Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  Ideas can cut up your Real. In the past, when faced with disappointment, I’ve pretended to be too cool cynical, when really I was giddy AF. I became a writer not because I genuinely aspired to be one, but because the first admirable women I met when I moved to New York wrote for a living. I’ve never felt happy to see my byline, because it’s always felt like a lie—like when I replied to that high school “friend” who threatened me, “Of course I’m not gay.”

  Oh, the things we do to fit in! I’ve always hated reality TV, from the very first season of Survivor, which my whole grade-seven class obsessed over. I can’t even overhear reality TV without feeling like I’m in a dentist chair. (I do love Ryan Trecartin’s reality TV rips, though, but that’s an article.) For decades, I lived my life like I dressed myself in guises that I saw on others and loved on them. Some of the styles suited me, no doubt, but any look is incomplete without a fullness of spirit. When you’re in the Real, you can wear anything, and it becomes you, as gracious truth, your Supreme Being, is infinitely complimentary.

  Now that I’d experienced it, I realized: if I was Real, my first boyfriend was too. But I’d treated him, because I didn’t feel myself to be, like he wasn’t Real. The night of the photo shoot, I called to apologize for living in fantasies I actuated without considering their repercussions for others. I saw how I’d been crashing through the world—which included him—as though my eyes were half-closed, my fingers in my ears, going “la la la la la la la la la.” (I was horrified by all I must have missed along the way.) “It’s okay,” he told me. “It’s true, you always seemed like you were striving to be elsewhere.”

  I had been restless most everywhere until, it seemed, this very moment. That night, on the fourth floor of La Mariposa, I was blissfully Earthbound. Gravity and Grace! Acutely perceiving little details—like the warble of Alicia’s speaking insecurities, the grooves of Max’s chest, and the fact that the exposed-brick wall I’d faced on so many mornings here was actually fake: a facade. That was funny.

  I was calm, and felt overwhelmingly sweet, liberating love. BIG LOVE. Compassion like I’d learned to feel alone, meditating, and could feel in the company of a boy-lover (the root of the word passion is pati, as in to endure, undergo, experience, or suffer), but which, for whatever reason, I hadn’t been able to feel in groups of people, and never around other women, except for Simone. Now letting this in—I couldn’t stop crying. Grateful tears, mournful tears. I was alive. This was Real. And I was so happy—so, so, so happy—about what I was experiencing, except: What the fuck was this stranger doing in our home, shooting my beloveds as if for some lifestyle catalog? What had I done!

  When Morgan came home, I cornered her in the bathroom.

  “I need to talk,” I said maybe for the first time in my whole life. (“We need to talk,” I’d said to boy-lovers before. But I? Need? I tried to only have needs I could meet myself.) I told Morgan it felt like I’d eaten four grams of mushrooms but I’d only eaten a chicken salad.

  Welcome to the Real World! Where furniture is multidimensional! See this chair? It was made from a tree. A Real living thing! Like you and me.

  The awakening had been coming. I’d flickered into the Real in Morgan’s bedroom, and every so often, walking around LA, I would step into It. This space of knowing where my heart, mind, and something more—some spirit sense—operated at the same time. When I had all the time in the world, and understood my place in It.

  We’re suspended in the sky! Four floors high. Below our feet are three strangers’ homes and a basement, and then concrete, and maybe roots from nearby trees, and rocks and metals and ha ha ha I’m so dumb!

  Out of It, before, I perceived the world as a blur, like what you see when you’re running. Or it’d be partly obscured, like I was looking out from behind something, or through a frame—no peripheral, no turning back. I’m talking about decades of partial or total unreality. Hiding from the Real in movie theaters, behind the glamour of clothes, or in bed with a book. Escaping into drugs like boys. “La la la la la la la la la.” I held my breath for fifteen years trying to get my gut as flat as that of a girl in a magazine, limiting the oxygen to my brain.

  “Morgan,” I said. “I’ve been seeing things. Like the other day, I was with Modesty”—a mutual friend of ours—“and she was talking about someone who had wronged her, and her top lip twitched so obviously, it was like a cartoon, like in slow-motion. Her anger was palpable as hurt. I recognized its texture, and it’s the weirdest thing . . . My heart then, it beamed with love for her.”

