Frozen Butterflies

by Simona Grossi

  He looked at me to check my reaction. I wasn’t thinking about the blog, and I didn’t taste the food, as I felt almost anesthetized. The pepper or something had been too strong.

  As Nick was clearing the table, I wandered around the living room. There were photos on the walls, some on the coffee table, a few on his desk. I wondered who those people were. Friends? People he had interviewed? And then there was a photo of a boy with what might have been his father. Was it Nick with his father? He returned too soon for me to figure that out.

  “This will help the writing,” he said, handing me a glass of wine. I thanked him and sat at the computer close to him, holding my glass.

  “I’ll read from where we left yesterday,” I said.

  July 3

  * * *

  I’m glad you didn’t take your clothes and your books with you when you left. Today the cleaning lady asked me what she should do with them. Obviously nothing. If you come back, you might want them back. I told her to collect them and place them in a suitcase, ready for you to pick up if and when you decide that you need them. It’d be easier for me to give them to you, I thought. But then, after she did that, I asked her to undo it. If you come and all I have to do is hand you that suitcase, we’ll only have a few minutes to talk. If you have to collect your things scattered around, it’ll take you hours. So, after the cleaning lady placed the clothes back on the clothes rack, and the books on the shelves, I misplaced them, and put them in random places so you’ll have to stay longer when you come to retrieve them. Your ballet shoes are still on my desk. I had actually never looked at them as closely as I did today. They must have been painful to wear. At times, I felt they were in fact your feet, and that was easy to believe since you often walked as if you were dancing en pointe, and I would not notice any break between your feet and the shoes. In fact, was there any? The shoes truly seemed your feet. And how painful it must have been to be living your life en pointe, carrying with you that soft, continuous pain. Did you want that? Did that help? Was there a worse pain you were trying to silence? I wish I had thought about it, considered that. I viewed your continuous dancing and walking en pointe as a way to put some distance between you and the world, between your world and mine, between you and me. You were probably just trying to protect yourself and perhaps me from something else. I wish I had thought about it. I went to a ballet last night. Swan Lake. Remember? You wanted me to see it but I resisted. I thought I wouldn’t like it. But I did. I felt their pain, the lightness, I saw beauty. Is that what attracted you to ballet? Was it the beauty and the lightness, or was it the pain? I went for a bike ride the other day, along the L.A. river. The road was not that easy. I started riding fast, I fell, and had to go to the hospital to get some stitches. Nothing major. But that pain helped, it was good, as it distracted me from you. And it was good as it got me closer to you, it made me feel what you could have felt sometimes. That pain made me think about you and ballet yesterday, as I was watching the dancers dancing en pointe, their feet pressed into their ballet flats. I wondered if their feet were actually bleeding, and for a few seconds I almost felt their blood in my throat. I thought about the flats you left on my desk. And for the first time, I felt your pain. I think my toes even ached. You were so disciplined in your exercises and diet. Sometimes I had the feeling you hated my attitude toward sleep and food. I slept more than you did, ate more than you did, and ate junk food, which you seemed to fear so badly. I never managed to make you try those wonderful truffle fries I loved, not to mention my favorite hamburger. And I understand ballerinas need to be thin, but . . . You never compromise, do you? Doesn’t that make you sad? Do you have to be sad? Why didn’t you try the fries once, just once, why didn’t you even taste one? You know, that would have made me so happy. And I’d have been so happy if we had talked about you, what you believed, what your fears were. We never did. And was that because you thought I could not understand, or rather because I never showed you any interest? I hope that’s not the reason, because I was, I am interested in you. I just didn’t know how to show that to you. I should have tried harder, I know. And now I can only talk to your friends and try to understand you better. Is it too late? I met with Sarah yesterday. She didn’t want to talk to me. I had to call her three times to convince her. She was surprised by my request and continued to examine me during our conversation, somehow looking for answers to questions she didn’t ask. Why did I want to talk about you? What was wrong with me? What’s wrong? I’m a moron who lost his girlfriend after four years without even trying to get to know her. Sarah told me about your ambition, your desire to dance Tchaikovsky as a prima ballerina around the world. She said you were obsessed by perfection. I told her I knew that. She described the hours of practice, the time Madam Guillem criticized a move you had made and insisted you repeat it over and over and over again. She said she made you repeat it fifty times. She described the time Madam Guillem said you looked like a clumsy clown and you cried, not because you were hurt, she said, or mortified, but because you were tired after having repeated that same move a thousand times. She also told me that you never complained about anything, and even when you were tired, you tried your best to smile and keep going. She said you knew Madam Guillem and the others were just doing their best to make you succeed. And so, no, you never complained. She remembered you lowering your head when they said they didn’t like something you had just done, and saying that you would try again and again until they would say it was OK. Not a single complaint. She remembered your serious expression during rehearsals, and then your smiles on stage. She said you were an actress, that you truly became absorbed in your roles. And when you were on stage, you were that role, and the ballet seemed to have been written for you, if not about you. Yes, you worked hard and never complained. I wonder what you thought when I complained about my job whenever they asked me to change my drawings, to prepare a few more strips. I wonder what you thought when I did that. Did I lose your respect then? Is that when you stopped loving me? Was I too human for you, Emily? I asked Sarah if she thought you were happy. “When she danced,” she said. So you were not happy with me. Of course you weren’t. Otherwise you would have not left me. “I don’t think it was her choice, Andrew,” she said. “Of course, it was,” I replied. And then Sarah left. She left me in the café where we had met, without saying another word.

