The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  He scanned the room. Knob Creek, Maker’s Mark, Jameson, Crown Royal. Tanqueray, Luxardo, Chartreuse, Cynar, and Galliano: Bottles along the wall were as curved as bodies, the names like those of women Ben had only heard about—foreign exchange students, strippers, hookers, and cheap hotels.

  Humble said, “You look like a fighter. Georgie told me you were a mess.”

  Ben could barely hear him over the noise. He said, “Georgie?” He hadn’t seen Georgie. They had a deal—Sarah said she wouldn’t mention it.

  Sarah sat on the couch with her magazines, the phone, and the pack of maxi-pads within reach. She was too tired to get up but afraid to fall asleep, alone and bleeding. Ben would be home before it grew late. Soon enough she’d pass that little blue sac, the collection of misguided cells. Once that was gone—this collection of cells that refused to form a child—her whole body could calm down. It was a natural process.

  Animals had miscarriages. Prairie voles were known to have spontaneous abortions after hanging out too long with a male other than the father, in lab tests.

  There was a stab in her gut, and Sarah thought, Did this happen because of Dale? He always sat so close, in small rooms alongside the cages at the zoo. Spontaneous abortion induced by impure thoughts? Jeez, she was getting more Catholic by the second.

  The phone rang. She grabbed it. “Hello?”

  The first sound she heard on the line was a baby’s wail. It was a baby, crying! A baby had called her? She wanted to throw up. There was a rattling sound, not a baby’s rattle but the sound of papers, somebody fumbling for the phone. Georgie’s voice came on over the wail of the baby. She said, “Where’s Ben? Does he know?” So she’d gotten the message.

  Ugh. Sarah had to quit shaking. She said, “He’s out with Humble, right?”

  Georgie made a sound, a fast exhale, a breath of contempt. “They still met up?”

  The baby’s cry was quieter now, but still there, haunting and creepy in the background. Didn’t Georgie know where her own husband was? Sarah said, “Ben needed a night out.”

  “You need him home,” Georgie said. “What’s going on?”

  Then the line clicked. Sarah couldn’t get away from the sounds of the baby crying fast enough. She said, “Dulcet’s calling.”

  Sarah flashed over. She heard the sound of a party, a woman laughing, voices mixed together. Dulcet said, “How are you feeling?” Her voice was slurry, a few drinks in.

  “Like hell,” Sarah said, “but I’ll be okay. Where are you? Georgie’s on the other line.…” The phone clicked again. Caller ID showed it was Nyla—Nyla, with her calming, responsible ways.

  Sarah said, “I’ve got to take this other call.”

  “I’m on my way over.” Dulcet sounded more on her way under, as in drinking herself under a table somewhere.

  “Line ’em up!” Ben said. It was his turn to buy. Humble drained his pint. When Hum said something, he turned his head away and Ben couldn’t hear him very well over the music, but he caught the words Dead girl and Skoal and Make a bet. He followed Hum’s gaze and saw a cop show rerun on TV with an underweight Asian girl in a bikini dead on a slab, her ribs architectural under her thin satin skin.

  The regulars along the bar roared. They slapped the wooden bar top. Humble leaned forward and smiled at the masses. He lifted his glass. Everybody drank.

  Cheers, dead girl!

  A skinny woman in a nearly sheer shirt—she wore it like a dress, but it was a shirt—bumped Ben’s elbow as she leaned on the bar, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. She whipped her hair around and flashed a look at him just long enough to say, “Sorry.” Her eyes were green. Her teeth were small. She was barely twenty-one, if even that, Ben guessed.

  He said, “It’s okay.”

  She stopped, stared, and pulled a strand of hair out of her mouth. “What happened to you?”

  He smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was happy to be out on the town. Before he could come up with the right clever line, Hum leaned in and yelled through the music, “He slipped in the john.”

  The woman’s face moved into an uncertain smile. “Really?”

  Ben let the conversation unfold across him. Humble nodded, said, “Hit the sink,” and smacked one hand against the other.

  She said, “Oh my God. This is the guy you told me about!”

  Humble and the woman both busted up over it. Ben asked, “What?”

  The woman said, “You should sue somebody.”

