Man and Wife Bug

Benny’s still cooking when he hears the door. It’s Jeff, home from work, claiming he’s solved his daughter’s problem. Jeff throws his coat on the bicycles. Katie has been in bed for an hour, but she’s not asleep. Down the hall, sheets flap, and her body rolls. Air wheezes out of her in high notes of frustration.

“Finally,” says Benny. His arm relaxes as he stirs in the last of the white pepper. “Whatever it is, I hope it’s not contagious.”

The six-year-old has been covered with itchy pimples for weeks. The doctors thought it was eczema at first, or juvenile acne. They are currently treating for both, with an antihistamine, but Katie still scratches, open-fisted and reckless.

“You made gnocchi,” Jeff says. “Slow day?”

“Still slogging through that review,” says Benny, though he barely touched it today. “It makes me hungry.”

They sit at the table and open warm winter beers. It’s freezing outside, and the subway is all the way at the top of the hill, where Joralemon Street begins. Jeff’s eyelashes are frosted together. He blinks and powders his plate with a tiny snowfall.

“I can’t handle the suspense,” Benny says, serving Jeff the potato dumplings with peas and mint. “What does she have?” He gives Jeff an extra scoop and leans back in his chair for the story.

There’s a clatter at the other end of the apartment. Socks pad over wood. Before Katie is halfway to the kitchen she’s talking.

“Daddy and Benny, I’m itchy.”

Katie helps herself to a seat at the table. She wears pajamas with carrots on them. Where she’s scratched too often, her peach flesh glows through the threads.

This is the first time Benny has lived with a child. Not even as a child did he live with another child. But a year ago he defaulted on rent once too often, and Jeff convinced him to move into his high-ceilinged apartment in Brooklyn Heights, between the elevated expressway and the river. They’d been dating for a year. This was before Benny started recovery, so he was furtive and remorseless. He took the chance at free rent and didn’t look back.

“Honey, it’s good you’ve come to the table,” Jeff says. “Because we need to chat.”

“I like chatting,” Katie says. She sets her chin down on her folded hands. Her eyelids droop. A kid so young shouldn’t have cause to look so tired.

“I think I know what’s going on with your itching.”

Katie’s eyes turn vague. She’s already zoning out.

“I’m thinking we have a case of bedbugs,” says Jeff.

“Like don’t let the bedbugs bite?” Katie asks.

“Unfortunately, they have. I’ve called the bug killers, though, and everything’s going to be fine. So I don’t want you to worry about it for one second.”

Adults are not supposed to betray open terror in front of children, so Benny holds his face in a grimace of compromise. Katie sneaks a cherry tomato. She nips one end, and gel spits out the other. She gnaws the empty hide, considering.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s kinda weird.”

“This is actually bad, you realize,” Benny says, later that night, as he pulls back their creamy duvet. The mattress is tall and puffy, over-soft and button-free, and they refer to it as Bed Island. “I have friends who were infested. You’re going to lose all your stuff. We’ll have to microwave the books. The house will be full of toxins. And even then, the bugs won’t go away. They never do.”

“Don’t worry,” Jeff says.

“No, seriously. Do you know how they reproduce?”

“No, and I don’t need to.”

“Traumatic insemination.”

“Wonderful.”

“Listen. The females don’t have orifices. The male stabs the female anywhere he feels like. She’s covered with bleeding holes and fleeing from him. That’s why they spread so fast. There’s probably a herd of woman bugs fleeing to Bed Island as we speak. Victims of sex crimes. Looking to drown their worries with the sweet taste of blood.”

“Benny,” Jeff says. “Enough. We’ll sort it out.”

Jeff pats Benny on the back like a coach and goes to sleep.

Benny doesn’t sleep. He watches Jeff, whose face is so slack that his mouth loops open in the corners. Maybe since the period of sleep is so defined for Jeff, he can embrace it gratefully. Benny knows he can stay in bed as long as he wants in the mornings, that Jeff will feed and water Katie, revise her wardrobe, and walk her to Saint Ann’s en route to the subway. Benny has the article to write but it’s really just a short piece; he could finish in an hour. But then he’d have nothing.

A few hours after they get in bed, Katie appears, a shadow in the open door.

“I’m afraid of bugs,” she says.

“Hop in,” Jeff says.

Benny and Jeff part to either side of Bed Island and Katie rambles in between. She smells funny at night. Benny slides away from her to the edge of the mattress, so his nose hangs off the precipice. But each inch he surrenders, Katie seizes in sleep, until she’s spread out like a sour-mouthed starfish.

