The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  “And that’s wrong?” Nyla’s voice broke. She knew her daughter.

  “The police have tests for substances.”

  “Then they must not have tested it.” Nyla felt her nose grow congested and tears well up, but she blinked the tears back and hid it—stoic! She’d be stoic. Nobody could tell. She’d cry later, on her own.

  Mrs. Cherryholmes slid a box of tissues closer to Nyla’s side of the desk.

  Okay. So she could tell. Nyla wasn’t stoic!

  “If you really feel there’s been an error, I encourage you to revisit this with the police. They have the evidence. They’ll sort it out.”

  Nyla coughed to clear her grief-choked throat. “There’s still a chance?”

  Mrs. Cherryholmes shook her gleaming hair. She smiled. Her lipstick was frosted, too, in a sheen of confidence. That was probably the actual lipstick color: Administrative Confidence.

  Nyla asked, “How come nobody here followed up on it? Nobody noticed or investigated?”

  The principal tightened down on her smile of success. She said, “Please. We have twenty-four hundred kids in this school. We have five security guards a day rotating through. Our job is to curtail any culture of drug trafficking or other problematic behavior, and maintain a quality education. When there’s a problem, we shut it down. We don’t test drugs ourselves. If there’s an error, the police will find and fix it.”

  It sounded so easy. So rational. And so very impersonal.

  “Understand this—we can’t afford a situation like they’re having in Washington right now.”

  A sexting scandal going through a southern Washington school district had been all over the news. A photo of one girl’s naked body, forwarded through the whole school system, left every child involved charged with distribution of porn. It was a nightmare. Parents had filed lawsuits against the district, citing a hostile learning environment. The lawsuits had started piling up on top of one another.

  “Your daughter will be fine,” Mrs. Cherryholmes offered. “The support of a concerned parent like you makes all the difference in the world.”

  The principal stood up, and Nyla stood with her. They nodded their heads in unison. It’d all be all right. And in that way, the principal silently convinced Nyla to leave. She walked her out of the office and down the hall to the school’s front door.

  “Good luck with it. Let us know,” Mrs. Cherryholmes said. “You’re doing everything right.”

  Nyla was happy for the talk. It felt like they were friends. It almost made her want to volunteer in the school again, though she’d given that up years before when she got in trouble for letting kids play with matches in the name of an art project, working with burnished driftwood and melted paraffin.

  Back then, one of the girls had long, curly hair. They were supposed to tie their hair back! But anyway, Nyla had put the fire out fast, using her own wool jacket even, and the girl had only a few singed bits, and she looked good with her new short hair the next day. She did! It could’ve been worse, and it wasn’t, because Nyla knew what to do in a crisis, and that was something they needed around schools.

  Nyla didn’t want to remember that scene too much but knew if she’d been there when Arena was accused—even if it was someone else’s daughter who had been caught selling a mysterious powder—she would’ve seen the project through and had the substance in question tested. Definitely.

  The truth was, Nyla hadn’t given up volunteering back when Arena was in grade school—she’d been banned. Maybe they’d forgotten. For now, though, she wouldn’t volunteer anyway because she had her own project, and that project was her daughter.

  At home, Nyla called the nonemergency police number. She went through the hoops, pushing one button to indicate her precinct, then another to tell the computer it wasn’t a stolen vehicle problem. No, it wasn’t domestic violence, which would mean pushing two. It wasn’t assault, corporate crime, a traffic incident, or a food poisoning grievance. They had a whole menu of options.

  It wasn’t a mass cult suicide. She thought of the Temple Everlasting, that creepy dive, and hoped to never push button six.

  When the option came up, she chose “evidence room”—“press eight”—and then listened to Muzak for a tooth-grindingly long time, but toughed it out. She listened to that shitty excuse for hold music because this, the phone call, was about Arena.

  The Muzak cut. A man said, “Case number and date of complaint.”

  It caught Nyla off guard. She fumbled. “What?” She’d expected something more like a conversation.

