Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  “The practice has been around forever. In the Kama Sutra they call it ‘the congress of the crow.’”

  Frankly, I couldn’t imagine crows in such a posture. How would they possibly avoid pecking each other’s genitals to pieces? And I didn’t know which embarrassed me more: watching two people engage in something that I would have presumed demanded privacy or having to be schooled all over again by my ex-tutor, this time in an area at the crux of our connection.

  I was disgusted. And uncomfortably reminded of my time with Assefa. And aroused.

  But when we fell onto the bed, clawing off each other’s clothes, it wasn’t Assefa I wanted to be touching, but Adam I wanted to try out this new act with, Adam’s face I wanted to see when we eventually shifted ourselves back into a more familiar position, Adam’s eyes I wanted to be looking into as a massive mini-explosion melted my mind.

  Alas, that was far from the last of it. Adam began wanting to turn on the computer before almost all of our encounters, and I began to feel increasingly suspicious when he’d disappear for what felt like ages to the men’s room when we were all scribbling away at our blackboards in the lab. But it took something he said on the night of Sally Price’s birthday party to bring it all—no pun intended—to a head.

  Just that day, I’d found what felt like just the right gift for her: a dusky-blue-verdigris, heart-locket necklace that was adorned with a brass butterfly. As I busily wrapped its little box on the dining room table, Adam slipped into a chair beside me and said in a voice that sounded suspiciously fake-casual, “Sally’s quite a dish, isn’t she?”

  “A dish?” I replied, filled suddenly with a me, too-ish sort of foreboding.

  “Yeah, you know.” His bad leg was jitterbugging up and down like a nervy adolescent’s. “Sexy.” A pause. “Have you ever imagined what it would be like to have a threesome?”

  I pushed the package away from me. I heard the ice in my own voice. “No. But evidently you have.”

  Adam flushed, which was a rarity for him and one that should have signaled that I was veering dangerously close to shaming him.

  “Well, I don’t know too many guys who wouldn’t want ...”

  “Wouldn’t want what?”

  “To try it on with two women.”

  Moving right past the questions that formed instantly in my mind—Was that really true? And what did it mean?—I replied, with no little asperity, “You’re not talking about just any two women. You’re talking about Sally Price. And me.”

  Adam literally hung his head. But I didn’t care, instead taking an unmistakably sadistic pleasure in seeing it.

  “Sorry,” Adam said. “I’d better get dressed,” he mumbled, exiting the room.

  We didn’t say a thing to each other on the way to Sally’s digs, which were packed to squeezing point by our mutual friends and Sally’s from her separate life. Thanks to the ridiculous crowd, which ended up spilling onto the sidewalk in front of the balloon-festooned bungalow, it proved easy to avoid each other for the rest of the evening. Which didn’t mean that I wasn’t keeping a Murder She Wrote eye on Adam as he moved from chatty little group to group, at one point giving Sally what I thought was an excessively tight-looking hug. How was I ever going to be comfortable with my friend again? Could it be that he’d broached the topic to her first? Had she encouraged him? And if she had, how dare she? How could I complete my project with my colleague and my husband carrying on an affair?

  You can see where this was heading. The Green-eyed Monster was back in full force, and, as usual, was no respecter of the facts. Nor of emotional restraint. Which was why, when the evening ended, I pinched my belly and banged my head against my headrest and shouted at Adam almost all the way home from Eagle Rock to Pasadena. The fact that I was more than a little inebriated and he, as our designated driver, stone sober didn’t help any.

  What did help a bit was that about a half mile from home, he pulled over the Prius and stopped the car. “Okay, that’s enough.” His voice wasn’t all loud and shouty like mine, but instead exerted its effect via a steely authority. “I get it. It was stupid and insensitive to suggest it. What you and I have is precious, and I let my fantasies run away with me into territory they didn’t belong in.”

  That shut me up for about a minute. “Where do they belong? Why are they there in the first place?”

  Okay, that was dumb. But I was drunk. And hurt. And afraid.

