The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  qwerty123: how often do you have to, you know…?

  Fantabulist: if wondering, fuck yes it hurts.

  JSTORED: oh, hun. come back when ur 18!!

  I sighed. I hadn’t felt eighteen in weeks.

  * * *

  I opened Napster to see how my favorite users’ libraries were coming along. I liked peering into other people’s hard drives, other people’s minds (stealing, Misha said). Onyx123 stocked songs by the musical wing of Neue Slowenische Kunst. I looked them up. Albums stored in others’ libraries migrated into mine. I wondered what, to Misha’s algorithms, my browsing history implied.

  * * *

  When Misha returned, the kitchenette displayed the evidence of my abandoned search. The screen was filled with Viking shipwrecks discovered along the Nova Scotian coast, the credenza was replete with onions, whole opalescent piles, and I was at the sink, sharpening my knives. He stood for a moment in the doorway, bucket and wand in hand. Is everything all right? I held up the silver yield of my errands for him to admire. I was well on my way to becoming a cook, I announced. Or at least a sharpener of knives. Misha took my wrists and gently guided them to the table. He’d left for the Rockaways at dawn, now he kissed me and I breathed him in: onions and sea and salt. I leaned into the fact of him. His coat was cool against my cheek, and when he spoke his words muffled in my hair.

  Don’t be mad, he said. But just now, I’m afraid I am committing us to the poetry reading again.

  * * *

  Often, when Misha returned from the Rockaways, I liked to sift through his winnings with him to assess the value of what he’d unearthed. Antique lighters. Spoons. Once, a tiny thimble. That evening, however, I was annoyed. I had a great deal of affection for the self-help author, but her poetry readings were a bimonthly phenomenon I took great pains to avoid.

  Misha! I said. Didn’t you walk quietly?

  He glanced at the door and lowered his voice.

  She is always in the stairs!

  * * *

  This was true. The self-help author really was always in the stairwell, on her way to get the mail or a gallon of milk, haul laundry to the laundromat, and this meant we often passed her on our own way out the door. She was a woman of presence, and had a way of making people flustered. She made me flustered. Still, I was annoyed that Misha, flustered or not, had accepted her invitation, especially since we’d developed specific protocols for how to politely decline. They dragged on for hours, these readings. There really was no “popping by” for poems. This dance of invitations extended and declined was made all the more difficult by the fact that sometimes I needed to “pop by” the self-help author’s on a Sunday afternoon to ask her opinion about the rearrangement of a chapter, or to clarify a passage in book two, chapter ten. I had learned my lesson, in other words, about living above one’s boss: you are always on call.

  * * *

  Misha turned toward the door. I will tell her it is a mistake, he said. Then his eyes rested on the package. He paused. Intrigue clouded his face.

  What’s this?

  * * *

  I reached for the envelope and held it close. Of course the package wasn’t Misha’s. I was seized by a feeling of protectiveness, as if he might do it harm. There was a time in childhood when I lived for the mail. The nearest mall was across the border, in Quebec, and we did most of our shopping by catalog, knew the mailman by name. Perhaps it was some sense memory, then, that caused me to cling so jealously to what I felt was mine. I turned the package round. This particular envelope was too heavy for a nightgown, a Buddha, or anything else I might have ordered for myself back when the post was still supreme, and I held it delicately, in case, in my insomniac delirium, I had impulse-ordered something made of glass. Who knew what desires my subconscious might express in the well-stocked aisles of the web? I was afraid to think what Misha might find, were he to open it.

  It’s for the self-help author, I said. I was actually just bringing it to her now.

  * * *

  Misha studied me a moment, pail swinging from his hand. He brushed the hair from my face.

  Babe, he said. You look a little dazed.

  6

  After so many years, you’d think I’d have internalized a bit of the self-help author’s advice. Be honest, she said. Communicate. Say what you mean. Perhaps it would have done Misha and me some good, I thought, as I descended the stairs, package in hand, to listen to my employer on occasion. One of the very first rules she set for readers (and which I edited, for clarity and style) was to schedule time for sex. Misha and I, for our part, hadn’t scheduled a single rendezvous in our lives. Arousal for us was an unpredictable if synchronized phenomenon, and lately it wasn’t really a phenomenon at all. On the landing, I pressed against the wall to make room for two men carrying a small mattress up the stairs. I lingered, listening to their progress as they disappeared overhead. One floor. Two. I tried to imagine Misha assembling a crib. He was hopeless in practical matters, almost as hopeless as I. It was something I loved about him.

