Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  “Oh.” I swallowed the moment, not fully processing it until just recently, when it dawned on me that these people weren’t, as I’d thought, better than me at what we did. I thought they’d earned their wealth by working harder and being smarter and more innately creative, talented, graceful, and godly than me. Worthier. When really, America’s class system is a caste system. At this point in capitalist history, wealth has consolidated such that class mobility is anomalous and still: the promise.

  It’s like we’re all forced to play this rigged game of Monopoly where some of us start off with a little stack of money and one property, some with stacks of money the height of hotels, a few run the bank, and many are in jail. Money, in this game, is no longer just paper, it’s coded numbers on screens that most of us aren’t educated to read, let alone trade in. And the rules of this game—they keep changing. People who consider themselves “winners,” those who can afford to, make up the rules as they go. They make deals with each other and the bank, to suit their established interests, to win all the wealth.

  (The earliest version of Monopoly was known as the Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904.)

  Money, now, can buy so much. It can buy beauty. You wouldn’t believe the subtle cosmetic procedures the daughters of socialites I know get. Money can buy a false sense of desirability. A majority of my friends have escorted, dated, or otherwise traded their genetic beauty for cash, which is dangerous—the delusion of a man paying for it, his repression, resentment, and rage. Money can buy you a career in the arts. Once I started paying attention, it became obvious—how many young so-called creatives, from painters to magazine editors, were just uninspired rich kids. I wonder if they thought I was one of them, the trust-funders and hangers-on I spent time with.

  I met the first lot through my model friend Cupie. The rich are impressionable to beauty. I’m not beautiful enough to qualify on looks alone, but I have taste. Impeccable, covetable—even salable—taste in theater, art, music, literature, and most of all: fashion. I love clothes! I’ll be the homeless woman talking to the sun by the Pacific Coast Highway in a vintage Lagerfeld blazer, Fiorucci jeans, Yves Saint Laurent hat, and Lucchese cowboy boots—they’re embroidered with flaming phoenixes, eternally returning in style.

  “Oh, you’re just Canadian—” is how well-to-do Americans write me off when I get all rah-rah class-conscious lately.

  “I can’t believe it’s like this!” I exclaim. “And y’all accept it?”

  But I didn’t know it. Not when I moved to New York and worked ninety hours a week at various gigs trying to keep up with the cool kids. Not when I experienced a masochistic mental breakdown from the inevitable burnout. Not when I rehabilitated care of yoga and other healing-industry goods. And not even when I killed our reality show contract, mostly because I was ashamed I couldn’t negotiate a livable budget. I still thought it was my fault. I still believed “success” was based on merit. On True Talent. And that I didn’t have it.

  Of course, at the same time, I also didn’t believe all that. That’s the thing—it’s like deep-dish-pizza down we always know. Even when we can’t articulate it, or act on it, we know what’s true, just, and beautiful. What’s Real. Love. Our souls will it, which is why we have so much mental illness, cruelty, and violence in our culture. Our true natures are repressed by manufactured desires and fears, by the temptation/frustration cycle of consumerism and power-as-domination. It’s like my sixty-nine-year-old mentor Steven Klein says, “The ego industry is a mass conglomerate!” You will never be satisfied.

  Even when I was a teenage camp counselor, I couldn’t help it: I always played favorites. At La Mariposa, I loved Alicia’s art the most. One of my many jobs in New York was to report on hype things for “cool” magazines. I was always looking for a feeling, a spark, someone putting experiences into forms until then unexpressed. If the magazines I worked for back in New York were really cool, they would’ve put Alicia on the cover, and assigned me to profile her for a good three thousand words, but these outlets aren’t after what they pretend to be. Like authenticity and art—they act like that’s their deal, when really they’re looking for accreditation and validation. Trading in existing cultural capital, they don’t know how to generate it. Real artists are generators, not traders. My editors were always asking where else my proposed subjects had been reported on; how many social media followers they had; and/or what famous people they’d collaborated with or were born from. There’s a checklist. Alicia doesn’t qualify—yet.

