Bedbugs Page 2

  “Stay in this room, please,” said Alex, and Emma nodded without looking up, already deeply engaged in her coloring.

  “My goodness, she’s a happy duck, isn’t she?” said Andrea as she led Susan and Alex up the narrow uncarpeted staircase to the second floor. “Howard and I never had any of our own, but I’ve always loved children. Even the miserable snot-nose types, but especially happy little ducks like yours.”

  The second floor was really just two large rooms, a master bedroom and a second bedroom, separated by the staircase landing and a decent linen closet. The upstairs bathroom, where the air shaft ended in a small arced skylight, was large, with room for both a shower stall and a full jetted tub. At the sight of it, Alex whispered a mock-lascivious “hey now” into Susan’s neck, and she nudged him playfully. The master bedroom, like the kitchen downstairs, faced Cranberry Street and was similarly bathed in warm and generous light.

  “All these windows are double paned, by the by,” said Andrea, rapping on the sturdy glass. “Noise reducing. Work like the devil. I got ’em downstairs in my apartment, too.”

  On the way out, Susan asked to see the bonus room one more time. While Alex spoke to Andrea in his low, all-business voice, she walked in a slow, enchanted circle around the tiny room and then stopped to rest her hands on the windowsill and gaze outside. The small back lot was separated from the mirror-image lot, belonging to a house on Orange Street, by a weathered wooden fence. The lot was overgrown with wild grass and dotted with bent and spindly trees; Susan wondered which of these gnarled beauties she would paint first.

  From all the way down the hall she heard Andrea’s voice saying, “So I’m sorry about that …” and then something she couldn’t hear, to which Alex replied, “… I know how it is …” Then Andrea laughed a dry rustling titter and said, “Well, the less said about them, the better.” Emma could be heard giggling and hooting, having coronated herself princess of the living room, with a host of invisible subjects.

  Turning from the window, Susan was suddenly struck by a sour unsavory odor, a nasty staleness in the closed air of the room. She crinkled her nose, and in the next breath it was gone.

  She shut the door of the bonus room behind her, gathered up her daughter, and found Andrea and Alex in the kitchen, framed by the slanting sunlight. Andrea was nodding vigorously, eyes narrowed with interest, leaning into the conversation.

  “A photographer?” she said. “Is that a fact?

  “It is,” Alex said.

  “Two artists! My humble abode will be quite the atelier. ”

  Susan glanced uneasily at her husband. Alex was not an art photographer—not anymore. Like Susan, he had begun his postcollege life a decade ago with high artistic aspirations. Unlike Susan, who had folded up her easel after eighteen months of desultory effort and gone to law school as her parents had always intended, Alex had bopped along for a while, enjoying just enough success to encourage him but never enough to make a living. What he had found instead was an unusual niche in the world of commercial photography, at which he had been unexpectedly successful—so successful, in fact, that he hadn’t taken what he would consider a “real” photograph in years.

  “I’m not really an artist,” Alex told Andrea. His tone was light, unoffended, and Susan exhaled. “I own a small company called GemFlex. We take pictures of diamonds and other precious stones, for jewelry catalogs and advertisements.”

  “Really? How interesting!”

  “Ah. That’s where you’re wrong,” said Alex, giving Andrea an easy lopsided grin. “But it pays the bills.”

  Back outside on the stoop, they all shook hands. Andrea knelt with some effort to give Emma a hug, which the girl surprisingly accepted.

  “Thank you so much for showing the apartment to us,” said Susan. “We’ll be in touch soon, OK?”

  “Take your time, take your time,” said Andrea, and coughed. “But I’ve got a good feeling about you people. I do.”

  They had Emma all buckled in when Alex turned back and called, “Oh, hey, Andrea? One more thing.”

  Susan squeezed her eyes shut: here we go. He was fishing for a problem, for a reason to exercise his magical with-you-not-working-right-now veto, to keep them entombed in their one-bedroom on Twelfth Street for all eternity. The place is amazing, Alex, she thought. This is where we’re going to live. Just accept it.

