How Should a Person Be? (6 page)

•
chapter
4
•

SHEILA WANTS TO LIVE

Twenty minutes later, Sheila and Margaux walk down the street to the Katharine Mulherin Gallery, where they recently began sharing a small studio on the second floor. Margaux unlocks the glass door, and they walk past the hung paintings to a rickety stairwell at the back. Sheila has been thinking about the crazy impressiveness of Margaux never having quit anything. She follows Margaux up the back steps.

SHEILA

But
listen
, Margaux! Otto Rank says that one day there will be no art, only artists—­so the work of art is
renounced
! And I agree! I'm renouncing this play because it's not in ser­vice of my life. But if the primary thing was the work, I'd spend all of my time on the play. But you know what? This does not serve my life!

MARGAUX

Right.

SHEILA

Don't you think that's what's going on?

MARGAUX

No.

SHEILA

No, no! In Otto Rank's construction of it!

MARGAUX

We-­ll
.
.
.

They walk across an old rug into their dirty, white-­walled studio
.

I
do
think it's responsible not to put out a crappy play—­in an old-­fashioned, like, a strict old-­fashioned sense. You shouldn't put out bad work. But if it's not about the work, then it ­doesn't matter how crappy it is. What matters is the people you're doing it with, and the experience you have doing it. Actually, I think it would be
way
more in ser­vice of your life to put out this mediocre play, so you could—

SHEILA

(
with angst
)
More
in ser­vice of my life! But my life suffers if I make bad—­if I put out a bad play!

MARGAUX

That's right. So
.
.
. Otto would say,
Who cares?

Margaux starts setting things up on her drafting board.

SHEILA

No, no! Otto would say I'm doing the right thing! 'Cause if I want my life to be a work of art, then if I make bad work, it tarnishes my life. All I'm trying to say is that what you said earlier I think is
true
. We make art insofar as it enhances our life, and insofar as it adds to the beauty of life—

MARGAUX

Right.

SHEILA

—
'cause as you say, it feels good to work hard—

MARGAUX

Yeah.

SHEILA

—it feels good to create something beautiful—

MARGAUX

Yeah.

SHEILA

—but not beyond that to the point where life suffers!

MARGAUX

So
.
.
. you would have had to work really hard for this—­right—for this play that might not have served you.

SHEILA

(
sighs
) I don't know about the play. I don't know.

•
chapter
5
•

ISRAEL

T
hat night, after spending several hours staring at my miserable play, I shut down my computer in frustration and left my apartment. I went to a party to celebrate the appearance of three more books of poetry in the world.

The party was in a wide and cavernous room with a large stage up front and the ceiling painted brown, draped
around the sides with brown velvet. A large disco ball rotated
in the center, and everything was polished wood and semiformal and awful.

Standing alone at the bar, I wondered if I could love the boy I noticed at the end of it—­the one with the curly brown
hair, who was like a washed-­out, more neutral version of the
first boy I loved. When he stepped out onto the front
steps, I thought,
If he has gone out there to smoke, I will love him
. But when I got outside, though I could see a ciga
rette dan
gling from his lips, I did not love him.

I went back inside to get another drink and was standing by the bar when a man, slightly taller than me, stepped out from the crowd and moved toward me. My stomach lurched. I turned away. I was so attracted, I ­couldn't let myself speak. I knew him, though; his name was Israel. This was a guy whose girlfriend I had complimented the year before, running into her on the street and saying, “Your boyfriend is
the sexiest guy in the city.” Though I meant it, I was also
hoping to flatter her. Later, when I learned that she was angry
at me for saying this, I got upset. I had genuinely wanted to compliment her.

I had met Israel once before, several years ago, and I never forgot it. I was married at the time and was going down in an elevator in a building of artists' studios. He entered on the same floor and stood there beside me. He had killer eyes, huge, jaded, soul-­sucking eyes, a nice and lazy smile, big thick lashes, and the lips of a real pervert.

Watching his face in profile, I'd felt faint at a sense of destiny between us—­as though we ­were not standing beside each other in an elevator but ­were on the peaks of two separate and faraway mountains, with a deep valley and gorge between us. In that moment, I felt aware in my body of how difficult it would be to cross that distance to get to him.

