How Should a Person Be? (7 page)

•
chapter
7
•

PRAYER OF THE PUER

T
here's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to
begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—­if not
Live
. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-­ass skirts and
Live
. I'm just sitting ­here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.

I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of
announcing the arrival of the next cock—­I mean, messiah—
I will shit into my oatmeal.

Who among us will be asked to lead the people out of bondage, only to say,
God, I have never been a good talker. Ask someone ­else. Ask my brother instead of me.
There is no way to accomplish what I feel I must accomplish with this play. There is no way in heaven or on earth! I am the wrong person to do it. Look at the shitty red hoodie I am sitting ­here in. Look at my dirty running shoes. I have such small breasts. God, shouldn't you call upon a woman with great big knockers, who the people will listen to? Why do you call on me, who ­doesn't have the cleavage to capture the world's attention? Ask my sister instead of me, whose big breasts are much more suited to doing your work.

May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved. If everyone around me talks nothing but shit, how can I hold myself aloof? My fate is not separate from everyone's fate. If one man or one woman can stand up and call themselfs saved, that means we all are. And I know I'm not, so no one is.

Last night someone said to me, “Come on—­all the five, six times I have seen you, you have been drunk out of your mind.” I was drunk last night too, when he was telling it to me. I resented the implication that I had been, in the five, six times we had seen each other, any drunker than he had been. For we are all, all of us, drunk all the time, and it's not fair for him to single me out like that and make me the exception, when if it comes to the drinking habits in the circles I run in, I am the rule. The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink. We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning, hungover. In either case, we lack the capacity to second-­guess ourselves.

People say there is no direction to evolution—­upward to
any height; that the proper meta­phor is the outward webbing
of a bush, not the striving of a tree toward the heavens. When
we ­were children, we would lift our arms to the skies as
high as we could—­as tall as we could make ourselves—
stretch,
stretch, stretch!
When I look back on those gym classes and how
we all stretched ourselves to be as tall as the tallest tree, I ­can't help but think,
Those ­were the most religious moments of my life.

If now in some ways I drink too much, it's not that I lack a reverence for the world.

Today I am fasting. A girl I know who is a semifamous singer, and who is very slender and glamorous in pictures, once told me that when she has been eating badly, she will fast for a day or two. She said that Nietz­sche made her think that her self-­denial and need for purification ­were vulgar bullshit, but then she said no to Nietzsche—­she sees no reason she shouldn't enjoy emptying out, the same as she enjoys exploiting abundance.

The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietz­sche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no
longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situ
ating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He
typed Zarathustra
? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!

Knowing this, I don't see why I don't just kick it all to hell and shut up at last about my concern that I might put more shit into the world. The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won't even make a difference—­it's only natural. It's to be expected. I should put a lot of shit in the play, so it will be a multicolored shit.

Everyone enjoys economy for its relation to a certain morality, but if I have to suffer from other people's excesses, why should I not suffer doubly from my own?

•
chapter
8
•

MARGAUX PAINTS

I
worked on my play for several days, badly. Finally one night, needing to get out of my apartment, I picked up my computer and went with it to our studio. It was early on a
Friday eve­ning, and I was walking slowly when I heard
someone call out my name.

I turned and saw Margaux coming down the alley. She was pushing something on a trolley in front of her, and as she got closer I saw it was a tree—­a baby tree in a pot! We hugged hello, and then I asked her if it was a tree she had
grown. She said it was. Margaux grew plants on her balcony
and she was really good at getting them strong. I was curi
ous
to know what her secret was. She told me she was going
now to plant the tree in a friend's yard, a friend whose
father
had recently died. I decided to go with her, and as we walked
together, we talked.

SHEILA

You know what? If we ever have kids, I really like the idea of trading babies.

MARGAUX

(
laughing
) Yeah, that'd be fun—­getting pregnant together.
And you're right! We'd have such adoring love for each
other's baby. But it might be hard
.
.
.

SHEILA

What? To give up your own?

MARGAUX

Maybe
.
.
. Do you think you'd prefer one to the other?

SHEILA

I think I'd have more fun if it was yours.

MARGAUX

Yeah, exactly, you would!

Laughter.

