by Sheila Heti
What I had done in the night—it felt like the first choice I had ever made not in the hopes of being admired. I had not done it to please him. It was not to win someone’s regard. Then, from inside of me came a real happiness, a clarity and an opening up, like I was floating upward to the heavens.
• chapter 27 •
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
Say my first boyfriend was right. Say it’s true that if I live the life that is truly inside me and extend my will into the world, I will wind up loveless, lost, and alone, my face in some stranger’s hairy ass.
But if my fate is truly my fate, then trying to escape it by doing whatever I can to make my life resemble some more beautiful thing will only lead me more quickly to the place I most fear. If there can be no escape from who I am, then I ought to reach my end honestly, able to tell myself, at least, that I have lived it with all of my being, making choices and deciding, walking the whole way.
Who cares? If someone has to wind up, at the end of their long life, kneeling in a dumpster before a Nazi, it might as well be me. Why not? Aren’t I human? Who am I to hold myself aloof from the terrible fates of the world? My life need be no less ugly than the rest.
ACT
4
• chapter 1 •
SHEILA THROWS HER SHIT
Now it was time to write. I went straight into my studio and thought about everything I had, all the trash and the shit inside me. And I started throwing the trash and throwing the shit, and the castle began to emerge.
I’d never before wanted to uncover all the molecules of shit that were such a part of my deepest being which, once released, would smell forever of the shit that I was, and which nothing—not exile, not fame—could ever disappear. But I threw the shit and the trash and the sand, and for years and years I just threw it. And I began to light up my soul with scenes.
I made what I could with what I had. And I finally became a real girl.
INTERMISSION
I was standing in line in the lobby of the theater, waiting to buy a soda at the bar, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and behind me was my husband, who I hadn’t seen in half a year. He told me what he had been doing this last while, and I told him some of what I had doing since we’d seen each other last. Looking into his face, I felt the same tenderness I always felt with him, but which I began doubting the sufficiency and purity of as soon as we were married.
We moved gradually along the line toward the counter, and I felt inside of me a fluttering of love. There in the theater I had no doubt that it truly came from inside me—that it was meant for him, and that it truly was mine.
We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives—to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls?
“Perhaps it’s evolutionary,” he said. “If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions—how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that’s an inevitable part of life—maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.”
“Or maybe,” I said, “the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it.”
We took our drinks and went outside to have a smoke, and I saw that he was carrying under his arm the next morning’s newspaper. He was an editor at a daily. When we lived together, it had been so exciting to see him come home from the office with the paper, hot off the press, before its delivery to the street boxes. But that was a long time ago. For old time’s sake, I smoked quietly as he read out the editorial to me, just like we used to do when we were married.
“It’s written by a fourteen-year-old girl,” he said, then cleared his throat.
When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization’s secret. Even today, with all we’ve built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, no one in that family—not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types—could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will ever know our secret—the secret of our existence together—just as we do not know the secrets that lived and died with the past.
He paused and looked up. “Huh. The headline on this is all wrong. I know because I wrote it. The foundry must have run out of the letters needed to make the word Apocalypse.”
“What word did they use instead?” I asked.
He handed over the paper to show me. “Plays.”
“The World Fears Impending Plays?”
“Yes. It’s actually pretty good, no?”
“We-ll . . .” I hesitated. “I do think I’ve known some pretty powerful plays.”
Then I thought about how plays had intermissions, because the audience grew tired. I wondered if I would ever get an intermission from the play my teenage boyfriend had written about me, which had somehow become my life. Or would the play end? If it really was a play, maybe it would. And for the first time ever I saw it: perhaps I was not fated to a life of loss and suffering—an end so degraded and mean.
Those had been his thoughts and fantasies. And that fourteen-year-old girl had managed to express a greater truth than my high school boyfriend ever had: that for all of our fears and all of our certainty, the bonds that unite us will remain a secret from us, always.
Then we heard a faint pinging, the signal that the final act was about to begin, and the lights inside the lobby flickered on and off, so, along with all the other smokers, we threw our cigarettes into the road and headed back inside.
ACT
5
• chapter 1 •
THE UGLY PAINTING COMPETITION
Sheila wakes to an email from Margaux . . .
1.i have been thinking: we’re both unusually free people, but i think we have different mechanisms for being free.
2.with you, it’s like you never believe you have any effect on people. maybe you don’t think you’re a person because you haven’t decided what sort of person to be.
