How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  MARGAUX

  Oh, I guess that is how theater works.

  SHEILA

  Yeah. So now what sets Ms. Oddi off is that they’re in the hotel room and she’s playing the flute, and Jenny never knew that she played the flute, and somebody from the hotel comes and asks if she’ll play for dinner to­night—

  MARGAUX

  Yeah?

  SHEILA

  And . . . she ­doesn’t.

  MARGAUX

  (disappointed) Oh.

  SHEILA

  ’Cause she realizes she hasn’t been playing all these years. She loved it but never took it seriously, and now she’s afraid she’s not good enough.

  MARGAUX

  Wait. Where did the flute come from?

  SHEILA

  The suitcase.

  Margaux laughs.

  So now ­we’ve got Ms. Oddi, who somehow—­she feels she has to change her life—­but she just keeps getting embroiled with all these various men from the hotel when all she wants to do is play her flute!

  MARGAUX

  The flute’s my favorite part.

  SHEILA

  It’s stupid!

  MARGAUX

  (laughing) It’s just an autobiography.

  Sheila puts her head in her hands.

  SHEILA

  I know, I know! But my life keeps changing. My life keeps changing!

  MARGAUX

  Well, it’s too bad she never plays the flute. It’s like when in films there’s a painting that’s being discussed, but you never—­and all you want is to see this painting—­but you never get to see it. It always seems nice to never see the painting because then it becomes so much more amazing than you could ever imagine!

  SHEILA

  (unhappy) Yeah.

  Margaux picks up a thing of jam.

  MARGAUX

  Did you take one of these already?

  SHEILA

  Yes.

  Margaux puts the jam on her plate.

  In fact, I should pull the play.

  MARGAUX

  Pull the play?

  SHEILA

  (miserable) Too late now. Oh my God, Margaux, what am I going to do? The play’s never made any sense! It’s nonsense!

  MARGAUX

  How is that possible? You’ve been working on it for years!

  SHEILA

  I should have totally fucking never agreed to write this play in the first place! Oh my God. Maybe I can go into our studio and just spend all day . . .

  MARGAUX

  I mean, I guess you could spend all day . . .

  SHEILA

  But I ­can’t fix the play in one day! If I ­can’t fix it in three years, I ­can’t fix it in a day! I have a real psychological block! I ­haven’t been able to bring myself to finish it or work on it—­I don’t know why!

  MARGAUX

  Oh, it’s so scary. Maybe you could come up with an alternative to the play. Maybe you could think of an alternative—

  SHEILA

  (panicked) An alternative what? An alternative way of writing it, or an alternative for what they could do?

  MARGAUX

  Maybe something about it being theater is really, like, blocking you. Maybe you could say, “What I’ve written is not interesting—­here is something ­else you could do. If you don’t want to do that, I’m sorry, but maybe you should pick someone ­else.”

  SHEILA

  But they don’t want to pick someone ­else! And they want a production! They want a play. There are so many interesting things one could do with a theater in three weeks. That I would love to do! That would be really interesting!

  MARGAUX

  Yeah, they want a play. Man, are they missing out. I really feel like theater hasn’t caught up from a 1930s awareness. Do you want some of my toast? ’Cause this is a lot of toast.

  SHEILA

  Oh my God. Why are we doing this? I should have totally fucking said no last September!

  MARGAUX

  So what? They want to start getting actors and stuff?

  SHEILA

  They want to have a workshop in February and a main stage production in the spring. I should pull the play. There has never been a draft that anyone’s been happy with. Not me, not the producer, not the director, not the other director we had.

  Margaux eats the toast with jam.

  MARGAUX

  It still seems like you might do something in the next day that’s remarkable. Maybe that’s what the play could be about.

  SHEILA

  (anxiously) What? Saving the day?

  MARGAUX

  Something remarkable.

  SHEILA

  (uncertain) Yeah.

  Long pause. Margaux is staring out the window.

  What? What are you thinking?

  MARGAUX

  Sorry, sorry, I’m just trying to think of—­of things I’ve given up on.

  Pause.

  No. I ­can’t think of anything.

  • chapter 4 •

  SHEILA WANTS TO LIVE

  Twenty minutes later, Sheila and Margaux walk down the street to the Katharine Mulherin Gallery, where they recently began sharing a small studio on the second floor. Margaux unlocks the glass door, and they walk past the hung paintings to a rickety stairwell at the back. Sheila has been thinking about the crazy impressiveness of Margaux never having quit anything. She follows Margaux up the back steps.

  SHEILA

  But listen, Margaux! Otto Rank says that one day there will be no art, only artists—­so the work of art is renounced! And I agree! I’m renouncing this play because it’s not in ser­vice of my life. But if the primary thing was the work, I’d spend all of my time on the play. But you know what? This does not serve my life!

  MARGAUX

  Right.

  SHEILA

  Don’t you think that’s what’s going on?

  MARGAUX

  No.

  SHEILA

  No, no! In Otto Rank’s construction of it!

