The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Sometimes a miscarriage is fast. Other times, it takes days. By the third day Sarah said, “One of us needs to hunt and gather.” Grocery-wise, they were depleted.

  Ben ran a hand over the bridge of his nose. A hard kernel, like bone, rested under his skin and moved beneath his fingers. He could make it click, there in the radiating pain of a bruise.

  He pressed it and it hurt in a way that made his dick shrivel, his spine tighten, his toes clamp down against his shoes. When he caught his reflection he was still surprised to see the deep, plum shadows and a jagged red line that worked its way up toward his forehead. The skin under his eyes had turned from purple to the first sallow lines of healing, a futuristic sunset. His nose, though, man. It was still a mess, with the crack of a bruise across the bridge and a new, flattened, sideways look to the rest of it.

  Sarah squinted and her eyes traced a line from his nose to his forehead, then his hairline. He ruffled a hand through his hair and checked for stray hair in his fingers, always monitoring for hair loss.

  It’d been a week since he’d “slipped on a wet paper towel” in a public restroom. That’s the story he told: He slipped, fell, and hit a sink. Every time he said it he saw Sarah look him over carefully—with something like love, or concern, but then he’d see, in her squint, something more like flat-out suspicion.

  “Dale, at work, thinks you could sue somebody,” she said. “Seriously. A wet paper towel—that’s dangerous.”

  Was she testing him?

  Like he’d explain on legal documents why he’d been in a bathroom long enough for the automatic lights to turn off. He smiled painfully. “I’ll go to the store.” One of them had to do it.

  He found his sunglasses on the mantel. In the winter, even the days were dark in Portland. Now it was evening. He put the glasses on anyway, gave a cavalier tap to the frames, and lurched toward the front door. When he picked up his keys, Shadow rallied, ears up: Walk? Ben ignored the animal and slid his cell phone into his front pants pocket.

  “Ben? Don’t. Sperm? Please.” The phone.

  Sweet Sarah. She believed radiation could be avoided. There was more radiation in that arid land where Ben grew up, where the sun beat down over rippling fields, than there was in that cell phone. His hometown was downwind from the Hanford nuclear site, east of Boardman, a coal-fired plant, complete with toxic spew. It was a golden landscape of big sky, sun, and cancer.

  Everyone on the planet was bombarded by cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and radon that seeped up from the ground. Granite countertops off-gassed in rehabbed houses. That cell phone in his pocket? On the scale of things, it wasn’t much of a problem.

  But for Sarah, he took the phone out of his pocket again.

  He moved through the warbled lights of the grocery like water. His head felt weird. Could a cracked nose cause a clot to form in the brain? Or else it was oxycodone talking to the whiskey in his blood, with an electric current of caffeine laced in. He picked up a carton of powdered sugar doughnuts, the taste of a road trip. Almost ten years earlier, when they were first together, he and Sarah had driven from Oregon to Las Vegas then down through the Southwest, to Tucson and up to Albuquerque. They’d lived on powdered doughnuts. Now when he lifted a pack of the same cheap doughnuts he remembered the way a pale sun rose over a Nevada campground, the air shifting from cool night to early heat, and Sarah’s skin beside him in their joined sleeping bags. Maybe she’d remember, too. In the candy section he stacked three dark chocolate bars in his palm.

  He found a fat pack of maxi-pads in the feminine protection aisle. That package was as big as a baby. A woman, teetering in high heels, looked his way. She looked again. Maybe it was the sunglasses, or the purple sunset of a bruise that seeped around the edges, or the way he swayed when he tried to stand, like he was on a boat. Was she taking an interest or appalled?

  Ben pushed past her, rolling his narrow, high, modern shopping cart. The cart was so tall it forced his elbows to stick out in a way that seemed girlish. The pack of maxi-pads in his basket caught on the claw of a toothbrush display rack, and the whole thing crashed to the ground. He lifted the cardboard cutout—it was shaped like a giant toothbrush—but the maxi-pads were tangled in the metal hooks and toothbrushes swung and slapped like muffled wind chimes.

