by Lauren Groff
“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.
That year, all of the department was there, and most of the administration. There were caterers in tuxedos, the pool lit up in turquoise in the night, the glimmering lights of the Bay below. But that day, I had decided not to go. The party was right after Clarissa found she had lupus, and my hair was shorn close to my head; I had stopped running because there was something wrong with my knee and had gained about ten pounds since winter; that evening, I sat too late at my wheel after pottery class, and I was dressed in my filthy clothes, ripped jeans and a flannel shirt, loose and torn and filthy with clay. I looked horrible, not festive. Plus, I knew with utter certainty that this year the chosen student was going to be a boy, as usual.
And then, just as my pottery teacher left me alone in the studio, and I was spinning a vase on the wheel, I imagined people in their slinky dresses and suits ringing the Dwyers’ doorbell. I sat there, watching my lumpy concoction swirl around and around and found myself wanting to be at the party more than any other place in the world. I washed my hands and my face, and put a clean tunic over my pants, hoping both that it covered the clay stains and that I looked bohemian and chic and not like the pigeon-coddling bag lady I felt like.
I made it to the party just as Primus Dwyer was clinking the wineglass in his hand, standing atop the diving board and wobbling around quite a bit…. This year, he was saying, the graduate students I am taking to Alaska will be (and here he paused and cleared his throat) John Beardsley and Wilhelmina Upton. I was in the midst of downing a glass of white wine like a shot, and froze. I saw The Castrating Bitch’s eyes narrow; I saw her put her fists on her hips. But when I stepped forward, as everyone slapped my back, I saw her consider me; my pudgy face, my shorn hair, my messy clothing; I saw her relax. I almost saw her call me a dyke in her head. I frowned at her. She saw and gave me a little simper.
…we have two graduate assistants this year, Primus Dwyer was explaining, because this year is the year we will find what we have come close to finding for so long.
Hooray! shouted everyone around the pool.
Hooray, I whispered into my wine, weak in the knees, all trembly.
On the day that I met them at the airport, of course, I wore the femmest outfit I could find. I wore lots of makeup and a little pink minidress and high heels. I found the rest of the group just about to go through Security, and Dwyer and his wife having an emotional good-bye. For once, he wasn’t dressed like a Victorian bachelor; he was wearing normal clothes, though he did look like a Geographic Society explorer in his matching khaki zip-off pants and button-down shirt and metal-toed boots. John Beardsley smirked at my outfit, then slid through the metal detector. Dwyer and his wife extracted themselves, and that’s when they saw me.
He did a double-take, and looked away from the long stretch of my bare legs. His wife frowned, very hard. But there was no time, and then I went through. Dwyer followed, and there may have been the tiniest note of panic in his wife’s voice as she called out behind us, “Good luck! Be good!”
We had a tight, cramped flight from SFO to Salt Lake City, a tiny bag of peanuts, one
miserly lime soda. But after we were in the air from Utah to Alaska, John and I deep in our separate books, the flight attendant came and told us that there was an empty seat in first class, and Primus Dwyer had charmed her into offering it to one of us. John and I thumb-wrestled. I won. I went up, and there was Primus Dwyer resting behind an eyeshade, so I settled into the comfy chair and began to watch a movie.
Halfway through, he tapped my shoulder and proffered a fresh chocolate chip cookie in the tentative way one would offer a peanut to a zoo animal. So I paused my movie, and we began to speak. We talked about the project. In summary, it’s a good assumption that native North American peoples came to North America from Siberia, via the Bering Strait. Our project was to push back the time frame when they’d arrived: though the lower climates have evidence that people were there 33,000 years before the present era, the oldest sites in Alaska date back only to maybe 14,000 years before the present era. This discrepancy is troublesome. Primus Dwyer and the Harvard boys were digging a site near Cape Espenberg that they were almost positive dated back to about 25,000 BCE, or before the common era. In the realm of human prehistory, if we found proof of human existence there that early, it would be an enormous discovery.
By the time we’d moved on to lighter topics, the doctor and I had begun to do a strange dance, flirting without seeming to admit that we were flirting, having a grand time, whispering because everyone around us was sleeping, even the flight attendant on her little seat in the front. It felt not unlike a sleepover party. I noticed for the first time that he had dimples, which surprised me, because I have always been a sucker for dimples. I didn’t see the shiny red nose anymore, or the chinlessness. I was charmed. But I thought it was quite innocent until the very moment he looked at me, and slid his hand onto my thigh and raised an eyebrow.
I had two choices then. One: I could have very politely placed his hand on the armrest between us, and continued my sentence, and we would have had a very nice trip together, and I would have become an honorary man for the summer, and become good buddies with all the Harvard boys, and when we returned the conquering heroes in the autumn, they, feeling brotherly, would have done everything in their power to help me along in my career.
Two: I could have raised an eyebrow back. I could have slipped into the spacious first-class bathroom and waited for the scratch at the door. We could have then been very naughty, laughing and shushing one another, my pink dress going up, his khaki pants going down, and suddenly, in the midst of the lighthearted little mischief, I could look up to find a serious, sweet look on his face, and a kiss that wasn’t so light and silly anymore. In the podlike bathroom, the engines droning on around us and the ranks of businessmen snoozing out beyond the door, I could have looked up to an expression on the last face I ever expected to see it on, and find myself beginning to fall, and heavily.
THIS IS WHERE Clarissa interrupted to say in a muted voice, “You, Willie Upton, are a big, fat fool.”
