by Sheila Heti
“Use the mirror,” she told me. “The mirror is a tool.”
I nodded. I looked at Sholem’s head in the mirror. He seemed glum. I went to get some cream to settle his Jewish curls, then ran my hands through his hair.
SHOLEM
Of course, it’s a brilliant plan, because there’s no way Margaux can make an ugly painting. She just can’t! How is she going to reverse her color sense? How is she going to reverse her amazing compositional sense, her brushstroke, her line? I have to say that if Margaux brings something to the competition that she’s embarrassed about, a painting that she is really, truly ashamed of, or one that is actually bad—I will be agog.
I went to get one of the stylists, because I was not experienced enough to blow-dry. But before I left, I asked Sholem if he felt any cleaner than he had felt before. He shook his head simply. “No. For some reason I only feel worse.”
Then he said, “Listen—everything I said about Margaux is just between you, me, and the walls. Don’t tell her I said any of this.”
“Okay,” I said, for I wanted him to like and trust me.
That afternoon, walking back and forth through the salon, picking up towels and sweeping the floor, I kept my attention on Anthony—one of the dozen stylists who worked there. Uri did everything so beautifully, but I couldn’t say I loved him. I admired and respected him, but I had genuine love for Anthony. Maybe because I felt he was like me, I saw him with my heart, not my mind. He worked at a station in the corner of the salon and had been working there for nine years. A few weeks ago, I began overhearing gossip: Why doesn’t Uri fire Anthony? Anthony is so immature and arrogant! He made Leslie cry! Anthony was always boasting about how he had cut hair in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, and had been asked to teach in various salons. He was better than this city. If he hadn’t met his wife, he would be in one of those cities right now. Did we know that he had once colored Lindsay Lohan’s hair? He claimed that nobody in the world cut the way he did, a method he called fluid motion cutting, whereby he’d move quickly around a client’s head. To watch him was like watching an athletic performance. He would dye customers’ hair without telling them, if he thought it would make them look better, and though some gazed into the mirror with tears of regret, no one protested, for they felt they were dealing with an artist.
And that was how Anthony saw himself—as an artist—whereas Uri had the simple goal of the craftsman: excellence. He was so dedicated to the business that he almost died three years ago from blood leaking into his brain. He did everything perfectly, and the same way every time—but he was not without some cruelty, I was beginning to see, which made his customers reliant on him, because he knew their flaws. He was the first to tell them that they had gray hair, even before they saw it. Or he’d explain that their hairline was receding, or thinning at the back. But he was consistent, and it was hard to find fault. With Anthony, you never knew what you were getting. He was a new man every day.
I once mentioned Anthony’s accomplishments to Uri, and Uri laughed robustly. “Oh yes, the amazing Anthony! Tell me then, if he’s so amazing, why doesn’t he have his own shop?” This was Anthony’s greatest regret, though he hid his shame. The more Uri took me under his wing, the more Anthony tried to win my confidence, cornering me in the back room and telling me about his life; how he had almost opened a salon five years back, but then the seller took it off the market—he did not know why—and a month later the economy collapsed, and then it was impossible. He ran a consulting business on the side—this salon was not his whole world!—but when I asked if I could have one of his business cards, he made a big show of being affronted. He never gave out business cards! That would be tacky.
Just before closing that day, Anthony’s children were paraded in—three sweet toddlers—and Anthony had me wash their silky, childish hair. Seeing me doing this, Uri came up and put his hand on my shoulder and said in a booming voice, “Some hairdressers think they are gods because you have people all the time telling you how incredible you are. But a good hairdresser does not think he’s a god!”
I didn’t want to write this on my arm.
When I was finished, I hung up my rubber apron in the back room and changed from my low heels into winter boots and headed straight for Israel’s.
Sheila’s mother prays that Sheila will help her . . .
1.I am renting a dumpster and throwing out all the garbage from the basement and the garage. Hopefully this weekend or at most in two weeks.
2.I do not want to throw out my daughter’s things; she has lots of wonderful things here, pictures and more.
3.May she come over one day and sort out what is garbage. I do not want to throw it all out, but I am tempted.
4.I know it is a bad time for my daughter. But it’s been a bad time for her ever since she moved out. She will never ever have the time for it, and I do understand. It is a very low priority. But it is not a low priority for me.
5.I have been living here for almost thirty years, and I don’t want to go on with my reasoning, I am just ready to do it! Please make her come over now, not when she has the time for it, for she will never have the time for it.
6.Once I rent the dumpster, I might as well throw out what belongs to my daughter. Ninety-nine percent of the stuff is just garbage. That is probably why she doesn’t do it. Why would she spend her time with garbage?
7.I don’t want to be the storage place for garbage anymore. It is a huge clutter on my brain! Perhaps I can figure out something better for my basement. I just want it free of the piles of garbage. Starting with my ex-husband’s pinball machine.
