How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  Several times a year, Eli would return to Toronto for a week or so, and would go to art parties and talk about paint­ers and the importance of painting, and would speak confidently about brushstroke and color and line, and would do coke and be sensitive and brutish. On his forearms ­were tattooed twelve-­point letters—­the initials of local women artists he had loved, none of whom would speak to him anymore. The male paint­ers embraced him like he was a prodigal son, and word always got around: Have you seen Eli Langer? Eli’s back in town!

  Late last winter, Margaux talked with him for the first time. They sat on an iron bench behind a gallery after an opening, surrounded by snow, warmed by a fire burning in a can.

  Margaux worked harder at art and was more skeptical of its effects than any artist I knew. Though she was happier in her studio than anywhere ­else, I never heard her claim that painting mattered. She hoped it could be meaningful, but had her doubts, so worked doubly hard to make her choice of being a paint­er as meaningful as it could be. She never talked about galleries or went on about which brands of paint ­were best. Sometimes she felt bad and confused that she had not gone into politics—­which seemed more straightforwardly useful, and which she thought she was probably well ­suited for, having something of the dictator inside, or something of the dictator’s terrible certainty. Her first feeling every morning was shame about all the things wrong in the world that she ­wasn’t trying to fix. And so it embarrassed her when people remarked on her distinctive brushstrokes, or when people called her work beautiful, a word she claimed not to understand.

  Then that night, around a fire burning in a can, she and Eli spent several hours talking about color and brushstroke and line. They went on to email for several months, and she was briefly converted into the sort of paint­er he was—a paint­er who respected painting in itself. But after two months, her art crush dematerialized.

  “He’s just another man who wants to teach me something,” she said.

  •••

  Misha and I had planned to take a walk that afternoon, so I went to the apartment he and Margaux shared. When I arrived, he was in his study, at his computer, worrying over his life by checking his email.

  We left together and walked north through the neighborhood. It was one of the few genuinely hot days we’d had that summer. As the sky went dark with dusk, I asked him whether Margaux had begun her ugly painting yet. He said he thought not. I said I was really eager to see the results.

  Misha said, “It’ll be really good for Sholem. He’s so afraid of anything hippie.”

  “Is making an ugly painting hippie?” I asked him.

  “It kind of is,” he said. “There’s, like, experimentation to no clearly valuable end. It’s certainly more hippie than making a painting that you know is going to be good.”

  “Why should Sholem make a painting that he ­doesn’t know is going to be good?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I do think Sholem has a fear of being bad, or of doing the wrong thing. He seems really afraid to take a wrong step at any moment, in any direction. And if what you’re afraid of is to take a wrong step at any moment in any direction, that can be limiting. It’s good for an artist to try things. It’s good for an artist to be ridiculous. Sholem should be a hippie, because with him there’s always a tremendous amount of caution.”

  “What’s wrong with caution?”

  “Well, there’s a misunderstanding, isn’t there? Isn’t that what was happening over brunch? Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute what­ever he wants, just what­ever image he has in his mind. But that’s not freedom! That’s control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing.”

  I said nothing, feeling tense. I wanted to defend Sholem, but I ­wasn’t sure how.

  “It’s like with improv,” Misha said. “True improv is about surprising yourself—­but most people won’t improvise truthfully. They’re afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that’s cheating! And cheating’s bad for an artist. It’s bad in life—­but it’s really bad in art.”

  We had circled ten blocks and the sun had gone down as we ­were talking. The ­houses and trees ­were now painted a dark, dusky blue. Misha said he had a phone meeting, so we started back toward his apartment. His work life was strange and I didn’t quite understand it, but neither did he, and it sometimes perplexed and saddened him. There seemed to be no structure or cohesion to it at all. He did only the things he was good at, and the things that gave him plea­sure. Sometimes he taught improv classes to nonactors, sometimes he tried to keep nightclubs out of the Portuguese neighborhood where we lived, sometimes he hosted shows. There was no name you could give to it all. In the short biography he had submitted to Harvard—­for what would become a dense, leather-­bound volume for distribution at his fifteen-­year college reunion—­his classmates wrote lengthy entries about their worldly success, their children, and their spouses. Misha’s entry had simply stated:

  Does anyone ­else feel really weird about having gone to Harvard, given the life they’re living now? I live in a two-­bedroom apartment above a bikini store in Toronto with my girlfriend, Margaux.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night.”

  Several years ago, when I was engaged to be married but afraid to go through with it—­afraid that I would end up divorced like my parents, and not wanting to make a big mistake—­I had gone to Misha with my concerns. We ­were drinking at a party and left to take a walk through the night, our feet brushing gently through the lightly fallen snow.

  As we walked, I told Misha my fears. Then, after listening for a long while, he finally said, “The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

  So I took what he said to heart and got married. Three years later I was divorced.