  When I was subletting the bed next to hers, Alicia was always churning out images—digital collages, fashion editorials, portraits, still lifes, and videos—that reflected the violence of desire, attachment, and healing. That feeling of wanting to destroy the one you love. To consume them. Knowing you’re acting evil and watching yourself do it anyway because you don’t believe in the goodness of yourself, or because you’re attached to people who behave the same way. Alicia was especially good on loving men—masculine hetero men. She figured animal sex. Instinct, aggression, and loyalty. Divinity. Looks of abduction, eyes blackened. Her manicured nails looked like blades and shields. There was melancholy and beatitude.

  Even in my dArkest, Alicia once captioned one of her Instagram posts, there sparks burning in my mouth, which is as concise a description of her work as I can come up with.

  I wanted to see what Alicia would do with a budget. It’s hard to say who was the most broke among our lot. It would’ve been a difference of a couple hundred bucks a month, which to us was a lot. In Los Angeles, Alicia patched together rent from miscellaneous bartending and modeling gigs, which got her out of the apartment. Otherwise she was at home, which was affordable. Alicia made art the way I did when I first started: from need, love, and naivete. When the feelings are as big as the information is chaotic, you put it into physical form in order to better see it, rearrange it, and maybe change it. Computers and their offshoot tools, like editing apps and social media, had given Alicia a near-free medium to work with. Grateful for this, Alicia constantly gave all her work away for free on social media. Her giveaways were more interesting than most movies being made, but they were ephemeral, diffuse, not reaching all they could touch. While they were helping her process, packaged like this, they weren’t going to build her the artistic career she said she wanted.

  I wanted to help. Blame my Virgoan servitude, my bleeding Leo Moon heart, and my burgeoning maternal instinct—and maybe also, I was projecting. You know the myth of discovery? Someone sees in you something you can’t see yourself or don’t have the resources to cultivate, and they make it happen for you. Classic story, the crafting of a leading lady. When I was younger, I so wanted that to happen to me. Soon after I signed the contract, enacting the part of discoverer, I realized how sick that story is. Casting agents, headhunters, and commercial producers are opportunistic creeps. What I envisioned for Alicia and the rest of La Mariposa, for our show, was less creepy than it was delusional. I was attempting to put on their oxygen masks before I did my own. I was faking it, so they could make it. Nadezhda did this, and it drove me crazy: she performed the role of “hacker girl,” when she only knew basic html. (Even I bought it for a minute; the girl dressed and talked the part.) I had fancied myself as a patron of the arts, like my second-wealthiest friend, Henry Gaylord-Cohen, was always telling me: “You’d make the best rich person, Fiona.” Clad in vintage Mugler and local handcrafted clothes by Lou Dallas, I would throw Jean Stein–worthy dinner parties; fund-raise for sexual liberty, affordable housing, right-to-water, and education; and you know I’d collect the heaven, hell, and Earth out of Real artists.

  Now in New York, waitressing full-time and so tired, Alicia’s pretty much stopped making work. Many of the best are striving in the shadows. Spotlight’s full of frauds.

  Episode 03—“Love loves to love love”

  THE OTHER NIGHT LUCIEN CALLED to talk about our relationship. When he tells me he loves me, I say I can’t feel it. “If only you beli
eved . . .” he repeats, leaving me to fill in the blank. I can feel my love for him. When I meditate, this patient rush will come spreading through my heart center, and I have angel wings. This is Real. And when we’re together, in person, and I can lock eyes with him, or hold him, then I can feel it.

