Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  Or maybe you’re a writer. A method writer, an everyday life actress, dangerously curious and curiously dangerous. An evil succubus stealing their life story because you’re not creative enough to invent your own.

  In high school in Ottawa, Ontario, I remember the boys used to have us line up according to height, twelve girls in a row, so they could slap our asses in a crescendo. Once, we volunteered to line up according to bra size. Not yet knowing I had perfect, puffy-nipped Lolita tits, I was humiliated to be first in line. In the nineties and early aughts, where I grew up, prime girldom—womanhood—was all about big titties. I knew the bra size of every one of my friends, just as I knew their grade point average. We competed in every domain in which we were rewarded: looks, grades, popularity.

  I remember, once, we made this known. At Sybil’s house, one afternoon after school, our clique confessed to our miscellaneous rivalries: how I was jealous, but actually awed, by Ash’s effortless holistic perfectionism; how Dawn’s 98 percent made us feel dumb; how we wished Sybil’s photogenic nuclear family was our own; and how we each felt too ugly, thin, fat, or flat. Six fifteen-year-old white girls hysterically crying, exchanging judgments as compliments, and compliments as judgments. We all hugged at the end, went home, and never talked about it again.

  Remember when I told you I went to Oaxaca City on an art residency? That’s where I was when Saturn hit the exact degree it was in relation to Earth when my already hairy head screamed for the first time. I was marked with a Scorpio Rising, just like Lucien. They say that relates to a difficult birth. My mom will say she’s “not so sure” about that; that she, like me, “has a pelvic construction perfect for popping them out—it was easy.”

  “No,” I’ll reply, knowing this isn’t entirely true. “I know I didn’t want to be born in London, Ontario. I’m a Californian baby, and you took that away from me.”

  I remember the first time I saw Lucien. It was at Café Gratitude on Rose Avenue in Venice Beach, and he was all thin and tweaky, styled like a hippie and acting as if he’d time traveled from when our parents were young, reckless, and wild. Since a friend had told me about him, I knew something Lucien didn’t yet: that he was raised in the house I’d gazed at pictures of my whole life. My almost life: it’d been alive inside me for twenty-seven years, and now it was standing in front of me, clearly wasted, longing, on edge. I prayed Lucien wasn’t a junkie, because I knew I’d follow him anywhere.

  Right before I met Lucien, I had made two resolutions. One, I would no longer date entitled pretty boys. Two, I would practice aligning my intentions, communications, and actions, meaning I would mean what I say and say what I mean, and behave accordingly. The mystery of life makes this tricky. As soon as Lucien showed up, I knew I’d break both resolutions.

  For over two years, he lived inside me. The music we listened to together played on repeat. Every orgasm came with a sound of him. Our studies intermingled—Krishnamurti, Stanislavsky, Reality. Lucien and his friends could afford to live in the Real, it seemed, unlike me and mine. They tripped beyond the confines of their minds and screens, to Paris, Taos, Tokyo, and Desert Hot Springs. They played real instruments, like grand pianos and violins, and lived in real big apartments they could afford without having to pretend to be something they weren’t. My girlfriends and I strived to get what they had: enough time and space to create. Washing hair, babysitting, waitressing, and sugar babying, we faked pleasantries, dissociated, to get it done and go. But everything you do becomes you. My internal tempo from thirteen to twenty-seven was go go go. If I just do this, then maybe I’ll get that. It was promised. You can be anything. I took it too literally. I tried to shape-shift, work hard, people please, act.

  When I met Lucien, I’d already started to let go of all notions of self and other bad habits I’d taken on in order to “make it.” I was open. And then we met, and this still feels Real, whenever I think of him: I know myself. I’m no name—I never identified with my name. I’m not this body—it keeps changing. I’m not my parents—what a chance occurrence. I’m a resonance, a texture, a chord. The heartstrings are no metaphor!

  Lucien had been supposed to join me in Oaxaca. Instead, I got a story. A young woman named Miranda showed up at my apartment gate on Elden Avenue to meet Clara, who had been subletting my blessed yellow room while I was away. Miranda had driven seven hours from the Bay to meet a boy she’d had a romance with in Austin, Texas, a few months before. His name was Lucien Langham and when she arrived in Los Angeles, after he had been the one to encourage her to come, he didn’t return any of her texts or calls, just like he’d done to me before. Meanwhile, Lucien had been talking to me.

