The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  And as soon as she hit “send” again, she saw her mistake: “I’d love time to think about tit.”

  Tit.

  Crap! This was the problem with typing with a baby in her arms, a nursing baby, a baby high on tit.

  An e-mail came back: “Well write it. You get a copy the day of.”

  That was confusing. Well write it? She was missing a crucial piece.

  Georgie e-mailed, “Sounds good. I’ll write it, once I know who I’m introducing. Okay?” She tried to put a smile in her words without sinking to emoticons.

  For a while, her in-box stayed quiet. There was an ad from Sears, and another from Doctor Sears. Much later another conference e-mail came back. “We’ll write it,” this one said, more clearly. “All you have to do is show up and read it onstage.” Signed with a smiley face.

  Less exciting, but fine, and still a way to keep her hand in.

  She wondered who she’d be assigned: a writer, an editor, a theorist, a filmmaker? Somebody smart. Johnny Depp?

  Ha. She pictured introducing him in his Willy Wonka glasses, or his Jack Sparrow makeup. More likely he’d be in a good suit. Somebody at the top would snag that assignment. Al Gore was a keynote speaker, too. Michael Pollan would be there, and all the superstars would be far out of reach. Georgie would likely be assigned an obscure academic on a back stage.

  One of her exes, a professor named Brian Watson, hit up all the lit conferences. He usually sat on a few panels, ran a seminar or two, and chaired a hiring committee. She’d seen him at more than one hotel lobby cocktail party. Brian Watson had been a tenured full-time professor since he finished grad school two decades back.

  When Georgie went back to teaching in the spring her goal was to become full-time faculty. Her department chair, Dan, was on every committee. His vote would be key. Maybe she’d introduce him at the conference. That’d be okay. Not thrilling, but still an opportunity. Georgie hitched up her shirt and let her baby nurse again, turning over her body while she herself lived in her mind, the idea-driven world of plans.

  That evening when Humble came home, Georgie and Bella rested in the indentation of their collapsing couch. Georgie said, “Guess what?”

  Humble jumped. He said, “Jesus, it’s dark in here. Thought you’d gone to bed.”

  The sun set early in the winter. Georgie, in her cave with her thoughts, hadn’t bothered to turn a light on. She and Bella were fine moving around in the soft glow of the computer.

  Humble poured a drink from a bottle of bourbon they kept on a low shelf in the dining room. He dropped down onto the couch beside her and put his bourbon on a side table. His body was warm. He was a big man, with solid shoulders. He pulled the blanket down, away from the baby’s face. “How’s our girl?”

  He smelled like a bar.

  They used to go out for drinks together, sit in a bar midafternoon sometimes. Back then it felt like vacation. When she got pregnant, at first she’d still go along—have a soda and bitters and chew on a maraschino cherry to calm her stomach.

  He put his finger in the girl’s palm. Bella closed her hand. He said, “You fill out the life insurance papers?” His words knocked into one another.

  “Oh, jeez,” she said. He’d been asking Georgie to fill those out. If you died today.… It was a threat, there on the front of the glossy brochure. The threat that came with bringing a child into the world: abandonment. She said, “Did you drive home like that?”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Drunk,” she said.

  The phone rang. Neither of them moved.

  When the phone rang again, Humble made an obvious effort to not slur. “You wan’to answer?”

  No, she didn’t want to answer. Sarah had already left a dozen messages about coming over. The house was a wreck and steeped in Georgie’s own unshowered, sliced-open, stitched-closed, nursing body odors. She turned to the window behind the couch and pulled back the curtain to look out.

  “You could throw a little party.”

  A party for the baby. Who was he kidding? She’d have to get dressed, for starters. Sarah would leave in tears. Dulcet would show up high. Nyla would fixate on “spiritual midwifery” and the home births of her own two children. Ugh.

  Portland was packed with happy mamas who birthed babies at home. Each one chalked it up to her personal, unique, deep-seated womanly wisdom. They preached natural birth as the only valid birth experience.

  Georgie had bought into that narrative, too, until Bella.