  “Listen, Fleur.” He tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away. He stared out the windscreen, muttering loudly enough for me to hear, “I probably didn’t fool around enough as a teenager. Too damned insecure. And then there’s the baby thing.”

  “The baby thing?”

  “Well, you know. I love her more than life itself, but dirty diapers and breast pumps and our attention pretty much focused on the Monkey twenty-four seven when we’re home. I guess I’ve been feeling like an afterthought.” He paused. “And honestly, a little bored.”

  Bored. The word chilled me. I knew about this. Mother had warned me of it when she was alive. How I wished I could run to her and collapse against her shoulder. I began to cry, as much now for missing Mother as for what felt like Adam’s betrayal. That was something I was learning about the loss of a mother. It keeps happening over and over again as if for the first time. At every moment when a mother’s love and interest would come in more than a little handy, the void presented itself in all its gaping nothingness. I waved Adam away when he leaned over to comfort me. I couldn’t speak.

  Oddly, I thought, he took that as an invitation to keep talking. “It’s not like we’re really connecting when we’re together at the lab. The project’s like a second child for you. Sometimes, I feel like I’m last on your list there, too, with whoever has the best ideas jumping to the head of the line.”

  I dug a tissue out of my purse and honked into it. I wasn’t able to think very clearly, but the latter rang true. I felt awful. I told him so.

  “Me, too,” he said. “Do you think we can do something about it?”

  “I don’t know. But you’ve got to stop watching porn all the time. I don’t know much about all this, but I know it isn’t helping.”

  He stiffened. “I think that’s my private business, don’t you?”

  I lashed out, “Well actually, I’m sorry, but you’ve made it mine, as well.”

  “We need to talk about this when you’re sober.”

  “We need to talk about this when you’re not so hot for Sally Price.”

  The conversation hadn’t gone so well, after all.

  We tried again the next day. We walked Callay in her stroller to the Huntington Gardens, where we could let her toddle and fall and toddle again on a long stretch of thick grass bounded by camellias and eighteenth century Italian limestone statues that led to a grand Baroque fountain. As we watched her squeal with the sheer freedom of it, Adam turned to me and ventured a tentative, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “God, you’re going to make me spell it all out, aren’t you? You must be very angry.”

  For once, the student had surpassed the teacher. “Not so much angry as hurt. And jealous. And hurt. And afraid.” I paused. “And hurt.”

  We both laughed. It helped.

  I said in a rush, “To be fair, it’s not like I’ve never been attracted to anyone else.”

  At the very same time, he was saying, “No one’s as beautiful to me as you.”

  We laughed again.

  But I sobered quickly enough. “But maybe not so sexy. You said you were bored with me.”

  “Not bored with you. Bored with myself. And insecure. That’s why I went on that site in the first place. I thought if I upped my game ... I thought you were bored with me. I really have been feeling like I’m last on your list.”

  I studied him, his green eyes round and earnest. “Adam, you’re my sun and moon and stars. I mean it. If I’ve made you feel taken for granted, it’s my fault.”

  He turned to
check on Callay, who’d arrived at one of the statues and was staring up at it as if it were God.

  “Listen, Fleur. I know some of this is unavoidable. That little one’s both of our sun and moon and stars.”

  “And a great deal of why I feel so fiercely connected to her is that she’s the product of the two of us. Of our love.” I added shyly, “Of our sex.”

  Adam pulled me to him. We kissed, and I felt his hardness against me.

  “We don’t get enough of this, do we?” I whispered into his ear.

  “No,” he replied. “Not like this. I know we’ve been fucking more, but we’re always in a rush, or tired, or keeping quiet in case we wake the baby.”

  I responded slyly, “Makeda and Melky don’t let that stop them from yelling ‘Hallelujah!’”

  Adam laughed. “They don’t have to end up with a little girl between them if they wake her.”

  As if on cue, Callay seemed to realize that we weren’t next to her. She began screaming that high-pitched scream that is capable of shattering eardrums and champagne glasses (the latter of which I can personally attest to). We parted without a word, both of us running toward her and exchanging a look of infinite sweetness as we ran.