  I was researching flights to Mexico for Lucien when Miranda called Clara, a girl she knew online, looking for a place to crash. What a beautiful coincidence. Miranda and I had the exact same Fuchs brand red recycled-plastic toothbrush. Same apple cheeks. Clara sent me a picture of Miranda in my bathroom, our two toothbrushes lined up next to each other.

  Miranda and Clara ended up having an affair. For two nights, they hooked up in the very bed—on my one set of sheets—that Lucien and I had unmade so many times before. When Clara texted to tell me, I was hit with envy: Clara was always hooking up with girls besides me!

  When I first met Clara, I had thought I wanted her, but then I did what I default to with girls: I made her a sister. Within fifteen minutes of meeting, Clara was undressing in front of me. She had to try on this Prada Sport ensemble a professional woman we both admired had just gifted her. A miniskirt and halter top. Clara has the type of body people want to dress and undress. She was manic that first meeting. It didn’t seem ethical to seduce her, I thought, like I, too, would be taking advantage of her.

  Over the next couple of years, Clara and I got close, close enough to call each other sister, and that’s how I learned, through her casual telling, how often she ended up fucking when she “wasn’t so into it.” Subtly coerced into a threesome; raped by a sugar daddy who she did have a boner for before, but not in the way he ended up in her. Clara seemed open to advances, I guess. Pliable. She submitted easily to performative authority and “believed the best in people.” This often meant ignoring their bad behavior, or justifying it like: Well, what they really mean to share is love, I can feel it, but they’re wounded so . . . Even though she’s tall, strong, naturally athletic, and creepy smart, Clara consistently lets iffy people direct her life experiences for their own sexual benefit, to her detriment, and this question haunted me: Why?

  When Lucien was in Austin with Miranda, he had been writing of his undying love for me. I forgave him again and again. I forgave him when a barely legal–looking girl came up to me to tell me she was a fan of my writing, and then when she saw who I was texting, said, “That guy has been messaging me too, like explicitly.” I forgave him when he threatened “to O.J.” any new lover I took, and when he cried suicide every time I said I was leaving him, a clear manipulation. I even forgave him after a blond model entered my Sex and Love Addiction recovery group and started detailing a boy she was dating who sounded just like Lucien. He was the one who had suggested I enter the program—because I refused to commit to him—and I, being open to experience, or something, agreed to try it. The program had me cut ties with Lucien. You’re not supposed to engage with your addictions while recovering. Then this young woman came in, well into a relationship with him, longer into it than I’d been in the program. It was him, I later confirmed via three verifiable sources. I’m a journalist, kid! It’s like he wanted to get caught.

  In Mexico, I’d found him flights like he’d asked, and even arranged a chaste sugar baby date to help pay for our life when he arrived. The date went as so many of my sugar-baby dates did—we’d talk about politics and familial psychodynamics and then I’d get a kiss on the cheek and an envelope of cash at the end.

  Eduardo was Spanish and Mexican. He ran his family’s dairy farm. He’d never been married or even close. He was forty-five, and he told me that at f
orty he had suffered a severe depression.

  “In Mexico, we don’t have mental illness,” he said, meaning it’s not socially recognized.

  I remember seeing a hand-painted sign for NEURÓTICOS ANÓNIMOS by a highway in Oaxaca City. An anime-style boy in a hoodie and jeans held his hands to his face in anguish. Neurotics Anonymous.

  “Here,” Eduardo explained, “life is pain. You’re supposed to endure, keep quiet, find God.”

  Eduardo believed in the same kind of God as me: “There’s something—serendipity, mystery, all this . . .” We drank a fulsome Spanish red at the most expensive restaurant in Oaxaca City and talked about the local teachers’ strike, American colonialism and military intervention, and the “harmony ideology” practiced between indigenous Oaxacan populations.

  While in Mexico, I had been dropped by a publisher for writing “too subjectively” and “unbelievably.” “Problematic.” They were right, and not. I was writing from inside madness. It wasn’t unreal—in fact, many femmes found it relatable—but my book was definitely not set in the Real. It was sick, sad, and yearning—like I was about to get in the extreme: I caught a parasite or two. Convinced I could fight it off alone, because I didn’t want to pay for a doctor, I hid in my room suffering for a week until it was clear this was fucking stupid.

