The Stud Book

Arena’s phone message was cryptic and unsettling. When Nyla called back, she wouldn’t answer, and she hadn’t come home. Nyla tried not to watch the clock. She left a simple, cheerful message of love and being present: “Dinner’s ready! I love you! Love, love, love!” She couldn’t say it enough. Then she sat down to dinner alone.

Trust was crucial.

She picked through a plate of quinoa with feta and herbs and knocked the bones out of a slim bit of sustainably harvested Alaskan salmon.

After she’d faked her way through the meal long enough, for an audience of nobody, she got up, put the rest of the salad in a glass bowl, and snapped on an environmentally friendly reusable lid. She put the salad and Arena’s dinner in the fridge.

The wait for Arena to come home was killing her. She couldn’t do it. She reached for the car keys. She left a note on the table: “Call when you’re in, dear!” She slipped on her shoes and went to her store to stay busy.

There Nyla chipped and chipped and chipped at her perfect world. With each swing of her putty knife she was improving her circumstances in all ways, building her self-sustaining economic future while making her mark of environmental awareness.

But when she looked at her clock and it was past eleven and she still hadn’t heard from Arena, her self-restraint cracked. What the hell was going on? Her daughter never stayed out this late. Nyla slapped down the putty knife.

She called Arena again, and there was still no answer. She dialed 911, then hung up.

Was this an emergency?

That call would contribute to the city’s problem of an overburdened 911 system. She tried the nonemergency police, where she reached a recording. She followed the instructions, well accustomed to their automated system by now, punched in the right numbers, and left a message.

As soon as she hung up, she regretted the call—Arena was still on parole. Had she just turned her own daughter in?

Arena wasn’t out of control, only out of the house.

Now Nyla waited for two things—Arena to come home, or the police to call back, whichever came first.

She couldn’t pretend to do any more work that night. She lifted her worn canvas bag and locked up the store. The street was dark. Nyla pulled her coat closed against the cold. When a lone man passed, she kept a careful distance. The shadowy stranger materialized into a Kurt Cobain look-alike. Portland was flooded with them these days, now more than ever, as though Cobain’s death had spawned his likeness, born the moment he died, and now they were all teenagers, his energy transferred—

She knew where Arena was.

The Temple Everlasting was a short walk. Nyla was barely in her own body, and she ran. The blocks flew by. She ignored the pull in her groin muscle and the ache in her side. That damn human body with its demands. Her body served her children, that was its best use. With each gallop, her bag slapped her hip like an eager jockey.

She gulped air.

When she got there, she pounded on the glass of the Temple’s front door. Then she saw the notice: a green tag stuck firmly against the front window.

Eviction due to safety concerns.

The building had been vacated, and the owners had forty-five days to remove property for repairs. Eviction? She ran her hand over the tag as though over a lover’s portrait and immediately felt almost a nostalgia for Mack and his little world, because if Arena wasn’t there, where was she?

It was dark inside and looked half-ransacked, but it had looked like that before. The cool glass was soothing to Nyla’s worried forehead, and even though it was covered in street grime, she pressed her skin against it and closed her eyes, as though welcoming her own mother’s soothing hand. When she opened her eyes, she saw a sliver of light that radiated from under another door in the far back.

Was he there? Mack and Arena could be there, behind that door getting it on, drinking booze or church tea. Maybe laughing at her. Sure he’d been evicted, but maybe he hadn’t gone.

She slapped on the window again.

When Nyla was that age she and Dulcet had hung out with old men who bought booze, and Greek bar owners, and a drug dealer named D’Loi. One time, at Pittock Mansion, a historic house with a sprawling lawn outside of town, they’d been up there drinking in the dark, overlooking the city with an old rocker who had coke, and Dulcet went to pee in the bushes and the rocker attacked Nyla, rolling her on the grass. Maybe it was meant as a seduction.

She’d been Arena’s age.

It all seemed like a good time back then. Really. Even when it was awful.

She smacked her palm against the glass, rattled the door handle, kicked at the wood along the bottom, and yelled, “Open this door!”

After a wait long enough to hide a dead body, long enough for Nyla to almost give up, Mack shuffled out from the back of his place. He was there! He was in a robe, with his hair sticking up, and had a big cardboard box under one arm.

A box? That was creepy. It was only a box but it seemed so wrong.

