She aired out the room afterwards to eradicate the smoke and perfume. No matter how vigorously she soaped herself afterwards, Mrs. March could still smell Sylvia on her throughout the day—a stinging, provocatively sweet scent that seemed to hide an underlying rot, like when her mother sprayed Chanel No. 5 in the bathroom to disguise the reek of a leaking pipe.
Mrs. March would wash her neck and wrists in her bathroom—suds falling between her breasts and down her back, the delicate skin on the inside of her wrists peeling from the repeated rubbing—refilling daily the gilded soap dispenser (which she’d been assured by a pushy antiques dealer once belonged to Babe Paley). Then she’d sniff herself repeatedly, stopping on her way down the hall to wash herself again in the guest bathroom.
It was on one such occasion, after washing her increasingly cracked hands in the guest bathroom with a round soap George had brought back from the London Ritz—that she noticed the painting. The painting, which once depicted several naked women bathing in a stream and peering shyly in a half-turn, now showed the women with their backs completely turned.
The towel dropped from Mrs. March’s hands. She stepped closer to the painting. They were the same women—she knew their hairstyles and coloring by heart—and yet their smiling, rosy faces and their plump, pastel breasts had disappeared. On display now were their pale backs and dented buttocks. She stared at it, confounded. Had they bought the two paintings as a set and she had somehow forgotten all about this one? But even if that were true (which was unlikely), where was the one that had been hanging in this bathroom for ten years? She studied the painting for several minutes, touching it softly with one fingertip, willing it to change back.
She stepped out into the hallway, debating whether to tell George about the painting, contemplating the possibility that he would laugh at her. As she approached her bedroom, she heard voices. Whispers. She stopped dead in the middle of the hall and cocked her head to listen. The voices were coming from Jonathan’s room. “This game is boring,” she heard Alec say. “Let’s play something else?”
Mrs. March tiptoed to the door, pressed her ear to it. On the other side Alec said, “I wanna be the cop.”
“Okay. I’ll be the criminal then,” Jonathan answered.
“A robber?”
“Naw, something better. Like a murderer.”
“A murderer, gee.”
“Would you turn in a murderer to the police?” asked Jonathan. “Even if you knew ’em?”
Mrs. March covered her mouth with her hand, her wedding band cold against her lips.
“How do you mean?” asked Alec.
“Like, say it was your brother?”
“But I don’t have any brothers.”
“Well, say it was your mother then.”
“I couldn’t rat out my mother,” said Alec firmly, with a touch of pride that prompted a surge of envy inside Mrs. March.
“But if it was the right thing to do?” said Jonathan.
“I don’t know. Can we just play now?”
The voices quieted, replaced by light thumping sounds. Armed with a new determination, Mrs. March sought George out—he was reading in the living room, the television on in the background—and asked him, straight out: “Who changed the painting in the bathroom?”
He frowned but kept his eyes on his book. She rubbed her wrists, then turned off the television for something to do.
“Mmm?” said George, more at his book than at her.
“The painting in the guest bathroom. Who changed it?”
George appeared to continue his reading as he said, “Honey, I’m sure the painting is the same as it’s been all these years.”
When she didn’t answer, he peered at her over his glasses in that George-like way that irked her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Of course I am,” she said. “I thought I remembered it differently, is all.”
“Well, it’s been up there for so long, you probably just never really noticed the details.”
“Yes,” she said, looking at him. “That certainly seems to be the trouble.”
Gritting her teeth, she retired to her bedroom and closed the door, her hands trembling with rage so that her fingernails tapped on the panels. He was denying it, just like he had done with the dead pigeon in the bathtub. Like he had done with everything.
She slipped on the wig, fingering the brunette tresses, admiring herself in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t consider her worthy of murdering, of possessing in such a fervent, urgent way. He thought she was stupid, plain, boring, only deserving of humiliation in the pages of a book. A joke.
She slid the black headband over the wig, the velvet like soft down under her fingertips. Her pupils dilated in the mirror. “It’s me you want, George March,” she whispered.