  Georgie had cracked a tooth, gritting against the pain of labor, when Bella was ready to be born. In the hospital, the epidural was a soothing cocktail. Then everything had gone into emergency mode. There was an oxygen problem, the obstetrician said, reading a monitor. They’d wheeled Georgie into the operating room without time to talk and jacked up the drugs, so many painkillers through her spine she couldn’t lift her arms.

  They hung a blue paper curtain between Georgie’s head and her body because what they were about to do was brutal. They cut a fast line, let the blood seep, lifted her baby girl out. Bella’s long legs unfolded like a little foal’s. Georgie felt like a floating head. The rest of her body wasn’t her own—it was numb, bloody, being stitched closed by strangers—but she saw her daughter, and they handed the baby to Humble, and she was beautiful. It wasn’t a natural birth. Whatever. It was the happiest, bloodiest day of Georgie’s life.

  Bella was born alive and sans brain damage. So what if it wasn’t in a candlelit bath of balanced sea salts set in the middle of feng shui-ed master suite, right? So what if it wasn’t in the chicken coop of an urban homesteading commune.

  Humble turned on a light that cast him in a warm yellow glow. He could star in an old French painting, flattered by Vigée-Lebrun, dressed in the rococo ruffles of royalty.

  He poured himself another shot. Georgie saw him sway. “How many drinks have you had?”

  “Enough to quit counting. You want a Breathalyzer?” He leaned over to give her a bourbon-soaked smooch.

  “Don’t put me in the cop role.” That was the road to momism. Georgie felt herself walking a thin, nervous line: She had a family now, the very thing she’d lost as a kid. Her own mom would’ve been planning an escape.

  He stumbled, and she thought for a moment he’d crush her and Bella both. She held a hand up, to protect Bella, but Humble found his way.

  She said, “Listen. I volunteered to work on a conference, with Johnny Depp.”

  Days later, Sarah folded herself into her husband’s car, into that cloud of leather polish and spent gasoline, with a wrapped present on her lap. A week had passed since the baby was born. Sarah was like an aunt to that child! She would be, anyway, given a chance. She was out to practice her “aunting behavior,” as the ethologists called it. She’d treat that child like family.

  Ben got in on the driver’s side.

  In the tight box of a car, Sarah bent over her knees, over the gift, and gagged. She wiped a hand to her mouth then hacked again, a cough mixed with throat clearing. The present crinkled under the pressure of her chest against it. “Oh, God, I spit up a little on the cute bows.” She picked at the curling ribbon.

  Ben asked, “You okay?”

  “Sure, I’m great. It’s a good sign, right?” She looked for anything made of wood to rap her knuckles on. The dash was plastic, the seats leather, the floors covered in carpet. Paper was like wood, or had been when it was still alive, before it was made festive, girlish, and metallic. She tapped her hands to the silver and pink wrapping paper, then she tapped her head. She tapped her breastbone, not for luck so much as to urge back the sense of vomit rising.

  The pregnancy test was positive. They had a baby on the way! It’s good to be queasy in the early weeks of pregnancy—it shows a body tilting into new hormones, adapting as a host, though maybe what she felt was only prenatal vitamins resting heavy in her stomach, a minor flu, bad food.

  “I shouldn’t have had that Saint André.” Bacteria in soft cheese
s, that’s not good for unborn babies.

  Ben said, “Brie won’t kill you.”

  Saint André wasn’t exactly brie. It was a triple crème, richer and fattier and harder to resist. She said, “I’m not worried about me.”

  If her pregnancies had worked out, their backseat would be crowded now. The floor of the car would be flecked with cheddar goldfish crackers and Pirate’s Booty.

  He put his hand on hers, on top of the present. “We could see this kid another time.”

  “Now is good.”

  “Are you going to hold the baby?”

  Sarah said, “Of course I’ll hold her.”

  Ben shifted the car into reverse and backed down the driveway. “Are you going to cry?”

  She’d fallen apart at the baby shower when a friend of Georgie’s from work brought a cake shaped like a woman’s body with a plastic baby floating in an amniotic fluid made out of pale Jell-O. It was awful. She’d played the toilet paper game, guessing Georgie’s size at eight months by tearing off a length of toilet paper, but she had to dry her eyes on her game piece. It kept getting shorter.