I think it's a great idea. I think I always want culture to work like that. I think it would be less emotionally complicated if I was raising society's child. But you'd have to sleep with somebody who's really big with black hair.

SHEILA

No, because babies can be anything.

MARGAUX

But when they turn twenty, boy!

They laugh.

When we got to the yard, I
watched as she dug a neat, deep hole and placed the tree
inside it. I leaned against the
fence and waited until she was done. I said I would walk
her home, but on the way to her apartment, we stopped in at my place so I could pick up a sweater. Inside, Margaux pointed to a pile of papers on my desk, which ­were labelled on top with a black marker,
Margaux.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Our conversations,” I said.

Margaux was quiet. She went to wait by the stairs.

On the walk to her place, Margaux mentioned that she had been painting swimming pools. In every painting she had made that month, there was a pool. She said she had
been working on a painting of
me
in a pool before she left her
­house that night, based on the naked photos she had taken of me in the whirl­pool at the Y. Did I want to see it? Of
course I did! All my life I had dreamed of being friends with
a paint­er who would make me into an icon that people would
admire.

In her painting studio we stood before her fresh canvases.
I recognized my narrow body in a small angular pool,
seemingly outdoors, my head wooden and stiff. She put on the prescription glasses I had given her, without which
she ­couldn't see. I had told her, when I gave them to her, that
it might be nice for her to see her paintings. She said she had
never considered it, the images coming directly from inside her head.

Now she explained, touching its sides, “I wanted to call it
The Genius
but instead I'm calling it
House for a Head
. I
don't believe enough in genius, but I
do
believe in having a
­house for a head.”

I almost cried. I didn't want to say it, but I felt pretty
crummy at being demoted from
genius
to simply having a 
­house for a head.

Alone in our studio, sitting before my computer, I was deter
mined to finish my play, but instead I grew distracted and stared out the window. I now saw that hanging out with Margaux, and talking with Margaux, and sharing a studio with Margaux was not enough to make me a genius in the
world. It would not help me lead the people or make me into
the sort of person I should be. It would not help me finish my play, or solve any of my problems.

Yes it would. It would solve them all.

•
chapter
9
•

THEY WANDER IN MIAMI

T
hat
winter, Margaux's gallerist decided to take some of her paintings to Miami, where for a week the city would be turned into a giant art fair. Collectors from all over the world would attend, and all the top galleries would be there. The fanciest art would be shown at Art Basel, the largest of the fairs, and of the smaller fairs orbiting its periphery, one, called Scope, was where Margaux's work would be.

Though her dealer had already left for Florida, Margaux
continued painting. I said she should deliver the newest paint
ings by hand, not ship them, and said it was important for me to take the trip down with her. I wanted to record us there. Didn't I need to write my play? she asked. I told her that the trip would be like writing; I hoped that if we went away together, like the mothers in my play, I could later
study the transcripts and figure out what reality had that
my play did not; learn why my play was not working, which was maybe the same reason my character was not working, and thus discover how I and the play should be.

Then I watched, the morning we ­were to board public transit to the airport, as Margaux stuffed three oil paintings packed in bubble wrap into her large duffel bag, along with twenty T-shirts. We ­were only going for three days.

On the plane ­ride down, we read an article in the
New York Times
about a paint­er who would be attending the fair that week, a twenty-­five-­year-­old guy named Ted Mineo who had studied at Yale and was being represented by one of the top Soho galleries. Basel would be his debutante ball. From Miami Basel to the heavens! His dealer intended him to meet everyone. No doubt he would be kept busy his entire time there. It read as though his life for the past five years
had been very well managed, from art school, to his discovery in art school, to his move to Brooklyn and so on, so he was quoted saying of the contemporary art world,
“There's a career track. You get your B.F.A. and then you get your M.F.A. You move to New York, you have a show, and it's like being a lawyer or something ­else. And that ­doesn't entirely square with the romantic ideal of being an artist, living in isolation and being the avant-­garde hero.”

When we finished reading it, I asked Margaux if she had ever thought about going to Yale. She told me she had once spent several weeks thinking about it, after searching around on the internet and realizing that all the big artists had gone there. She had made millions of sacrifices for her art—­maybe she should beg, borrow, and steal what­ever she could to go. But then she thought,
No, that's awful
—­because there ­were just too many people who could not, and it seemed like it shouldn't be the rule that you have to attend Yale. “In the end,” she said, “it felt too unfair to even think about, and it just seemed wrong to my morals and my faith in art. I think it would have really hurt me and made me sad. To me, it looked the same as joining a country club that Jews or black people aren't allowed into. And lots of good people
do
join country clubs. But it would depress me
too much. I figured I had to see what would happen without me
joining the country club.”

