The Stud Book (8 page)

Dulcet collected her rubber vest with the picture of smoker’s lungs, and her bottle of water. The PE teacher picked up stray boobs that had scattered like hacky sacks. The laptop and projector belonged to the school. Dulcet pulled out her flash drive and looped the lanyard around her neck.

A lanky high school girl cut free of the pack and headed toward her. Dulcet knew these girls, the ones who snuck up quietly afterward. Hers would be a personal question: Pregnant? Overly familiar with genital warts? One boob bigger than the other?

As the girl separated herself from the crowd, Dulcet saw it was Arena, Nyla’s daughter. She’d forgotten—Arena went to school there.

“You were great.” Arena’s voice was soft, lost under the high ceiling of the gym. “Here’s your thing back?” She handed over a gelatinous fake boob. It was warm, palpated by the masses.

Dulcet said, “Thank you, sweetheart. Cancer, or no?”

Arena said, “I think that one’s got it.”

Dulcet found the lump between two fingers. Arena was right. “Perfect. That could save your life.” They walked together toward the door. “So, you like this place?”

Arena looked away. “It’s life as I know it.”

They came to a closet in one corner of the gym. Dulcet said, “Well, this is my backstage.” The PE teacher came up behind them, carrying more silicone boobs.

Arena said, “They didn’t give you the faculty restroom?”

Dulcet said, “I don’t want to waddle down the hall in the outfit, my parts showing.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Arena said. She slouched, a sweet, shy girl, with her chest tucked in and her shoulders forward.

Arena’s father had died in a car accident in the same year, around
the same time, that Dulcet’s father succumbed to cancer. Dulcet’s parents had four kinds of cancer between the two of them—breast, liver, prostate, lung. It was a whole season, an era, of dying.

So when Arena was little and Nyla was newly widowed, Dulcet had gone to Nyla’s house every day after she left the hospice. She’d brought Nyla wine, and brought the girls blueberries, strawberries, and overpriced gummy vitamins. She’d brought them Goodwill dresses and pens from the credit union, anything she could find. It was a way of grieving, to feed the girls vitamins and keep them dressed.

She and Nyla would sit together, ice packs on their puffy eyes, and they’d cry. They’d wash down Dulcet’s dad’s pain pills with Chardonnay, after he didn’t live long enough to need them all.

Dulcet was still washing down pain pills ten years later.

She tried to be an aunt figure, somebody Celeste and Arena could count on, but she forgot birthdays and showed up late for school events and slept through their fund-raisers. She got too drunk at birthday parties, especially when she tried to be domestic, and she never brought the same date twice.

Did Arena remember the strange light of those winter afternoons, after her father’s death? As the girl loped away now, she seemed relatively unscathed other than being so very much alone. Teenage girls were supposed to move in packs.

Dulcet ducked into the closet, a dark space, where one hanging fluorescent light warbled from the middle of the ceiling. The room was full of balls and orange cones, full of the smell of rubber.

The PE teacher had finished collecting latex breasts, and followed Dulcet. “We’ve got hand sanitizer for the props. Don’t want to take home swine flu. Need any help?” The woman let Dulcet’s fake boob collection tumble from her hands into to a tidy pile on the floor.

Dulcet said, “Actually, my zipper.” She pointed at her back. It was hard to lift her elbows all the way up, to reach her back, in that slingshot of a suit. The teacher hesitated. Dulcet said, “It’s under the vertebrae.” The zipper was camouflaged by a thin drawing of bone.

Dulcet felt cool air. The zipper went down. The teacher’s breath moved over her neck. “That was a terrific presentation.”

“Thanks.” Dulcet shook her way out of the tight shirt and tossed it onto a mesh bag full of volleyballs. She’d rinse it at home.
Now she was in the latex bodysuit with the heart and arteries on it. A green scrawl drew the lymphatic system; the endocrine system was in blue. Dulcet knew well where the cancers lived that caused her parents’ deaths.

“You do a lot of these?” the teacher asked.

