Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  During our road trip, I kept looking at Tracy’s back, hunched over the wheel. She had done all the driving, four thousand kilometers in four days, because her car insurance was expired, I’d only just gotten my license, and she didn’t want to risk more than she already was. I wanted to help. She was obviously in pain, wincing, rolling her shoulders and neck. I kept thinking: Rub her back. I kept picturing it and I couldn’t do it. My turtle shell had turned into a straitjacket. Do it. Don’t do it. Why can’t I do it?

  I’ll always be in that silver sedan with Tracy, unable to reach out, just as I’ll always be on the ground by that tree, gutted by the evil inside me.

  In the weeks before our road trip, I visited Tracy in her studio often. She was putting the final touches on the pieces for her solo show. Ambitious, huge canvases. Those roses covered by black blinds, and butterflies. Tracy cut hundreds of butterflies out of canvas and painted them sunflower yellow, pumpkin, chalkboard black, shimmery mauve, and many tones of rose. She affixed at least one butterfly to every piece in her show. One canvas was covered in them. A flurry of asymmetrical mariposas, as if every freak we knew were flying free.

  We were turned on—lit up—by screens. They’d raised us. Which was why I thought our real Real World might work. It was a bad idea though. Don’t worry—I’m full of them. If I could only sell my soul, I’d make a great ad executive. I know exactly what to sell: desire.

  Nadezhda tells me she wishes she’d “never asked ‘Why?’ So you wouldn’t have doubted, so it could’ve happened . . .” Two Leo Moons, we talk about the spell of “And . . . action!” How cameras alert to the moment. This is the appeal: we want to feel pushed up against the Real. Here and now, wow! I’ve been practicing delivering this with my everyday gaze: shining it upon the world, upon my people, who and what I want to see play. It’s like David—the boy from the desert; remember? he’s now a film producer—said to me: “You’re the camera, Fiona.”

  Even when days on end are gray and nights are rife with nightmares, I’m grateful that electrical outlets look like little spooked faces; amused that you can almost spell evil with beautiful; and mesmerized by how a person can change you. I hated gray days until I loved Tracy. Now I get a thrill in them, imagining how she’d feel—alert under gray as I am under the sun.

  I wanted to give the young residents of La Mariposa everything I thought I’d missed. I wished someone had taken my amorphous anxiety seriously. I wished I’d been gently called out for being a phony. I wished someone had loved me enough to ask, “What do you want?” And, “Do you know how to want?” And if not—the answer would’ve been no—I wished someone would’ve taught me.

  The Real is like getting to exist in my truth. Which is like, ultimately, we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing here so let’s make the best of it. All my youthful suffering—my shame, meekness, mania, depression, dysphoria, hysteria—I now think of as an existential, or spiritual, misunderstanding.

  See, for a long time, I thought I was missing something. Everyone else around me seemed to function like they knew what was going on, like they had purpose, direction, a role. I’d go through phases where I’d try to imitate people who seemed near enough to my makeup and who were making it in the world. It never worked. That’s when I’d come across as a phony. Or I’d rescind it all, go blank—hide out in my home or mask my void under spectacular clothes. They must know something I don’t know, I thought. I was constantly doubting myself. I’d misplaced my conscious intuitive faculties, like so many of us do.

  It took me a long time to embrace a thing like God. What I now know of it is so private, I hardly want to speak on it. As a young girl, I feared even trying to believe. I was afraid—the same way I was with schoolyard bullies, cops, doctors, girl crushes, and my parents—of looking foolish and being punished, or worse, dismissed. “God” to me then was but a historical concept, a means to justify oppression and repression, man over other, righteousness; at best, it seemed like a consolation prize for the dispossessed. The word irked me. God dog God dog God dog.

  A lot of words I didn’t get until I got them. When I was flailing in my early twenties, Simone would tell me, “Trust your gut.” She’d ask, “What does your heart say?” I’d shake my head. I didn’t know how to understand what she was suggesting.

  I was raised cold, with little exposure to felt experiences of heart, gut, or soul. David sent me a passage the other day about the word cliché. It comes from, this article suggested, the sound typewriters make. A word or phrase, typed too many times, became a Clich-ay Clich-ay Clich-ay. Saying the words out loud now—gut, God, heart, soul, spirit, truth—I feel their reality rise, in the same way that if I hear Fifi in a crowded space, I sit at attention and look for its source. Try it with different words:

  Love. Love love love. I love saying love! It’s enveloping. Easy. Like a smile across my heart center. And potency? Doesn’t it sound just like engorgement? Like pride. Like ooooh, baby, oh. Potent! Potential!

  When I’m in a fury, I swear. I curse. People get hurt. Cursing. See? Once we understood the magic of words.

