Read Online The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff - Free Book Online Page B

wickedly innocent ways that led people to confide in her. She was very good at what she did. She had a fiance, 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 of 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