Bedbugs (15 page)

When he came downstairs in the morning, a few minutes after seven, and Susan tugged down the strap of her Old Navy camisole to show him the tiny pink blemish marring her shoulder, he cocked his head, squinted, and said, “Hmm.”

And then, after a moment, he asked if she was sure the mark hadn’t been there before.

“No, Alex. It wasn’t there before.”

“Are you sure? It’s not, like, a pimple, or … ”

“A pimple?”

“Well, whatever. I think I’ve seen it before.”

Susan looked at him. “Alex. I saw the bug. I woke up and saw it biting me. I felt it.”

He sighed, said, “Bleh,” and pulled open the fridge to rummage around for coffee beans, talking over his shoulder. “It’s just … I mean, the lady said we were clear, right? The exterminator.”

“Dana Kaufmann.”

“Right, Kaufmann. I knew a guy with the same name in my dorm, freshman year. Did I ever mention that?
Dan
Kaufmann. Isn’t that funny?”

“Alex?”

“Right. Well, she said we didn’t have bedbugs. She was pretty unequivocal about it, you said.”

There was no way Susan had said that. “Unequivocal” was a word from Alex’s lexicon, one of his all-business, look-how-clever-I-am vocabulary words. She rubbed her rutted, scabby wrist with the flat of her palm. “She was wrong, Alex. I’m getting bitten. I think we have to move.”

“Whoa, whoa.” He pushed shut the fridge door and turned to look at her. “Move? Slow down.”

Susan shut her eyes. She saw Jenna staring across the table at Les Halles, insistent:
“I have heard so many horror stories …”

“Alex, I know this sucks.”

“No pun intended.” Susan didn’t laugh, and Alex sighed. “Couldn’t it still be something else? What was it the lady—”

“Kaufmann.”
It was irritating to Susan that Alex couldn’t get the name straight. He wasn’t paying attention to the problem.

“Right, right. Didn’t she say it was spider beetles or something?”

“She said it
could
have been. But it’s not. It’s bedbugs.” She slapped her hand down on the table, loud, and he took a step back, startled, and ended up leaning against the sink. “Alex, I
saw
it.”

“I know you did, baby.” Alex raised his hands in gentle surrender. He wore baggy pajama bottoms and a ratty, ancient softball jersey. “But you don’t think it’s possible—just possible, is all I’m saying—that you imagined it? Dreamed it or something? They’ve really been on your mind lately, right?”

“Well, yeah. Of course they have.”

He nodded. Case closed.

“I didn’t dream it. It was—it was vivid. It was real.”

Alex settled down at the kitchen table across from her. “I know, but moving? Think about it, Susan. I feel like we haven’t even unpacked.
And it took me a little while, but, you know, I feel like I’m settling in here, I’ve got the commute down. I like it. And I know you’re working hard to figure out a preschool in the area, here, for Emma for the spring.”

Crap
. In fact, Susan had forgotten about it completely.

“Not to mention that if we have to sacrifice that monster security deposit, we’re … well, actually, no. I mean, we can’t. We can’t afford to do that.”

“But if we have bedbugs, she’ll have to give us the money back.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Alex. “
If we
can prove it. And anyway, even putting aside the issue of the security deposit, it would cost a few thousand bucks to move again, and we definitely don’t have a few thousand extra bucks. Just making rent right now is—I mean, it’s fine, we’ll be fine, but, you know. Moving is an expensive proposition, especially when you start doing it every couple months.”

He went on—calm, reasonable, reassuring—while Susan stared at the ceiling. When he had said his piece, she leaned forward and held his hands in her own.

“I totally know all of that, and I totally see what you’re saying.” She tried to keep her own voice even and calm, to match his reasonable, rational tone. “Don’t forget, this is not the first time. I’ve been bit before. That’s why we called Kaufmann in the first place.” She tugged up the sleeves of her pajamas, held up her wrists. “Remember?”

He winced, jerked backward in his chair. “Christ, Sue.”

Susan looked down at her wrists. They were red and raw, with angry tracks running in ragged parallel lines from the base of her hand to her elbow. The original cluster of bites was long gone, lost in a muddle of torn, mottled flesh. The whole lower part of her arm looked like a battlefield.

“What the hell have you been doing?”

“Scratching.” Susan looked at the floor.

