The Stud Book (28 page)

“Madonna-like.” Georgie nodded and lifted her baby from the sling. Bella was in a sweet pink terry onesie, with even her little feet covered.

Dulcet asked, “Like mid-eighties Madonna, when she was cute and round?”

Georgie gave her daughter a pat, as though to say “All good,” and the eco-unfriendly disposable diaper crinkled beneath her hand. She said, “I mean, like early AD Madonna, the timeless one. Mother and child?”

Georgie wore a pink, nearly skin-color dress that she imagined as a drape, a Grecian wrap, or maybe even the plain cloth garb favored by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the French painter at the center of her dissertation. Vigée-Lebrun was famous for making everyone look beautiful, even though she dared dress her subjects in muslin during the era of lace, the rococo days, in the Palace of Versailles.

In the photos around the room, Dulcet had made everyone look gorgeous. Still, Georgie wanted that muslin.

Dulcet put her camera on a cabinet. She came forward and lifted Georgie’s hair, and Georgie shivered. “If you want classical, definitely strip.” She unzipped the zipper on the back of Georgie’s dress. “Naked is as timeless and sacred as it gets.”

The synthetic material gave no protest. The dress slithered down Georgie’s shoulders. She still had the baby sling on, like a beauty queen’s sash, and the dress caught on it, not yet fallen.

Around the room all those naked women laughed and leered. They paraded their confidence—Esteem! Built from posing naked!—smiled at Georgie, and dared her to smile back. She cowered. Bitchy Bitch lifted her head.

What kind of role model was Georgie if she couldn’t pose naked—couldn’t stand proud in her meat suit, as the saying goes?

Dulcet lifted the sling to take it away. Georgie let her and maneuvered Bella through the sling, though she held on to her dress with one hand. She asked, “Do you ever take photos of naked men?” Her voice came out a little thin and desperate, vying for a distraction.

Dulcet put the baby sling on her filing cabinet. She glanced at the lights and kicked the step stool to another corner to adjust another one. “Not often. With men, the whole focus is on the cock, you know? Erect, curved, relaxed. That’s it. With women, you can find more complex planes, invert conventions, find a cultural charge.”

Georgie hid behind her dress and her baby, uneasy with that cultural charge. Her nursing bra was heavy cotton, decorated with snaps where function trumped form. Worse than the bra, she still wore granny panties hoisted over her C-section scar.

Dulcet disappeared behind a tall rolling bookcase that served as a room divider, then came back out with an old cotton battery-operated jiggling baby chair on a metal frame. “Voilà!” She plunked it down. When she turned a switch it played a slow and garbled song. “Let’s start with a few of just you, until the room warms up.”

Georgie walked over to the bouncy chair. “What do you have this around for?” She put Bella down. The girl didn’t fuss. Without her baby in her arms, she felt naked already. Dulcet was stripping Georgie of props.

“I photograph some moms,” Dulcet said, and picked up her camera again. “You don’t have this much rock-solid sexual energy and not make a few babies. Now, you ready?”

“I’m fat.”

Dulcet snapped a picture. She said, “You’re gorgeous.”

Bitchy Bitch jumped off the chair and settled in closer, blinking big eyes. What’s more powerful, the male gaze, or a blinking bitch’s calm stare?

Dulcet let the camera hang around her neck and ducked behind her wall-shelf again. “I’ve got a little something to put you at ease.”

Georgie could hear her dig through a box. A little
something
. What did that mean? Georgie called over, “I’m still not drinking. And I’m staying away from pills. All of them.”

Dulcet came back around the corner tossing a silk scarf. It caught on the air, hung, then fell without going much distance. Georgie bent and picked it up, still holding her dress in place. As she bent she felt her bottom grow larger—expanding! Impossibly large. Her knees pressed together, she felt like a hippo. This body! She didn’t love it.

There, she admitted it to herself: She didn’t love her body. Was that such a crime?

