How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

  9.i’m going to get rid of the dress now, cause it makes me a little sad to look at it.

  10.you don’t have to reply to this email.

  Hurt and shocked, I did not.

  INTERLUDE FOR FUCKING

  That morning, as I was getting dressed, I fastened behind my back a lacy pink push-­up bra and pulled out from the drawer a nice pink pair of panties. The underpants suited the bra beautifully, and I smiled at this, but then I thought, No wait, Israel said he wants to see you tomorrow, save the pink panties for tomorrow. I hesitated back and forth, then decided to put on the pink pan­ties, since I had no intention of seeing Israel tomorrow, or on any other day. I would never let him see my underpants, and wanted to remind myself of this.

  The day went on, and at around noon I got a call. Israel had emailed after we spoke in Miami, saying he would call me on Saturday to make plans. I had not replied. It was only Friday, so it took me a moment to realize it was him. Then I understood that he had been thinking about me and just ­couldn’t wait. My heart started beating fast. I didn’t know what to do, so I told him I would call him back. I closed up the phone, unable to eat another piece of sushi, but I forced myself to put one more piece in my mouth, then I paid the young woman and left. I started walking south, taking me at once closer to my home and to where I knew he lived.

  Just moments before, sitting at the Japa­nese restaurant, I had been leafing through the pages of the I Ching, which I had bought right before lunch. I hoped the book would teach me something about how to be, and had randomly opened to a page that read: “RENUNCIATION: Voluntary retreat brings good fortune to the superior man, and downfall to the inferior man.”

  Walking now, and thinking it through, I saw the book was right. The only way to be faithful to my ideal of celibacy and thus finish my play would be to retreat. I would call Israel and tell him that I could not see him until July, seven months from now, which is when I believed I would be finished with it and ready to come out of my celibacy and think about men once more. I smiled and felt relieved at this plan. For the first time on my walk, I noticed what a lovely winter day it was; how everything was covered in soft white snow. My decision made me cheerful. I had no need of any man.

  With new vigor and confidence and delight, I called him back. I said I ­couldn’t see him the next day, but I would see him in July, when I would be ready. I told him all of this as I walked. I explained that he had gotten under my skin, and that I really did like him, but these feelings ­were not working with my plan. If I saw him, I would fall deeper into things, so I had to resist. I had never before spoken to a man in such a way—­admitting absolutely everything.

  I felt calm and true until he said, “That is the most pretentious thing I have ever heard. Don’t you believe in the moment? Who knows where anyone will be in July?”

  I understood at once what he meant. If I did not see him today, by July there would be another girl. Perhaps it would be the girl he would marry.

  “All right,” I said. “I ­can’t see you tomorrow night, but I’ll meet you right now, for a walk.”

  He was pleased. We agreed on the corner where we’d meet, and I rehearsed in my head what I would say when I saw him: Sorry, all signs point to renunciation. But when I saw him coming down the street, I only smiled at his thick black lashes, at his big brown eyes, his slimness, his pink lips. I didn’t mention renunciation once.

  We spent three or four hours walking, making our way down to the water. We passed a group of schoolchildren, and when a little boy ran into him and jumped away scared, Israel raised his hands, laughing. I said to myself, He’s a good man.

  He told me about how, over the past year, he had thought about me often. He had a friend who rented a studio on the second floor of Katharine’s gallery, right beside the room Margaux and I shared. When he went to meet his friend he’d sometimes see us sitting there, quietly working. He told me, “I thought about taking those flowers from your desk, just stuffing them in your mouth, and bending you over the desk and fucking you.”

  They ­weren’t flowers but mint leaves—­a present from Margaux—­but I did not say so.

  We went into an alley, and with one hand he held my waist and with the other he pulled down the front of my jeans, slightly, as if to have a glance.

  “These are pretty pan­ties,” he said.

