The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Nyla was the mother bread’s mother.

  Every ten days forever that starter would be ready to split, like cells dividing, turning into twins, triplets, quadruplets.

  Bread without end, amen.

  Every ten days she’d have a new gift to give away. It was a chain letter in dough form. They’d all make bread together, tending that baby. She’d give a starter to the parents of that boy when she found them.

  Her answer to the world’s despair was bread.

  She lifted a cup of dough out of the starter. Two more times, and she had three gifts. Nyla had three lumps of bread dough individually packaged in plastic bags, each one round and white.

  She headed for Sarah’s.

  This was the day to spread her love.

  Dulcet claimed it as a day to spread her legs and her latex. A day to get the bills paid. The banks had shut down one of her lines of credit, though she had made her payments on time and met their incredibly high interest rate. It was the new lending climate. Her other cards were maxed. The schools hadn’t brought her in to do the body show since the “incident,” as she thought of it, in the closet.

  She had options: sell off photography equipment, give up the cheap lease on her studio, or pull out the latex suit.

  Mr. Latex was her answer, her angel. He would be her stopgap.

  He seemed genuine in his urges. Maybe he was a dedicated cop sustaining an undercover ruse, or a patient and conniving murderer. More likely he was a man pushing sixty who saw death skulking on the horizon and wanted his needs gratified in this lifetime. She slid out a clothing bag from under the bed. Like a vampire, the latex suit didn’t do well stored in the light of day. She unzipped the case and lifted her organs out. There was the lung vest, the respiratory system, and the underlayer of ovaries, uterus, and kidneys. The pieces were well oiled with a silicone that gave them a shine. Inside, it was dry and clean and powdered. She laid it on the bed.

  The one part that was missing from this woman’s body, she thought for the first time, might be a developing fetus in the uterus. She hadn’t considered making a pregnant anatomy when she ordered the suit. She always thought of it as anti-baby.

  She put her hand inside, behind the uterus, and wondered how a baby doll might work, upside down, against her own skin, under the latex.

  She could take a Sharpie and draw in a simple, tiny embryo. Then she’d be in Nyla’s body, that fertile, fecund maker of babies.

  Nyla was on the verge of an empty nest, and suddenly—Inexplicably! Wham!—pregnant. Ding-ding-ding! What were the odds of that? Dulcet was pretty sure Nyla had engineered the situation on purpose.

  Clearly, Nyla had lost all sense of herself except as a mother.

  Dulcet pulled off her dress, kicked off her underwear, then sat stark naked beside the suit and began to rub a water-based lube across her stomach. She worked lube over her bony hips and along the arch of her ass.

  The goal was for the suit to happily glide on, not tear or overstretch. Latex clothes are big bucks. This one was tailor-made, and it was her income; she babied that precious fetish wear.

  Nyla, uneasy about leaving the house since she had started showing up on the local news, scrambled to her car. She locked the doors and revved the engine, always grateful when the car started. She’d been recognized more than once by neighbors, as that woman from TV who beat up some punk. Her neighborhood business association invited her to teach a class in self-defense for small business owners.

  The newspaper found reasons to get extra mileage out of her photo: ECONOMY WORSENS, VIOLENT CRIME ON THE RISE. And there would be her picture, the poster victim of rising violent crime. They were saving money by rerunning the image.

  She didn’t feel like a victim. She’d put up a serious fight. It was possible that, out of the two of them, she was the only one fighting. That kid could not keep his hands up, to protect his face, to save his life.

  Alvin Kelvin Aldrich was the prisoner who set the record for crowding in the juvenile jails. His sweet, sad face showed up under headlines such as SYSTEM OVERBURDENED.

  She hurried up Sarah’s front steps. Her breathing was shallow. She was kind of a wreck. She cradled what she’d come to think of as her Bundle of Love, the starter dough, knocked on the door, and kept her coat collar pulled up high.

  The city was a sprawling jail under cement-gray skies. Nyla had donated what extra money she could come up with to the Oregon Humane Society that month. She gave money to save ringed seals. She bought a magazine subscription from a kid who came to her door even though she didn’t believe the magazines would ever be delivered.