8.Please let her come over and be nice to me and do it. If I do end up throwing out her things, neither of us will ever forgive me.
9.If my daughter comes over, she will make me very happy.
1.Yesterday, at a barbecue, somebody asked me if I had any kids. I almost said, I used to have kids. I don’t think it’s all my fault that I said that.
• chapter 4 •
SHEILA BEGINS AGAIN
Sheila sits with Misha in a cheap Italian restaurant, late at night, in the back, under the fluorescent lights. There are people at every table.
SHEILA
(to the waiter) I want the “whole grilled rainbow.”
Misha nods at the waiter; the waiter leaves.
SHEILA
I don’t know if that was the right choice but?
MISHA
It’s all right.
SHEILA
(hyped up) I’m finding it so confusing with him! And I’m really aware in this situation, like, Oh, we’re not going to get married, you know? It doesn’t have that big dream attached. Even though I don’t think of myself as somebody with that big dream, obviously I am, because I have been—
MISHA
—married, yeah. I guess when I was single and promiscuous, a lot of what I kind of objected to was the idea that those two things had to go together.
SHEILA
But how can you not have an emotional relationship?
MISHA
You do have an emotional relationship, but it’s just a different kind. Like, it’s really fun to have sex with people. You spend a lot of time in your life going out and having coffee with people you’re not friends with. You don’t want them to call you at two in the morning if they’re feeling down, you’re not going to help them move house, they’re not dear friends. But you do understand that Oh, it’s thrilling to have—
SHEILA
—this exchange?
MISHA
Yeah! And on the whole it makes you an intellectually more interesting person. The same might be true of sex. It seems very analogous. Like, Oh, it’s really fun to have sex with different people. Even if you liked to play squash, and you wanted to play squash with different people—
SHEILA
But sex is different from squash, no?
Misha shrugs.
I spent the next few days at Israel’s with my cell phone battery dead, working on my blow jobs, really trying to make them something perfect. I started feeling proud, like I was doing something useful in the world—and not for one moment did I think to myself that I should be doing something more old-fashionedly important, like finishing a play.
When I arrived home late one night, I found a yellow envelope in my mailbox. I took it to my room and opened it, and the gray dust from inside went all over my hands and face. Inside the envelope was my tape recorder. I hadn’t seen it in so long! I didn’t even realize it was gone. I turned it on, and a light flashed—one new file—noting a day I had not recorded; a day I had been at Israel’s.
Margaux’s voice comes out softly . . .
1.It’s me. I’m not sure where the recording part is. I’m sitting in our studio, but I’m at your desk. I never noticed before that it’s completely chalk-blue.
2.It seems like such a strange desk, now that you’re gone.
3.I came into the studio tonight and there’s an art opening downstairs, so they gave me a glass of wine. So now I’m just looking at the glass of wine. But it feels very different than when you’re here.
4.My rule is that I’m not allowed to erase anything that I record . . . I tell myself after something I would have erased.
5.The sky is so beautiful today, right now, out the window.
1.Last night, Misha and I were looking at the MacArthur Fellowship website. But I think you have to live in the U.S. to get them. And I think you have to be a genius.
2.It was funny. I had no feelings of insecurity looking at the MacArthur Fellowships, or at all the people who won them. I felt so happy looking at it.
3.It felt so much nicer than an art magazine or other types of reward systems. I guess it’s a grant for potential. But it was so nice to think that there are these quiet people doing these wonderful things, and that someone tries to notice that. It maybe felt like a more beautiful illustration of ambition. Or a better kind of ambition. Like not to be a genius, and not to be . . .
4.Just to do good work . . . to have potential . . . to be recognized in your field among other people, as though you’re progressing somewhere collectively, rather than competing.
1.I think I do better with the recordings when you’re here. I think what I want to do right now is just record this, then go over to my desk and work. And so to pretend like you’re here.
2.The quieter I am in your tape recorder, the more it feels like you’re here.
1.(sighs) I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl . . . who was as serious as I was.
I wasn’t sure if this delivery was Margaux’s way of telling me to get to work on my play—or that she missed me in the studio, or even that there was money for geniuses—but somehow it all felt possible. It suddenly felt like the simplest thing. Why had I forgotten all the ways that it was natural and easy for me to work?
A feeling of my true freedom came up inside me, and I sat down before my computer and calmly transcribed the message Margaux had left me on the tape recorder. Then I wrote up the narrative of what happened to us in Miami, putting down all the things we said; the private sentiments that only I knew. I wrote fluidly for three or four hours. And I felt so happy doing it, so at home. There was a peace and security in me. It wasn’t my play, but it felt good—far better than fiddling with the dialogue of Ms. Oddi and Mrs. Sing, as I had been doing for so long. I felt closer to knowing something about reality, closer to some truth.