  Which didn’t necessarily solve what I’d come to think of as the Porn Predicament. I ended up confiding in Sammie and Makeda (but needless to say, not Sally Price) the following week.

  Unsurprisingly, Callay was there for this conversation, too. A young child is the living embodiment of ubiquity. Adam and Melky had gone off to the soccer league they’d joined following an after-dinner comparison of their newly-blossoming beer bellies. They’d taken their informal cheering section, Sofiya and Melesse, with them. I’d called Sammie to see if she could come over since I’d lose her again soon for her upcoming visit to Amira, who’d just returned—safe, sound, and triumphant—to London from her latest working trip to Afghanistan. Makeda joined us enthusiastically at the kitchen table.

  The three of us dunked our McVitie’s Digestives in our PG Tips tea as Callay sat on the floor with Buster, who’d endeared me even more this past year by patiently submitting to my child’s rather rough petting style.

  “So I’ve got this little dilemma,” I ventured.

  “Look out,” Sammie snorted, turning to Makeda. “We both know from how she put it that she’s got a major problem on her hands.”

  “No, really,” I said. “It’s not funny. It’s Adam.” I slid a guilty glance toward Callay, then shrugged. She wasn’t that precocious. Still, I lowered my voice to a near whisper. “He’s gotten addicted to porn.”

  “Oh really?” asked a surprised-looking Makeda.

  “Oh shit,” said Sammie.

  “What do you know about it?” I asked her.

  “Only that it was the final straw between Jacob and me.”

  “Oh shit,” said Makeda.

  I led them both through the sequence of events, leaving out, of course, the impact of Makeda’s sex life on us.

  That dear woman was actually little help at all. “I can’t imagine what is more exciting than having the one you love with you in the flesh. Who cares how other people express their desires?”

  Which was exactly how I felt. So I turned to Sam. “What bothered you about it?”

  She hesitated. “No offense to Adam, or to guys in general, but it’s all so bloody crude. Soulless. And compulsive. Sort of Trumpish, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  I winced. “Adam would die of mortification if I said that to him.”

  “Look, it’s not just a men versus women thing. There’s a world of lesbian porn out there, or so I’ve heard,” Sammie said, lifting Callay onto her lap when it looked as though Buster had had his fill of her clumsy handling. Sammie proceeded to sing “Eensy weensy spider” to my daughter’s great delight, then repeated it three times to Callay’s insistent, “Again!” before setting her down next to the little train set she’d brought her. Callay instantly put Thomas the Tank Engine into her drooling mouth.

  Sammie continued, “People have been enjoying erotica from the beginning of time. In one of my early art history courses, we studied everything from Paleolithic cave paintings to early Roman depictions of threesomes to Indian statues of every position possible from the first century on. Something to cater to every taste. As my prof put it, ‘One person’s ew is another person’s wow.’”

  “You’re joking aren’t you?” I responded. “He didn’t really say that.”

  “Yes, she did. And she wasn’t a dummy. It helped relieve the tension.” She watched me mull that one over. “The thing is, though, for me, it’s not so much what’s depicted as how. What’s the spirit of it? I once saw a billboard in Manhattan that said, ‘Porn kills love.’ Is erotic material consistent with love or is it degrading? It’s like the difference between a Nobel-winning novel and a comic book. That’s what drove me nuts about Jacob. He was a bright man, but for him, the cheesier the porn, the more arousing. Some of the stuff made me want to laugh, and some of it scared me with its brutality.”

  I shook my head. “God, this feels like too much information. I have to admit that I myself got pretty excited after watching a soixante-neuf scene.”

  “Yeah, but did you enjoy doing it?”

  I blushed. “Actually, no. I kept worrying about giving him pleasure whenever I started getting carried away by what he was doing to me.”

  “Sort of like talking and chewing gum at the same time, right?”

  We laughed, then had to explain the image to Makeda, who laughed then with us. But soon enough, she sobered. “What is this brutality you speak of, Sammie? In my country—what was my country—the unspoken purpose of genital mutilation is to provide greater organ sensation for the man. I believe that any kind of sexual activity that hurts the partner or demeans them is very, very bad.”

