The Stud Book (35 page)

Jesus.

He wanted to scream. He was a bad husband, and bad father, and he knew it, and the voices in his head sang a different song, and he kept walking. His phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out, saw his wife’s name, and put it back. What would they do, yell? He couldn’t do it, couldn’t talk. The phone was so small between his fingers. What did it say, that he had such a prissy little phone?

He hunted for a bar that would feel like home.

Georgie held the baby and breathed baby smells. The meatloaf was raw in its bowl on the counter. The noodles, undrained, grew fat. Bella was sound asleep, but Georgie was afraid to put her down. She stayed on the couch and picked up a ballpoint pen. What came next—kick him out? Fix things?

It’s hard to build a family when you didn’t have one to begin with. It’s harder to know when to let your new family, the one you made, go.

She called Humble. This was a nightmare. Maybe, she thought, if they talked, they could fix it. But her head throbbed where she hit the wall, Bella was half-awake now, in her arms, and Humble didn’t answer.

On the rhetorical triangle, that tattoo on her arm, she wrote “Mom,” in a scrawled hand caused by reaching over the sleeping baby girl. That was one point of the triangle, one corner of the making of meaning. At another juncture, she wrote “Baby.” And who held up that third side?

A
KA tagged along beside Arena like a stray dog, but no worries. He had his clothes on again now. They’d started “the project.” He did what he could to keep his hands off her.

He walked with her on the street, both of them dressed, and remembered being naked in front of her—the feeling was still with him—and though maybe it looked like he walked beside her, he knew he was really a step behind, following her lead.

Overhead, there was one heavy cloud in the sky, a floating mountain, Mount Hood’s weightless cousin. It was a place they could live. AKA entertained the dream. He said, “What do you see?” and gestured at the cloud.

Arena squinted to the sky. He waited. If she said a floating mountain, their dreams would be in sync, like two iPods with the same playlist.

“In the cloud?” she asked.

He nodded yes, hungry for communion.

She said, “Drops of water and frozen crystals, suspended in the atmosphere.”

Gawd. Not the answer. Her words made him want to lace his
fingers through her hair, pull her head back, and kiss her until she agreed to see what he saw. He wanted to demand.

She said, “Isn’t that amazing enough?”

She didn’t wear makeup. Her mouth was red, always a little open. Her skin was pale. She was weird in the way she could go forever without talking, and then when she did talk, it was only to him, not to anybody else that he’d seen, and that was cool. It was like he could be her translator.

He had a monopoly, and she let that happen.

As they walked, their feet kicked out in front together, each step. She said, “What happened to your shoes?”

The rubber toes of his Chuck Taylors had been turned to blackened cheese. He said, “Radiator.” He’d been trying to dry the rain soak out and left the shoes a little too close. “Shoulda seen the smoke, Jesus.”

Arena said, “You should get a new pair.”

Like he had money. That was the difference between her and him.

They walked side by side in silence, past a brick wall with an ad for a bar on the side:
FINE CHAMPAGNE AND CRAFT BEER!
A little rattle-can art had altered the message to read
FINE CHAMPAGNE AND CRAP BEER!
Which was probably about right, too.

AKA nodded at the wall and jostled Arena’s shoulder. “I did that,” he said.

“Really?”

“You don’t believe me?” He was proud of his work, his voice. It was supposed to stay secret, that was part of the tagger’s code, but he’d told her and right away he felt exposed: He wanted to share. He hated even trying.

They reached a bus stop. She started to say something. Her red mouth opened. She looked away. Her tongue touched the corner of her lips. His eyes were on her mouth. She said, “I’m going to leave you here.”

Here? AKA felt her words like a shove.

Leave him?

That was a gut punch.

He could push back, there in the middle of nowhere, a dead zone between industrial and new built. It was a city block with a short
row of stores—some of them boarded up, others with businesses—across from an abandoned warehouse. He tried to smile and felt his mouth twitch. He said, “Where’re you going?”

In one cube of a store, a man changed an overhead lightbulb. In another, a woman rearranged her furniture. The woman pushed and shoved, directing a love seat across the floor.

Arena said, “I’m going to catch a bus.”

He said, “I’ll wait with you.”

She said, “That’s okay. No need.”

Behind Arena, in the store, the woman moving furniture stopped pushing the love seat. She put her hands on her hips, then wiped stray hair away from her face. It was dark out and light in her store, making her as good as on TV, under those bright lights. Hers was another yuppie dive.

Arena hung on the bus stop pole. She was so thin. She and the pole were twins.

“What’re you going to do with the footage?” AKA asked. He felt weird about letting her take a movie of him naked. That’s what she had asked for: him, naked, in his apartment. She asked him to dance, just a little, and slow. She filmed him letting his jeans fall to the floor. Now that would go out in the world? She could do anything with it. She could show it as art or post it on the Internet. And she was leaving him.

She said, “Trust me. You’ll like it.”

