by Sheila Heti
“It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought,” he thought, and got up and undressed and went to the shower and rubbed himself hard, then went to his room where he dressed in brown and walked in the rain to work.
When he arrived the woman in the cubicle was already there. Her spine was haughty and tense and she was turned away. But as he sat and arranged his folders he knew that she was thinking of him. “She can’t do any better than me,” he determined. Yes, he would destroy her. This woman with the husband and the three lovely kids; she was looking for an affair, a real sweaty romance, he could smell it on her skin.
Indeed, by the coffeemaker at 11 AM she said, “I would like to go home with you tonight. I would like to see where you live.”
“It is not a sight for a lady,” he said, dangling this info in front of her. “It’s a small place. A man’s place. I’m a poet, you see, and I live there alone with my roommate of seven years who is cruel. Women fall in love with him but he cannot love them back. He is a novelist. He’s very messy.”
“I want to come home with you,” the woman said, pressing her eyes into him and spilling all the coffee.
THAT NIGHT THEY sat around the table: the poet, the novelist, and the woman from the cubicle. The woman from the cubicle, eyes all aglow, looked back and forth from one to the other. One was so gruff and silent and thick, like a real man! And the other was disinterested and distracted and edgy, like a real man! She was falling in love with them both.
The novelist, feeling violated for reasons he could not understand, stood up and left the table and went to his computer and peered in, and again saw the bug behind the screen. “Damn it!” he cried, pounding his fist into his desk. The poet looked dreary and did not respond.
The woman said, “Please, tell me about your life. You must be fascinating. I have never known a poet before, except for one in high school. And I don’t even know if he’s still a poet.”
The poet said darkly, “Don’t tell me that.” Then, “Come with me to the bedroom. It is my bedroom and I should like to show it to you.”
The woman put down her fork and followed in behind. She was delighted. She felt so bohemian. She wanted to take off all her clothes.
“Good,” he said, turning on a lamp. “You can see now on my wall two letters from Al Purdy, telling me I am good but not good enough.”
He sat on the bed which was low to the floor and spread apart his legs and looked up at her as she walked around the narrow space, fingering all the things.
“That is a picture taken of me when I was in Poland. I was a professor.”
“You look very Polish here.”
“I know.”
He lay back on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, hands adjusted behind his head. “Do you smoke?” he asked.
“No.”
“Please go into the next room and get a cigarette from my novelist roommate. He should have a pack beside him on the desk. Tell him it is for me; he will understand. If he refuses to give you one or throws a fit, leave the room at once. Sometimes it bothers him to be interrupted while writing.”
The woman left the room and walked down the hall and saw the novelist hunched before his computer, deep in his chair, pressing his fingers to the screen. “Come,” he said, when he heard her approach, and she moved toward his desk and placed her hands upon it and leaned archingly forward. He put one hand on her ass, felt it shifting beneath her dress.
“Do you see a bug?”
She held her breath, did not move. Then she looked evasively away and said, “I have come here to get a cigarette for the poet. He says you’ll understand.”
“Sure I understand.” He somberly pulled two cigarettes from the pack and gave them to her. She left the room and walked numbly through the hall toward the poet, and on the walk she remembered a dream. “I dreamed once I was in a room with other people.”
When the poet saw her he sat upright on the bed. “Close the door,” he said. “The novelist gets very jealous.”
She closed the door and sat down beside him. She put the cigarettes in his hand. He looked at them dumbly. She wanted him to throw his leg across her, push her down on the bed, slap her and rape her hard.
“Two,” he said. “He must like you.”
“Yes. He touched me on my bum.”
“Let me see.”
She lay down on her stomach and he examined her through her dress.
THE SORT OF WOMAN FREEMAN LOVED
FREEMAN TOOK THE woman with the good body and drove and drove in his squat yellow car all the way to a country parish where he married her. Though she seemed at the time to be smiling, if he had looked closely he would have seen a trace of exasperation.
They settled in Manshire, where she told him, on their first day together in their brand-new house, that she was bored already and if he couldn’t provide her with entertainment she’d be forced to run away. Her name was Sally. There were silly little dreams Sally had that she mistook for grand possibilities; this was her central failing.
One Saturday morning in June, after the newlyweds had been living in their dreary little bungalow for three months, a salesman came to their door and introduced himself as Eli. It was his job, he said, to give people the one thing they really needed. After all, he wouldn’t be much of a salesman if he gave people the one thing they really didn’t want. Ha ha. So what was it he could provide them with? He would be happy to open his briefcase on their living room table and show them what a decent honest man he was. See? No gimmicks.
Well, Sally looked at Freeman and Freeman looked at Sally. He shrugged. She told him emphatically that what they needed was someone to entertain her; indeed, she began to describe the man she was thinking of in glorious detail, triple-X detail, leaving out the measurements that didn’t count, like the circumference of his anus. But his eyes had to be icy blue. He ought never to smile and should have big, burly hands that he never—or rarely—used in big, burly ways. His skin would have to be the color of taffy and his lips lighter than his skin. Hair curled just so.
