Bedbugs (10 page)

Except
there
, along the left cheekbone, Susan had given the girl a row of nasty welts, three of them in a line, running at a slight angle from the far corner of the left eye down to the nostril. Three marks, three round, raised, red circles, each with a pinprick of white at its dead center. The marks were carefully executed, and Susan did not remember painting them at all.

Marks?

No. Bites
.

She had given Jessica Spender a row of bites.

Bedbug bites
, her mind hissed.
They’re bedbug bites, they’re totally—

Susan slammed the door and retreated into the living room, her hand pressed to her chest. She bit her lip and pressed the heel of her palm into her eyes, trying to summon memories of Friday night, her intense hours of painting, her … binge? Trance? Whatever state of hyperfocused semiconsciousness she had entered into. The rest of the painting was carefully realistic, taken directly from the photograph. Except she had decided, some part of her had decided, to add the marks. The bites.

Could she have done that kind of work, that kind of careful work, without remembering it? And why would she?

Susan thought of the blood on her pillow—
paint, paint, I thought we decided it was paint? Or dirt, a smudge of dirt? What did we say?
—and a wrenching shudder traveled down her spine.

“Hey, Sue?”

Marni was hollering from the kitchen, where she’d been busily gathering snacks and plastic utensils, getting Emma ready for departure. “We’re taking off, if that’s OK?” The nanny was being extra solicitous, trying to make up for her supposed illness on Friday, which had miraculously resolved itself in time for a concert Saturday night at Hammerstein Ballroom.

“Wait,” said Susan, and hurried down the hall. “One second.”

“Hi, Mama.” Emma was ready to go: she had on her shoes, her little jean jacket, her oversized Dora the Explorer backpack. Marni stood with the diaper bag slung over one shoulder, the strap running snugly between her breasts.

“Emma, honey,” Susan said, “Mommy needs to ask you something.”

In the bonus room she guided Emma carefully around the broken shards of the coffee cup and stood her before the easel. Susan
gave her daughter’s hand a reassuring squeeze; at nearly four years old, she could sense when her mother was upset about something, and to worry that she was the source.

“Emma, do you see these little dots on the woman’s face?” she asked gently. Emma raised herself up on her tiptoes and nodded gravely. “Honey, did you make those dots?”

Emma shook her head vigorously, her bangs flopping on her forehead.

“Are you sure? Maybe on Saturday, before dinner? When Mama and Dada were in the kitchen? You were playing by yourself in the living room, did you maybe …?”

But Emma kept shaking her head, her tiny brow creased with adamance. “No, Mama. I
didn’t.
”

Susan felt a presence and glanced up. Marni was hovering in the doorway, head tilted to one side, scrutinizing the portrait of Jessica Spender. Susan cast her an irritated look, and she backed away.

“Mommy’s not mad, honey. I just need you to tell me the truth. Did you touch my painting?”

Suddenly, urgently, Emma threw her arms around her and buried her face in Susan’s neck, breathing hotly into her throat.

“Can we leave, Mama? I don’t
like
this room.”

“Sure, Em, just—”

“I don’t
like
it!”

*

Susan cleaned the spilled coffee and the broken mug, gathering up the shards into a paper bag and mopping the floor on hands and knees with a wad of paper towels. Down here on her knees, she could
still smell it, even under the rich bitter smell of the coffee: that abandoned cat, its dying reek of piss and rot. The painting stood on its easel above her, still and silent. The truth was, Emma couldn’t have messed with it, even if she’d gotten it in her head to do so. She would have had to drag in the stepstool, drag it back when she was finished, not to mention mix the colors and clean the brushes and.…

I did it. I painted that picture that way, and I don’t know why
.

Susan felt a darkness welling in her veins. She rose from her cleaning crouch and stepped to the painting, ran her hands over the three dots marring Jessica Spender’s beautiful cheeks.

I’m sorry, Jessica
, she thought, as if she’d vandalized not the painting but the girl herself.
I’m sorry
.

*

Twenty minutes later, Susan was out the door and on her way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. She would, she had decided, sit with her sketchpad and charcoal pencils, watch the stream of joggers and the middle-aged Caribbean nannies pushing their strollers; she would set her artist’s gaze on the Manhattan horizon and sketch the magical skyline. She hustled down Cranberry Street, feeling the September sun on her cheeks. Turning right onto the Promenade, she dug her iPhone out of her coat pocket and called Alex.