  He said it again. “Case number. Upper right hand. Sixteen digits, two letters.”

  She dug through her purse for the folded yellow paper they’d given her the day it all started. She read her case number off the slip. This was the path to the solution. She’d do it their way. Eye on the prize.

  There was the light click and tap of a keyboard on the other end.

  She asked, “Can we revisit evidence without bringing in lawyers?”

  The man on the phone coughed. Then, in his tired voice, he said, “We show no evidence on hold associated with that report, ma’am.”

  She said, “None?”

  He said, “Sorry. Nothing listed. Maybe it’s still in processing.”

  The legal system and the school system both had their own paperwork, their own rules. Nyla made phone calls, memorizing the pattern of buttons to push to move through electronic instructions. She had a constant sound track of Muzak in her head. Out of all her calls, nobody could come up with “evidence,” and at the same time, the school wouldn’t agree to let Arena off the hook.

  It was like she’d fallen, her feet moving in two different directions, all of it tangled. The paperwork was in process, Arena’s name was on it, and there was a gap between the humans who worked at the school, the paper pushers in the district’s legal offices, and the law, which was inhuman, disembodied, and looming.

  Somebody, somewhere along the way, had made a human error. Somebody operated based on an assumption. Maybe it took more than one person, but nobody was willing to step up and fix the error, which could, at least theoretically, involve laying blame.

  Another day, another call, a man from the local district attorney’s office said, “The report says she was selling a controlled substance, ma’am.”

  Nyla said, “I know it does, but she wasn’t.”

  She heard the crunch of food on the other end of the line, as though the man was eating chips. He took a deep breath. He said, “You’d want to get yourself a lawyer.”

  His words sunk to her stomach like rancid fat.

  She’d worked with court-appointed lawyers after the wreck that killed her husband. Lawyers like that? They’re budgeted for a limited amount of standard paperwork. You can’t even talk to a lawyer without accruing a bill. To ask a lawyer to read a single sentence of e-mail could cost more than a hundred dollars. To send three lawyers the same short note was a fortune.

  She wouldn’t contact a lawyer if she could help it.

  The DA’s office man said, “I’d recommend you let your daughter go through the process. It’s a small thing. It’ll be like water running its course. She might even learn from it. You can have it expunged from the record later.”

  Nyla asked, “Does expunging take a lawyer?”

  “It does.” The man’s voice was forgiving, but his facts stayed the same. After a pause, he said, “I’ve seen people spend more time and money fighting the law than it takes to just participate in it.”

  On a porn shoot, you’d call it the “C-light” and use it to cast a cunt or a cock into the brightest glow. The C-light directs a viewer’s eye, leads the way like the yellow brick road right to the moneymaker. Dulcet had one hand on the black casing of what would be her C-light. She gave the piece a twist and a tap, and aimed the beam. She said, “Stand on the X.”

  Georgie, with Bella in her arms, shifted uncertainly to an X made out of duct tape on the floor.

  Dulcet�
�s photography studio was a rented room on the first floor of a warehouse building in southeast Portland. There was a black cloth backdrop rolled down and ready. The windows were covered with poster board and silver duct tape. Bitchy Bitch slept curled up in a well-worn overstuffed armchair.

  Dulcet said, “Taking photos is about creating a relationship between the subject and the photographer. And we already have that. This’ll be fabulous. Ready to strip?”

  Georgie adjusted one of the nursing pads lodged in her cotton bra, cradled Bella, and looked around. “It’s cold in here.”

  It wasn’t that cold, though, really.

  The walls were lined with pictures, a few framed and more un-framed, and then even more on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was one of a naked woman on a beach, her body echoing the planes of sand and driftwood. Another showed a curvy, nude blonde alone in her retro kitchen with a Wedgewood stove.

  Georgie let her eyes rest on it and felt a pang of stove envy.

  Even more, she had a hit of envy for the way all these women could stand naked and made-up and act casual.