“Pretty regularly, in the fall.” Dulcet dug in her canvas bag.

“It’s full-time?”

Dulcet pulled out her Volcano vaporizer, a metal, cone-shaped smokeless smoking system, a way to get high without wrecking her lungs, setting off fire alarms, or getting busted by the smell. “Mostly,” she said, “I’m a commercial photographer. Nude portraits.” She moved a crate of basketballs to get to an outlet. “I patch together a living.”

Dulcet plugged in her Volcano. She could wait to get high until the teacher had gone, that was an option, but the PE teacher didn’t seem to be going anywhere too soon. Dulcet had already waited through her own presentation. She knew how to be patient. She also knew that patience came easier when she was high, and the Volcano would take a while to heat up. “I’ve got a chronic pain problem. This is totally legal.” She loaded the chamber with weed.

The PE teacher asked, “What kind of pain?”

Dulcet pulled the straps of the latex leotard-like swimsuit down over her shoulders. The suit clung. “Skin, bones, joints. Fibromyalgia, restless legs syndrome, TMJ. You name it.” She rubbed her jaw. She took both hands and twisted her head sideways until her neck cracked. Ghost cancer, a perma-hangover, love wedged in with bone-deep loss—who knew where the pain came from? It was always with her. She said, “Doing the body show makes my bones hurt.”

She peeled the suit lower. Her breasts sprung out, small and high.

Her goal? To feel and not feel, at the same time.

The Volcano whispered a promise only Dulcet could hear. Her mouth practically watered. Only pot and meds lifted the pain. The latex suit bunched around her waist. She left it there, let her damp boobs breathe in cool air. She bent and attached a valve and a balloon chamber to the Volcano, to collect the pot vapor. Dulcet had never been shy. She’d made a decision a long time ago to skip the shy routine.

The PE teacher said, “I’m a registered massage therapist.”

She touched Dulcet’s neck with a mix of professionalism and an invitation. Dulcet knew how this worked: When she wore her organs on the outside, showed that cartoon version of every heart and liver, it sent out a signal of easy familiarity. When she pulled the suit down, let herself be naked, strangers were willing to take risks.

She was a body, intimate and public at the same time.

The teacher smelled like roses and rain. She rubbed her thumb in small circles along Dulcet’s upper vertebrae and said, “Sit down.” Dulcet sat on a step stool. It was a low place for a tall woman, almost like sitting on a curb. She relaxed under the teacher’s hands.

“I work on micro-muscles. Most people only tune in to the larger muscle groups. They don’t realize how many muscles a body has.”

Dulcet said, “I do.”

The balloon on the vaporizer moved as though ready to inflate.

The PE teacher reached forward, a hand on both sides of Dulcet’s clavicle. She said, “Come see me, at my practice. I’ll give you a card. You don’t have to be in pain.”

One hand inched down Dulcet’s bare skin as though counting ribs. In that gesture was a question: Where were the limits of this particular intimacy? It was a conversation between two warm bodies alone in a badly lit room.

This was another moment in Dulcet’s sweet skin-story, nobody’s business but her own, an exchange between humans. No condemning bearded God paused to look down from his elitist Heaven and dangle that carrot in the shape of a cross, that bribe—a trick to pass up life’s libertine liberties.

Dulcet said, “If you’d want your picture taken, we could trade. I do nudes.”

The teacher’s breath brushed Dulcet’s ear, with the scent of mint.

The door cracked open and light cut in. There was a curvy silhouette, a woman in high heels whose hair glowed like new snow on a winter night against the dark of the poorly lit room, and as Dulcet’s eyes adjusted she saw the principal, Mrs. Cherryholmes, under that halo of weak fluorescents.

The teacher straightened up and scrambled backward.

Mrs. Cherryholmes jumped back and almost closed the door again before she got herself together to step forward. “Ms. Marvel, your check.” She waved a white envelope. There was a tightness in her voice that implied that their conversation wasn’t over.

Dulcet’s whole job could be over.