“Hey, hon,” he said tersely. “What’s up?”

She could picture him, staring like an X-ray technician at his computer screen, running the pixelated magnifying glass over an enlarged JPEG of a diamond, searching out its flaws.

“Nothing, just a random question for you. Did you by any chance do something to my painting?”

“Did I what?” She heard his fingers rattling over the keys.

“My painting, Al, the painting I’m working on in the bonus room.”

“I’m sorry, Susan, could you hold on for just one sec?”

“Sure.”

She was halfway down the Promenade now, and she tossed her bag onto a bench and sat beside it, looking out at the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island. A few feet away, a knot of tourists was posing at the railing, framed by the view, leaning on one another and laughingly hoisting an Italian flag.

“OK. Sorry, babe. What is it again?”

“I—
careful!
” One of the tourists was bobbling a toddler up on his shoulders, and Susan had a lurching sensation of the boy tumbling over the railing, down into the rushing traffic of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway below.

“Susan?”

The boy was fine. His father had his legs gripped tightly, one in each hand. Susan closed her eyes and opened them again, resumed breathing.

“When you got home on Friday night, I was working on a painting. In my … in that little room, behind the living room. Did you, by any chance, do something to it? Over the weekend?”

“Did I
do
something to it? Yes, dear. I baked it in a pie.”

“Alex.”

“I have not stepped foot in that room since we moved to Brooklyn.” She heard rapid tapping: he was sending e-mails while they talked. “I seriously don’t even know what the room looks like.”

“Huh. It’s the weirdest thing … ”

“Susan? I am so busy today. Can we—”

“Yes. Of course. Get back to work.”

Susan held her sketchbook in her lap for half an hour, staring out across the river.

*

When Alex came home that night, it was as if the easygoing, eager-to-please doofus with whom she and Emma had spent their weekend had been kidnapped and replaced with his sullen, irritable twin. He barely said hi, barely acknowledged the painted pinecone Emma had spent all afternoon making for him.

“You don’t seem up for dinner,” Susan said, trying to get a read on him. “Should I do grilled cheese?”

“Sure. Fine.”

While Susan dug around to find the cheese for their sandwiches, he reached over her head and helped himself to a beer.

“Want to hear some great news? There was some old dude hanging out on our stoop just now, perched on the front step, smoking a cigar. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ as in, ‘Can I help you?’ but he didn’t say anything. He just shifted over and gave me this big, extra-polite grin. Like he was doing me some big favor, you know, letting me into my own house.”

Alex stalked over to the front window, pulling on his beer, and glared outside.

“If he’s still out there in ten minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

Susan was slicing cheese on the cutting board. “That’s just Louis,” she said.

“Louis? Who the hell is Louis?”

Alex’s voice was too loud. Susan stopped slicing. Emma, at the
kitchen table, looked up from her coloring book and back down again quickly.

“Remember, when Andrea told us she had a guy who did stuff around the place for her, like unclog the toilets and stuff? That’s him.”

Alex rolled his eyes, let out a derisive snort. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Susan gave him a look
—language
—but he ignored her. “What is he, a thousand years old?”

Susan shrugged, heard herself parroting Andrea. “He doesn’t look like much, but he gets the job done. Seriously.” Alex sipped his beer and grunted. “So what’s going on? How’s work?”

“You don’t want to know.”

But he told her anyway. From all appearances, their hard work the previous week on the Cartier shoot had been for naught. Richard Hastie, the potential rep, was using the watch-face snafu as an excuse to pass them over on the Cartier contract in favor of a large Diamond District outfit called Stone Work.

“It’s just classic. They’ve got more experience, he says, so Cartier feels more comfortable with them, but of course we can’t
get
more experience without a big-time client. So we’re stuck with the penny-ante stuff, and I’m spending half my time writing invoices and payment reminders, instead of taking pictures.” He snorted. “At least when I’m taking a particularly stylish picture of a ring, I can
tell
myself I’m a real photographer.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

Susan made the right sympathetic noises, but beneath the surface her anxiety blossomed to bright and busy life. She could hear every word that Alex was thinking but not saying:
This is all your fault, Susan. All your fault
. He was struggling, handcuffed to a sinking business, stripped of his artistic identity, and she got to stay home and make art?

