Jenna’s Model Life

I am fairly sure that if a permit had been filed in sufficient time with the Ventura County authorities registering an intention to shoot on a stretch of rocky Malibu coast on Monday, the 28th of April, as originally foreseen by my last client — a particularly talented young designer who rewarded me with several beautiful dresses and a blouse with cameo horsehead buttons — I would still be in a relationship with Peter today. But the permit was not in order, the job was pushed back to May 5; it was the only work I’d booked in some time and I needed the money and I had a place to stay and there was no question of backing out; so I bought groceries, and Burnett’s, and I unpacked my suitcase, never suspecting the extra week spent in Los Angeles would prove long enough for us to have one last fight, long enough for certain realisations to harden into certainty.

We have dated since my 19th birthday party; been in love since January 9th, 2005. Officially cohabitated for one year, nine months; unofficially, our separate leases became a technicality sometime in the late summer of 2005. He knows my surviving set of grandparents, and I once went to Racine, Wisconsin, to meet his U.S.-based grandma and maternal relatives. He gave advice to my brother, and I told Peter’s sister how lovely I thought her selected prom dress was, before spending long hours talking with his father about feminism and mathematics and books, in front of a raging fire in a farmhouse in the snowy months. I went to his graduation, and he to mine, and we had terrific, awful, vicious fights, the fights you feel between you like the edge of a knife for days after, the night and morning before both ceremonies. His B.A. completed, he lived one extra year in Iowa, for me. We adopted a cat. And we loved each other very much.

The usual things went wrong, to do with worldview, and money, and alcohol, and sex, and insecurity and projection and transference and the fact that I now spend eccentric periods in distant, seemingly glamourous, locales. We moved in when all we had was each other; even then, I think we suspected that it wouldn’t be enough.

It is not always pleasant or even satisfying in the abstract to be proven correct.

My dear friend Bec is visiting, by purest, most blessed coincidence, and it is the first time we have seen each other since the southern hemisphere summer we both turned 18. We are doing a San Francisco blitzkrieg tour to try and take my mind off the fact that, left to my own devices, it takes me two hours to finish a cup of ginger carrot soup, an hour to read an article in a newspaper, and that when my booker calls me on the phone with a money job, I burst into tears. Today we did Chinatown, exorcised my beloved House of Nanking, and spent two hours browsing City Lights’ shelves, during which time I managed to read exclusively parts of various of the books I’ve been pretending to have digested for some time now.

Yesterday, we went to the Conservatory of Flowers. Nothing like a toasty, bright greenhouse in the sanative high Victorian spirit, filled with bursting, dripping colour pour changer ses idées. Flowers as mental sanitation, as sedative, as alternative to the valium eiderdown.

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longpieceoftextheretocreateaestheticallypleasingwhitespacekthanxbai

longpieceoftextheretocreateaestheticallypleasingwhitespacekthanxbai

The self-played trick was almost working. And then I remembered that all flowers are beautiful because they are having sex, and that depressed me.

Then we decided to visit the special butterflies exhibit. Before we could be wowed by the beautiful pollinator hordes, we passed through the information section, a bare room full of kids absorbing diagrams of the proboscis, pistil, and stamen, and learning that bees see flowers in blue, and yellow, as well as colours in the UV spectrum that humans cannot, and found this:

After the information room, even this didn’t cheer me up.

At least, not enough.

I head East shortly. I do not know when I will be back to San Francisco. If you want a variety of tables, chairs, several wonderful bookshelves, a gorgeous solid oak-framed mirror that once belonged to the brilliant author Nam Le, and many, many books, it’ll all be on Craigslist soon enough.