Her green lymphatic system and blue endocrine system, those pretty graphic designs, were bunched up in the latex at her waist. Without getting up, she said, “Thank you.”

Mrs. Cherryholmes put the check on one of the industrial shelves. The teacher made herself busy organizing soccer balls. As the principal started to turn away, something else caught her eye. She said, “What is that?”

The Volcano.

“Mine. It’s medical equipment.” Dulcet’s voice came out low, gravelly and relaxed.

The principal studied the Volcano, her eyes steady, taking it in. “Nice to work with you, Ms. Marvel. Ms. Tompkins, please see me in my office when you have a moment.” She closed the door.

The room went dim again. It smelled like rubber and sweat. Dulcet said, “So you’re Ms. Tompkins?”

Ms. Tompkins said, “I have to go.” But instead of leaving, she moved further back into the storage closet, to a rack of industrial shelving, and found a small box. She took out a card and handed it to Dulcet. “My massage therapy business,” she said. “Call me.”

T
here are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Ba-da-boom!

W. Somerset Maugham famously said that, and he said it again now in Georgie’s ear, and he threw his head back and laughed.

His words were scrawled on a piece of paper tacked to her wall. She was at her computer, a desktop set up in the dining room. With a one-term leave from an adjunct teaching job at Portland Community College followed by Christmas break, this was the moment to dust off her dreams. It would be the longest consecutive stretch of time she’d had off from work since she was thirteen, since her mom transferred with Nike to Malaysia and her dad forgot how to buy groceries, since she got her first period and had to take the city bus to buy her own tampons. At thirteen she washed cars. She made blackberry pies from berries that grew in an alley and sold them by subscription to residents in a retirement home.

Twenty-five years later, this was her big break. Her plans for maternity leave? She’d write a book.
Author
a book, even. She’d been patching one together for ten years already, in bits and pieces—it
was her PhD dissertation:
Implied Narrative and Suppressed Symbol in the Paintings of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
.

She could smell the best-seller possibilities!

With a shift in tone and scope she’d turn her dissertation into a commercial manuscript—play up the romance, the tragedy. Manufacture a lot of deeply felt emotion.

Pssst!
They don’t tell you this in grad school, but here’s a tip: People go nuts for deeply felt emotion.

Vigée-Lebrun was a beautiful raven-haired portrait artist who flattered her patrons and worked her way into Marie-Antoinette’s life as a court painter. She lived at the Palace of Versailles with her infant daughter. When the French Revolution hit, when Marie-Antoinette lost her head, Vigée-Lebrun and her child escaped overnight, in a seriously competent mother moment.

This woman’s life was destined for the big screen! Georgie opened the file. Bella slept in her bassinet. The house was quiet. First thing Georgie did was revise the title of her work:
The Secret Narratives of Vigée-Lebrun
.

Readers love secrets.

Success inched closer. Somerset Maugham could have his laugh, but she’d win out and find her own rules. Her writing project had a nerve-racking sense of suppressed urgency.

Back when Georgie’s mom left town, Georgie dropped out of school. Social workers tracked her down. Her dad must’ve given them Sarah’s address. She was with Sarah’s family, eating their Pop-Tarts, bread, and tuna. She had Pop-Tarts hidden in her pockets. Heat pumped out of the vents in Sarah’s house, a minor miracle. She slept in Sarah’s extra bunk bed, on an extended sleepover, ready to leech love from a family that wasn’t hers.

She was a stray.

Now the bruised feeling around her C-section incision had started to lessen. Bella, mid–baby dream, scrunched up her face like Margaret Thatcher on a bad day—like Marie-Antoinette, when politics took a wrong turn—but still she slept.

What could go on in those new dreams? Freud suggested dreams were about working through repressed urges. What would be repressed in a newborn baby? Maybe Freud didn’t take care of enough babies.

Georgie readied her hands over the keyboard.

To spell
and
to cast a spell
came from the same Middle English, the same source and sorcery, the same impulse and high hopes: to charm an audience.