The Stud Book (45 page)

Dulcet tripped in, in high heels and a long leather coat. She swung her purse and stumbled, but didn’t fall, and made her way to her crew, with the cardboard portfolio tucked under her arm.

“This is it?” She looked at the nets.

Arena lifted the remote and turned the projector on. A nearly naked man appeared dancing on the scrim made by a piece of mesh. The fabric was just dense enough to hold the image. The man wore snug white cotton briefs. He looked hopeful and vulnerable, naked and bruised.

Arena turned on the second projector and there he was again. “Reproduction,” she said.

On the first screen the man bent, pulled off his underwear, and danced. His cock hung free. As soon as the spectators all saw it, he bent and picked up his underwear again and put it back on. He was bold, then shy. He moved with intention, then something like regret. His regrets set in just as his twin on the other screen peeled his underwear off and did the same dance. They were in front of a mattress on the floor.

One undressed as the other dressed, in a loop.

Dulcet moved behind the scrim.

“You’re in the room with him,” Georgie said. Dulcet did a shimmy with the man on the screen, waved her portfolio, flashed her latex suit—her beyond-naked body—and gave her boobs a good
shake. Then she laughed, wrapped herself back in her coat, and said, “You’re with him, too. All of you.”

Everybody on the other side of the screen was in the room with the naked man. He faced the crowd from both sides; it was the same image. Ben looked through the screens and saw Sarah in the man’s bedroom, and felt the fleeting heat of possessiveness; he was ready to take his wife home. Dulcet saw Georgie and the baby with the naked man, a diorama of family. Sarah saw everyone, the gymnasium full of people, with the naked man front and center stage. She was used to watching animal hordes in cages. The gym was an exercise in overpopulation.

Nyla pushed her way through the gym doors, limped across the basketball court into the masses, and scanned for her daughter, cradling a wad of pink lilies wrapped in neon-green tissue. Her hip screamed. She pushed against that pain with one palm. Her vision was narrow, her mind focused.

The gym buzzed with families cooing over children’s art. “Look what our babies have done!” Every child was a genius.

Nyla was queasy, in a cold sweat with her pain, as she scanned that sea of humanity. Dulcet emerged out of the crowd, in front of Nyla. She leaned in. “More speed dating?”

Nyla looked confused. What was she getting at?

“Looks like you’ve pulled something,” Dulcet yelled, over the noise. This was almost as loud as the bar the night before. The sweet-bitter skunk of Dulcet’s pot breath was startlingly close.

Dulcet laughed. When did she get so many teeth? She said, “You’re limping like you’ve had major action.” Dulcet’s coat flashed open as she moved ever closer. Underneath, she was all organs: lungs, kidneys, and ovaries as visible as if her skin had been peeled off.

Georgie moved in, with her baby, and asked, “Yoga strain?”

Nyla had only one person in mind. She stepped around them, said, “Darling!” and held out her arms to her daughter. Arena recoiled. Nyla came at her with the flowers. Arena didn’t take them, but instead ducked behind a screen, behind her rippled fabric. Then Nyla saw the dancing man, too. Before then, her eyes had been solely on her girl.

“Look familiar?”

The naked man stepped out of his underwear. He flashed an
awkward glance. Nyla recognized him and gasped. She dropped the lilies. “Him!”

“Yes. Him.” Arena spit the words. She broke them off, crumpled them like paper, made them sound recycled and weathered. She hadn’t spoken to her mom since she saw the photo in the news. She hadn’t even been home.

Nyla felt like she was losing her mind. Was that really
him
? She wasn’t sure. She’d never seen her attacker naked. “Who is he?”

“He’s a good guy, Mom.” The girl’s voice choked. “I love him.”

The man disappeared from one screen, then the second screen. “We can’t show this here.” Mrs. Cherryholmes, with her frosted hair and frosted makeup, had turned the projectors off.

She’d expelled the image on the screen from the school. They were big on expulsion here.

“Can’t show art at an art show?” Dulcet giggled with a stoner’s glee, always up for an altercation.

Nyla picked up her fallen lilies. Arena had the remote in her hand and, in quiet defiance, turned one projector back on. AKA came back, dancing and naked. The principal bent and clicked it off. Arena turned on the other. There he was again.

Nyla whispered, “Alvin Kelvin Aldrich.” She stepped forward and back, then forward again, in constant nervous motion. Sarah recognized the movement. Where had she seen that dance before?

“So you admit you know him,” Arena said.

Mrs. Cherryholmes said, “This is inappropriate.” AKA disappeared.

“It’s a celebration of the human form,” Dulcet barked, accustomed to the argument in light of her own work. Now she felt lifted into the place of a role model. Despite all the missed birthdays and weak social skills, maybe Dulcet had an influence on the girl after all! Maybe this was her legacy, not a child but an artist. “Turn it on, Arena, honey.”

Arena did. There he was again.

The principal took the remote away. “It’s sexually explicit content.”

Arena turned to her mom. Nyla offered, “It’s … not?” Then again, with more conviction, “It’s not explicitly sexual.” The whole
time, Nyla never quit walking. It was like she couldn’t turn off part of her workout routine.

Georgie bounced her baby and murmured, “Well, it is kind of explicit.…”

“What’s wrong with explicit?” Dulcet’s voice was loud and clear even under the high ceiling of the gym, against the wail of children.

Arena sucked in her breath, that anxious response. She twisted her hair, still the girl-child she’d always been. She said, “Stand up for me, Mom!”

Nyla held no sway in this school or any school; she had nothing but struggles. She pressed a hand to the ache in her side, stepping from one foot to the other. She said, “This is about freedom of expression.”