He came to the door and slid open a lock. Then he turned a key, another lock. He took off a chain. Nyla could see it all through the glass. Three locks, and still anybody could break that glass if they really wanted in. His robe was stained, and his socks had holes. He said, “Not evicted, right? Because there is no true eviction.”

His breath smelled like curdled milk. He put the box out on the sidewalk. “We just circulate, like a box of Portland’s finest castoffs. I’ll find new digs.”

Nyla pushed Mack out of the way and went inside.

He said, “Arena’s not here.”

She marched to the far back and peered through the open door. There was a couch and a fat old TV set with a cop show on. She called, “Arena?”

“How long’s she been gone?”

Nyla felt a fist in her gut. She clutched her phone—that severed, invisible cord that linked to her baby.

Mack was sleepy eyed. He poured a glass of water from a speckled Brita pitcher, handed the water to Nyla, and said, “If I see her, I’ll tell her to go home. I’ve got my own kid out there, too, you know.”

Nyla had no idea.

“He lives with his mom.”



The walk back to her store was a march of anxiety. She held a hand to her side and limped forward. She scanned the crowd in a bar, through the front window. What if Arena was there?

She saw the back of a man and recognized the fit of his jeans. It was Humble, at the end of the bar, his back to the glass of the storefront window.

Was that really him? Was she so versed in the shape of her friend’s husband’s ass? He turned. It was Humble, poised, about to drink. He saw her, gave a nod, and raised his glass.

She wiped her eyes with her palm. She checked her phone, where there were no calls, no texts from Arena or the police. She was afraid to go home and worry alone. Instead she doubled back, found the door to the bar, and went in.

She hadn’t been in a bar in forever. The dive bars of her youth had all been converted to yoga studios, as though the buildings in the city had grown up alongside her, their interests evolving together.

This one was hot inside, ready for hot yoga.

She pushed her way through the clusters of drinkers. Humble looked at Nyla like she was coming to check for his hall pass. That ache clawed her side.

She sidled up to the counter in a slim space near the servers’ station, near the cut limes and lemons and tiny onions. She wedged herself in next to Humble, still running her fingers over the buttons of her old cell phone.

Her heart was pounding, the bar was loud; she put her mouth next to Humble’s ear. “Order me whatever you’re having.”

He gestured at the bartender, the slightest movement of one finger, like a king.

Then she thought twice: the baby.

She pulled him close again. “Change that. I’ll have a soda.”

He said, “You’re sure?” His voice found its way through the noise more easily than hers, as though the whiskey on his breath brought it over.

She didn’t want a soda. Would one whiskey hurt her baby? Her hands were shaking. Her heart was a knot. “No. Never mind. What you’re having,” she said.

Humble had no idea yet what was up ahead, what it means to love a baby who grows into an adult. Nyla said, “You’re at the easy part.”

He turned toward her, raised an eyebrow, and raised his glass.

She said, “Don’t ever let your daughter out of your sight.”

He heard her words as a joke, smiled in response, and swirled his drink. “She’s out of my sight right now.”

“That’s where it starts,” Nyla said, ready to cry.

The bar erupted in a cheer. Her words were drowned out. Cups raised! What happened? Everyone drank. A short girl gave Humble a hug from behind, and he raised his glass. Nyla looked for the game on TV, but saw instead a woman in a strapless dress with her graceful neck slit, and a serious man in a good suit giving her the onceover. He played with his keys in his pocket. The dead girl looked like Arena, gangly in the elbows, a glossy ponytail. That was it. It was too much! In the middle of the cheers, the drinks, and the drunks, Nyla found her phone and dialed 911.





The next morning, at the end of his ten-thirty break, under a pale lemon sun and the haze of city air, Ben left Nordstrom with a silver shopping bag the size of a slim lunch box. The bag twirled from his fingers in the breeze of the traffic’s wake. He shifted to his serious visage—his office job face—and put a fast stop to that twirl. He folded the bottom of the bag, rolled it up, and tried to shove the thing in his blazer pocket. It was almost small enough to fit; his pocket was nearly big enough. He was still manhandling his way through the impossibility of that volumetric problem as he crossed the street to Pioneer Square, “the city’s living room.”

Every brick in the square had the name of a donor pressed into it, somebody who’d paid for that privilege and so funded building the space.

A flock of gutter punks had settled on the orange bricks, their dingy asses covering the names of Portland’s philanthropists. They leaned against a slice of wall—a wall that served as nothing except a place for street kids to lean. One of them wore a leather hat, a dog collar, and army fatigues. Others were in torn jeans and flapping coats, their hair half-dyed, half-fried, with a pit bull on a rope. Ben stepped into the square, and as soon as he let go of it, the silver bag fell out of his pocket onto the bricks.