She made him nervous. He knew he’d like it. He liked everything that had to do with her. “Trust isn’t my strongest thing,” he said. “I didn’t sign a release form, right?” He tried to sound cool, like he knew things.

She said, “We have an oral agreement.”

God. It made his cock hard, to hear her say it: oral. Her red mouth. She held the video camera, in its case, at her shoulder, her arm bent at the elbow. It wasn’t her camera; it was borrowed from school, in her new classes.

She was back in school. That made him nervous, too. She was moving forward. He never graduated and never would. She had a mom who cared.

Of course they had an agreement. Oral, written, written on the body even: She could have what she wanted. Arena won. Arena would always win.

He said, “Next time, maybe I won’t be the only one naked.” He lifted her hair and came in for a kiss. She shrugged him off, and she smiled, but she looked over her shoulder like somebody might be watching, and he had that feeling of pushing things—he wanted to push, to tear her shirt off, make something happen—and he held back. He kept himself in check. This kind of situation was why he didn’t drink and had cut out the weed. Not just because they made him do it, in juvenile detention. He had to work hard to keep his impulses in check.

His counselors at the Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Home told him that. He wanted to be a better person. But he wasn’t. Not inside.

A TriMet bus came down the road, wheezing and belching diesel. Arena stepped away from the stop. When the bus came near, she waved it on, shaking her head. “I thought you were waiting for the bus?” AKA knew he had trust issues. But still.

“I’ll catch the next one,” Arena said. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”

Behind Arena, the woman in her store was alone, with her little black dress and her ponytail, puzzling something out. She was maybe the most vulnerable woman in town, her head full of the wrong problems. Maybe she had an SUV and a husband, a house in the hills. She probably had a tiny little phone that she thought could save her life. Women did that, even men did it—clung to their phones.

It said lifecycles on a bare white sign that hung in the window. LifeCycles? What did that even mean? Part of a life cycle is death.

He said, “You’re going home?” He had to double-check, couldn’t help it.

“I have my own life.” She followed his gaze, to the store, to the woman inside. “What’re you looking at?”

That woman was everything AKA never wanted to be: Tame. Working. Building her own little trap. A store! Oh, so nice. Consumerism nobody needed for sale in a part of town nobody came to. More than that, she was a woman and looked like the kind of mother he never had. A woman who might bake. Who might wash her kids’ clothes, not pile ’em out in the dirt and say they’d get to the laundry soon. Not break a window when she was high, or date a guy who barely knew how to run a meth lab but was always willing to wing it. AKA was outside, looking in.

Arena looked at the store, too.

He nodded. Okay. If Arena wanted him to, he’d go. He’d put on the right show.

He’d go, he’d go, he’d go. He had to tell himself, like the trained dog he was, the half-trained feral dog. He made his feet cooperate and turned as though to leave. Then his feet turned back; he was facing her again. “See you at work screw.” He hoped she’d laugh.

She only nodded.

He said, “Don’t forget.” They had a plan to meet up after.

There was no bus coming. Arena said, “See you then.” Her eyes glittered in the fading light, and AKA wanted her to love him more. She had to love him—he loved her! He wanted to cram her in his pocket. She stood there, on her own.

He remembered a class he’d had, part of probation: He was responsible for his own actions, she was responsible for hers. He’d bring her around. Money would help. Money always helped.

If he had cash, he could lure Arena to him.

The need for dollars was an old ache, like a best friend just out of prison calling his name. The urge for pocket money grew like a lie, like a fever, and he felt his childhood illness of deep need coming on.

A
t the mandrill cage, the zoo’s Community Outreach department had laced a pole with pink and blue crepe paper and set up an awning. Volunteers sliced and served a sheet cake with a square footage the size of a studio apartment. They offered coloring pages for the kids, little packs of crayons, and a contest: Guess how big around Mama Mandrill is?

It was a citywide baby shower!

Really it was a desperate plea to get people to visit the zoo in these colder months.

Helium balloons bobbed like cartoon heads. A face painter drew mandrill stripes on the willing, kids and adults, blue lines down their cheeks. All those testosterone-indicating alpha mandrill stripes could pose a threat to the zoo’s mandrill patriarch if there was any realism to it. A fine mist in the air made the face paint streak and blur into bruises. It looked like a zombie party, or an orgy of domestic abuse. Sarah stood in the thick of that scene and worked on her animal observations through a hot glaze of blinked-away tears.

Baby Lucy came to the bars, behind the glass, and wrapped her fingers around them. She looked out into the crowd, with big eyes. A family of six looked right past her, saying, “Where’s the baby?”

She’d grown, and it was like they couldn’t see her. The public wanted their babies tiny. This was biology, for Christ’s sake—the mandrill grew at mandrill speed. To tear up over it was even dumber than crying over a song on the radio, or a Dove soap ad. Dale skidded to a stop on his Nishiki, and Sarah wiped her eyes.