Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  Wouldn’t that just serve her right: while she was procrastinating, avoiding her supposedly beloved art, some ungodly stench had been festering in her beautiful new studio.

  It’s my own fault! Susan thought, banging her fists against her thighs. My own fault!

  Tears trembled in her eyes, and she ordered herself to chill. It’s just not that big a deal. Breathing through her mouth, Susan walked briskly across the bonus room and opened the window. It slid up easily, but then the top of the window banged against the frame, and it slid right back down.

  “Oh, come on,” Susan muttered. She tried again, sliding the window up and watching it sail back down again, as if blocked by a hidden hand determined to keep it shut, to let no air into the stale and stagnant room.

  “Crapola,” Susan muttered.

  First the delightful fragrance of cat urine, now a defective window. Her mind ran to the separating floor boards on the second-floor landing and the spooky Door to Perdition under the front stoop. Anything else we overlooked? she thought bitterly. Railroad tracks running through the kitchen? Faucets spraying fire?

  Susan stomped back to the kitchen for a wooden chair. She dragged it back down the long hallway, through the living room, and into the bonus room, feeling damp pockets of sweat open up in her armpits. She pushed the chair into place and climbed up to examine the window frame, not sure exactly what she was looking for. She saw what Andrea had meant about the windows being double-paned against the noise—there was a second pane of glass set in the window, separated by a thin millimeter of space from the frame. But did that explain the …

  Oh. Here we go.

  There was a thin gash dug into the wood at the top of the window. And buried in the wood, sticking up just enough to keep the window from kissing closed into the frame, was a folded piece of paper.

  No, not a piece of paper. It was a photograph.

  Susan dug the picture free from the wood and turned it over in her hand. It was a wallet-sized snapshot that had been folded over twice into a fat little square, like a middle-school crush note. She sat down on the chair and unfolded the photograph slowly, carefully tugging it loose from itself; the back, it seemed, had been coated with some sort of adhesive. When she had it open she forgot about getting the window open, forgot even about the foul reek of the room. She sat in the high-backed kitchen chair and gazed at the happy couple in the picture.

  They were cuddled together in a red-curtained photo booth, the old-fashioned kind that was set up sometimes in movie theater lobbies or as a fun activity at a wedding reception. The man in the picture was short haired and goateed, sporting a fedora and a pair of those dark, horn-rimmed Elvis Costello–style glasses so favored by hipster dudes. He was planting a fat smooch on the woman’s cheek. She was pretty and pert nosed, wearing a teasing, sexy grin. Her hair was dyed a bold scarlet, with bangs slashed at a fashionable angle across her eyes.

  Cute, thought Susan. She turned the picture over, looking for a date, or names, anything jotted on the back. She found instead that the adhesive coating the back of the picture was, in fact, dried blood, tiny bits of which flaked off in her hand. And, at the dead center, was the dark, crusted swirl of a bloody thumbprint.

  *

  “Hey, Andrea? Did the people who lived here before us have a cat?”

  Andrea’s Scharfstein’s eyes went wide, and she stopped what she was doing, which was spooning sugar out of a powder-blue ceramic bowl into Susan’s mug.

  “A cat?” she said at last, with an intensity that made Susan feel a little unsettled. Andrea’s hand trembled slightly as she returned the miniature spoon into the sugar bowl. “Why do you ask?”

  Susan had only wanted to ask her question and get back upstairs, but Andrea had been so nakedly delighted at the unexpected visit that she decided a quick cup of tea wouldn’t kill her. Andrea sang lightly to herself as she moved slowly from living room to kitchen and back, preparing a tea service, fruit plate, and cookie tray.

  “Can I help you?” Susan had asked, but Andrea had waved her off, relishing the role of hostess. “No, you sit, dear, you sit. I’m quite all right. Fine and dandy like sugar candy.”