  But he’s only intermittently here. He’s like my favorite TV shows from when I was a teenager, before streaming on-demand: I only get him once a week, on his schedule. Predictably romantic and always ending with a cliff-hanger, I’m left longing for more. Usually I wait patiently between episodes, because I’ve come to think—and because he tells me this is so—that his absences are deliberate lessons in restraint, self-knowledge, and God. And I do experience heavenly ecstasy in the waiting, when I “stay in my heart,” as he tells me to. But then sometimes, when there’s a longer gap in our programming, my mind will start to believe all these other things. He doesn’t really see me—know me—love me. How could he? What’s there to love? I pick fights and act out; drama, lies, cheating. He insists he’s faithful, equating godliness with monogamy, and suggests I work on my faith.

  We’ve been on and off for a year and a half.

  The night of his call, I was in what used to be Nadezhda’s bedroom, where I now live with Noo. It had been weeks since our last conversation. When I told him I’d been struggling—lacking work, money, him—he asked if he could read me something. Lucien prefaced his reading by saying it had been his mother, who he knows I admire, who first shared the piece with him.

  “It’s a letter by Rilke,” he said. “Written from Rome. This one is fairly common. Maybe you’ve read it?”

  I hadn’t. Lucien always seems to share exactly what I need. The perfect song, a myth, a memory. It’s one of the things I love most about him. He tells me it keeps him coming back to me, despite the repeated hurt. “I communicate more beautifully with you than with any other,” he says. “But you—” Often, I have to tell him, I’m not really here right now.

  The letter was about love and solitude and men and women. Individuals must “become world,” Rilke writes. We must learn to live in our solitude—to ripen and cohere—before we can really be with another. I know, I’ve been trying, I thought. Because I know if I don’t, I’ll continue to use men and media to fill my void. Feeling my influence—how I can delight—that makes me feel Real for a minute. Performing sexy or cute, dream girl, bad girl, generous, bratty, mother, savior, sweet. It’s so retrograde, but I love fulfilling these roles, witnessing how even Lucien, who claims to want me to be this autonomous Rilkean woman, buckles under the pressure of his boner when I pout, or how he warms when I listen rapt to his monologues, the problematics of which (his classist judgments, for instance) I only clock in retrospect, when I’m alone again.

  In the letter, Rilke writes about “the girl and the woman in their new, individual unfolding.” Dumbstruck and identifying, I started bawling as Lucien read the following:

  Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves . . . someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

  Playing the role of guru, Lucien read this letter as a riddle, offering no interpretation of his own. We hung up with I love you’s, and I lay down in my bed, a hand-me-down mattress on the floor, which I’d been sharing with dog-eared library books and maps and charts—plots to fix the world. I’d been drawing these maps, of histories of technology, of wealth as it’s distributed now, of value systems and where I fit in, all to try to figure out how I might help enact some kind of change that would bring me a life I could like. A life that would allow me to be Real 24/7.

  That Lucien read that letter seemed as prophetic as the letter itself. According to my charts, Western women have been stuck in this phase that Rilke described as “imitating male behaviors, misbehaviors, and male professions” for half a century, if not more. I want independence as much as the next girl, but I don’t want to have to fake bossiness, bitchiness, ruthlessness, or selfishness, or sell my sexiness, to get it; that’s a trap. So I stay in bed. But Rilke got me all revved up.

  “Tomorrow, I will leave the apartment!” I declared. “But tonight, just a poem—”

  And so, at the top of a convoluted map on “the advent and dissolution of private property,” I wrote this guy:

  She who opposes

  force with counter-

  force alone

  forms that which she

  opposes and is

  formed by it.

  In the desert last year, shortly after I killed our reality contract, I took mushrooms with this kind boy I’d been dating for three weeks named David. I felt in love with both him and Lucien at the time. I’d been sleeping with the two of them, sometimes both in the same day. Neither of them knew. David seemed to offer what Lucien lacked and Lucien, fucking Lucien—I kind of hated him then. I felt like I could say anything to David and he’d get it or at least try. While everything Lucien said felt like It: godsent, genius. I envied him. Articulate and persuasive, with friends in high places (Lucien’s mother was famous), the kid lived my fantasy: sleeping under a Cy Twombly, he only diaried on hotel stationery, as he traveled frequently to Moscow, Buenos Aires, Paris. The desert was basically his backyard—he, only twenty-six, had been glamping in it for decades.