There was a long pause then, and I think we were both thinking of how it wasn’t, perhaps, uncharacteristic for me to have made what was so clearly the wrong decision. First, I had a thing for authority figures: there was the photography professor in college, balding, alcoholic. In the darkroom, under the red bulb, watching the grizzled face of a woman I had snapped on the street emerge in the chemistry bath, the professor had come up behind me, and put his hands on my stomach, and our weird fling lasted for two semesters, until he was fired for a DWI. Then there was my weakness for funny guys, boys who’d gone to clown college or who were obsessed with improvisational comedy; a man who made me laugh was exponentially sexier to me. And then there was the eentsy little promiscuity problem, the months I’d swear off boys, entirely, and then in one night have such a frenzy of flirtation that I would take one into the bathroom at a party, and then take another home with me. I was not promiscuous, I think; just sexually bipolar.
Then I told Clarissa how, when Primus and I emerged from the bathroom, the entire plane was still asleep, as if under a spell. How it could have been awkward between us then, but instead he held my hand under the armrest and fell asleep, mouth open like a little boy. And he was gentle and sweet on the difficult trip, from Anchorage to Nome, from Nome to Cape Espenberg, from Cape Espenberg out in the Land Rovers, then on the hike all the way out to our site. He bought me coffee whenever we waited, and I’d catch him gazing at me, a little smile on his lips, from time to time.
And so it happened again. And then again and again and again. Nearly every night in my little separate tent, in sleeping bags zipped together against the chill of the ground. Even on days it was too cold for me to take a bath, it happened.
It was a kind of insanity: there we were in that impossible, beautiful place, with the sun shining all the time. All those migratory birds spinning about us, stunning colors in the bare and impressionable landscape. Our dig was going well, the camaraderie good between us and the Harvard guys, and even the food was excellent, one of the Harvard grad students having been a chef before he gave it all up for academia. The work was excruciatingly hard, and it felt nice, at the end of a long day, just to be soft with someone. And in the sun, he lost his pallor. With the work, he grew harder and fit, and a scruff covered his weak chin, and all of a sudden, Primus Dwyer was really gorgeous, and not just to me. One of the Harvard grad students, a macho gay man, began calling him “Dr. To-die-for.” I lost my extra weight, and lost even more, so that my muscles were tight against my skin, and my tan dark. I knew I looked good, too. And as there is very little fucking on the tundra that can go unnoticed, it was inevitable, perhaps, that the others knew what was happening. The Harvard guys all knew Primus Dwyer’s wife, of course; she had been around for a long time. They tended to look beyond my face when they addressed me.
The time when I was supposed to get my period came, and then went again. I thought: no worries, happens all the time, just the change in diet. And then the time for it came and went the second time, and I began to feel nauseated.
But just as I began to feel sick, we found the spearhead. And then, one day later, we found the skeleton. Pre-Clovis, both. Our osteologist guy was dancing around: he was almost positive, just by looking at the teeth, that the skeleton was of close Siberian ancestry: John was our biofact guy and said the seeds in the stomach area were from some plant he was almost certain was extinct at least 22,000 years ago up there. The Harvard principal investigator had called for a bush plane, and we were waiting in the Land Rover at the strip to say good-bye to him, because he was off to Nome and then Anchorage, to the university, to radiocarbon-date some things.
We were just fooling around, talking about a pickup game of Wiffle ball, when there was the sound of an engine over the wind, and we all prepared to say good luck to the Harvard PI off to Anchorage. Over the horizon, the little speck of the plane turned into a big speck, and it touched down and taxied. The pilot slid out of the plane, props still spinning hard, but his face was pale and pinched. He crossed over to the passenger side and opened the door.
Out slid The Castrating Bitch.
She marched her bony ass straight up to me. By that time, the good Doctor Primus Dwyer had taken his arm off my shoulders and sidled away. His wife took her cold hand out of her mitten, pulled the sleeve up on her puffy winter coat—unnecessary in that weather—and smacked me across the cheek. My mouth dropped open, and she went over to her husband and dragged him away from the rest of us, hissing.
I watched them move off. My cheek began to burn. The Harvard guys and John were watching, amazed.
That’s when I went a little crazy. I went right up to the bush plane and slammed the door and somehow put it in gear, and began driving after Primus Dwyer and his wife. He turned around and his eyes went round, and then he sprang out of the way, pulling his wife with him.
Imagine a bush plane roaring out across the tundra, spinning about, revving up. Two small figures running away from it, hand-in-hand. The plane beginning to accelerate toward the figur
es, and then, when they split up, turning toward the smaller figure, the skinny one, bearing down on the screaming, running lady in the puffy down jacket. Then the pilot, goddamn gutsy, swinging up into the cockpit, and swerving the plane at the last minute. He took one look at my face, then pushed the plane full throttle, lifting us up off the ground.
He took me all the way back to Nome because, he said, he was scared what I would have done if I had stayed. I caught a flight to Fairbanks and from Fairbanks a flight to San Francisco. All paid for on a credit card I’d found in the black Gucci pocketbook in the front of the plane, still warm from Dwyer’s wife’s hands. The cockpit was still sweet with the perfume she’d sprayed on herself only moments before she slid from the plane.
I touched down at the San Francisco airport, shaking so badly I could barely walk. I had no luggage and took a taxi to Stanford, the palm trees like a military line down Memorial Drive, the buildings pink as heaven. I sweated in my Alaska clothing as I loaded my car with everything that was important to me. And then I set off on my drive. I had had no sleep, was crying, going ninety miles an hour for the most part. I only stopped for gas and the bathroom, once to try to wash myself and change into a tee shirt and shorts. I ate nothing and could see very little by the time I crossed through Erie. A vision of Primus Dwyer sometimes sat in the seat beside me, the way I knew him best, tan and handsome, in his explorer’s kit. He said nothing, just smiled. Still furious, I pretended not to see him.