The Stud Book (32 page)

As soon as Georgie pushed open the Green Room door, she saw him. Right next to a tray of salami and Havarti. Clifford. She saw the red hair on his back, his giant head as it swung her way. His big cartoon character eyes and ever-present smile. Georgie said, “Clifford?”

The dog bobbed its massive head.

There was no mistaking the situation, and no way out.

Arena, behind her, giggled. Georgie shook the dog’s stuffed paw. Then Georgie turned and introduced Arena, because what else could she do? She was ready for full retreat—time to go home. It was time to hit the couch, cuddle with her baby, forget about work, career, networking. Forget about the world. It was time to drink the glass of wine she’d been denying herself since even before she got pregnant and take those pain pills the hospital had sent her home with. They had forty-five minutes to kill with a big red stuffed animal. Her job was to introduce a person in a dog suit.

Another volunteer handed her the assigned script.

“Okay,” Georgie said. She tried to smile. “Let’s go find your stage.”

Bella screamed when she was back in the stroller. Georgie offered her blankets, pillows, and a rattle that attached to the stroller bar with a martian-esque bobbly head, but the baby kept crying. Georgie broke out in a sweat, then gave in and carried Bella, letting the blankets and toys ride. Arena pushed the stroller through the crowded wide conference halls like some kind of middle school science lesson on birth control.

Right away they passed a group of three faculty from Georgie’s school. Georgie nodded, smiled, kept walking. She saw a former student who looked glad to catch her eye. She nodded back, adjusted the baby in her arms, and didn’t break her clip.

Who wants to mingle when your date’s a guy in a dog suit?

Then she saw Brian Watson. Maybe Brian Watson saw her first. Whatever. She saw her ex. The married professor, her professor, the man who never left his wife for her after all. That’d been so many years ago. It should’ve been forgotten. It was forgotten. They’d grown up. They grew out of it. She’d met Humble and fallen in love! Still, she lurched, stumbled against the carpet, tried to turn away.

His rock-star curls were silver—they’d been half-gray before—and still fabulous. He was a Fulbright fellow, an award winner. His skin had a perma-tan, weathered like a cowboy.

Georgie scratched the side of her face and held up the conference paperwork, a map of the booths and stages, to hide behind it.

“Georgie!” he called. His social skills had always been better than hers. Particularly if you count fucking around as a social skill.

She said, “Brian!” and hoped it sounded spontaneous.

He said, “Look at you, you haven’t changed at all.”

She knew it was a lie—her hair was thinner, her ass was bigger, she had toothpaste on her shirt. She hadn’t changed her clothes at all, was more like it. In this moment, Georgie wanted Humble by her side. She wanted her sexy man, her life.

Brian Watson said, “You brought your family,” and waved a hand.

“Family?” If only. Georgie kept a smile on her face. She followed the wave. There was her crew: Arena, tall and thin and
rumpled, who made the world into her own little Calvin Klein ad. Clifford stood with his hands on his hips. The stroller was full of blankets, rattles, a stray pacifier, and the martian-esque bobbly toy. There was something demented about pushing a stroller with no baby in it. Georgie tried not to slouch and not to stick her hip out under the weight of tiny Bella and the massive diaper bag. As a group, they were a family right out of the toy box, a hodgepodge of creatures pulled from different boxed sets. She forced what she tried to present as an easy smile, and said, “Sure. That one’s my husband,” and pointed at the big red dog. “And that’s our latest addition,” the empty stroller. It seemed funny, like a kid’s game, until she said it out loud.

Brian Watson, the smartest infidel in academia, the most gracious of liars, leaned forward so easily, so readily. He glanced at Arena’s boobs. He read her shirt. He said, “I heart old people. Fabulous!” He offered a hand to the dog suit. He said, “Nice to meet you. You’ve got a gorgeous family.”

How did he manage to come off as sincere?

His sincerity made Georgie feel like the cad, like she’d set him up, told him a lie.