3.you always think no one can see you, which of course gives you the crazy freedom that lets you do whatever you want to.
4.for me, i always moved around a lot as a kid, so i never had any physical or recorded evidence of anything to do with the past. all my life i felt no restraint from anything in my past because it literally wasn’t there.
5.when i was younger and i first started to be in the papers, no matter how small or mundane the media source, no matter how banal or positive the review was, i would see my name there and feel a weight of doom that would last about a week. it was just this mix of panic, depression, and anxiety that i couldn’t escape or talk myself out of until it wore away.
1.i wanted you to know that i’ve started to find it interesting—this talking, this recording, this new freedom of letting my words be separate from my body.
2.i think growing up in a small town, what a bad person was, was to be the pretentious, rich, smirking artist in the corner of the room who no one understood, who was being intentionally obscure.
3.but maybe i don’t need to be out there with this artist’s statement about wanting to change society.
4.maybe we can be honest and transparen
t and give away nothing.
1.you know, when you first asked to tape me, it felt like you were saying, can i take away your freedom? and for a month i felt that same panic, depression, and anxiety that i used to feel when anyone wrote down my name.
2.but of course, i knew that the thing you most fear will always present itself, and what i feared most were my words floating separate from my body.
3.so i said okay to you, because for me the only way to go somewhere new is to do the thing i most fear.
4.i guess i have only ever solved my personal problems in uncomfortable ways.
Margaux, Sholem, Misha, Jon, and Sheila gather in Jon and Sholem’s living room. The long-awaited Ugly Painting Competition has finally arrived. Everyone sits on the couch or on chairs except for Sholem, who stands before everyone.
SHOLEM
Okay, here are the art school ground rules. The ground rules are that the presentation has to—intentions are covered, the intention of the work is covered—we have to talk about intentions and what we did and whether what we did translated into what actually happened.
Laughter. Everyone starts speaking at once.
Don’t stall this! Get going!
Wait!
Not at the same time!
Give us time to—
SHOLEM
The other thing that has to be discussed is whether you feel you’ve succeeded in making an ugly painting. Okay, we’ll flip a coin: heads or tails?
MARGAUX
Tails.
I was going to say tails for you!
Who’s got a coin?
Can I give you a check?
Here you go, here you go—
Sholem takes the coin from Jon.
SHOLEM
If it’s tails, Margaux goes first.
Sholem flips.
Heads. I go first!
Sholem went and stood before us, and showed us the painting he had made by doing everything he hated when his students did it, and we agreed that it was truly ugly. There was nothing in it that could be called beautiful, nothing that made you want to look longer. Sholem sat down. Then it was Margaux’s turn.
MARGAUX
Oh wow, the whole setup actually makes me nervous. Like, Maybe it’s not ugly enough!
I’m so excited!
What’s it called? What’s it called?
MARGAUX
I have to tell you after you see it. Everyone close your eyes; no cheating, close your eyes.
She turns the painting around.
Okay, ready!
Huge laughter.
What is it!!
MARGAUX
It’s called Woman Time!
Ugliest title ever!
I love it!!
It’s the funniest thing ever!
SHOLEM
You have to sit down; I put a chair there.
Margaux sits.
MARGAUX
It’s fully art school.
MISHA
What’s art school like?
MARGAUX
It’s like . . . I don’t know.
SHOLEM
First, what did you intend?
MARGAUX
Well, it’s confusing, because ugly’s a confusing word for me, but—okay. What I really wanted to do, but I decided it was too conceptual and would probably lead to beauty, was to cover myself in paint and straddle the canvas and then have a rainbow coming out of a hole with a sunrise, and I was like, It’s great!—it’s huge!—and it’s so funny! I wanted it to be four foot by five foot. Then I thought, No—’cause it was already in my head—that’s not right, I should follow my instincts more. So I thought, I’ll just do it instinctually, and the same thing came out!
SHEILA
Why four foot by five foot?
JON
It makes no sense.
MARGAUX
It’s an ugly size.
SHOLEM
I think three foot by four foot is an ugly size. It’s into the larger-than-normal.
MISHA
Can you explain to me, because I’ve never been to art school, why the painting is not ugly-great, it’s just ugly-ugly?
MARGAUX
Well, it’s confusing ’cause I like ugly a lot of the time, so I tried to think of an ugly I didn’t like or that actually felt slightly repulsive.
