As Husbands Go Read Online Free PDF

had an edge to his voice—world-weary, snide—as if he were picturing a staggering-drunk husband, or one with the lousy luck to fall asleep after having sex with his bimbo girlfriend.
    I walked across the bedroom toward the window that faced the front and sat in Jonah’s favorite chair in the world, a Regency bergère with gilded wood arms and legs. It was upholstered in creamy silk with a ribbon motif. When I’d spotted the bergère at an auction house, an embarrassingly loud “Ooh!” had escaped me. It was a beauty, fit for British royalty—and okay, suburban Jewish doctors, too.
    Because I wasn’t the only one blown away by its beauty; Jonah had wanted the chair way more than I did. He’d sat on it and noted in his objective clinician’s tone that it wasn’t comfortable. You didn’t see it, but you could feel its back angled in a bizarre way. Instead of sitting straight, you felt pitched slightly forward, as if you were examining your knees. But he added in his deeper-than-usual, I’ve-got-a-refined-aesthetic-sensibility voice, “It’s a splendid piece.” Also a decent investment. But there was more: I could feel the chair’s power over him. It made him feel not just well-off— Hey, I can afford this exquisite objet— but incredibly refined. If George the Whatever had needed a court plastic surgeon, Jonah knew he would have been tapped. In a flash of marital ESP, I caught all this in under a second. We bid. We bought. For both of us, sitting in that chair always made us feel elegant and rich. Protected, too: We’ve made it. We’re upper-class, and therefore things go the way we wish them to go .
    Even in that instant, petrified that life was about to give me the cosmic smack in the face that would make every woman on Long Island tell her best friend, “Thank God I’m not Susie Gersten,” I knew if I were sitting in a repro Regency covered in polyester damask, I would feel worse.
    A second later, as I glanced back at my cell phone, the chair vanished from my head. I got up and called information. When the computer said, “City and state, please,” I told it, “New York, New York,” then enunciated “Donald Finsterwald” even while knowing the computer wouldn’t get it, having obviously been programmed not to comprehend New York accents by some hostile Southern Baptist; except for twice in my entire life, I’d always had to wait for an operator.
    Even though it was not yet six in the morning, Donald Finsterwald, the administrator of Jonah’s plastic surgery practice, sounded not just alert but primed, up on the toes of his orthopedic loafers, ready and eager to handle the day’s first crisis. “Hello!” His extreme loyalty to Manhattan Aesthetics always creeped me out because it resembled patriotism more than simple dedication to work. Jonahsaid I didn’t have an organization mind-set, that every decent-sized office needed a Donald.
    “Hi, Donald. Susie Gersten. Sorry to call so early.” My voice came out squeaky; plus, I was still breathless. I tried calming myself by taking a Lamaze breath through my nose and exhaling it through pursed lips as silently as I could so he wouldn’t think, Partner’s wife breathing hysterically. Watch what you say! “I’m concerned . . . I am worried about . . . Jonah didn’t come home last night. I didn’t get any messages from him.”
    “Oh, I’m sure—” He always strung out his vowels—“Ooooh, Iiii’m suuure”—so even in the best of times, it took practically a week till he got out a sentence. Also, he had one of those unisex voices, so nearly every time he called, if he asked for Dr. Gersten and didn’t say, “Hi, Mrs. Gersten, it’s Donald,” I’d wonder if it was a patient with a question about her new chin implant who’d managed to get Jonah’s home number, or the Irish dermatologist who always sat at the Manhattan Aesthetics table at any Mount Sinai fund-raising gala.
    I said, “Listen, Donald, something is really wrong.