Bertie was upstairs in her brownstone townhouse in Brooklyn, which was done up in the Art Deco style, at the time considered the cutting edge of sophistication. She was in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror. Her lipstick was smeared, or perhaps just very badly applied, and she noticed that the tube of lipstick in her hand was completely blunted away to mush. On the mirror, someone had used lipstick of that very same shade to write a word.
Bertie read the word but she could not seem to remember it. The moment it went into her head it faded away again. It was infuriating, and she didn’t understand it, and it was making her head hurt. She snatched up one of the pristine white cotton towels and tried to rub all of the lipstick off the mirror, but only managed to smear the glass. She turned the handle on the chrome faucet her husband had installed for her last spring after she’d found out about his affair with the shoe saleswoman—the man had impeccable taste when it came to fixtures and footwear—but a wet towel was worse than a dry towel. The mirror was now scarlet all over.