“Scratching?” Gingerly, Alex drew her sleeve back down over her wrist. “Baby, you gotta stop.”

“Well, it
itches.
”

“Look, Susan—”

“Look, Alex—”

They had both started at the same time, and both stopped at the same time, and he smiled, and Susan found herself smiling, too. She allowed him to take her hands in his. “I know this is upsetting,” he began. “But can we give it a few days and just see what happens? As soon as you have a bite, or I have a bite, or God forbid Emma does, we’ll tell Andrea.”

God forbid Emma does. God forbid—

“Forget telling Andrea. If Emma has a bite, we’re leaving right away.”

“Well, Andrea may want to solve the problem for us.”

“Are you kidding, Alex? She hasn’t even fixed the floor, or the outlet cover, or … Andrea’s useless. You were right about her in the first place. She’s a useless landlord.”

“OK, so then we’ll move. We will. If we have to, we’ll figure it out. I promise.”

The Mr. Coffee beeped, and Alex stood abruptly to pour himself a cup. Susan was imagining Andrea, poor old Andrea, nodding, stoic but brokenhearted when presented with the news that they were leaving. She remembered the feel of the shaky old hand resting on her elbow, the two of them enjoying a mother-daughter kind of moment on the stoop that afternoon, partners in some unnameable melancholy.

“So that’s the plan,” Alex said, pouring his coffee and smiling gently. “We give it a few days. If we so much as hear a bug farting in the night, we are out of here.”

Susan sighed. She knew what he was doing; kicking the can down the road, giving her time to forget this flight of fancy when a few days had gone by. It had happened before. When she had wanted to get a dog; when she had made noises about leaving New York, moving upstate, somewhere with mountains. He would say, hmm, let’s think about it, hmm, we’ll talk about it next week, when I’m not so crazy at work, when Emma’s not sick, whatever … and eventually other things cropped up to distract her attention. She looked at her shoulder. The pink mark on her arm was tiny, barely visible. Maybe it
was
a pimple. And they
had
brought in a professional, paid good money for a thorough investigation not two weeks ago, and been given the all clear.

But the fresh knot of unease that had formed in her chest that morning at three o’clock, when she woke to see the monster on her shoulder—
it was no dream, no dream at all
—had not abated. It throbbed, sending out one message, over and over: they had to move, had to get out of there, and quick.

Or else or else or else
.

Alex turned to look at the clock, and Susan gnawed furtively at her nails, wrenching off a hunk of thumbnail and spitting it on the floor. A pulse of pain shot up her thumb, and blood welled where the nail had been and drooled down over the knuckle. Alex turned back and planted a sweet kiss on her cheek. “So, we’ll handle it. We’re on top of it.”

“OK,” she said and smiled weakly, rubbing her eyes. “OK.”

Clutching his coffee cup, Alex padded upstairs to get ready for his day. As soon as he disappeared, Susan’s shoulder began to itch.

When Marni arrived for work, an hour and a half later, Alex had just left, and Susan heard him on the exterior stairs, greeting the nanny in passing. She had remained in the kitchen, slowly sipping her coffee and staring with dead eyes out the front windows.

“Hey,” Marni called brightly from the front door, and Susan leaned back in the chair to respond.

“Morning. Emma’s upstairs.”

Marni poked her head into the kitchen, and the girl’s big brown eyes and tousled auburn hair were framed by the morning sunlight like a shampoo commercial. “You all right, Susan?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

Susan smiled tightly. Marni was so effortlessly beautiful, and she could only imagine what she herself must look like: unshowered and exhausted, her hair a knotted mess, her eyes red rimmed, her face unmade-up and greasy.

“Marni!” Emma squealed from upstairs. “I’m making a pee-pee, Marni!”

“Awesome!” Marni yelled. “Here I come!” She bounded out of the kitchen toward the stairs, flashing an
ain’t-she-cute?
grin over her shoulder as she went.

Susan rose and trudged up behind her, wondering about the moment a few minutes earlier, when Marni had brushed past Alex outside the apartment on the stairway landing. It was a small space. How close had they passed? Had her small perky breasts pressed against his chest? Had Alex gotten a deep noseful of her flirty orange-blossom perfume? How often did they squeeze past each other that way, while Susan was upstairs picking out Emma’s clothes or downstairs pouring milk on cereal? Marni was immortal, impervious to tiredness or hurt. She was like Alex in that way, Susan reflected sourly: both of them wore the mantle of the world so lightly. Not the type to get sunburned, or stung by bees, or suffer the untimely death of their mothers.