She reached one hand down in front and pulled the damp nursing pads out of her bra. Her nipples were sweaty and cramped. She tossed the pads out of the way, off the backdrop. She reached back and unhooked her bra, under her dress. She’d known Dulcet twenty years, since before she became Dulcet Marvel, back when she was Tina Stanton and got her first job as a waitress at a French restaurant. They’d gone camping together. They’d been naked at hot springs. It was different with a camera. She’d have to trust Dulcet’s eye.

It really was about trust.

Georgie stared at the robust ta-tas and damp love lips of the women on the walls. “So are these all about developing relationships? Photographer and subject?”

Dulcet took a breath. She thought about the question. “Sometimes, secretly, I think maybe really it’s only about my relationship to me.”

Georgie let the scarf unfold. It was a wide scarf, and long, though sheer. She let her dress drop. The cold air was a chill.

Dulcet said, “A naked woman’s body is a commodity, as natural and common as homegrown pot. Strip everything away, like a stripper, and you’ve got this radical object. Take a picture of a woman’s back, it’s art. Show the vertebrae and ribs, it’s architecture. If you take the same picture from the front, straight on, it’s confrontational. Spread her legs, and the photo’s illegal to show in public, most places.

“And I am one. That’s the part I can’t get my head around. I am that object.”

Georgie reached a hand down and slid her fuchsia granny panties to her knees. She stepped out of them.

Dulcet said, “I’ve found two galleries to show my stuff. Both times, the show closed early.”

Georgie said, “And they sold out, right?”

Dulcet said, “Yes, that, too.” She snapped a photo of Georgie naked and veiled.

Georgie tried to relax. She tossed her head back. She twirled the scarf experimentally.

Dulcet said, “These’ll be a gift for Humble. Imagine he’s here—that he’s the one you’re posing for.”

Ha! Georgie hardly thought Humble would care. He was a simmering pot on the stove, the way he skulked around the house these days.

Dulcet said, “He’s one of the good ones.” Then she lowered her camera. She looked over the top of it. “What is that?”

“What?” Georgie looked behind her. Then she looked at her own front, at her soft stomach and pale thighs. Her scar was a red grin along the top of her pubic bone. She’d only just started to relax. Now the anxiety meter shot up again.

Dulcet said, “Above your ass, next to your tattoo?”

Jesus. Embarrassing! What was it? Georgie twisted to one side. She brushed her fingers over her skin and ran a hand down between her own legs.

Dulcet walked over to touch one finger lightly on the back of Georgie’s hip. “It’s huge.”

Georgie twisted around the other way until she could see a bruise the size of a softball, purple and yellow and faded at the edges like a storm cloud.

Dulcet traced a line up Georgie’s back. “And you’ve skinned
your spine. In another kind of shoot, we could use it as a prop, it’s that dramatic.”

There was nothing between naked Georgie and the world. “I fell down the stairs.”

Dulcet let out a long whistle.

She found an oversized tackle box. She opened one drawer, then closed it again and opened another. She took out a tube of makeup, a container of powder, and a few triangular sponges. She dabbed pale green concealer on her fingertips. “I’ll Photoshop it out, but it’ll be easier if we lighten it now.”

Georgie let Dulcet paint concealer on the round backside of her hip and dot cool makeup along her vertebrae. Dulcet asked, “Does that hurt?”

“No.” Georgie closed her eyes. She felt nerves radiate a hot pain under Dulcet’s fingers, and then again as Dulcet swiped her skin with a sponge.

Dulcet said, “Has Humble seen it?”

Georgie kept her eyes closed, without answering. The fingers on her back could be anyone’s fingers, taking care.

Why go into it?

When Georgie opened her eyes, baby Bella, in her pink onesie, was a sweet rosebud there on the floor, in her bouncy chair. She was pink and fresh, still figuring out how to lift her own head, a newborn baby girl. Bella smiled her small, toothless smile, glad to be part of the world, happy to be alive. She was beautiful. Georgie’s heart ached. Her skin warmed under the glow of the C-light as it poured light like an artificial sun kissing her bruised back.

