The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Ben had been cool once. Hot enough to get laid, anyway. He asserted this to himself and silently debated with the punks like they mattered.

  Maybe he wasn’t fooling anyone these days about his coolness quotient, but he liked himself better behind the Lancôme mask.

  The MAX train cut him off at the corner as he started across the street.

  The doors slid open, people poured out, and in that crowd he saw Arena. She was tall and pale, and she stepped onto the bricks of the square and squinted into the sun. He was right in front of her, a few feet off, camouflaged by the masses. Why should a kid have such dark circles under her eyes?

  He remembered the day she was born.

  Now she looked tragic and gorgeous, and Ben had known women like that a few times in his life. Yes, he’d been cool enough to get laid by those very women.

  Arena looked lost. Was she lost? He called her name. The train shut its doors behind her, then moved off. Arena’s hair blew into her eyes. She shook it away, saw Ben, stepped closer, and gave a timid nod.

  He said, “No school today?” He heard his own words and it sounded like he was talking to a child. Ugh. He meant it as a good thing—a day off! Portland Public Schools had all kinds of in-service days, enough that it made the newspapers, because they couldn’t afford to keep the lights on, apparently. But the way Arena’s lips tugged down he could tell he’d said something stupid, definitely square, or straight, or whatever they called it now.

  Was she expelled again? He couldn’t keep up with her drama. He shoved the Nordstrom bag back in his jacket pocket, where it didn’t fit and wouldn’t stay.

  Arena said, “You’re wearing makeup.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Ben’s chuckle sounded fake even to himself—mostly to himself. He was a weak liar. How could she see that expensive foundation?

  There was one male makeup guy in Nordstrom. He worked behind the MAC counter, an Asian man who liked to run hot pink under his eyebrows and line his eyes in deep black. He looked ready to star in Cats. His was the sort of thespian outsider flair that gave men in makeup a bad name.

  So Ben had gone to the Lancôme counter instead. He didn’t opt for eyeliner. His makeup was all about concealer.

  When Arena did look at him, her eyes were big and brown, and conveyed sincerity and maybe grief; she’d known Ben her whole life. He said, “Okay, a little. To cover my broken nose.”

  Arena’s lips were chapped. She said, “It doesn’t look broken anymore.”

  “Then it’s working!” He forced a laugh again, like this was all easy for him.

  She let her gaze drift down the street. Maybe she had somewhere she was supposed to be. Like, high school? When she touched her face, her fingernails were dirty.

  If she had somewhere to be, she didn’t seem to want to go there. What was wrong? Ben was no good at deducing, couldn’t tell if it was something big or small, serious or growing pains. Sarah would have it all figured out already.

  Once, when Arena was maybe five years old, for some reason Ben had been left in charge of her. He had to watch her, this little kid, for a couple of hours. Thing was, he’d let her cut paper with scissors that were too big and sharp for a child. What did he know back then? She’d sliced her finger and bled all over the paper he’d given her, and she screamed. He remembered his panic when he didn’t know what to do. But he’d washed her hand and found a Band-Aid, and she loved that Band-Aid even though it was only a plain one the color of nobody’s real skin, the color of cheap makeup. She quit crying, and her resilience made him suddenly feel like an expert in child care. Then they’d walked to the store and he bought her a Klondike bar, and they sat on a dirty bench in the sun.

  She needed a Klondike bar now. She needed a meal and a little under-eye brightener. He said, “They do makeup at Nordstrom. It’s free.”

  She smirked and shrugged his suggestion away. Then it was like watching a silent movie, the way her face shifted, falling from smug to broken. Her mouth opened, ready to say something, but there were no words.

  He fumbled for something to say, to find their equilibrium. Did she need help? He said, “Your art show’s tonight.”

  She looked at him like she was drowning. She said, “Screw it.” After a shaky moment she spit out, “I’m not going.”

  Nyla had been talking about the show all week. She’d sent out e-mails, sometimes at three or four in the morning. He said, “Your mom posted it as her Facebook status.” Maybe they’d laugh at this together, a shared perspective, a healthy distance.