  All right, Israel, cum in my mouth. Don’t let me wash it out, so when I talk to those people, I can have your cum swimming in my mouth, and I will smile at them and taste you. It will be as you wanted it, me standing there, tasting your cum, stumbling over my words. And if you see something you don’t like, you can correct me later. You can take your hands and bruise my neck, keep pushing till you feel the soft flesh at the back of my throat, so the tears roll down my cheeks like they do every time you thrust your cock to the very back of my throat—­like it never was with any other man. I never always had tears rolling down my face. Even when you hear me gagging you don’t stop. It’s your unconcern that makes me want you to do what­ever you want with my body, which can be for you, while yours cannot be for me. I can see that your body must be for many women, and though I once thought the same of mine—­that mine must be for all the men who wanted me—­I can just tease with it if you will keep on fucking me. I ­wouldn’t want your cum wasted on just one girl, not when there are so many girls to take your disinterested thrusting. Fuck whichever sluts it’s your fancy to fuck. You will find me in our home one day, cooking or doing your laundry, as you wish, washing your slutty underwear that some girl slutted on while you ­were out. I’ll make you your meals and serve you them, leave you alone to paint while I go into my room. Then in the morning when we wake, you can look down, touch your cock. It’s hard. Do you need me then? Tell me, as you did the first time I woke in your bed, I like to have my cock sucked in the morning.

  All right, Israel. I will put it in my mouth. You just close your eyes. I will do my work for you in the morning.

  I don’t know why all of you just sit in libraries when you could be fucked by Israel. I don’t know why all of you are reading books when you could be getting reamed by Israel, spat on, beaten up against the headboard—­with every jab, your head battered into the headboard. Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.

  It always starts off the same, easy; you just get into bed. But instead of picking up a book, you have Israel there, so no moments pass before his soft flesh is on your flesh, and his hands are on your skin like it’s your skin—­not some alien skin but your skin moving from the inside.

  What is there in that book anyway? What is there to be learned to­night when you could learn to suck Israel’s cock? What is there to think about when your brains could so easily be smashed against the headboard, in which case there’s no way to think of anything?

  I don’t see what you’re getting so excited about, snuggling in with your book, you little bookworms, when instead Israel could be stuffing his cock into you and teaching you a lesson, pulling down your arms, adjusting your face so he can see it, stuffing your hand into your mouth, and fucking your brains right out of your head.

  I don’t see why you walk down the street so easily, not noticing that you are living half a life—­or how you move up to the counter to order a tuna sandwich like there is nothing ­else in the world—­when there is only one thing in the world to be paying attention to right now, which is that you are not getting your brains fucked out of your skull by Israel, and don’t you think that’s a problem, you stupid, brain-­dead slut?

  I’m just saying—­because I was watching you there and I thought, This stupid fucking know-­nothing slut needs her brains scrambled by the cock of Israel. Her throat has never been bruised down its back by him—is all I was thinking when I saw you ordering your sandwich. Tuna fish, lady? Do you have no dignity? Is your body a limp half-­body? Or is it impossi
ble to have any dignity unless you are getting nightly reamed by Israel?

  If you would like to call your mother, go and do it. The sun is shining, it’s half past noon, the time for tears is now. Please tell her I said hello and that I think her daughter’s a stupid cunt if she thinks she can go around the world with her priss-­ass high in the air like a queen on a throne while not having known the humiliation of being fucked by Israel.

  It is afternoon. It is eve­ning. All the people are going to sleep except Israel, who is a working man—­but sleep has no friendship with him this week—whose sleep is being slaughtered and slit.

  I really must hand it to all the grocers in this town, to all the flower sellers, all the pastry makers, all the people who stand on the floor of the stock exchange with their computers and their ticker tape—­the secretaries, the office lunchers who sit in dreary underground malls and eat their lunches—­their grungy Chinese noodles, their grungy ham and cheese—­who have no joy, who have no fucking, who have nothing but the dreariness of having never been fucked by Israel.

