The Monsters of Templeton Read online

  Clarissa was pale and her forehead was creased by the time we rounded the lake, but when we came into Templeton, with its great old mansions and sparkling streets, with its crowds of happy tourists, she brightened. “This,” she said, turning to me with wonder in her face, “is like a town in a snow globe. This is a perfect place.”

  “Well. It’s pretty nice,” I said.

  “No,” she said, and her voice was severe. “It’s perfect.”

  That week, Clarissa and my mother got along swimmingly, so much so that Vi often stayed up with us late into the night over cookies and wine, and laughed and laughed, more than I’d ever heard her laugh in my life. It was a prematurely snowy Thanksgiving, and while my mother worked one night, Clarissa and I went to a candlelight festival at the Farmers’ Museum, where the snowbanks were carved into cups and held flickering votives, so that the snow was lit from within by golden orbs of light. The upwafting wind smelled of woodsmoke and the fresh snow-smell and wassail cider and even the clean sweat of the Clydesdales who trotted us around from place to place in sleighs. The sounds of their harness bells mixed with the fiddlers in Sherman’s Tavern, where there was a dance of sorts going on, and the laughing shrieks of the kids having a snowball fight in the darkening commons.

  Clarissa stood with me on the steps of the pharmacist’s, looking out at the old-fashioned village in its soft dusk. In the small, close house we had just smelled the mingled smells of a thousand herbs; feverfew and yew and bee balm and willow-bark aspirin; we palpated the phrenological head; we watched the fat black leeches crawl on the glass of their jar. Aristabulus Mudge, moonlighting from his modern pharmacy in town, watched us good-humoredly, cocking his head above his hunchback like a parrot and slipping us free lavender sachets for our sock drawers.

  “Here ye are, Willie Temple,” he said to me, our little ritual.

  “Willie Upton,” I said, pretending irritation, as usual.

  “Whatever you say,” he said, and gave me the same wink as always.

  Walking outside, Clarissa sighed. “I really feel,” she said, “like a colonial woman. Isn’t that strange?”

  I looked at her expensive duck boots, three-hundred-dollar jeans, and grinned.

  But then I said what I had been thinking about, which was just as strange. I said that when we as a society ran out of oil, the hobbyhorse of my econ professor that fall, when all social structure broke down and we could no longer supply ourselves with goods in the way we had developed, I felt comforted that all we had to do was go to the Farmers’ Museum to learn all those forgotten, essential arts. “It’s a self-contained world,” I said to Clarissa, so excited I couldn’t see the face she was making. “There’s a whole body of forgotten knowledge here. They make everything: shoes, barrels, wheels, brooms, linens. We can learn animal husbandry and herbal medicine, you name it. Like a little backup generator of culture we’ve got here. When all of civilization ends, we can just come to Templeton.”

  It was only after I delivered my little speech that I looked at Clarissa and saw the fury on her face. “Why do you always have to ruin things like that,” she said, and she leapt into the snowdrift beside the porch and went wading off, the little red pompoms on her hat waggling furiously at me.

  When it was time for us to head back to school, my mother took Clarissa’s little face in her hands and peered down into it.

  “There is a room here for you whenever you need one,” she said.

  “Vi,” I said, horrified. “Clarissa’s got her own family.”

  Vi didn’t look at me but rather kissed Clarissa on the forehead.

  And she said something so softly I could not quite hear it, that sounded like “Well, an orphan knows an orphan.”

  Later, in the car, as we passed into Massachusetts, I stared out at the glittering icy road. “Clarissa,” I said. “Want to tell me what that all was about? What Vi said?”

  And she said nothing at first, for at least fifteen miles. And then she lit a cigarette, even though it was forbidden in my car, blew the smoke out a crack in the window, and said, “She was right.” Staring out her passenger window, she told me that she’d been the only child of aging professors, the child of their old age, the center of their attention. And then, when she was almost sixteen, they went on a family trip to Norway, and her father pulled the rented Volvo to the side of Goblin’s Pass to get a picture. As her parents stood on the brink admiring the view, she climbed behind a tree to take a tinkle.

  When she emerged, they were gone. The camera was placed at the edge of the fjord. The last picture was their two faces, smiling before the crevasse, taken by her father from an arm’s length.

