How Should a Person Be? (9 page)

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

M
argaux 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,
between 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.”

“Right.”

“Then, on our last night there, we forgot to close the bathroom door—­we ­were so drunk—­and in the morning you woke up and it was beside your leg, and without even thinking, you smashed it under your hand.”

“I remember,” I said, uneasy.

“Well, that's like you buying the same dress as me. I'm doing a lot, what with letting you tape me, but—­boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”

•
chapter
2
•

THEY WANDER THE CITY ON DRUGS

T
he world is made up of poets and retards, and everyone's a poet, and everyone's a retard. I made a slip of the tongue the other day, and instead of saying I wanted an audience, said I wanted a Godience.

A man ran into a bar and began smashing all the beer mugs, throwing them to the floor. The bartender tried to stop him, and so did all the people drinking in the bar, but he was too violent. There was too much rage within him, and it overpowered all the others, who ­were fearful and afraid. At last, in his exhaustion, the man fell into a chair.

The man said,
Stop
. He got up and, stumbling, said to
himself in a mumbling undertone,
Stop stop stop
. The people
stood tense around him in a circle. He paused where he
was, wavered a bit, then looked up at the dark, wooden,
low-­
hanging ceiling. If he had reached up, he could have touched
it. The police had already been called. Would they
arrive
too soon, before he had a chance to speak? He lifted his
head.
I want to make an announcement,
he said.
I have an
announcement to make
.
The man who loves God loves liberty.
And as for the
rest
.
.
. license is what they love.

Milton! That's who he had been reading that morning, or the morning before, or before he went on his bender. Now the policemen came to the door, and he was handed into their arms. In the corner, a blond-­haired girl was crying, she had been so afraid. She was being comforted by a
man. A policeman spoke. “Does anyone ­here know Milton?
Has anyone ­here read Milton?”

Ryan said, “I read an introduction to one of his books. I only read the introductions. That's where all the information is, and that is where it all happens.”

I was feeling nauseous. The ­whole commotion had made
me practically sick, and this was a place reputed to refill the
beer steins in the back with what was left behind in the pitchers and the glasses.

Ryan and I had enrolled in a clown class together. I was
really excited about it. Since all the best artists know where the
funny is, I thought if I went to clown school, I might know
it too.

There ­were three former clowns leading the class because enrollment was so high. They had to hire two
extra teachers so we would all get some individual attention. Ryan sat before me with his face painted white—­I had painted it—­and I was making his lips red. The other students ­were already way ahead of us. They had already moved on to the second person, so that half of them had their faces complete, while the others ­were being powdered. I hadn't even started on Ryan's cheeks, and both of us ­were growing concerned. I saw him ner­vous­ly pulling at the paper towel I had tucked into the white collar of his T-shirt.

“I remember being told in kindergarten not to talk too much,” I told him. “My teacher called me a chatterbox.”

“Wow,” Ryan said. “I don't have any traumatic stories like
that.”

I was saying how life is like a bar brawl and there is a cow
boy shooting at your feet. It was me, Ryan, and a red-­
haired girl from class. We ­were walking through the dirty snow—­snow gone bad from three months of pissing dogs
and cars. In that moment, I felt as though I had made a mistake in comprehending everything. What would our
punishment—­for conceiving of things wrong—
be
? Life is not like dancing while a cowboy shoots at your feet!

“Guys!” I said. “Life is not like dancing in a bar brawl while a cowboy shoots at your feet!”

Then I woke the next morning, thankful I ­wasn't high. I will give up pot because it makes me paranoid. But I will stay close to God because he makes me paranoid.

Margaux and I broke from our feelings of austerity with drugs. A good night of drinking and smoking, or a night of doing coke, and the next day, far from being hungover, our brains felt stilled and refreshed. It was like our insides had been set back to 00:00:00.

Margaux made the best paintings of her career the morning after we had been drinking for eight hours straight. She woke at nine and got up, and without thinking or hesitation went straight into her studio and began making paintings. I woke and cleaned the entire apartment, washed all the walls by hand. We didn't feel the need to call each other that day,
and normally Margaux and I talked minimum once, for
reassurance.

Soon it came to be that several times a week we would meet at Lot 16, just for a beer; then, not wanting to stop, we'd call someone for some coke; then it would be every night we wanted to relax like that after having worked all day—­and the next day we'd wake and work better than if we hadn't got fucked up the night before. All that time we ­were calmly getting shitfaced, calmly waking at 00:00:00, and not calling each other until night fell, when we would ask like it was the first time ever if the other wanted to take a break.
Yes
. In the
daytime, austerity. In the nighttime, oblivion. Daytime,
nighttime. Daytime, nighttime. It went on and on like that, like throwing a ball from one hand to the other.

•••

At one point Ryan tried to talk to us. “No one wants to be friends with you two, and when they see you, they avoid you. Sheila, you never come to clown class anymore.”

“Who gives a fuck about clown class,” I said, giving a 
kick to the sidewalk with my foot.

We ­were following our instincts, same as we had always done.

I wanted to take a big pipe and swing it against someone's throat. I wanted to see their body buckle back and red shoot from their throat like a burst water main. Psychoanalytic drugs.

Though it was cold, we'd pace through the city at night. Now in one direction, now another. Always changing direction.
Should we go down this alley? Fine. Do you want to go up this alley? Yes, let's do it. But we just came down this alley. That's okay, we'll go up it again.
We went up it and down it, up it and down.
If we keep walking through this alley, we'll tread a rut into it
.
That's okay, I prefer pacing to getting somewhere
. Up it and down, up and down. Then in the mornings Margaux would paint, and I would wash the walls.