Benny can’t close his eyes. He keeps them fixed on the desk across the room, where the illuminated heart of his laptop pulses. Jeff is a dead man sleeper, and Benny is accustomed to getting up at night and trolling the computer for men. He has done this for years, since long before he lived with Jeff. Even back when he was fifteen in Boston and the only option was searching code words on AOL profiles, seeking other boys who listed the Smiths, or baking, as special interests. He’d meet the boys in Back Bay, each taking buses in from separate suburbs. He remembered looking through carved-up windows into other fluorescent-lit buses passing up Mass Ave. through Lexington and Arlington and Cambridge. He’d look for boys his age, wondering if they were his date.

The boys never looked like Benny imagined. The ones who were awkward on IM were gorgeous: graceful princes of their freshman classes. The articulate ones were soggy-lipped puffballs in real life. Any photographs were invariably red herrings: shots of strangers culled from the early infrastructures of the internet or pre-cystic acne shots dug out of shoeboxes and scanned. After the dates, Benny would assess the pictures again, seeking consistencies and finding few.

In college, Benny used the website Bored at Lamont, a primitive hookup site for gay boys at the library. He enjoyed the privacy of bathroom stalls or obscure aisles in the stacks (the Goethe folio section, maybe, or cheesemaking.) He’d crouch with some boy, hand on zipper, until the automatic lights gave up and flickered out and they could begin. Sometimes he snuck in hand jobs at parties or dances. His roommate wondered at his lack of visitors, felt guilty for sexiling Benny once or twice a term. He didn’t know those nights stranded out of the room were the only times Benny dared hook up in a bed. After college, in the Lower East Side, when all the golden boys of Harvard felt like it had never been real at all, Benny visited The Cock nightly, passing under the orange rooster after his official evening plans concluded.

To friends and family, Benny had dated two men: a puffy pink kid senior year and Jeff, strong-jawed and professional. No one but Jeff knew about the liaisons that had been staining the skin under Benny’s eyes for eight years. Once they moved in together, it wasn’t long before Jeff detected the difference in Benny after he returned from soda runs sweating and grouchy.

“I want you to be clear with me,” Jeff said, in the same voice he used to punish Katie. “What the hell is going on?”

Jeff was the one to call it an addiction. Benny never would’ve given it that much credit.

“It’s a disease,” Jeff said. “And we are going to work it out.”

They talked about Benny’s history, his feelings before and after an encounter. There wasn’t much to go on, psychologically speaking. Benny’s parents had accepted him at once, years before he officially came out. They’d recommended movies and books with gay characters to him since childhood, frequently mentioned that Ellen was funny. They were afraid to confront the matter head on, but eager to let him know they loved all of him, including his loose, slender limbs and squeaky voice.

The pink boyfriend was a bore, hadn’t lasted long, but Jeff was different. Benny could think of no reason why he couldn’t stop fucking around. He marveled at the restraint Jeff had shown for thirty years. He’d been a model virgin until Katie’s conception. A childhood friend, briefly back in the city, had seduced him. They’d slept together a couple times, produced the kid. The mother had agreed that Jeff was a more fit parent, with his high-level consulting gig and paid-off apartment. After the birth she signed away her rights and disappeared to Frankfurt to sing with a classical orchestra. When asked about the sex, Jeff said it was unremarkable.

“You didn’t totally explode?” Benny said.

“She was a girl, Benny. I like men.”

“I know, but God.” Benny would take a girl over nothing if he had to go even a week without.

Jeff researched the groups, made the calls. Benny attended Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous in the basement of a church in Gowanus and cut himself off, cold turkey. He stopped seeing friends, forced himself to stay home and play with Katie to avoid temptation. Jeff reduced the nanny’s hours, then let her go.

Benny hasn’t been with anyone but Jeff since he was discovered, and he’s amazed that, despite his sloppiness with protection and years of lies, Jeff wants to continue and help Benny through. It’s almost infuriating at times, how even-keeled he is.

Though Benny is technically sober, having completed the final step of S.L.A.A., he can’t give up cruising the sites at night. He adds pictures of himself to Manhunt and Craigslist, freshens up his profiles. He fields messages, teases, but never makes appointments. In daylight, while he’s writing his articles, he wouldn’t face it. But he can’t keep away at night.

When Katie reaches her flattest point, her nose and crusty lips the only peaks cresting above her pancake body, Benny slips out of bed for a quick check. He settles in front of the laptop and opens Manhunt. He navigates past the animations of blow jobs that rattle at the edges of the screen. He reads the first response.

“What are you doing?” says a clear, wakeful voice.

Benny snaps the laptop shut, whips around. Katie is sitting up, eyes bright. He can’t tell if she’s seen anything.

