Bedbugs (16 page)

Finally, she rose slowly, walked over to the counter, and poked gingerly at the pile with the tip of her ring finger.

Coffee grounds.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Susan said to no one. She exhaled heavily as her heart resumed beating. She was brushing the coffee grounds off the counter and into her palm when she heard keys jingling in the door, followed by Emma’s hopeful call of “Mama?”

She called, “In here, love!” as she rinsed the coffee grounds off her hand into the sink.

Her legs were wobbly beneath her, dancing with pinpricks. She had been in the kitchen, seated at her computer, since the girls left, five and a half hours earlier.

*

“Hey, you want to know what I read on the Internet?” Susan said.

“That the Internet is a giant waste of time?”

“Har-dee-har.”

The TV was on in the background, with Alex keeping one eye on the
Top Chef
season finale. When they spoke on the phone at 5:30, Alex had announced his intention to make a big chef’s salad for dinner, but Susan told him the lettuce had a lot of rotten pieces, so could he grab a pizza on his way home, instead? She was lying about the lettuce. In fact, she had seen small dark specks on the bottom of the
vegetable drawer, and, even after confirming that they were apple seeds, and after rinsing the drawer thoroughly, she couldn’t shake the idea that the spots had been dead bedbugs.

“All right, sorry. What did you read on the Internet?”

“I learned that a lot of people with bedbugs think they’ve killed them—they think the infestation is over, in other words, and then the bugs come back.” Alex chewed his pizza, half listening, while Susan yawned into her fist. That afternoon she’d taken Emma to the big playground down in Dumbo and watched her make circuits from the rope ladder to the slide and back, too exhausted and preoccupied to give chase.

“They’re not like ants, where you just use Raid or whatever and they’re gone. Even in abandoned apartments, with no one to eat from, bedbugs can live for months and months. Some people say up to a
year
. Oh, and they can hide in your hair. Disgusting, right?”

“Yes,” said Alex, and made a face. “Actually … wait …” He put down his slice, dug his fingers into his corkscrew curls, his features convulsed with exaggerated terror. “I … I … feel them right now! Aaaaah!”

He shook his head wildly, clutching at his temples.

Susan looked at him evenly. “I need you to take this seriously, OK?”

“I am. Seriously, honey. I totally am. In fact, I called Dana Kaufmann today.”

Susan’s heart leapt in her chest. “You did?”

“I did. Could you pass me another slice of the mushroom?”

She obeyed, her hands trembling slightly.
Yes! Let Kaufmann come back. This time she would see—surely, this time …

“I just figured we might as well have her come back and take another look,” Alex said. “She wasn’t too happy about it. She told me
she was ‘past the point of reasonable doubt as to that particular residence.’ Quote, unquote.”

Susan smiled. It was easy to imagine the deadpan Dana Kaufmann using exactly those words, and in exactly the icy tone Alex had conjured. Alex smiled back, took a big bite of his fresh slice, and tugged a strand of cheese from the corner of his mouth. “Anyway, I talked her into it. I told her my wife is pretty sure we’ve got bedbugs now, even if we didn’t before, and my wife’s a pretty smart lady.”

“Thank you.” Susan reached over and stroked Alex’s cheek gently. “I really appreciate it.”

“I’m on your side, babe.” There was a pause, and then he delivered the punchline. “Hey, can I borrow two hundred bucks? Tax free if we pay in cash.”

Susan laughed and helped herself to a piece of pizza while Alex started in about his day. Slowly but surely, he said, things were turning around for GemFlex. “Bottom line, we might remain midlist for a little while, but to tell you the truth, that’s
fine
. Midlist is
fine.
”

“Of course it is,” Susan said.

“I mean, so we’re snapping a few Rolexes instead of Cartier, who cares?”

“Exactly.”

“Although, actually, on Friday afternoon we booked a gig with Tiffany—”

“Oo-la-la.”

“I know. So, who the hell knows?”

When Alex asked Susan what she’d done with her morning, she took a breath and said, “Oh, you know. I took a walk, did some sketching on the Promenade. I’m going to get back in there and do some painting soon.”

“That’s great, honey.”

They cleared the table, and Susan sat sipping wine while Alex put in a tray of fish sticks so Marni would have something to give Emma for lunch the next day. When a decent amount of time had passed, Susan changed the subject back to the bedbugs.