SHE WAS waiting for George in the dark when he entered the bedroom that night. She sat, whoever she was, in shadows in the armchair in the corner. “George,” she said. Her voice was different, like her larynx had been restrung.
George turned toward her, squinting. The moonlight through the window only illuminated her hands, crossed in her lap, in faint streaks. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
She slunk toward him and embraced him as she imagined a young girl who was having a yearning, long-distance affair would: feeling every wrinkle in his shirt between her fingers, taking in the scent of him (whisky, old wooden drawers). George touched the tips of the wig tentatively. “You changed your hair,” he said, as if admiring the effort. The room seemed to darken further around them in response.
That night, Mrs. March seduced her husband. Familiarly at first, then strangely—laughing, biting herself. George seemed curious, politely responsive, then ultimately appreciative, his pine-needle beard grazing her neck, his heart beating against her chest. She could feel her shoulder blades protruding more than usual, threatening to slice through her skin.
There was a quick, sharp pain between her legs as he pressed his way into her. She pictured a closed ear piercing, the skin grown over it like the stump of an amputated limb.
Pounding the mattress with her fists, she felt a trail of maggots—Sylvia’s maggots—tickling her from the inside before dripping out of her in wet, writhing knots.
She rocked back and forth, humming softly, Sylvia’s chocolate locks brushing her clavicles, until Johanna was no more.
Gabriella’s stolen cigarette case was gone. Mrs. March searched for it, feverishly, among her drawers: scarves flying across the room like streamers, her sweat leaking into her silk chemises. Gripping the closet doors, fearing the worst, she crossed the hallway and went looking for it in Jonathan’s closet.
She was setting aside cartoon underwear between pinched fingers when she came across the drawings. Disturbing, hand-drawn images of birds pecking at the naked, bleeding bodies of women, the waxy crayon lines spread thin over dark scribbles of pubic hair.
Tucked among the drawings she found not one but several newspaper clippings concerning Sylvia’s disappearance and murder. They were stained with grease and flecked with coffee grounds, indicating that they had been salvaged from the garbage can in the kitchen. The missing article from George’s study was among them. As Mrs. March dug deeper into the closet, she retrieved, from under a navy sweater, one of George’s notebooks. She rejoiced at this reversal of fortune, but as she flipped through it she realized that it was the notebook she had taken with her to Maine. It was her notebook.
As Jonathan entered the room to find his mother clutching all these secrets in her ugly, trembling hands, a wave of anger swelled within Mrs. March, as sudden and visceral as a bout of nausea. The truth was, she didn’t want to face the implications of Jonathan reading these horrible things—rape and strangled and slut?—written in his mother’s handwriting. The fear that Jonathan may have also found her brown wig—may have even tried it on—so unmoored her that she gagged, hiding her face in the coats hanging in Jonathan’s closet.
When she had composed herself enough to face
her son, he was standing so close to her she jumped, and fell deeper into the closet. “Where did you find this?” she asked, waving in his face the news clipping from George’s study. “Where?”
Jonathan shrugged.
“Have you been into Daddy’s study? Answer me!”
“I don’t know. Sometimes.”
“What else did you find?” she asked, eyes wide and beginning to water. “Did you find anything else?”
When he didn’t answer, she shook him. “Why did you draw these?” she asked, crumpling the drawings. “Did Daddy tell you to?”
Jonathan, upset, also crying now, shook his head. “No!”
“He did, didn’t he? Don’t lie to me!”
“No, it was, it was—” Jonathan’s eyes failed to meet her own as his little mind searched for an answer. “Alec.”
“Don’t just say it was Alec, if it wasn’t. If it was Daddy, you have to tell me.”
“It wasn’t!” He hugged her, his arms around her midriff, as he sniffled. “Please don’t be mad at Daddy.”
Mrs. March didn’t return her son’s embrace, but rather continued her inquisition, bile rising in her throat. “Then tell me, Jonathan, why did Alec want you to draw these?”