  It’s Sunday now for all you lonely fuckers, but for me it’s always Sunday afternoon. There is nothing but Sundays and three in the afternoons for me now—­and even midnight is as leisurely as a stroll, all the leisure of being battered and bashed by Israel. You poor beautiful lonely suckers whose lives I never wept for until now, whose sorrow I never noticed until now, whose dreariness I never dreamed of till now, till now. Enjoy what you can of a life without the magnificent cock of Israel.

  •••

  Then love, which ­can’t be helped, slips into the death drive. The death drive seeks comfort and knowledge of the future. It wants the final answer and is afraid of life. It is weary of life. It is weary of self-­containment, the continuation of its purpose, the channeling of the energies of the self. It wants to step into the oblivion of someone ­else, and its heart races at annihilation. It renounces and gives up renouncing equally. Cliffs are the friend of the death drive, particularly cliffs into another person. It wants a mutual plummeting into the center, one into the other, like a sixty-­nine. It hopes to drive you off your course like a car plunging into the center of the earth. It strives for love, annihilation, comfort, and death. Now the future is clear! it cries. It wants to drag you down.

  But if you lie still, you may find that you want to lie there in bed beside him not because of the death drive, but for a different reason, which is that you are enjoying looking at his beautiful green-­walled room and being alive—­the sun coming in with the breeze, and the drawings on the wall tacked up with clear tacks and green tacks and yellow and blue, and it is not even so much about the man beside you in the bed, but what a room, what a room!

  Then, when your heart sinks again, it sinks from the death drive like a serpent creeping in—­but from another direction this time; so you thought you had closed up all the stops, but you missed this one. You missed it, and the serpent slithered in. It is death coming, masquerading as life, and blessed is the man who can see the death drive in the woman. Blessed is he who leaves in the morning without any promise of love. And blessed is the woman who can answer for herself, What about living? What is it about living that you want?

  In the mornings, he would get up from the bed and leave. I never saw any sentiment in his eyes. He would roll up the sleeves of his shirt so slowly. Watching him dress, the careful way he did it, and how his underwear came up over the lip of his jeans, I knew he could never be mine. That casual way of dressing before a woman, slowly and deliberately, with so much attention paid to every little gesture of grooming—­though he told me that a man must never dress any better than the woman he is with.

  Israel, if you ever want a child, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to sit around the table and discuss the whens and ifs of it, or how it should be done. Just hold me there with your hands and don’t take your cock out when you cum. Do it as often as you want till it takes. I’ll leave it for you to say. I won’t ask for babies or tell you I’m not ready. Shoot it in me when you think the time is due. You know my legs are always open for what­ever you want from me. I won’t make a fuss or complain—­but no conversations, please, no pleading, no wondering about it all. Impregnate me like I’m an animal that can take it ’cause I am. When the time is ready, just shoot me up. One night you might find yourself wanting it, after the cigarette is put out. It might occur to you in half your mind, sideways, wanting to try it out and see. Then try it out on me, fill me up with your load. I won’t protest.

  I am indifferent to what­ever you do to me, as long as it feels as good as it did those three times. I am indifferent to whether you turn me into a sow you lead around the ­house with a leash, or if you lash me nightly, or if you throw my body into the bed or out of it. If you want my cunt to take your cum, or to turn me into an animal who can take it, I’ll learn astrology. I’ll be the stupidest whore you ever met; forget everything to kiss the head of the little nothing you give me, if you want it. And if you don’t want it, it’s your cock’s head I’ll kiss when you shove it up against my lips. I don’t mind. You sleep and I’ll tirelessly not sleep if that’s the way your cock decides it should be. What­ever your cock decides.

  You told me after he told you that he had made out with me, you said to Alexei, You should try fucking her. Lend me to Alexei then, to whichever one of your friends. I will fuck them like I’m fucking you, and think of you all the while—­your body, and the greatness of you, that makes me do such things—­and I will lick it up, what­ever trails you leave and wherever you leave them. You call me. I’ll be there with my ­whole mop of hair to clean it up.