  MARGAUX

  We-­ll . . .

  They walk across an old rug into their dirty, white-­walled studio.

  I do think it’s responsible not to put out a crappy play—­in an old-­fashioned, like, a strict old-­fashioned sense. You shouldn’t put out bad work. But if it’s not about the work, then it ­doesn’t matter how crappy it is. What matters is the people you’re doing it with, and the experience you have doing it. Actually, I think it would be way more in ser­vice of your life to put out this mediocre play, so you could—

  SHEILA

  (with angst) More in ser­vice of my life! But my life suffers if I make bad—­if I put out a bad play!

  MARGAUX

  That’s right. So . . . Otto would say, Who cares?

  Margaux starts setting things up on her drafting board.

  SHEILA

  No, no! Otto would say I’m doing the right thing! ’Cause if I want my life to be a work of art, then if I make bad work, it tarnishes my life. All I’m trying to say is that what you said earlier I think is true. We make art insofar as it enhances our life, and insofar as it adds to the beauty of life—

  MARGAUX

  Right.

  SHEILA

  —’cause as you say, it feels good to work hard—

  MARGAUX

  Yeah.

  SHEILA

  —it feels good to create something beautiful—

  MARGAUX

  Yeah.

  SHEILA

  —but not beyond that to the point where life suffers!

  MARGAUX

  So . . . you would have had to work really hard for this—­right—for this play that might not h
ave served you.

  SHEILA

  (sighs) I don’t know about the play. I don’t know.

  • chapter 5 •

  ISRAEL

  That night, after spending several hours staring at my miserable play, I shut down my computer in frustration and left my apartment. I went to a party to celebrate the appearance of three more books of poetry in the world.

  The party was in a wide and cavernous room with a large stage up front and the ceiling painted brown, draped around the sides with brown velvet. A large disco ball rotated in the center, and everything was polished wood and semiformal and awful.

  Standing alone at the bar, I wondered if I could love the boy I noticed at the end of it—­the one with the curly brown hair, who was like a washed-­out, more neutral version of the first boy I loved. When he stepped out onto the front steps, I thought, If he has gone out there to smoke, I will love him. But when I got outside, though I could see a cigarette dangling from his lips, I did not love him.

  I went back inside to get another drink and was standing by the bar when a man, slightly taller than me, stepped out from the crowd and moved toward me. My stomach lurched. I turned away. I was so attracted, I ­couldn’t let myself speak. I knew him, though; his name was Israel. This was a guy whose girlfriend I had complimented the year before, running into her on the street and saying, “Your boyfriend is the sexiest guy in the city.” Though I meant it, I was also hoping to flatter her. Later, when I learned that she was angry at me for saying this, I got upset. I had genuinely wanted to compliment her.

  I had met Israel once before, several years ago, and I never forgot it. I was married at the time and was going down in an elevator in a building of artists’ studios. He entered on the same floor and stood there beside me. He had killer eyes, huge, jaded, soul-­sucking eyes, a nice and lazy smile, big thick lashes, and the lips of a real pervert.

  Watching his face in profile, I’d felt faint at a sense of destiny between us—­as though we ­were not standing beside each other in an elevator but ­were on the peaks of two separate and faraway mountains, with a deep valley and gorge between us. In that moment, I felt aware in my body of how difficult it would be to cross that distance to get to him.

  As we stood there at the party, talking to each other up close, a trembling was going through me. I began to worry about my play—­I had only just left my marriage and I needed to think about women, not men! I reminded myself, The flower of love soon fades, but the flower of art is immortal! But it was as if I was stuck to the floor beside him. When he asked me to leave the party, I startled myself by saying, “I’m celibate right now.”

  His eyes came alive in a different way, and his grin was the grin of a bear.

  “So you’re one of those people,” he said.

  “One of what people?”

  “One of those people who think they can control themselves.”

  I blushed unhappily, then followed him out. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those people who thought they could control themselves.

  We walked together through the chilly night air for two or three hours, all the way down to the water. I felt, as we walked, I could walk with you anywhere. He noticed the shapes on buildings, other things I didn’t see, pointing out this and that to me. He disagreed with me when I said you could love anyone. “No you ­can’t,” he said. “It matters—­the person that you’re with.” I felt delight run through me and took plea­sure in the excitement of just being near him.

  We passed an ice cream truck, and he bought me an ice cream. Then we wandered back to his place, which was on the way to mine. I told myself that I was only walking him home, that I would leave him at his door so he could go in and change for his early shift at the bakery. But when we reached his place, I said, “I would like to watch you getting ready for work.”

  We went up the dark stairwell to the top of a run-­down boarding­house. He had two rooms at the top of the stairs: one for his drawing and painting, the other where he slept. He had no possessions other than a table, a mattress on the floor, a few dishes in the sink, and a hot plate plugged into the wall. I felt like I could just close my eyes and go to sleep on that mattress forever. There ­were no chairs, so I sat down on the messy sheets and watched him move around the room, then leave for the bathroom, then come back, showered and changed, coked up, his shirt open and untucked.