“Going to the bathroom,” Benny whispers.

When he gets to the bathroom, he finds something on his arm: a bug as big as the dinner peas, crimson. “Fuck.” The words drops out of him, too loud.

He returns to the bedroom. Jeff is leaning on the headboard, Katie on his chest.

“Why did you swear?” Katie says.

Benny presents the bug to Jeff.

“That’s it,” Jeff says. “I’ve been looking at Google Images all day.”

“I always see those guys,” says Katie.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” says Jeff. “That’s what’s biting you.”

“Oh.”

Jeff and Benny flush the bedbug. It spins twice in the water tunnel, disappears.

“Bye-bye,” Katie says.

~

The exterminator comes while Jeff is at work the next day. He brings a dog named Helen, prickly like a ruffled hen, who can smell the bugs. Helen trots through the apartment, her anus exposed below a snobby bobtail. She sits in front of a sofa, tongue out, grinning. The exterminator feeds her bacon. She cases the rest of the house and finds bugs in Katie’s bed frame, both mattresses, and at intervals in the wall.

“These dogs aren’t perfect,” the exterminator says. “They smell the dead ones and stuff. Old trails. But it looks to me like you’ve got a pretty severe case.”

“Why haven’t my partner or I been bitten, then?” Benny asks.

“Only about half of people are allergic.”

Benny calls Jeff at the office, and Jeff selects the most rigorous treatment plan available, one grade higher than recommended.

The next day, more exterminators come. They take the furniture apart and spray inside it, steam treat the mattresses. Benny puts toys and books in plastic bags with mothballs. He washes their clothing in hot water twice. The exterminators say he shouldn’t microwave the books. He microwaves one, for the drama. He sticks all the bed legs in tin cans full of petroleum jelly. The bugs cannot travel through the jelly, though they can get around this precaution by climbing up the ceiling and dropping down from above. Benny imagines a bed bug landing on his open eye as he lies sleepless, ripping his retina and rendering him unable to write. But he follows instructions.

Jeff brings home new sheets, which they pull over the plastic wrap on the mattresses. Everything must stay bagged for a week. Katie plays with silverware and crisp new sponges. Benny makes her a doll out of cornhusks, using a pattern online. He can’t dry it out, though, since it’s winter, and it mildews immediately.

“It’s too scary,” Katie says. “I don’t want her in my room.”

But Katie sleeps fine in their bed, mindless of the sinister doll. She continues to stink up Bed Island and continues to spring into consciousness whenever Benny moves. He logs a few hours of sleep the first couple nights, but by the end of the first week, his nerves are shredded. He stuffs his bony arm under the pillow and feels clammy little fingers already curled there.

One night, it occurs to him that the bedbugs are definitely his fault. The infestation is several months old, dating back to when he still had encounters. A hookup must’ve passed them to him. Man and wife bug, clinging to his flapping trench coat. He can’t imagine Katie bringing them home, so clean and scrubbed with her apple cheeks, or Jeff from his bleached office, molded from glass a mile above street level.

The blogs Benny reads recommend keeping a flashlight under your pillow, and rapidly employing it the hour before dawn. This catches the bedbugs when they’re active, before you can scare them away. As dawn threatens each night Benny yanks out the flashlight and blares cold light over his chest and arms. He never finds anything, but he manages to amuse Katie each time.

One night, while Katie’s in the bathroom, Jeff heaves his body over and puts his face in front of Benny’s open eyes.

“You haven’t slept. You’re restless.”

“I know,” says Benny.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. The bugs, I guess.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Jeff pinches Benny’s chin.

“This will be over in no time.”

Jeff is right. Exterminators come the next day to spray a final time. They do a thorough check and declare the infestation over.

“Rot in hell, motherfuckers,” the exterminator yells, fist pumping, as though he has never succeeded before.

Benny doesn’t believe it. He’s heard too many stories. Online it says only six percent of infestations are cleared through a single treatment. As he unpacks the clothes and launders them a final time, he fingers the fabric for bugs. He can’t even find a dead one. He mops the chemicals off the floor and shakes out the mugs.

That night, Katie returns to her own room. Bed Island feels more open and glorious than the day Benny moved in. The air is fresh and childless, and Benny sinks into his deep imprint by the window.

But he still can’t sleep. The hairs on his limbs feel like bug legs, creeping. He gets up to check every couple of hours, confirming that lint and nail shards are not bugs. He checks that the welts he’s made from erroneous scratching do not have pimples hidden in the middle, especially not the trio of bites (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) that spell the bedbugs’ interrupted meals.

