How Should a Person Be? (11 page)

•
chapter
5
•

THE WHITE MEN GO TO AFRICA

Sheila invites to dinner one of the former directors of her play, Ben, and his playwright collaborator, Andrew. Margaux is there, too. Sheila wants
to see what Ben has been doing since they worked on her play and wants
to hear about the play he's directing now. She is curious to see where theater's at, compared with where it was at ten months ago. The dinner is nearing its end. The table is littered with the remains of bread
and cheese and meat and peas. Sheila's silver tape recorder and Ben's
silver tape
recorder lie opposite each other amid the plates of food like two silver guns.

BEN

Talk is cheap, you know.

SHEILA

Talk is cheap?

MARGAUX

Talk is cheap—­so you went to Africa.

BEN

Yup.

MARGAUX

'Cause Africa's not cheap.

BEN

Actually, Africa's pretty cheap.

MARGAUX

Where in Africa did you go?

ANDREW

Johannesburg. Johannesburg and Cape Town.

BEN

We had slightly different reasons for going, I think, but they found some mutual expression in the idea of going to Africa. For me, it was because my life in theater is so consuming and busy and it's such a kind of insular world in a lot of ways, and I was dissatisfied with the absence of doing meaningful—­what I felt was meaningful—­I didn't feel I
was spending my time in the most meaningful way possible,
and I wanted to bring a more meaningful, uh, component to the work I was doing.

SHEILA

In a more activist kind of way?

BEN

Potentially. I got fed up with my own narcissism basically. I just felt like I was being narcissistic. And it was becoming really difficult to separate my desire to create art from my narcissism. Of course, I felt incredibly silly about going to Africa. It felt like a really stupid thing to do. You go there—­what are you going to do?

ANDREW

It's also very fashionable.

BEN

It's
very
fashionable, you know.

ANDREW

And it's so easily a continuation of the narcissism.

SHEILA

That's what I was going to say.

BEN

But what really impressed me about being there was just talking to these people, and seeing all the millions of ways that you could—­with so little effort—­expand your world and be helpful and involved. And it was really easy to see in a place like Africa 'cause things are so extreme. It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works eco­nom­ical­ly, whereas ­here—

ANDREW

It's disguised.

BEN

It's disguised. It's so easy to forget.

MARGAUX

Seems kind of hard to forget; I don't know.

BEN

Does it?

MARGAUX

Yeah, it really does.

BEN

Not to me. And there—­well, the most profound experience I had was, like, meeting people who live in extreme poverty or what­ever, and I started to realize the extent to which I objectify poor people, and the ways we objectify poverty in order to tolerate the incredible disparity and lack of justice in the world—­and what I experienced there was like,
Oh my God! These are all people! These are a million people that live in shacks that are awesome people, that are smart and, you know, are people.

ANDREW

Yeah—or not even smart—­are just people.

BEN

We visited this one woman who was living in this real little shithole. Do you remember which one I'm talking about?

ANDREW

Yeah.

BEN

How many kids did she have?

ANDREW

Three.

BEN

I think four. And several of them had HIV. And she had HIV obviously. And her husband had, I don't know, died
last month from AIDS. She had just gotten a new boyfriend,
and she has this new little baby who probably has AIDS, and the boyfriend is clearly going to get AIDS—­I don't know
.
.
.

ANDREW

Just the scale of de­pen­den­cy of women upon men there was shocking. Just to see what it actually means for women to be dependent on men was
shocking
. And how the men have totally failed—

BEN

—and how women are doing everything.
Everything!

SHEILA

What do you mean the women are doing everything and the men aren't doing anything?

BEN

The women are doing
everything
—­they're raising the kids, they're bringing in the money for the kids, they're the ones who are—

ANDREW

—organizing communities.

BEN

Or­ga­niz­ing all the movements. They're doing
everything
!

SHEILA

And what are the men doing?

BEN

Drinking.

ANDREW

Drinking and hanging out.

BEN

Just wallowing and lost. Lost.

Ben gets up and starts pacing around the table.

You step for one minute outside of your privilege, your stresses and concerns, and you see something that's worth responding to. But then you come back, and it's a couple months later, and it's like,
What was that?
You're inundated with—­or I am, anyways—­like there's no room in my life for
anything
. I can barely keep up the standard of living I need. The idea of adding to that a concern for others and making time for others is
really
daunting. But at the same
time I've been feeling right now—­really acutely—­the injustice
of the circumstances some people are born into versus others, and I would like to be able to address that because, you know, the world is tremendously unfair, and it shouldn't be that unfair for the vast majority of people.

MARGAUX

I'm reading
Sirens of Titan—
the Kurt Vonnegut?—­where it's the culture of unfairness? So after the revolution people have bags of weights on them to make it balanced for people that have good luck, or people that are—­yeah, good luck, so that covers everything—­class, race, gender
.
.
.

BEN

Sure, sure.

MARGAUX

And really beautiful women smear their faces with really disgusting makeup to—­and sort of have a hunch.

