Frozen Butterflies Page 4

  When I awoke, we went to a nice Spanish restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was on the corner of an outdoor market, with some cute tables outside. A group of young men and women were sitting there, drinking beer and singing.

  “Whenever I come here I think about a trip to Madrid that was wonderful. I had no time or will to plan. Almost everything was improvised. Still, everything was perfect.”

  “Improvisation sometimes may work better than plans.” I thought about my class.

  “Yes. You’re more truthful if you improvise. But that’s hard to do,” Nick said, and sipped his beer.

  What was hard? To be truthful or to improvise?

  We talked about instinct and analysis. His ideas about the interaction between the two were fascinating, but they left me wondering how much of what he described actually applied to him, and whether his choices had been more the product of his instinct or his plans.

  “You are so beautiful,” he suddenly said, opening the door of the car for me after we left the restaurant. His eyes were sad though, as if his words were hurting him. But why would they? He attempted a smile, but his eyes cloaked it. I looked at him and didn’t know what to say. Should I be happy? Thankful? I was confused.

  Once at his apartment, he opened a bottle of wine and looked eager to resume our work. At that point, I was almost sure I had dreamed the whole evening up to that very moment, and that thought hurt.

  I’m attracted to you, you seem to be attracted to me. Can we talk about this? This is what I or he should have said. But neither of us did. Instead, he asked me to read, and I did.

  July 12

  * * *

  I was in the hospital for a few days. Again in the hospital, I know. I tried your ballet flats and tried to walk on my toes as you used to do for a few hours. True, the flats were not my size, but they were not that small either. I pushed my feet into them and finally made it, I was wearing your ballerina flats. My toes started bleeding but I didn’t notice and continued to walk. But then I lost balance and I smashed my left toes against the living room skirting. The pain was excruciating, but I didn’t want to see a doctor. So I waited, but the infection got worse, I got a fever, and I had a minor surgery. Now I have metal pins in my foot, and I will have to use crutches for a month or two. That sucks, considering that sports were keeping me busy and distracted. I’ve not worked on my novels and sketches in a long time. My agent called me at least three times in the past two weeks to ask me if any of my “new projects” were finalized and ready to be submitted. He said that this time my graphic novel should be “lighter” than my other stories. What does that even mean? When I asked him, he said, “you know, something that would make people laugh.” I told him I had stopped laughing too long ago to even remember when that happened. He insisted that I move on with my life, that I think about my job and try to preserve it. The problem is, my novels were all inspired by us, our silences, our routines, our fights, your successes, my failures. They were all fragments of a life that I knew. True, they were not “light.” There was a whispered line of sorrow in my characters. But that’s what I knew. And that feeling still belongs to me and defines me. It’s real. Why would I write about something that’s not real? Something I don’t know? For the sake of it? It would make a wonderful, plastic, sterile literary and graphic exercise. But bookstores and libraries are full of that shit. They don’t need mine. I wonder if you truly liked what I drew, my stories. You said you did, but you might have said that not to hurt me. Did you do that? That would be awful. I don’t think I could stand it. Is this what you did, Emily? Just the thought of it makes me sick. What did I lose? What did we lose? We probably lied to each other day after day. Didn’t we? Why did we do it? We were in love, weren’t we? Did I ever resist your truths? Did you try to be honest with me and I wouldn’t listen? Did I try to be honest with you and it didn’t work? I feel ready to write and draw again, and I think the title of my novel might be Lies We Tell. And it won’t be light, and it won’t make people laugh, but it’ll probably make people think about the lies on which everyone’s life is built.

  As soon as I finished reading, I started shaking. I felt cold and almost stopped breathing. It was Nick’s look before, me before that moment, the love stories that never happened, the one that never happened to me, and perhaps something else—so much cold, so much emptiness, nonsense. I pressed my hands against the stained paper of Andrew’s diary. My eyes cried, and I hated them for that.

  “Are you OK?”

  I looked at him but couldn’t answer. He poured some wine for me and put “Summertime” on the stereo.

  “Would you dance with me?” he asked.

  I abandoned myself on his shoulders, and the alcohol, the bass, or his warmth started warming my tears, the ones that he could or could not see. It felt too good to be true. But then he stopped, turned, made a joke, and went to his desk. The music stopped too. What had just happened?

  “They were lying to each other,” he said and looked at me. No, he couldn’t see me. Anything. Or he did and had just lied to me. Or I had lied.

  “Nietzsche said that lying is a condition of life.” He checked my eyes, seeking their approval, but I wasn’t there. “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, and I wasn’t, truly, of anything.

  We didn’t talk much more. He wrote, I read, and when it was two in the morning, he gave me a stack of readers’ emails. I called a taxi and went home. I needed to close my eyes and just disappear for a while. Something was hurting, and I needed that feeling to be mine. Just mine.

  Day Four

  Today I called in sick and stayed home, but I wasn’t sick or tired. I just wanted to have some time for myself on an ordinary weekday. I woke up at six, called the office, put on my old jeans, placed the emails Nick gave me last night in a bag, and left.

