How Should a Person Be? (18 page)

•
chapter
25
•

ISRAEL BECKONS

Back at home, Sheila finds an email from Israel
.
.
.

1. i have a hard-­on right now in the viet­nam­ese internet palace.

2. theres a guy next to me whos really getting into the porn. he just went to the bathroom and i think hes jacking off.

3. he just came back and yep, he smells like giz, hes kind of creepy, ex military or something, but the porn hes looking at looks pretty good.

1. so theres something i need done for me.

2. i want you to buy a porno mag, and i want you to look at that porno and get really horny thinking about me fucking you like a dirty dog and cumming hard down the back of your throat.

3. take the mag and roll it up tight. tape it so it doesnt move and put a condom over it. put some lube on your cunt and the mag.

4. spread your legs as far as you can and put the magcock up your cunt and fuck yourself.

5. then take pictures of you doing this and send them to me.

1. i know you once said that the idea of an old man fucking you in a portolet didnt turn you on but that wasnt the point.

2. the point was that it turned me on thinking you would do something like that for me.

3. its not the idea of you fucking a disgusting old man in a portolet that gets me going, no, i like the idea of you doing things i ask.

4. bye for now.

I saw there was no way of escaping a man like that. Even if I went to the farthest shore, there would still be internet access there and he would find me. Only if I never checked my email, then I would be safe. But I
always
checked my email, even when I tried not to. North Korea was the only place I would be safe. But even there I would still have my memories of him, so I would not be safe.

•
chapter
26
•

DESTINY IS THE SMASHING OF THE IDOLS

I
should have spent the night inside writing, figuring out
how a person should be, like I meant to, but I was afraid. I ­wasn't ready. Instead I went out. I went to meet Israel. I
went not knowing what would come. We agreed on a spot, at a bar on the longest street in the world. When I arrived on the corner, he was standing there smoking. He gave me a lazy look that cut at my heart and said, “Nice hair, old
lady.” We walked together to the bar, and he asked me if I 
had ever written him that letter from camp. I felt uneasy. I said no.

Inside the bar, I sat silently as he talked on about a coffee
shop he wanted to open, while I just looked at his face. I
­couldn't believe he was a real person sitting there before
me. He didn't ask me any questions. I ­wouldn't have known
what to answer.

As we ­were finishing our second drink, he said, “Should we go?” So we left. I ­couldn't tell if I loved him or liked him or if I felt nothing at all. We got in a cab—­his idea—­and soon we ­were back at my apartment. I paid. We went
into my bedroom, then I excused myself to use the bath
room.
When I returned to the bedroom, he pulled off all my clothes. Then he took off his clothes. Looking at him, his
belly was softer; his legs seemed stout. When he smiled, it did not make me feel special or strange. There was a
vacancy in our touch, a deep well of nothing. What­ever
bright thing had existed between us had left and moved on to other people. I made out with his penis until the
moment came that he might fuck me. He was on top of me as I lay on my back. Then he hesitated and said, “Maybe I shouldn't.”

“Okay.”

I did not know why he said it, or if he would want to in ten minutes, or in the morning, or next week, or never again. We lay silently in my bed, and then my body felt it, deep and calm: what I wanted to do—­something I had never done before. Without letting myself think about it a
moment more, I shuffled down beneath the covers, saying
to him as I did it, “I want to sleep beside your cock.” I
slithered down there and lay, my lips soft up against his
dick.
I felt his legs grow tense. “Get up,” he said. “No.”
“Come
up ­here,” he said, more forcefully this time. But I knew that if I did, his
desire for me might remain, and I wanted
none of it left. I had to be so ugly that the humiliation I
brought on myself would humiliate him, too. I would have
to strip every last filament of gold from my skin—­all the
gold I had put there—­and strip the gold from his skin, so that none of the gold on him would reflect onto me, and so none of the gold
on me would reflect onto him, so we would be in utter darkness together. I curled myself around his legs. I knew
he'd never understand why I was doing it—­that he was misunderstanding what I meant. But I didn't care if he got me wrong. The way he saw me was not the same thing as me.

I felt so alert as I felt his dick shrink away, disgusted or ashamed. A few minutes passed. Then he turned his back on me. My nose went into his ass, and I felt its tiny hairs on my skin. A heat blanched my cheeks and my soul, but I remained there, stoic.

I had gone down, gone under, and when several minutes later I surfaced from beneath the hot, stuffy sheets, it felt truly like I was emerging into a new world entirely. Israel kept his back turned. We did not speak the rest of the night.

The next morning, I lay calmly on my side of the bed and watched as he stood in the middle of my room and dressed.
After buttoning his shirt, he looked down into his shirt
pocket and pulled out a quarter. He placed it on the win
dowsill beside my head with real deliberateness, then turned
and walked away.

I glanced out the window, into the bright day.

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?

S
ay 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

N
ow 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 the
ater 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 transparent 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 paint
ings. 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!

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.