“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.
19
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.
“Motherfucker,” 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.”