How Should a Person Be? (12 page)

What was so crazy about wanting to be the human ideal?
That upset me.

SHEILA

Have you made your ugly painting yet?

MARGAUX

Not yet.

SHEILA

Why not?

MARGAUX

I don't know!
Ugly
,
beautiful
—­I don't even understand what those words mean.

SHEILA

Then why did you agree to the competition?

MARGAUX

I'm doing it for
him
! I thought it would be interesting for Sholem, because when there's such re­sis­tance, as there was
.
.
.

I didn't want to talk about Sholem anymore. I pulled some pages out from behind me, rolled up like a cylinder. “Take this,” I said, pressing it into her hand. Margaux held it, turning it around.

“What is it?”

I suddenly grew excited. I explained about how the other
night, after she had returned to me my tape recorder, I began
writing about us in Miami, and transcribed our conversations from that trip. I wanted her to read it now.

“I don't want to see it!”

“Why?”

“I don't know!”

Her expression of aversion struck me. It recalled to me a warm afternoon as a teenager, when I had been hanging out with my high school boyfriend at his father's place. We ­were sitting on his father's couch. Suddenly and without warning, he unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock. I had burst into tears of shock—­it was the first adult penis I had ever seen, and without ceremony or warning—­and I left the apartment, furious. I ­wouldn't talk to him for two ­whole weeks. Then I came to love him.

“I want you to see it,” I said, thrusting it in her direction,
hurt. She reached out reluctantly, timidly, and took it. A
feeling
of satisfaction ­rose in my being, such that I ­couldn't
imagine she would feel any way but as impressed by its
power and beauty as I was.

•
chapter
6
•

THE ART SHOW

O
ne
week later, I went to see a group show that Paul
Petro curated. My plan was to drop in for just ten minutes, then
head home. When I arrived, a group of people ­were standing by the front doors, smoking. A girl I hardly knew
turned to me with a friendly smile, and I grinned widely back.

Inside the white-­walled space, Paul, a tall man with
smooth skin and a deep tan, came up to me and smiled. He
asked me if I had seen Margaux's painting yet. I said no, I had no idea she was in the show! We went to the back and
he got me a beer, then I followed him up to the second floor.
I went with him into the front room, and we stood there
together, facing the largest painting Margaux had ever made.
It was still wet. And it was terrible to behold.

She had depicted herself as a fat, chubby-­cheeked Buddha figurine, with a smug, sly smile wiped across her face. In the background ­were cotton balls. Her body was made of shiny porcelain, and jewels and rings crowded her fingers and arms. She sat cross-­legged, her peroxide hair falling thinly over her shoulders, and her expression was one
of greedy self-­satisfaction. It was utterly grotesque. The title,
printed on a small card, was
Margaux Souvenir.

A cold wash ran through my body. Paul laughed, understanding nothing, but I knew how Margaux felt about
the world. She saw no glory in being Buddha, and had never
painted herself this way before. Buddha was the one who
turned his back on the suffering of the world to sweeten himself with good feelings—­privileged feelings of benevo
lence and purity, just like her worst fears about what it meant
to be a paint­er.

I thanked Paul and turned and went slowly down the stairs, careful not to fall, my heart racing and feeling nause
ated. Leaving my half-­empty beer bottle on his desk, I
made
it out the front door and headed straight for Margaux's apart
ment, three blocks away.

•
chapter
7
•

MARGAUX QUILTS

I
knocked on the front door of Misha and Margaux's
, but no one answered. I used my key to get in, then went up to the second floor. The door to their place was open, and I went straight through the kitchen and into the bedroom, where I found Margaux in the dark, sitting upright on their bed, watching a movie and quilting. She glanced at me with the unblinking eyes of an animal, her face washed in blue. It had been a week since we had seen each other last.

“I was just at Paul Petro's. I saw your ugly painting there.”

“Oh? You found it ugly?” She turned a cold, hard look at her quilt.