Susan climbed the steps until she stood on the landing between the bedrooms, watching Marni get Emma dressed. Her eyes lingered on her daughter’s naked body: her clear vanilla skin, the bulge of her tummy, the fragile lines of her legs, the small pink creases of her nipples.

“Hey, Em? Do you feel itchy?”

Emma looked up and giggled, like it was a joke. “No, I do not.”

Marni laughed and Emma waggled her head playfully, but Susan didn’t say, “Good puppy,” like she was supposed to. She nodded silently, slowly, and went back down the stairs to the kitchen.

*

Susan turned on her MacBook and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table until the screen lit up, telling herself all the while that she was being an idiot.
Go take a shower
, she told herself.
Put on something pretty, get the hell outside
. It was really a great area—the Promenade, the cute coffee shops on Smith Street, that row of antique-furniture stores
along Atlantic Avenue. Outside the kitchen windows of 56 Cranberry Street the day had blossomed bright and blue, the kind of crystal blue you only get on crisp autumn days, when smoky clouds drift through pockets of sunlight.

Go paint something, for God’s sake. Capture the autumn light. Eat a bagel
.

Instead, Susan stayed rooted to her kitchen chair, drinking coffee and surfing the Internet, her face bathed in the pale light of the screen. She Googled “bedbugs” and “bedbug infestation” and “signs of bedbug infestation,” scanned the resulting paragraphs, and jumped from link to link. She downloaded an article from the
Journal of Applied Entomology
, scrolled through chat-room threads, and watched YouTube clips of bedbugs swarming in laboratory jars.

“Yick,” said Susan.

When the coffeepot was empty she brewed more.

Susan learned that bedbugs can be killed by extremes of heat and cold; she learned that they hide in the hair of their victims, in discarded clothes, under beds, and in couch cushions. Back on BedbugDemolition.com, Susan discovered numerous schools of thought relating to bedbug control. Some exterminators adhered to the aggressive methods of Dana Kaufmann: contact kill, residual kill, growth control. Some advocated the exclusive use of pyrethroids; others suggested more traditional insecticides or a compound made of diatomaceous earth, which could be purchased at pet-supply stores and which, when sprinkled around the home, kills the bugs by drying out their waxy membranes.

“DDT!!!!!!” suggested one contributor, who signed himself EndsJustifyMeans. It was noted in a flurry of responses that DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, one contributor sneeringly adding, “SILENT SPRING MUCH, DUMBASS?” To which the
stubborn EndsJustifyMeans simply wrote
“
DDT!!!!!!
”
again, this time all in bold and underlined.

The guy who signed himself [email protected] had contributed to this thread, too, writing “makesureit’sreallybedbugs.” Susan wrinkled her brow and grunted, “Huh,” when she had teased out this jammed-together phrasing. What does he mean, “make sure it’s really bedbugs”? She clicked on the signature link and dashed off a quick e-mail to [email protected]: “So how you do you know it’s really bedbugs?”

As she plowed through website after website, Susan occasionally scratched at her wrists and shoulder. At some point, the shoulder-bite itch intensified, and she dug a ballpoint pen out of the junk drawer and used its capped end to zero in on the itch. At 11:52, her phone rang, startling her with its crazy rattling vibration on the counter. The screen showed that it was Karen Grossbard, a college friend, who was in town for the weekend with her two kids; they had made loose plans, a couple weeks earlier, to hang out today. Susan was absorbed in a detailed explanation of the dual proboscis morphology of bedbugs and other hemipterans: one channel to suck the victim’s blood, the other to inject saliva and anticoagulant, which maximized the flow of blood while keeping the host from feeling the sting.

Keeping her eyes locked on the article, Susan fumbled for the phone and silenced the call.

*

Another sign of a bedbug infestation, according to a contributor to BedbugDemolition.com named MrMcEschars, was their deposited feces. “Gross but true!” MrMcEschars wrote and attached a
picture of one such deposit in his bathroom: a small pile of black and brown dust. Five minutes later, Susan was yawning elaborately, stretching back in her chair and twisting her torso, when she spotted a pile of the feces on the kitchen counter, just below the broken outlet cover. She blinked, gasped, and froze, staring at it in shock.