  “Mom? Dad?” Clarissa called out uncertainly, and nobody ever answered her. She began to scream, louder and louder, and the echo that returned and returned was distant and mocking.

  When the rocks below were searched, nothing was found. When she went back to the house in Connecticut, nothing was missing. She had their life insurance policies, she sold the house and most of the furniture, she had plenty of money. But her parents were the only children of only children, and so she had nowhere to go on holidays, she said.

  Then she turned to me as we pulled into the parking lot behind the dorms. “You fucking tell anyone, and I kill you, okay?” she said. “Dead. An extremely painful and tragic death, understand? Garroting. Possible flaying involved, if I’m pissed enough.” Parked there, we watched a boy trying to stuff an enormous duffel through the door of the dorm, his breath in the cold rising like a furze around his head.

  “All right,” I said at last. “Why?”

  “I’m nobody’s pity case,” she said, and gave me a little pinch on the arm. “Ever. Not even yours. Head case, maybe,” she said, and smiled weakly at her joke.

  Clarissa had graduated, ended up as a journalist, though her career choice at first surprised me. But there was something about her smallness, her huge personality, her bright clothing and wickedly innocent ways that led people to confide in her. She was very good at what she did. She had a fiancé, Sullivan Bird, who was clever and kind and funny, and though I at first had a hard time accepting that a nonpervert would want to be with someone who looked as if she were a twelve-year-old girl, in the end, I was sold. Sully Bird was an architect, had a face soft as a koala bear’s, and the first time he’d met her at a concert, he’d followed Clarissa around all night, looking dazzled, saying, “Please, just go out with me. Please,” all unspoken rules about not looking utterly pathetic to an unknown love-object thrown to the wind. She laughed; she caved; and to the surprise of both of us, she found out how kind and gentle Sully was, and had been with him for five years. True, that past winter, things were rocky between them, blowing up once in a bar (the jukebox blaring “Love Me Tender,” the tang of mojitos in my mouth), an argument that seemed to come from nowhere and that devolved quickly into ad hominem attacks. In between Sully’s charges of “snob,” “superficial,” “egoist,” “brute,” and Clarissa’s of “sap,” “weakling,” “intellectual pansy,” “conservative,” people cowered and ran for cover. All our friends dissolved away.

  “I can’t marry that man,” wailed Clarissa in the taxi home after I had wrestled her away. “He doesn’t know me.” Their separation lasted a week, and then they were back together as if nothing had happened, cracking each other up with their saucy little impersonations of their friends, doing their choreographed, impromptu swing moves on the street corners. Still, maybe I imagined it, but I felt a little hesitation, a little chill there where I hadn’t felt any before. I suspected sometimes that when she was gone for the weekend on “assignment,” that she was visiting Templeton and my mother, staying in the room on the second floor of the 1970s wing that we called “Clarissa’s Room.” I never mentioned it, though. Everyone deserves a little comfort.

  And then, out of nowhere, at the age of twenty-nine, my Clarissa found herself sick.

  One night in late February, Clarissa and I went to a gallery opening for one o
f our friends from school. Heather was a sculptor, and already getting famous, though back when we first met her she was a plump poli-sci major who had dreamt all her life of running a think tank. Now she was splinter-thin on her diet of raw foods, sleek in her artfully deconstructed cotton dresses, and she made lush three-dimensional body parts from organic matter, great astounding breasts and bellies and penises crafted of leaves and seeds and braided grasses. We were barely in the door with champagne flutes in our hands when Clarissa sighed and rubbed her head. “I’m so tired, Willie,” she’d said. “God, I’ve never been this tired in my life.” I wasn’t really listening: I was trying to find Heather to compliment her on her opening, and Clarissa had been whining about being tired for almost three months, which I thought was because she had been working hard on her current huge story about a crooked Berkeley cop. I took a step away from Clarissa and heard a little oof, and when I turned back, she was sitting on the granite pedestal of two billowy golden ass cheeks woven from some ripe straw. Ex(flax) was its title. Clarissa was pale and shaking her head.

  “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 café. 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 ( Jesu
s, 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.”