How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  BEN

  Sure, sure.

  MARGAUX

  And really beautiful women smear their faces with really disgusting makeup to—­and sort of have a hunch.

  No one says anything.

  BEN

  To me, the deeper place is like, I’ve always wanted to be a theater artist, and I’ve succeeded to the extent to which I—­to which my dreams allow. But so what, you know? I’m not convinced that this is a good use of one’s time. There are so many other things one could be doing with one’s life. It’s a very par­tic­u­lar kind of experience, being a theater director. Nervous-­system-­wise, it’s a very par­tic­u­lar kind of activity. It’s a very narcissistic activity.

  MARGAUX

  (loudly) You guys keep saying narcissism; what do you mean by that exactly?

  BEN

  I mean that one is very involved in one’s own mind.

  SHEILA

  But all art is like that. Books and paintings and—

  BEN

  Sure, sure.

  MARGAUX

  Even activism is very involved with righ­teousness, you know.

  Long pause.

  SHEILA

  So where are you guys with your collaboration? Is your play going to talk about this?

  BEN

  Uh . . . maybe. I hope so. In some kind of way. A simple way to talk about it is that it’s about us, and about our embarking on a project together, and ­we’re trying to make something together as friends, trying to take each other out of ourselves and into the world, and it evolves into an actual engagement in the world. Then comes the discovery of something that ­we’re interested in replacing ourselves with.

  ANDREW

  ­We’re working with an actress. She’s doing a lot of the voices of the women we spoke to there, so suddenly in the middle of the play, Ben and I will kind of leave the stage so she can talk . . .

  BEN

  Ultimately what we’d like to do is tell somebody ­else’s story (laughs a bit)—­to build a bridge from our story to another story that we think is important to tell, then tell that story somehow. So ­we’re acting in the play right now, and our little challenge to ourselves is that maybe we’ll get off the stage at some point.

  Sheila stands up.

  SHEILA

  Should I bring out the dessert?

  MARGAUX

  (rising) Oh, I can bring it out.

  BEN

  You know, making art but not boring people . . .

  SHEILA

  Really? That’s amusing. I like boring people. I think it’s a virtue. People should be a little bored.

  MARGAUX

  (exiting) Girls aren’t as good at being boring.

  SHEILA

  (exiting) Girls aren’t as good at being boring?

  MARGAUX

  Maybe.

  All the white men I know are going to Africa. They want to tell the stories of African women. They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality. Sure, I said. Sure, if they would like to present themselves as role models for teenage girls, what have I got on them? Only a natural empathy that no one could guess at from the way I have been living. They come at life from the outside, those white boys who went to Africa. To have to wear on the outside one’s curiosity, one’s pity, one’s guilt . . .

  All I want is to look back with no regrets. And perhaps go to Africa and return with the story of an impoverished black woman whose boyfriend has AIDS and drinks, and whose four babies have AIDS and drink—­to communicate something of greater importance to North Americans than the poverty of my soul.

  Later that eve­ning, Sheila and Margaux wipe their hands on a towel, having cleaned up after dinner. They go onto the front steps and sit facing the street. A halo of light emanates from a street lamp across the road; a fuzzy, translucent white crystal of light against the dark blue sky, sort of like descriptions of the artist Robert Irwin’s luminescent disks, which people once went rapturous about, calling them moon-­silver, incandescent, ethereal, dropped from heaven.

  SHEILA

  How can these artists we read about—­who have been married five or six times—­how can they have enough time for all that life, and also make art?

  MARGAUX

  And have a heroin addiction?

  SHEILA

  Either there’s something I’m not understanding, or that was another point in history.

  MARGAUX

  You know, visually, I think I always understood that looking at a Pollock painting or looking at a brick wall—­like, the brick wall might be more interesting for me. But because the brick wall might be more interesting for me, I never quite understood why it was important to make things sometimes.

  SHEILA

  (excited) I made something!

  MARGAUX

  What?

  SHEILA

  I’ll tell you . . .

  Sheila reaches behind her back, then grows scared and changes her mind.

  You know, the other day, Sholem came into the salon—

  MARGAUX

  I saw him in the street yesterday, buying new clothes.

  SHEILA

  He feels dirty because of the ugly painting he made!

  Then I told her about how Sholem had gone about making his ugly painting—­making a list of all the things he found ugly, and putting them in a painting.

  Margaux shakes her head.

  MARGAUX

  That’s what I was afraid of. Sholem should have been ugly with all of his heart—­from his center, not from a list!

  SHEILA

  I know! He also told me he thinks you’re in the middle of a painting crisis.

  MARGAUX

  What! He said that? Oh my God, I’m so totally not having a painting crisis! Just ’cause I don’t automatically have respect for paintings. But Sholem does. He’s so reverent: Oh, it’s a painting! Well, so what? Frankly, I’m surprised by his total interest in it.

  SHEILA

  But that’s natural, isn’t it, for someone who’s a paint­er to be interested in paintings?