  Sammie nodded emphatically. “I totally agree. God, you name it, Makeda. There’s a fair amount of porn around this days that involves rape, simulated or,” she shuddered, “otherwise. BDSM—sorry, bondage/domination/sadism/masochism—can cross that line for sure. And worse: pedophilia. Not that we watched any of that.” She shook her head. “With Jacob, it felt like the most intangible, but creepiest part was that our sex started to feel dehumanized. Not just animalistic, but thingy.” She grew pensive. “I’ve never really thought about this before, but the destructiveness of modern porn is that, besides objectification of women, it treats sex so concretely. It’s so literal. It crushes the beauty of the human imagination.” She directed a scrutinizing eye at me suddenly, as if sensing that I was on the brink of pinching and flapping. It felt comforting to let her warm hand encircle and tightly squeeze mine.

  In our silence, we became more aware of Callay, now pushing her Thomas the Tank Engine along the tile floor and doing her best to sing one of her favorite songs. “I ee wookeen onna wailwode.”

  I loosened my hand from Sammie’s and went over and scooped up my child. “I ee wookeen, too, my love.”

  Nothing was resolved, but over the course of a few weeks, I could sense something in me working away at the problem. I began to feel like an exaggerated version of the modern woman, trying to keep way too many balls in the air. I had my project at the lab, my commitment to Callay, and now, in a kind of seismic shift, my relationship with Adam was beginning to feel like work, too. And not just in how I spoke with him, but how I thought and felt about him. It wasn’t just the emotional equivalent of seeing him with spinach between his teeth. His vulnerability, his humanness hadn’t bothered me before. His bad leg, and how matter-of-factly he managed it, had been part of what had endeared him to me in the first place. I’d been touched when he’d voiced his fear that he’d lose me, as he’d lost his mother, in childbirth. I’d been aware for years that he, too, was capable of falling victim to the Green-eyed Monster. As he’d later confessed, learning that I’d slept with Bob Ballantine—yuck! I still couldn’t bear thinking about it—had emboldened him to seduce me at Santa Monica Beach for the first
time. Nor had I always experienced him as adoring only of me. How I’d anguished over his relationship with Stephanie Seidenfeld. And how many times had I driven myself nuts by stalking the Facebook page of his ex-fiancée Elissa Trooly?

  No, this Porn Predicament was a different kettle of fish. For the first time, I struggled with a kind of revulsion against my beloved. I was used to feeling disgusted and ashamed of myself. But Adam? Not ever. Even his Campbell’s chicken soup B.O. wasn’t smelling so appealing these days. If anything, it seemed interspersed with faint hints of Father’s bitter underarm odor that I smelled when I inspected his suits as a child, looking for the dough Nana claimed he’d raked in as kickbacks from Leland DuRay.

  It was at around this time that I had the Episode with My Brain. I’d experienced infirmities of the body before: ringworm, your garden variety colds and flus, trapped and untrapped gas, and even that bout of fierce tweeter pain that led to my fiasco with Assefa. Giving birth wasn’t an illness, but it had sure felt like it. And having my breasts get engorged hadn’t been a party, either.

  But having my head cease to function the way it was supposed to was in another class entirely. It happened like this: I was holding Callay in my lap as I stretched out on one of our navy blue lounge chairs by the pool. It was one of those unseasonably hot days that climate change had wrought, and though I bemoaned its cause, I rejoiced in bathing my skin in such warmth. The heat of the blue cushion under my body was heavenly. Even though she’d weaned herself months before, Monkey kept trying to reach into my bathing suit to pull out a breast, and I was playfully pushing her chubby little hand away when my cell phone rang, startling us both. I turned my head quickly to reach for it, and the next thing I knew, my visual field had altered in a profoundly disconcerting way. My baby’s face and the luxuriant jasmine bush behind it began scrolling upwards like the credits to a film. Callay seemed to sense that something was amiss, as she stopped fussing at my suit and simply stared at me. I stared back, but less at her, actually, than the spectacle of her rolling image.