  His maxi-pads were torn open. He felt the woman’s eyes on his back.

  Then his phone vibrated in his coat pocket. His first thought, his only thought, was: Sarah! With one hand still wrestling the cardboard toothbrush and its wind chimes of brushes, he used his other hand to slide the phone from his pocket. It wasn’t Sarah; it was Humble. A text said, “C U @ Clive’s.”

  God. Did Humble really use that text-speak? Even on his phone, Ben always wrote in complete sentences. Clive’s was a bar. Clive’s Dive. He’d forgotten their plan to have a drink. Humble had made the plan. Ben had only nodded. That seemed so long ago, before the miscarriage. He turned his head and knocked into the top of the cardboard toothbrush display rack—how was it supposed to stand on its own? The woman, in her heels, reached to help him. She stood the cutout up like it was a giant paper doll, moving with a calm competence.

  When he got back with the groceries he told Sarah about his plans with Humble. He said, “I can cancel.”

  “You should go! You’ve had a lousy week,” she insisted. Her bathrobe was open. She was naked underneath. She held a bloody dishrag between her legs like she was trying to stop a leak, to staunch bleeding, but really she was just catching blood as it ran out. There was blood on the white linoleum of their kitchen floor.

  Ben pushed aside a pizza box on the counter, then moved a saucepan crusted with old rice. “It’s not like we’re really friends.”

  She said, “Of course you’re friends.”

  They were, and they weren’t. He knew Humble Johnson as one of Sarah’s friends. Ben made what he considered his real friends in middle school, when they played Dungeons and Dragons and shared marching band practice. It seemed a leap to count Humble in the same category as friends he found when they were all kids turning into men, in a small town under the big sky.

  Those old friends? One at a time they, or he, had moved farther away and quit going home. He’d moved to Eugene for school, then to Portland, looking for a bigger city.

  He piled up moldy plates and stacked glasses to make room for the groceries. He sat an empty wine glass on top of the plates, then slid the economy-size pack of maxi-pads alongside the groceries in a little corridor of cleared space. “We’ll set it up another time.”

  When Ben heard from the men he called friends, it was during holidays, in mass-produced letters written by wives. His old friends did family things. Ben had a wife, but not what they called a “family”—no kids, just that blood on the floor.

  He said, “I couldn’t leave you home alone.”

  Sarah kissed him. Their lips met in a quick hello. “I’ll be fine. I’m schooled in all this by now.” She tried to smile, but her smile twitched.

  He slid another bag of groceries onto the counter, then took off his sunglasses.

  She said, “Your eyes look better.” She pulled the top of her robe closed but kept her other hand down between the folds of it, holding the rag.

  The first miscarriage she’d been sentimental about. The second? Her jaw had tightened, and the way she spoke grew more clipped. It was a little chin lift brought on by disappointment, like a young Katharine Hepburn. During the third pregnancy her words, and her jaw, had softened again, but now here they were, round four, back to another pack of pads and blood everywhere.

  She lifted the edge of her robe far enough to pull out her hand without getting blood marks on it. She threw the cloth in the sink. It slopped against the stainless steel. She rinsed her hands, ran cold water over the rag, and dried her hands by wiping them down the sides of her robe.

  These miscarriages gave her license to be a slob. She slouched now. She’d put on a few pounds with each round of pregnancy, and those slight gains we
re adding up. She reached for the maxi-pads. The package was split, and pads sprang out like so much extra body fat in too-tight panties. “They’re open?”

  “I did that. An accident.” The way the pads burst from their package reminded him of Sarah’s body. He could pinch the new fat on her hips. He could kiss it and rub his hands on it for heat and good luck. She had a line of tiger’s stripes in stretch marks over her backside—he saw them every morning, and he was the only one who did, and he loved it; he loved her stripes.

  When they first got married, she wouldn’t even change a tampon with the bathroom door open.

  “Got the rest of my miscarriage kit?” She stood on tiptoe to look over the edge of the grocery bag. There it was: canned chicken noodle—the old kind of soup, the simplest, and cheap. It was what she’d asked for. She’d stir in lemon juice and one whipped egg, for an abbreviated version of a Greek avgolemono, a shortcut back to childhood comforts. When she was a kid, most of downtown Portland was owned by Greeks, all mom-and-pop stores. Greek food was Portland food, 1980s-style.

