the environment. He stank. And his excessive courtesy was simultaneously exhausting me and making me a nervous wreck.
What’s his game? What does he want from me?

“The reason I’m asking for all this information now, ma’am, is so I don’t need to keep having to come back to you for more. I hope you understand and can bear with me.”

“Of course. I appreciate . . .” Besides the dizziness, my mind kept veering off in a hundred directions. It didn’t seem like I’d offered any helpful information about Jonah that Detective Sergeant Coleman could use. Not one single “Good, I see, right” had escaped his lips. So I felt doubly pressured to make a positive impression. I wanted him to think I was a fine, deserving person so he’d work day and night to find my husband. But he wouldn’t think I was so fine if I went berserk, which I felt I could do at any second. If I started screeching hysterically—“I want my husband! I want my husband!”
—
while grabbing the detective’s lapels and shaking him, he would get sidetracked. Maybe he’d decide I was one of those “She seemed so nice” wives who, three days before her period, axes her husband and shoves him
into a calico-covered Container Store box with the croquet set and pool toys—then saunters back to the kitchen to make zucchini bread.

The tension was too much. Also, from the minute I opened the door, I was afraid he’d be hostile because of my height. Tall women get to some short guys, and not in a good way. And Coleman was short, like he’d been zoomed down to 75 percent. With me at five feet nine inches, I didn’t want him to feel I was the type who didn’t take mini-men seriously, even though he’d never see the five-five he probably lied about on his driver’s license. I wasn’t hung up on height. Jonah was shorter, but not dollhousey like Coleman. Jonah was solid and strong.

Then I got upset with myself:
It’s not about you or Detective Sergeant Smell-o-rama. It’s about Jonah
. I hung my head with shame—not a good idea, because the sudden shift of position made me want to throw up.

Coleman, perched on the edge of the seat of a carved Sri Lankan chair, kept the questions coming. I suppose I answered. Images kept flashing inside my head and overpowered any thought: Jonah writhing on the floor in some obscure men’s room at Mount Sinai, delirious with fever from a superbug he’d caught in the hospital. Jonah carjacked, bound and gagged in the black, near airless trunk of his BMW.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” Detective Sergeant Coleman said, “but has Dr. Gersten ever, uh, not shown up before? Not come home?”

“Never. Jonah is completely reliable. I can always count on . . .” The tears I’d held back in the kitchen started to spill. I wasn’t actually crying; my eyes just became full and overflowed, like a stopped-up sink. “He’s so responsible.” It came out as a froggy sound because I was choked up. “That’s why I think it must be something bad, because . . .” The tears cascaded down my cheeks. Coleman sat there. Instead of averting his eyes, he watched. A tiny spiral-bound notepad rested on his knee. Its size seemed grossly inadequate for recording the huge facts of Jonah’s vanishing.

Finally, I found the energy to propel myself up. “Excuse me,”
I said. I rushed into the guest bathroom, blew my nose, wiped my eyes.

When I returned to the living room, Coleman was still at the edge of his chair. “I didn’t know whether to call the police this soon,” I told him. “I remember from movies when detectives say they have to wait forty-eight hours or three days until they can look into a matter.”

“Oh no, ma’am. If someone who keeps a regular pattern suddenly doesn’t show up, we should know about it. A lot of times the local precinct only sends in regular officers to take the initial report, like if it’s a teenager who’s probably with a friend, or if it’s someone with a history of instability. The next day, if that sort of person is still unaccounted for, the department follows up with a detective. But with someone like Dr. Gersten, what with his position in the community, well, you know.”

“Right.”

“Now, when we were in the kitchen, you mentioned your last conversation with your husband was yesterday afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“Can you recall what each of you said in that conversation, ma’am?” I was examining a medallion of roses and laurel leaves on the needlepoint rug. He repeated “Ma’am?” louder, which made me jump.

“I don’t know. Let me think. It was a regular late-afternoon phone call. Jonah still had a couple of post-op patients to see. Then he had some odds and ends to do in the city before he came home.”

“Did he happen to say what they were, ma’am?”

“The only thing he mentioned was maybe going to Tod’s. It’s about twenty blocks downtown from his office. A shoe store.”