  * * *

  That particular evening, the self-help author was dyeing her hair a shade of cherry-blossom mauve. Her door was ajar, and I breezed in. Percy, is that you? Where have you been? She emerged from the kitchenette. Her head was wrapped in cellophane, then again with a kerchief. In her hand, the mechanism of her metamorphosis: a box bearing the image of a woman whose long pink locks withstood a strong headwind. The self-help author presented it to me.

  How long am I supposed to leave it in?

  I squinted at the instructions.

  An hour.

  She checked the clock.

  Well, shit. Help me get this off?

  * * *

  The cellophane was wound like a roll of tape—it took a moment to find the end. Hurry, hurry, she said. But what harm, really, could a few extra minutes do? Her hair poured into the sink in a sheet of ruby red. I ran the faucet and massaged her scalp until the water ran clear. Her body wedged against mine, soft and comfortable. A kind of maternal impulse welled up in me. I shifted an inch away.

  * * *

  All my life, I had considered motherhood in only a vague, conjectural way, and in recent weeks had reached some tentative conclusions: I did not dislike children. In fact I reserved for them a great affection; I considered them my peers. For a while, in college, I’d babysat the son of an art history professor, and I often rested my hand on the crown of his head as we waited to cross the street. He liked to inspect my hair while we sipped milkshakes at the counter, an idle exercise he completed with curiosity and dignified disgust. Percy, he said firmly, when once he produced a leaf. You should really wash. He was a quiet, imperious child who enjoyed coloring and foosball. We got along just fine. With girls, it’s true, I did less well. I was hopeless around little girls. When I used to watch Harold’s niece for an hour or two in the afternoons, she’d install herself in my window with a slice of toast and a spoon and proceed to push the jam endlessly from edge to edge. After a long pause she’d look up with wide and tragic eyes to ask, Is it better to take one good bite with all the jam at once, or spread it evenly so every bite has just a little bit? What a relief to send her back across the hall. And that’s the thing, with a child of your own. There is no across the hall.

  * * *

  The self-help author, by contrast, lived a life of perfect freedom. How many women she kept cooped up inside of her, compressed, like an infinite series composed of many terms. There was the woman she’d been in Times Square in the years before the city cleared those theaters away. She’d lived out of a stolen car, run her own shop, resided for a time in an abandoned apartment alongside Tompkins Square Park according to squatter’s rights, and through those broken windows tossed Molotov cocktails during the riots of ’88. Now she was a successful author, a peddler of wisdom, formerly brunette and as of that evening sporting a peremptory shade of red. That December her books were selling better than we could have ever imagined. The publisher had registered an u
ptick following the attacks. I felt tenderly toward these new readers. I felt I understood. It is a constant struggle, to take one’s mind off things. No wonder self-help sells.

  * * *

  I helped her gather her fresh locks into a towel, twisting the terry cloth until it held fast. She reached for the box.

  It’s really red, isn’t it?

  I conceded.

  It’s pretty red.

  It doesn’t look like the picture at all.

  It’s certainly from the same genus, I said.

  I know there’s some reason I pay you, Percy, but lying isn’t it. Hold on, though. I have your paycheck.

  * * *

  She set to riffling through the papers on her desk.

  * * *

  I looked around the very clean room. The self-help author’s apartment was the mirror image of ours. The kitchenette to the left, the bed and bath to the right. The fireplace was just the same, its mouth closed off with bricks. Her bookshelves strained with atlases and poetry collections, catalogs from museums around the world. She made a point of selecting a few to display on the coffee table, for guests: When entertaining, one ought to have a conversation piece on hand. That evening she’d featured an anthology of Dickinson and a map of Prague, choices entirely appropriate for the poetry reading that she’d planned in one week’s time, and which, I regretted, Misha and I would not be able to attend.

  * * *

  The self-help author was still sifting through papers in search of my check. I was about to tell her it didn’t matter, I’d come back tomorrow, the check was not why I was here, when she upturned an overflowing banker’s box onto Dickinson and Prague. Receipts and coupons and pamphlets scattered. I descended to the carpet to help gather the debris. I put bills with bills. Contracts with contracts. I just saw it, she muttered. I know I did. She crumpled a flyer and tossed it into the trash. Hold on a second, I said. I retrieved the knot of paper from the bin, smoothed it flat: environmental-protection spam. Back on hands and knees, I reached beneath the sofa and found printouts of emails I had sent, mock-ups for the covers of her books. I’d tried to explain we didn’t need to keep hard copies of emails, but here they were. The towel was slowly unwinding from the self-help author’s head and falling toward the floor, revealing her loose red locks, dark and wet. The color would grow brighter as it dried, and then she’d really be aflame.

  Ha!

  Triumphant, she produced a pale blue slip and raised it into the air.

