Frozen Butterflies

by Simona Grossi

  He came closer to me and almost touched my neck with his lips. But he stopped to check my eyes. Then he came closer and lightly pressed his lips against my neck and breathed heavily. I felt warm. His lips seemed to control me. He then went down and almost touched my breasts. But he stopped, slowly rolled up my T-shirt, freed my breasts from it, and then looked at them. I was shaking. When I opened my mouth to get more oxygen, he sucked and bit my lip. And then when I was dying with desire, he stopped. He looked at me and seemed sad again. The same look I had seen before.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He looked more deeply into me but did not respond.

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure this is . . . I’m not . . .”

  “You’re not what?”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m not used to this.”

  I pulled my shirt down and walked to the door.

  “Susan wait, come back. Let’s talk,” he said, looking down, his hands holding his head, which seemed too heavy to stay still on its own. “I need time.”

  “Time for what? To decide whether fucking me is a good idea? Whether you’ll like it? Whether I’m hot enough for you? Am I?”

  I turned to leave, but he grabbed me, put his arms around me, my shoulder against his chest. He pulled my hair up and kissed my neck. Then he turned me toward him, undressed me, and pulled me up, pressing me against the wall. He took me in his arms and made love to me. The silence became louder and louder. And louder. And then the silence became silent again.

  When I opened my eyes I saw him seated on the couch, staring at a photograph. I would have given anything to know what he was thinking, what he had been thinking before. Yes, I would have.

  “Hey,” I called.

  “Hi,” he said, and placed the photo back in its place. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I said, and looked at him to ask his eyes the same question, but they turned away too quickly for me to do so.

  “What time is it?” I then asked.

  “Six,” he said, and handed me a cup of coffee. “Jack called. They need our post in one hour. Do you feel like reading what I wrote? I could read it to you.”

  His eyes—what I found and what I didn’t find in them—made me forget what I was thinking and feeling, my doubts. It was clear to me that my relationship with him was not going to be like any I had had before. And it was clear that, no matter what, it would be hard, almost impossible, to resist him.

  “Are you OK?” he asked again.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  No, I am not.

  “Do you want me to read?”

  No. Can we talk about what happened before?

  “Yes,” I said, and closed my eyes. We had just made love.

  He sat close to me and read.

  July 14

  * * *

  I’ve started drawing Lies We Tell. I have thought about whether you might get mad at me for using your real name and almost changed the name of the main character to make sure nobody would understand it’s you. But then I figured I couldn’t do that. I had to see your name, and your body on the pages. I spent hours drawing your face. I’m usually good at portraits, but I couldn’t get your eyes and your lips quite right. I tried and tried again, drew and erased, softened, shaded off, drew again, erased one more time. I pierced the canvass and had to start over. Do you remember the time I showed you some of my early drafts? You were in there. I thought you were. I showed you the sketch and you laughed. You said it wasn’t you. I said it was a sketch, a cartoon version of you. You didn’t like it, and then got mad. I didn’t understand why. My sketch of you looked nice to me. Fun. I leafed through the pages of that novel and I think I get it now. You were right. It wasn’t you. There were no wrinkles on your face, you were empty, just the contours of a person, with no content in it. How could I do that to you?