A loose, frightened feeling ran through my ­whole body,
then my body grew heavy, as if weighed down with shit. I wanted to take back what I had written about us
in those pages; what­ever she had read to make her—­us—seem
so awful. But I could no more disown it than my
teenage boyfriend could have wiped from my mind how he had portrayed me in his play. It happened. I thought of apologizing—­but ­couldn't. Women apologize too much, I once decided, and made myself stop, and now found it incredibly difficult to tell anyone I was sorry.

Margaux said, “I once had a friend in art school, who I shared a studio with. She ran away to become a Buddhist and to live in a Buddhist colony in Colorado. She had
been
a paint­er, too, but when I went to visit her, she was just painting pretty colors on the insides of the temples that only the rich people who had reached the highest
spiritual plane could see. I always thought that would never
be me.”

Her face fell while I stood there, stunned. For a long
time I didn't say anything. I wanted to tell her that being a paint­er was
not
meaningless, de­cadent, narcissistic, and vain, but how could I know, for sure? All I knew, down to the deepest part of my being, was that if I lived the life that was truly inside me, near her, I would only cause her pain. I didn't have any faith that what­ever I might say ­wouldn't hurt her doubly and only make things worse.

“I think I should go,” I said.

She agreed.

I turned and left her apartment, hesitating, slowly, hoping she would call me back, but she did not. Making my way down the hall, I passed her studio and glanced inside.
Through the half-­closed door
I saw no canvases, no brushes, no paint. I felt something drop inside of me, like gravity had shifted, like when you
suddenly realize the person you have been staring at is
missing a limb.

•
chapter
8
•

SHEILA QUAKES

D
own in the street I got onto my bike and biked as fast as I could to one of the abandoned fields by the foot of the city, down near the water, spread out beneath the elevated
highway. No one tended to the land there. No one devel
oped
it. It existed for no one, this dead-­grass expanse.

I had come too close and hurt her—­killed what­ever in 
Margaux made art, what­ever allowed her to tell herself
that it was all right to be a paint­er in the face of all her
doubts. I knew why and how it had happened. Instead of
sitting down and writing my play with
my
words—­using
my
imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and privacy of my soul—­I had used
her
words, stolen what was
hers
. I had plagiarized her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine! Then she had looked into it and, like looking in a fun­house mirror, believed the de­cadent, narcissistic person she saw was
her—
when really it was
me
. Unwilling to be naked, I had made her naked instead. I had not worked hard or at all.

I had cheated.

Shame covered my face and hands. I would abandon my
play for good. I would never tape us again! I climbed under the fence and ran down the hill and wandered off through the field in pain. The moon was out and full, and everything was shivering in the moon's silvery light. I thought about nature, and that I was in nature, and then I said to myself,
You
are
nature
. My eyes caught the edge of something in the sky—­a beautiful sign perched over the highway that had been erected so long ago by a manufacturer of washers and dryers. Its bright white bulbs outlined
in pink formed the magical word:
Inglis
. I stood there staring
at it, wondering, near tears, if there could be, in heaven or
on earth, anything more beautiful than this bright sign over this dead field, and how amazing it was what human
nature—
Inglis
—and nature-­nature—the field—­could make
in harmony with each other.

I must have been standing there like that for twenty minutes, when I noticed something: a sentence scrolling beneath it in bright LEDs. It had been scrolling the entire time I'd been there, but only just now did I see what it said:
make the decisions that benefit everyone. make the decisions that benefit everyone.

My heart caught on my rib. If only I could figure out what that was—­the decision that would benefit everyone—­I would do it!

Kneeling in the grass, Sheila's heart races her an email
.
.
.

1. How terrible will be the day of judgment, Amen. How terrible will be the judgment when you walk down the street and catch yourself in a store window. And you will be judged.

2. Smash the tops of the pillars so that even the bottom of the doors will shake. Make the pillars fall on the people's heads; anyone left alive, I will kill with a sword.