  Morgan nodded.

  “And Nadeem!” I exclaimed. He was this Washington-raised Afghan skater boy I’d been dating. “Sweet Nadeem at the end of our third date last week drove us back to his place without asking first. We hadn’t done more than make out yet. And so I teased him. I was like, ‘What are we doing here?’ And I swear, Morgan, his head reeled from side to side, so fast, like a robot about to combust! He was like”—I was laughing now, mimicking Nadeem’s shy manners—“‘Oh uh well I uh uh uh uh I uh thought maybe uh.’ And again, like with Modesty, I saw this as if in slow-motion, and I felt him. Have you ever experienced this?”

  “No,” Morgan said. “But I think I get it.”

  “I’m just like . . . I know that’s me too. I know I’m a cartoon!”

  Morgan looked transfixed. We all were longing for something like this. We talked about it constantly in our apartment: revelations, transformations. “I’m aggressively trying to heal!” was Morgan’s punch line.

  “Morgan—” I leaned in to her as my voice lowered to a guilty half whisper. “I made Nadeem like me. I made it happen, like this photo shoot, I made it happen. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I keep doing it! I imagine these things . . . I always wanted to date a cute skater boy like him. It’s like I make up these stories and characters, and then they become Real, but then I don’t know what to do. And . . .”

  I was completely ignoring the photo shoot I was supposed to be directing. People kept asking for guidance, and I’d reply, “Just be yourself!” then look away.

  Morgan was patient, in her college hoodie, makeup half ready to join the others in our shoot. “It sounds like there’s an interplay between your imagination and reality?” she said. “And that’s a gift, and maybe also scary?”

  “It feels like a responsibility,” I said. Suddenly I was so tired. I watched Morgan join the group for a few final poses in the kitchen, then I ordered the photo shoot over, and slept dreamlessly for many nights after.

  Episode 07—“Bob”

  I FIRST CAME TO KNOW of Amalia Ulman as an enigmatic young artist, a friend of friends, who made eerily graceful images that were novel with the potential to become fashionable. What she was making back then, circa 2012–13, was formal and impersonal. Loving the mystery, I followed her closely.

  Over the course of a few months, in 2014, I watched Amalia’s output on social media begin to change. Her face and body took center stage in a life that appeared to be styled according to lifestyle trends for a hyper-femme identity. She seemed to be branding herself alongside whatever trends were also selling: kawaii sweet, sugar baby x label whore, white girl–bad girl hip-hop looks, enlightened-health-guru vibes. The way she was doing this—it was believable. Every image she produced looked like she’d made it, bearing traces of her earlier aesthetic, while also seeming basic, in the way that people had started derisively coupling the word with this one: bitch. From my Internet voyeur position, it seemed that Ulman had chosen to trade in her high-art aspirations for the immediate gratification of transactional femininity, and this disturbed me, because a part of me wished I could do the same thing.

  I’ve dabbled. Desperate for cash, I’ve tried “sugar babying.” That’s sex work veiled in mentorship, patronage, romance, and/or innocence. There’s an app for it. I liked dressing the part, in snug cardigans and peach blush, but the privilege of my entitlement always kept me from taking it any further than a man paying
for my dinner.

  I couldn’t fake it. I gagged into my latte when a rare-guitar dealer and former Rolling Stones tour manager claimed his backstage dealings were actually a “conceptual art performance.” After googling the name on the credit card of another daddy, who claimed to be a lead writer on The Colbert Report, and finding no credits to the name, I ambushed our second date with Miffany, who, high as heaven, asked him the same invasive questions about faith and feelings she asks everyone, and Nadezhda, who mocked his replies. Dude paid for everything and sent me an e-mail the next day: “If you continue to keep company like that,” he wrote, “I see nothing but ruin on your horizon.”

  My last forever ewwww sugar daddy date was with a “financial entrepreneur” who called me a car to the Glendale mall. There we had sushi as he told me about his plans to get into the movies (“It’s like Taken, but the sex slaves all have special skills—think topless trampoliners.”), about his twelve-year-old daughter (“The doctor I had take her measurements is predicting she’ll be as tall and stacked as her mother, my ex-wife, five foot eleven, 36DD, and blond. I’m in trouble.”), and finally, about the time he met Donald Trump (“He didn’t want to shake my hand until I showed him the hand sanitizer I keep on me at all times.”).