The bag spit out its decorative tissue and unleashed a plastic disc like a hockey puck that spun slowly in widening circles.

It was high-grade, talc-free, mineralized loose powder, and that didn’t come cheap; Ben ran after it. It was a gift to himself, an effort to even out the blotchy skin of crying all night about the loss of their dog.

It was an effort to even imagine talking to anyone about that particular sadness, and to pretend he was fine.

He tried to step on the compact as it rolled, but he missed. He chased after it. People moved aside, raised their eyebrows, and held their satchels and purses and bags. He swung his foot again, in a dance, and strangers danced, too—they danced away, that is; he felt their eyes on him and hated to be the center of a minor scene, but this time the powder lost and—smack—he knocked it to the ground.

The gutter punk with a dog on a rope threw a burning cigarette into the crowd. The punk didn’t deserve a dog; the dog deserved better. The cigarette skidded and stopped near Ben’s feet, near his hockey puck. The gutter punks didn’t crack a smile; that cigarette smoldered their contempt.

Ben tugged at his collar. He was clean and crisp and on his way to work. What was so wrong with that?

His face had healed, sure, but it didn’t look right to him anymore without the war paint. He’d grown used to seeing himself with diminished pores and highlighter along his brow bone. It was a good look. Why didn’t all men do it? Makeup—hadn’t those gutter punks heard of A Clockwork Orange? All murderous boys loved makeup.

Ben had been cool once. Hot enough to get laid, anyway. He asserted this to himself and silently debated with the punks like they mattered.

Maybe he wasn’t fooling anyone these days about his coolness quotient, but he liked himself better behind the Lancôme mask.

The MAX train cut him off at the corner as he started across the street.

The doors slid open, people poured out, and in that crowd he saw Arena. She was tall and pale, and she stepped onto the bricks of the square and squinted into the sun. He was right in front of her, a few feet off, camouflaged by the masses. Why should a kid have such dark circles under her eyes?

He remembered the day she was born.

Now she looked tragic and gorgeous, and Ben had known women like that a few times in his life. Yes, he’d been cool enough to get laid by those very women.

Arena looked lost. Was she lost? He called her name. The train shut its doors behind her, then moved off. Arena’s hair blew into her eyes. She shook it away, saw Ben, stepped closer, and gave a timid nod.

He said, “No school today?” He heard his own words and it sounded like he was talking to a child. Ugh. He meant it as a good thing—a day off! Portland Public Schools had all kinds of in-service days, enough that it made the newspapers, because they couldn’t afford to keep the lights on, apparently. But the way Arena’s lips tugged down he could tell he’d said something stupid, definitely square, or straight, or whatever they called it now.

Was she expelled again? He couldn’t keep up with her drama. He shoved the Nordstrom bag back in his jacket pocket, where it didn’t fit and wouldn’t stay.

Arena said, “You’re wearing makeup.”

“What’re you talking about?” Ben’s chuckle sounded fake even to himself—mostly to himself. He was a weak liar. How could she see that expensive foundation?

There was one male makeup guy in Nordstrom. He worked behind the MAC counter, an Asian man who liked to run hot pink under his eyebrows and line his eyes in deep black. He looked ready to star in Cats. His was the sort of thespian outsider flair that gave men in makeup a bad name.

So Ben had gone to the Lancôme counter instead. He didn’t opt for eyeliner. His makeup was all about concealer.

When Arena did look at him, her eyes were big and brown, and conveyed sincerity and maybe grief; she’d known Ben her whole life. He said, “Okay, a little. To cover my broken nose.”

Arena’s lips were chapped. She said, “It doesn’t look broken anymore.”

“Then it’s working!” He forced a laugh again, like this was all easy for him.

She let her gaze drift down the street. Maybe she had somewhere she was supposed to be. Like, high school? When she touched her face, her fingernails were dirty.

If she had somewhere to be, she didn’t seem to want to go there. What was wrong? Ben was no good at deducing, couldn’t tell if it was something big or small, serious or growing pains. Sarah would have it all figured out already.