  Some of the photos were theatrical: There was a bare naked black-haired, ivory-skinned princess sprawled on a polished bar top, a cherry floating in an amber Manhattan, the tumbler tucked between her thighs; in another, the light hit a woman’s ass, close up, and the woman turned her head to look back at the camera and laugh, playing off an exaggerated angle between her narrow face, lower down, and her broad fanny, which loomed large.

  Dulcet hauled out a space heater. The heater hummed its own song.

  Georgie held her baby’s wobbly head close, glad for the cotton sling that kept her daughter’s gaze veiled. A newborn’s eyes aren’t strong, but a baby is wired to learn fast, and it didn’t seem right to let a two-week-old girl baby look far into Dulcet’s panopticon of female sex.

  In one photo, a satin-skinned woman, dressed only in high heels, talked on an old-school phone with a long curly cord. She seemed to have gotten terribly tangled, fallen over in her tipsy shoes, then pulled a pillow under her stomach just enough to lift her rear and give a glimpse of an inner-thigh tattoo.

  Georgie moved closer, inching away from the X on the floor. She said, “What’s the story here?” She looked for the narrative line, the rhetorical angle. She read a picture the way she’d read a book.

  “Story? That was a blast. That’s the PE teacher.”

  Georgie looked at Dulcet. “The one who got you kicked out of the schools?”

  Dulcet laughed in a way that meant yes, of course, and no at the same time. “I got myself kicked out the schools.”

  “The famous PE teacher.” Georgie smelled Bella’s head, her soft hair, the scent trapped and condensed inside the fabric of the dark, cradling sling.

  Posing nude was esteem building. That’s what people said, anyway. The immergence of the gaze invests itself in the legitimation of the gendered body. The photo shoot was Dulcet’s postpartum gift to Georgie: a mother and child portrait, which sounded like a great plan back when Georgie pictured herself reclaiming her pre-pregnancy body, back when she still bothered to wash her hair.

  She wanted pictures of Bella, so new and delicate. But photos of her own naked ass? That she could put off forever.

  “All systems go,” Dulcet sang.

  Georgie hesitated. How did other women do this? This was not self-esteem building. Not at all.

  Dulcet said, “Stand on the mark. We’ll take a few test shots.”

  Georgie kept her clothes on and held Bella in the sling in front. She walked over the sheet on the floor, stepped onto the X, and claimed her fate.

  Dulcet snapped away, then squinted at the image on the back of her digital Nikon, checking light and composition. She took another. Georgie smiled into the lens and winced under the flash.

  “I vote you get naked. At least get the baby out of that hammock. You’ll look totally hot.”

  Georgie said, “Do we have to go for ‘hot’? Maybe something more Madonna-ish.”

  Dulcet lowered her camera. “Madonna? That’s what you want?”

  “Madonna-like.” Georgie nodded and lifted her baby from the sling. Bella was in a sweet pink terry onesie, with even her little feet covered.

  Dulcet asked, “Like mid-eighties Madonna, when she was cute and round?”

  Georgie gave her daughter a pat, as though to say “All good,” and the eco-unfriendly disposable diaper crinkled beneath her hand. She said, “I mean, like early AD Madonna, the timeless one. Mother and child?”

  Georgie wore a pink, nearly skin-color dress that she imagined as a drape, a Grecian wrap, or maybe even the plain cloth garb favored by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the French painter at the center of her dissertation. Vigée-Lebrun was famous for making everyone look beautiful, even though she dared dress her subjects in muslin during the era of lace, the rococo days, in the Palace of Versailles.

  In the photos around the room, Dulcet had made everyone look gorgeous. Still, Georgie wanted that muslin.

  Dulcet put her camera on a cabinet. She came forward and lifted Georgie’s hair, and Georgie shivered. “If you want classical, definitely strip.” She unzipped the zipper on the back of Georgie’s dress. “Naked is as timeless and sacred as it gets.”

  The synthetic material gave no protest. The dress slithered down Georgie’s shoulders. She still had the baby sling on, like a beauty queen’s sash, and the dress caught on it, not yet fallen.

