by Monica Drake
Also by Monica Drake
Clown Girl
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Monica Drake
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drake, Monica.
The stud book: a novel/Monica Drake.
p. cm.
1. Friends—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Parenthood—Fiction. 4. Portland (Or.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.R354S78 2013
813′.6—dc23 2012032560
eISBN: 978-0-307-95553-1
Jacket design by Megan McLaughlin
Jacket photography: Howard Sokol/Getty Images
v3.1
For my family, For in all directions.
Where would I be without you?
And especially for Monica Robertson,
with all love and gratitude.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Adaptive Behavior
The Road to Hell
Dead Girl Solitaire
Visitors
The Future Is Unwritten
Mate Choice Availability
God’s Angel
Dulcet’s Anatomy
Fifty Things You May Not Need to Worry About
The Gift
The Telltale Heart
Mr. Slips
Neither Created nor Destroyed
Bargain Hunting
Studbook: Check
Denning Up
Ben’s Night Out
Sitcom
The New Rules
Sugar
Risk Assessment
Energy
A New Heaven, a New Earth
Baby, Cry It Out
Open the Studbook
Arrangements
Posterior for All Posterity
Sentencing
Low-Hanging Fruit
Energy Fields
Georgie’s Big Break
Needs
Proof
Scent of a Party
Relapse
Breeding Ground
Punch It Out
Breeding Loan
Wise Up
Animal Behavior
Mother Bread
Division and Subtraction
Family
Concealer
Live! Nude! Men!
Animal Nature
Dead Girl Solitaire Reprise
Habitat
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Say you’re a night crawler in warm ground. Your body is a tube within a tube, soft as foreskin. You’re a hermaphroditic sex organ burrowing through dark earth, a reproductive decomposer.
Fully loaded with two sets of testicles, two testes sacs, ovaries, sperm, and eggs—seminal vesicles, seminal receptacles; the parts sound almost spiritual, nearly Catholic, really—and you have what it takes to build an army, a generation.
The heartbreak? You’re not an asexually reproductive creature, like a lonely sea sponge or a budding hydra. You can’t fertilize yourself.
You have needs.
Your job is to find another earthworm, a dew worm, an angler, to swap sperm, fertilize your eggs, and incubate them in a slime tube, a bellyband, a pale pink saddle you’ll wear briefly around your waist until you slip it off over your head like a silky nightgown. Charm your way into a biological destiny.
Blind hermaphrodites find each other in the dark. It happens all the time.
Sarah stepped over one pale banded worm on the damp asphalt walk of the Oregon Zoo. She saw the bellyband—the slime tube—and thought: Babies! So dear, even in a lowly worm. She carried a timer and a clipboard, pulled her coat closed against a fine rain, and leaned on the railing of the mandrill habitat.
Inside the enclosure the kingpin man-ape gave a flying leap. Leaves tumbled in his wake. He moved from his high perch to a low branch, and on the way flashed his penis, where his body was as red as a rash.
If that mandrill were Sarah’s baby, she’d powder his rash. Not with talc—talc is pure cancer. She’d dust sweet cornstarch on the flaming red genital area between that mandrill’s muscular, hairy thighs. Except his wasn’t really a rash and she knew it. Baby fantasy over. She was a professional. Mandrill penises are red; their scrotums are lilac. He’d be a grotesque infant, big and buried in hair.
The sky was blanketed with gray clouds as bright as aluminum, hiding a winter sun. Visitors moved in tight packs in the rain over the tended zoo grounds. Kids lurched ahead of their parents, with room to roam and no streets to cross. A sullen flock of teens clustered at a cement picnic table around a paper basket of French fries. They had a fat pink baby in a fat pink fleece jacket in a stroller nearby. Who was the mother? They were all kids themselves.
Sarah was twice their age and watched their parenting, or lack of parenting, as though the teenagers were her assigned animal behavior study.
If her first baby had survived, the child would be three years old, with sticky ice cream–coated fingers pressing against the glass in front of all the animals.
Her timer beeped. In the mandrill enclosure—and you don’t say “cage” in a modern zoo, but “enclosure”—a newborn named Lucy clung to the rich olive hair of her mother’s chest. The two huddled on a shelf against a back wall. The mother ate nits from Lucy’s coat. Sarah marked “Grooming” on her chart.
Sarah would eat bugs from her own baby’s hair if that was what motherhood required.
That baby mandrill was Sarah’s field study. The patriarch, though, with his strut and flash, was a steady distraction. The more color a mandrill shows in his red, white, and blue behind, the more testosterone is cruising through his system, and this one advertised his virility like a flag.
His ass was an ornament, in evolutionary terms.
On his branch, this head honcho tugged his golden beard. He clambered and waved his ornament like a second face there to say hello. On sunny days visitors snapped photos to post on the Internet. They took videos. What a crowd-pleaser! With an ornament like that, you’d think survival of the fittest was about drawing hits on YouTube.