“So, I’m sorry. When did Kaufmann say she was coming back?”

“Uh, I wrote it down. Friday at 4:30, I think.”

Susan nodded, tried to smile. It was now Wednesday night, and Friday at 4:30 seemed like an awfully long way away.

“And look,” Alex went on. “If she finds anything, then we’ll decide what to do.”

If she finds anything …
Susan felt a cold rush of fear in her spine.
What if she doesn’t?

*

Four hours later, Susan was standing at the linen closet, gathering up a couple of sheets, a pillowcase, and their spare blanket, when Alex stuck his head out of the bedroom.

“Hey. What are you doing? You’re sleeping on the sofa?”

“Yeah. I know, I know.” She laughed, trying to sound light and self-teasing. She had thought Alex was already asleep. “I think, for now, I’ll just be more comfortable.”

Alex made a pouty face and looked like he was about to argue. But then he shrugged. “OK, babe.”

She walked down the steps to the front hall, clutching her ungainly camp-out bundle tightly to her chest, and then looked back up at Alex at the top of the steps. They stood that way for a long moment, her looking up and him looking down, and from Susan’s
perspective he was silhouetted by the wash of light from the bathroom behind him. Her husband looked a distant stranger, dimly perceived from a mile away.

*

Susan inspected the sofa thoroughly before lying down, of course. A contributor on BedbugDemolition.com named EcdysisMan had written a chilling vignette about (finally) clearing his gorgeous double bed of bedbugs, only to have an overnight guest discover a thriving colony between the cushions of the sofa. Susan lifted the cushions one by one, shook them out, banged them together, slipped her fingers into the cases and wriggled them around. Nothing.

She dry swallowed an Ambien, lay down, and descended immediately into a vortex of anxiety.

Alex would see, wouldn’t he? He’d have to see. It was ridiculous to stay in an apartment that had bedbugs—
if there were bugs, if it’s real, what if it’s
—over a matter of a couple thousand bucks. It was insane. She could call her dad, ask him to borrow the money, to help them out with the move.

No way … come on, Susan …

Her dad didn’t have money and wouldn’t be inclined to loan it if he did. Alex’s parents were the ones with the money, and they had given Alex a ton to go to art school—money that he was supposedly paying back, although Susan couldn’t remember the last time they had made a payment. The room felt hot, too hot, but when she kicked her leg out from under the blanket she felt a draft, so she tucked it away again. Beads of sweat formed on her temples and dripped down into her eyes, convincing her for one alarming instant that bugs were
crawling across her eyelids. She wiped away the sweat and stared at the ceiling.

At least it’s a different ceiling for a change
.

Small sounds drifted up the air shaft from Andrea’s apartment: shuffling, slippered footsteps, the clink of a spoon on a teacup. She was reminded of the weird
ping
they had heard—whatever had happened with that?
I guess Andrea took care of it.…

Of all the flaws with the apartment, all the things Susan had complained of, it was the only one Andrea had done something about.

When at last she slept, Susan had horrible torturing nightmares of bedbugs. They were marching across her stomach, leaving behind them a trail of that disgusting brown-black dust
—feces
. A trail of bug shit on her body like the uneven black line of an Etch-a-Sketch. They scuttled up her stomach and bit her chest, her shoulders, her neck and face. In the dream she couldn’t lift her arms to wipe them away, could only lie helpless as they sank their horrid needle-noses into her undefended flesh—stinging—pinching
—biting
—and then,
disappearing
, skittering back to the air shaft, crawling into the cracks between the glass and the wall—

She opened her eyes, gasped for breath, rose unsteadily from the sofa and staggered across the room. She slapped at her body, ran her fingers across her chest—no bugs. No marks. Nothing. It had be a dream, this time
—right?

It had to be
.

In the darkness, she pressed her face against one of the little windows on the air shaft, trying to see down.

When she woke it was still dark, and Susan was on the floor, wrapped in a starchy linen tablecloth they’d gotten as a wedding present from Alex’s great-aunt and never used. Susan had no memory of taking the tablecloth out of the sideboard, nor of deciding to sleep on the ground. Her back was sore and knotted, her eyes ached in their sockets, and her mouth tasted like ash. Rubbing at her temples with her thumb and forefinger, Susan stumbled from the living room down the hall to the kitchen, where she glanced at the clock on the stove. It was 6:22 in the morning.