  Nick typed parts of the pages as I read. And when I finished reading the last line, we remained silent for a while, perhaps thinking about Andrew and Emily, or about ourselves.

  “While you were reading, I almost had the feeling that you had written those words,” he said out of the blue.

  “Why do you say so?”

  “I don’t know. The way you read. Your voice.”

  I didn’t expect that, and I lost myself in his eyes.

  “What do you think?”

  “About?”

  “About this, Andrew . . .”

  Right.

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to recover my balance and hide my temporary absence. “Too early to say.”

  He left his chair to get another beer, and I continued.

  “Might be obsessive-compulsive.”

  “Explain.”

  “He definitely obsesses about Emily.”

  “We got an email from a reader,” Nick said, and he read it. The reader described his relationship with his girlfriend and their breaking up after seven years. He said it was his fault. He did not understand her, did not see her. He said he understood what J.N. was going through: it was “like going through hell.”

  I watched Nick read and got distracted, lost in the wine I was sipping and the trails its warmth was tracing for me. But I did capture a few lines of that email, and I thought the comparison with hell perfectly fit Andrew’s pages. Yes, we should post it.

  Nick noticed I had been wandering somewhere. He lit a cigarette and went to the balcony to smoke.

  “Do you want to join me?” he asked, perhaps trying to join me. Could
he see where I was?

  “No, I don’t smoke. What does it do for you?”

  “Nicotine?”

  “Yes, nicotine.”

  “Works like painkillers, like morphine. Try.” He handed me a cigarette, and I tried it but didn’t like it and gave it back to him.

  “Smoking is addictive,” he said, “and there are no good addictions. Once you become addicted to something, it’s very hard to stop. So it’s better not to start.”

  “What addiction scares you the most?” I asked.

  “My addiction to adrenaline. And fear. I crave fear.”

  I was hoping he would share more, but he stopped.

  When I checked the time, it was one in the morning. I called a taxi and returned home.

  I slept for four hours and woke up at six again, but again with the alarm, since I had to get ready for work.

  It’s interesting how the scenarios I had been contemplating from my window, the cars coming and leaving, that woman and her tears, have lost their appeal to me. Now I enjoy watching the sun rise, the trees’ intense green in the morning dew, the changing colors of the sky. And they almost hurt me, as I feel more vulnerable but strangely like I have a direction, something I’m looking for. I look forward to seeing him, and I look forward to him hurting me, because I know he’ll then take care of me the way he does. It is as if he can’t make me happy without hurting me. So I let him do it, and I look forward to it.

  I slept last night, and I was alone, but didn’t feel so.

  Day Three

  I arrived at school at 8:05 a.m. though my class was supposed to start at 8:00. In the past that would have bothered me a lot. Not today though. I didn’t use my notes and instead improvised. I didn’t want to be trapped in a script. Class was rewarding but intense, and once I was done, I sought refuge in my office.

  It was raining, and I felt cold. It was probably the dress, which left my legs partly uncovered, or perhaps the fact that I was tired. After half an hour, no student had shown up for office hours. I left the chair to close the door and take a nap, but as I pushed the door closed, someone knocked.

  “Professor Blanc? Hi. May I come in? I’m John. I was in your personality and cognition class.”

  “Oh, yes, sure . . . John . . . I remember you.” Actually, I didn’t.

  He was tall, pale, and had red hair a bit longer than the usual man’s haircut and a broken smile. His hands were thin, and they were slightly shaking as he spoke. He seemed nervous.

  “I just came to say that I enjoyed your lecture today.”

  I was surprised to hear that. I couldn’t recall a student stopping by to tell me that they had enjoyed my class. Ever. Most of my students seemed to live in their own heads. They rarely showed any particular enthusiasm or affection. And, true, I didn’t do that either.

  As I was still trying to understand the reason for his reaction, or why I hadn’t heard anything like that from a student before, he asked, “Why did you study psychology?”

  He wanted to know more about his teacher. That would be typical of students. Not of my students though.

  “I always wanted to know how the mind works, how we think and process information, how life experiences change our response to the world.”

  “And now that you’ve learned how it works, why do you teach rather than practice?”

  Right. Why did I teach?

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Perhaps I haven’t learned how it works yet, and teaching is a way of searching.”

  I should have filtered my answer, but I wasn’t sure I could. So I asked him why he had decided to take my class.

  “Psychology seems fascinating. I’d love to study personality disorders one day.” He turned toward the window and stared out somewhere beyond where I could see. “I read a lot about personality disorders,” he then added. “I remember someone arguing that they might be extraordinary manifestations of brain power and creativity that people can’t understand and dismiss as anomalies. I wish I could make up my mind on what the truth is.”

  He stopped to check my reaction, but before I said anything, he spoke again.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to take much of your time.”