As we stood there at the party, talking to each other up close, a trembling was going through me. I began to worry about my play—­I had only just left my marriage and I needed to think about women, not men! I reminded myself,
The flower of love soon fades, but the flower of art is immortal!
But it was as if I was stuck to the floor beside him. When he asked me to leave the party, I startled myself by saying, “I'm celibate right now.”

His eyes came alive in a different way, and his grin was the grin of a bear.

“So you're one of those people,” he said.

“One of what people?”

“One of those people who think they can control themselves.”

I blushed unhappily, then followed him out. I didn't want him to think I was one of those people who thought they could control themselves.

We walked together through the chilly night air for two or
three hours, all the way down to the water. I felt, as we
walked,
I could walk with you anywhere.
He noticed the shapes
on buildings, other things I didn't see, pointing out this and
that to me. He disagreed with me when I said you could love
anyone. “No you ­can't,” he said. “It matters—­the person that
you're with.” I felt delight run through me and took plea­sure
in the excitement of just being near him.

We passed an ice cream truck, and he bought me an ice cream. Then we wandered back to his place, which was on the way to mine. I told myself that I was only walking him home, that I would leave him at his door so he could go in and change for his early shift at the bakery. But when we reached his place, I said, “I would like to watch you getting ready for work.”

We went up the dark stairwell to the top of a run-­down boarding­house. He had two rooms at the top of the stairs: one for his drawing and painting, the other where he slept. He had no possessions other than a table, a mattress
on the floor, a few dishes in the sink, and a hot plate plugged
into the wall. I felt like I could just close my eyes and go to sleep
on that mattress forever. There ­were no chairs, so I sat
down on the messy sheets and watched him move around the
room, then leave for the bathroom, then come back, showered and changed, coked up, his shirt open and untucked.

He got on the bed and put his hand on my thigh and rubbed it up and down, then got up and walked around the room and forgot what he was doing, then came back and
kneeled beside me, and said into my ear, “I'll decide if you're
celibate or not.”

•
chapter
6
•

THE STORY OF THE
PUER

B
ack at home, having walked Israel to the bakery, and
having exchanged a hard and fluttering kiss, I went dizzily to sleep and had a dream: I was waiting at an airport. I was trying to get somewhere, to someplace higher and better. A bunch of people ­were at the airport too, and I was relieved and excited to see so many people I knew there. I went around getting their autographs.

I realized I had forgotten a bag at the other end of the terminal, so I ran, in a panic, to get it. An employee drove me back on a very slow buggy, and when I arrived at the gate, all the people who had been waiting ­were gone. I ran up to the counter and threw my two small tickets, desperately, into the flight attendant's hands. I begged to be let on—­it was everything to me that I be let on!—­but she said the plane had already left.

I spent days waiting for the next plane that was headed to where I wanted to go. I finally managed to board. Once again, there ­were people I knew there. I went to use the bathroom in the back, and the plane took off while I was sitting on the toilet. Though I knew the flight attendants
would have been upset to find me there, I was happy because
the view from the bathroom window was so amazing—­we
­were flying so low to the city, just above the highways, flying
in between the ­homes, dipping down sharply, then up. Then
I realized this was not the way it was supposed to be, and I got scared.

We flew over a vast recycling center that only poor people used. Their bags of garbage went on forever. I was certain the plane would make an emergency landing there, but when it did not, I made a quick decision and slipped out the back door of the plane's bathroom. I landed safely on the ground, my fall softened by all the garbage bags.

I went into the recycling center—­just a wooden shack
surrounded by garbage, many miles from where we had
taken off. Poor people ­were handing their garbage across the
wood counter, and the man behind the counter was paying them pennies for it.

I went back outside and was surveying the dump when I noticed that my plane had crashed into a nearby lake. Its end was sticking out, smoking with fire. I was so relieved that I had jumped from the plane in time, but also spooked. I walked up to a curly-­haired woman by the shore: my Jungian analyst. I asked her what the number of the flight had been and she told me, but the numbers ­were not familiar. It had not been my plane at all!

Now my airplane was very far away—­still traveling
through the sky! I would not be able to catch up to it by running
or even with a car. I would have to find my way
back
to
the airport,
back
from this unfamiliar town, and take yet
another
flight out.