When Jonathan didn’t answer, she offered, “Does Alec want you to get in trouble?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“He … he’s jealous because Daddy’s famous.”
Mrs. March kneeled down in front of her son and he hugged her, resting his head on her shoulder. She let him. “Jonathan, is Alec really jealous about that?” she asked, stroking his hair.
“Yes,” Jonathan answered, his breath hot in the furl of her neck. “He told me you’re really mad about Daddy’s book and everyone knows.”
Mrs. March buckled, cradling Jonathan’s head with one hand, holding his body against hers with the other. There was a silence, then she heard, feverish and moist inside her ear: “Johanna,” in a drawn-out breath.
In one quick movement Mrs. March pushed Jonathan away from her, and he stumbled backward with huge, shocked eyes.
Resolute, Mrs. March stood up, grabbed Jonathan by the wrist, and pulled him out of the room. She dragged him through the apartment, out the front door across the carpeted hallway, and into the grand elevator.
A few floors up, she knocked on the Millers’ door, and Sheila had barely opened the door when Mrs. March said, “I’m afraid the children are not to be friends anymore.”
Sheila stared at her with such a pantomimic display of surprise—all knotted eyebrows and concerned blinking—that Mrs. March felt the urge to slap her.
“I don’t want Alec to see Jonathan anymore,” Mrs. March said, and—not getting a reaction—grew more hysterical. “Alec is not good for him! He is corrupting my child!”
Now Sheila piped up. “Excuse me?” she said, her low voice restrained, her eyes diverting to Jonathan, who was held, firmly, in his mother’s grip. The look of concern on her face for Jonathan further enraged Mrs. March, who yelled, “You heard me!” Her words echoed down the hallway.
“Well,” said Sheila, her shoulders dropping, relieved of an unknown weight, “I didn’t want to get into this, especially not like this, but it just so happens that I’ve been wary of the boys’ relationship, in particular Jonathan’s influence on Alec.”
“Jonathan’s—”
“Yes,” snapped Sheila, her eyes piercing Mrs. March’s. “Jonathan has … ideas. Strange ideas which, frankly, frighten me a little. And what with Jonathan’s suspension and—well.” She shook her head, still looking at Mrs. March, her voice almost a whisper: “I heard what Jonathan did to that little girl.”
Mrs. March leaned forward abruptly and was pleased to see Sheila flinch. “You think you know, but you don’t know anything,” she seethed, spittle flying, her twisted lips twitching. Hearing the creak of a door behind her, she flung her head around, where half a dozen curious neighbors were peering out of their apartments. Stumbling on Sheila’s welcome mat as she dragged Jonathan to the elevator, she cried, “None of you know!”
MRS. MARCH had not seen any cockroaches for weeks, but that night she opened her eyes to something worse—bedbugs. Scores of them all over her body, lodged between her breasts and between her toes, crawling over her knuckles and into her belly button. Round, brick red, and prickle-legged, fat with her blood, squeezing out of crevices in the walls and from the seams in the mattress for their nightly feed.
With a howl Mrs. March slapped the light switch on the wall by her bed. The bedbugs were gone, replaced by them, kneeling on the floor around the bed—Sheila George the gossipy neighbor from the supermarket Gabriella Edgar the investment banker from the party Jonathan the day doorman Paula and even old Marjorie Melrose. All of them. Staring at her, mouths agape, drooling.
Mrs. March woke up, choking, and bolted upright in bed. She turned her head to see, for once, George beside her. She counted down from fifty, letting her heart settle, then slipped her hand under her pillow, feeling for the handle of the butcher knife. Once her fingers found the wooden grip—cracked from one too many trips to the dishwasher—she relaxed, easing onto her back.
The next morning, over breakfast, George asked her whether she’d had a nightmare. “I was in and out of sleep and I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming it,” he said.
“No,” she said carefully, “no nightmares. My tooth was hurting, that’s all.” Which wasn’t a lie, for the ache had indeed worsened lately, her gums now ablaze with a deep, sharp pain that seemed to seize her from out of the blue, reminding her, with its searing, building spasms, of the contractions she’d had in the hours before birthing Jonathan.