  “God.” Arena only twisted her hair. She held her own arm, hugged herself, and said, “I hate that school. I’m in the wrong classes. I don’t want to hang my work in the show. It’s fucking stupid.”

  The way she said “fucking” was like the word didn’t come naturally. She was testing the waters.

  Ben needed to say exactly the right thing. This was what it meant to be an adult; it was his job. He’d never been a parent—wasn’t even a coach. Arena bit her lip, and her chapped lips started to bleed.

  Ben said, “Listen,” and she turned toward him. She really did it—she listened. He’d set himself up now, as though he had advice.

  Where was that Klondike bar? The Band-Aid. The comfort of a public bench.

  He hated his job the way she hated school. Why go back? He was a punk rock runaway hidden in his own button-downs and Dockers. He tried again, and paced his words. He said, “Sometimes, we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “You’re giving me the ‘Suck it up’ speech?” She took a breath so deep it raised her teenage chest. She started to leave.

  He said, “No. Listen.”

  He couldn’t believe it when she turned back—she gave him another chance. Why? She waited.

  She made him feel like an adult.

  Who was he? He was a fat kid who’d grown taller and thinned out, and now he was a man with a job and two ounces of overpriced cosmetics in his suit jacket pocket.

  He said, “I understand.…” He aimed to be honest. He wasn’t sure what in him was even a little honest or clear anymore. He said, “I get it. I understand your destructive urges.”

  Arena quit her nervous flickering and looked at him then. Her eyes narrowed. He’d said either the right thing or the wrong thing, and he was working on his next line when she asked, “What did you say?”

  He said, “I mean, sometimes we all—”

  She said, “No. Say it exactly. Say what you said.” She moved in closer. Her cracked lips were open, like she breathed through her mouth, like a kid with a stuffy nose, a child who had been crying, in need of Vicks VapoRub. He took his small, crumpled shopping bag back out of his pocket and found the tissue paper inside it. He used the white tissue to dab Arena’s bleeding lip.

  She pulled her head away from his hands and said, “Say it.”

  He tried to remember exactly. “I understand your … destructive … urges.”

  Arena scowled, but then it wasn’t a scowl, it was tears, and her mouth folded and she looked sick, and her face flushed red.

  She wrapped her hand around the bloody tissue paper in his hand and threw herself against him, crying into his shoulder. Her hair was a tangled smell of incense and skin. Another cargo load of people poured off the next MAX and stared as they parted around him and Arena, and Arena sobbed.

  He touched the ends of her tangled brown hair. He said, “You’re okay.”

  She tried to talk. She said, “My dad. Marquee Moon—” She coughed on her own snot and tears.

  Had Ben inadvertently quoted lyrics? It rang a distant bell, Tom Verlaine. Maybe he’d heard that song. Maybe every sentence possible had become lyrics by now. He said, “Shhh …”

  She said, “It seems so perfect—” and she choked again and couldn’t talk and Ben petted her hair and wondered if he’d sweat off his makeup. It was all too much, too intense, it was like he’d found a lost pet and couldn’t let it go and he didn’t
mean to bring this animal home but he was in deep and didn’t know what else to do. Arena stayed wrapped around him. If she cared about what anybody thought, she didn’t let on. She didn’t wear makeup. She didn’t hide. Ben hid. Always. These days he wrote an ongoing script for the gutter punks’ judgments, for strangers, talking back to a world that talked around him, about him, about how he looked, and mostly about what his life meant or failed to mean.

  A coworker came down the street. Ben turned his face into Arena’s shoulder to hide. She wouldn’t let go. He reached for his cell phone. He’d call in sick—say it was an emergency, because it was, and he was in way over his head.

  Say you’re a fish in the Labridae family. You’re a pretty thing, bright and darting out near a coral reef, living to entertain snorkelers. In that family, maybe specifically you’re a wrasse. That’s a fine name for a creature, a word that comes from the Welsh, based on a word that means an old woman or a hag.

  Sarah felt herself a wrasse as she rode in the car alongside Ben.

