Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  Unbeknownst to me, during my last phase of devotion to Lucien, three girlfriends of mine, Clara, Misty, and Alicia, smart girls, were each mired in their own abusive dynamic with a volatile young man. That’s a mark of relationships like these: we hide them from loved ones. I learned of Clara’s idiot when, months into the romance, she shared screencaps of his messages to her, which had finally escalated, she realized, beyond something she could keep private. He called her a bitch, a whore, and more, threatened violence, samo samo. Alicia’s and Misty’s guys stalked them after my friends tried to break up with them. I’d be hanging with Alicia or Misty, and see an ex lurking down the street, waiting for me to leave, so they could catch their prey alone.

  The guys knew to cry when they apologized. “I’m sorry, I fucked up.” He didn’t mean to punch Misty. He didn’t mean to destroy Alicia’s art portfolio. He didn’t mean those things he said to Clara. These guys were vulnerable when it served them, lavishly expressing their woundedness—“I didn’t mean to”—which we lapped up, because we hurt too, but less, so much less, when we were helping them.

  “It’s a movie,” Alicia told me. “The one-to-one intensity. You can get caught up. Especially if, you know, when you’re in it, you’re getting dick four times a day. It’s also probably something like mistaking adrenaline from fear for passion, and longing for love.”

  Freedom is what I was after. That feeling of nothing constricting your chest, of mobility, bouncy ease. But like longing can be confused for love, and fear for passion, freedom can be mistaken for reaction: fleeing, fighting, feeling what you need to be free from.

  The Boys. It’s their confidence I wanted. Their entitlement. Seemingly uncaring of what others thought, and lauded for it. Cowboys. Skater boys. With evasive gazes and unadulterated eyelashes, long, thick, and naked. The groove of their chests. Their turning their backs. Shrugs and hair flips and poor grades: a demonstration of their intelligence, being above normative structures. Casualness in business rewarded with big money. Their freedom. Their autonomy. My fantasy.

  Lucien wasn’t the first, he was just the ultimate Boy. Me if I were one. We have the same curve of ass. The same sensitive skin that breaks out on our back. The same professed values and taste in justice and art. And the way we looked at girls as these mystical creatures that got our dicks hard and in so doing momentarily solved it all: our self-loathing, our resenting the real world for making us feel like pieces of shit, our acting like pieces of shit.

  My friends Chloe and Flan (they’re in a band, with the best lyrics, called Odwalla 1221) named the archetype: “Butterflies.” Chloe laughed when she said it. “Carefree popular pseudo-free spirit boys.” Yes. Butterflies in my stomach, butterfly kisses on my pussy lips, social butterflies, elusive, pretty, flying flowers, he loves me, he loves me not.

  What I wanted from Lucien, more than being with him, was to be him. Narrow-hipped, a dick. Moneyed, cultured, an artist. Articulate. The mean things he said to me were just more eloquent versions of what I’d been telling myself daily since puberty. You’re dumb, fake, fat, inexperienced, ignorant, and too smart for your own good.

  A false concept of mind versus heart was what really kept me in it. I thought I hated my mind, that it was so ugly, that it was good for nothing except making people miserable, since most brainiacs I’d witnessed used their gifts to belittle, deride, and intimidate. I didn’t want to be smart, because I equated it with being unkind, and not hot. Lucien knew this. He said, “We came together so we could both learn to live from the heart.” This was why I had to be faithful, simple, true. “Cut the head,” he’d say, whenever I displayed “too much mind,” like if I pointed out flaws in his logic, his hypocrisies, or the other girls who announced themselves to me. “Feel what’s real,” he insisted.

  At the core of feeling, at the core of me, as I imagine it is for everybody, is an infinite void full of love, ecstatic and soothing. I call it God, and while Lucien did help me learn to connect to this, claiming ownership over the discovery was perhaps his greatest cruelty. So colonial! As if. Lucien was constantly critiquing “the sins” of “the white man,” but then he used language like the worst of them: seducing with flattering lies, claiming superiority through convoluted tautology and enigmatic vocabulary, then threatening violence when the previous tactics failed.