  MARGAUX

  I’m interested in meaning, not paintings. Paintings can be pretty meaningless, you know. Like, it’s insane! I want to create complete meaning in art that’s even better than po­liti­cal meaning! And Sholem wants to make the most flawless paintings in the world. And you—­you want to be the human ideal! ­We’re crazy. We all want such big things!

  What was so crazy about wanting to be the human ideal? That upset me.

  SHEILA

  Have you made your ugly painting yet?

  MARGAUX

  Not yet.

  SHEILA

  Why not?

  MARGAUX

  I don’t know! Ugly, beautiful—­I don’t even understand what those words mean.

  SHEILA

  Then why did you agree to the competition?

  MARGAUX

  I’m doing it for him! I thought it would be interesting for Sholem, because when there’s such re­sis­tance, as there was . . .

  I didn’t want to talk about Sholem anymore. I pulled some pages out from behind me, rolled up like a cylinder. “Take this,” I said, pressing it into her hand. Margaux held it, turning it around.

  “What is it?”

  I suddenly grew excited. I explained about how the other night, after she had returned to me my tape recorder, I began writing about us in Miami, and transcribed our conversations from that trip. I wanted her to read it now.

  “I don’t want to see it!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Her expression of aversion struck me. It recalled to me a warm afternoon as a teenager, when I had been hanging out with my high school boyfriend at
his father’s place. We ­were sitting on his father’s couch. Suddenly and without warning, he unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock. I had burst into tears of shock—­it was the first adult penis I had ever seen, and without ceremony or warning—­and I left the apartment, furious. I ­wouldn’t talk to him for two ­whole weeks. Then I came to love him.

  “I want you to see it,” I said, thrusting it in her direction, hurt. She reached out reluctantly, timidly, and took it. A feeling of satisfaction ­rose in my being, such that I ­couldn’t imagine she would feel any way but as impressed by its power and beauty as I was.

  • chapter 6 •

  THE ART SHOW

  One week later, I went to see a group show that Paul Petro curated. My plan was to drop in for just ten minutes, then head home. When I arrived, a group of people ­were standing by the front doors, smoking. A girl I hardly knew turned to me with a friendly smile, and I grinned widely back.

  Inside the white-­walled space, Paul, a tall man with smooth skin and a deep tan, came up to me and smiled. He asked me if I had seen Margaux’s painting yet. I said no, I had no idea she was in the show! We went to the back and he got me a beer, then I followed him up to the second floor. I went with him into the front room, and we stood there together, facing the largest painting Margaux had ever made. It was still wet. And it was terrible to behold.

  She had depicted herself as a fat, chubby-­cheeked Buddha figurine, with a smug, sly smile wiped across her face. In the background ­were cotton balls. Her body was made of shiny porcelain, and jewels and rings crowded her fingers and arms. She sat cross-­legged, her peroxide hair falling thinly over her shoulders, and her expression was one of greedy self-­satisfaction. It was utterly grotesque. The title, printed on a small card, was Margaux Souvenir.

  A cold wash ran through my body. Paul laughed, understanding nothing, but I knew how Margaux felt about the world. She saw no glory in being Buddha, and had never painted herself this way before. Buddha was the one who turned his back on the suffering of the world to sweeten himself with good feelings—­privileged feelings of benevolence and purity, just like her worst fears about what it meant to be a paint­er.

  I thanked Paul and turned and went slowly down the stairs, careful not to fall, my heart racing and feeling nauseated. Leaving my half-­empty beer bottle on his desk, I made it out the front door and headed straight for Margaux’s apartment, three blocks away.

  • chapter 7 •

  MARGAUX QUILTS

  I knocked on the front door of Misha and Margaux’s, but no one answered. I used my key to get in, then went up to the second floor. The door to their place was open, and I went straight through the kitchen and into the bedroom, where I found Margaux in the dark, sitting upright on their bed, watching a movie and quilting. She glanced at me with the unblinking eyes of an animal, her face washed in blue. It had been a week since we had seen each other last.

  “I was just at Paul Petro’s. I saw your ugly painting there.”

  “Oh? You found it ugly?” She turned a cold, hard look at her quilt.

  A loose, frightened feeling ran through my ­whole body, then my body grew heavy, as if weighed down with shit. I wanted to take back what I had written about us in those pages; what­ever she had read to make her—­us—seem so awful. But I could no more disown it than my teenage boyfriend could have wiped from my mind how he had portrayed me in his play. It happened. I thought of apologizing—­but ­couldn’t. Women apologize too much, I once decided, and made myself stop, and now found it incredibly difficult to tell anyone I was sorry.

  Margaux said, “I once had a friend in art school, who I shared a studio with. She ran away to become a Buddhist and to live in a Buddhist colony in Colorado. She had been a paint­er, too, but when I went to visit her, she was just painting pretty colors on the insides of the temples that only the rich people who had reached the highest spiritual plane could see. I always thought that would never be me.”