Or sit uselessly on the Promenade and people watch, not making art at all?

“Come on, Susan, don’t use the santoku knife to cut tomatoes.”

“What?”

“We have a cheap tomato knife. Use that. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.”

Emma went to bed early that night, and Alex and Susan watched
Hell’s Kitchen
in silence. If Alex remembered her odd phone call, questioning him about her painting in the bonus room, he didn’t mention it. Given his mood, Susan saw little point in reminding him.

The next day, Susan made no effort to paint. Once Alex had left for work and Marni had arrived and taken Emma to a 9:30 story time, she walked, with her umbrella open against a damp and drizzly autumn morning, to a Court Street coffee shop called Cafe Pedlar. She ordered a cappuccino and a pretzel roll, settled at a table in a back corner, and contemplated the recent unsettling events.

By now, she had abandoned the idea that Emma or anyone else had snuck into the bonus room and messed around with her work. She had painted the marks
—bites, the bites, the bites
—but could not for the life of her imagine why. Did this strange act of automatic painting represent the emergence of some cache of artistic energy lurking in her subconscious? Was she, in fact, an artist of exceptional brilliance, whose talent lay buried beneath calcified layers of ego and superego?

“No,” she said aloud, and snorted derisively. “Probably not.” A bearded dude in a Bob Dylan T-shirt, sitting with an iPad at the next table, glanced up and scowled. Susan smiled apologetically.

So, what, then? Had a ghost painted the row of red bites? A poltergeist?

She shook her head, sipped her coffee. Susan had never had much use for the supernatural, or even the religious. At her mother’s
funeral, she’d knelt by the open casket, said the required words, thinking the whole time how stupid it all was. This was not her
mother
laid out before her, this was a broken machine, a dead thing, ready to be lowered back into the earth from whence it came.

Susan sighed. Probably she was just a lunatic. She remembered an article from the
Times
magazine section, from a few years ago, about people who do bizarre and unaccountable things in their sleep: punch their spouses, eat raw steak, urinate on the floor. She’d sleepwalked down the stairs in the middle of the night, Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday, added the dots to the painting, and slipped back into bed.

That had to be it.

The other thing that kept playing in her head was a vision of Louis, standing in the newly cleaned bonus room with his hands knotted together anxiously: “This house has always had sort of an
atmosphere
to it. Something. And well, there’s a whole lot of sadness in the place, since Howard died.”

 … a whole lot of sadness in the place …

Oh, would you stop it
, Susan told herself. The Bob Dylan guy scowled at her again. Susan smiled very politely, gave him the finger, and got up to leave.

*

On the way home, Susan stopped at Dashing Diva on Smith Street for a manicure, pedicure, and waxing.

“You bite your nails, ah?” said the manicurist, a small Korean woman named Lee with a tall pile of shellacked black hair and a frozen smile.

“What? Oh, years ago.”

Susan had developed the habit in the months after her mother died and cured herself only years later, with a combination of hypnosis and the gross pepper-spray-type stuff parents smear on the nails of their thumb-sucking children. But now Lee’s plastic smile flickered with confusion, and when Susan looked down she saw that her nails were raw and ragged, with red spots at the corners where she had chewed away the skin.

*

That night the family ate in silence. After Emma was in bed, Alex did the dishes, complaining several times about the “bucket of crap” under the sink. Susan had dutifully been tossing vegetable matter under there, periodically running the plastic containers down to the foot of the steps for Andrea to compost. When he was done with the dishes, Alex turned on his laptop and sat on the sofa, his glasses pushed up into his hair, his palm pressed to his forehead. Susan puttered around, sending out small feelers—“Do you mind if I put on some music?” “I thought we’d try that place Jack the Horse this weekend, if we can get Marni on Saturday night”—and earning only caveman monosyllables in return. Once she glanced at the screen and was surprised to see not a photograph of a diamond or a watch, blown up to full-screen view so Alex could scour it for flaws. Instead, there was a long column of figures, which he was scrolling through, jotting notes on a yellow pad beside him and muttering.