“To . . . ?”

To have a martini, shmuck.
“To try on a pair of shoes,” I said. “Brown suede lace-up shoes. He’d seen them in the window. But he was pretty tired, so chances were he wouldn’t bother.”

“He said he probably wouldn’t bother, or was that your sense of things?”

“He said it.”

“Had he been under any special pressure lately?” I must have given him a
Duh
look because he added, “That he was tired from a more-than-usual workload? Or maybe family pressure?”

“No. I mean, he’s in a great surgical practice. Well, it’s been less than stellar lately, the economy being what it is, but they’re doing better than most of their colleagues. So far, so good.” Coleman blinked. I noticed he had no sign of beard, as if he used Nair instead of a razor. Imagining stroking a hairless, almost poreless man’s cheek was so repulsive that I forgot I was in the middle of answering his question. When Coleman uncocked his head and looked into my eyes straight-on, I quickly said, “Sorry, I lost my train of thought.”

“You were saying your husband wanted to build up his practice,” he said.

“Right,” I said. Coleman wiped the tip of his pen on the pad. He seemed ready to jot down some significant detail. “A lot of his business comes from referrals from other doctors, so he needs to stay active in the medical community. Like if a woman asks a doctor she knows, ‘Can you recommend someone for . . . ?’” I patted the underside of my chin with the back of my hand to demonstrate. “Jonah says if that doctor has run into him in the last week or two, he’s likely to say, ‘Jonah Gersten. Definitely. He’s first-rate.’ Which he truly is. If you’re not well trained and gifted, no one’s going to risk recommending you. But Jonah knows being out and about is important, too. And he’s big on PR. If he’s quoted somewhere, like in
O
or
Allure,
he’ll get calls for the next few months. All that takes time and planning. Plus being a surgeon, he has to keep up professionally. So his hours are incredible. And since the triplets were born—”

“They’re how old again?”

“Four. They’re usually asleep when he gets home. They go to bed at seven. We decided that instead of family dinner, we’d have family breakfast. But I know Jonah wishes he could have more time with them, not just mornings and weekends. I guess you could call that pressure, too.”

“What about financial pressure, ma’am?”

“We’re okay.” Early on in my marriage, I’d overheard my mother-in-law telling one of her friends that it was très LMC—lower-middle-class, a heinous crime—to say “X is rich.” “God in heaven,” she said, “‘rich’ is so crass.” She meant saying it, not being it. Anyway, within a month after moving from New Haven to New York, I’d come to understand that “rich” was fine to describe Rembrandt’s colors or a veal stock. But when it came to even really big bucks, I knew to say “X does nicely.” Detective Sergeant Coleman was fingering his hairless cheek, trying to figure out what my “we’re okay” meant. So I added, “Jonah’s making a very good living.”

Coleman’s fast 180 scope of the living room apparently gave him confirmation because he started nodding like a bobblehead. “You mentioned earlier he has partners in his plastic surgery practice,” he said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t hear me because he was busy flipping through his little pad, stopping every couple of pages. Maybe he was fascinated by notes he’d made. Or he couldn’t read his own writing. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do Dr. Gersten and his partners get along?”

“Yes.”

“No financial disagreements? Egos? That sort of thing?”

“They’re fine,” I said.

“If I might ask, how are things within your family?”

“Fine. Great. He loves the children, loves me. And vice versa.”

“The two girls you say are living here?”

“Our au pairs,” I said. His lids fluttered. “Mother’s helpers. They’re here from Norway.” More flutters. “They’re all legal and everything. They have valid work permits and—”

“Dr. Gersten has no issues with them, ma’am?” He wrote something on his pad.

The dizziness that had eased sneaked back, maybe because I could almost hear Coleman thinking,
Two Scandinavian girls. Blondes, I bet.
True, they were blondes. But Ida and Ingvild bore such a resemblance to Miss Piggy that I was waiting for their visas to expire before buying the DVD of
The Muppets Take Manhattan
for the boys. “No issues at all. Jonah thinks they’re great with the boys. Listen, my husband is, you know, easygoing. Friendly but polite. Respectful.” He underlined whatever he had just written.