No one says anything.

BEN

To me, the deeper place is like, I've always wanted to be a theater artist, and I've succeeded to the extent to which I—­to which my dreams allow. But so what, you know? I'm not convinced that this is a good use of one's time. There are so many other things one could be doing with one's life. It's a very par­tic­u­lar kind of experience, being a theater director. Nervous-­system-­wise, it's a very par­tic­u­lar kind of activity. It's a very narcissistic activity.

MARGAUX

(
loudly
) You guys keep saying
narcissism
; what do you mean by that exactly?

BEN

I mean that one is very involved in one's own mind.

SHEILA

But
all
art is like that. Books and paintings and—

BEN

Sure, sure.

MARGAUX

Even activism is very involved with righ­teousness, you know.

Long pause.

SHEILA

So where are you guys with your collaboration? Is your play going to talk about this?

BEN

Uh
.
.
. maybe. I hope so. In some kind of way. A simple way to talk about it is that it's about us, and about our embarking on a project together, and ­we're trying to make something together as friends, trying to take each other out of ourselves and into the world, and it evolves into an actual engagement in the world. Then comes the discovery of something that ­we're interested in replacing ourselves with.

ANDREW

­We're working with an actress. She's doing a lot of the voices of the women we spoke to there, so suddenly in the middle of the play, Ben and I will kind of leave the stage so she can talk
.
.
.

BEN

Ultimately what we'd like to do is tell somebody ­else's story
(
laughs a bit
)—­to build a bridge from our story to another story that we think is important to tell, then tell that story somehow. So ­we're acting in the play right now, and our little challenge to ourselves is that maybe we'll get off the stage at some point.

Sheila stands up.

SHEILA

Should I bring out the dessert?

MARGAUX

(
rising
) Oh, I can bring it out.

BEN

You know, making art but not boring people
.
.
.

SHEILA

Really? That's amusing. I like boring people. I think it's a virtue. People
should
be a little bored.

MARGAUX

(
exiting
) Girls aren't as good at being boring.

SHEILA

(
exiting
) Girls aren't as good at being boring?

MARGAUX

Maybe.

All the white men I know are going to Africa. They want to tell the stories of African women. They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality.
Sure
, I said. Sure, if they would like to present themselves as role models for teenage girls, what have I got on them? Only a natural empathy that no one could guess at from the way I have
been living. They come at life from the outside, those white
boys who went to Africa. To have to wear on the outside one's
curiosity, one's pity, one's guilt
.
.
.

All I want is to look back with no regrets. And perhaps go to Africa and return with the story of an impoverished black woman whose boyfriend has AIDS and drinks, and whose four babies have AIDS and drink—­to communicate something of greater importance to North Americans than the poverty of my soul.

Later that eve­ning, Sheila and Margaux wipe their hands on a
towel, having cleaned up after dinner. They go onto the front steps and sit facing the street. A halo of light emanates from a street
lamp across the road; a fuzzy, translucent white crystal of light against the dark blue sky, sort of like descriptions of the artist Robert
Irwin's luminescent disks, which people once went rapturous about,
calling them moon-­silver, incandescent, ethereal, dropped from
heaven.

SHEILA

How can these artists we read about—­who have been married five or six times—­how can they have enough time for all that life,
and
also make art?

MARGAUX

And
have a heroin addiction?

SHEILA

Either there's something I'm not understanding, or that was another point in history.

MARGAUX

You know, visually, I think I always understood that looking at a Pollock painting or looking at a brick wall—­like, the brick wall might be more interesting for me. But because the brick wall might be more interesting for me, I never quite understood why it was important to make things sometimes.

SHEILA

(
excited
) I made something!

MARGAUX

What?

SHEILA

I'll tell you
.
.
.

Sheila reaches behind her back, then grows scared and changes her mind.

You know, the other day, Sholem came into the salon—

MARGAUX

I saw him in the street yesterday, buying new clothes.

SHEILA

He feels dirty because of the ugly painting he made!

Then I told her about how Sholem had gone about making his ugly painting—­making a list of all the things he found ugly, and putting them in a painting.

Margaux shakes her head.

MARGAUX

That's what I was afraid of. Sholem should have been ugly with all of his heart—­from his center, not from a list!

SHEILA

I know! He also told me he thinks you're in the middle of a painting crisis.

MARGAUX

What!
He
said
that? Oh my God, I'm so totally
not
having a painting crisis! Just 'cause I don't automatically have respect for paintings. But Sholem
does.
He's so reverent:
Oh, it's a painting!
Well, so
what
? Frankly, I'm surprised by his total interest in it.

SHEILA

But that's natural, isn't it, for someone who's a paint­er to be interested in paintings?

MARGAUX

I'm interested in
meaning
, not paintings. Paintings can be pretty meaningless, you know. Like, it's insane! I want to create complete meaning in art that's even better than po­liti­cal meaning! And Sholem wants to make the most flawless paintings in the world. And you—­you want to be the human ideal! ­We're crazy. We all want such big things!