Clifford’s smile never faltered. It couldn’t—it was sewn in. Clifford shook Brian Watson’s hand and nodded his big fuzzy head. It was like the dog was half-deaf in that outfit. Who was in there? Knock-knock. Georgie wanted to rap the dog on his head.

She said, “Really, only the baby is mine.”

Brian Watson tipped his chin up, like he was working out a philosophical angle, sinking into brainiac musings.

Georgie said, “The dog, Clifford, is a social signifier employed in this context to convey that interstitial terrain between childhood and adulthood, the locus between television, the great equalizer, and the individuality inherent in fantasy, as seen through the eyes—yes, plastic eyes—of an almost human form intended to elicit a sympathetic response while gratifying basic urges through purporting to know what we can never know, the mind of animals and the mind of the other …”

Georgie was looking for the end of her own sentence, while Brian Watson watched her like an infomercial. Maybe he was thinking about a new paper on hostility and comedy, one disguising the
other. Maybe he thought Georgie was a jerk. Either way he held a relaxed, pleasant look on his philosopher’s face. He took one step away. He didn’t laugh. He said, “Did you ever finish that book you were working on? What was it, Vigée-Lebrun?”

She flushed. How could he possibly remember that, and—Oh, God!—had she really been working on it for that long? She said, “I’ve started another book.” The hypochondriac’s guide, her book about baby ailments. He, an academic and an award winner, wouldn’t count that as professional work.

He said, “Really? What’s it about?”

“Health,” Georgie said. “And psychology.”

“Psychological health?” He dragged the words out in an awkward combination of syllables, making the whole thing sound preposterous.

Georgie nodded. “It’ll be a significant contribution to women’s studies—”

“Women’s studies?” he said, nodding as though he understood, but raising his eyebrows at the same time, as though she were talking about unicorns and fairies.

She said, “It’s a nonfiction work offering advice based on a particular study.…” That study was her, Georgie’s life, her own ex perience.

But Brian Watson had already quit listening. A tall, thin woman half his age ran her arm through his, and he shook his silver hair. He said, “Take care, okay? Don’t be a stranger, kid.” He tapped her with a rolled-up program.

The dog turned its big head Georgie’s way. She saw a second set of eyes behind sheer black screens, hidden in the dark fabric of the animal’s mouth. Those eyes—did they look at her with pity? Georgie couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman inside. An androgynous judge. It was somebody who refused to talk. Did this outfit, this Halloween joke, this toddler celebrity, really need an introduction?

Georgie walked. Arena, with the empty stroller, fell in line. Clifford, too.

What kind of parade has my life become?
Georgie thought.

She avoided everyone she could until she saw the department chair, her adviser. Part of her tenure committee. “Hello, Dan,” she said.

“So, I see you found your guest,” Dan said. He rocked up on his toes.

“Can you believe it?” Georgie whispered. She turned away from the animal, afraid it could read lips. “Out of all the visiting stars, the professors, the writers, I end up with a stuffed dog.”

The department chair closed his mouth into a thin smile. He gave a slow blink, and said, “I was sure you’d be thrilled.”

“Wait, you knew about this?”

He said, “I set it up. You’re perfect.”

Georgie felt her face grow hot. Her fingers were trembling. She needed to sit. Why was she suddenly “perfect” to introduce a cartoon character?

This didn’t look good for tenure.

She wanted to put the baby down, to walk away, to pull herself together. Her arms were weak and strong at the same time—it was like there was no weight to them, no blood, but like she could swing, could hit something and pack a punch. She wanted to run, to jog, to get off the planet.

“Because I’m a mom?” she said.

“Sure, and it’s fun, right?” Dan clicked his fingers down low, a habit he had.

Not “fun” in any way that he might take it on himself—his serious, academic, male self. He saw her now as a mother, existing in the world of children’s books, not literature.

He saw her as a child.

She wanted to throttle him.