  Again? Ben let that wash on by. He said, “Maybe I’m already a rich man.”

  The woman, or girl, said, “I’m sure. The Humster told me all about you.”

  The Humster?

  Hum grinned back like he was used to flirting with underage drinkers, or drinksters: the Humster and the Drinksters.

  What did Humble know about Ben’s smashed face, anyway? Not the real story. Ben tipped back his glass. The girl-woman ordered her drinks, holding a few bills in one hand and running the fingers of her other hand over the ends of them.

  Then Hannah came on the TV over the girl’s shoulder—Hannah, the newly appointed senator.

  Or state senator, really.

  She was a floating face, an angel or devil, ready to whisper in the young woman’s ear, to whisper in Ben’s ear. She was the mother of all those children in the bar, high above, a concerned talking head.

  It was a newsbreak. Hannah spoke with authority about some vague plan; Ben missed the lead-in, and what was she talking about?

  Maybe because of the beer, or maybe because of his broken face, to show he was more than a buffoon, Ben elbowed Humble in a way that made both their beers slosh. He said, “I used to date her.”

  Humble looked again at the busty young chick in the sheer shirt. He smiled. “Her?”

  Ben said, “No, her,” and pointed at the TV. “In college.”

  Humble looked up at Hannah, with the blank stare of the unimpressed. Ben tried to shake it off like Humble’s opinion didn’t matter, but yes, it was her, his old girlfriend, on TV, and she still mattered.

  He had her photo torn from the newspaper folded in his wallet.

  At home, over the phone, Nyla asked, “Does it hurt more or less than the time the cops showed up and you fell out of that tree and couldn’t catch your breath, you hit the ground so hard?”

  Sarah said, “You know, I was so wasted back then. That was a long time ago.…” It was a landmark in their shared ancient history. They’d been under drinking age but over eighteen—old enough to throw in jail—on a night when a party was busted. A close call.

  “But that’s what it feels like, isn’t it?” Nyla said. “The one I had was quick. Like an afternoon. It was intense, but only lasted for a few hours.”

  Sarah flipped her magazine closed and reached for her glass of wine, but she didn’t sit up all the way and knocked the magazine into the wine instead. The glass spilled; wine rolled across the coffee table, under magazines and junk mail, and across the old maxi-pad. “Ah, crumb!” She grabbed the first thing she could reach—more pads—and started blotting.

  Nyla said, “What is it?”

  “Nothing. A spill, red wine. Second one today. I’m so wiped out, it makes me clumsy.” She stood up, and when she stood she heard and felt, in a mixed sensation, the suck of blood and clots tumbling. Her head tipped back like somebody had put a palm to her forehead. She said, “Oh, jeez!” and reached for a wall.

  Nyla said, “What?”

  She said, “Just dizzy, for a minute.”

  Nyla said, “Sit down. Right now, right where you are. Are you okay?”

  She said, “The bleeding’s a little heavier.”

  “Hang up and call 911. Call, and I’m coming over. I’ll call right back. When I call back, I want to hear that they’re on the way.” It was a plan.

  Humble’s voice was loud when he said, in Ben’s ear, “Ever think about it, like, what if you were still with her? You’d be in politics.”

  Ben said, “No way, ma
n.” He shook his head. It seemed the thing to say. Why tell Humble about pining?

  Hannah, on TV, was dressed in the worst kind of clothes, a self-imposed frump. But even in her politician costume, she was beautiful. She was hot. If he’d married her, by now he’d be the public husband lagging behind his successful, hot politico wife. It’d be good—she’s a powerhouse. And it’d be lame—he’d look useless.

  His own wife was a crazy hot mix of brilliant and sexy, and she loved him in a way that made him confident. They made each other’s lives rich.

  “I don’t think about that woman at all,” he said.

  The girl in the sheer shirt across the way, surrounded by drunks, shook out her hair. Overhead Hannah nodded, a crease between her eyebrows, and took a question from somebody offscreen. When Ben first moved from his small town nowhere to Eugene, for college, the city felt huge. Now he knew Eugene was a relative backwater town. But then, the bars were different from the cowboy taverns at home, and he was old enough to get in, and sometimes he and Hannah would drive to Portland for a show, and mostly he remembered sex with Hannah. She was his first girlfriend. Sex was a trip. It was a hard-won prize, his daily dose of bliss.