“I can do that,” the salesman said, snapping closed his briefcase. He left their house with a parting wave and a big broad smile, then turned to face the road. Locking the door behind him, the two went to sit on the couch. Sally fantasized about her elaborate dream, part of which involved making it in the role of public celebrity. Freeman smiled into her face. She was beautiful. Whatever, she was the woman he wanted.
Suddenly Sally turned to him. “You do know that I love you, Freeman.”
Freeman smiled and nodded. He knew. She had married him and now she was living with him. She was living with him in their very own house.
THE NEXT WEEK the salesman was back at their door with a large wooden crate. It was a Sunday morning and since only religious good could come on a Sunday, the salesman told them that it might be best if they didn’t open the package till midnight. Just out of respect for the Lord; they understood his reasoning. Could he have his money now? The salesman stood there tapping his foot and grimacing at the cloudy sky as Freeman wrote out a check for seven thousand dollars, then softly closed the door.
When he returned to the living room his wife was already pulling nails out of the crate.
“But, but Sally, didn’t you hear the man? He said it was best to leave the day to its religious duty.”
“Shut up, Freeman.”
The crate flung open and standing there before her was the man she had ordered, exact. He was wearing thin black underwear and his arms hung at his sides. His face showed no expression. Sally threw her head back and laughed and hooted in glee. It was the first time Freeman had ever seen her genuinely excited, and he was scared. He escaped into the kitchen and telephoned his mother.
“Sally’s crazy, Mom!” Freeman whispered into the phone, half a mile away from tears.
His mother was a tiny shrugging woman in a little house far away, and her words were coming faint ove
r the line like a whisper on a thread, so that it suddenly occurred to Freeman that she might soon be dead. He hung up the phone and hurried into the living room where Sally was standing gleefully, running her hands up and down the chest of the entertaining man, pressing her body into him, eyes all aglow.
“Sally, we must get back to Jackson! My mother is dying in her little blue room!”
Sally snapped him a horrible face. “You go,” she scowled. “I don’t give a shit about your boring old mother. I’ve got big plans.”
“Oh Sally,” Freeman sighed. He looked at her with a husband’s sadness. Then he hesitantly stepped forward and held out his hand to the entertaining man. “I’m Freeman,” he said, enunciating his words as though it was deaf. Nothing happened. Freeman turned to Sally and put his hands on her shoulders. She was frail and her shoulders bent a little.
“Sally, come on now, I know you don’t want to see my mother die. We have to go, this afternoon, in the car.”
“Fine,” she said. “But I have to get him some clothes first. We’re going into town. We’ll be back around three.” And she took the entertaining man by the hand and walked him, like a toddler, into the road.
Freeman stood in the doorway and watched them. It was as though they had been blessed with a two-hundred-pound baby. His lips twitched once before he closed the door and went inside and started packing.
When Sally and the entertaining man returned later that afternoon they had a lot of bags, maybe about thirty, and many of them contained sequined dresses and high-heeled shoes. Freeman also noticed that Sally had gone to the hairstylist and that her fingernails were now red. When she passed him in the hall she did so with her nose in a snub, and she didn’t want to answer any questions. The entertaining man was dressed up nicely but his eyes refused to dilate.
THEY DROVE DOWN the highway in the squat yellow car, Freeman in the front, the entertaining man and Sally in the back. When they were about two hours from Jackson, Freeman folded down the roof and the air began gusting at them and Sally began to shriek, “My hair! My hair! You bastard! You animal!” And so Freeman hurriedly closed up the roof and drove on, accelerating. The sun was setting behind them in the west and everything was growing pink. Sally began talking to her man in whispers.
When they arrived at the house in Jackson it was dark. Freeman went up the stairs and found his mother lying in her bed, shrunken into a pale skeleton. It was as though there was a little something inside her clutching at her skin, trying to pull itself through her bones.
“Get in here with me, Freeman,” she said, and Freeman climbed into the bed and put his warm body under the covers and huddled and held her in his arms. He cried some salty tears while she barely breathed, then she fell asleep.
He arranged her hair into a spiral, then rose from the bed and left, closing the door with a slow, respectful turn of the handle. He went down the hall to his childhood room and there he found his wife sitting on the bed with the entertaining man in front of her. She was dressed in high heels and panties, and she was taking off his clothes, yanking his pants down over his thighs. Freeman stood at the door barely able to see because of the tears that were caught in his eyes, but he could smell the nudity.
“Oh, get lost Freeman,” Sally said.
Freeman closed the door and went downstairs into the den and lay on the couch. A fluffy little white dog ran into the room. He did not know his mother had bought a dog! It had a bell on underneath its chin and it jumped on the couch and ran across Freeman’s chest and began licking at his neck. It had the brightest, most enthusiastic eyes Freeman had ever seen, and Freeman laughed.
Suddenly Freeman heard a dull tone and with a start he jerked and bounded up the stairs. The little dog followed one step at a time.