I woke at four-­thirty in the morning, my heart beating fast. I
had to discuss this dream with my Jungian analyst, so I
went to my computer and made it gently ring.

My analyst's name was Ann. She was in her midfifties. Decades earlier, she had studied in Zu­rich, then moved to Toronto where she practiced for many years. I met her while I was studying at the university, taking her class on Carl Jung. A few years later, I returned to her as a patient. Two months ago, she moved to the En­glish coun
tryside to live in a barn on a farm where her family had
farmed for generations, which was now idle and was where she had been born.

I felt so grateful when she answered my call. It was almost ten in the morning there. She asked me how I was; if I'd had any dreams. I told her about my dream, and she asked me if I had made any decisions lately. I ­couldn't think of any, then I remembered my breakfast with Margaux and my desire to pull the play.

Ann asked, “Did you imagine writing the play would get you somewhere higher and better, just like an airplane does?”

I didn't know how to answer such a plainly obvious question. “Of course!”

“But then writing it turned out to be dangerous, like the airplane in your dream. So you've decided to quit. You slipped out of your marriage, too, which you also hoped would get you someplace higher and better.”

SHEILA

(
defensive
) Wait! I want to cancel the play not because it's
dangerous
, but because life ­doesn't feel like it's in my stupid
play, or with me sitting in a room
typing
. And life ­wasn't in
my marriage anymore, either. Life feels like it's with Mar
gaux—
talking
—which is an equally sincere attempt to get somewhere, just as sincere as writing a play.

Sheila sees Ann glance into the corner of her room.

ANN

But life isn't only where things are exciting; it's where things feel hard and stagnant, too. And arguing for a pure act that ­doesn't have a product in the end—­well, there's two things there: one is there's not a concern for making a living; and second is there's not a concern with working to the end and winding up with something solid.

SHEILA

Except for the story of what happened.

ANN

The story of you talking to Margaux?

SHEILA

Perhaps.

Sheila becomes ashamed at the thought.

ANN

You slipped out from the plane at the first sign of danger, but then you returned to the airport to catch
another
plane? Why?
Maybe there's a good reason to fear planes—­one was
weaving among the ­houses, the other one crashed. You
could have
walked
from the dump. What's wrong with walk
ing?
It might take much longer
.
.
. forty years as opposed to four
hours. But you're more likely to arrive there, safely.

I ­couldn't help the sudden, hard laugh that came from my mouth. It seemed too simple—­a fantasy! I tried to cover up the fact that I had laughed.

ANN

There's taking airplanes and waiting for airplanes, but
another possibility is to make the difficult choices and decide.
You remember the
puer aeternus—
the eternal child—­Peter Pan—­the boy who never grows up, who never becomes a man? Or it's like in
The Little Prince
—­when the prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator tries and
tries again, but each time he fails to do it as well as he wishes.
He believes himself to be a great artist and cannot understand why it's not working. In a fit of frustration, he instead draws a box—­something he
can
do well. When the prince asks how it's a picture of a sheep, the narrator replies that it's a picture of a sheep in a box. He is arrogantly proud of his solution and satisfied with his efforts. This response is typical of all
puers
. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it's their everlasting switching that's the dangerous thing, not what they choose.

Sheila's heart beats up in her chest
.
.
.

SHEILA

Why is their everlasting switching dangerous?

ANN

Because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type—­though such people do not believe they represent a
type
, but
feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man,
who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things
gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the
puer.
Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

.
.
. Sheila listens on, in agony, fear, and dread
.
.
.

But—and ­here is the hope—­there
is
a solution for people of this type, and it's perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must
work
—­without escaping into fantasies about being
the person who worked.
And I don't mean work for its own sake, but they must choose
work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the pro­cess.

.
.
. Sheila's insides begin to tremble
.
.
.

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.
Puers
don't need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this—
It is
their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they
choose—
they might discover themselves saved. The problem
is the
puer
ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—
­which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life—­living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life.

.
.
. a weak personality
.
.
. who only wishes to avoid suffering!

They must give themselves completely to the experience! One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they ­can't be happy, let them at least be unhappy—­really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.

I fell back, exhausted.

If I can do this, then perhaps my life, when I look back on it, will at least be not as empty as the heart of any Casanova.