  The great thing about being human, and not a character in a movie, is that, if you’re doing it right, you’re playing more than one role at a time. With Lucien, I may have been acting the part of a twentieth-century girl-form attachée to a Great Patriarch, a chick to his Manson, Anaïs to his Henry, Lee Krasnering his drippy Pollock, but I was also in concurrent relationships with my parents, my cat, my writing, my editors, and the girls.

  I started picturing my girlfriends in the room when I was engaging with Lucien. Nadezhda was unimpressed by my laughing off his slut shaming. Susan rolled her disenchanted eyes so far back at his yee-haw they got stuck at her third eye and she became instantly enlightened. Clara saw herself in my letting Lucien coax desire out of me only to the point that it served his desire, and she stopped letting boys do that to her too. Mostly I kept thinking, Amalia would’ve shot Lucien by now, and that movie image—her cute Cupid lips pursed as she aimed a pistol at his entitled face—cracked me up and out of it. Amalia had better things to do than fuck with fuckboys. She was exhibiting at museums and galleries around the world, starring in movies in China, producing a cartoon for a network in the US, and editing two books.

  It’s messed up how being myself in public, like the idea of ever publishing this book, still scares me more than a boy who breaks bottles in my face, punches his knuckles raw, and tells me I’m a sex addict just because I know how to communicate with the pulse of my my my!

  Episode 12—“This is when the Real fun begins”

  There is no reality. There are only people who know this, and people who don’t know this and are being manipulated by those who do.

  —TERENCE MCKENNA

  NEITHER OF US COULD GET out of our own lives fast enough. I was about to turn thirty. Tracy was thirty-three, or thirty-four. She’d stopped counting. We wanted the same things.

  “The world is trying to kill us,” Tracy insisted, “with the erasure of magic.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Reality is the most spiritual place, and few of us live here.”

  Our talk would flow fast and heavy, and we were miserable. We were driving across the country, retracing the route my parents took with me in utero, thirty years ago to the week. It was Tracy who had to go. She had a wedding in Toronto and a solo show in New York after that. Then she was considering disappearing. Tracy has been miserable in Los Angeles. The real life she wanted there isn’t possible. We’re not rich, and she’s lonely.

  When I learned that Tracy was planning to drive to Canada alone, the creep of potential adventure took over. I shouldn’t go. I had been in Baja. I had worked hard to get there. I had fumigated La Mariposa (roaches) so I could sublet my room (have cash). I had hired a cat-sitter for Noo, sold the last of my salable clothes, and gotten a pal to get a pal to get a pal to give me a ride to this self-made retreat (house-sitting again) where I was to write for and by myself, finally. I was almost thirty, and still talking to Lucien every now and again. He’s sober and more responsible, but can still make me cum like I’m an angel as we’re talking on the phone, and he knows about cool things, like plant subjectivity. He’s also disappointing. All talk. He said he wanted to come to Baja just long enough for me to make him cum.

  In Baja, I told Lucien, “I’ve been writing about us.”

  “Beautiful,” he replied.

  “You might not like it.”

  Pause.

  “You could help”—I suggested—“make it a happy ending?” (It was always a battle of wills with us.) “I’d love to write a real modern romance.”

  The next day I Skyped my parents. My parents. I think about them every day, but rarely engage. With overbearing mothers of their own, the
y’ve let my brother and me more or less be since we were three. My parents wanted to talk because I mentioned the possible road trip in an e-mail and now they were all excited, almost romantic sounding.

  “I can send you the exact route we took,” my dad said. “You can stop in the park where your mother cried from exhaustion.”

  The road trip should’ve been fun, but I let everything that holds me back take up too much space in that car. Tracy likes to talk about trauma and hurt. We got into it early and I couldn’t get back out. I was a slew of creepy relationships, I was getting off on conflict, I was maybe molested, defending my abuser, not standing up for myself, betraying my ideals, longing for Mom, never going be a mom; I was broke . . . Was I poor? That’s the word Tracy used: “I’m sorry that you’re poor.”