The timer beeped again. Baby Lucy banged a stick in loose straw on the shelf where she perched. “Play behavior.”
One of the lone females followed the patriarch, walking close behind, like his flash ass was the ice-cream truck and she had change in her pocketbook. This was mandrill flirting.
Toward the back of the cage, another female sat with her legs tucked against her body. She was pregnant, the previous customer to chase that ice cream. Mandrills generally don’t show pregnancy the way humans do, but this wasn’t her first round. Her body had thickened, the muscles grown slack from carrying earlier offspring, and this time her pregnancy was pronounced.
A woman with a stroller pushed past, her baby under a clear plastic rain liner like a little biosphere—didn’t babies suffocate under plastic? It certainly wasn’t teaching good habits. But at the same time the plastic dome made the baby seem precious and revered, like a diamond in a case, or a doll tightened down inside its plastic box.
If Sarah’s second baby had survived, it’d be twenty-three months old by now, spitt
ing out the names of animals from around the world.
Toward the zoo entrance, on the horizon, a white van edged its way over the top of a distant hill, KZTV NEWS written on the side.
The timer beeped. Lucy rested snug against her mother, mouth on a teat. The mother wrapped a protective hand around her child. Sarah marked “Nursing.”
The news van stopped where the paths grew narrow. Its sliding door opened, and a crew tumbled out. First came the reporter, a correspondent out in the field, identifiable by her markings: a helmet of blond hair, a large head, a tweed skirt-suit. Why was there a news van on zoo grounds?
One of the teen girls stood up from the picnic table, stretched, and showed a lump under her coat like a beer gut, another baby on the way, or maybe both.
Another baby?
Sarah bit the end of her pencil. The news crew approached on foot. The reporter, in heels, skittered along the curving path like Dorothy on her way to see the wizard, flanked by her loose-legged cameraman and a bearded guy in a headset. The cameraman balanced a shoulder cam over his puffy winter coat. A woman so young she was practically a girl carried a clipboard and led the way, their own little Toto.
They traveled toward Sarah. Her guess? They were hunting for a feel-good story on baby Lucy. She saw it coming: They’d want her expertise. She’d have to hold back. She didn’t work in PR, wasn’t authorized to answer press questions. Zoo publicity was a tricky business of walking a line between PETA protesters and wealthy donors. Portland is a city of vocalized opinions and insta-activism. Sarah’s job was strictly to compile data. The reporter would ask about the mandrills. She’d have to decline. She felt a conflict of interest creep closer with each step of the news crew on the rain-darkened asphalt trail.
She was proud to work for the zoo, in an amazing community of caring people. The air that greeted her daily inside the zoo walls was a particularly habitable atmosphere. Her role was small, but it was hers.
Breeding was a tightly planned eugenics exercise. Animal curators worked with the algorithms of the International Species Information System to determine who would breed and who, of the genetically redundant, was given birth control.
Every zoo manages a budget. They know how many animals they can support and have data to prove who brings in the income—Pandas! Elephants! Monkeys!—while the lazy sun bear and the Visayan warty pigs serve as chorus girls.
Each mandrill birth was recorded in an international studbook, an official intergenerational record of who has sex, who’s born, who lives fast and dies young. The studbook is like Mormon genealogy listings, all those famous begats in the Bible, or People magazine for caged animals singing the song of celebrity births. It’d be gossip if it weren’t seriously about bolstering the genetic makeup of dwindling animal populations.
Sarah collected one thin current of data that fed into behavioral documentation, noting which captive infant animals thrived and which failed.
The young woman with the news crew traipsed in white Keds that miraculously stayed white even in the rain. She seemed to grow younger as she came closer, and smiled, baring friendly teeth. Sarah hated to turn her down, sensing a kindred spirit—they both had clipboards!—but it was zoo policy.
The girl, the woman, reached out a hand as though to shake, to touch skin in a behavioral display of goodwill, and Sarah put her hand out, too, only then, instead of shaking, the girl tucked her clipboard under her arm and rolled her hand, calling the reporter in like reeling in a fish. The correspondent stepped in close, then closer, bringing along a cloud of hair spray.
This is how elephant cows assert dominance: They sway closer and closer, until one cow gives up ground.
Sarah was that cow. She gave up ground. The reporter stepped a sharp heel on the mother-father hermaphrodite worm where it inched along the asphalt, right on the bellyband. Her foot skidded. Babies! She caught herself as if it’d never happened.
The reporter’s hair blocked Sarah’s view of the mandrills. When the timer beeped, Sarah said, “Excuse me—”
The teenagers at the table watched them like they were on TV already. The human primate in the stroller sucked its pacifier while the man-ape flashed his best feature. Sarah bobbed her head to one side of the reporter’s hairdo then to the other, trying to do her job. It was important work! She was here for the zoo, for science, for the future of humanity! She’d definitely turn down their silly little media request, hoard her specialized information.
