Free The Middle Stories by Sheila Heti Page B

eyes all aglow, looked back and forth from one to the other. One was so gruff and silent and thick, like a real man! And the other was disinterested and distracted and edgy, like a real man! She was falling in love with them both.
    The novelist, feeling violated for reasons he could not understand, stood up and left the table and went to his computer and peered in, and again saw the bug behind the screen. “Damn it!” he cried, pounding his fist into his desk. The poet looked dreary and did not respond.
    The woman said, “Please, tell me about your life. You must be fascinating. I have never known a poet before, except for one in high school. And I don’t even know if he’s still a poet.”
    The poet said darkly, “Don’t tell me that.” Then, “Come with me to the bedroom. It is my bedroom and I should like to show it to you.”
    The woman put down her fork and followed in behind. She was delighted. She felt so bohemian. She wanted to take off all her clothes.
    “Good,” he said, turning on a lamp. “You can see now on my wall two letters from Al Purdy, telling me I am good but not good enough.”
    He sat on the bed which was low to the floor and spread apart his legs and looked up at her as she walked around the narrow space, fingering all the things.
    “That is a picture taken of me when I was in Poland. I was a professor.”
    “You look very Polish here.”
    “I know.”
    He lay back on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, hands adjusted behind his head. “Do you smoke?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Please go into the next room and get a cigarette from my novelist roommate. He should have a pack beside him on the desk. Tell him it is for me; he will understand. If he refuses to give you one or throws a fit, leave the room at once. Sometimes it bothers him to be interrupted while writing.”
    The woman left the room and walked down the hall and saw the novelist hunched before his computer, deep in his chair, pressing his fingers to the screen. “Come,” he said, when he heard her approach, and she moved toward his desk and placed her hands upon it and leaned archingly forward. He put one hand on her ass, felt it shifting beneath her dress.
    “Do you see a bug?”
    She held her breath, did not move. Then she looked evasively away and said, “I have come here to get a cigarette for the poet. He says you’ll understand.”
    “Sure I understand.” He somberly pulled two cigarettes from the pack and gave them to her. She left the room and walked numbly through the hall toward the poet, and on the walk she remembered a dream. “I dreamed once I was in a room with other people.”
    When the poet saw her he sat upright on the bed. “Close the door,” he said. “The novelist gets very jealous.”
    She closed the door and sat down beside him. She put the cigarettes in his hand. He looked at them dumbly. She wanted him to throw his leg across her, push her down on the bed, slap her and rape her hard.
    “Two,” he said. “He must like you.”
    “Yes. He touched me on my bum.”
    “Let me see.”
    She lay down on her stomach and he examined her through her dress.

THE SORT OF WOMAN FREEMAN LOVED
     
    FREEMAN TOOK THE woman with the good body and drove and drove in his squat yellow car all the way to a country parish where he married her. Though she seemed at the time to be smiling, if he had looked closely he would have seen a trace of exasperation.
    They settled in Manshire, where she told him, on their first day together in their brand-new house, that she was bored already and if he couldn’t provide her with entertainment she’d be forced to run away. Her name was Sally. There were silly little dreams Sally had that she mistook for grand possibilities; this was her central failing.
    One Saturday morning in June, after the newlyweds had been living in their dreary little bungalow for three months, a salesman came to their door and introduced himself as Eli. It was his job, he said, to give people the