Printing it out and reading it over, a feeling of pride bloomed in me like spring, like something new was being born.
• chapter 5 •
THE WHITE MEN GO TO AFRICA
Sheila invites to dinner one of the former directors of her play, Ben, and his playwright collaborator, Andrew. Margaux is there, too. Sheila wants to see what Ben has been doing since they worked on her play and wants to hear about the play he’s directing now. She is curious to see where theater’s at, compared with where it was at ten months ago. The dinner is nearing its end. The table is littered with the remains of bread and cheese and meat and peas. Sheila’s silver tape recorder and Ben’s silver tape recorder lie opposite each other amid the plates of food like two silver guns.
BEN
Talk is cheap, you know.
SHEILA
Talk is cheap?
MARGAUX
Talk is cheap—so you went to Africa.
BEN
Yup.
MARGAUX
’Cause Africa’s not cheap.
BEN
Actually, Africa’s pretty cheap.
MARGAUX
Where in Africa did you go?
ANDREW
Johannesburg. Johannesburg and Cape Town.
BEN
We had slightly different reasons for going, I think, but they found some mutual expression in the idea of going to Africa. For me, it was because my life in theater is so consuming and busy and it’s such a kind of insular world in a lot of ways, and I was dissatisfied with the absence of doing meaningful—what I felt was meaningful—I didn’t feel I was spending my time in the most meaningful way possible, and I wanted to bring a more meaningful, uh, component to the work I was doing.
SHEILA
In a more activist kind of way?
BEN
Potentially. I got fed up with my own narcissism basically. I just felt like I was being narcissistic. And it was becoming really difficult to separate my desire to create art from my narcissism. Of course, I felt incredibly silly about going to Africa. It felt like a really stupid thing to do. You go there—what are you going to do?
ANDREW
It’s also very fashionable.
BEN
It’s very fashionable, you know.
ANDREW
And it’s so easily a continuation of the narcissism.
SHEILA
That’s what I was going to say.
BEN
But what really impressed me about being there was just talking to these people, and seeing all the millions of ways that you could—with so little effort—expand your world and be helpful and involved. And it was really easy to see in a place like Africa ’cause things are so extreme. It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works economically, whereas here—
ANDREW
It’s disguised.
BEN
It’s disguised. It’s so easy to forget.
MARGAUX
Seems kind of hard to forget; I don’t know.
BEN
Does it?
MARGAUX
Yeah, it really does.
BEN
Not to me. And there—well, the most profound experience I had was, like, meeting people who live in extreme poverty or whatever, and I started to realize the extent to which I objectify poor people, and the ways we objectify poverty in order to tolerate the incredible disparity and lack of justice in the world—and what I experienced there was like, Oh my God! These are all people! These are a million people that live in shacks that are awesome people, that are smart and, you know, are people.
ANDREW
Yeah—or not even smart—are just people.
BEN
We visited this one woman who was living in this real little shithole. Do you remember which one I’m talking about?
ANDREW
Yeah.
BEN
How many kids did she have?
ANDREW
Three.
BEN
I think four. And several of them had HIV. And she had HIV obviou
sly. And her husband had, I don’t know, died last month from AIDS. She had just gotten a new boyfriend, and she has this new little baby who probably has AIDS, and the boyfriend is clearly going to get AIDS—I don’t know . . .
ANDREW
Just the scale of dependency of women upon men there was shocking. Just to see what it actually means for women to be dependent on men was shocking. And how the men have totally failed—
BEN
—and how women are doing everything. Everything!
SHEILA
What do you mean the women are doing everything and the men aren’t doing anything?
BEN
The women are doing everything—they’re raising the kids, they’re bringing in the money for the kids, they’re the ones who are—
ANDREW
—organizing communities.
BEN
Organizing all the movements. They’re doing everything!
SHEILA
And what are the men doing?
BEN
Drinking.
ANDREW
Drinking and hanging out.
BEN
Just wallowing and lost. Lost.
Ben gets up and starts pacing around the table.
You step for one minute outside of your privilege, your stresses and concerns, and you see something that’s worth responding to. But then you come back, and it’s a couple months later, and it’s like, What was that? You’re inundated with—or I am, anyways—like there’s no room in my life for anything. I can barely keep up the standard of living I need. The idea of adding to that a concern for others and making time for others is really daunting. But at the same time I’ve been feeling right now—really acutely—the injustice of the circumstances some people are born into versus others, and I would like to be able to address that because, you know, the world is tremendously unfair, and it shouldn’t be that unfair for the vast majority of people.
MARGAUX
I’m reading Sirens of Titan—the Kurt Vonnegut?—where it’s the culture of unfairness? So after the revolution people have bags of weights on them to make it balanced for people that have good luck, or people that are—yeah, good luck, so that covers everything—class, race, gender . . .