  One night we had to spend one hundred dollars more than I expected on a hotel. We’d just left Boulder, Colorado, where all the cute hippie B and Bs were booked. We drove from motel to hotel to motel—all sold out. The parking lots were stuffed with shiny new pickup trucks and SUVs. “Oilmen,” the night clerk at one Ramada Inn explained. “There’s oil work right now.” At eleven p.m., after twelve hours of driving, we finally found a suite to sleep in. It was my turn to pay, and because it was more than I’d budgeted for, I spun out as I do when I’m around people: wordlessly.

  I know what set me off. It was early in our journey, and Tracy had suggested, as she had a few times before, that I “be more empathetic,” that this would somehow solve all my problems. I got defensive and then I was silent. Neil Young played. Unspoken rebuttals rushed in: I know I was closed off for a decade plus. I know I can seem cold and disconnected, but I believe it’s because I am an empath.

  I feel what you feel, and it can engulf me. That’s why sex is so epic and why living in New York was so hard—too many competing energies, I couldn’t filter the feels. Empathy is a liability in this country: it’s inefficient, unproductive, and I’m paranoid. Sober around drunks, I’ll feel that loosening, mean heat. Sober around stoners, I’ll get goofy, cushy, cloudy. Migraines are contagious, as are hysteria, mania, and lethargy. When Noo gnaws on her claws, I feel this satisfying pushback of kitty cuticles, like we’re one entity.

  As we approached the Canadian border and crossed into Sarnia, Ontario—exactly as my parents did with me thirty years ago—Tracy and I felt lifted. The sky was the same, but as Tracy said, “Isn’t it like a dark cloud has passed?” It was true: life felt lighter here.

  “I could speed and get pulled over and not be afraid!” Tracy wowed.

  “We could get in an accident,” I added. “And go to the hospital!”

  Windows down: we loved the smell of rural Ontario, and talked about moving back to Canada. But just a couple of hours later, as we were entering Toronto, it became “Ummm, no, I don’t think so. Ha ha ha.” (This is a common question for ambitious Canadians: Why do so few of us stay?)

  I had kept going back to that house. The one my parents and Lucien all lived in. I’d hitch my bike to public buses and ride two and half hours from La Mariposa to Malibu and cry in front of the locked gate, the house now owned by some rich tech exec, like an encroaching amount of Westside real estate.

  Once, when I was twelve, my parents took my brother and me to Southern California for a family funeral, and we passed by their old home.

  “We made you right below that window—” my dad said, pointing to a jutting construction.

  “Oh yeah,” my mom deadpanned. “I know exactly when it happened.”

  No wonder I grew up to be a pervert.

  They got married in that house too. My mom wore Japanese designers, powder pink and sapphire blue. They had ten friends over, a woman priest presiding, and served sushi and champagne.

  “Does it bother you that it wasn’t Real?” Tracy asked me on our trip. Her last relationship had also been this kind of thing: an entitled white male artist who gets girls to play roles he basically scripts for them. Absurd sex. Demeaning critiques. A totalizing experience. They tell you you’re special, say “I love you,” when really, you’re one of what have been, and will be, many.

  “No,” I replied. “Because it was real to me.”

  God knows I love a good story. Synchronicity compels me. That’s why God gave me this coincidence: so I’d get in that car with Tracy. A Saturn Return retrace, LA to Toronto, was too juicy not to follow. Even though it was painful (there were times when I wanted to smother Tracy, for all our drive was reminding me of), I stayed the course, and eventually was delivered to where I needed to be.

  From my parents’ apartment in Toronto, I could see how I’d spent the last two years crying in front of the wrong door. I’d been trying to make a home out of a broken American boy, when I should’ve been addressing where I’m blessed to have come from. Where I probably chose to be born.

  I get it! If I got knocked up now, I’d move back to Canada too.

  “It’s just like the US,” my Midwestern friend Katherine said on her first visit to my homeland. “Only no one’s evil here.”

  When I got back to Los Angeles, thirty years old now (it happened in Toronto), it was time to move out of La Mariposa.

  There’d been a series of subletters all summer, as Nadezhda, Darya, and I came and went. The young woman who had been occupying my room had somehow turned my white sheets sooty, ashen, and green. There were tiny pieces of torn paper and dust bunnies all over; roaches tickling the bathroom floor.