When we arrived in Miami, we changed from our pants and sweaters, getting half-­naked in the airport washroom, our clothes spread all over the counters. “Be careful,” I told
Margaux, since she was so loyal. “What­ever outfit you choose
for yourself now, you'll be wearing for the next three days.”

Recently, Margaux had been trying to reassure me that I had a good brain. My brain had not worried me when I was younger, but over the past year I had become convinced that I did not think as well as other people. No, that was putting it gently—­that I didn't know how to think at all. Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not.

As we walked down the side of the Miami highway, my arm linked through hers, the crescent moon faint in the sky overhead, I again brought up my fear. I explained that I felt my insides ­were a blank—­a total neutrality—­null.

“That's amazing!” she said. “
God
, everyone ­else is like
these
automatic windup toys.”

“But I feel like other people are seeing and perceiving and synthesizing, and I'm—­I'm not doing any of that!”

“You're doing something, boy, let me tell you. I think mainly people have opinions on,
Well, what do you think about abortion?
Everybody we hang out with is pretty competent at vaguely intelligent party talk, but you say things that help me think better, you know?”

I shrugged, but inside was filled with something new, and prayed that what she said was true.

In any case, I believed it to be gold and held it near.

We finally found a cab and took Margaux's paintings to Scope—­a large, makeshift tent in the center of a muddy field in a park, in what the taxi driver told us was a very bad neighborhood that the city was trying to fix with art. Having delivered her paintings, we got into another taxi, then dropped our bags at our cookie-­cutter hotel. We hoped to get dinner in Little Havana, at the other end of town, and walked around for a while trying to find a bus stop.

At four ­o'clock, we stepped onto a bus, midway through
a conversation about what you need to know in writing
and what you need to know in art. We came to the same conclusion: you have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything. Sit
ting up front, across from a seat labeled
I
n
M
emory of
R
osa
P
arks
, we tested out this theory.

MARGAUX

David Lynch is pretty funny.

SHEILA

And Harmony Korine is hysterical. And do you think Werner Herzog is hysterical?

MARGAUX

(
laughing
) Oh my God, yeah. He's really funny in a Kafka kind of way.

SHEILA

I think Manet is funny.

MARGAUX

Yeah, Manet is very funny.

SHEILA

And Kierkegaard is really funny.

MARGAUX

Really? I see him as so sweet. I see him so much more like poetry.

SHEILA

Do you think Nietz­sche's funny?

MARGAUX

I ­haven't read him much. Baudrillard?

SHEILA

­Haven't read him enou—­hmm. Richard Serra's not funny.

MARGAUX

No. He seems to take himself and art
very
seriously. It's nice to take it seriously while also leaving your back door open. I mean, your pants down.

SHEILA

(
laughing
) You mean slipping on a banana peel.

MARGAUX

You know, I didn't realize that you—­you ­can't really slip on a banana peel unless it's rotten. Which is what happened to me.

SHEILA

Was the buttery side down?

MARGAUX

It was all black, so it was hard to tell.

SHEILA

(
laughs
) How about Jackson Pollock?

MARGAUX

Not funny.

SHEILA

Mark Rothko?

MARGAUX

I mean, all those guys are—­I mean, one of them would have been enough for me.

After finishing our dinner, we returned to Scope and arrived just as it was closing. A tall, aloofly handsome Asian man blithely dragged behind him a cabbage on a leash, making his way into and out of the rooms. People noticed, but no one cared. Since the lights ­were going down, we walked superfast through all the booths:
like it
.
.
. hate it
.
.
. don't like it
.
.
. don't care
.
.
. then walked out through
the doors and into the night after pausing briefly to say hello
to a pale, thin, blond Chelsea dealer we both knew.

Leaving the tent, Margaux began to rage. “Of course! She
leans in to kiss you, but she ­doesn't kiss me. Connecticut! All
the Connecticut bitches hate me!” To calm her from the
slight, I asked her to recite what I knew to be her favorite American poem—Matt Cook's poem.