  He missed it, now. That person he’d been.

  But that wasn’t about Hannah—it was about lost youth.

  Ben wanted his wife, Sarah, with her stretch marks like a tiger’s stripes, and their shared squalor. They were at the start of good things. Even if they never had kids, Sarah was enough to make Ben’s life worth living.

  As long as his cell phone didn’t vibrate, he knew she was fine. She was sad, at home, but they’d get through it. She wanted him to have a night out. He put a hand to his thigh, where he didn’t feel the usual lump in his pocket. His jacket hung on a hook under the bar. The phone would be in his jacket—for Sarah, at her request. It was away from his sperm. One more drink, then he’d go. At home, he’d clean up. He’d make something like dinner. If not tonight, then other nights. Sarah understood him. He pushed away his ludicrous nostalgia for Hannah and the boners of his youth. He loved Sarah. He really did. Being out in a bar in this guy way, it wasn’t his thing. He was ready to go home.

  Dulcet got to the house first. She banged on the door, rang the bell, then banged again. When Sarah answered, she leaned against the wall like she needed that wall in order to stand.

  Dulcet said, “Oh, darling, you look like hell.” She pushed her way past Sarah and tripped over a pair of scattered shoes in the hall. When she saw the rest of the house, she said, “It’s a bloody war zone in here!” Her breath was full of red wine. Her teeth were purple.

  In vino veritas, Sarah thought, but didn’t manage to say. She slid down the wall, to the floor. There was blood on the wall in fingerprints and blood on the floor. Dulcet screamed, stumbled again, and dropped to her knees.

  The paramedics pulled up soon enough. They took Sarah’s blood pressure. It was low, but it was always low. That ran in her family.

  Except now it was really low.

  When blood pressure reaches zero, veins collapse. There’s nothing to keep the freeways of blood and oxygen moving. Sarah was close to zero and losing pressure, losing blood.

  “Hello?” a voice called, over the low roar of the ambulance’s generator. It was Nyla, trying to see around the paramedics. Dulcet stepped past Sarah to reach Nyla. Sarah was still on the floor, flat on her back.

  “Oh God,” Nyla said. Sarah was in a white hall streaked with bloody fingerprints. Georgie, in her old sedan, pulled up to the curb.

  Dulcet and Nyla stood under the porch light and watched as Georgie leaned into the car. Georgie’s skirt jiggled, thick with the clinging pounds of her pregnancy.

  Dulcet looked out. “She didn’t, did she?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Georgie unpacked her newborn baby from the car seat in the back of her Honda. She’d brought her baby to the scene.

  Dulcet said, “What is she thinking?”

  But Nyla had the picture. “She can’t leave the baby at home, if Humble’s out with Ben.”

  Georgie hoisted the basket half of the car seat contraption, full as it was with all eight pounds of baby Bella.

  Dulcet pointed one skinny finger and, in a loud, drunken stage whisper, hissed, “Leave the baby in the car.”

  Georgie froze, midstride. “What?”

  “Leave the baby …” Dulcet started again. Her elbow was a jagged crook, her finger a weather vane.

  Nyla grabbed her arm. “Shush …”

  Georgie, talking louder now, said, “I can’t leave her in the car. That’s illegal, for one thing. Like even if I would.”

  Dulcet lurched into a Frankenstein walk across the front yard, a walk choreographed by a mix of drink and high heels that stuck in the dirt. “What’s going on?” Georgie asked.

  “Wait,” Dulcet slurred, heading over. She shook a finger in the air.

  Georgie sat back in the car. She dialed Humble again, in an effort to reach Ben.

  Humble’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and the noise disappeared into the music and drunk talk and laughing. On TV, a girl lay dead and blue against a disco floor. The girl in the sheer shirt slapped Humble’s back. Ben couldn’t hear what she said over the noise, but saw her laugh and slam half her beer before it ran over her chin and onto the floor. Her friends shouted, “Skoal!”

  Humble ordered a round of Jägermeister. He leaned in and said, “Here’s how you play.” They put their heads together.