  This subletter had extended her destruction as far as the apartment’s front door when she was locked out one evening. Nadezhda had texted her, Wait! I’ll be home in an hour. But this impatient punk decided to kick down the door instead. Nadezhda, with her surveillance paranoia, was always complaining about the security cameras in our halls, but I love picturing it: a grainy long-shot of this young woman’s strong tattooed leg cracking down our once-dear front door.

  My new place is on the Westside, the sunny home of a young man named Brandon, who, like my father’s friend from when they were our age, suffered irreparable physical injury while working construction for the art world. Brandon was burned while assisting a young male artist who hasn’t touched a piece of art, except to sign it, since he was signed to a blue-chip gallery at twenty-three.

  Like most of my friends, Brandon didn’t have health insurance, and the young artist he worked for didn’t have workplace insurance; he was paying everyone under the table. Brandon was being paid fifteen bucks an hour to work with hot wax and light steel. He was assembling some sort of militaristic ventriloquist-dummy-cum-drone in the guise of Icarus. The artist Brandon worked for wanted to fly his dummy over the beach at Miami Art Basel. He called “the whole tableau” “a painting.” It was about “climate change, surveillance, and the will to power,” or something. When Brandon incurred third-degree burns on his hands, feet, and face, along with tens of thousands in hospital bills, from a faulty hot wax container, he sued his employer for personal injury. The artist countersued for defamation; he said he’d never hired Brandon. The cases kept getting stalled, Brandon couldn’t afford his lawyer, and now he has legal debt on top of the medical, and is looking for someone to come on board pro bono.

  My father’s friend Michael fell down an empty, unmarked elevator shaft in a minor art star’s New York City loft when he was doing repairs for the artist in the mid-’80s. My father moved to Point Dume, Malibu, to assist Michael through physical and cognitive rehab. That’s how he met my mother.

  Not only does Brandon, an LA native, know dozens of women who have fallen for Lucien Langham (and at least three of them at the same time as me), but he also makes everything seem so simple. “Life is difficult enough as it is,” he says. “There’s no use adding stress to stress.” For every girl Lucien has chewed through, Brandon has a friend. His friends are always coming over to lend him a hand since his are out of commission.

  I think the most dangerous thing about not feeling Real, which I still often don’t, is that you’re liable to treat
others that way. When I “quit writing,” it was for the same reason I killed the reality show contract: I was afraid of doing harm.

  I was six years old in a party dress when I learned how evil I can be. It was one of those exhilarating first days of spring in Montreal, and we were playing in the park after school. I was playing alone, climbing a favorite tree, which I realized, as I got settled in on a high branch, was covered in fuzzy green caterpillars. Hundreds of black-spotted green creatures with orange antennae. They crawled all over me. Their prolegs were sticky, like tiny damp suction cups. I kissed a few on my fingers and placed them back on the branches, as delicately as I could. For what felt like a long time, I was in awe of their quantity. I whispered stories to them, named them, and tickled them against my cheeks, like butterfly kisses from my baby brother. When my mom called me to go, I shimmied down the tree as usual. On the ground, I saw how my dress was maimed. Splotches of green and yellow were crushed into its full pale skirt. The horror crawled up my back too. I must’ve killed dozens of new friends in my play.

  The reality show was too much like the writing I do. Journalistic, invasive. Writers are evil. Our material is this world, is people, is power, is love. If I’m not murdering, I’m at least a thief. I can’t make art without stealing. People are my favorite medium.

  Cats are evil, too, and I love them. So maybe it’s okay that I am what I am. We’re predators, daydreamers, slinky, dethroned royalty, cuddly only when we say.

  But Tracy was right about the empathy thing: I’m not the compassionate creature I wish I were. For years, I’ve pictured myself hugging, double-kissing, teasing, cuddling, and giving love. Instead I wear what Simone dubbed my “turtle shell.” It’s more like Bowser’s shell, from Super Mario Bros. My armor is spiky-sharp, untouchable, and it weighs on me.