The Monsters of Templeton (8 page)

"Whoa," I said, kneeling. When I put my hand on her arm she felt hot. "You okay?"

"I don't know," said Clarissa. "I think so. Vi thinks I'm just anemic. It'll be all right; I'm eating lots of beef."

"Wait a second," I said. "You were worried enough to call Vi?"

She shrugged. "Well," she said, "I mean I've never felt like this before. And check this out; this popped out three days ago," and Clarissa pulled her bottom lip down from her gum and showed me a livid red pustule the size of a quarter.

"That's so disgusting," I said.

She gave me a wicked little smile. "That's what Sully said." Then she stretched her arms and tossed her entire glass of champagne back and stood. "I'll be okay. Let's find Heather and skeedaddle," she said. "I need to go to bed."

I didn't see Clarissa all the next week, but when we met up for brunch on Sunday, she seemed tinier than she already was and was blinking rapidly in the bright light slanting into the cafe. She also had a strange red rash across her face that looked so perfectly delineated it seemed almost fake. I gave Clarissa a hug, and without sitting down, I said, "Don't order anything. I'm taking you to the doctor. Right now," I said.

"Don't bother," she said. "I went to my dermatologist Friday and he said he thought it was my face wash."

"You went to your dermatologist?" I said. "Clarissa, what if it's...," but Clarissa waved her tiny hand and coughed juicily and quieted me. "I just want my pain au chocolat," she said. "I just want a huge vat of coffee and my best friend to make me laugh and then I will go home and take a hot bath and finish my story that was due three days ago and then I want to go to bed. Sorry, Willie," she said. "But everybody's been annoying me about this, and I've had enough."

"Fine," I said, sitting down. "You tiny little fascist."

"My body," she said, "my fascia," and her laugh sounded so much like the old Clarissa's that I smiled, too, hoping, and ordered my omelet.

Clarissa disappeared for a few weeks after that. I called but she never answered or returned my calls. All the times I stopped by her apartment, though, nobody ever answered the buzzer, and so I assumed she was better, out interviewing people for one of her stories. One night, I went on a date with an amazingly geeky law student to a little tapas place in Menlo Park, and after an hour was jittery with boredom. I loved Sully for calling; I answered my phone, rudely, at the table. But there was worry in Sully's soft voice when he said, "Willie? Clarissa's acting strange. How soon do you think you can get here?"

"Twenty minutes," I said, then smiled at my date as he tipped his wineglass up into the air and extended his tongue to lap up the very last drops. "Strike that," I said. "Eighteen."

When I arrived at their apartment, Clarissa was bug-eyed and standing atop their glass coffee table in a tank top with no underwear on. There were strange raised rashes on her arms and legs, now, in addition to the red masklike one on her face, and in her hands were fronds from the great potted palm tree that was her pride, the only thing, she ever said, she could keep alive. She was shaking them rhythmically at the ground, breathing something that sounded like gibberish to me.

"Clarissa?" I said, but she didn't hear me, so I stepped closer and whispered in her ear. "Clarissa? What are you doing, honey?"

"Ants," she breathed between incantations. "Armies of ants trying to climb on me."

I turned to Sully and threw him my keys. "Pull the car up," I said. "Now," and I wrestled Clarissa off the table and forced her into underwear and a skirt and slippers, and carried her shouting over my shoulder into the car, where Sully sat at the wheel, white-knuckled, his face looking as if he had been slapped repeatedly.

At the hospital they didn't make us wait long. The weary attending came out of Clarissa's room and held our hands with her two moist, fat ones. "I'm sorry to tell you," she said, "but it seems pretty clear to me that your friend has an advanced case of lupus erythematosus. The rashes, the psychosis, the joint-swelling, the fever, all parts of the disease. Two weeks more and she would have had total system failure. Even now, it's attacked her kidneys and the lining of the lungs. Her brain, too." Sully crumpled into a chair, and put his head in his hands.

"Lupus, right? That's okay, right?" I said. "It's not a horrible disease. It's not like AIDS or anything. Right? It's curable."