Once, when Arena was maybe five years old, for some reason Ben had been left in charge of her. He had to watch her, this little kid, for a couple of hours. Thing was, he’d let her cut paper with scissors that were too big and sharp for a child. What did he know back then? She’d sliced her finger and bled all over the paper he’d given her, and she screamed. He remembered his panic when he didn’t know what to do. But he’d washed her hand and found a Band-Aid, and she loved that Band-Aid even though it was only a plain one the color of nobody’s real skin, the color of cheap makeup. She quit crying, and her resilience made him suddenly feel like an expert in child care. Then they’d walked to the store and he bought her a Klondike bar, and they sat on a dirty bench in the sun.

She needed a Klondike bar now. She needed a meal and a little under-eye brightener. He said, “They do makeup at Nordstrom. It’s free.”

She smirked and shrugged his suggestion away. Then it was like watching a silent movie, the way her face shifted, falling from smug to broken. Her mouth opened, ready to say something, but there were no words.

He fumbled for something to say, to find their equilibrium. Did she need help? He said, “Your art show’s tonight.”

She looked at him like she was drowning. She said, “Screw it.” After a shaky moment she spit out, “I’m not going.”

Nyla had been talking about the show all week. She’d sent out e-mails, sometimes at three or four in the morning. He said, “Your mom posted it as her Facebook status.” Maybe they’d laugh at this together, a shared perspective, a healthy distance.

“God.” Arena only twisted her hair. She held her own arm, hugged herself, and said, “I hate that school. I’m in the wrong classes. I don’t want to hang my work in the show. It’s f*cking stupid.”

The way she said “f*cking” was like the word didn’t come naturally. She was testing the waters.

Ben needed to say exactly the right thing. This was what it meant to be an adult; it was his job. He’d never been a parent—wasn’t even a coach. Arena bit her lip, and her chapped lips started to bleed.

Ben said, “Listen,” and she turned toward him. She really did it—she listened. He’d set himself up now, as though he had advice.

Where was that Klondike bar? The Band-Aid. The comfort of a public bench.

He hated his job the way she hated school. Why go back? He was a punk rock runaway hidden in his own button-downs and Dockers. He tried again, and paced his words. He said, “Sometimes, we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

She looked at him incredulously. “You’re giving me the ‘Suck it up’ speech?” She took a breath so deep it raised her teenage chest. She started to leave.

He said, “No. Listen.”

He couldn’t believe it when she turned back—she gave him another chance. Why? She waited.

She made him feel like an adult.

Who was he? He was a fat kid who’d grown taller and thinned out, and now he was a man with a job and two ounces of overpriced cosmetics in his suit jacket pocket.

He said, “I understand.…” He aimed to be honest. He wasn’t sure what in him was even a little honest or clear anymore. He said, “I get it. I understand your destructive urges.”

Arena quit her nervous flickering and looked at him then. Her eyes narrowed. He’d said either the right thing or the wrong thing, and he was working on his next line when she asked, “What did you say?”

He said, “I mean, sometimes we all—”

She said, “No. Say it exactly. Say what you said.” She moved in closer. Her cracked lips were open, like she breathed through her mouth, like a kid with a stuffy nose, a child who had been crying, in need of Vicks VapoRub. He took his small, crumpled shopping bag back out of his pocket and found the tissue paper inside it. He used the white tissue to dab Arena’s bleeding lip.

She pulled her head away from his hands and said, “Say it.”

He tried to remember exactly. “I understand your … destructive … urges.”

Arena scowled, but then it wasn’t a scowl, it was tears, and her mouth folded and she looked sick, and her face flushed red.

She wrapped her hand around the bloody tissue paper in his hand and threw herself against him, crying into his shoulder. Her hair was a tangled smell of incense and skin. Another cargo load of people poured off the next MAX and stared as they parted around him and Arena, and Arena sobbed.

He touched the ends of her tangled brown hair. He said, “You’re okay.”

She tried to talk. She said, “My dad. Marquee Moon—” She coughed on her own snot and tears.

Had Ben inadvertently quoted lyrics? It rang a distant bell, Tom Verlaine. Maybe he’d heard that song. Maybe every sentence possible had become lyrics by now. He said, “Shhh …”

She said, “It seems so perfect—” and she choked again and couldn’t talk and Ben petted her hair and wondered if he’d sweat off his makeup. It was all too much, too intense, it was like he’d found a lost pet and couldn’t let it go and he didn’t mean to bring this animal home but he was in deep and didn’t know what else to do. Arena stayed wrapped around him. If she cared about what anybody thought, she didn’t let on. She didn’t wear makeup. She didn’t hide. Ben hid. Always. These days he wrote an ongoing script for the gutter punks’ judgments, for strangers, talking back to a world that talked around him, about him, about how he looked, and mostly about what his life meant or failed to mean.