  Around the room all those naked women laughed and leered. They paraded their confidence—Esteem! Built from posing naked!—smiled at Georgie, and dared her to smile back. She cowered. Bitchy Bitch lifted her head.

  What kind of role model was Georgie if she couldn’t pose naked—couldn’t stand proud in her meat suit, as the saying goes?

  Dulcet lifted the sling to take it away. Georgie let her and maneuvered Bella through the sling, though she held on to her dress with one hand. She asked, “Do you ever take photos of naked men?” Her voice came out a little thin and desperate, vying for a distraction.

  Dulcet put the baby sling on her filing cabinet. She glanced at the lights and kicked the step stool to another corner to adjust another one. “Not often. With men, the whole focus is on the cock, you know? Erect, curved, relaxed. That’s it. With women, you can find more complex planes, invert conventions, find a cultural charge.”

  Georgie hid behind her dress and her baby, uneasy with that cultural charge. Her nursing bra was heavy cotton, decorated with snaps where function trumped form. Worse than the bra, she still wore granny panties hoisted over her C-section scar.

  Dulcet disappeared behind a tall rolling bookcase that served as a room divider, then came back out with an old cotton battery-operated jiggling baby chair on a metal frame. “Voilà!” She plunked it down. When she turned a switch it played a slow and garbled song. “Let’s start with a few of just you, until the room warms up.”

  Georgie walked over to the bouncy chair. “What do you have this around for?” She put Bella down. The girl didn’t fuss. Without her baby in her arms, she felt naked already. Dulcet was stripping Georgie of props.

  “I photograph some moms,” Dulcet said, and picked up her camera again. “You don’t have this much rock-solid sexual energy and not make a few babies. Now, you ready?”

  “I’m fat.”

  Dulcet snapped a picture. She said, “You’re gorgeous.”

  Bitchy Bitch jumped off the chair and settled in closer, blinking big eyes. What’s more powerful, the male gaze, or a blinking bitch’s calm stare?

  Dulcet let the camera hang around her neck and ducked behind her wall-shelf again. “I’ve got a little something to put you at ease.”

  Georgie could hear her dig through a box. A little something. What did that mean? Georgie called over, “I’m still not drinking. And I’m staying away from pills. All of them.”

  Dulcet came back around the corner tossing a silk scarf. It caught on the air, hung, then fell without going much distance.
Georgie bent and picked it up, still holding her dress in place. As she bent she felt her bottom grow larger—expanding! Impossibly large. Her knees pressed together, she felt like a hippo. This body! She didn’t love it.

  There, she admitted it to herself: She didn’t love her body. Was that such a crime?

  She reached one hand down in front and pulled the damp nursing pads out of her bra. Her nipples were sweaty and cramped. She tossed the pads out of the way, off the backdrop. She reached back and unhooked her bra, under her dress. She’d known Dulcet twenty years, since before she became Dulcet Marvel, back when she was Tina Stanton and got her first job as a waitress at a French restaurant. They’d gone camping together. They’d been naked at hot springs. It was different with a camera. She’d have to trust Dulcet’s eye.

  It really was about trust.

  Georgie stared at the robust ta-tas and damp love lips of the women on the walls. “So are these all about developing relationships? Photographer and subject?”

  Dulcet took a breath. She thought about the question. “Sometimes, secretly, I think maybe really it’s only about my relationship to me.”

  Georgie let the scarf unfold. It was a wide scarf, and long, though sheer. She let her dress drop. The cold air was a chill.

  Dulcet said, “A naked woman’s body is a commodity, as natural and common as homegrown pot. Strip everything away, like a stripper, and you’ve got this radical object. Take a picture of a woman’s back, it’s art. Show the vertebrae and ribs, it’s architecture. If you take the same picture from the front, straight on, it’s confrontational. Spread her legs, and the photo’s illegal to show in public, most places.

  “And I am one. That’s the part I can’t get my head around. I am that object.”

  Georgie reached a hand down and slid her fuchsia granny panties to her knees. She stepped out of them.