"It's not curable," said the doctor. "And it is an autoimmune disease. But with steroids and antipsychotics and antidepressants and maybe even some advanced treatments we can talk about later, your friend can live a healthy life. It'll take her a year or so of total rest, though, until she recovers to the point when she can go back to work. I want to put her on a clinical trial, monoclonal antibodies. Expensive, but she's perfect for it."

"Not possible," said Sully. "She's a journalist. She's one of the greats. Or will be. She's totally driven."

"Not only possible," said the attending. "But absolutely necessary. If you'll excuse me, I have to go check on my other patients," she said, and scurried off.

Sully had put his head between his legs and now was breathing deeply. Great wings of sweat had feathered over his back. "It's okay, Sully," I said. "I can hold down the fort if you need to go."

"No," he said and wiped his face, smiling a shaky smile. "You're not her only friend, you know."

"I know," I said, and squeezed his hand, but there was still a little something in that hospital hallway, a dark, hard button, between us, and I couldn't understand it.

When Clarissa awoke in the afternoon, sane and furious ( Where the hell am I, she growled), I was the one to tell her about her disease. Sully had gone home to gather some things for her stay in the hospital, and in the meantime I had charmed a medical student into using his laptop to do some research.

So I told Clarissa many people lived happily with lupus for years, that the word came from the rash across her face; lupus, in Latin, meant "wolf," and the way it spread had reminded oldtime physicians of a wolf's muzzle. I said it was also a constellation and another name for a fish, a luce or a pike; I said the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary was circa 1400 from Lanfranc's Cirurg., whatever that was, and recited it in my bad Chaucerian accent: Summen clepen it cancrum, & summen lupum.

"But it's definitely not cancrum," I said. "Lupum we can fight."

"Oh, so it's a good life-threatening condition," she said grimly, tiny in her sheets, her curls wild around her head. "Hooray, lupus!"

I told her about what she was likely to feel, the joint pain, the fatigue, the course of treatment options. About the famous people who'd had it: Flannery O'Connor (A good disease is not hard to find, Clarissa had punned then, her face lighting up), and perhaps even Jack London ( Jesus, that's ironic, she'd said. Wolves.). I said that it was an inherited disease and asked her if anybody had died unexpectedly in her family history.

"Other than my parents maybe-maybe-not falling off Norwegian fjords? No," she'd said. Then, "Yes. My nana just up and died when she was forty." I looked at Clarissa, who rubbed her eyes wearily. "She had rashes, too," she said, softly. "And arthritis."

I told her, cringing now, that she wasn't allowed to go back to work until she was healthy. It was a measure of her sickness that she didn't fight what I said. She put her head back against her pillow, and closed her eyes, and I assumed she was asleep and left.

She was in the hospital for a month, until her infection left her kidneys and brain, until her pleurisy subsided. I filled her apartment with vases of purple lupine--a macabre joke--and she laughed with tears in her eyes when she saw the flowers. On the day she went home, I sat with her, watching movies, until she turned and told me that she knew the class I had to teach was in an hour and if I booked it I could get to Stanford with time to make photocopies. She told me all she wanted to do was to sleep, and Sully would be home in a few hours, anyway.

"No," I said. "I'm staying here."

"Yes," she said, and fixed me with one beady eye and began saying puns so fast it was all I could do to gather my stuff to get away. "A dyslexic man walks into a bra," she said. "What do you call cheese that isn't yours? Nacho cheese," she said, and escorted me down the elevator. I gave Clarissa a kiss on the head as I climbed into my car. "This is retarded," she said, sneaking a cigarette on the street, and blowing the smoke in my direction. "I was supposed to get lung cancer, not lupus, of all things. I'm crabby, not wolfish."

"Christ, Clarissa," I said. "That was lame."

"I'm just getting my groove back," she said, and shrugged.

In April, the day before Clarissa was to start her very expensive monoclonal antibody therapy, we were sitting in her breakfast nook when she put down her coffee. "Oh, hell. Let's just do it," she said.

"I'm in," I said. "Whatever it is. Let's do what?"