  “A cartoon version of you”—what was I even thinking? There can’t be a cartoon version of you. This time I used charcoal. I didn’t use any picture of you, just my memories. I drew your face’s lines, your nose, the contours of your eyes, and your lips, your hair. I almost felt as if I were passing my hands through it. So soft and thick, wild, wide. And then I spent hours on your eyes and on your lips. I had not thought about whether I wanted you to be happy or sad. I thought the drawing itself would decide that. But I had a very hard time getting your eyes and lips right. Your eyes were never actually smiling, even when they tried to. They smiled only on stage. Although I knew that wasn’t a real smile. That was perfect acting. The audience would never guess. They didn’t know you. Did I? And your lips . . . they too hid struggles, and a deep passion, conflicts, doubts. How was I going to render that with the charcoal? I tried and tried again. I couldn’t get enough of it, could not get enough of you. Moving my fingers on your eyes and your lips felt good. I felt I could give you life, I could draw you so well that you would become real. I wanted to touch you, to own you, keep you here with me. I tried, and tried again, and at some point I even pretended I had come close to having you on the paper. But it wasn’t you. It wasn’t even close. I showed my sketch to Joe and he said it was great. “Emily, wow, man, this is awesome,” he said, patting me on my back. I felt cheated, and left. I stared at that portrait for a long time, and I knew it was a long time only because I checked the clock and couldn’t believe what I saw. I had been there for hours. I thought I should do better. So I bought some clay and tried to make a sculpture of you. A three-dimensional you might be more truthful, it might capture you better, I thought. But my result wasn’t any better. I was ready to give up the idea of my novel, but then I thought I shouldn’t. I thought I should try harder, at least this time. So I kept working on it, I kept working on you. I haven’t come close to capturing your beauty and sadness yet, but I will try harder. I took a break from the drawings and moved to the narrative. I remembered some of the happiest moments we had together. The picnic in the Malibu hills, the walks on the beach, that vegan restaurant you liked, the movies you watched for ten minutes at the most before falling asleep, your getting sick, me getting sick, our cooking together, me at your debut with the Julliard ballet in New York, you with flowers and fans, me standing behind, lost somewhere, wearing that big, old suit that you said looked like it came from Goodwill. And I never told you this, but that is precisely where I got it. Your hours of practice, my empty afternoons watching porn, my attempts to find inspiration in cocaine, my failures. We were so in love the first year. It seems that my best memories belong there. What happened next? I’ve chosen to use black and light-blue-purple for the drawings. This color is sedate and seems to slow down the time so I’ve more time with you. I’ve made only a few drawings. The hardest part was trying to get as close as I could to the truth. I know I’ll never own the truth, but it’ll be nice to get as close to it as I can. Will I be healed if I do that? I hope so. Lies starts when we met. Do you remember? It was the afternoon, and it was raining. I was sketching a story at the café close to our favorite bookstore, and you entered, ordered a coffee, and sat just across from me. I’ll be forever grateful to that big table where perfect strangers sit close to one another. I could not take my eyes off you. Your elegance and beauty were overwhelming. You were holding your coffee with both hands, trying to warm yourself up. You seemed frightened, and that made you look more charming, if that was even possible. And your legs were moving frenetically. Your thin, long, beautiful legs. You were wearing your tights and legwarmers, and I thought you should be a ballerina. Your whole persona was that of a dancer. Your hair was tied in a chignon, your face was pale, so much that I thought it must have been the makeup that made you look like a pierrot. But that was your skin color, and you were a pierrot. Your snow-white face, and your red lips like rose petals on white ceramic. You kept moving your big green eyes, sometimes checking the people around you, sometimes just following your thoughts. And while you were immersed in your journeys, your eyes met mine for what seemed forever. But then you returned fro
m your wanderings and nervously looked away. “Are you a ballerina?” I asked, trying to bring your eyes back to where they had been before. You looked at me again, then around, then back to me, and said, “Yes, I am.” You hesitated a bit, and then you added “Sometimes I wish I were something else.” I was so thankful for that unexpected sharing. Why would you, such a beautiful creature, share a bit of yourself with me? “Why do you say so?” I asked. You lowered your head, turned, and left. I followed you outside, and stopped you. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually stop strangers. I know that’s impolite.” You laughed, but then cried. “Would you like to share some cake?” “I don’t eat sweets,” you said, and looked so sad that I wanted to hug you and take your sadness with me. “What about a tea, with no sugar, then?” You smiled, and we found a precious little tea place and . . . us. I’ve drawn this. All of it.

  I closed my eyes and tried to retain what he had just read as much as I could. Somehow it was as if Andrew’s words were melding with my thoughts, my story, our story, and as they did, they added clouds to what I was living, making it more foggy, confusing, and at times darker.

  “So Andrew wrote Lies We Tell. I wonder if it’s been released,” Nick said. Then he turned to his computer and started doing research. “No, there’s nothing under that title.”

  He browsed on the internet for a while, and then said he wanted to take me somewhere but didn’t say where. We left shortly after. It was seven. The city was more crowded and noisy and somehow felt dirtier. We walked for a while, both silent, until we reached his destination.

  The place he wanted to show me was a bookstore that looked almost like a mountain hat. Quite strange for a California setting, I thought. There was a ground floor and a mezzanine, which you accessed through a little wooden stair, and in the corner of the mezzanine, near the ceiling, a handwritten sign said “Graphic Novels.” The graphic-novel bookshelf was not huge, but some of the novels captured my interest. Nick pointed to a chair close to the wall and asked me to sit there and leaf through the pages of a few books he selected for me. The drawings were simple and complex at the same time. They looked like sketches, but the characters had depth, life. They looked real.

  “I’ll get these three,” I said, showing Nick my choice.

  “Great,” he said, but seemed absent now. I had lost him again, who knows to what or whom. I paid for the novels, and we left.

  “I think I should call a taxi and go home,” I then said, as I felt I needed some time on my own. He seemed disappointed.

  “I was hoping we could work on the readers’ emails. You didn’t like this?”

  What was this? If this was his attempt to expand what we had before, what had just happened, this was a lame attempt. I needed to know more about his eyes before, his resistance, what made him change his mind and make love to me, what the impediment to our love story was—I knew there was one. I needed to know how he felt. I needed him. But he had made love to me and then left. So no, I didn’t like this.

  “Didn’t we say we were going to post one today?”

  “Use the one I gave you at the café. There are my notes on it. I liked it.”

  He looked as if he wanted to say or ask something, but he didn’t.

  “OK.” He stopped a taxi that was approaching, opened the door to let me in, and before closing it, said, “It was beautiful. Before, I mean. It was . . . beautiful.”

  I felt my hands and legs shaking, and I did not respond. Nick tapped on the side of the car, and it took off. And that was all I needed. Right there.

  Day Five

  I didn’t sleep as well as the previous nights. I continued to think about Nick and what had happened yesterday, my head spinning, dragged, and pushed by my instinct and my urge to rationalize. I thought I needed a break from him, and I worried that he would call and ask me to meet again too soon.