“Okay. ‘James Joyce
.
.
.' ” I prompted.

MARGAUX

(
sighs
)

James Joyce

He was stupid

He didn't know as much as me

I'd rather throw dead batteries at cows

Than read him

Everything was going fine

Before he came along

He started the Civil War

He tried to get the French involved

But they ­wouldn't listen

They filled him up with desserts

He talked about all the great boxers

That came from Ireland

Like he trained
'
em or something

Then he started reading some of his stuff

Right as we told him to get lost

He brought up the potato famine

We said “Your potatoes are plenty good.

Deal with it! Work it out somehow.”

Then he said “America must adopt the metric system.

It's much more logical.” We said “No!

We like our rulers! Go away!”

Thomas Jefferson said, “You always get the rulers you deserve.”

SHEILA

Do you know any other poems by heart?

MARGAUX

No.

We sat down on the pavement and waited forty-­five minutes for a cab to take us to the beach where the city was hosting a Peaches concert. I pulled out my tape recorder—
Margaux glanced down at it—­and we began to discuss
Margaux's hopes for the fair. I ­couldn't understand how
anyone could get famous in a place like this, where there ­were thousands of artists and so many galleries, and all of the art just laid out to speak for itself like cereal boxes on super
market shelves, but without even the words. The art and
the artists had started blurring together for me, and I suggested that as yet we had seen nobody truly great.

MARGAUX

Well,
of course
there are people ­here that are really truly great! But how could you see that? Like, for instance, if Takashi Murakami had just one of his sculptures ­here, you ­wouldn't know how good it was.

SHEILA

You don't think?

MARGAUX

No! But both of us have read these extensive articles about
him. Like, of course if you saw
one piece
by Takashi Murakami—
­
but we have such nuances because of articles and context
and because ­we've seen his past work and, you know. But this is so many young artists trying to show all of that in one go.

SHEILA

So the point ­here is not to decide who's the greatest artist?

MARGAUX

Not at all. Not at all. But it
is
a chance to let the younger artists in. It
is
a chance to let the smaller galleries in. I don't know what it is. It's not everything.

SHEILA

If you think that going to an art fair and having your pictures in a booth will make you famous, it won't.

MARGAUX

But no one's thinking that at all!

SHEILA

Hmm. I would be thinking that if
I
was an artist ­here.

Then we went to the concert and got into a fight after I told Margaux, “All the art you like is only
almost
good.” In bad
moods, we met up with her dealer and walked in the rain to
get some food, and went into a pizza place and sat by the
window. Margaux ordered a Hawaiian slice. As we ­were eating, a boy and girl in their early twenties who ­were obviously part of the art crowd came in and addressed Margaux directly.

“Are you Margaux Williamson?” the girl asked excitedly.

“Yes,” Margaux replied.

“Oh my God, I love your paintings! I've seen them on the internet!”

We looked at each other, wide-eyed.

The boy added, “I met you at an art fair in Los Angeles! I'm a paint­er too.”

As they went on to talk about her work, my mind went to a video Margaux had made of our friend Ryan's per­for­mance of a song he had written for his band, Tomboyfriend. She put it on YouTube, and one viewer listed himself as a fan; a man, supposedly, from Af­ghan­i­stan. Planning the band's first concert, Margaux had carefully chosen the title:
Big in Af­ghan­i­stan.

That night, back at the hotel, Margaux and I lay in one of the beds and watched as, on my computer, an heiress gave her boyfriend a hand job. She seemed really into it; there was no reason to doubt it. Then her cell phone rang, and she let go of his dick and threw her body across the bed and answered with a far more convincing show of enthusiasm than she had shown while jiggling his cock. Her boyfriend was scowling now. After fifteen seconds, he said, “Get off
your fucking phone.” She talked a moment more, then
hung up and returned to where she had left off.

She was an eerie figure who appeared in the pale gray outlines of night vision. Her eyes glowed like the eyes of a cat. Watching her, I felt a kinship; she was just another white girl going through life with her clothes off. I told myself quietly,
Consider all the warriors down through time, without great brains—­like you!—­who nevertheless struck the enemy right through the breast. They just kept their wrists steady and struck.