She trudged up the stairs, scratching absently at her wrist. Halfway up the stairs, she heard Alex’s alarm go off and felt a pang of longing—now he would snooze for ten minutes, and it would be so pleasant to slip into the bed, to nuzzle her face into his neck and snooze alongside him. Instead, she went into the bathroom, peed, and flushed.

She stood, shuffled over to the sink and was squeezing toothpaste out of the tube when she saw a tiny translucent blob nestled among the bristles. Susan blinked. Her mouth dropped open. Slowly, she raised the toothbrush and brought it closer to her face, squinting.

It was an egg. She recognized it from a dozen different images she had stared at on BedbugDemolition.com. A milky white larval orb, smaller than a pinhead, nestled between two bristles of her toothbrush.
But she could
see
it. In the bright vanity lights of the bathroom mirror there was no ambiguity; it wasn’t the middle of the night, it wasn’t dark, and she wasn’t half asleep. Susan was wide awake, and she was staring at a birth sac, in which, she knew, a baby bedbug waited to emerge.

“Mother
fucker
,” she whispered.

Susan reached carefully with her forefinger and thumb, feeling for the impossibly small white dot. She grasped it, raised her fingers slowly, opened her hand—and saw nothing.

“Shit. Shit shit shit.”

She must have accidentally brushed the egg away, into the sink. “Shit!” Quickly, Susan pulled the stopper of the sink closed, so the tiny sac couldn’t slip down the drain. She craned her neck over the basin, squinting for the white dot against the off-white ceramic. Nothing.

“Damn it!” Susan said.
“Damn it.”

“Baby? You all right?”

“What?”

Alex had cracked open the bathroom door and leaned in to the room, groggy and unshaven. Susan looked over, holding the toothbrush limply in her hand.

“I just asked if you were all right?”

“Yeah. I …” She turned back to the sink, playing out the conversation in her mind:

“There was an egg sac on my toothbrush.”

“Oh, wow. Let me see it.”

“It’s gone. I lost it.”

“Well, if you see another one, let me know.”

“It’s nothing,” Susan said, and Alex shrugged.

“Okey-doke.”

“You need to pee?”

On the way out of the bathroom, Susan flung her toothbrush into the trash.

*

By the time Alex emerged from the bathroom, Susan had dressed and returned downstairs; when he came down to make his coffee, she asked if he could hang out with Emma that morning till Marni arrived. A cloud of annoyance passed over Alex’s face, and Susan could see him weighing the value of his lost work hours against the cost of pissing her off. Finally, he smiled, shot her a thumbs-up, and said, “Of course, baby.”

“Great.”

Susan pulled on her coat, suddenly desperate to get out of the house and taste the air.

“You doing all right?” Alex paused on the stairs, examining her as he took his first slow sip of coffee. “How was sleeping on the sofa?”

“Fine.”

“Oh, good. So I’ll survive if and when you kick me out of bed.”

Susan gave him a tight smile in lieu of a laugh and slipped out of the apartment, buttoning her coat as she walked down the exterior stairs to Cranberry Street. Immediately, she realized that the weather was too cold for her shortish skirt, loose cotton top, and light jacket; the wind bit at her legs, chased up her skirt and her sleeves.

This was autumn weather, and Susan felt a melancholy shiver, like the seasons had changed without asking her permission. She glanced back at 56 Cranberry Street but kept on walking.

She stopped into a characterless deli on Henry Street, ordered an
everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, and ate it as she walked the streets. For an hour, then two hours, she walked around Brooklyn in wide circles, watching the sun come up and the commuters emerge from their apartments and move in their intersecting tides toward the various subways. She meandered as far south as 2nd Place, west to the Atlantic Center, east as far as the shipyards. At 9:30 she was on Van Brunt Street, on the outskirts of Red Hook, and she stopped into a consignment shop that was just opening for the day; there was a poster taped in the window of a cartoon bedbug, upside down with its legs in the air. “Every item treated for infestation!” it said. Susan had a sudden, insane fear that this guarantee was backed up by infrared cameras, scanning each patron for bugs, and that some sort of alarm bell would sound as bedbug-sniffing dogs chased her from the store.