  It was her ongoing effort to atone.

  When the door opened, it wasn’t Sarah or even Ben. It was a big, silent, brawny, weathered man. Thieves? Nyla’s fist tightened, with an urge toward self-preservation. But she couldn’t start another fight, not ever, not in that town. She tried to think peaceful thoughts. “Is Sarah here?”

  The man rotated his thick neck to gaze back into the house. Nyla took two steps away. She felt hands wrap around her shoulders, and when she moved she stepped on somebody’s foot, gave a yip, and flung her Bundle of Love.

  “Hey, darlin’.” Sarah’s voice, behind her, was the burble of a river. “I was in the backyard. What’d you bring us?” Sarah picked up the Ziploc bag of white starter dough from where it’d tumbled under an azalea bush and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Salt dough clay?”

  Nyla said, “Friendship bread. You can use it to make other starters, too, and expand the circle of friends.” Her voice was nervous and thin.

  Inside, the house had the smell of men at work: cut planks, fresh dirt, and sweat. Ben came downstairs with damp hair like he’d just stepped out of a shower. He walked in a cloud of berry shampoo—not the smell of work at all. Sarah took the starter to the kitchen, leaving her alone with Ben. Nyla still hadn’t forgiven him for abandoning Sarah during the miscarriage.

  Now she asked, “What do you have going on?”

  “We’re adding a deck!” Then more quietly, confidentially, Ben said, “She’s been fragile, since the last miscarriage. Home improvements keep her spirits up.”

  There were the sounds of a handsaw being drawn back and forth against wood. Sarah came back from the kitchen, and Ben put a hand on her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him. They seemed so happy together, completely partnered. They even looked alike. Nyla missed the days when she’d had a husband. She missed it more than anyone could imagine.

  Sarah and Ben’s lives were perfect and easy.

  All Nyla did, all she’d ever done, was work. She felt it now, watching the hired men. She’d rehabbed her own houses. She knew how to use a Sawzall, for God’s sake, that mark of an ambitious, self-sufficient homeowner.

  The pain in her side spoke up in its way. Ugh. Nyla put a hand to it.

  Seeing Sarah and Ben so happy together, surrounded by all that industry, improving their lives, made her miserable, even as she was happy for them, and she couldn’t hold on to both emotions at once. They seemed so suddenly Ken and Barbie, both of them lanky but an average Oregon height, where women ran tall, the two of them like a pair of grande Americanos in that Starbucks daily measurement system, or a Subaru’s compact Outback, all those ways of saying middle ground, evenly matched in their long limbs.

  She couldn’t stay there. It was easy to excuse herself—she was incidental to their happiness. She got out.

  She wanted to see Dulcet.

  Dulcet, her dear debauched friend, that lone wolf, would be an antidote to the overwhelming hit of Sarah and Ben’s domestic bliss.

  Arena marched at the edge of the road and heard her feet crunch gravel along with a symphony of crickets, tall grass rustling, and the hum of electrical wires. The road was empty and the dark was crowded with noise. There were no lights. The stars were clear but small and far away between cloud cover. Starlight? That was a joke. The stars didn’t light up anything but themselves.

  She’d taken the last bus o
ut.

  She used her iPhone to find directions to the address of the house on the back of AKA’s photo. She tried to use the same phone to light her way, but that dim light only made her feel more visible against the dark.

  She could use the phone to actually make a call. To talk to her mom, to tell her about the hippie. Arena’s wrist was red and swollen.

  But this was her mom’s fault. She never wanted to talk to her mom again.

  She wanted to see AKA, cry into his shoulder, smell him up close. The thought of his caramel skin kept her going forward. She thought about her own virginity thing. This was the time: She’d find AKA and tear his clothes off. She’d give herself over—pull his body so close even their molecules could mingle.

  Her thigh muscles tightened against the cold night. She came to a mailbox and used her phone to light the numbers of the address on the side of it. She was closer.

