The Stud Book

When he got back with the groceries he told Sarah about his plans with Humble. He said, “I can cancel.”

“You should go! You’ve had a lousy week,” she insisted. Her bathrobe was open. She was naked underneath. She held a bloody dishrag between her legs like she was trying to stop a leak, to staunch bleeding, but really she was just catching blood as it ran out. There was blood on the white linoleum of their kitchen floor.

Ben pushed aside a pizza box on the counter, then moved a saucepan crusted with old rice. “It’s not like we’re really friends.”

She said, “Of course you’re friends.”

They were, and they weren’t. He knew Humble Johnson as one of Sarah’s friends. Ben made what he considered his real friends in middle school, when they played Dungeons and Dragons and shared marching band practice. It seemed a leap to count Humble in the same category as friends he found when they were all kids turning into men, in a small town under the big sky.

Those old friends? One at a time they, or he, had moved farther away and quit going home. He’d moved to Eugene for school, then to Portland, looking for a bigger city.

He piled up moldy plates and stacked glasses to make room for the groceries. He sat an empty wine glass on top of the plates, then slid the economy-size pack of maxi-pads alongside the groceries in a little corridor of cleared space. “We’ll set it up another time.”

When Ben heard from the men he called friends, it was during holidays, in mass-produced letters written by wives. His old friends did family things. Ben had a wife, but not what they called a “family”—no kids, just that blood on the floor.

He said, “I couldn’t leave you home alone.”

Sarah kissed him. Their lips met in a quick hello. “I’ll be fine. I’m schooled in all this by now.” She tried to smile, but her smile twitched.

He slid another bag of groceries onto the counter, then took off his sunglasses.

She said, “Your eyes look better.” She pulled the top of her robe closed but kept her other hand down between the folds of it, holding the rag.

The first miscarriage she’d been sentimental about. The second? Her jaw had tightened, and the way she spoke grew more clipped. It was a little chin lift brought on by disappointment, like a young Katharine Hepburn. During the third pregnancy her words, and her jaw, had softened again, but now here they were, round four, back to another pack of pads and blood everywhere.

She lifted the edge of her robe far enough to pull out her hand without getting blood marks on it. She threw the cloth in the sink. It slopped against the stainless steel. She rinsed her hands, ran cold water over the rag, and dried her hands by wiping them down the sides of her robe.

These miscarriages gave her license to be a slob. She slouched now. She’d put on a few pounds with each round of pregnancy, and those slight gains were adding up. She reached for the maxi-pads. The package was split, and pads sprang out like so much extra body fat in too-tight panties. “They’re open?”

“I did that. An accident.” The way the pads burst from their package reminded him of Sarah’s body. He could pinch the new fat on her hips. He could kiss it and rub his hands on it for heat and good luck. She had a line of tiger’s stripes in stretch marks over her backside—he saw them every morning, and he was the only one who did, and he loved it; he loved her stripes.

When they first got married, she wouldn’t even change a tampon with the bathroom door open.

“Got the rest of my miscarriage kit?” She stood on tiptoe to look over the edge of the grocery bag. There it was: canned chicken noodle—the old kind of soup, the simplest, and cheap. It was what she’d asked for. She’d stir in lemon juice and one whipped egg, for an abbreviated version of a Greek avgolemono, a shortcut back to childhood comforts. When she was a kid, most of downtown Portland was owned by Greeks, all mom-and-pop stores. Greek food was Portland food, 1980s-style.

Ben had bought Tums, Tylenol, and red wine; three oversized dark chocolate candy bars from a company devoted to saving monkeys; two magazines, Real Simple—like anything was so simple—and More, the magazine for women teetering uncomfortably close to menopause.

She palmed the candy bar and said, “I’ll be fine. Have fun. I’ve got to find underwear.” She walked without lifting her feet, the chocolate in one hand, the other holding the maxi-pad in place.

He found space on their shelves for canned tuna and black beans. It had been a hard week. Other men could wear a broken nose and two black eyes like a badge, but he wanted to stay home forever.

Sarah was in sweats when she came back out, a matched set in snug cherry velour that showed off her curves. Ben took it as a good sign. She was trying. He put an arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. “Keep up on your pain meds, okay?”