SHEILA
So you think your instinct is so beautiful that it had to be counterintuitive?
MARGAUX
Well, everything I like is ugly-beautiful. For me, what’s truly ugly is, like, tight blue jeans with cowboy boots and a lot of makeup—restrained things. That’s really ugly—or like a really detailed drawing of a rocking horse. I think anything tight is truly ugly for me. Not ugly for the world—people love that—but it just looks awful to me. It looks like death.
SHOLEM
Was there anything along the way, sort of from beginning to end, that didn’t go according to plan?
MARGAUX
I had no plan.
MISHA
Was there anything that surprised you?
MARGAUX
I started making a movie, and then I painted this, and then I went back to painting, and now I paint differently!
SHOLEM
Really? How?
MARGAUX
I don’t know . . .
JON
I have a question: Would you care if this was thrown in the garbage?
MARGAUX
No.
SHEILA
I like it! I want to hang it in my kitchen.
MARGAUX
You can have it!
SHEILA
How did you know when to stop? You know what I mean?
MARGAUX
Oh! I think I had to really resist fixing things. You know?
SHEILA
Do you find the colors ugly?
MARGAUX
(tired) I don’t know. I looked at all my colors, and my instincts were like: black and yellow, black and yellow. It was very quick, you know. Like: I should smoothly blend an orange ball. Misha saw this, and Misha was like, “I actually pictured orange circles on white background!”
Everyone laughs.
I mean, it’s just such a default, the abstract, ’cause you’re going with your instincts, but it was abstract, and then it became a vagina.
Sholem stands and approaches the painting.
SHOLEM
Well, I think my suspicions were largely correct. The colors are ugly. Yellow and black is, like, textbook ugly, and the way that shape on the lower right-hand side is almost like a thumb. I find that so hideously ugly. And I find the drip ugly, because nothing upsets me more than seeing a drip. It’s like this gross shorthand for expression—
MARGAUX
I like this critique! This is awesome!
SHOLEM
But see, the saving grace is your touch. The nonugly is your touch. I knew it would be like this! The way this line sort of whorls in on itself, and you have these two beautiful streaks of this gorgeous red—
MARGAUX
I knew he was going to like that! I was like, I should go fix that!
SHOLEM
—and the way it sits on that gorgeous sort of crimson-orange ground. Again, so special. Your touch is all over this painting. Your snaky, searching line is everywhere. And that’s one of the greatest strengths of your paintings. You haven’t obliterated your hand. Even though you said you wanted to make this really awful thing, your strength is still in there. Your mark is there in everything you do!
MARGAUX
(laughing) I’ve never been more flattered in my whole entire life!
&
nbsp; SHEILA
If somehow it ended up in a group show with your name attached to it, would you be embarrassed?
MARGAUX
No. I could hang this in a show if I wrote, Ugly Painting Competition with Sholem. I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t want to compromise my own work. So my work can be about my own life sometimes, but I would have to be thoughtful, and in this case that would mean titling it that way.
SHEILA
Would you show this at the Katharine Mulherin Gallery? If she came to your studio and was like, Margaux, I love this new direction?
MARGAUX
She does that all the time, and I’m like, That’s not done!
Sheila smiles.
I walked home alone. There was always a fear in me of what choice would make me less human, that a lapse could be like a pink eraser and smudge me. I felt my life was under the hand of an art student—a ruthless, Nietzschean art student. I tried to be the mark that could lead such a hand to draw a picture of a real human. Together the hand and I would live, have no experiences that weren’t human. Then I heard news of a seed whispering, Everything that happens to man conforms to the well-worn patterns of humanity.
• chapter 2 •
THE SACK
in a few hours it would be Margaux’s birthday; it was time to deliver the champagne I had promised I would take to her studio so long ago, when I had missed her birthday and we were first becoming friends. I took the bottle from the refrigerator, went down the stairs, and set off into the street. When I arrived at Margaux’s place, she opened the door to me, and she smiled. We went up the stairs, straight into her studio, which smelled of grease and paint, then we sat on the floor and drank the champagne from her very best cups.
We spoke for several hours, getting happier and more drunk. Then Margaux walked me to my apartment, since it was always so hard for us to leave each other, and we stood together in my garden, and the breezy air blew all around us. The clean scent of pine trees was up, and it mixed with the sweet stink of garbage bags that the neighbors had left out for pickup.