  Her legs were machines. Her breath was shallow. She could smell AKA’s mix of cigarettes, sweat, and soap, and tried to imagine his room in the house he grew up in: clean sheets, a doting mother, a woodstove. Houses in the country all had woodstoves, right?

  After forever—miles?—she found the address in black numbers on gold squares stuck to a mailbox. She slid the photo from her coat pocket; it was hard to see the details in the dark. She held the photo close to the light of her phone.

  This was the house.

  The mailbox, covered in rust, crumbled when she prodded it with a finger. A car approached from far away. Its lights ran across Arena, illuminating her on the side of the road. She ducked behind bushes that grew in the culvert. The culvert was full of rain, though, and it soaked through the fabric of her Toms.

  Could AKA be in the car?

  The car slowed, as though looking out into the dark. What if an ax murderer drove down that empty road and saw her stumbling along?

  She froze, like a deer.

  The car sped up again, kept going, and left the night darker than before. If it had been a murderer, Arena would be dead. That’d show her mom faster than anorexia, which was the way most girls at Maya Angelou called out for attention. It’d be faster than alcohol poisoning even, and more decisive than teen pregnancy.

  Her mom would love a teen pregnancy! She was nuts about babies.

  Arena walked on trembling legs down the pitch-black driveway, where it was covered with the tangle of branches, leaning trees, and vines. Leaves had fallen, thick on the ground.

  The house, when she reached it, looked diseased, with black patches against pale paint. There was a car in the driveway. Something moved. Arena froze.

  She saw the movement again. It was so slight—like somebody who didn’t want to be seen, the shoulder of a crouched man. No, it was a tire swing on a thin and frayed rope. The screen door was half off its hinges.

  “Hello?”

  A window was broken. Something had happened here. A fight? The house looked beaten up. “AK?” she called. She stepped onto the porch, reached past the broken screen door, lifted a knocker, and let it fall against the wood.

  She jumped at the sound, even as she made it.

  When she stopped knocking, there was only the song of the invisible bugs in the grass, frogs, crickets, or the electric hum. The windshield of the car was dark with the rot of fallen leaves. Arena put her hand around the brass doorknob and turned. It gave in. The smell of the house came out to meet her.

  She broke a law; she stepped inside.

  An open magazine sprawled on the couch. A pan of water waited for a dog, or for the roof to stop leaking, or both. Arena stepped over matted socks and a dirty carpet. A few more steps and she saw the kitchen. The fridge was pulled away from the wall. And there he was—AKA.

  He was in a photo under a Disneyland magnet. He was a boy, then older.

  A house is a box for a family. She opened bedroom doors. There was a room with a sliding closet door, and the closet was open, crowded with plastic hangers and women’s clothes.

  Two more doors and then she found a room with a short bookcase, a mess of T-shirts, and blue and yellow wallpaper. A boy’s room. The bed was narrow and cheap and broken.

  This had to be his.

  There was a watch on the floor. Arena picked it up. It was the kind with a clock face, not digital, and it had a rotating sun and moon, to show day and night. In an old movie a watch would be a clue—she’d seen that before, in Chinatown. Here the only thing it meant was a dead battery.

  But something violent had happened; the house was ashamed. The family was gone. Einstein was wrong. Energy was both created and destroyed in that place—she could feel it—and the history of a family was trapped in decay.

  Nobody marked off the crime scene because the crime didn’t happen all at once. A house was a horrible thing.

  She was in that closed-off part of AKA’s brain, the home that would haunt him in dreams. There was no bus back to the city until morning. The night was pitch-black, and the light switches did nothing. Arena picked her way over the cluttered floor, stepping around the shimmer of puddles. She went deeper into the smell, to the kitchen. She took AKA’s school portrait photos off the refrigerator. She took the picture of him happy in the backyard. She held the photos in her palm and pressed them into a tight stack, each one cut to the same size. She collected the photos the way people bury the dead, because maybe if she got his pictures out of that house, it’d help his spirit.

  Her arm hurt from fighting off the hippie. She was so far from Portland, in an awful corner of a forgotten world. There was no way home.