Sarah was resistant to taking pills. Aspirin gave her hives. Zoloft, prescribed after the second miscarriage, did the same.

“It’s not really that kind of pain, anymore.” He saw her forehead, lined from wincing. She pressed into Ben’s chest enough to move him away, then reached for the magazines and bumped the edge of the stack of dirty plates. The wine glass on top tottered. They both grabbed for it. Her hand touched it and his did, too, but too late—the glass fell and smashed against their blood-spotted floor.

She rolled her head back, closed her eyes. “My God. We’re in squalor.”

He went for the broom.

“That’s all right. Go.” She took the broom from him. “Just come back early. Don’t stay too long.”

“Don’t worry about cleaning,” he said.

“I haven’t been.” She nodded toward the piles of dishes.

“I’ll do those when I get back.” He wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into his chest. “Call if you need me. I’ll have my phone.”

“But not in your front pocket,” she said.

“No, not in my front pocket.” He loved her for her faith in problem solving, as though where he kept his phone could change their future. He kissed his wife good-bye.





Humble was at the bar on a stool, watching his curly-headed reflection in the mirror between bottles of overpriced bourbon. It was a narrow bar, dark and crowded, with a giant TV hung up high in a corner. Ben made his way through the crowd. Everybody there—they were kids! Who was even twenty-one? He wanted to card the bartenders, the bar backs, the waitresses.

He’d been carded at the door, forced to pull out his cracked driver’s license. The license showed he was forty years old. Some teenage girl hired to man the door scowled, furrowing her soft forehead in a way that made Ben want to give a soft pat to the top of her head on her dyed-black hair. She held up Ben’s license, looked Ben in the eye, and moved her gaze back and forth between the two like she was trying to compare. Was she mocking the broken nose?

Whatever.

She handed the card back, and Ben went in.

The thrum and rattle of bar music was loud and seeped into his chest. People were laughing, already drunk. He was glad to be in. He needed this.



At home, Sarah felt a dull ache like a hand pressing too hard low down against her pelvis. It never let up. She called the hospital’s advice nurse. “It’s the third day,” she said.

The advice nurse asked, “Are you soaking more than a pad an hour?”

“Maybe about that?” Sarah guessed.

Store-bought maxi-pads are high tech. They’re more efficient than hospital pads. Hospital pads are about as absorbent as a wad of plastic bags. They’re like something left over from a Communist work camp. If she’d been using hospital pads, the answer would’ve been yes, definitely yes. She’d learn that later, in the hospital.

The nurse said, “If you want to come in, we can do an ultrasound to see if you’ve passed the products of conception.”

“I don’t think I have.”

“Well, it’s up to you.” That was the advice nurse’s official advice: It’s up to you.

She tried to call Ben. A phone threw out a few bars of funk like a tiny dance club in the next room. She followed the sound. Ben’s phone rang and vibrated and danced to its own music on the slick white surface on top of the microwave.

Ben’s voice came on through the phone at her ear, warm and efficient, probably coming all the way from some cheap digital real estate halfway across the globe, part of a computerized international answering service. “I’m not here, but leave a message!”

She started to call Georgie, then hesitated. She hadn’t heard from Georgie in days. Now she’d call and talk about another failed pregnancy? While Georgie rocked her own baby to sleep? Pathetic.

Sarah’s big plan was to get pregnant again as soon as possible, get back on the horse that threw her, do this to her body as many times as it took. She’d get back in the pregnancy cycle the way cutters sliced their skin, the way drunks reached for booze: compulsively, relentlessly.

Once she’d asked her doctor about movie stars—all those aging movie star ladies giving birth. Her doctor, an aging woman herself, lost all bedside manner. She snarled, “Surrogates,” and waved a hand through the air, swatting off an invisible fly.

Sarah did not want a surrogate.

If they had to, she and Ben would take on fertility treatments. They’d get a loan, spend their savings, inject hormones, schedule intrauterine insemination or in vitro. It was a biological imperative.

“Goddamn, Shadow,” she swore at her dear dog. Jesus. The animal was nosing at a bloody maxi-pad Sarah hadn’t yet gotten all the way to the garbage. He looked up at her with that special anxious dog-love in his eyes: He wanted that pad. But he’d grown feeble in his old age. She kicked it away, held a hand to her gut, and limped to the back door, snapping her fingers and sending the dog out to the fenced yard.