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.





Say 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.



Dulcet tripped in, in high heels and a long leather coat. She swung her purse and stumbled, but didn’t fall, and made her way to her crew, with the cardboard portfolio tucked under her arm.

“This is it?” She looked at the nets.

Arena lifted the remote and turned the projector on. A nearly naked man appeared dancing on the scrim made by a piece of mesh. The fabric was just dense enough to hold the image. The man wore snug white cotton briefs. He looked hopeful and vulnerable, naked and bruised.

Arena turned on the second projector and there he was again. “Reproduction,” she said.

On the first screen the man bent, pulled off his underwear, and danced. His cock hung free. As soon as the spectators all saw it, he bent and picked up his underwear again and put it back on. He was bold, then shy. He moved with intention, then something like regret. His regrets set in just as his twin on the other screen peeled his underwear off and did the same dance. They were in front of a mattress on the floor.

One undressed as the other dressed, in a loop.

Dulcet moved behind the scrim.

“You’re in the room with him,” Georgie said. Dulcet did a shimmy with the man on the screen, waved her portfolio, flashed her latex suit—her beyond-naked body—and gave her boobs a good shake. Then she laughed, wrapped herself back in her coat, and said, “You’re with him, too. All of you.”

Everybody on the other side of the screen was in the room with the naked man. He faced the crowd from both sides; it was the same image. Ben looked through the screens and saw Sarah in the man’s bedroom, and felt the fleeting heat of possessiveness; he was ready to take his wife home. Dulcet saw Georgie and the baby with the naked man, a diorama of family. Sarah saw everyone, the gymnasium full of people, with the naked man front and center stage. She was used to watching animal hordes in cages. The gym was an exercise in overpopulation.

Nyla pushed her way through the gym doors, limped across the basketball court into the masses, and scanned for her daughter, cradling a wad of pink lilies wrapped in neon-green tissue. Her hip screamed. She pushed against that pain with one palm. Her vision was narrow, her mind focused.

The gym buzzed with families cooing over children’s art. “Look what our babies have done!” Every child was a genius.

Nyla was queasy, in a cold sweat with her pain, as she scanned that sea of humanity. Dulcet emerged out of the crowd, in front of Nyla. She leaned in. “More speed dating?”

Nyla looked confused. What was she getting at?

“Looks like you’ve pulled something,” Dulcet yelled, over the noise. This was almost as loud as the bar the night before. The sweet-bitter skunk of Dulcet’s pot breath was startlingly close.

Dulcet laughed. When did she get so many teeth? She said, “You’re limping like you’ve had major action.” Dulcet’s coat flashed open as she moved ever closer. Underneath, she was all organs: lungs, kidneys, and ovaries as visible as if her skin had been peeled off.

Georgie moved in, with her baby, and asked, “Yoga strain?”

Nyla had only one person in mind. She stepped around them, said, “Darling!” and held out her arms to her daughter. Arena recoiled. Nyla came at her with the flowers. Arena didn’t take them, but instead ducked behind a screen, behind her rippled fabric. Then Nyla saw the dancing man, too. Before then, her eyes had been solely on her girl.

“Look familiar?”

The naked man stepped out of his underwear. He flashed an awkward glance. Nyla recognized him and gasped. She dropped the lilies. “Him!”

“Yes. Him.” Arena spit the words. She broke them off, crumpled them like paper, made them sound recycled and weathered. She hadn’t spoken to her mom since she saw the photo in the news. She hadn’t even been home.

Nyla felt like she was losing her mind. Was that really him? She wasn’t sure. She’d never seen her attacker naked. “Who is he?”

“He’s a good guy, Mom.” The girl’s voice choked. “I love him.”

The man disappeared from one screen, then the second screen. “We can’t show this here.” Mrs. Cherryholmes, with her frosted hair and frosted makeup, had turned the projectors off.

She’d expelled the image on the screen from the school. They were big on expulsion here.

“Can’t show art at an art show?” Dulcet giggled with a stoner’s glee, always up for an altercation.

Nyla picked up her fallen lilies. Arena had the remote in her hand and, in quiet defiance, turned one projector back on. AKA came back, dancing and naked. The principal bent and clicked it off. Arena turned on the other. There he was again.

