Susan Isaacs - As Husbands Go

As Husbands Go

A Novel S USAN I SAACS

To St. Catherine and Bob Morvillo with love

Here, take this gift,I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, theprogress and freedom of the race,Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.--Walt Whitman, "To a Certain Cantatrice," Leaves of Grass

Chapter One

Who knew? It seemed a perfectly nice night. True, outside the house, the wind was whoo-whooing like sound effects from a low-budget horror movie. The cold was so vicious that a little past seven, a branch of the great white spruce on the front lawn that had been creaking all afternoon suddenly screamed in pain. Then a brutal CRAAACK, and it crashed to the frozen ground.

But inside our red brick Georgian in the picturesque Long Island town of Shorehaven, all was warmth. I went from one bedroom to another to kiss the boys good night. Despite the sickly yellow gleam of the SpongeBob Squarepants night-light in his bedroom, Mason, the third-born of our triplets, glowed pure gold. I stroked his forehead. "Happy dreams, my sweetie." He was already half asleep, thumb in mouth, but his four other fingers flapped me a good night.

A flush of mother love reddened my cheeks. Its heat spread. For a moment, it even eased the permanent muscle spasm that had seized the left side of my neck seconds after Jonah and I gazed up at the sonogram and saw three little paisley curls in utero. My utero. Still, a perpetual neck spasm was a small price to pay for such a wonderful life, one I had hardly dared dream about as a little girl in Brooklyn.

Okay, that "wonderful life" and "hardly dared dream" business does cross the line into the shameless mush of Mommyland, where "fulfillment" is all about children, not sex, and where mothers are jealous of each new baby-shoe charm on their friends' bracelets. Feh.

Sure, sure: Sentiment proves you're human. Feelings are good, blah, blah, blah. But sentimentality, anything that could go on a minivan bumper sticker, makes me cringe. Take this as a given: Susan B Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten (i.e., me) was never a Long Island madonna, one of those moms who carries on about baby Jonathan as if he were Baby Jesus.

What kind of mother was I on that particular night? A happy one. Still, it wouldn't have taken a psychologist to read my emotional pie chart and determine that the sum of my parts equaled one shallow (though contented) human being. One third of that happiness was attributable to the afterglow of the birthday present my husband had given me two weeks earlier, a Cartier Santos watch. Another third was courtesy of Lexapro (twenty milligrams). A little over a sixth came from the pure sensual gratification of being wrapped in a tea-green Loro Piana cashmere bathrobe. The remaining sliver was bona fide maternal bliss.

Maybe I'm still shallow, just deluding myself that after all that's occurred, I've become a better person. On the other hand, even at my superficial worst, I wasn't terrible. Truly, I did have a heart.

Especially when it came to my immediate family. I loved them. So I gloried in that moment of mommy bliss. I remember thinking, Jonah and I have some lucky star shining down on us . Along with our three boys, my husband, Jonah Paul Gersten, MD, FACS (picture a slightly older--and significantly shorter--Orlando Bloom, with a teeny touch of male pattern baldness), was the light of my life. Naturally, I had no clue about what was happening with Jonah twenty-six miles west, in Manhattan.

How could I possibly know that right at that very instant, he was stepping into the Upper East Side apartment of a call girl who had decided a month earlier that the name Cristal Rousseau wasn't projecting the class-up-the-ass image she had been aiming for. Lately, there hadn't been much of a market for the refined-type fuck, so she'd changed her image and her name to something still classy yet more girl-next-door--Dorinda Dillon.

Why would a man of Jonah's caliber bother with someone like Dorinda? Before you go "heh-heh," think about it. It's a reasonable question. First of all, Jonah never gave me any reason to believe he wasn't devoted to me. Just a couple of months earlier, at the annual holiday party of his Park Avenue surgical practice, I had overheard the scheduling coordinator confide to one of the medical assistants, "Dr. Gersten always has that look of love, even when Mrs. Gersten is standing right beside him in those four-inch heels that--I hate to say it--make her shockingly taller."

Also, being a plastic surgeon with a craniofacial subspecialty, Jonah was a man with a sophisticated sense of beauty. He had the ultimate discerning eye. No way would Dorinda Dillon's looks have pleased him. Objectively speaking, I swear to God, she looked like a ewe in a blond wig. You'd expect her to go baa. Genuinely sheepy-looking, whatever the word for that is. All my life I've read much more than people ever gave me credit for, and I have a surprisingly decent vocabulary--though obviously not decent enough.

Anyway, Dorinda had a long, wide sheep nose that sloped down straight from her forehead. It took up so much room in the middle of her face that it kept her eyes farther apart than human eyes ought to be. Despite her loyalty to some hideous blackish-red lipstick, her mouth came across more as dark two-dimensional lines than actual lips.