  “Oh, no. Of course.”

  He collected his things and shook my hand.

  “Good luck,” he said. He stood up and walked out the door.

  That was unusual too. I wished he had stayed. I liked listening to him. He definitely seemed more mature than his age, although I couldn’t actually say what his age was.

  When he closed the door, I suddenly felt exhausted. I checked my office for food. I didn’t have any, and although there was a restaurant just across the street, I didn’t feel like walking there. It was raining, and I was colder than before. I pressed my shoulders against the old chair, started following the rain drops staining my windows, and slowly lost contact with the present.

  Why did I study psychology? Really?

  Since I was young, I had always felt isolated from the world. I didn’t like being with people and preferred to be alone. I remember my father getting ready for a party or family event, and me on the sofa, reading my books or watching old movies or cartoons, trying to come up with any possible excuse not to go. I hated those events. The conversations were not interesting. They sounded empty. I had the feeling that adults were all engaged in finding ways to “kill time,” to deceive each other. To me they seemed to be dragging their souls and lives in nonsensical circles. I wanted to be left out.

  When my efforts failed and my father managed to drag me to those events, I sat on a chair, my plate filled with food on my lap and a book I had brought with me underneath it. I was only waiting to leave and read. I loved reading. The stories appeared to me as possibilities in life that I could experience. One day I would. I had so many dreams, and at that time the only impediment to them seemed to be my age. The more realistic the story, the more it felt like something that could happen to me, the more interested I became. I didn’t like comics, but I liked graphic novels, especially those in black and white.

  “Why don’t you like colors? What’s wrong with you?” asked my father one day at a bookstore. He had pulled a colored graphic novel from the shelf and wanted to buy it for me, but I refused.

  “That’s not interesting,” I said.

  “How do you know? Have you read it?”

  “This story doesn’t look real.”

  “Why?”

  “Life is not colored. Life is black and white and gray.”

  I was only eight, but I had already concluded that life was not colored, that adults had not captured the essence of it, and I didn’t want to be part of their misery. I didn’t want to, and I would not fake it. I just wanted to be left alone.

  My attitude didn’t change over the years. And so, when it was time to go to college, I didn’t hesitate when my father asked me if I wanted to rent a studio or a room in an apartment with other students. Of course I wanted a studio.

  My studio was close to the university. A small apartment in a not too fancy area of the city filled with cheap and sticky Thai and Chinese restaurants, thrift shops, and some travel agencies to remind you that, after all, the world could be better than the neighborhood. My studio was an old garage that the owners had turned into an apartment, clearly without using much effort or taste. What made it look like a deal to me was that I got a small house for the price of a studio. The downside, though, was that the house was in fact a garage, and it still looked like one. It was old, with the remnants of some cheap paint on the walls and on the carpet that almost seemed to lay on dirt. The bathroom was full of rust around the knobs, and the kitchen always looked dirty, despite my stubborn attempts to clean the brownish stove that must have been white once—or maybe it never was.

  But even if it was old, it was my place, a refuge I could turn into everything I wanted it to be, even a romantic, intimate space. And so I bought candles, placed them on the floor and on the chests of drawers, and mostly used them inst
ead of electricity for the first two years. I had only a little lamp close to my bed, which I used when I felt like reading at night before falling asleep. Other than that, I just had my books, milk and cereal, some chocolate, chips, ice cream.

  My bedroom was basically the living room of the studio. I had a sofa bed that, if pulled out, would take up the entire room. And so for a while, to keep the house neat and clean (as much as I could), I slept on the sofa. But then, still unhappy with the result, I started sleeping on the floor, using my bed’s duvet as a sleeping bag. The candles and the sleeping bag sometimes made it feel as if the ceiling disappeared, giving me the illusion of being outside under the stars on a summer camping trip. But mostly they gave me a feeling of intimacy and proximity to my soul. If forced to articulate it, I would have probably said that something was hurting me. But with the same candor, I would have admitted that I didn’t know what it was. Was it my relationship with my classmates? My relationship with my family? The fact that I didn’t have a boyfriend? I really didn’t know. But I remember some mild feelings of dissatisfaction and doubts about whether the direction I was heading in—assuming there was one—made any sense.

  I didn’t spend time with my classmates. And when they asked me whether I liked the school, the program, or LA, I replied that I loved being there, and that I wished I had more time to spend with them. But, obviously, that wasn’t true. I just wanted to be left alone.

  I probably should have looked more carefully to see if there was anyone interesting in my class, if anyone, like me, preferred shades to colors. Someone like John might have been a good classmate, maybe even a friend. Someone like him or like Nick could have explained to me why I preferred candlelight to electricity, and someone like Emily could have explained what discipline, pain, and pleasure have in common.

  I felt sad for having wasted time and wondered if, in college, I was in fact already a full member of the group of adults whose lives were empty and filled with nonsense. A rush of sadness sucked the last spark of energy from my day, and I fell asleep. When Nick called to take me to dinner, I was dreaming dreams that could turn true. We were seated on the seashore, and he was playing with my hair. I could see two glasses of wine touching each other on the sand, very close to the water. What would the impediment be this time?