  I had gotten sick the day I realized Lucien wasn’t coming.

  Lucien Langham got $3K from his trust every month, and he wouldn’t even split the cost of my morning-after pill when he was the one who got too excited months into our relationship. “It’s your body,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to interfere.” He always left my place with a keepsake: a lighter, a ball cap, sunglasses, parking passes, books. I’d never see these things again. Things were always being “stolen” from him. When we first started hanging out, he requested “a simple favor”: that I not tell mutual friends we were involved. “I’m famous, Fiona,” he said. “People love to talk.” Then he’d share excessive poetic visions of marrying me, tell me I’m so smart, have me promise to be “a good girl,” meaning faithful. He said he would “always be here” for me, then be unreachable for weeks. And somehow, he had a psychic radar for whenever I was moving on. Every time I started going out with new people, as dates or just as friends, Lucien would show up again, often on my doorstep, late at night, pacing and cursing me out. Once he punched his car, breaking skin. Another time, he smashed a glass bottle at my feet. “Liar!” he screamed, when I insisted I hadn’t been with anyone but him. “Even thinking about it is a betrayal,” he said. I clocked all these red flags as they waved in my face, but why did I stay for so long?

  I loved the dirt behind his fingernails, the slant of his brown eyes, and his smell, like cigarettes, sweat, and the lingering musk from boy-branded grooming products. Lucien smelled like a boy! I loved how he taught me to wake up with no idea of what to do, and how he reminded me to walk slow and take back alleys. I loved all the music he played: Croatian synth pop, Bobby Caldwell slowed and chopped, Blaze Foley, Kendrick Lamar, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and Jackie DeShannon singing about what the world needs now. I loved the music from his iPhone crackling out on my Bluetooth speaker as he left my home, like the way he’d let his cigarettes burn out, distracted by his own talktalktalk.

  On the radio, I once overheard Camille Paglia say offhand that what we don’t talk about when we talk about abusive relationships is how the sex is so good. Paglia insisted that’s why so many women stay in them. They call us victims, say it’s about our subjugation, cite Stockholm syndrome. Yes, but there’s the animal. Women are wild too. The sex wasn’t even that good. Lucien could be lazy, he came all too fast, and didn’t luxuriate in oral (I need you to genuinely love it for me to surrender on your mouth). But the energy. Fucking cosmic or biological destiny, I wanted his seed in me. The heart between my legs beat cartoonish for him. Sticky thighs and selfies. I learned how beautiful I was around him. I loved making out in cars, alleys, and on the beach. Lucien kissed like a girl. He must have kissed hundreds of girls. I kept telling him, We don’t need to be monogamous, I know you’re not, do what you want, just don’t lie to me.

  But he did, and even though I knew, I repeated: “I love you.” I told others too: “I love him,” “He’s a piece of shit,” “A li’l liar with tiny—” “But God, I love that kid.”

  And I believed it. Totally, fully, full of it.

  I love him, I thought, because every time I meditated on him, my psyche cleared, my heart lifted, the Real came into focus, and I knew myself. Our love felt incorruptible. Man could kill me, and I’d still love him. It was Krazy Kat shit. We were both Krazy and Ignatz. I loved torturing him and getting slapped.

  Maybe the feeling isn’t love, I wrote in my diary in the swollen dumb heart of it. Maybe it’s power? I don’t know. Language can only paw at the door of sensation.

  And create it. Looking back, I see how Lucien Langham cast spells on me. You know, s-p-e-l-l-s. He told me all these things I wanted to hear. Stories of Ancient Egypt, Native America, Old Hollywood, and Point Dume back in the day. He told me: People will listen to you, Fiona. You could be a really important writer. Love is the answer. No one feels better. We need you for the revolution. I prefer bush. I don’t know if he meant any of it, or if he’s just that skilled a manipulator, discerning what his target wants to hear. And I don’t really care because I’m so grateful to have learned what it is I want to hear.