3. Not one person will get away. No one will escape. If they dig down as deep as the place of the dead, I will pull them up. If they climb into heaven, I will bring them down. Forget your drugs, forget your sex, for you will be brought down if you are up, and you will be brought up if you are down in the place of the dead, to the middle place that is intended for you, Amen.

4. Do not hide at the top of Mount Carmel or at the bottom of the sea with the tropical fish and a heavy tank of oxygen on your back, for I will find you
even there. And if you are happy, I will make you sad,
and if you have been innocent, I will make you guilty.
I will command a snake to bite you, and then you will become like a snake to others, telling them all your troubles and troubling their innocence!

5. I will keep watch to give them trouble, not do them good.

6. Cry for the dead, for
Inglis
has no mercy on the dead. Even in the heavens there is no looking forward to or looking back from, just a pure white burning in the light.

7. So walk up the hills and run down the hills, ascend the stairs and descend them, sit and lie and dance and stand, for there will be no moving in the land of judgment. There will be no sitting or fidgeting or smoking or sleeping. There will only be a burning without your body in the light. I will destroy all you have known, and all you will know is me.

8. Be like a shaking piece of grain in a sifter.

9. Shake like a little piece of grain upon a sieve.

10. Rattle and stir like a little piece of soil in a sifter.

11. Not even the tiniest stone falls through.

I would go to where she ­couldn't see me, or be pained by me anymore—­where no one would know what I had done. Like a good spider—locked safely away—­I would leave the city to her.

Then maybe one day, in the future, with the bad feelings I had caused in her erased from her heart, and all memory of the Miami piece and our travels and me forgotten, Margaux would paint once more.

•
chapter
9
•

WHAT IS CHEATING?

N
ow we find ourselves in the knowledge of what is cheating. It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon. It was true four thousand years ago when our ancestors wandered the desert, and it's as true today when the icon is our selves.

The Jews wandered through the desert, thrown from the land, for as soon as we did settle, we made an idol to worship. Our punishment was to wander and be like gypsies
without anything except the necessities for living, which
we carried on our backs. So the story of wandering and being expelled is told, and is an old one.

There is no way we can be forgiven except to say: We
did not even know how to talk to our own mothers. We ­were left with our friends, as lost as we ­were. We ­were left with ourselves, as lost as our friends—­sheep with no shep
herd, sheared of what­ever once kept us warm. We ­couldn't even
really believe that the sheep that came before us ­were warmed
by their own wool. It all seemed so improbable and far away.

Now we are at the point where all the cards have been laid and the story they chart can be read. We are worse off than we ­were at the beginning—­but this could have been predicted from our starting point. In the beginning, the gods gave us liberty; in the end, we discovered cheating. Instead of developing the capacities within, we took two roads: the delusion and oblivion of drugs—­which didn't start off as cheating, but as access to the sublime; and treating ourselves as objects to be admired—­the attempt to make the self into an object of need and desire by tending to the image of our selves. We have found that, in our freedom, we have wanted to be like coke to the coke addict, food to the starving person, and the middle of the night to thieves.

Yet the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are:
as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves
to
be
an object, when a human being is really the other
two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type. One only has to travel on a subway during rush hour and pull into a station and see all the people waiting to get on and off to be struck by how many of us there actually are in the
world. One is a reproduction of the human type—­one sleeps
like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like all other humans. We are gestures, but we less resemble an original painting than one unit of a hundred thousand copies of a book being sold.

Now the gestures we chose are revealed as cheating. Instead of being, one appears to be. And the cheater breaks her own heart.

Yet the sex started off so incredibly sublime! The dinners, the nights, the paintings, my beauty, his beauty, hers, theirs.
At first, the drugs gave us a feeling for the sublime in nature
and ourselves. When we took them, we expanded into a
thousand pieces. Then it seemed like cheating when we
already ­were in a thousand pieces, and the sex and drugs
didn't expand us into a hundred thousand more or put us
back together again.

But in those early days on earth, nobody could have made
a complaint against us.