Bedbugs

return her call — she knew he was busy, trying to repair the damage done by the lighting assistant and salvage the crucial Cartier shoot. But he could at least check in, to acknowledge the change in schedule. The morning slipped by, they went home for lunch, and still Alex didn’t call.

He must be really busy, Susan told herself. He must be slammed.

“Mama? You OK, Mama?”

“Yes, love. Eat your sandwich.”

While Emma napped, Susan ate her own lunch, a bagel with cream cheese from a place on Montague Street, and flipped aimlessly through the paper. There was an article in the New York section about a co-op board on the Upper West Side dealing with a bedbug infestation: a couple was protesting an edict they’d received to either undergo a costly extermination or move. Susan skimmed the article before flipping to the crossword. When she went to the junk drawer for a pen, she found the photograph of Jessie Spender and her boyfriend Jack.

Such a shame, she thought, turning the picture over in her hands in the light of the kitchen window. They look so happy.

After nap, at the playground, they ran into Shawn, the sweet-faced kid with the cornrows whom Emma had played tag with on the Promenade, the morning they first came to look at the apartment. While the children played an elaborate game of Cinderella, in which they took turns in the roles of prince, princess, fairy godmother, and coach-bearing horse, Susan chatted with the boy’s mother, Vanessa.

“Oh, hey, have you got Shawn in a preschool?”

“Three days a week. If you need any information on what’s around, just ask. I did so much research it’s ridiculous. I’m way anal about that stuff.”

Susan grinned — Vanessa sounded like a woman after her own heart. “I will totally take you up on that,” she said. The woman agreed to arrange a play-date-slash-information-session sometime soon, and they swapped numbers.

Soon after Vanessa and Shawn’s departure, Susan and Emma’s pleasant afternoon was marred by an ugly incident. A tall, coolest-dad-at-the-playground kind of character, in a tailored sport coat and black jeans, eyes locked on his BlackBerry as he pushed his daughter on the swing, gave the girl a too-hard shove and sent her flying. The kid, a frail, dark-haired girl of five or six, landed headfirst on a jutting edge of rock and came up wailing, gushing blood. The mother ran over from a bench while the father furtively jammed his BlackBerry in his pocket.

“Can I get you something?” Susan called out, lifting Emma from her swing and rushing over. “Does she need a bandage? Should we call an ambulance?”

The mother didn’t respond, focused on the girl, cradling her head and daubing at the cut with a wet paper towel. Mr. BlackBerry, however, turned to Susan with open irritation. “An ambulance?” he said. “No, it’s nothing. She’ll be fine.”

It didn’t look like nothing to Susan, but it was also none of her business.

“Is she OK?” asked Emma, craning around in her stroller seat, as Susan wheeled her out the gates of the playground.

“Yes, doll,” said Susan. “Of course.”

Susan cast her own glance backward at the frightened girl, who was rising unsteadily, reddish streaks caked to her forehead. She thought of the awful dream she’d had the other night: The stroller slamming into the ground and bursting like a bomb, sending fountains of blood spraying into the sky. She thought of the rusty smudge on the back of the photograph; she thought of poor Catastrophe the cat, starving and mad in the bonus room, white spit and pink blood foaming the corners of his mouth.

“Alex? Hey.”

They had just returned home, and Susan answered her iPhone on the first ring. It was 4:45 p.m.

“Hey, babe. How are you?”

“I called this morning. Did you get my message?”

“What? Yeah. Oh — I mean, I think so. This morning?”

Alex’s voice carried an undertone, a subtle tightness, indicating to Susan that he was looking at his computer while they talked. Vic was shouting orders to someone in the background.

“You sound busy.”

“Susan, I’m sorry about this, but I can’t come home tonight.”

“Oh.” Susan felt a queer twisting in her gut. She cradled the phone under her ear while she sat Emma down to tug off her shoes.

“It’s this stupid watch. It took us all morning to find a new face and get it affixed properly. Now we still have to shoot the thing, along with the sport watch, the Rolex, the one that was actually scheduled for today. It’s gonna be hours.”

“How many hours?” Susan struggled to control her voice.

“I really have no idea, babe.”

“Oh.” Susan paused. How understanding was she supposed to be here? “So, you know, Marni didn’t come in today.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I told you on the message.”

“Hold on.” He yelled to someone in the room with him, probably Vic: “Two seconds, OK? One second?” Then he was on the phone again. “That sucks. I’m sorry about this. We really have to nail this gig. You know that, right?”

Exactly how bad was Alex’s business these days, Susan wondered. She felt a dark pocket of despair open in her stomach: they’d just blown all this money on the move, increased their rent … what if Alex’s business was about to crumble? Then what? You can always go back to Legal Aid, pick up law- temp work, document review … something.…

“Listen, Sue, I gotta go.”

“Sure, sure.”

She hung up, lowered the phone, and saw her daughter staring at her, her eyes quivering saucers of grief.

“Honey?”

Emma burst into tears. “I wanted to talk to daddy!”

Three and a half hours later, with Emma sleeping soundly, Susan fixed herself an easy dinner of pasta and a glass of shiraz. Then she washed the dishes, cleared the table, and dug the picture of Jessica and Jack out of the junk drawer. She walked straight into the bonus room, set up her easel, and tacked the photograph in the lower- right-hand corner of a fresh canvas. The cat-pee stink was gone, thank God, but Susan left the window open anyway, allowing the mild nighttime chill of early fall to breathe into the room. There were two electrical outlets, and in one Susan plugged the baby monitor so she could hear if Emma cried; in the other she plugged her laptop, so she could turn on iTunes and listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, always her favorite music to paint to.

Susan arranged her pleasingly old-fashioned wooden palette, her turpentine, her cleaning rags, her wineglass, and the bottle of Shiraz.

“All right,” Susan said to the photograph of Jessica Spender. “Shall we?”

Slowly at first, she painted. Her eyes darted back and forth between the photograph and her canvas as she scumbled in the thin oval of Jessica Spender’s face, the high angles of her cheekbones, two dark recesses for the eyes, the confident angle of the hairline. Soon Susan was working faster, shedding her initial hesitance, losing herself in the work, drawing in details with the tip of a brush. She sang along with the music, moving her brush confidently, slashing and darting, feeling a kind of vigorous animal power flowing through her as she attacked the canvas.

Occasionally, Susan danced backward to survey her work, grunted approvingly, took a gulp of her wine, and dove back in. I’m good at this, she thought, jabbing her brush at the portrait and then yelping aloud. “I’m fucking great!”

Burning hot, sweating buckets, Susan stripped down to her bra and underwear, kept painting, faster and faster, her eyes locked on Jessica’s eyes, hypnotized by the woman she was bringing to life on canvas. She disappeared into the work, edging in the dark shapes, thickening her layers, massaging the colors, feeling the power