  I live downtown. The city is a mess up here. There are a few peaceful blocks adjacent to hell, but hell accounts for most of downtown. Fancy hotels close to homeless camps, sophisticated restaurants squeezed between kiosks where exotic things are all sold for two dollars. Los Angeles is a city of contradictions. But it is also a city full of surprises. Hidden alleys with nice little restaurants; an authentic bakery a Mexican family has owned for generations; old theaters, most of which are now closed; a magical bookstore that hosts art exhibitions on its top floor and has a bunch of couches spread all over the other floors, where customers and non-customers can sit and leaf through the books before buying them. Or stealing them.

  That bookstore is close to my place, walking distance. I used to go there on the weekends, and I had always told myself that I should return on a weekday to work there, although the bookstore is not thought of as a work space. But who would notice if I snuck in some emails?

  I grabbed a coffee at the café on the corner and walked to the bookstore. A guard at the entrance asked me to leave my bag with him. I explained that I had some papers I needed to check to find the right books for my research. I don’t think he bought it, but perhaps because it was early and I was the second, if not the first, customer of the day, he decided to let me and my bag in.

  The bookstore was empty at nine-thirty a.m. on a weekday. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked toward the door that lead to the art collections through a narrow passage. On the right of that passage there are wide windows. The glass is dirty, as nobody ever cleans it. The bookstore stands amid tall and wide skyscrapers that hide the sun. So the clouds from the glass and those from the skyscrapers make it always dark up there, even on a bright, sunny day. You can’t see much from those windows, and you’re shielded, from the chaos of the city—and sometimes from your own too. It’s peaceful. Sometimes.

  The city seems distant, and it is enveloped in a thick fog. You could sit on the wide windowsill of one of those windows and stay there for hours just looking at people passing by. It’s interesting, that diverse group seems to have been assembled by a divine experiment intended to study human reactions to
the unknown and unexpected. And it’s the same scene every time I watch it. Just different people. Sometimes. This time too.

  The upstairs was only half-illuminated when I arrived, and some cleaning personnel were trying to get rid of the trash, customers’ leftovers from the day before. I sat on the farthest windowsill, sipped a bit of my coffee, and started reading.

  The emails I read were empty. Mostly nice compliments for the choice of this series of posts, although there were some angry ones too, and for apparently no reason, questions for J.N., questions about me, questions about my relationship with Nick . . . And then I found something, a letter written with a typewriter that had been sent as a PDF attached to an email.

  Dear Susan and Nick,

  * * *

  The passages from the journal you published made me think of my relationship with my wife. Or ex-wife I should say. Megan and I grew up together. We started dating when we were fifteen, went to college together, then grad school. At some point, though, our paths diverged. I accepted a job as a pharmaceutical representative and she decided to do research. She spent hours in her lab, sometimes coming home late at night. I was traveling three days a week but the rest of the week I was home, and I remember waiting for her in front of the TV until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. A full day wasted waiting for her to return. I rarely saw her. We had sex once a month, if that often, and every time it felt like a concession to me for my good behavior, for waiting without complaining. At that point, I don’t even know why I was looking for it, looking forward to it. I felt her disinterest. It was clear. But perhaps I was hoping each time would be different, that I could finally bring us back to where we started. I wanted to ask her if she was seeing anyone, but I feared that she would say yes, and leave me. I loved her, but did not tell her that often. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I did. Slowly I got used to a life on my own and when, one day, she asked me if I wanted to make love to her, I realized that I didn’t. My feelings for her were swallowed by my resentment and contempt for a woman who no longer cared for me and, in fact, perhaps at that point, not even for herself. Megan is not like Emily. But I’m worried I might have made mistakes with her as J.N. did with Emily. I feel he was missing something, and I fear I might be doing the same. I’ve started asking myself questions, revisiting my past with her, my memories. I leafed through our photo book, the photos of our wedding. Megan looked sad. As I was trying to remember why that could be, I remembered our arguments around that time. When we decided to get married, she was happy but I wasn’t. I didn’t feel ready. She was. I loved her, but she may have doubted that I did. I wonder whether this is when I started losing her. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll do something. What I don’t like about J.N. is his doing nothing. He seems to be fighting against himself rather than fighting to get her back. Is loving someone a search for ourselves? If so, I wouldn’t fight against myself to find me. Perhaps that doesn’t make any sense. If so, just ignore my outburst. I was actually going to do that myself, trash what I had written. But then I thought I should give my thoughts a chance. Maybe you’ll get what I don’t. In any event, thanks for sharing the diary. It helped.

  * * *

  Ashton

  “Is loving someone a search for ourselves?” That put a cold breeze into my stomach. Hard to explain why.