She called to Arena and handed over the baby. Bella screamed immediately, in that psychically attuned way that infants can give voice to the parent’s inner life; Georgie wanted to scream, too. She reached for the stroller. She turned around to grab her diaper bag, too fast, and bumped into a group of men coming up on one side. One man’s shoe hit the side of her wedge heel and knocked her leg out from under her.

She was kicked down.

As she fell, she saw it was a pack of frat boys, strong men in slacks and T-shirts. They had square heads and bodybuilder arms. They had Bluetooth headsets. It was frat boys knocking down intellect, knocking down the academy, the faculty—or just her. A person.
The crowd against one. Georgie. She landed on her side, padded by her weight. Oof!

She wanted to cry.

But there was one guy in the middle of the crowd, a man with a lighter build. He was different from the others. He had a nicer suit. He leaned toward her. He had long hair. He tucked a wayward strand of his hair behind his ear as he leaned in. His eyes were wide and brown. They were kind. His mouth opened as though to say something. He licked his lips. Reached a hand. It was Johnny Depp. The frat boys—they were bodyguards, or handlers. They were security.

Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture boomed in the auditorium of her mind.

Georgie reached back. Her fingers were inches from his, from Johnny Depp’s hand. Then she felt herself lifted. Two fuzzy red paws took her by the armpits and helped her up. They pulled her away from Johnny. The brown-eyed man—was that Johnny Depp?—disappeared so quickly. Manly bodies closed in like doors and cut him off from the masses.

Clifford’s paws beat against Georgie’s lucky shirt, her tight skirt, to dust her off. She couldn’t see around the dog’s stuffed and swinging cranium. Where was Mr. Depp? Where was her angel? Johnny!

Clifford picked up the diaper bag in one thick paw and slid it onto his arm. He managed to collect the scattered onesies in his hairy paws and shove them back into the bag. Instead of handing the diaper bag over, the big red dog hoisted it to his own shoulder. The bag looked at home there. He bent for a fallen rattle and rested it on the shelf of the stroller. Baby Bella still screamed in Arena’s arms. Arena was a good kid, but her top skill as a sitter seemed to be acting deaf. She was a shy girl, with no leadership skills.

Clifford reached for Bella. Arena handed her over like a bag of laundry. Bella quit crying. She snuggled in. The dog bowed his massive head over her tiny one and swayed back and forth in a clumsy big-footed waltz. Bella closed her eyes, wrapped in the plush folds of red poly-fibers.

She knew who was inside that costume: a mom. Somebody unemployed. Maybe someone with a graduate degree, out to network.
Maybe it was a writer-mom with a book in process, an agent in New York, a dream big as all Manhattan. It was somebody who knew how to sling a diaper bag, push a stroller, and not miss a beat. A person who could take care of a kid without being sidetracked even by Johnny Depp in the flesh. Inside that big dope of a dog, inside that dancing red costume, was at least one part of the woman, the caretaker, Georgie tried to pretend to be.
This
, she thought,
this dog, is how we dress a mom
. Her own head felt like a puppet’s then, big and fuzzy, blinking under fluorescent lights, hiding another brain deep inside.

T
he school halls were quiet when Nyla signed in at the front desk. Students were in class or out on the fields for PE. She took a butterscotch in a translucent wrapper from a crystal bowl on the counter, and was given a laminated visitor’s pass. The principal’s office was down the hall. She made her way over squeaky linoleum floors so clean she could see up her own skirt.

Despite a queasy feeling, she wanted to dance, to slide on the polished floors, raise her arms, and chant, “We got it, we got it, we got it.”

That morning during their daily phone negotiations, Mrs. Cherryholmes had said there was a way, perhaps, to get Arena back in classes sooner than the initial terms of her expulsion. Yes! Victory! Her hopes were high. Nyla had come down to iron out the details.

The butterscotch settled her stomach and obscured the bitter saliva of pregnancy mouth. The vice principal had the outer office, in front of the principal’s rooms. She was on the phone making a soothing cluck and murmur. Still behind her desk, she nodded hello and waved a hand toward a second door, the door to the principal’s quarters.