  This pig-faced man kept calling me “Delicious,” and I felt very righteous, because clearly he hadn’t learned how to be psychic: I’d been glaring into his eyes thinking you’re vile, repugnant, idiotic, and pathetic since we sat down. As our plates were being cleared, this loathsome character asked me if I’d like to go “to a motel nearby for a massage, but first—and I always ask this—I’d like us both to take showers separately using different bars of soap. I’m something of a germaphobe.”

  I stood up and said I’d rather not.

  After calling me a car to the fake address I provided, he asked me to text him: “Once you’re in the Uber, why you’re not interested.”

  “I’ll do it right here,” I replied, emboldened by my recent consumption of lean protein and the crowd of witnesses in the restaurant. “Financial capitalism, the work you do, and the culture you promote are greedy and nearsighted, afflicting large populations of the nation, America, which you claim to adore, including your daughter, who I pray has an escape plan. You should leave her body alone. The world is changing, your ways are becoming irrelevant, and I think you know it. And the tassel on your left loafer is missing.”

  His pink face boiled crimson as he huffed all pouty like a toddler told no for the first time.

  When I got home, the fridge at La Mariposa was filled with Moon Juice. Every shelf and drawer was stacked with pastel pink, mauve, green, cream, and gold milks; electric-blue and pink waters; cold brew with silver flakes; the lot. Store policy was to trash all products the night of the day they were made, even if they wouldn’t technically expire for a few more days. Miffany was working there part-time and would bless our home with leftovers. I felt like a happy princess drinking pearl-infused strawberry-rose-probiotic-almond-whatever whatever. I love femme shit like this. But, I resolved to myself then, I’ll go without if the only way to get the funds to afford it is entertaining male delusion.

  When Ulman began posting square photos of her brand-new boob job, I lost it. If my list of financial priorities wasn’t rent, food, debt, books, art, rent (it comes every month! like your period, ugh), I’d consider implants. (Big tits are one of my top turn-ons.) I called a friend who knew Amalia. “Is this real?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

  So I wrote Amalia a shy hey, I was hoping you might like to talk? She replied that she’d be happy to meet up soon. Sooner still, it came out that Amalia Ulman’s covetable social media presence was an art performance about gender, attention economies, and belief production. (Several of the images she had posted, like the chest wrapped in post-surgery bandages, were appropriated from online forums.)

  When we finally connected, a few months later, I was stunned by Amalia’s composure. Unlike everyone else I’d met who was “Internet famous” or trying to be (her performance had awarded her a six-digit audience), Amalia wasn’t caught up in any persona in person. She was attentive and sensitive, asking knowledgeable questions, but also goofy and funny—librarian manners meets clown-school mannerisms. I’ve listened to too much judgment in my day—persona pushers tend to attack those who risk threatening their facade, be they competitors, skeptics, or disbelievers. Amalia wasn’t judgmental, but I did perceive that she was very perceptive to people’s bullshit—delusion, ruthless ambition, vanity, cruelty, greed—and would do herself the service of avoiding any ego who might interrupt her positive flow.

  I had a sense that Amalia and I spent our early lives similarly alienated but dealt with it in different ways. An only child, Amalia grew to relate to form, her craft, first and foremost. She carved out time for herself; she became an artist. Discerning in her friendships, Ami kept her circle so small, sometimes it was just a line between her and another, sometimes a dot. I spent a lot of my early life outside the house, at playgrounds and community centers, among dozens of elders and even more kids. As my parents worked overtime, I grew to observe. To clock points of likeness in others, even if they were sparse. I learned to fake it, to be that one thing we had in common. Mirror/rorriM. I adapted to the world around, learned to see from others’ points of view, justified all—even ill—behavior with empathy, in order to not be alone.

  This meant that, when I first met Amalia, I was in the second-to-last of a series of relationships with boys I wanted to be. They were free. Self-determined, cocky. Writers and artists. Amalia was more successful than all of them combined, and she was doing it making work that hit me on more levels of my being than I was used to experiencing simultaneously.