  “You seem like you’d be a great landlord,” he was saying. “But if there are, I don’t know, problems, with the heat or the toilet or whatever—”

  Andrea interrupted with her high, throaty, barking laugh.

  “Oh, good heavens! No. These ancient hands will not be plunging your toilet.” She held up thin, knotty fingers. “There’s a nice gentleman, an old friend, who is very handy and takes care of all that sort of thing for me. He can handle anything. I promise.”

  “Oh,” said Alex, seeming mollified. “Well, great, then.”

  That’s my girl, thought Susan, and beamed up at Andrea, who waved.

  “All right, folks. See you soon.”

  It was three or four blocks down Cranberry Street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where Emma hopped out of the stroller for some much-needed running around. Susan and Alex leaned on the railing and stood side by side, gazing out across the broad expanse of the East River at the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, and the skyline hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. Susan glanced furtively at her husband over the top of her Ray-Bans, trying to assess his state of mind. It was turning into a hot day, and she wore not only her sunglasses but a big floppy hat to protect herself from the sun. She had sensitive blue eyes and the kind of pale Scandinavian skin that burned easily; Alex, rugged and dark, had no such problems. He never bothered to wear sunscreen, which made Susan envious and, occasionally, mildly irritated.

  They turned their backs to the railing and saw Emma streak by, shrieking merrily, in fervid pursuit of an adorable little boy in blue Crocs and a windbreaker, his hair in neat cornrows.

  “All right, dear, moment of truth,” Susan said at last. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I think a lot of things.” He let out a long breath and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Did you hear? Her last tenants ran out on her, so she’s asking for three months’ security deposit.”

  “Three months? Jesus.” Susan did some quick math in her head. “So that’s—”

  “It’s ridiculous, is what it is.”

  “Can we afford it?”

  “We can, because the rent is crazy low. I mean, really insanely low. In fact—” Alex gave Susan his most serious pretend-serious face. “It’s probably haunted, right? Gotta be haunted.”

  Susan cracked up and rested her head on his shoulder. She had a good feeling about where this conversation was going. “Totally,” she said. “Built on the only Indian burial ground in Brooklyn Heights.”

  “Shame,” he said. “Because otherwise it’s fabulous.”

  “It is, right? And a great neighborhood. And an easy commute for you.”

  “Yup.”

  “And, it’s got that … what did she call it?” Susan pretended to try and remember. “The bonus room. It’ll make a great studio, I think.”

  “Right. Now, did you notice? No washer/dryer.”

  “Eh. I’ll live.”

  Susan looked around for Emma and found her right away, on a nearby bench with the little boy, chatting merrily with a woman Susan guessed was the boy’s mother. Susan pointed to herself and then to Emma, mouthing “she’s mine,” and the other woman smiled back and waved cheerily.

  God, Susan thought. I love it here.

  “So, OK,” Susan said, turning back to Alex. “Why don’t we sleep on it tonight, and …” She trailed off and broke into a surprised smile. Alex had his phone out.

  “Screw it,” he said, grinning. “Let’s call her right now.”

  Susan’s heart leaped in her chest.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We both know we’re going to t
ake it. So let’s just take it.”

  As Alex dialed Andrea Scharfstein, Susan felt a sharp sting on her calf and bent to smack at the mosquito. She nailed it, and her palm came up bearing a thick bloody smear.

  Andrea sent the lease three hours later to Susan via e-mail, exactly as she had promised. After Emma was asleep and after Alex left for a long-scheduled and eagerly anticipated game of Texas Hold ’Em with some college cronies, Susan sat down to review it.

  “I’ll take a look when I get home,” Alex promised.

  “Sure you will,” said Susan, and gave him a kiss as he headed out the door.

  He would, naturally, be drunk later, or at least buzzed, and the truth was she didn’t really need his help. She was, after all, the lawyer. Well, Susan thought with a smile, as the document emerged from their sleek miniature laser printer, former lawyer.