Some day in the future she’d hold her own newborn son or daughter and, like so many other mothers, act like giving birth was natural and easy.

For now, she fell to the couch.

She called Nyla. Nyla was the most comforting of her friends, when she wasn’t busy being an alarmist about global environmental collapse. And she’d had a miscarriage, too, a long time ago.

Voice mail picked up. Sarah said, “Where are you? I’m at home, having another miscarriage, goddammit.” She blurted it out. Then she tapped her knuckles on the doorjamb for luck, the closest wood in reach. Maybe there was luck in wood, and if there wasn’t any luck, it still didn’t cost her anything. That’s how she’d become in the months of miscarriages—desperate, superstitious, hedging all bets.

Losing so much blood over days made her nervous. Knocking on wood was what she had by way of an agnostic’s prayer.

But with all that compulsive knocking, Sarah’s message would sound like she was doing construction, checking beams for dry rot. She said, “I’m bleeding like crazy. When you had one, was it days and days, or a weekend thing? Anyway … I need a little distraction. My gut! It’s sickening. It’s worse than menstrual stuff. It’s between the flu and a period. I don’t know. Call if you want.”

Sarah gave in and tried Georgie, though Georgie would probably be asleep, nursing, or bonding with her baby. Play behavior. Grooming. Locomotion. Sarah envisioned the tally, the check boxes of mother-offspring behavior. She couldn’t reach Georgie, either, and again left a message. “I’m having another miscarriage.…” Her voice cracked. She soldiered on. “Could you call Humble and ask him to ask Ben to call me?”

Her voice, so weak!

As she hung up, she was more alone than in the moment she’d spoken to a distant machine. She tried Dulcet, her third and last resort.



In the dim orange glow of a cedar-lined room, lit only with salt candles, Georgie breathed a deep hit of gyno-steam. Steam seeped up between her legs. Her vaginal folds were hot and damp. It was like resting on a geyser.

Her C-section incision was on its way to becoming a scar. Everything smelled rich with herbs and p-ssy. The baby was on blankets and pillows on the floor. The spa was baby friendly, but when Bella started to cry Georgie eased off her throne, picked up the girl, and found her way back to her perch. She dropped open her white spa robe to let Bella nurse. The phone rang.

A sign on the wall urged this is your time.

Her opening to life was sweaty. The phone cried out again, its ringtone a classical riff, singing need. Georgie eyed the sign—your time—and let the phone go.



At the bar the music was loud. Humble leaned toward the bartender, made a quick gesture, and there it was, another pint set on the dark red wood countertop. Ben hoisted the glass and let the foamy head roll. That first swallow of beer tasted like a party that shouldn’t end. He wanted to order a second pint as soon as he touched his first.

He scanned the room. Knob Creek, Maker’s Mark, Jameson, Crown Royal. Tanqueray, Luxardo, Chartreuse, Cynar, and Galliano: Bottles along the wall were as curved as bodies, the names like those of women Ben had only heard about—foreign exchange students, strippers, hookers, and cheap hotels.

Humble said, “You look like a fighter. Georgie told me you were a mess.”

Ben could barely hear him over the noise. He said, “Georgie?” He hadn’t seen Georgie. They had a deal—Sarah said she wouldn’t mention it.



Sarah sat on the couch with her magazines, the phone, and the pack of maxi-pads within reach. She was too tired to get up but afraid to fall asleep, alone and bleeding. Ben would be home before it grew late. Soon enough she’d pass that little blue sac, the collection of misguided cells. Once that was gone—this collection of cells that refused to form a child—her whole body could calm down. It was a natural process.

Animals had miscarriages. Prairie voles were known to have spontaneous abortions after hanging out too long with a male other than the father, in lab tests.

There was a stab in her gut, and Sarah thought, Did this happen because of Dale? He always sat so close, in small rooms alongside the cages at the zoo. Spontaneous abortion induced by impure thoughts? Jeez, she was getting more Catholic by the second.

The phone rang. She grabbed it. “Hello?”

