The Stud Book (44 page)

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.

S
ay 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 and 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.

His ex-lover was more hidden than he was. That girl was gone. He said, “You have lipstick on your teeth.”

Hannah’s unnaturally white state senator smile faltered then, and she scrubbed her front tooth with a finger. He saw the old Hannah for a fleeting second: a hard worker, an enthusiast.

And she was gone, turned into a politician again as she shook a stranger’s hand. She transformed her beautiful, unbridled self into a tame, packaged production.