"Shave it. Shave it all off. Go to our favorite place and shave my hair down to the scalp. Why the heck not."

"Why do you want to do that?" I said, stunned.

She looked at me and frowned and said, "Because I can, Willie. I've always wanted to and never had the guts. Now I have the guts. Plus," she said, "my hair's falling out," and showed me a little clump of curls in her hand.

"All right," I said, and we gathered our things and went out. We went to the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park, and sat there in the heavy ocean wind, and I cut all of those gorgeous twisted curls from Clarissa's head, and they sprang and bobbled there on the ground. I ran the shaver over her head and put on lotion until her pale scalp glistened. And then, as she was rubbing her hands over her new pate, as her eyes closed and she began to look sick among all those red-gold tulips, I reached up and snipped a long swatch of hair down the center of my own head. When Clarissa opened her eyes, I was wearing a reverse Mohawk, my dark long hair falling on the sides and back, and a great gap where I had once had my part.

She looked horrified, and then began to giggle. "You would do that?" she said. "You would do that for me?"

I grinned and snipped off some more. Clarissa, cackling, shaved my head.

When we walked back over Golden Gate, past the golf course, past the bison, the wind licked over our bald heads, and we held hands. And in that city of permissiveness, people grinned at us, mistaking us for what we weren't. A bare-chested Rollerblader circled and circled us as we walked, and said, gliding splay-legged around us, throwing his arms out, "Oh, I adore this town. Hand in hand in the springtime," he sang. "Two baldy ladies in love."

THE NIGHT AFTER I came home to Templeton, I called Clarissa out of force of habit. Only after her phone began to ring did I realize that I had dialed, the phone was to my ear, and I was calling. Before I could reach for the hook to hang up, though, there was Clarissa's throaty dark voice saying, "I was watching a movie, so whoever this is, it had better be good."

She didn't sound good, but she sounded better than I had feared, weak but lively. I smiled, despite myself. I took a deep sigh. "Oh," I said. "Oh, don't you fret, Clarissa-cakes. It's good."

AFTER SHE STOPPED yodeling with joy that I was home and shouting at me for being home and not calling her right away, I told her the full story.

She had known already about Dr. Primus Dwyer, that he was my seminar professor when I first came to graduate school, that he was a big name, that when I got him as a thesis, then dissertation, advisor, I was thrilled. If anyone at Stanford could help me in the field, he could.

But she didn't know that we all called him, in hemidemisemi-reverence, "Mr. Toad." It fit, with his plaid waistcoats and beer belly, with his pocket watch and British accent, with his shining nose and unfortunate weak chin. He also had a new red VW bug, and every time we saw him heading down Memorial Drive in it, someone or another would chant, Ladyboy, ladyboy, drive away home; your nose is afire and your chin is all gone. It was cruel, perhaps, but we blamed his wife for dressing him like that. She was razor thin, all bone and black cashmere, the dean of students, and renowned for her jealousy. He reputedly wasn't allowed to close his door when he had conferences with his female advisees, and it was all because of her. The Castrating Bitch, we called her.

But Primus Dwyer we loved because he was funny and sweet and brilliant. We loved his half-poetic, half-pretentious take on archaeology. Imagine human history, he said on the first day of our graduate seminar, gesturing as was his wont in great, grandiose sweeps, as palimpsest upon palimpsest. The deeper you scratch, the more layers you reveal. And we hoped without a great deal of hope that he would like us, too, because he had a huge grant for a government dig up in Alaska with some Harvard guys, and they were about to find something big, everyone was sure.

Every year in May, Mr. Toad and The Castrating Bitch had a party up in their posh house in Los Altos Hills to celebrate the summer vacation. The party was when he always announced the graduate student he was going to take with him to Alaska for the summer to help with the dig. Everyone always prayed to be the honored student because, frankly, his projects were immediate career kindling, but he had never once selected a girl, and we all knew it was because of She Who Must Be Obeyed. But their house was gorgeous, all glass and boxy furniture and views of Redwood City and Atherton and the Bay at their feet like an offering. We went for the catered food and free liquor.