  Nyla sang as she limped the halls of Dulcet’s apartment building. She sang anything—parts of songs, words, “Good day sunshine,” “Think I can make it now”—with one hand to her hip, bearing her second Bundle of Love. The long, yellow hall reeked with cat urine. She passed one apartment door, then another, swimming her way to France, to that metaphoric further shore, a place of forgiveness.

  She’d lived in only one apartment in her life. As soon as she was married, they’d bought their old house and torn it down to the studs. They were young. And when her husband died, she kept working on that house, forever. She actually envied Dulcet’s cheap digs: Why was she, Nyla, devoted to the temple of her home? She was a servant to her house, a place for her babies.

  She knocked on Dulcet’s door.

  “Christ!” somebody barked.

  Did it come from Dulcet’s room, or down the hall?

  Nyla knocked again then put her ear to the door.

  A man came in through a back door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. He stopped farther down the hall, looked at Nyla, and said, “Didn’t I see you on TV?”

  There was a crash inside the apartment. Was Dulcet okay?

  The man down the hall pointed a fat finger. He said, “D’oh! Better get in my apartment! You could be dangerous.” He raised his hands and crouched, in a sloppy kung fu posture. “Ha!”

  He was a human enactment of the throbbing ache in Nyla’s side. Her palms broke out in a pain sweat.

  She found a pen in her handbag. She leaned into the wall and wrote on the card she’d brought along, “Love is all there really is, and I love you. Love, your friend, Nyla.” Then she drew hearts, which was a way of saying love, without saying it. Could she get any more love on that card? At the bottom she put an asterisk, and a PS, and a little note: “See you at Arena’s art show!” and one more heart, and hugs and kisses.

  The man down the hall said, “You use a half nelson on that scum sucker?” He fell into a coughing fit that sounded like he needed an inhaler fast.

  Nyla took her phone out to call Dulcet, and as she dialed, another call came in.

  Arena.

  There was another crash inside Dulcet’s place. Something was wrong. Nyla could call her daughter back.

  Mr. Latex scurried to put his Dockers on even as Dulcet tugged them away. She hissed, “Shhh—we’re okay.”

  She wore her superhero anatomy suit, complete with thigh-high boots and a length of unspool
ed rubber intestine meant to serve as a whip.

  The knocking didn’t stop. Mr. Latex said, “Cops?” He threw a crocheted afghan over the Volcano, where it stood like a major erection.

  She said, “Why would it be cops?”

  He said, “You’re in this with me.” He was high and paranoid, on the verge of flipping out. It turned out part of his game, what he wanted, was a booty bump from a latex doll. Yes, Dulcet was his doll, in her plasticized body, and he had asked for an anal administration of meth. At the time she’d said, “You’re insane, sir. That shit can kill a person.”

  It’d destroy a life.

  “Once,” he said. “I want to try it once. I’ve never done it.”

  By the beauty of his good teeth and ordinary, unscathed skin, she believed him. She said, “The future might deviate from the past, you know. I don’t want to start something—”

  He was a strange bird clawing at the ragged edge of his existence, wanting to find a genuine sensation in life before it was over. Dulcet could relate. She wasn’t there yet, but she could glimpse his pain on a distant horizon. He was an adult. He had his drugs. He’d done the legwork, if you could call it that.

  There was the knock on the door again.

  Mr. Latex Lover was so jumpy! Dulcet wasn’t on steady ground herself. Yes, they were high, and who was that at her door?

  But the money. “We can finish,” she said.

  She’d had him half-convinced to stay, even after the third knock, until a man’s voice outside the door cut in: “… use a half nelson on that scum sucker …”

  Latex ducked, like they could see him. Dulcet froze. They watched the door.

  She whispered, “You still owe me for the hours.” Her phone started to ring. She silenced it.

  “You owe me for the pot,” he said and pulled a T-shirt over his head.

  “You said you had pills.” The latex squeaked as she moved. She poured herself a whiskey.

  He couldn’t leave yet. She said, “They’re still out there.”

  He nodded, his teeth clacking together like a party skeleton, Day of the Dead, thinly cloaked in a temporary human casing.