  I’d been microdosing mushrooms for months, so I was familiar with the trip. The feeling of lungs like wood. Breathing slow as a tree. My feet on the ground, every step a massage. The concrete or sand or soil beneath just as much a part of me as my heart, whose simple knowing would finally hush my brutal, greedy mind.

  In the desert, I stretched on a rock as David played jazz saxophone while his friend Sofia coiled herself in copper sheets. They were in art school, and this performance was purportedly why dozens of young people had congregated in the desert, but from my stoned perch, it looked like Sofia was doing it for the photographs; David because he was generous, or unsure of himself, and Sofia had asked; while the rest of us were there for the beer and party favors.

  After the performance, I ate more mushrooms. In David’s car, en route to the campsite, I sat on his cute friend Milo’s lap and psychically had sex with both him and David, who was driving. I thought I was planting seeds for later in the tent, but when we got to the campsite, David and I walked into the desert. I’d never seen so many stars and I was obsessed with the spaces in between. They seemed to represent suffering or a natural emptiness we fear to plumb and so suffer from. Birth, death, the womb, void. It was cold and impersonal and universal, and I understood how I was host to it.

  David was having a great time. In the dark blue his face became a mask of birds and then a lizard. He laid a blanket down and we had sex on it. I had visions of myself as a painting by Marjorie Cameron. Split tongue out, on my knees, cat-cowing. I’m Inanna, I thought. There were slithers. I am the Earth. “But don’t forget”—I remembered Lucien saying—“at her center, Earth is Fire.”

  After—what? Did we cum? I can’t remember. I was the Universe until David started talking—why did he have to start talking about what a shame it was that few people still practiced the art of oral storytelling? That’s Lucien’s art. It’s one of the things I love most about him. I thought: I should be here with Lucien. The Sky chimed in, “When you try to have everything, you end up with nothing!”

  I told David I was “gnarly tripping.” He didn’t let it bum his high down. I loved that about him. David is trustworthy, kind, and self-caring. I started shaking then about the stars and the alphabet—how language organizes, how reality may be a collaborative script, how if only we’d author it more responsibly,
blah blah blah—and David said he could tell I was onto something, that most everything he’d heard from me seemed to be geared toward this something, and it felt real and worthy and like it was going somewhere. I cried. David held me in his arms and told me I was really, really special.

  “And,” he said, “I don’t think you know it.”

  I’m nothing, I thought, not self-pitying, not pleading for attention, like I had so many times before. It was just true, free-feeling.

  Why do few women ever experience themselves as Real? All my life, or at least since puberty, it’s been easy for me to see that others were alive and hard for me to feel it except in extremes—feeling fatally beautiful, getting hurt, loving like it’s a service. This led to crisis.

  Most of the women in my life seem to be similarly afflicted. We have anxiety disorders, depressions, bipolar swings, and furies. We wear cosmetic defenses, like BB cream and overcompensatory intellect. High achievers, my girls are public successes, even famed. But I’ve seen them in their living rooms, with hollow cheeks and sallow skin, telling me that if they didn’t perform as they do, they’d kill themselves, and that they’re convinced they’re dying or will soon, anyway, which is probably true, if they think it.

  When I met the women of La Mariposa, maybe because they were younger and better at faking bravery—or maybe because I’d spent the six months prior in a retreat of self-care where I had visions, real experiences of true freedom and creativity—I thought we could make something great together. As I got to know them, though, I realized these young women were a lot like I still am: limitingly self-conscious or prone to self-protective falsity in public, which now, thanks to social media, all feels like publicity. We effusively interrogated our passions in private, but feared that none of it would be taken seriously by the powers that be.