  Andrea’s apartment was laid out on the same blueprint as the first floor of Alex and Susan’s, with the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other, though it could not have been decorated more differently. Where Susan strove for a clean, modern, and uncluttered aesthetic, Andrea’s rooms were stuffed with oversized wooden furniture, tottering bookshelves, potted plants, and—in one corner of the living room—a glass case displaying a collection of hideous “ethnic” dolls. On the opposite wall, Andrea had hung vertical mirrors on either side of the air shaft; an effort, Susan suspected, to downplay the presence of the unusual, semi-industrial architectural feature. There was nothing, Susan mused, to indicate the influence of a second aesthetic, nothing to suggest that a man had ever lived here; she wondered when it was that the late great Howard had passed away.

  Andrea’s eyes looked tired and rheumy as she raised her teacup to her lips, and Susan felt like she could see past the makeup and the bright clothes to Andrea’s real age, the fragility of a woman in her early or mid-seventies—and, chillingly, felt she could see past that, too, to the very old woman that Andrea would soon be: a few lank hairs clinging to an ancient scalp, the skin pulled taut around the skull.

  “I’m sorry to say this,” Susan said. “But that small room behind the living room? The one you called the bonus room? It smells really bad. Like cat pee.”

  “Cat pee.” Andrea exhaled heavily and placed a hand to her forehead. “It’s worse than that, Susan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am so sorry about this. I thought we had got that smell out, I really did.”

  “Andrea?” It was like one of those old grosser-than-gross riddles from elementary school. What’s grosser than a room soaked in cat urine? Susan sipped from her steaming cup of tea and stared at Andrea, waiting for the answer.

  “They were a young couple. The previous tenants, I mean. Jack and Jessica, though she went by Jessie. Sweet names, right? I liked to tease them about it, tell them it oughta be up in lights: Jack and Jessie! Jessie and Jack! In their twenties, I think, and not married. ‘Living in sin,’ we used to call it, not that it was any of my business.”

  Susan thought of the photograph of the sweet kids, posing giddily for the camera. The picture was currently lying on her kitchen table, faceup.

  “Jessica Spender was her name. His surname, I must say I never knew. She signed the lease and wrote the rent checks, too—again, not that it was any of my business. And they had a cat. It was the sweetest little thing, barely more than a kitten. Catastrophe, they called her. Catastrophe the cat.”

  Susan smiled faintly at the name, sipped her tea. Naming a cat Catastrophe, a gesture at once mildly ironic and sweet, the hallmarks of the generation just younger than her own.

  “Anyway, Jess and Jack were not to be, apparently. They seemed very loving to me, very happy, but I guess appearances can be deceiving, because one day Jack abruptly departed. As in, one morning he was just, you know, poof. Gone. And I found poor Jess on the stoop outside, crying and crying. I mean—she was—couldn’t even speak. It was really something.”

  “Yikes.”

  Andrea took a deep, ragged breath, coughed drily, and shook her head. “Well, before you get too sympathetic. Jessie left, too, shortly thereafter, stiffing yours truly for a month’s rent. Only reason I knew she was gone was because the check never showed up. A couple days I don’t mind, of course. Between you and me, I won’t starve. But two weeks, then it’s three weeks, it’s a problem. And you know, as the days go by, I don’t see her, I’m worried. So I knocked one day, then let myself in. And … ”

  Andrea stopped, shaking her head with tight, birdlike jerks. A watery pain had entered her voice, and Susan leaned across the table and stroked the older woman’s rough, papery hand—all the while dying of curiosity.

&nbs
p; “And …” she prompted.

  “And the poor cat was dead in that little room. I guess, in her hurry to get out, Jessica had—had forgotten and closed that door … no food, or no water. And this was July, remember. It would get extremely hot in there with the air off and the window closed. The poor animal … ”

  Andrea squeezed her eyes shut against the memory, and Susan found herself a bit choked up as well. Poor Catastrophe! Poor little kitten! How could anybody … God. People are horrible.

  Andrea honked loudly in a napkin. “Anyway,” she said firmly, as if to clear the air of the unpleasantness. “Louis and I cleaned the area thoroughly, but I guess not thoroughly enough. I will certainly have him come up and take another pass.”

  “That would be great. Whenever he gets a chance.”