  Ben had bought Tums, Tylenol, and red wine; three oversized dark chocolate candy bars from a company devoted to saving monkeys; two magazines, Real Simple—like anything was so simple—and More, the magazine for women teetering uncomfortably close to menopause.

  She palmed the candy bar and said, “I’ll be fine. Have fun. I’ve got to find underwear.” She walked without lifting her feet, the chocolate in one hand, the other holding the maxi-pad in place.

  He found space on their shelves for canned tuna and black beans. It had been a hard week. Other men could wear a broken nose and two black eyes like a badge, but he wanted to stay home forever.

  Sarah was in sweats when she came back out, a matched set in snug cherry velour that showed off her curves. Ben took it as a good sign. She was trying. He put an arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. “Keep up on your pain meds, okay?”

  Sarah was resistant to taking pills. Aspirin gave her hives. Zoloft, prescribed after the second miscarriage, did the same.

  “It’s not really that kind of pain, anymore.” He saw her forehead, lined from wincing. She pressed into Ben’s chest enough to move him away, then reached for the magazines and bumped the edge of the stack of dirty plates. The wine glass on top tottered. They both grabbed for it. Her hand touched it and his did, too, but too late—the glass fell and smashed against their blood-spotted floor.

  She rolled her head back, closed her eyes. “My God. We’re in squalor.”

  He went for the broom.

  “That’s all right. Go.” She took the broom from him. “Just come back early. Don’t stay too long.”

  “Don’t worry about cleaning,” he said.

  “I haven’t been.” She nodded toward the piles of dishes.

  “I’ll do those when I get back.” He wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into his chest. “Call if you need me. I’ll have my phone.”

  “But not in your front pocket,” she said.

  “No, not in my front pocket.” He loved her for her faith in problem solving, as though where he kept his phone could change their future. He kissed his wife good-bye.

  Humble was at the bar on a stool, watching his curly-headed reflection in the mirror between bottles of overpriced bourbon. It was a narrow bar, dark and crowded, with a giant TV hung up high in a corner. Ben made his way through the crowd. Everybody there—they were kids! Who was even twenty-one? He wanted to card the bartenders, the bar backs, the waitresses.

  He’d been carded at the door, forced to pull out his cracked driver’s license. The license showed he was forty years old. Some teenage girl hired to man the door scowled, furrowing her soft forehead in a way that made Ben want to give a soft pat to the top of her head on her dyed-black hair. She held up Ben’s license, looked Ben in the eye, and moved her gaze back and forth between the two like she was trying to compare. Was she mocking the broken nose?

  Whatever.

  She handed the card back, and Ben went in.

  The thrum and rattle of bar music was loud and seeped into his chest. People were laughing, already drunk. He was glad to be in. He needed this.

  At home, Sarah felt a dull ache like a hand pressing too hard low down against her pelvis. It never let up. She called the hospital’s advice nurse. “It’s the third day,” she said.

  The advice nurse asked, “Are you soaking more than a pad an hour?”

  “Maybe about that?” Sarah guessed.

  Store-bought maxi-pads are high tech. They’re more efficient than hospital pads. Hospital pads are about as absorbent as a wad of plastic bags. They’re like something left over from a Communist work camp. If she’d been using hospital pads, the answer would’ve been yes, definitely yes. She’d learn that later, in the hospital.

  The nurse said, “If you want to come in, we can do an ultrasound to see if you’ve passed the products of conception.”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “Well, it’s up to you.” That was the advice nurse’s official advice: It’s up to you.

  She tried to call Ben. A phone threw out a few bars of funk like a tiny dance club in the next room. She followed the sound. Ben’s phone rang and vibrated and danced to its own music on the slick white surface on top of the microwave.

  Ben’s voice came on through the phone at her ear, warm and efficient, probably coming all the way from some cheap digital real estate halfway across the globe, part of a computerized international answering service. “I’m not here, but leave a message!”