  The girl in the sheer shirt already knew the dead girl game. Her friends knew it. Ben, in the warm rush of a whiskey shot, went along with it all, drank and laughed and kept a body count on the TV and let himself have this night.

  Paramedics put Sarah on a stretcher, pale but conscious. Her face was blotchy. One said, “You’re going to be fine.”

  She grabbed Nyla’s hand. “Tell Ben. Write him a note, would you?” Sarah’s voice was a breathy whisper, almost sexy, entirely fragile.

  Nyla said, “Sure, honey. We’re going to clean up a little. Then I’ll meet you at the hospital.” Sarah could see in Nyla’s face she was trying to look calm.

  They carried her out past where Dulcet stood smoking and leaning against a car door, where Georgie sat in the car, where baby Bella slept in her cozy, overpriced, guaranteed-safe-forever car seat.

  Ben dropped his keys. He stooped to find them in the dark and the cobwebs of their badly lit porch. He found them and dropped them again, and it took a few tries, between the booze and the pain meds, but he got the key in the lock. He hadn’t been really drunk in forever. It felt good. His face was warm, and the night was cool. He opened the door. Inside he kicked off his shoes. The kitchen light was on, and somebody was moving around. He walked down the hall, glad to be home.

  He’d left the bar early, or it seemed early when he paid the tab, but now it was late, after midnight. How did that happen?

  He walked into the light of the room, welcomed by the fine rear ends of three beautiful women on their hands and knees. They scrubbed his kitchen floor. Three women, the three graces—beauty, charm, and joy—showed him the loveliest of human anatomy in their rounded, Tae Bo–sculpted, kickboxing-toned asses. Okay, Georgie’s wasn’t so toned, but it was still all right. His wife was probably upstairs asleep. Ben didn’t see the baby at first. When he did see the baby he had to stop and think—a baby?—before remembering: Georgie’s. The newborn slept in a car seat carrier.

  The dishwasher sang its song. More dishes were washed and stacked neatly to one side of the counter. He was glad that his wife had such good friends—that they had friends, their friends in common. He made that leap now, to think of them as his friends, too. His heart expanded. Actually, he was so full of love, he felt the blood swim to his drunken cock, a half nod to the good fortune of being surrounded by sexy women.

  Hannah felt like a weird dream, an old TV show. He was over her. He tried hard not to slur or spit when he asked, so gently, “How is Sarah?”

  One
after another the women, beautiful, curvy women, stopped scrubbing and lifted their heads. They were cats. Busy house cats, cleaning their pretty fur. They turned toward him. Each face was a closed mouth, narrow eyes, and he saw it, plain as a billboard on the side of the road, the headline on a newspaper: He’d been kicked out of their cat paradise. Each one offered the closed face of a woman who had vowed to never speak to him, to Ben, that bastard, ever again.

  Ben arrived at Emanuel Hospital with his buzz fading. The fluorescent lights were a quiet violence. Sarah sat in a cranked-up bed with a tray attached to a long mechanized arm adjusted to hover over her lap. A stack of short plastic cups rested on the tray. When Ben walked in, Sarah turned toward him and patted the mattress beside her hip in an invitation. “Ready to try again?”

  She looked thin in all the wrong places—around her cheeks and under her eyes. Her hair seemed longer, lank and greasy. Her nails were painted but already chipped.

  Had she been that pale when he left her at home?

  Her blanched skin under hospital lights let every old scar come forward, a visual journal of the times Sarah had fallen down as a kid, when she had chicken pox, a map of her life in bruises and nicks. He looked for the scar that blamed him—he’d let her down.

  She poured dark grape juice into a cup full of chipped ice. When she drank, her lips turned a deeper shade of purple. She wore a hospital bracelet, and a Band-Aid covered the spot where an IV had been.

  The TV news showed a pregnant monkey. “Oh, Jesus,” Sarah said. “They’re still running that story?” There she was on TV, huddled against the garbage cans. She tortured herself by watching. “I’m not that hairless primate, am I?”

  She was high on painkillers.

  Ben found a wheelchair pushed against one wall. He sat in it and used his heels to roll himself closer. “Sarah, I’m so sorry—”

  She flipped the channel. “It’s okay.” She drank her juice and watched TV. She found some kind of sitcom: an office, people talking. A laugh track.