Nyla whispered, “Alvin Kelvin Aldrich.” She stepped forward and back, then forward again, in constant nervous motion. Sarah recognized the movement. Where had she seen that dance before?

“So you admit you know him,” Arena said.

Mrs. Cherryholmes said, “This is inappropriate.” AKA disappeared.

“It’s a celebration of the human form,” Dulcet barked, accustomed to the argument in light of her own work. Now she felt lifted into the place of a role model. Despite all the missed birthdays and weak social skills, maybe Dulcet had an influence on the girl after all! Maybe this was her legacy, not a child but an artist. “Turn it on, Arena, honey.”

Arena did. There he was again.

The principal took the remote away. “It’s sexually explicit content.”

Arena turned to her mom. Nyla offered, “It’s … not?” Then again, with more conviction, “It’s not explicitly sexual.” The whole time, Nyla never quit walking. It was like she couldn’t turn off part of her workout routine.

Georgie bounced her baby and murmured, “Well, it is kind of explicit.…”

“What’s wrong with explicit?” Dulcet’s voice was loud and clear even under the high ceiling of the gym, against the wail of children.

Arena sucked in her breath, that anxious response. She twisted her hair, still the girl-child she’d always been. She said, “Stand up for me, Mom!”

Nyla held no sway in this school or any school; she had nothing but struggles. She pressed a hand to the ache in her side, stepping from one foot to the other. She said, “This is about freedom of expression.”

In Portland, even the full-nude strip joints were deemed an exercise in free speech.

Mrs. Cherryholmes held on to the remote. “That doesn’t pertain to a public high school, when minors are present.”

Then Sarah recognized Nyla’s dance: It was the pacing of the one-eyed elephant at the zoo who had lost her baby. It was the nervous dance of a mother in pain.

Sarah could hardly stand to watch. She laced an arm over Nyla’s shoulders, but Nyla shook her off, waved at the screens, and said, “This is work my daughter did in school. Here.”

“Direct action!” Dulcet said. She bent to turn one screen back on, in her stumbling way, and her makeshift cardboard portfolio slipped from her arms, scattering an arc of black-and-white photos.

At a glance the pictures held the inviting curves of ripe fruit in sun and shadow. Upside down, sideways, and on top of each other, one materialized as a landscape of low hills. A white crescent was a shell, or an ear, until it became an arm wrapped alongside two legs, hands laced together under a knee. Ben was the first to come forward, crouch, and start picking the photos up, always eager to make himself useful.

And if one looked at the photos a moment longer, the curves settled into the planes of Georgie’s face and the fullness of her breasts and the dark circles of her nipples, and there was the baby, and it was a mother and an infant, and what was that sheer scarf of a drape? The black-and-white shadows and lights reached across the gray scale.

There was the triangle tattoo. Any questions?

Georgie, her arms full of her child, couldn’t pick up the photos fast enough.

A woman in a sweat suit bent to retrieve a print that had slid far across the gym floor. Dulcet called out, “Hey, you’re still here?”

“So far.” The woman held a photo in front of Georgie, to compare the image. “This must be Georgie.”

“She saw the shots in my studio.” Dulcet was crouched down, too, now, in her high heels. She caught herself before falling sideways. “Remember my friend, the gym teacher?”

Georgie countered, “I saw yours.”

“This is not supportive. None of it,” Arena said, loudly—loud enough for any child services representative who might unexpectedly be in the area, as though she were talking to the world, not only her mother and her mother’s friends.

Nyla half-whispered, “Dulcet, it isn’t your show.”

“I’m not trying to take over,” Dulcet said, surprised.

“Well, you’re not trying to smooth things over, either,” Nyla added.

Barry Gibb moved through the crowd, shaking his mullet and meeting parents. This was the teacher who’d encouraged Arena, who’d let her do this work in his class. He looked like somebody’s way-too-old prom date, in jeans and a sport coat.

Sophomore year, Dulcet had crashed somebody else’s senior prom with a guy exactly like that.

The principal unplugged a projector and started winding up the cord. She said, “I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

“Ask them, you mean?” Nyla was ready to cut her friends loose, if that’s what it took to support her daughter.

“All of you.” The principal stood firm, mini-projector in hand.

Arena said, “Good riddance.” She walked out first.

“You can’t keep throwing us out!” Nyla said. “We just got her back in.” The AV guy brought a cart around. The principal slid the projector onto the cart. Arena had already walked off. Nyla called her name and tried to run, but only managed to limp after her daughter.