  Now all the windows in the kitchen are shining with the light from outside—­where you are, Israel—­while I am inside, on the phone, so you can see me with three guys to­night while you smoke on the chair you put into the corner of the room, only to leave it to lean down and look at what is going on between my legs. Blow your smoke up my cunt so I can taste it with my dizzy little puss—­dizzy for you. What­ever you want me to do, I will do it, and what­ever I don’t want to do, I will do that too, and will want to.

  Today the light came through the windows so beautifully that I didn’t know if it was moonlight or sunlight I was seeing. I just stood there washing the dishes and breaking them on my wrists and hands like the long-­suffering wife of a great poet, which you are not.

  Now you want to go from me into the happy solitude of your maleness, with your need of no comfort from any woman. As you said, “I have finally learned not to need any woman.”

  Let my breasts not satisfy you then. Let my cunt bore you completely, so that even all the other cunts in the world ­can’t distract you from the boredom that comes over you when you think of mine.

  ACT

  3

  • chapter 1 •

  TWO SPIDERS

  Margaux appeared at my door late one morning, knocking hard. I got up, weary, and went to answer it. She said, “You ­can’t just not email me back after I sent you an email like that!”

  “I thought you would never want to see me again,” I told her.

  “Just because I was upset ­doesn’t mean it’s all over!”

  It had been several weeks since we had been in the same room together, and I ­wasn’t sure we ever would be again. She followed me inside and watched me as I dressed. I wanted to explain myself, but there was nothing I could say. I never thought that my buying the dress would upset her. Also, I knew that if I said a single word, I would burst into tears, as I always did, always had, my entire life, whenever anything difficult had to be discussed. It always was too scary; a threat I had felt since childhood that at any moment a relationship might disappear with a poof because of something little I had done or said.

  There in my crummy apartment, I felt like we ­were together after the Fall, expelled from a perfect garden. I always imagined a golden age—­a time before the Fall, betwee
n me and every other person—­before they knew my ugliness. Then I felt irrevocably uneasy once it had been revealed, when there could be no more appealing to their total trust and admiration, to that early, easy innocence.

  But with Margaux sitting in my living room, a shiver of hope danced in my heart that she might forgive me for buying the dress. Why ­else had she come? I sat across from her on the small green sofa and was quiet for a few minutes. Then I asked her, trying not to let my tears fall, what the big problem had been with me buying the same dress she had bought. She looked out the window, sighed heavily, thought for a bit, then spoke.

  “You know that hotel we stayed at in Miami?”

  “Sure.”

  She asked if I remembered how our first night there, I noticed a spider on the bathroom wall. I had forgotten, but now I vaguely recalled.

  “Well, you went to the bathroom, and you saw this daddy longlegs there. And I was like, Do you want me to throw it out the window? But you said, No, let’s keep it. Spiders are good. I would have thrown it out, but you said let’s not, so we agreed that we just didn’t want it to wind up in our bed. We would keep our bathroom door closed the entire time. That way, the spider would stay in the bathroom and not crawl into our bed, which would be really disgusting.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “pretty soon you started to like it. You developed feelings for it. Like, whenever you went to the bathroom, you would look for it, and when you spotted it you’d speak to it. Sometimes it was in the tub, sometimes it was on the ceiling, sometimes it was sitting on the shower curtain. Then, after leaving the bathroom, you would say good-­bye and close the door. You ended up becoming pretty affectionate with it.”

  “It became like a pet,” I offered. “I remember that.”

  “Not something you could control, but something you could love. But if it had left the bathroom and invaded the bedroom, you probably ­wouldn’t have liked it so much. But keeping it in the bathroom allowed you to love it. Keeping it in there was a sign that you loved it.”