  She started to call Georgie, then hesitated. She hadn’t heard from Georgie in days. Now she’d call and talk about another failed pregnancy? While Georgie rocked her own baby to sleep? Pathetic.

  Sarah’s big plan was to get pregnant again as soon as possible, get back on the horse that threw her, do this to her body as many times as it took. She’d get back in the pregnancy cycle the way cutters sliced their skin, the way drunks reached for booze: compulsively, relentlessly.

  Once she’d asked her doctor about movie stars—all those aging movie star ladies giving birth. Her doctor, an aging woman herself, lost all bedside manner. She snarled, “Surrogates,” and waved a hand through the air, swatting off an invisible fly.

  Sarah did not want a surrogate.

  If they had to, she and Ben would take on fertility treatments. They’d get a loan, spend their savings, inject hormones, schedule intrauterine insemination or in vitro. It was a biological imperative.

  “Goddamn, Shadow,” she swore at her dear dog. Jesus. The animal was nosing at a bloody maxi-pad Sarah hadn’t yet gotten all the way to the garbage. He looked up at her with that special anxious dog-love in his eyes: He wanted that pad. But he’d grown feeble in his old age. She kicked it away, held a hand to her gut, and limped to the back door, snapping her fingers and sending the dog out to the fenced yard.

  Some day in the future she’d hold her own newborn son or daughter and, like so many other mothers, act like giving birth was natural and easy.

  For now, she fell to the couch.

  She called Nyla. Nyla was the most comforting of her friends, when she wasn’t busy being an alarmist about global environmental collapse. And she’d had a miscarriage, too, a long time ago.

  Voice mail picked up. Sarah said, “Where are you? I’m at home, having another miscarriage, goddammit.” She blurted it out. Then she tapped her knuckles on the doorjamb for luck, the closest wood in reach. Maybe there was luck in wood, and if there wasn’t any luck, it still didn’t cost her anything. That’s how she’d become in the months of miscarriages—desperate, superstitious, hedging all bets.

  Losing so much blood over days made her nervous. Knocking on wood was what she had by way of an agnostic’s prayer.

  But with all that compulsive knocking, Sarah’s message would sound like she was doing construction, checking beams for dry rot. She said, “I’m bleeding like crazy. When you had one, was it days and days, or a weekend thing? Anyway
… I need a little distraction. My gut! It’s sickening. It’s worse than menstrual stuff. It’s between the flu and a period. I don’t know. Call if you want.”

  Sarah gave in and tried Georgie, though Georgie would probably be asleep, nursing, or bonding with her baby. Play behavior. Grooming. Locomotion. Sarah envisioned the tally, the check boxes of mother-offspring behavior. She couldn’t reach Georgie, either, and again left a message. “I’m having another miscarriage.…” Her voice cracked. She soldiered on. “Could you call Humble and ask him to ask Ben to call me?”

  Her voice, so weak!

  As she hung up, she was more alone than in the moment she’d spoken to a distant machine. She tried Dulcet, her third and last resort.

  In the dim orange glow of a cedar-lined room, lit only with salt candles, Georgie breathed a deep hit of gyno-steam. Steam seeped up between her legs. Her vaginal folds were hot and damp. It was like resting on a geyser.

  Her C-section incision was on its way to becoming a scar. Everything smelled rich with herbs and pussy. The baby was on blankets and pillows on the floor. The spa was baby friendly, but when Bella started to cry Georgie eased off her throne, picked up the girl, and found her way back to her perch. She dropped open her white spa robe to let Bella nurse. The phone rang.

  A sign on the wall urged this is your time.

  Her opening to life was sweaty. The phone cried out again, its ringtone a classical riff, singing need. Georgie eyed the sign—your time—and let the phone go.

  At the bar the music was loud. Humble leaned toward the bartender, made a quick gesture, and there it was, another pint set on the dark red wood countertop. Ben hoisted the glass and let the foamy head roll. That first swallow of beer tasted like a party that shouldn’t end. He wanted to order a second pint as soon as he touched his first.