  “No, not ‘whenever he gets a chance,’ ” said Andrea, and then craned around, raising her voice. “Louis?”

  “Just one moment,” came the booming reply. Susan, startled, half rose, looking around. The whole time they’d been sitting there, she’d heard not a sound from anywhere else in the apartment, and Andrea had given no indication they weren’t alone. Now Louis, in thick black boots and a denim work shirt, emerged from the front of the apartment.

  “What’s up?”

  “That nasty odor is still hanging around the little room upstairs.”

  “You’re kidding me. Really?”

  Susan nodded. “Sorry.”

  “No, no, don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.” Louis stroked his chin. “OK if I come by tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “What time works?”

  “Early is good, just in terms of—”

  “Early is fine,” he said. “What time are you up and about?”

  “We have a three-and-a-half year old, so, I mean, we’re up at seven. But—”

  “No problem. I’ll be there at 7:30. Just gotta put it in the old bean.” Louis chuckled, tapping at his forehead, and then headed back down the hallway, murmuring to himself. “Seven-thirty … seven-thirty …”

  “He’s working on the sink in the bathroom, which is clogged like you wouldn’t believe,” Andrea explained and then leaned forward and adopted a confidential, just-us-ladies tone. “Hairballs.”

  “Ah,” said Susan. What else could one say to such a thing? Andrea rose with a sigh to clear away the teacups.

  Susan thought about poor Catastrophe, and about Jack and Jessica, who had so thoughtlessly left the animal behind. Who, Susan wondered, had stuffed that picture in the window frame, before their abrupt disappearance? Who had clutched that photograph with a bloody thumb?

  “Enjoy that gorgeous hair of yours while you can, dear,” said Andrea wistfully from the kitchen, and Susan self-consciously brought a hand up to her dirty-blonde curls. “Because when you get old, it will fall out in clumps. In clumps.”

  Susan rose abruptly, thanked Andrea for the tea, and went back upstairs.

  7.

  Susan had forgotten entirely about the faint pinging sound the cable man had brought to her attention on Tuesday morning. But on Thursday night Alex heard it, too. Dinner was over, and the whole family was smooshed on the leather living-room sofa, reading Amelia Bedelia, when he paused midsentence and said, “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Dada? Read, please.”

  “One sec, hon.”

  “Hear what, Al?”

  “Read the book, dada.”

  Then they all heard it, faint but distinct, sounding from somewhere and nowhere. Ping. And then a few seconds later, again: ping. They slid off the couch, all three of them, and started meandering around the house searching for the source of the noise.

  “Could it be the smoke alarm?” Susan ventured. “Carbon monoxide?”

  “No way,” said Alex, glancing up at the light on the smoke detector, which glowed an unbroken green. “Alarms better be a lot louder than that.”

  Ping went the noise again, so soft you almost couldn’t hear it. Emma said, “Ping!” in return and then started bouncing up and down, yelping, “Ping! Ping!”

  “Ping!” shouted Alex, and then the noise sounded again, as if in response: ping. “Weird,” he said. “It’s like sonar.”

  Ping went the house, and Emma went, “Ping!” and they all giggled.

  Their search was fruitless, and the noise stopped, and Alex chased Emma up the stairs for bath. Later, after their daughter was asleep, Susan was about to tell Alex about the cat-pee smell, and the awful story of Jack and Jessica and Catastrophe the cat, and the photograph with the bloody thumbprint on the back. But she checked herself, realizing with a prickly flush of shame that the story would have to begin with an explanation of why today was the first time she had set foot in her “studio” since they moved in.

  She stood in silence, leaning on the kitchen counter, watching Alex gather lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and red onion from the fridge to start on a salad, imagining his response:

  “Well, honey, I thought the whole point of moving was so that you could have your own space to paint?”

  “Well, honey, if you’re not painting and you’re not watching Emma, then what are you doing?”

  “Well, honey, what the hell?”