  • chapter 2 •

  AT THE POINT WHERE CONVICTION MEETS THE ROUGH TEXTURE OF LIFE

  In the years leading up to my marriage, my first thought every morning was about wanting to marry.

  One night, in a bar on a boat that was permanently docked at the harbor, I sat beside an old sailor. He had been watching me steadily as I drank. Then we started discussing children; he’d never had any, and I said I thought I would not, as I was certain my kid would be a bad kid. He said, bewildered, “How could anything not good come from you?”

  I felt so moved then—­shivering at the thought of a divine love that accepts us all, in our entirety. The bar around us became rich and saturated with color, as if all the molecules in the air ­were bursting their seams—­each one insisting on its perfection too.

  Then the moment was gone. I saw him as just an old man staring at a girl—­seeing her but seeing nothing. He didn’t know my insides. There was something wrong inside me, something ugly, which I didn’t want anyone to see, which would contaminate everything I would ever do. I knew the only way to repair this badness was devotion in love—­the promise of my love to a man. Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true. I wanted to be an ideal, and believed marrying would make me into the upright, good-­inside person I hoped to show the world. Maybe it would correct my flightiness, confusion, and selfishness, which I despised, and which ever revealed my lack of unity inside.

  So I thought about marriage day and night. And I went straight for it, like a cripple goes for a cane.

  Several months before our wedding, my fiancé and I ­were strolling together in an elegant park when off in the distance we noticed a bride and a groom standing before a congregation, tall and upright like two figures on a cake. The audience was sitting on foldi
ng chairs in the afternoon sun, and we went over giddily to eavesdrop, crouching behind some false rocks, trying to be serious but giggling anyway. I could not see the groom’s face—­he was turned away—­but the bride was facing me. The vows ­were being exchanged, and the minister was speaking quietly. Then I saw and heard the lovely bride grow choked up with emotion as she repeated the words for richer or for poorer. A tear ran down her cheek, and she had to stop and collect herself before she finished what she was saying.

  As my fiancé and I walked away, I said that I thought it was a pretty vain, stupid, materialistic part to get choked up on—­but we admitted that we did not know her financial history.

  On the day of our wedding, my fiancé and I stood in a bay window before an audience of a dozen people—­family and close friends—­repeating our marriage vows as the secular minister spoke them.

  Then something happened. As I said the words for richer or for poorer, that bride came up in me. Tears welled in my eyes, just as they had welled up in hers. My voice cracked with the same emotion that had cracked her voice, but I felt none of it. It was a copy, a possession, canned. That bride inhabited me at the exact moment I should have been most present. It was like I was not there at all—­it was not me.

  In the months and years of our marriage that followed, I recoiled, disgusted, whenever I recalled this scene—­which was supposed to be among the most beautiful of my life. Some people look back on their wedding day as a reminder of their love, but I felt ever uncertain, thinking back upon it, about whether my marriage could truly be called mine.

  I had lived with one man before my husband: my high school boyfriend—­the first man I truly loved. We thought we would be together forever, or if we separated, that we would return to one another in the end.

  Before we moved in together, we lived down the hall from each other on the second floor of a crummy rooming ­house in tiny, separate rooms. He sat at his desk and wrote plays, while I sat at my desk and wrote plays too. One evening, spying outside my door, he heard me talking on the phone with a friend about how I had a crush on a photographer in New York and thought it would be exciting to be with him. The photographer had invited me to live with him there as his girlfriend and assistant. He had taken some flattering pictures of me before leaving his home in Toronto, and I still thought about him a bit, sometimes.

  My boyfriend, feeling hurt and jealous and betrayed, that night stole my computer from my room as I was sleeping and wrote on it till dawn, then returned it to my desk before I woke.

  When I got up the next morning, I found, there on the screen, an outline for a play about my life—­how it would unfold, de­cade by de­cade. Reading it compulsively as the sun came up in the window behind me, I grew incredibly scared. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I absorbed the terrible picture he had painted of my life: vivid and vile and filled with everything his heart and mind knew would hurt me best.

  In the story, my desire to be with the photographer in New York started me on a path of chasing one fruitless prospect after the next, always dissatisfied, heading farther and farther away from the good, picking up men and dropping them. While my boyfriend ­rose in prestige and power, a loving family growing around him, I marched on toward my shriveled, horrible, perversion of an end, my everlasting seeking leaving me ever more loveless and alone. In the final scene I kneeled in a dumpster—­a used-­up whore, toothless, with a pussy as sour as sour milk—­weakly giving a Nazi a blow job, the final bit of love I could squeeze from the world. I asked the Nazi, the last bubble of hope in my heart floating up, Are you mine? to which he replied, Sure, baby, then turned around and, using his hand, cruelly stuck my nose in his hairy ass and shat. The end.

  I tried to forget his play, but I could not, and the more I pressed it away, the more it seared itself into my heart. It lodged inside me like a seed that I was already watching take root and grow into my life. The conviction in its every line haunted me. I was sure he could see my insides, as he was the first man who had loved me. I was determined to act in such a way as to erase the fate of the play, to bury far from my heart the rotting seed he had discovered—­or planted—­there.