  I went to school, taught my classes with even less energy than usual, and checked my phone a thousand times to see whether he had called, but nothing. At three p.m., I fell asleep on my sofa. The phone woke me up at five. It was Nick.

  When I saw his name on the display of my phone, I tried to make up my mind as to what I’d say to him, but the answering machine was faster.

  “Susan, it’s Nick. I was checking in to see how you were doing. I was thinking that with this whole thing, our posts, I’m probably taking too much of your time. Maybe we shouldn’t work tonight. I’ll take care of the journal and see if there are emails we might want to post. I’ll send you a draft as soon as I’m done. Enjoy the rest of your day. I hope . . . I hope I’ll see you soon.”

  I should have felt relieved, but in fact, I felt empty.

  I wandered around the house, thought about calling him back, dialed his number and hung up three or four times, and then decided to take a cold shower, hoping it would shut my head down. I did feel a little better after that but realized I shouldn’t stay home. I got dressed, took the graphic novels with me, and went to the bookstore I had been to the day before. I sat in the same spot, and as soon as I did a man in his late thirties came and sat close to me.

  “It’s my favorite spot,” he said. “I should have come earlier.”

  “It’s my favorite spot too. But I’ll be happy to leave it to you if you like. I can definitely find other nice spots.”

  “No, no need. I’ll sit here if you don’t mind.”

  Before I said anything, he spoke again.

  “Do you like graphic novels?”

  “Some.”

  He smiled and started reading his book, but it was clear he wanted to talk more.

  “I fell in love with graphic novels when I was six or seven,” he added. “When I found out I could draw, I wanted to write my own stories and drawings, make them into graphic novels. And I’ve been doing that ever since.”

  “Have you published any of your work?”

  “Yes, a few.”

  Could it be him?

  “I’m Susan. Nice to meet you.”

  “Matt.”

  I lost myself in my thoughts again. Interesting coincidence. I was working on Andrew’s journal and was sitting close to someone who was also a graphic novelist. Was the world truly small, or had I made it so with my own choices? I must have stared at the same page for quite a while, thinking about my questions, which had something to do with the novel but were not exactly about it.

  “That might not be the best novel for you,” the stranger said.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve been staring at the same page for a long time. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t . . . but if you don’t like that novel, I can help you find a better one.”

  “That’d be nice,” I said. I felt dragged by what I wanted to believe was a coincidence in the small world of graphic novels I had accidentally entered—a world I had otherwise nothing to do with—curious to see where it would lead me.

  “What type of stories do you like?” he asked, trying to figure me out.

  “Real stories or stories that feel real.”

  “Then what you’re reading is not right for you. For a start, I’d choose a story in black and white. Colors distract from reality, make the story appear fake, like a cartoon.”

  I agreed with that. My coincidence and I had something in common.

  “Follow me,” he said, and started walking without turning back to see if I had followed. “We’ll look at a couple of novels you might like.”

  We walked toward the center of the room, where cluttered bookshelves were hiding another room filled with graphic novels and some old books on various topics, treatises, maps.

  “This is my world,” he said. “I come here almost every day, sometimes just to touch the books, taste them, their scent.”

  “Taste them?”

  “Yes, books have a distinct scent. After leafing through so many books, sometimes I feel I might recognize the date of the book from its scent.”

  He looked at me, then back at the shelves.

  “Some of these books are from th
e nineteenth century, but you can get them for a buck or two. Every time I come here I notice one or more gems and take them home with me.”

  I thought the combination of graphic novels and old books in the room was odd. But maybe I was missing something.

  “Why do you like old books so much? Do they have anything in common with graphic novels?”

  “Oh, yes, they do. Their pace is similar. Their stories are interesting, silent, and powerful at the same time. Or at least, that is how I feel about them.”

  “The maps and treatises too?” I asked, not sure I was following. What were the stories in there?

  “Yes, especially those. They’re filled with stories, just not the conventional ones. They’re different. Takes time to find them, but they’re there. And their pace is similar too.”

  He pressed his fingers against some of those books, pulled one from the shelves, opened it, pressed his nose against the pages, and then continued.

  “My apartment is filled with books. I had to get rid of furniture to make space for them. No kidding. Now I’ve only got a desk and a chair, a small couch, a coffee table, and my bed. And, of course, books spread everywhere across the apartment.”

  “That sounds interesting. I should do the same.”

  He saw a graphic novel abandoned on a tall shelf in front of us, climbed on the lower shelves, and grabbed it for me.

  “I think you might like this one. It’s the story of an Iranian girl growing up during and after the Islamic revolution. Take a look at the drawings. What do you think?”

  I leafed through the pages.

  “Yes, this novel looks more interesting than the one I was reading. I like the drawings. They pull me in. Thanks, Matt.”

  He smiled and walked away.

  “Matt? Would you like to get a cup of coffee?”

  He turned and examined me for a few moments.

  “Sure,” he then said, but sounded uncertain, probably still trying to figure out the reason behind my offer.