“Mother!” he cried, but stopped before her room. In the doorway was Sally, her eyes wide and frightened, and the entertaining man, holding her hand, his eyes wide and frightened too. She tugged on his arm, then he tugged on her arm, then she tugged on his. They looked no more than six years old; a brother and sister at the zoo.
THE NIGHT OF RORY
THE MAN WITH the wide shoulders and the thin nose turned left down the street. The night was cold on his face and he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and walked to where the men would be; playing chess in the back of the store, the lights too bright, the smoke too thick, and he would be served the drink he wanted. Nobody had called him by name all week, and in a hundred years there wouldn’t be his wife or him or anyone he knew. At one point there were healthy Roman citizens looking up at the sky, and then there was him and one day no one.
One block away and already he could see the terrible sign, a white fluorescent. All he wanted was maybe two or three drinks but not to spend the night. At home his wife asked too many questions and talked too fast. He pushed open the door and the place was lit up like a gymnasium.
The historian was playing chess with a critic while a columnist looked on, and the man went right to the back and sat with them, their cigarettes dangling from their mouths like dicks. One man looked up mildly.
“Rory.”
That was that. The man said “rye” and the server walked away and behind the server was a woman in a red dress. She went to the bar and stood up straight, looking over at him.
He kept his eyes on the chess game. The drink came. He drank it down and still he kept his eyes on the game.
In a moment he finished and said good-bye, then ducked out past the woman into the street where the air was biting and his cheeks, only halfway down the block, were already pink and cool. In an instant the whole world could be gone and not in a way that anyone knew anything about. Couples were emerging from doorways into the night. It was the hour when people strolled and the sky was blue and you could still see the sky. He heard a clip-clopping behind him.
Stopping at a light he turned and the woman halted, suddenly looking down and pressing her hands over the fronts of her thighs.
“You shouldn’t have left when I came just for you.”
“Why not?” he said, but he knew why; because she had come just for him. His eyes were watering from the stench of her perfume, and the beautiful couple he had seen that morning with the smiling baby might lose their baby the next day in an accident and everything in their world would just be shattered, and here she was pulling on his arm, and she had no choice either.
The light changed and he turned to face the street. He thought, “I could plow myself into that windshield and they’d all be dead, the car overturned and five people dead.” Or maybe the beautiful couple with the baby would be fine the next day but six years down the road the baby would be snatched away or run over by a car and that would be the end of their happiness forever; everything changed and no reason for it.
She caught up with him now. He had crossed without even knowing it.
“Come with me please. I don’t want to be alone.”
He didn’t feel like going to her apartment. He avoided women but now he was following her to a neighborhood he hardly knew, dirty with immigrants and bicycles. Twice she turned nervously to point out places where she liked to eat but he was not impressed. He said nothing, just kept his eyes open.
She turned the lock in a door beside a bakery and he was walking up the narrow staircase before her. She had been anxious and let him up first, and the stairwell was dark and there was one blue light burning dimly at the top. When they reached the landing there were three doors and she squeezed around him and opened one up. The apartment had been done over in an oriental fashion. There were fans and umbrellas and colorful little china dolls and pillows printed with dragons and tiny orange fish in a big round bowl; he didn’t care. There was nothing about anything that seemed to him real and even when he fell on the couch it sunk with his body and she was lit up by a plastic orb that glowed. She went over to the window that was big and without curtains and leaned on the sill facing him. Haloed around her head and the top of her body were the lights from the nig
ht: airplanes with flashing blue and red signals zipping through the sky, other things spinning; a moon, a planet, bright stars. His eyes blurred thick and dizzy before the hairs that were tangled like wire and fur.
THE MAN FROM OUT OF TOWN
SINCE HIS FIRST day in town the man had been looking for a nice girl to spend good times with, but none of the girls would have him. He wasn’t sure why but suspected it had to do with his status. The waitress who served him corroborated this when she called him a bum, even though he was not living on the street and he had two suits.
Not until his roommate found out the cause of his sorrowful mood did he call up a girl he had known from the park and invite her over for a dinner of pork and mashed potatoes with nutmeg.
It was her high ass that mysteriously lifted itself up to her waist that caused the man to see what a nice girl she was, and how pleasant she would be to spend good times with. She also had a sweet smile and some pretty funny things to say, and whenever she laughed the sun would stream a last dying ray in through the window. Noticing all this the roommate kept playing good tunes, and by the end of the night the man and the girl were dancing together and she was laughing into his shoulder—a good sign.
In the morning she sat on the couch in his denim shirt and yesterday’s underwear, and her voice seemed deep when she said, “I’m going to be late for work.”
“It’s Sunday though.”
“Still,” and she looked out the window and the grayness of the day convinced her. Wandering into his room she found her suit and zipped it up and left his apartment with a good-bye shrug. Following her with his eyes as she walked to the bus stop, the man knew that this was not the girl who would be agreeable to spending good times with him. It was not easy to explain.
In the afternoon he walked down the boardwalk, drinking warm soda from a red and white cup that was waxy on the outside and gradually melting, when a man with a dog caught up to him and threw his arm around his shoulder and asked in a jaunty voice what the matter was.
