Free Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters Page A

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 of each small act of creation. The
Mass
crescendoed, the Credo, and Susan moaned with exultation, lost to the world.
    When she heard the knock at the door, her hands froze. She looked around wildly, heaving breath, scared and guilty like an animal caught feasting on something forbidden. Susan shut off the music, unplugged the baby monitor from the wall, and slipped out of the bonus room, carefully pulling the door shut behind her.
    Alex was at the front door. “I’m so sorry. I forgot my keys,” he said, then paused. “Honey? Are you OK?”
    “Why?” she asked. “What?”
    “What do you mean, what? You’re naked. You’re covered in paint. That is paint, right?”
    Susan looked down. She was streaked and splattered, bright jagged lines of reds and blacks crisscrossing her chest and torso.
    “Also, it’s two in the morning.”
    “What?”
    Two? That couldn’t be right. She hadn’t been in that little room for
five hours
, had she? “I was just doing some painting, is all. I got really into it.” Susan’s own voice sounded distant and unnatural. She felt exhausted; her muscles ached and her head swam. “Really? It’s two o’clock in the morning?”
    “Yeah. I’m really sorry I’m so late,” Alex said. “After the shoot was finally over, I ran into Anton on the way to the subway, and I bought him a beer. He and Blondie are on the outs again, apparently.”
    Susan nodded, blinked. How had it gotten to be two o’clock?
    *
    She was so tired she could barely make it up the stairs. But once she had brushed her teeth and peed and collapsed into bed, Susan couldn’t sleep. Alex, of course, passed out easily and immediately, and she lay watching him for half an hour before slipping out from under the sheets. She considered taking an Ambien but decided it was too close to morning, and she was already pretty drunk on the wine. She went to the bathroom, peed again, and then washed her face and hands, watching as flecks of paint spiraled down the drain. On her way back to bed, she lifted Alex’s jeans from where he’d shed them onto the bedroom floor and was halfway to the laundry hamper when she noticed a curious square bulge in the pocket. Susan hookedtwo