  When she turned in her estimate, what she had left of that strip of toilet paper was damp, blackened with mascara, and tiny. She had to guess that Georgie was toddler-sized, maybe even what they called eighteen months in the infant section, and then she bawled again!

  She sobbed over the itty-bitty booties that served as table decorations. She’d totally made Georgie’s baby shower about herself, her own big void, her drama. Jeez Louise.

  She couldn’t help it—babies made her cry.

  This time, it wasn’t a party, thank fucking God. It was a visit. And this round she was pregnant. Again. That was her secret strength. She said, “I feel really good. I’ll be fine.”

  Georgie opened the door holding Bella bundled in a blanket. Sarah and Ben, on the porch, made all the right sounds—they exclaimed: They were glad to see her! The baby was beautiful! Georgie looked great!

  Sarah couldn’t hear whatever Georgie said over the baby’s scream mixed with the grind and shudder of a jackhammer down the street, that familiar, loud language of a neighborhood intent on gentrification.

  Georgie still looked half-pregnant, and, of course, nobody had expected her to put on makeup for their drop-in anyway. Maybe it was a leave-in hot-oil treatment that separated strands of her hair, showing a little scalp here and there? She had on some kind of Western-style shirt with pockets and big pearl buttons on the front like overstated nipples. The paisley swirl of the fabric was marked with dried milk patches.

  “Come in,” Georgie said, or something close enough, and moved out of their way.

  The house smelled sweet, tinged with sour milk. Right away Sarah heard Nyla, midsentence, saying, “You can still have a vaginal birth after a C-section. Women do it all the time!”

  Dulcet and Nyla were in the living room eating small sandwiches. Sarah hadn’t known they were coming. Yet again, they’d gotten there first. Neither of them had a regular job. They could show up on short notice, a total advantage.

  Arena slunk in from the kitchen, tall and sullen and gorgeous, with a handful of olives. That was pretty much everybody. Sarah was last.

  “Come meet the latest enfant terrible to join our tribe,” Dulcet called out.

  Sarah wanted a visit alone. Georgie owed her that much.

  Ben hung up his old jacket and surveyed the room in an open, neutral way, offering a smile for whoever stepped in front of him.

  She’d worked hard to get that visit. She’d called and called back and didn’t give up. Now she concentrated on keeping her smile easy—everything was fine!—and didn’t look down when she reached to hang her coat on the hook near the door, where she caught her foot in a trap and almost fell. A bouncy chair bit her ankle like a bad dog. The bouncy chair was little, pink, and lined with dangling toys. It burst into a slow, sad, and creepy version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Raggedy Bitchy Bitch leapt off the couch and came bounding to bark at the chair. Sarah still had the present in one hand and her coat in the other. She tried to kick the contraption off her foot but it held on, plinking out its little song.

  Dulcet grabbed Bitchy by the collar, swinging and spilling what looked like a mimosa from a martini glass in her other hand. Champagne and orange juice doused the baby’s chair.

  Dulcet said, “Settle, Bitch. Jesus. Do you have a towel? Sorry about that.” She didn’t sound sorry so much as vaguely entertained.

  Georgie joined the chorus of apologies. She clutched the baby, bent, and jiggled the chair off Sarah’s foot.

  “Good thing there’s not a kid in there,” Dulcet said, and swigged what was left of her sloshing drink. Sarah finally got her coat on the hook. A bassinet crowded the living room.

  “I saw you on TV,” Georgie said. “With the pregnant mandrill. That’s fantastic. Is everyone at work thrilled?”

  “They’re hoping it’ll help the levy pass,” Sarah said, in a controlled voice that came out a little flat, verging on hostile. That wasn’t how she meant it, not at all, but it was true—babies born to a zoo are about gaining funding, cultivating recognition, and maintaining a diverse population. Sentimental enthusiasm was for the press.

  Nyla said, “I heard they’re throwing a baby shower.”