If her third baby had lived, it’d be six months old, in her arms. They wouldn’t crowd her this way if she were flanked by her children. She’d be a different person, hold a different place in the world. She’d have what Georgie—the old Georgie, Sarah’s child-free, academic drinking buddy, that denizen of the life of the mind—would have called, as though from a great intellectual distance, the “cultural legitimization conferred through motherhood.”
Was that ever such a bad thing?
But Georgie had changed. She had a baby, the legitimizing child.
The only infant in Sarah’s care was Lucy. She’d protect Lucy’s privacy.
The girl with the clipboard said, “Ma’am? Sorry. We need you out of the frame.”
Across the river Georgie wore the blood-marked abdominal smile of a fresh C-section and navigated the short hallway of her two-bedroom bungalow. She had a round of prescription pain meds and a baby, like a warm bundle of fresh laundry, wrapped in a blanket in her arms.
It was lovely to carry her own perfect girl-child. Out of nowhere—or really, specifically, out of Georgie’s body, out of her uterus, out of the slash cut in the middle of her gut—there was a baby! Right in their house. Once they’d let a stray cat in, and those were weird days. Suddenly she and her husband held cat energy in the house, an animal curling around their feet, asking for food and love. A baby was even more dreamy and surreal. She kept thinking about that cat now, how it had come and gone, leaving cat hair on an armchair, traces of itself. This baby was here to stay. Georgie reached for her drugs.
Oxycodone is a cute narcotic, delivered in small pills like toy medicine. You could feed those pills to a mouse, a rat, a teacup Chihuahua. She shook the pills in their plastic container and they put on a ragtime rattle of a show for her darling newborn daughter. With its fine rattle that bottle was practically a Waldorf learning tool, except instead of the requisite Waldorf wood it was made out of plastic and painkillers.
Georgie clambered across the broad expanse of their California king with the baby clutched tight to her chest and the pills in the other hand, her hand wrapped around the vial, her knuckles against the bed. C-section stitches tugged across her bikini line. “Oof!” She said it out loud, like a cartoon character, a plea for sympathy, even though she was alone.
She was alone except for her daughter, anyway. That was the whole thing about being a new mom—always alone and never alone. Always with the baby. Always with this new nonverbal companion.
Humble would come home soon.
The baby’s fingers lay outside her pink blanket like a little row of roots, white and thin. Until she held her own child, Georgie hadn’t known anything about mother-love. Now it crowded her body, clotted her heart, made her want to cry. Maybe it was the painkillers that made her want to cry. Either way, she was high and happy and sad and the whole thing closed like a hand around her throat.
She couldn’t hold that baby tight enough.
She had a blue triangle tattooed on her bicep—the “rhetorical triangle,” her favorite paradigm. She drew the triangle on the whiteboard each year, the first week of her freshman English classes, as an illustration of how all meaning is made.
The three points of the triangle? Author, audience, and text, as they say. An author puts a text in front of an audience, and meaning is conveyed. Change any one component—new audience, new author, new book—and the meaning changes, too. It could be a slight shift, or massive. In class it sounded clear. Across her other arm, in the rounded font of an old typewriter, a second tat
too asked ANY QUESTIONS?
The soft spot of her baby’s fontanel pulsed with each breath, making tufts of the girl’s dark hair dance up and down.
In the rhetoric of new life, Georgie was author and audience both. Bella was the text, that daughter she’d drawn into existence. The meaning of the world shifted from the life of the mind to the bloody, seeping, heartbeat center.
Parent/Baby/World: All meaning came from that juncture. Any mind-body split was blasted out of the water once her own body was nurturing a new mind.
She had a third tattoo on the small of her back, a tribute to French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It read THE SECOND SEX, after one of Beauvoir’s seminal titles.
Seminal—could you use that word with a woman’s writing?
Weird.
But yes, Georgie had a French feminist tramp stamp.
She’d dropped out of high school. Now she had a PhD, because every dropout has something to prove, and she proved she could handle school all the way through. She’d learned to speak the language of the academy. It spoke right back, too, which is to say the legitimizing pedagogical institutions had granted investment in the (re)-formation and reification of her gendered body.
Ha!
In other words, she was a woman, a mom, with a PhD.
Bella was three days old. Georgie’s underwear was a day newer than that. One of the first adjustments to motherhood was that she’d bought a six-pack of granny panties—the kind that came all the way up—because every pair of her bikini-cut version hit exactly where a row of fish line–style thread was stitched through her skin.
Doctors called it a “bikini-line incision.” Georgie never realized “bikini line” was a precise anatomical designation until she tried to put her own clothes on.
The el cheapo granny panties came in fuchsia, turquoise, and glaring white. Each color made her ass look larger than the pair before it, but they didn’t rub against the stitches. They wrapped over her skin like a comforting hand. She settled into her nest of blankets, books, and magazines, and reached for the remote, turned the TV on, but kept the sound down. How much TV is bad for a newborn? That’s what it means to be alone and never alone—to reconsider every urge.