  Amalia drove the same car my parents had throughout my childhood. I was ashamed of it then—this old, boxy Volvo, so “other” compared with the sleek new leases my friends’ parents drove. “Embarrassing!!” I had screamed then. Real funny, I think now. My parents are eccentrics. When I was a teenager, we lived in a surreally normative neighborhood. My parents moved us there because the public schools were good. I remember my mom driving a few of my pristinely dressed friends around in our filthy old Volvo, talking about the SSRIs she and my dad were on like it was NBD. This was the early aughts, it was common. But I was mortified, just as I was when my mom would dance groovy rock ’n’ roll style in the mall or my dad would joke about politicians getting anal probed while we were eating dinner.

  Early in our relationship, Amalia invited me on a field trip. I’d just moved to LA in large part thanks to Ami, who had lent me her apartment for two weeks as a trial—that’s when I met Nadezhda, agreed to sublet a bed in Mariposa, and “fell in love with” Lucien. When I saw Amalia’s car, I knew I was home. Amalia drove us to Vernon. She, at twenty-six, had just gotten her license. I, then twenty-eight, still hadn’t gotten mine, and like everything I hadn’t yet done, it seemed insane. Could I ever?! Amalia put sneaky jazz piano on in the car like we were in a film noir. We were going to get a bird.

  At the Polleria in Vernon, there were doves, chickens, a parakeet, and two pigeons. Amalia picked the pigeon with the classic coat. It was patterned like a business suit, I recognized then. Masculine and shady. His name would be Bob and Amalia would live and make art with him for almost two years—a pet. As an icon, under Amalia’s wing, the pigeon came to represent a proletariat—homeless, commoners, scavengers—business-ing up in America. Class mobility. In China, I learned through Amalia, pigeons connote prestige; they’re racing birds, winners.

  Bob would fly around Amalia’s Downtown LA high-rise office in custom-fit diapers. He was beautiful, with a shimmery neck like my great-aunt’s fire-opal ring I always wore. Bob became the star of Amalia’s art, drawn like a Picasso dove, collaged as memes, a guardian angel to her pregnant Mary. Now my experience of cities is forever changed, as Amalia changed what it means to see a pigeon.

  I was
raised with the language virus: You can be anything you want to be. Wishful public-school teachers, my Republican stay-at-home grandmother, and TV, magazines, and advertisers constantly repeated this promise to me. They inspired my wide-eyed want want want, while imaging none but a few options and calling it everything, and offering almost no counsel on how to get things done. Girls are lied to. We can be whatever we are, but it’s not going to be easy. We can do whatever we want, but we won’t necessarily be rewarded for it by the powers that be. As girls in this world, we’re raised around so many ideas, and even more images, of what we should want to be that it can be hard to sort out what’s true for you.

  My creativity became bound to fashion: If I just put on this outfit, I can become the person with the life it signifies. Amalia had an amazing closet, but she was also so accomplished, it mystified me. I’d been a straight-A student, but I had no idea how to get from point A to B to car and career and back to art.

  Driving with Amalia to buy Bob for ten dollars transformed me. This was when I learned: We can do anything. There were so many options I’d never considered, so organized was my mind by norms. There’s a look to consciousness expanding. The scene around you will intensify or deepen as you lighten and open. In the car, driving home from the Polleria, Bob cooing in the back seat, jazz still bopping, the city lights were brighter, and the drive flowed smoother, or maybe I was just alert, finally noticing our current in a state of all-too-rare-for-me relaxed receptivity.

  Amalia opened my mind to possibility. What would I do if money wasn’t part of the equation? Where would I be if I’d never been told that my worldviews were “unrealistic,” and believed it? If I hadn’t read the Great Western Man canon and tried to identify? Even though I really didn’t—war seemed to me a horrible hoax to give men’s lives meaning. Look, we’re heroes! We conquered a conflict we started. And Kant versus Hegel? Or the mind/body binary? Nature versus nurture? What strange oppositions. Obviously, it’s all functioning simultaneously, enmeshed, there’s no me that’s not you. And the mind can think any which way and find proof of its ideation in the world. The world is so complex.