  She’d lost everything. Her dog was dead. Her babies had never been born. Now they were a ghost family frolicking together in her broken heart.

  But Labridae are clever fish, adaptive and tricky, and she hadn’t given up. Here’s their best trick: They all stay female in their harem as long as there’s a male in charge. If you lose the male? A female changes sex. It’s biological transsexualism.

  Somebody has to step up.

  Ben’s makeup was badly blended near his earlobe. Sarah reached out and smoothed the line away. She looked into his eyes, while he watched the road, and she said, “That under-eye concealer is really fantastic.” He had a gossamer shimmer where he’d once had umber circles of exhaustion.

  “Thank you. You’re not supposed to notice it.” He cleared his throat, as though quietly clearing himself of something that might have been shyness or shame.

  Arena sat in the backseat, her hands folded in her lap. They were on the way to her art show. They’d called Nyla and had a very long talk. The plan was to mediate a careful reconciliation. Arena had already threatened to run away again. Apparently she’d slept one night in an abandoned house, outside of Portland, some meth lab gone wrong by the sound of it. Ben had persuaded Arena to follow through with the show, when the others failed. Now the show would be a neutral spot, like a public child drop-off point arranged for some feuding and divorced families.

  They passed a cluster of lingering day laborers, male Homo sapiens complete with their particular gametes. Homo sapiens, Latin for “wise man.” The old woman that was Sarah gazed at the parade of wise men.

  Some people are obsessed with garage sales. Others browse real estate, or “Brake for angels!” Sarah shopped day laborers. She couldn’t help it. A rangy man with long ringlets of deep brown hair flashed a scar on his cheek like he’d been in a knife fight, and caught her eye: knockout genetic material, there in the strength of his arms, the saunter of his walk. She touched Ben’s shoulder. “Pull over. Here. Stop!”

  Ben popped on the brakes. A car behind them honked. He saw the line of men on the side of the road, furrowed his glowing, concealer-laden brow, and put his foot on the gas again. “No. Not now.”

  Sarah kept a wistful eye on the day laborers as they drove on past.

  He put a hand on her knee. “Sarah, it’s getting compulsive.”

  In his glance, she felt the boundaries of their marriage eroding, or expanding. What she wanted was a family in her house to claim as their own.

  And Sarah was a wrasse, an old hag in the making. She was her own example of biological transsexualism, and a convert from faithful to desperate, from passive to an effort at taking control. She’d build a family even if she had to do it alone.

  Nyla locked her store’s gate under a clear sky and a full moon. The city smelled like one big natural gas leak.

  She wanted her daughter, and wanted Portland to smell like good Pacific Northwest air even when it was full of enough benzene to bring on leukemia, when the papers called it a “toxic soup,” and an unchecked factory in the heart of town spewed microscopic aluminum particulates.

  After a third try, her car started. She pined for her girl in a way that hurt more than her pulled muscle. It was like she’d had an organ removed, an open hole in her body.

  Halfway to the show, she stopped to buy flowers.

  Dulcet eased into her latex suit. She and Mr. Latex had negotiated a second round. There was money involved, and promises. She actually liked him. He wasn’t awful.

  She’d finished touching up the studio portraits of Georgie and Bella. In the photos, the bodies, mother and child, looked physical, architectural, and seductive. Georgie’s hair was a chaos of greasy strands, and it worked. Her body was confident in ways Georgie used to be.

  When she saw those pictures, Georgie would love herself.

  Dulcet slid the stack of photos between two pieces of cardboard and wrapped silver elastic cord around them as a makeshift portfolio. She’d go to the art show, give Georgie her prints, then meet Mr. Latex afterward. Her suit was on, her body snug and hot inside that perpetual warm hug.

  The show was in the gymnasium. Sarah, Ben, and Arena arrived early to set up. Arena had a bolt of netting stashed in her school locker. She had two digital projectors checked out from AV.

  A maintenance man was there and had hung the pulleys.

  Arena’s piece was called Behind the Mosquito Net: Synthetic Heaven. If anyone asked, she would’ve said it was about humanity.

  Nobody asked, though.

