How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

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 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

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!

And the cheater breaks her own heart.

There are problems so vast and so deep that a young woman sitting alone in her room should slit her throat and die sooner than bother about the state of her soul, when so many great artists before her spent decades recalibrating a single blank canvas in their studio, fifteen, sixteen hours a day, as their marriages crumbled into the soil.

Reading through the biographies and taking notes, I learned that the artists originated in a hundred and eleven cities, but by the Important phase of their careers, they populated thirty-nine. Twenty-three of those cities had only one artist in them, and the remaining sixteen held the rest. Twenty-seven percent of the artists had left their country of birth. Not a single American-born artist had moved outside of America.

Paris 7 Amsterdam 8 Los Angeles 9 London 15 Berlin 19 New York 30

The answer was obvious: New York. It had been certain before I began. I could be there in twelve hours, for cheap, on the bus. There, the odds of meeting someone Important, and thus becoming Important myself, were best.

Then he said, “I hope you write until your fucking fingers break.”

“What is American cheese anyway?” I heard one of them say. Her friend replied, “I think it means it has a chemical in it.”

I called Jen, who once put me up in France, and asked if I might stay with her my first few nights in New York while I looked for an apartment of my own. She had returned to America and, in her friendly way, agreed to help me. I was looking forward to seeing her and imagined us growing closer and becoming true friends.

painting of a single stalk of asparagus. It was the most moving thing I had ever seen, painted so tenderly and with such a loose hand that it hardly seemed like it had been any work at all. When I finally looked over to see who had painted it, I discovered it was Manet, one of my favorite painters.

imagine I am struggling with a devil. But when I saw that painting I realized—no, it’s an angel. Now I always try to remember, when I am struggling, that I am struggling with an angel.

Time was passing, and it started to seem like we’d never leave the apartment. I wanted to be among the Important people! I was worried that we were running late. I didn’t want to spend my whole time in New York in someone’s apartment.

Earlier that morning, I had written an email to the theater, telling the producer to pull the play. She emailed within minutes and told me she was disappointed. I didn’t care. As I walked the streets, I thought only about Israel.

I had hardly told Margaux a word about him, for she was made impatient by conversations about relationships or men. Yet I had gone over to her apartment one afternoon, very early in my time with him, having not heard from him in forty-three hours, and paced around her kitchen like a wild animal until she decided to calm me down.

It was a French film, about love and bondage and sex. Well, I just emerged two hours later, into her studio, saying, near tears, “Love is a battle between the sexes in which the man always wins because that’s more erotic for everyone!” Not even turning, she said, “I should have shown you a different movie.”

Yes, I was scared. I really wanted to kiss you, and that scared me so I left. And I was like, Oh well, that’s too bad. You should have kissed me first and then left.

She’s going to be controlling the whole situation, and that scares him. That’s why there’s suddenly this big increase in homosexuality. I mean, there’s always been homosexuality in France, but now it’s just like, Okay, it’s simpler to be with a man because I don’t have to deal with these issues. SHEILA Really? You think it’s that easy to become a—a—to be a homosexual? ANJALI Oh, in France, yes.

They feel the suffering involved with a man is less.

He had started drawing seriously at the age of two.

He represented exactly the sort of person who made her feel really bad about her life and sort of despairing. She worried that she would never be good enough at anything. She had spent most of her life wondering where her father was, and her twenties going to parties and sleeping with men. She had not chosen a line of work early and stuck with it and gotten good.

Summoning everything within me, I said, “So what if you

haven’t been drawing comics since the age of two. Who cares? I’m convinced that everybody has been doing something since the age of two. And I’ll bet the genius is not the person who has been drawing comics since the age of two, but the person who, since the age of two, has been wondering whe...

“Do you even know what it means?” he asked in an aggrieved and accusatory tone. “Do you even know what Bird’s Milk is?” I replied that it was my father’s favorite dessert. “What? No! They hang these signs over shopkeeper’s stalls in Prague! We Sell Bird’s Milk means We Sell Everything!”

Listen to what Margaret Mead said: “The major task of every civilization is to get the fathers involved in the child-rearing process.”

No. She’s not. I have a very, very humorous, very loving friendship with my son. I think this is the reason I am with her. SHEILA That’s the reason you think you are with your wife—for your son? RON I think so. I think so. SHEILA Can a son be a soul mate? Could your soul mate be your son?

RON I think I have met my soul mate, but I am not with her.

I don’t know it, but I’m just telling you—deep in my heart. (drinks) If you meet a soul mate, it’s one of the most beautiful, pleasurable things in life. I have seen soul mates. They never get away from each other. But with not a soul mate—they never get along.

This is the worst eight-dollar cigar that’s ever been sold to me.

I can’t. (puffs) Why did you come to Atlantic City? RON Meeting women. SHEILA Meeting women?

She is not my soul mate. My soul mate I met two years ago. God forgives me for it, I think. God understands. I do not think my wife thinks that I am her soul mate.

Your soul mate is the one that misses you. Sheila stops puffing on her cigar.

I always feared that one day you would forget why we wanted to see each other all the time, once you no longer felt it or wanted to, and that you would be resentful that I still wanted to see you. 6. Why would you still hang out with me? You’re already off to the next thing that will help you be a genius. 7. But I cannot be your sometime friend. 8. That means I cannot be your friend at all.

There was nothing in me that did not mourn. I knew I would always lose what was good. That was the kind of person I would always be.

She said, “I called you and you were gone. I went to your house and you’d left. How could you leave me when things were so hard? You left without even saying good-bye!” I braced my body, became as tight and hard as armor. I felt nothing but the need to get through this and over it. “But it was me who made them hard! I thought I would leave so that things could be better for you! So you could forget what I had done.” “After I searched high and low and found you! All my life all I wanted was a girl! And then when I needed her, she disappeared.” I started to cry. “But I was so bad I made it so you couldn’t paint anymore!” “Look, I agreed to be taped. But you—you figured out how a person should be and then you went to New York to be it!”

My mother had been calling for weeks, leaving messages on my phone, sending long and desperate emails, so that I finally felt: Today is the day. I would go and do what she needed me to do—clean up the trash in her basement, which was my entire life, and throw it all out, so she could proceed in her life with a clear mind.

I looked about to see where my mess was, but I couldn’t find the mess. All the papers and books I had imagined cluttering everything up—there was nothing like that there. The hard brown carpet had recently been vacuumed, and there were two small hatboxes against the wall, one on top of the other. I went up to the boxes and knelt and opened them, and in them was my stuff. This was the mess I had left behind? This was what had been cluttering my mother’s mind for so long?

One box I put by the garbage bin outside. The other I carried home with me.

If only I could figure out what would make her trust me, I would do it. So I really tried to think. There were two things I knew for sure about Margaux: she had never quit anything, and she felt she had too much empathy.

“What! My embarrassing, impossible play!” “Yes! And I want it to answer your question—about how a person should be—so that you never have to think about it anymore. So that whatever you do from that point on isn’t about that question, and so our friendship won’t be either. And you can use anything you need from me to answer that question—my words, whatever, just answer it.”

It was the worst, most difficult thing she could have asked of me.

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.”