Finally he gives in and checks the sites. He goes on Manhunt, reviews his messages. He responds to a few heys, a dick pic, and a short, formal note praising his own brightly lit genitals. Then he logs out, shuts the laptop, and sleeps at last.

During the day Benny can’t get back to writing. The list of the ten best restaurants in Nolita remains only four passable ones. He tries to piece it together from online reviews because he’s still nervous about Lower Manhattan.

Benny scratches his wrists and ankles at the computer. Patches of skin go yellow and shiny. He examines every crevice in the apartment. The only bugs he finds are a litter of dead babies tumbling from a hole in Katie’s lavender headboard. He wonders if any hit her, their carcasses piling on her fat forehead.

Katie brings home a letter from Saint Ann’s on thick cream stock. A few of the families in the Lower School have reported infestations, and the school recommends restricting play dates to public spaces until the outbreak subsides. Jeff hasn’t told the school. So maybe Katie was the carrier, after all.

“Oopsie,” Katie says, when the implications of the letter are explained.

“No, honey, it’s not your fault,” Jeff says. But before school, he tucks scarves around the dried-up bites on her neck and pulls a giant hunting cap with hanging flaps around her face.

“They’re gone,” Jeff says at bedtime. “But I don’t want it to affect her, you know, socially.”

“I don’t know if they are gone,” Benny says. “I still feel them biting me. What if Katie brought them back from another kid?”

“She didn’t. And you couldn’t feel them even if she did,” Jeff says. “We’re not allergic.”

“But we could still feel their teeth biting even if we don’t get a reaction.”

“We can’t feel them. They’re gone.”

They have sex that is freer and happier than ever, for all the time that they abstained. But after, Benny slips out and checks the sites. He has a new message from the dude who offered praise. Most people on the site are in the mood that second, and if you reply an hour later, they’re taken care of. But Max, who has a generic, sweet face, a little doughy, is still interested. A liaison isn’t working out though, time-wise.

I’d really like to meet, Max writes. Let’s make it happen, okay?

The next day at dinner, Jeff tells Benny that he has a late meeting next Thursday at work. “Do you want to take care of the kid?” Jeff asks, dragging a fork through his arctic salmon.

“Can we get a sitter?” Benny asks. “I might get a drink with Freddy.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Jeff asks, still eating.

“Of course. Why not?”

“Freddy’s from your old life.”

Benny raises a scrap of pink flesh to his lips. “I can handle it.”

Thursday night, Brittany arrives late, even though she lives in the building.

“See ya, Katie-did,” Benny yells down the hall. “Be good to Brittany.”

Max wanted to meet out by the dog park. Benny passes the river and loops back up the hill on State Street. It’s freezing, and no one is out. He can’t decide if he plans to do anything. He used to be intrepid, weatherproof, but he can’t imagine exposing himself to the icy wind tonight. He doubts Max will take up the four hours they’ve hired Brittany for and doesn’t know what he’ll do when it’s over. But there is something about leaving the house, leaving the kid, that relaxes him. He doesn’t know if he’ll fuck Max, but maybe they can be friends. And maybe he actually will meet Freddy for a drink next week.

As he reaches the park, he sees a broad figure. Benny halts. He always meets in public, but the street is desolate now. Would the yuppies in their yellow windows hear if someone strung a wire across his neck? Maybe Benny wouldn’t even call out. Maybe he would take it quietly, like he deserves.

“Benny,” Max says, sheltered in the shadows, so Benny can’t yet see if his face is as cute as the pictures. He has a hood pulled over his hair and eyes.

“Max?”

“Shhh,” the hooded figure says. He spins Benny behind a tree and hugs his back into his chest. He unbuckles Benny’s pants with one hand, forces them down, with his underwear, to mid-thigh. It’s cold enough to burn Benny’s penis off like a wart. A woman with a sunburst puff of a dog crosses the street to the park, but when she sees them, she retreats with an unchanged expression.

“Hey,” Benny manages. “What are you doing?”

“Shut up and take it,” Max says. Max pumps Benny’s dick with a dry, frigid fist. His huffing is awkward and erratic. But slowly it fades into a rhythm, like a fan at night whose mechanical ratcheting is aggravating but blocks you from some worse noise: a screaming kid, boys on the prowl, wild cats.

Benny gets hard. He closes his eyes. Eventually he comes on the street. The ejection freezes into a white jewel on the pavement.

Without looking back, Benny says, “Jeff.”

Jeff looks like an incapable kid in the sweatshirt, the hood slung to the side. Benny buckles his pants, shakes the sweat out of his bangs. He’s too tired even to start the conversation.

Benny and Jeff leave the park together. Townhouse by townhouse, they cross the cobblestones back home, to the bugs and the kid, for at least one time more.