  The lease was obviously cut and pasted from a sample document floating around on the Internet. Across the top margin it said: SAMPLE OF A NEW YORK STATE RENTAL AGREEMENT, MODIFY AS NEEDED. But Andrea had not, so far as Susan could tell, modified it in the slightest. Still, it took her more than an hour to read through everything, not counting ten minutes of comforting Emma, who woke crying from an upsetting dream: in it, she said, while Susan kissed the tears from her cheeks, “Big Grandpa was chasing me”—Alex’s grandfather had died seven months ago—“and his face was all melty, like it was big chunks coming off of him.” Susan had no idea what could have inspired such an unsettling vision of decomposing, sliding flesh. She got Emma a glass of water and sang “Little Eliza Jane,” stroking her soft brown hair until she fell asleep.

  Alex got home after midnight, mildly but pleasantly drunk, rambling giddily about the monster pot he’d won by making trip sevens on the river.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But nice work,” said Susan. “You ready to sign a lease?”

  He grinned. “Totally.” Alex fell into the seat next to her and grabbed the pen. His sleeves were rolled up unevenly, and he smelled like cigars. “Oh! Wait! Shit. There was this guy at Anton’s, a lawyer, named Kodaly—Kodiak? Something. Starts with a K.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He said the person has to, like, promise the place doesn’t have bedbugs.”

  “Well, no. Not exactly.” Susan turned the pages of the document and found the clause the mysterious Kodiak was referring to. “Here. ‘The landlord or lessor warrants that the premises so leased or rented and all areas used in connection therewith in common with other tenants or residents are fit for human habitation.’ Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. It’s called a warrant of habitability, and …” Susan stopped. “Um, excuse me?”

  “What?” Alex asked with sing-song innocence. He had leaned over in his chair toward hers and was busily working his hands into her shirt, fumbling for her breasts. Susan leaned back into his arms.

  “I thought you wanted to hear about the bedbugs.”

  “Not so much, as it turns out.”

  *

  As always, Alex fell asleep almost instantly after sex, sprawled out naked on top of the sheets; Susan lay awake, reading and listening to him breathe softly. After knowing him eight years, and being married for five, she still could not say whether or not she found her husband handsome. Attractive, yes: Alex was tall and solidly constructed, with dark hair and coloring, and he radiated a kind of easy magnetism—especially when he was smiling, which was most of the time. But there was also a kind of roughness about him, a coarseness in his features when you caught them in the wrong light. And the largeness of his body and features, the same largeness that made Susan feel safe and protected when he laughed and threw his arms around her, was a little scary when he was being sullen and aggressive.

  Susan pulled on her robe, poked her head into the curtained nook to check on Emma—sleeping soundly now, looking startlingly like her father in her open-mouthed dead-to-the-world repose—and padded back to the kitchen table and her MacBook. She e-mailed Andrea and said the lease would be on the way back tomorrow with the appropriate checks; she e-mailed their management company to let them know this would be their last month on their month-to-month lease; she went to the website of Moishe’s, a moving company she had used in the past, filled out their detailed move-request form, and pressed “submit.”

  It was now 2:47 a.m. on August 16, 2010. They were traveling to visit Alex’s parents on Labor Day weekend, so on the move-request form Susan had indicated they’d like to move to Brooklyn on September 12, a Sunday.

  3.

  The week after Labor Day, the week preceding their move, the news was dominated by a grisly murder that had occurred in Downtown Brooklyn, just one neighborhood over from the Heights. As was relentlessly reported on 1010 WINS and WCS-880, the twenty-four-hour news stations Susan listened to compulsively—especially when she was at home working on a large project, like packing—a young mother had killed her three-month-old twins. It was an unsettling crime, irresistible to the news stations because of the horrific and strange way the children had been killed; and, as Alex pointed out, because the alleged murderess was young, privileged, and white. The woman, whose name was Anna Mara Phelps, had taken her two daughters in their big black Phil and Ted’s double stroller to the roof of their sixteen-story luxury building and then rolled it off the edge, with the infants still inside.

  Horror-struck bystanders had watched the giant carriage flipping end over end as it plummeted toward Livingston Street, where it shattered, killing the babies on impact. Phelps was charged with double homicide and considered likely to plead guilty by reason of insanity. On the day of the move, while Alex supervised the crew from Moishe’s, Susan took Emma to buy picture hangers at a hardware store on Court and Livingston. She stopped to stare at the spot where the stroller had landed, now marked by a massive shrine of flowers and toys and dolls.