  After Oaxaca, when I ghosted to the Bay to cat-sit Albert and Nabokov, my life was like this: I’d follow any gig or trade that would allow me the time and space I needed to create. Instead of writing for publications, I painted, meditated, read, and wrote and wrote and wrote copious dumb notes about what was wrong with me, my family history, society, the economy, God help me. During one meditation, seated on the carpeted floor of this beautiful home that belonged to one of my mom’s friends (they were closest right before I was born), I gave birth to myself. I was two days back from Oaxaca, and this was painful, ecstatic, and the most fearsomely calm I’ve ever felt.

  I realized I had died in Mexico. My rose-lensed romanticism had died. My unreality had died. I had gotten sick, I was taken care of, and I died. Lucien never came. The publisher dropped me. I ran out of money. In a tiny clay room, puking and shitting, sweating and sleeping, I had prayed for all the women in my life to come take care of me. Visions of Alicia wiping my brow, Simone serving me broth, Amalia cracking jokes, and my mother whispering good night. When I was a girl, I used to love getting sick, because it was one of the only times I was guaranteed my ambitious mom’s attention. She’d tuck me in and check back in throughout the night, and in the morning, taking my temperature, her hands couldn’t avoid touching my cheek.

  I sat cross-legged and so open-hipped my pubis touched the floor. I meditated into this split consciousness. I was simultaneously pure sensation and observing without judgment. The sensation was an undulation from my pelvic floor up to my spine and out the top of my head. I was rocking without willing it. “I” wasn’t doing anything as I passed through black to pink and red and back: excruciating pain; a damp, wet, raw opening; pleasure and pain. An orgasm, a deep, earthy, gross orgasm that decomposed as it rose, durational and shuddering, chaotic and quiet.

  Eclipsing the light, the visionary sensations ended with my floating in space, in this lonely, cold place, which I’d caught a glimpse of in the desert with David. Now I sat in it for a long time. I felt convinced I’d just experienced being born and giving birth, where we come from, and where we return. I felt my mother very close. I understood her wary wisdom, and why we fear women, because this place isn’t heavenly, easy, or light. It’s bitter, dark, fresh like humus, and Real, collective, suspenseful, antigravitational. Beautiful.

  The Real is a reminder of death. It’s the eternal now. It’s Maya, discerning illusion and sensing deeper. It’s taking responsibility, it’s being in the flow. It’s heavy, funny, and light. Fluid, paradoxical, holy shit. And it can be painful. Humiliating. Some peo
ple live here—where actions have consequences, where magic is enacted. Here, you have agency and guidance. Your heart is your compass. You feel what’s right and true. It may be ineffable, but it’s not ephemeral—the Real is the most material state I know.

  The Real can be painful. When did we learn to escape? Was I a kid bored in class? Was it when that man descended on me, if he did? Was it when I realized that the collective imaginary, the “real world” imaginary, like Disney and Wall Street, was in direct conflict with my interior life? The imagination is Real. I can look at your face and picture it melting, and it does. The thing about imaginary things is they disappear as fast as you envision them. They’re as unreliable as words unless you make them matter. Materialize them.

  Being with Lucien was like smoking. An image and fantasy I craved. Delight on the lips. A practiced suck that made me smolder. Late at night it felt so good. The next day, though, I’d be queasy, edgy, and craving more more more. In the short term, my indulgence would be coupled with other bad habits. I’d start drinking: fire for fire. Then need: weight to absorb the hurt. Bacon breakfast burritos with black coffee, another smoke. I’d get lazy, stop meditating. And think: cynically. Obsessing over elusive desire, I’d fail to show up for friends and family, ignore work opportunities. My life, every time I let him back in, would devolve—plain bad luck punctuated the mundane. Then I’d cut him out and repair myself, and fortune would find me again. But I couldn’t resist testing this. Friends called me a masochist. Like smoking, the glamour of self-ruin I delighted in was fun for a while, but in the long term I knew its accumulated reality could kill me.

  Another analogy for my relationship to Lucien came directly from him. A few months into his sobriety, he was spouting program gospel endlessly. We were driving through the Santa Monica mall one afternoon when he said, “Alcoholism is a simultaneous obsession with, and allergy to, alcohol.” I turned to him and said, “But love! That’s how I feel about you.”