  I sipped my coffee to warm me up, stretched my legs along the windowsill, and looked down the street. There were more people now, and they seemed to be walking faster. I felt so far from the ground. The sun had risen a bit. I could spot more of it from where I was. As people were waking up and the sun was rising, I felt I needed to sleep, and that wasn’t unusual given my irregular sleeping habits, my search for shadows, silence, and spaces that could be mine and mine only. I looked around and realized I was sharing the room with too many people now, so I collected my things and left in search of food.

  After some wandering, I stopped in front of a café. It looked cheap from the outside, but I was so hungry and tired from the walking that I decided to stop in. The café wasn’t bad. It was dark, intimate, simple. The music was an interesting mix from the 80s. The waitress smiled at me as I read the menu. There wasn’t much to read. I ordered an omelet, and she said I could go upstairs if I wanted. She would bring me my order. I looked around—there were tables available on the ground floor, but I took her suggestion and headed upstairs.

  The second floor was a discovery. There were worn and comfortable couches against the walls, a beautiful wide coffee table with worn-out novels and magazines that seemed to have been thrown there randomly. Yet there was an artistic logic. I could see it. The music was filling the atmosphere, and it was soft enough to let you take whatever journey you wanted to take. The table I chose was on the left side of the room, just above the stairs. It looked like a desk, and on it there was a small, unlit lamp. From where I sat, I could see people passing by on the street, a few cars. Everything seemed to move so slowly. Maybe it was the time of the day, maybe it was the street. Maybe what I saw wasn’t real. In fact, the same people had passed two or three times in front of the café’s windows. I noticed their jackets, so colorful and striking in the dimness of the corner. A red one was particularly loud. Then I saw three cars going in reverse. All of them, slowly, at the same time. I thought I was daydreaming. But then I spotted a camera. So they were shooting a movie or a commercial or something. The sky seemed cloudier now, but at times I could see the sun, although its light seemed to reach me as from another time, filtered by the café.

  When the waitress arrived with my order, she bent to turn on the lamp on my table. I said I was fine in the shadows. She smiled, placed the plate on the table, and left. I had not noticed, but I was alone on the second floor, and that felt good. I could barely see the food in my plate, but the shadows made me relax and release any tension left from the night before, the time before.

  After I finished my meal, I moved to a sofa in the corner of the room to write notes on the margins of Ashton’s email and drift more deeply into myself. The room was still empty. I took off my shoes, extended my legs, lay my head on one of the small pillows, and once I was done writing, I freed my mind and fell asleep. I dreamed about Nick. It was a strange dream, but it felt real. We made love, and it was our first time, but it felt natural as if we had known each other for a long time and had made love many times before. After a short while of us dancing on each other, he pushed my head down. I looked at him and something felt wrong, sad, empty.

  “Susan? What are you doing here?”

  Nick was standing in front of me. I had to catch my breath. I was dreaming. Something. But he was there, right in front of me. I took some time to sift my dream from what I was actually living. It happened too fast. The dream got mixed with reality, or the other way around. But he was there.

  “Shouldn’t you be working?”

  “I . . . yes.”

  He didn’t say much more and sat close to me. Just looked at me for a while. At another time I’d have tried to fill in the silence between us, but I wasn’t fully awake, so I just looked at him looking at me. What did he see? And did he like what he saw? I liked what I saw. Still did.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I like this place. I come here often. The music, the lighting.” He seemed not surprised to find me there, as if our meeting had been planned. “Did you find any clue in the emails?”

  “No, no clues.”

  The waitress came with his order.

  “The usual,” she said, placing the drink on the table.

  “What’s the usual?” I asked.

  “Ginger tea with cognac.” I thought it was too early for alcohol, but when he offered it to me for me to try it, I did. I took one sip of his drink and felt warm. I returned the drink to him, but then stole another sip.

  “Suzy, can you bring us another one?” Nick asked the waitress, before I could even try to stop him. When the waitress returned with my ginger cognac, I drank it all.

&nbs
p; “Why don’t we go to my place? We have work to do.”

  My memories of our walk to his place are confused. I don’t remember how we got there. It happened so fast. I feel we got to his place through a back door in that café, but that is not possible. We walked. We must have. The transition was so quick and soft though. I didn’t feel any break between us at the café and us in the apartment. Perhaps it was my dream, that soft, almost silent music, the cognac, and the shadows that gave me that impression. Or just the fact that by then I could see only Nick, as everything else had disappeared. And Nick was all of those things. My dream, the silence, the cognac, the shadows.

  His apartment was almost completely dark. He had left the curtains down, and they did a great job shielding the room from the sun.

  “And from the world,” he added. “I like to have my own space, my shadows. I love shadows.”

  “Really? I do too.”

  “Of course you do.” He dragged me to the sofa.

  “You never talk about yourself, do you?”

  I felt warm again.

  “Why do you like shadows?”

  I wanted this. I had dreamed this. I saw this.

  “Shadows take you closer to yourself,” I said. “You can see things more clearly. There’s no noise. No artificial light. Just the contours. The essence. You see what you can touch.”

  “And so I see you more clearly now. Your lines, essence . . . can I touch you?”