“You have to get that taken care of,” said George with an expression of concern that almost, for a second, softened her.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m going to ask Zelda to get you an appointment with her dentist. He’s the best. He has a waiting list, but I’m sure Zelda can get you in by tomorrow afternoon.”
“It’s really no bother.”
“You have to go, honey.” He smiled at her. “It’ll only get worse.” And with this chilling threat, he was off to his study to dial Zelda.
AT DINNER the following day, Mrs. March regarded Jonathan grimly. She was repulsed by the lilac shadows under his eyes, by his thick, effeminate lashes. He’d become chubby: his navy school sweater stretched around his belly, the trousers tight around his thighs and riding up his legs when he sat. The skin on his plump calves was bruised, with a smattering of black down.
Mrs. March resolved to send him away for the weekend. She would be protecting Jonathan, she told herself, from George. She’d be protecting her investigation. She packed his bag—stuffing it with socks and underwear, as if hoping he might not come back—and saw him off to school on Friday morning. She had arranged for George’s mother to pick Jonathan up that afternoon.
“Oh, I’d be just thrilled to have Jonathan to myself one whole weekend!” Barbara March exclaimed over the phone. “You two have big plans?”
“Nothing special,” said the younger Mrs. March, neglecting to tell the elder about the party she’d be hosting on Saturday to celebrate George’s birthday. She didn’t think it would be suitable for plain, portly Barb to attend. Barb with her cheap, frilly shirts and billowing slacks.
She pinched Jonathan’s shoulder as she ushered him out of the apartment that morning, his weekend bag thumping against his leg. Thump, thump, in the elevator. Thump in the lobby, drowning out the doorman’s greetings; thump, thump, thump, in the street, all the way to the cab. They rode to school in silence, the occasional sniff or cough from Jonathan making her skin tingle.
She did not get out of the cab when they arrived, but instead looked on from the back seat as he hobbled away, her lips pinched and her eyebrows so raised she felt her temples tighten. Once Jonathan disappeared into the mass of rambling children in the school courtyard, she gagged, wiping the fingers she had touched Jonathan wi
th on her coat.
WHEN SHE returned to the apartment, she found Martha standing in the hallway with her little olive purse hanging from her wrist.
“I have to give you my notice, Mrs. March,” said Martha in an uncharacteristic monotone. “I’m so sorry.”
“What? You’re leaving us?” said Mrs. March, thinking of the party that was to come, of the state of the apartment. “When?”
“I’m afraid today is my last day.”
“But that’s not possible. You have to give us two weeks’ notice.”
“Two weeks’ notice is courtesy but not legally required. I asked my lawyer,” said Martha. She seemed to be taking great pains to look Mrs. March in the eye.
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. March. “Have we done anything wrong? Anything to offend you?” she said (the last bit almost seeking to offend).
“No, no, Mrs. March, I—” Martha lowered her eyes to her creased, pink hands squeezed together in front of her, and said very quietly, “I think you should get some help.”
At these words Mrs. March went cold. Martha wasn’t embarrassed, but rather appeared almost afraid of her. All these years Mrs. March had feared Martha, feared her disdain, her judgment. Had it actually been the other way around?
“Well, yes, I’ll have to, obviously. I can’t be expected to run this household without any help. The apartment is much too large.” Mrs. March said this matter-of-factly, her arms crossed as she stared at Martha, who opened her mouth to answer but seemed to think better of it.
“Very well,” said Mrs. March. “I must ask you to leave now.”
“Thank you for understanding, Mrs. March. Please give Mr. March and Jonathan my best. I’ll leave the key on the table.”
“Don’t forget the mailbox key,” said Mrs. March. If Martha was upset by the suggestion, however slight, that she was the kind of person to steal someone’s mail, she did not let on. “Thank you,” she said, and pulled the door closed behind her as she stepped out into the hallway.
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