  He got on the bed and put his hand on my thigh and rubbed it up and down, then got up and walked around the room and forgot what he was doing, then came back and kneeled beside me, and said into my ear, “I’ll decide if you’re celibate or not.”

  • chapter 6 •

  THE STORY OF THE PUER

  Back at home, having walked Israel to the bakery, and having exchanged a hard and fluttering kiss, I went dizzily to sleep and had a dream: I was waiting at an airport. I was trying to get somewhere, to someplace higher and better. A bunch of people ­were at the airport too, and I was relieved and excited to see so many people I knew there. I went around getting their autographs.

  I realized I had forgotten a bag at the other end of the terminal, so I ran, in a panic, to get it. An employee drove me back on a very slow buggy, and when I arrived at the gate, all the people who had been waiting ­were gone. I ran up to the counter and threw my two small tickets, desperately, into the flight attendant’s hands. I begged to be let on—­it was everything to me that I be let on!—­but she said the plane had already left.

  I spent days waiting for the next plane that was headed to where I wanted to go. I finally managed to board. Once again, there ­were people I knew there. I went to use the bathroom in the back, and the plane took off while I was sitting on the toilet. Though I knew the flight attendants would have been upset to find me there, I was happy because the view from the bathroom window was so amazing—­we ­were flying so low to the city, just above the highways, flying in between the ­homes, dipping down sharply, then up. Then I realized this was not the way it was supposed to be, and I got scared.

  We flew over a vast recycling center that only poor people used. Their bags of garbage went on forever. I was certain the plane would make an emergency landing there, but when it did not, I made a quick decision and slipped out the back door of the plane’s bathroom. I landed safely on the ground, my fall softened by all the garbage bags.

  I went into the recycling center—­just a wooden shack surrounded by garbage, many miles from where we had taken off. Poor people ­were handing their garbage across the wood counter, and the man behind the counter was paying them pennies for it.

  I went back outside and was surveying the dump when I noticed that my plane had crashed into a nearby lake. Its end was sticking out, smoking with fire. I was so relieved that I had jumped from the plane in time, but also spooked. I walked up to a curly-­haired woman by the shore: my Jungian analyst. I asked her what the number of the flight had been and she told me, but the numbers ­were not familiar. It had not been my plane at all!

  Now my airplane was very far away—­still traveling through the sky! I would not be able to catch up to it by running or even with a car. I would have to find my way back to the airport, back from this unfamiliar town, and take yet another flight out.

  I woke at four-­thirty in the morning, my heart beating fast. I had to discuss this dream with my Jungian analyst, so I went to my computer and made it gently ring.

  My analyst’s name was Ann. She was in her midfifties. Decades earlier, she had studied in Zu­rich, then moved to Toronto where she practiced for many years. I met her while I was studying at the university, taking her class on Carl Jung. A few years later, I returned to her as a patient. Two months ago, she moved to the En­glish countryside to live in a barn on a farm where her family had farmed for generations, which was now idle and was where she had been born.

  I felt so grateful when she answered my call. It was almost ten in the morning there
. She asked me how I was; if I’d had any dreams. I told her about my dream, and she asked me if I had made any decisions lately. I ­couldn’t think of any, then I remembered my breakfast with Margaux and my desire to pull the play.

  Ann asked, “Did you imagine writing the play would get you somewhere higher and better, just like an airplane does?”

  I didn’t know how to answer such a plainly obvious question. “Of course!”

  “But then writing it turned out to be dangerous, like the airplane in your dream. So you’ve decided to quit. You slipped out of your marriage, too, which you also hoped would get you someplace higher and better.”

  SHEILA

  (defensive) Wait! I want to cancel the play not because it’s dangerous, but because life ­doesn’t feel like it’s in my stupid play, or with me sitting in a room typing. And life ­wasn’t in my marriage anymore, either. Life feels like it’s with Margaux—talking—which is an equally sincere attempt to get somewhere, just as sincere as writing a play.

  Sheila sees Ann glance into the corner of her room.

  ANN

  But life isn’t only where things are exciting; it’s where things feel hard and stagnant, too. And arguing for a pure act that ­doesn’t have a product in the end—­well, there’s two things there: one is there’s not a concern for making a living; and second is there’s not a concern with working to the end and winding up with something solid.

  SHEILA

  Except for the story of what happened.

  ANN

  The story of you talking to Margaux?

  SHEILA

  Perhaps.

  Sheila becomes ashamed at the thought.

  ANN

  You slipped out from the plane at the first sign of danger, but then you returned to the airport to catch another plane? Why? Maybe there’s a good reason to fear planes—­one was weaving among the ­houses, the other one crashed. You could have walked from the dump. What’s wrong with walking? It might take much longer . . . forty years as opposed to four hours. But you’re more likely to arrive there, safely.

  I ­couldn’t help the sudden, hard laugh that came from my mouth. It seemed too simple—­a fantasy! I tried to cover up the fact that I had laughed.