In Portland, even the full-nude strip joints were deemed an exercise in free speech.

Mrs. Cherryholmes held on to the remote. “That doesn’t pertain to a public high school, when minors are present.”

Then Sarah recognized Nyla’s dance: It was the pacing of the one-eyed elephant at the zoo who had lost her baby. It was the nervous dance of a mother in pain.

Sarah could hardly stand to watch. She laced an arm over Nyla’s shoulders, but Nyla shook her off, waved at the screens, and said, “This is work my daughter did in school. Here.”

“Direct action!” Dulcet said. She bent to turn one screen back on, in her stumbling way, and her makeshift cardboard portfolio slipped from her arms, scattering an arc of black-and-white photos.

At a glance the pictures held the inviting curves of ripe fruit in sun and shadow. Upside down, sideways, and on top of each other, one materialized as a landscape of low hills. A white crescent was a shell, or an ear, until it became an arm wrapped alongside two legs, hands laced together under a knee. Ben was the first to come forward, crouch, and start picking the photos up, always eager to make himself useful.

And if one looked at the photos a moment longer, the curves settled into the planes of Georgie’s face and the fullness of her breasts and the dark circles of her nipples, and there was the baby, and it was a mother and an infant, and what was that sheer scarf of a drape? The black-and-white shadows and lights reached across the gray scale.

There was the triangle tattoo.
Any questions?

Georgie, her arms full of her child, couldn’t pick up the photos fast enough.

A woman in a sweat suit bent to retrieve a print that had slid far across the gym floor. Dulcet called out, “Hey, you’re still here?”

“So far.” The woman held a photo in front of Georgie, to compare the image. “This must be Georgie.”

“She saw the shots in my studio.” Dulcet was crouched down, too, now, in her high heels. She caught herself before falling sideways. “Remember my friend, the gym teacher?”

Georgie countered, “I saw yours.”

“This is not supportive. None of it,” Arena said, loudly—loud enough for any child services representative who might unexpectedly be in the area, as though she were talking to the world, not only her mother and her mother’s friends.

Nyla half-whispered, “Dulcet, it isn’t your show.”

“I’m not trying to take over,” Dulcet said, surprised.

“Well, you’re not trying to smooth things over, either,” Nyla added.

Barry Gibb moved through the crowd, shaking his mullet and meeting parents. This was the teacher who’d encouraged Arena, who’d let her do this work in his class. He looked like somebody’s way-too-old prom date, in jeans and a sport coat.

Sophomore year, Dulcet had crashed somebody else’s senior prom with a guy exactly like that.

The principal unplugged a projector and started winding up the cord. She said, “I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

“Ask them, you mean?” Nyla was ready to cut her friends loose, if that’s what it took to support her daughter.

“All of you.” The principal stood firm, mini-projector in hand.

Arena said, “Good riddance.” She walked out first.

“You can’t keep throwing us out!” Nyla said. “We just got her back in.” The AV guy brought a cart around. The principal slid the projector onto the cart. Arena had already walked off. Nyla called her name and tried to run, but only managed to limp after her daughter.

They found Arena on a post in a gravel stretch across from the school, under a slow children sign. Dulcet teetered in high heels as she crossed the gravel lot, pushing a palm to the childproof lid of an amber vial, reaching for ever-present pain meds.

Georgie, striding along with Bella in her arms, in her Keds, said, “Why do stoner chicks ever wear high heels? Seems harder than it has to be.”

Dulcet gave a grin and put a pill on her tongue. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“Anybody want to go out for ice cream?” Nyla held a hand to her hip. Her top lip was beaded with sweat. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles, and her hair was all flyaways. She chirped, “My treat.”

Sarah looked like she hadn’t heard. Georgie was busy with the baby.

Dulcet offered, “Vicodin? My treat.” Her latex suit gave a happy squeak against her leather coat.

Nyla winced at Dulcet, then looked to her daughter. “No, really. Dessert, honey?”

Arena kicked the gravel. Dulcet held Georgie’s photos jammed under one arm, out of their cardboard binder now. Arena reached over and slid one from the stack. They looked at Georgie’s naked body.

“Humble’s gonna whimper,” Dulcet said.

Humble.

If only he’d whimper
, Georgie thought.
If he’d weep. If he’d make amends. If only
. Bella fussed, and Georgie pulled down the neckline of her dress to let the baby nurse. She and Bella were good at stealth nursing, it turned out. Until her daughter was born, Georgie didn’t know she had such a talent.

Nyla said, “Where is Hum, anyway?” She reached one pale hand for a pole to steady herself.

Sarah said, “Are you okay?”

Nyla said, “He said he’d be here.”

Georgie flinched, like she’d been hit, and said, “You talked to Humble?”

“We had drinks, last night.”

That was why Nyla looked so trashed: drinks. Too many drinks.

Humble was out drinking with Nyla? He wasn’t laid up with remorse or getting into rehab. He was hitting the bars.

He was supposed to whimper, weep, and wail.

Georgie said, “Drinks? Aren’t you pregnant?”

Dulcet cut in, tipsy and loud, “Nyla, honey, we’ll do your maternity photos when you’re ready.”

“Maternity?” Arena turned to her mom. “Oh, God. Mom, no way.”

Nyla said, “I was going to tell you—I didn’t have a chance. There was the crystal meth thing—”

“Crystal Light,” Arena cut in.

“The timing didn’t seem right, then you took off—”

“So it’s my fault?”

Nyla said, “I’m only eight weeks along. It’s still the first trimester.”