  “Well,” Alex said sardonically when she described the mournful scene, “welcome to the neighborhood.”

  The movers were done by quarter to five, and Alex dipped into his low, all-business voice to thank each one for his hard work and slip him a twenty. Then Emma, Susan, and Alex wandered around their new home, navigating the monolithic wardrobe boxes, upside-down furniture, and lumpy duffel bags filled with clothing, pillowcases, and knick-knacks.

  “Well, folks, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Susan.

  “First we get the TV set up, right?” Alex replied, half joking.

  “Where’s Mr. Boogle?” said Emma.

  “We didn’t put Mr. Boogle in a box, honey. He’s around.”

  Just before six, Andrea Scharfstein knocked on the door holding a bottle of cheap champagne and an autumnal bouquet in a disposable plastic vase.

  “You made it!” she growled pleasantly.

  “That is so sweet of you,” said Susan, and she meant it. The last time she’d been welcomed, when she and Alex moved in together on Union Square, it was with a three-page bulleted list of rules and regulations that had been slid under the door by someone from the management company, even though they were home at the time. Andrea’s hair was tied back with a green cotton headband, and she wore a plain blue sheath dress. Susan reflected in passing how pretty she must have been, years ago—and still was, in her old-lady way, with wide deep-set eyes and high cheekbones.

  “Hi, Andrea!” piped Emma.

  “Hello, young lady.”

  “Did you bring your pet dinosaur?”

  “So clever, this one is! You should be on television, dear heart.”

  Alex invited Andrea to join them for dinner, but she declined, to Susan’s relief.

  “Oh, please. Get settled first. Another time.” On her way out, Andrea gestured to a thin stack of take-out menus she had left on top of a box, and Susan noticed that her hand trembled just the slightest bit. “Try the vegetarian Chinese place, on Montague. I forget what it’s called, but it’s good.”

  The vegetarian Chinese place on Montague Street was called the Greens, as it turned out,
and it was good. They ordered vegetarian moo goo gai pan, miso mushroom soup, and something called General Tso’s Soy Protein, which Alex proclaimed “vastly better than it sounds.” After dinner they dug up towels and shower stuff, plus enough books and toys for Emma to have a decent playtime before she bustled happily off to bed.

  “I don’t miss old house at all,” Emma intoned solemnly as Susan tucked her carefully into her white IKEA bed, which the movers had reassembled before leaving.

  “Really, sweets? It’s OK if you do.”

  “Of course it’s OK,” said Emma, her eyes already drifting shut. “But I don’t.”

  The movers had also reassembled the big queen-size bed in the master bedroom, a process that Susan had anxiously overseen. The bed was very possibly her favorite possession, and she had agonized over its purchase for several months for reasons both aesthetic and financial. It was a sleek low-slung modernist beauty with a sturdy slatted frame and a black-oak headboard, sold by Design Within Reach for $2,550 plus tax—a significant chunk of change, even back when she was working.

  True to form, Alex had protested, mildly, that their old double bed was just fine. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, I’ve had it since college, for one thing. Plus we’re two people. We need a queen.”

  “But aren’t doubles for two people? Two? Double?”

  Susan had prevailed, arguing in part that a decent bed would help her sleep. She was a chronic insomniac, unlike Alex, who bragged that he could fall asleep in a muddy ditch or stay sleeping through artillery fire—a gift that had been maddening to Susan during Emma’s infancy, when he slumbered peacefully through many a late-night screaming session.

  After Emma was down they puttered around for a couple hours, drinking Andrea’s champagne from plastic cups and unpacking a few boxes marked UNPACK ME FIRST! Susan found the box of perishables and arranged its contents in the pantry while Alex focused on his treasured kitchen gadgets: the coffee grinder, the rice cooker, the nonstick frying pans, the knife block and full set of Henckels Twin Select cooking knives. Finally he yawned, announced that he was exhausted, and headed upstairs.