  She would have said it was sex and death. It was about saving her father—keeping him alive, though he was already dead. He’d slipped through her net, his energy scattered. If a person had the right net, speaking metaphorically, you could let the body rot but keep the energy together in human form. Why not? Mack and Einstein convinced her of that. The trick was how to harvest and contain that energy.

  Arena imagined a net that could hold life together.

  “Put the projector on the floor,” she told the AV guy, and waved a pale arm. He sat the tiny electronic projector on the red ring of the basketball court.

  She bent to adjust the machine, extending its tiny forelegs until it pointed up. Families filtered in. The boy with the whale migration project set up along one corner of the gym. A girl came in with her mom and dad and a pack of Mint Milano cookies. She’d drawn cartoons about family dinner in Sharpie marker inside jar lids.

  Georgie arrived, hugging baby Bella in a swath of blankets, and found her way across the gym. The maintenance man hoisted lengths of cosmic fishnet. Arena was watching it go up, like a captain overseeing her boat’s rigging, a dirty seafarer with tangled hair and cuts on her hands, but gorgeous, stern lipped, and steady.

  “Where’s Hum?” Sarah asked.

  “Not coming,” Georgie said. She hadn’t seen him in days. It took steady effort to not answer his phone calls. Now she’d worked to push her hair into place, to look like she ever slept at all.

  Sarah asked, “Are you okay?”

  Georgie started to nod yes, then her lip trembled. She pressed her mouth against her daughter’s soft hair.

  A woman, a stranger, tapped Ben on the shoulder. She gave him a hug. “So good to see you, Benjamin!” Her voice was cultivated in an acting-school kind of way.

  He flushed even through the cool, smooth tone of his foundation. He said, “What’re you doing here?”

  Sarah wasn’t used to Ben having friends who weren’t her friends.

  The woman tapped a fine fingernail to a badge pinned on her suit jacket: judge.

  “Sarah, remember I told you about Hannah? My friend from college.” Ben seemed nervous. He’d left out the world girl. His girlfriend from college, now in politics, Hannah smiled the gracious, munificent smile of the newly elected.

  Ben shuffled like a boy. He tried to hold back a smile and it came out broken and warped.

  Sarah wasn’t threatened. Ben could have his elation. She was drifty a
nd detached behind the veil of her prescriptions, where she forged her own plans: If Ben didn’t step up, didn’t get his sperm checked, Dale was her backup. If Dale backed out, there were day laborers. Right?

  She and Ben had their house together. They were married! A team. They were animals in captivity and they’d caged themselves and she hated the trapped quality of it all—she’d drop dead before Ben took action. They’d have no kids, no grandkids—and that anger cruised through her veins, and she held it in check with Klonopin.

  Muscovy ducks might stay faithful to their partners for a whole breeding season—which is to say, not very damn long. A season? Humans get so locked into their little contracts. Why can’t the partnership of marriage be split off from that sperm-collecting urge of the fertile female? Sarah could crack open the door on their cage. She could take the pressure off Ben.

  She shook hands with Hannah.

  Hannah wore a wedding ring, too.

  Parents and grandparents came to see the show. Ben and Hannah stepped to the edges of the crowd.

  A shrill scream pierced the room, the happy sound of kids playing, as melodic as a murder scene, and Ben couldn’t hear what Hannah said. That screech was awful! He wasn’t even sure he liked kids. He and Sarah, they had good furniture. Kids ruined furniture. They slept late on the weekends, and little kids didn’t let that happen. A baby would grow into a teenager, and who wanted a teenager in the house?

  Hannah spoke steadily about her new role as senator. “State senator,” she clarified, tapping a gentle hand to his arm.

  Ben eyed her eyeliner. She wore a streak of white shadow, a highlight carefully drawn under the arch of her eyebrow, there to brighten her face at the brow bone. The plum shadow in the folds of her eyelid was designed to enliven the hazel of her eyes.

  He knew her tricks.

  He never realized how much makeup some women wore until he started experimenting with it himself. Sarah went to work in the nude, makeup-wise. Now that he wore the mask, he could see the mask on everybody else.