  Susan shook her head clear, pulled a knife from the block, and helped him cut vegetables. During dinner she related a funny gossip item she’d read on a fine-arts blog, about one of the big Chelsea gallery owners and his ever-changing lineup of buxom “assistants.” But Alex’s responses were polite and peremptory, and as soon as they were done eating he turned to his computer and the barrage of e-mails he needed to send to prepare for tomorrow. Apparently there had been a screwup that day on the Cartier shoot, when a watch face was scratched by a worthless lighting assistant that Vic had hired for cheap. It was a major setback, and Susan could tell that Alex was deeply worried.

  When she went upstairs to sleep, Alex remained in the living room, muttering to himself and tapping away.

  Louis arrived to clean the smell from the bonus room at precisely 7:30 the next morning.

  “Will wonders never cease,” Susan murmured at the sound of his knock at the door before calling out “just a sec,” pulling her robe close to her chest, and opening the door. Alex had left fifteen minutes earlier, grimly clutching his travel coffee mug, game face on for a trying day. After offering Louis coffee or tea, which he cheerfully declined, Susan got Emma going on breakfast and then stood awkwardly in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bonus room, unable to decide if it made her more uncomfortable to perch there—watching an elderly man on hands and knees, in his jeans and an undershirt, cleaning her floor—or to return to the kitchen and leave him alone in this isolated corner of her home.

  “Have you been working for Andrea a long time?” she asked.

  “Well, how’s forty years?” Louis looked over his shoulder with a broad, playful grin. “Would you call that a long time?”

  “Forty years?”

  “I kid you not. Well, now, I guess I’ve only been working for her, officially, since Howard passed away. Helping out with the odd jobs and what-have-you. Do everything I can for her, you know?”

  Susan nodded as Louis settled back on his haunches, sponge dripping idly onto the hardwood. The guy was a talker, that was clear.

  “I’ve been retired some years now, so I’ve got my days free. Thirty-seven years as the assistant principal at Philippa Schuyler, up on Greene Avenue. And I tell you, after all those years keeping tabs on a couple hundred young people, scrubbing the occasional floor, well, I call that a vacation.” Louis’s laugh was low, gentle, and melodious, a slow-played tympani drum roll: huh-huhm, huh-huhm, huh-huhm. “No, but I loved it, I did. Loved those kids.”

  Susan thought with fondness of the assistant principal at her own middle school back in New Jersey. Mr. Crimson. Clemson? Something like that.

  “You want to know the truth, I’ve known Howard and Andrea since 1970, if you can believe that. Autumn of 1970. We met right here in
Brooklyn, protesting over Kent State, waving our signs in Cadman Plaza. One day I’ll bring up some pictures. As Andrea might say, you will plotz.”

  He gave the Yiddish word a thick, comical Andrea-style growl, and Susan smiled. “And when did Howard pass away?”

  The pleasant grin slipped from Louis’s face, and he looked down at the floor. “Four years ago. And may God rest his poor unfortunate soul.”

  A deep silence welled up, and Louis turned back to scouring the floor. As Susan watched him, she felt a twinge of remorse for the way she had sized him up yesterday: though he was clearly no kind of professional handyman, he was forceful and competent as he went about his business in the small room. He focused his efforts on no specific spot, just blasted away at the whole floor with bleach and Pine-Sol, inch by inch, the shock-and-awe cleaning method.

  After a few moments, Emma called out from the kitchen. “Mama?” she said. “All done.”

  “OK, baby.” From the kitchen came the scrape of a chair leg and a gentle thud as Emma lowered herself to the floor. Susan smiled: she’s growing up so fast. Louis’s memories, his nostalgic attitude, had put her in a sentimental frame of mind. My little girl.

  “Hey. Uh, Susan?” She turned and saw that Louis had shifted up onto his knees and was now hauling himself laboriously to his feet. He crossed his arms over his sizable stomach and stood with evident nervousness, not meeting her eye. “Something I need to say to you.”

  “All right.”

  “I wasn’t looking in your little girl’s room. That night. I need you to know that.”

  “Yes,” she replied, taken aback. “You said.”

  There was an adamance in this declaration, a pleading quality, as if Louis was sickened by the idea of anyone thinking even for a moment that he was the kind of person who would peep at a child. Susan believed him.