  Even though La Mariposa said they trusted me, I knew there was something creepy about my desire to put them on display. It was classic confused Leo meets Virgo. A little dictator—exhibitionist, slavish, savior complex. Instead of addressing what needed to be addressed—ha ha, me—I sought to work through others, to transform the world.

  My hair is about six inches longer. That’s the most marked material change between when I first moved to LA at twenty-eight and now at thirty. That and I can drive a car. Not that I can afford one. I’m still walking this city like I’m fucking Socrates. I have thick calves and knees. I’ve walked hundreds of hours in Fendi wood-soled clogs, Prada Sport kitten heels, Eckhaus Latta platforms, and my Lucchese cowboy boots. I walk, think, listen, and look.

  Nadezhda got rid of her motorcycle. She worked hard to get her grades up at community college, so she could qualify for this BFA program she wanted to go to at UCLA. She got in. She got a car. She got a boyfriend, they broke up. She started studying hacking for real in her free time, and is traveling in Russia right now. Alicia’s been waitressing and writing in New York. She quit modeling. She blocked that abusive ex-boyfriend. She’s mid–Saturn Returning, and confused—it’s a confusing time! Morgan flexed her way back to sociability, a state like peace, and moved to Amsterdam to finish her undergraduate degree. Maxime I keep seeing at the back of these readings I started hosting. I’ve seen him at events in LA and New York and I swear I saw his bleached mane in Montreal. As for Miffany, I don’t know. She dropped offline completely, so I only hear rumors about her sometimes.

  Simone, now thirty-two, has been painting church ceilings. She founded her own art restoration business, and has a calendar of work ahead of her. I visited her on-site in Saint Francis Church in Toronto a couple months ago. She had me—scared of heights—climb the scaffolding all the way to the top, where we shared a half bottle of Barolo, ate soft cheeses, and gossiped. Mo’s been having an affair with her hot young Sicilian assistant! He’s the one who suggested I call her Simone in my book.

  Amalia keeps voyaging to China. Her Mandarin’s even better than her Russian now, and her Russian’s not bad. Tracy, I miss. Clara too. They’re both living blocks from their family homes, in Victoria, Canada, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

  Darya and I had a falling-out. She’s an actress, remember? She was the one who informed me that “a casa de mariposa means ‘a whorehouse.’” One of the last conversations we had was about Lucien. Her favorite parts of this book were about him. I was wondering, after reading Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse, if I’d overstated Lucien’s harm. Schulman writes about how abusers often claim they’re being abused as a way to stake more power. “Maybe,” I mused to Darya, “I was confused. Maybe by thinking I was a victim, I abused my power?” Darya swiftly replied: “When have you ever been in a position of power, Fiona?”

  I learn so many new things every day, I�
��m always thinking about how stupid I must still be!

  On my thirtieth birthday, I had thrown a temper tantrum. I was so ashamed about not being the adult I wanted to be yet. I had to borrow money from a friend for rent that week. “Why am I such a loser?” I embodied my upset, and acted like a kid.

  Two months of introspection later, I threw myself a belated birthday party, because how else are you going to get what you want? I made two cakes, hosted two dozen friends, and served cheap prosecco, grilled asparagus, and monkfish. Amalia gifted me soap made by priests, and Alana, a thirty-three-year-old children’s librarian, gave me a birthday card that read: Welcome to your 30s, Fiona! This is when the real fun begins . . .

  A couple of months later, I met Miranda. Miranda, the girl who unmade my bed with Clara while I was dying in Mexico. Her fairylike laugh rang out at an event I was attending. She was the one who asked to hang out. Dubious but curious, I invited her to a party at a strip club later that night, but by the time she got there, I was gone.

  We rain-checked for a sunny day in early February. She showed up at my place in black silk gauchos embroidered with butterflies. She wore opals on three of her fingers, matching my own most precious family heirloom. Our hair was center-parted and hippie stringy at the ends. Her skin is rosewood to my porcelain.

  I like Miranda. She has the same oozy need-to-be-loved energy as Lucien, but she tries for it by giving it. This radiant magnetism that I know how to give off too, but I rarely do because I know it can attract the wrong kind of attention. She is also incredibly smart, with an enviable memory for factual detail. Her character flaw, she said, believably, when I asked her, “would have to be being too trusting.”

  Within a few hangs, I learned that Miranda had been sexually abused, more often even than Clara, and that she was only just starting to conceive of these experiences as nonconsensual, after a friend witnessed one in a threesome, and suggested it was messed up. It was normal until then, dating to back before puberty. Daddy and big-brother types taking advantage.