A
rena had been raised to walk abandoned dogs at the pound—beautiful dogs they couldn’t take home. She’d planted trees every Arbor Day, though the trees mostly died the same season. She, her mom, and her sister had a tradition of forcing their way into Thanksgiving meals at Sisters of the Road, a shelter where Nyla thought it was edifying for a kid to serve a holiday dinner to black-toothed drunks.

Community service didn’t faze her—but what was up with the idea of unearned punishment? Sure, she sold Crystal Light on school grounds, and she sold those individual packages marked not to be sold individually. So what? Lesson learned.

But no. Here was community service coming at her again. Her assignment: litter. Also, meetings where she’d meet other losers.

Each meeting cost $75. If she was one minute late, they wouldn’t let her in. If she missed a meeting, she’d have to pay anyway and then pay again at the makeup session. It was rigged.

Her mom was totally lame about it. She’d said, “Take notes. Keep a journal. Later, it’ll all seem like a great story.”

They were still trying to fight the accusations, but the truth was, Nyla could not afford a lawyer. Instead, she gave Arena a bound
book made out of recycled paper, with a recycled cover, and a recycled card where she’d written, “Keep an Attitude of Gratitude. Life is an adventure! I love you always.”

An Attitude of Platitudes.

Nyla would quote a teacher she’d had: “Interesting stories happen to people who can tell them.” Arena was supposed to collect interesting stories.

Arena wrote “My Prison Journal” on the cover in silver Sharpie.

On Nyla’s bumper, another sticker declared nonviolent, not silent. Arena had never noticed how ineffectual her mother’s political opinions were until now. Her mama had no power.

Nyla gave Arena a ride to the work crew pickup station. As she saw her off, onto a county bus, she waved and said, “See you at dinner! Remember, it’s all material, right? Tell me how it goes.”

The bus was short and yellow, like a school bus but without the name of any school or district on the side. Inside it smelled like sweat and loserdom. It smelled like old backpacks, lost lunches, and guys who needed to shower. It was all guys, and her.

On the short bus there was no way-back, no far-back, no place different from the front, no place to use her hiding skills. She sat in the second seat and put her forehead against the dirty glass of the window.

In
Red Azalea
, Anchee Min, assigned the role of peasant under Chairman Mao, was taken away in a truck, starting from someplace called “People’s Square” in China.

Was this any different? Arena was assigned the role of criminal.

Anchee Min wrote, “My family stood in front of me, as if taking a dull picture. It was a picture of sadness, a picture of never the same.”

Arena replayed her mom’s words: “See you at dinner. Tell me how it goes!” Her mom seemed almost happy, like this was a scholarship to science camp or some extended writing exercise.

The bus took them to a barren hellhole strip outside of Tigard, a suburb. They got out and walked along a culvert on the side of the highway. A coordinator handed out orange reflective vests, plastic garbage bags, and gloves. He said, “Stay three feet apart minimum. No talking, no breaks.”

The bus took off. The man in charge got busy with his iPhone, moved away, and lit a cigarette.

Picking up garbage was as easy as picking blueberries in season: McDonald’s wrappers, Big Gulp cups, cigarettes, diapers, soda cans, a pair of pants, three pairs of underwear—two ladies’ and one pair of boxers.

Arena had never touched what she still thought of clinically as a “penis,” and had no ready list of familiar pet names, stories about banana shapes and commas. She heard those stories, but she was a loner and a listener and school was one big reality TV show where up until getting expelled she’d been cast as an extra.

Now, she held a blue and twisted rubber condom in her gloved hands, then put it in her bag.

How many other hands had slid into the work gloves Arena wore? It was cold out, but the gloves were rubber and her hands started to sweat. The reflective vest smelled like old cigarettes. She was in the costume of somebody else.

Arena could write that in her new journal: “Punished for crimes I never committed, made to wear the costume of a criminal.”

The guy picking up trash beside her inched closer, breaking the three-feet-apart rule.

He said, “Hey. You new?”