It was getting colder. We told ourselves that these ­were the happiest days of our lives. Never had I had a routine. Never had Margaux had a system that worked so well. In the mornings there was frost on the windows. I went to the salon. There was beauty everywhere.

•••

The lecture portion of class was held in a university classroom with coliseum-­style seating. Everyone sat in the dark in their boots, having trekked in the snow with them, so that by the end of the lecture we all had puddles of slush beneath our feet. Pulling on our heavy coats at the end of class, we tried not to trail the hems of our sleeves in the little puddle of snow and muck. I sat with my coat on and could hardly see the page, the lights ­were dimmed so low. Before us on the screen was projected a slide of a man on a
mountaintop by Caspar David Friedrich. The professor's voice was amplified with her mike. “In the nineteenth
century
—
”

The nineteenth century
, I thought, snickering.

“
—
artists ­were compelled by the idea of the sublime, which was the most elevated expression of the harmony between nature and man. By contemplating nature, a figure
like this one on the mountaintop would be inspired with
reverence for the majesty of what God created—­both humbled by it and also elevated by it because he, as a witness and an observer, had a privileged relation to all of creation—­both of it and standing outside it to contemplate it. It was through contemplating nature that one would gain this experience of the sublime, so you tend to find in pictures from this time
—
”

Slide changed.

“
—
this theme repeated: the untamed and overwhelming
power and beauty of nature, and the witness to it, somewhere
in the painting, a stand-­in for the viewer and the paint­er. Without a witness to the scene
—
”

Right! Right! It is not a picture of the sublime! Suddenly I understood our walks, mine and Margaux's, through the alleys, up them and down them on our drugs.

“There is no sublime in it,” Margaux told me.

Now she was getting more interested in painting in the nights as well, and when I would call to see if she wanted to take a break from painting and go with me to drink, she would say no. She even told me, the one night she did come
out, that she only had an hour. When I tried to explain what I had learned in class about the sublime, she didn't
think it had anything to do with us or why we liked our drugs.

“We like our drugs for the opposite feeling,” she said, “for the feeling of nullity. Not for the awesome power of the universe.”

“No! No! We ingest it. We swallow it, we put it inside us—­the awesome power of the universe. ­We're not looking at a mountain range because there are no mountain ranges in the city.”

“That ­doesn't mean ­we're trying to put the mountain
range inside us—­so that we can feel the power of witnessing a mountain range, as in a Caspar David Friedrich
painting.”

“That's exactly what it is,” I said, looking her in the face.

Margaux shook her head. I nodded mine.

“I can see it,” I said. She shook her head.

We could see no trees and we could see no mountains from where we lived. When we looked out the window we saw cars, we saw people, we saw traffic lights and buildings just like ours. Sometimes the past came to greet us, and there
­were two policemen sitting atop their ­horses, walking down
the side street I was living on, and I woke to the sounds of the
­horses in the road. I raised myself in bed and looked out the
window. When a car came by, the policemen pulled on the ­horses' reins and the ­horses stopped, and the policemen and the ­horses waited patiently for the car to go by, one ­horse shaking its tail in the road.

I liked lying there in the dead of night, watching the snow swirl beneath the streetlights. It looked to me like the harmony between nature and man, that we should build such streetlights and nature deliver such blustery snow.

I didn't envy the teenage girls in their tight jeans with the curve of their round asses showing beneath their puffy jackets. They walked through the snow with their girlfriends who dressed alike, their hair hanging below their shoulders, shopping bags in hand. I regarded them like deer or any natural phenomena—­not designed specifically to please me, but pleasing all the same.

In the dead of night I would lie awake, gazing at the ceiling, and, thinking I heard the sound of ­horses, I would turn my body to look out the window, but I only saw the ­horses that once and never again.

I remembered the man who came into the bar, crashing the glasses against the floor.
Liberty is freedom, and license is freedom at the expense of God. Man can do nothing directly to achieve his own freedom
.
What he can do is to indicate his willingness to
be set free by knocking down his idols, so allow the Word of God to
circulate freely in human society.
I wanted to discuss this with Ryan some more, but when I went to his place and knocked
on his door, he was not there. I decided to go to the Communist's Daughter and sit at the small bar. My gut suggested
that the man who was breaking bottles was the hero. I sensed
something immovable in the center of him—­maybe not
admirable, but strong and stable and straight.

I knew as I walked that the planet was spinning at a very high speed, but that this did not prevent everything from staying in its place, and everything from seeming solid and straight. If the earth did not spin on its axis, this would not be the case. I might have been wrong, but as I had nobody to discuss it with, I was not contradicted in my thinking. When I arrived at the bar, I was pleased but not surprised to see Ryan sitting there. It was the place he most liked to
drink at, and he was doing it again. He moved aside, and I sat down next to him. I asked him how important he
thought
it was for the earth to spin on its axis, and he said, “I don't really know.”

The bartender, who was wiping down a spill, overheard this and remarked, “Of all of my customers, the two of you seem to know the least about science.”

“Are other people always talking about science?” I asked.

“Often,” he said and, hooking the rag back over the hook,
he said it again. “Often.”

I wanted so much to make a retort that would redeem us both, but I could think of nothing before he was off filling up a half pint of beer for someone ­else—­another customer, who knew more about science than Ryan or I did.

“It ­doesn't matter,” I said, turning to Ryan, but his face was clouded over.

He said, “If you think his opinion is going to shake me from my axis, you're wrong! My axis is solid and stable and straight, and I have always spun around it—
always
—not around his opinion or yours!”