  When I revealed to Miranda that I was involved with Lucien when she was too, she acted surprised, like: “No way! Wow. Just wow.”

  I asked her what it was like, and she confirmed that she, too, was told she was loved; told she was needed; told if she left him, she’d be responsible for killing him. She, too, Miranda told me, felt for Lucien, big feels, nurturing mother stuff, and so she would engage, then not, because when she did, her life would twist into chaos, confusion, paranoia, and isolation. Miranda also, like me, admitted she’d been consistently attracted to boys and men who, like Lucien, showed off obvious power, access, and prestige. “They’re all assholes,” she conceded.

  Right after Miranda and I traded our first set of Lucien stories, she tried on a strap-on I had just been gifted. We were in my bedroom. It was a velvet thong harness with an eight-inch dildo. Blush-pink tip. She put the thing on over her butterfly pants and waved her hips around, so the dual-density shaft slapped at her thighs, and we laughed.

  “I’ve always felt like I was a boy,” Miranda told me then, and I replied, “Me too,” not revealing that once or more, the year before, I got off imagining myself as Lucien fucking her, the other girl.

  I love Los Angeles because it’s a never-ending story. There’s always something new in bloom. No winter death mourning. The apocalypse has already happened. It feels like heaven and hell. You get to exist on this eternal current, attentive to the subtlest seasonal changes, like jacaranda and jasmine in spring, and June gloom, the only time when our Truman Show–bubble blue sky is constantly overwhelmed.

  The first year I lived in Los Angeles, I’d race out of the house to see the raw pink sunset every night. “Culture’s still nature!” I’d rebut, whenever someone tried to discount the vivid beauty I was in awe of because “it’s only like that because of pollution.”

  My parents moved me between three cities and nine homes before I was eight years old, more if you count in utero. I lived in fifteen apartments in five years before landing in Los Angeles, and I traveled. I felt unsettled whenever I wasn’t in motion. In LA, I found a city where I could be closer to still, or maybe it’s more like: it’s so sprawling, you’re kind of always traveling. I get meditative, calm, en route.

  I don’t get too attached to places, I think, because they stay with me. For whatever reason, streets and buildings stick in my memory when little else does. I can close my eyes and move through every home I’ve occupied. I know to avoid the slippery step in the basement of the big house in Ottawa from my teen years, just as I could draw the gemlike construction of the walls in the bathroom of this apartment in Montreal that my mom and I leased for two years.

  La Mariposa had an expansive ceiling. It was so high, you almost felt like you were outdoors, or in another world. At the same time, the apartment was cocoon-like, safe. The bathrooms were pink. There were ten large windows—two in each wing, and six in the center room—all along the same wall. Nadezhda used to live in what became my bedroom. She put holographic tape on the windows that cast rainbows when the sun hit just right: three p.m. in winter, four to six throughout the rest of the year.

  I’ve been writing the last few episodes of this book through a cracked screen on my laptop, which regularly crashes, forcing a restart. The crack was an accident. A crystal dildo, slippery from use, slipped out of my hand while I was dancing in my bedroom, and smashed into my screen. The crack has been expanding. Now it’s more like a portal. A palm-size black pool with purple and green glitches around it that keeps growing, spreading, infecting my workplace.

  Knowing I’m still struggling to make rent, no car, stranded West, with half a computer, and since I mentioned “I suck at endings, everything always keeps going,” Nadezhda started offering to end the lease at La Mariposa, “so you’ll have a conclusion for your book.”

  I told her, “No. Do it in your own time,” neglecting to say what I meant: “I’m touched by your offering.”

  The day I declared this book done (I wrote a fine-enough final line), Darya announced she was moving to New York and Nadezhda into student housing. They’d already given notice on La Mariposa, forging my signature on their letter to release, because even though I’d moved out five months ago, I was still technically on the lease.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Alana, Alex, Alexa, Alexis, Alicia, Allie, Amalia, Amanda Yates Garcia (the Oracle of LA, for her information on egregores), Amber, Ana, Ana Grace, Anastasia, Anna Jane, Asher, Beastlet, Bobby, Brant, Chloe, Chris, Dean, Durga, Eric, Fabiola, Flan, Henry, Ian, Ingo, Jac, Jacky, Janique, John, Jordan, Leslie, Malcolm, Margaret, Marsha, Martha, Matt, Matthew, Michelle, Monique, Noo, Riane, Rose, Sarah, Sojourner, Sra, Stefan, Steven, Vejas, Vivian, and Yuka: this couldn’t have happened without you.

  © Stefan Schwartzman

  FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian American artist, writer, and organizer. She is the founding host of Hard to Read, a lit series, and Pillow Talk, community organizing on sex, love, and communication. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.