  “Really?” Sarah choked. A pregnant mandrill cake? She pictured the amniotic fluid in Jell-O, a mandrill figurine inside. PR handled public celebrations. She was in the research wing, an entirely separate field. The Oregon Zoo was a research institution, and one of the best, dedicated to preserving endangered species. She was proud to be affiliated. “They wouldn’t. It’d be anthropomorphizing.” Sarah couldn’t handle another baby shower.

  The next baby shower she went to would be her own.

  “They throw a party for Ellie every year,” Dulcet said, and shrugged. “That’s anthropomorphizing.”

  Ellie was the zoo’s firstborn baby elephant, now a fifty-year-old matriarch. She’d given birth to six babies. Four of them had died, though nobody tried to think about that. At her birthday everybody wore giant paper elephant ears. They sang “Happy Birthday” while she demolished a three-layer wheat cake with bananas planted on top.

  “She’s alive. It’s a PR risk to let the public invest emotions in an unborn animal,” Sarah said, and her voice warbled.

  “It’s a risk to invest love in a living animal,” Dulcet said.

  Sarah ran a nervous hand over the terry cloth sides of the new bassinet. There was a gift certificate on the table: Good for one “gyno-steam treatment” at the Opening to Life Spa.

  “I’m going to steam my opening to life,” Georgie said, and gave a sort of awkward plié, the baby still in her arms.

  “We went in on it,” Nyla said. She and Dulcet were good at hanging out together because they could both make a dollar go a long way. “It’s an herbal postpartum vaginal steam bath. Drink?” Nyla tipped a green bottle over an empty glass.

  Ben said, “I’d love one.”

  Sarah knew that about Ben—he really did love a good mimosa. He loved mixed drinks and fizzy drinks and things with umbrellas.

  He wasn’t afraid to ask a stranger for directions, either, going against gender statistics. Sometimes he even sat down to pee, which was fine!

  Sarah said, “Virgin screwdriver for me.”

  Nyla poured while she narrated, “Regional, organic sparkling wine, raised on an eco-vineyard in Yamhill, with no sulfites added.” Yamhill was a sleepy town in the low, folding hills of Willamette Valley.

  Nyla was in the process of starting up a tiny eco-friendly store called LifeCycles, devoted to simple and transitory pleasures. When she found extra money she spent it on food and wine, the Portland way: Even when the economy tanked, when nobody bought what the news referred to as “durable goods” and the regional Goodwill stores had the highest sales rate in the nation, when renters made up the biggest demographic and everybody rode bikes because their old cars broke down, even then P
ortlanders blew through cash on microbrews. They’d pay for wine, grass-fed cattle, and Pacific coast sushi. They spent big on tattoos—that most durable of durable goods.

  The baby screamed.

  This is where Ben, if it were still the 1950s, would’ve said, “Great set of lungs on that kid!” clapped the new father on the back, and shared a cigar. Instead he sipped his mimosa. He asked, “Where’s Humble?”

  Georgie fluttered a hand in a half circle then above her head. “Organizing the attic.” The baby kept up its wail.

  “One way to use paternity leave,” Dulcet said, and picked at the tray of tiny deli sandwiches. They were baby-sized sandwiches, scaled in a cute size to honor the infant.

  As though newborns even noticed lunch meat.

  And as though those small pink slices of soft meat inside the bread weren’t eerily akin to the soft vulnerability of baby flesh. Sarah, nervous and half-queasy, saw the sandwiches as foreign, a strange behavioral ritual of a deli-worshipping tribe.

  But they also looked kind of good.

  Arena sat on a window seat and pulled her knees to her chest, shrinking away from the baby’s screams.

  Nyla said, “The beauty of bringing a baby into the world these days is, in part, that it automatically turns the new parents into environmentalists. You can’t have a baby and not care about the planet, right? It’s that awareness of future generations.”

  Dulcet ate maraschino cherries out of an open jar on the table. She flicked juice off her long fingers. “Then who shops at Walmart?”

  Nyla ignored her. “Giving birth to a child gives birth to the parents. They’re new people. It’s like crossing an invisible border.”

  Sarah’s stomach hurt, she wanted so badly across that border. She was an illegal immigrant peering into the land of maternity, deported three times already.