  Her face fell while I stood there, stunned. For a long time I didn’t say anything. I wanted to tell her that being a paint­er was not meaningless, de­cadent, narcissistic, and vain, but how could I know, for sure? All I knew, down to the deepest part of my being, was that if I lived the life that was truly inside me, near her, I would only cause her pain. I didn’t have any faith that what­ever I might say ­wouldn’t hurt her doubly and only make things worse.

  “I think I should go,” I said.

  She agreed.

  I turned and left her apartment, hesitating, slowly, hoping she would call me back, but she did not. Making my way down the hall, I passed her studio and glanced inside. Through the half-­closed door I saw no canvases, no brushes, no paint. I felt something drop inside of me, like gravity had shifted, like when you suddenly realize the person you have been staring at is missing a limb.

  • chapter 8 •

  SHEILA QUAKES

  Down in the street I got onto my bike and biked as fast as I could to one of the abandoned fields by the foot of the city, down near the water, spread out beneath the elevated highway. No one tended to the land there. No one developed it. It existed for no one, this dead-­grass expanse.

  I had come too close and hurt her—­killed what­ever in Margaux made art, what­ever allowed her to tell herself that it was all right to be a paint­er in the face of all her doubts. I knew why and how it had happened. Instead of sitting down and writing my play with my words—­using my imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and privacy of my soul—­I had used her words, stolen what was hers. I had plagiarized her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine! Then she had looked into it and, like looking in a fun­house mirror, believed the de­cadent, narcissistic person she saw was her—when really it was me. Unwilling to be naked, I had made her naked instead. I had not worked hard or at all.

  I had cheated.

  Shame covered my face and hands. I would abandon my play for good. I would never tape us again! I climbed under the fence and ran down the hill and wandered off through the field in pain. The moon was out and full, and everything was shivering in the moon’s silvery light. I thought about nature, and that I was in nature, and then I said to myself, You are nature. My eyes caught the edge of something in the sky—­a beautiful sign perched over the highway that had been erected so long ago by a manufacturer of washers and dryers. Its bright white bulbs outlined in pink formed the magical word: Inglis. I stood there staring at it, wondering, near tears, if there could be, in heaven or on earth, anything more beautiful than this bright sign over this dead field, and how amazing it was what human nature—Inglis—and nature-­nature—the field—­could make in harmony with each other.

  I must have been standing there like that for twenty minutes, when I noticed something: a sentence scrolling beneath it in bright LEDs. It had been scrolling the entire time I’d been there, but only just now did I see what it said: make the decisions that benefit everyone. make the decisions that benefit everyone.

  My heart caught on my rib. If only I could figure out what that was—­the decision that would benefit everyone—­I would do it!

  Kneeling in the grass, Sheila’s heart races her an email . . .

  1.How terrible will be the day of judgment, Amen. How terrible will be the judgment when you walk down the street and catch yourself in a store window. And you will be judged.

  2.Smash the tops of the pillars so that even the bottom of the doors will shake. Make the pillars fall on the people’s heads; anyone left alive, I will kill with a sword.

  3.Not one person will get away. No one will escape. If they dig down as deep as the place of the dead, I will pull them up. If they climb into heaven, I will bring them down. Forget your drugs, forget your sex, for you will be brought down if you are up, and you will be brought up if you are down in the place of the dead, to the middle place that is intended for you, Amen.

  4.Do
not hide at the top of Mount Carmel or at the bottom of the sea with the tropical fish and a heavy tank of oxygen on your back, for I will find you even there. And if you are happy, I will make you sad, and if you have been innocent, I will make you guilty. I will command a snake to bite you, and then you will become like a snake to others, telling them all your troubles and troubling their innocence!

  5.I will keep watch to give them trouble, not do them good.

  6.Cry for the dead, for Inglis has no mercy on the dead. Even in the heavens there is no looking forward to or looking back from, just a pure white burning in the light.

  7.So walk up the hills and run down the hills, ascend the stairs and descend them, sit and lie and dance and stand, for there will be no moving in the land of judgment. There will be no sitting or fidgeting or smoking or sleeping. There will only be a burning without your body in the light. I will destroy all you have known, and all you will know is me.

  8.Be like a shaking piece of grain in a sifter.

  9.Shake like a little piece of grain upon a sieve.

  10.Rattle and stir like a little piece of soil in a sifter.

  11.Not even the tiniest stone falls through.

  I would go to where she ­couldn’t see me, or be pained by me anymore—­where no one would know what I had done. Like a good spider—locked safely away—­I would leave the city to her.

  Then maybe one day, in the future, with the bad feelings I had caused in her erased from her heart, and all memory of the Miami piece and our travels and me forgotten, Margaux would paint once more.

  • chapter 9 •

  WHAT IS CHEATING?

  Now we find ourselves in the knowledge of what is cheating. It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon. It was true four thousand years ago when our ancestors wandered the desert, and it’s as true today when the icon is our selves.

  The Jews wandered through the desert, thrown from the land, for as soon as we did settle, we made an idol to worship. Our punishment was to wander and be like gypsies without anything except the necessities for living, which we carried on our backs. So the story of wandering and being expelled is told, and is an old one.