  What power a girl can have over a boy, to make him write such things! And what power a boy can have over a girl, to make her believe he has seen her fate. We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

  Every other Wednesday during my marriage, our apartment was filled with smoke from the cigarettes of all our friends. They drank in our rooms and made out on the fire escape. In the beginning, it felt like something truly important was happening. People came, and there was a bounty: cheese and grapes and bread and wine and all the alcohol you could drink.

  But two years into our parties, I surveyed the scene from the corner and wondered, Why are we having these parties? What ­were we making, coming together like that? We ­were trying to prove that we had everything because we had parties, but I began to feel like we had nothing but parties. If anyone from the future could look back on what we ­were building, I was sure they would say, That could only have been built by slaves.

  Friends passed through our doors. We laid out food and drinks. I started going to bed at one in the morning, then at midnight, then eleven, then ten. When finally everyone left at two or three or four, I would rise from bed and go downstairs, clean up the food, and cap the drinks. I would straighten the pillows, fix the chairs, sweep away the remnants of bread and cheese, dump out the cigarette butts and plastic cups. This was now my favorite part of the party.

  When I was little, I was truly afraid that one day I would grow up and get divorced. As I got older, this fear grew with me, and upon getting engaged, the fear raised an anchor and threw it down in my very center. A fear can feel like a premonition, and so it was with me; before marrying, and once married, I never imagined the happy years that he and I might share. What I felt instead was dread—­helpless before our marriage’s inevitable end.

  I felt like I was the tin man, the lion, and the scarecrow in one: I could not feel my heart, I had no courage, I could not use my brain.

  One night at one of our parties, I went into the bathroom with my stomach rumbling. I sat on the toilet and waited for the massive shit that I knew was coming, while friends and strangers sat around the living room, or stood outside the door, talking and drinking. Sitting there, I recalled a dream from the night before, in which I was taking pills that made me shit a lot. In my dream, I decided I would only write what I thought about as I shit—­since I was now spending all my time shitting. But I could not shit, sitting there at the party. I hated the thought that when I opened the door, I would reveal to everyone the shittiness that was mine. I stood up and buttoned my jeans, looked down into the empty bowl, and went to get a drink.

  After pouring myself a gin and tonic, I noticed that my husband was talking close to someone I had never seen before, who was a sitting on the window ledge, talking loudly over him. She had bleached blond hair and dark, obvious roots. Her voice was deep. She had the pitless eyes of a cartoon character and a genuine nonchalance in her being, and she was dressed in a strange outfit: heavy boots, tall white socks over black leggings, and a pink corduroy jacket with white fluffy clouds. She looked at the same time like a little girl, a sexy woman, and a man.

  My husband and I never observed much decorum about who we could talk or flirt with—­half the ­whole point of the parties was to talk and flirt around a bit—­but something about this scene was threatening. I didn’t like his eagerness, how drunk he was getting, how alive and happy he seemed. It ­wasn’t like watching him talk to other girls. I felt a jealousy spoil my blood, noticing the loose and confident way she had, her unmistakable freedom. What does she have that I don’t? came into my head, like a thunderclap; a question that left me so ashamed that I turned away and made for the fire escape to smoke alone.

  I was sitting on the iron steps in the coolish breeze, half finish
ed with my cigarette, when the girl climbed out of the window and looked at me.

  “Can I bum one?” she asked. “I lost my cigarettes in the street.”

  I handed over the pack, ner­vous inside. She told me her name was Margaux, and I told her my name was Sheila and lit her cigarette, then sat back, trembling inside. Had she come out ­here for me? An excitement ­rose in my being just to think it. But I didn’t say a word. Instead, we smoked together quietly, and as she exhaled, the trees touched each other’s branches in the wind.

  Later, remembering that night, all I recalled was the physical distance between us. We began seeing each other all over the city. We would say hello, not much more. Then we started exchanging emails, making plans and breaking them. Somehow it felt okay. If I canceled, she was relieved; it gave her more time to paint. And whenever she canceled, I felt relieved, as I was eager to finish writing my play. Finally we made plans that neither of us got around to canceling in time. We would visit an art gallery a little north of the city.

  We met up at the northernmost subway station and waited for the bus. When we got on, we learned from the driver that it would be a forty-­minute drive—­something neither of us had anticipated.

  And the ­whole way up, and the ­whole way back, we sat there silently, too intimidated by the other to say a thing.

  • chapter 3 •

  SHEILA AND MARGAUX

  One month later, I received an invitation to Margaux’s birthday party. I considered going, but in the end, I did not. I had more pressing things to do—­like work on my play and make it perfect. I also figured her party would be filled with all sorts of interesting and impressive people who ­were closer to her than I was; that she would just glance at me from the corner and wave.