The first sound she heard on the line was a baby’s wail. It was a baby, crying! A baby had called her? She wanted to throw up. There was a rattling sound, not a baby’s rattle but the sound of papers, somebody fumbling for the phone. Georgie’s voice came on over the wail of the baby. She said, “Where’s Ben? Does he know?” So she’d gotten the message.

Ugh. Sarah had to quit shaking. She said, “He’s out with Humble, right?”

Georgie made a sound, a fast exhale, a breath of contempt. “They still met up?”

The baby’s cry was quieter now, but still there, haunting and creepy in the background. Didn’t Georgie know where her own husband was? Sarah said, “Ben needed a night out.”

“You need him home,” Georgie said. “What’s going on?”

Then the line clicked. Sarah couldn’t get away from the sounds of the baby crying fast enough. She said, “Dulcet’s calling.”

Sarah flashed over. She heard the sound of a party, a woman laughing, voices mixed together. Dulcet said, “How are you feeling?” Her voice was slurry, a few drinks in.

“Like hell,” Sarah said, “but I’ll be okay. Where are you? Georgie’s on the other line.…” The phone clicked again. Caller ID showed it was Nyla—Nyla, with her calming, responsible ways.

Sarah said, “I’ve got to take this other call.”

“I’m on my way over.” Dulcet sounded more on her way under, as in drinking herself under a table somewhere.



“Line ’em up!” Ben said. It was his turn to buy. Humble drained his pint. When Hum said something, he turned his head away and Ben couldn’t hear him very well over the music, but he caught the words Dead girl and Skoal and Make a bet. He followed Hum’s gaze and saw a cop show rerun on TV with an underweight Asian girl in a bikini dead on a slab, her ribs architectural under her thin satin skin.

The regulars along the bar roared. They slapped the wooden bar top. Humble leaned forward and smiled at the masses. He lifted his glass. Everybody drank.

Cheers, dead girl!

A skinny woman in a nearly sheer shirt—she wore it like a dress, but it was a shirt—bumped Ben’s elbow as she leaned on the bar, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. She whipped her hair around and flashed a look at him just long enough to say, “Sorry.” Her eyes were green. Her teeth were small. She was barely twenty-one, if even that, Ben guessed.

He said, “It’s okay.”

She stopped, stared, and pulled a strand of hair out of her mouth. “What happened to you?”

He smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was happy to be out on the town. Before he could come up with the right clever line, Hum leaned in and yelled through the music, “He slipped in the john.”

The woman’s face moved into an uncertain smile. “Really?”

Ben let the conversation unfold across him. Humble nodded, said, “Hit the sink,” and smacked one hand against the other.

She said, “Oh my God. This is the guy you told me about!”

Humble and the woman both busted up over it. Ben asked, “What?”

The woman said, “You should sue somebody.”

Again? Ben let that wash on by. He said, “Maybe I’m already a rich man.”

The woman, or girl, said, “I’m sure. The Humster told me all about you.”

The Humster?

Hum grinned back like he was used to flirting with underage drinkers, or drinksters: the Humster and the Drinksters.

What did Humble know about Ben’s smashed face, anyway? Not the real story. Ben tipped back his glass. The girl-woman ordered her drinks, holding a few bills in one hand and running the fingers of her other hand over the ends of them.

Then Hannah came on the TV over the girl’s shoulder—Hannah, the newly appointed senator.

Or state senator, really.

She was a floating face, an angel or devil, ready to whisper in the young woman’s ear, to whisper in Ben’s ear. She was the mother of all those children in the bar, high above, a concerned talking head.

It was a newsbreak. Hannah spoke with authority about some vague plan; Ben missed the lead-in, and what was she talking about?

Maybe because of the beer, or maybe because of his broken face, to show he was more than a buffoon, Ben elbowed Humble in a way that made both their beers slosh. He said, “I used to date her.”

Humble looked again at the busty young chick in the sheer shirt. He smiled. “Her?”

Ben said, “No, her,” and pointed at the TV. “In college.”

Humble looked up at Hannah, with the blank stare of the unimpressed. Ben tried to shake it off like Humble’s opinion didn’t matter, but yes, it was her, his old girlfriend, on TV, and she still mattered.

He had her photo torn from the newspaper folded in his wallet.