  Here it is.

  Thanks, I said.

  * * *

  She stood, secured the towel. Then her gaze fell on the package, docked like an abandoned raft in the paper slough.

  What did you order?

  * * *

  It was exactly the question I had in mind. I lifted the envelope, held it to my chest. It was book-shaped, I decided. Oh, just an encyclopedia, I said. Of poems. The self-help author stared at me another moment. Her cheeks were pink, as was the outline of her face, tinged with quiet dye. It’s an Eastern European anthology, I said. Unabridged. Who knows how these improvisations came to mind? The self-help author was right: I wasn’t usually so quick with lies, or at least omission was more my forte. She invited me to bring the anthology to the reading on Sunday, pop by with a bottle of wine. I agreed. I was in the stairs, I was at home, where Misha was in bed, asleep, before I remembered I’d gone to tell her just the opposite: that we wouldn’t make it to the reading after all.

  7

  In the kitchenette, I plugged in the nest of holiday lights. Then I padded across the tiles and wrote a note, Cancel poems! and stuck it to the wall. There were other notes above the credenza: Insta-Ad; Misha’s presentation; sweet potatoes (??); Psychic when? They constituted a sort of telegraph station where Misha and I communicated back and forth, trying to connect. We overlapped for only a few hours in the early morning when he woke up, or in the evening when he came home, and so in the intervening day (or in my case, night) we scribbled annotations. Since I’d been gone, Misha had responded to one of mine: yes potatoes (the purple ones?). There were a few older notes that repeated the same message again and again, reverberating across the wall. Where did you go? Where did you go? I still didn’t know how to respond.

  * * *

  Beneath Misha’s presentation, a question appeared.

  you’ll come?

  I selected a pencil from the coffee mug.

  of course.

  I reread my response. It seemed to me terse.

  of course!

  Marriage, I thought, was quite possibly one long note to self, a work in progress constantly revised.

  * * *

  I wrote,

  i wouldn’t miss it for the world.

  Then I sat at the credenza with the package and slit the sealed flap.

  * * *

  Inside was a book. As I’d imagined. I unsheathed it from the bubble wrap. It was an exhibition catalog, and the name of a familiar gallery was splashed across the front. The artist on view was also familiar. I felt my stomach drop, and for once the nebula was not to blame. I knew this artist rather well.

  * * *

  I’d almost married him, in fact.

  * * *

  I do not believe in serendipity. I don’t think there are moments, of which so many people speak, in which a life irrevocably and neatly forks, like a line in your palm. I believe instead that the past returns to you in waves, crashing onto the shore, so that the ground on which you stand is always shifting, like a beach, imperceptibly renewed. What I think is that New York is a small city, in the end, equipped with some strange gravity that is forever pulling you nearer those people you’d rather avoid: you’re drawn back to the same places, the same games, ten years down the road. I was resigned, in other words, to the idea that my former fiancé and I would cross paths once again. I hadn’t expected it to come about in quite this way. I ran a hand along the title page. There was his name, unmistakable, serifed and in all caps.

  * * *

  I looked around my apartment as if through a stranger’s eyes. I had always considered my studio as a site of potential, a precursor to the sort of place in which I’d like to live. In this moment, however, it was simply a reflection of how things were. The walls were blank but for the notes, the shelves filled with Misha’s findings from the beach, onion slices languished in a strainer in the sink—I stuck them in the fridge. The whole scope of my life could be taken in with a single glance. I opened the book to consider, by contrast, what my fiancé had achieved.

  * * *

  The catalog was hardcover—a serious book for a serious debut. One hundred thick and glossy pages, heavy with ink. Well, I thought. How swell for him. After all, not everyone had the gumption to become a photographer so late in his career. I glanced again at the picture on the cover, a little relieved to see it was beautiful but boring, something I’d seen before: a nude woman asleep on a bed. I wondered if she was the woman he was seeing now. She had nice knees, I thought. They were smooth and blended with her thighs. I would have traded a great deal for unobtrusive knees like hers. I made a quick calculation in my head. She would have to be a lot younger than he was, even younger than I had been, when my fiancé and I first met. He was no artist back then.

  * * *

  And yet—

  THE EXHIBITION OF PERSEPHONE Q SEPTEMBER 12, 2001––MARCH 15, 2002

  A leaflet floated to the credenza when I cracked the spine. I held it to the holiday lights.

  Disclaimer: After the tragedy of the towers, viewers will no doubt approach these photographs through a veil of mourning. While the artist could not have foreseen the events of 9/11, these works anticipate with uncanny clarity the loss of the towers as well as the many complicated questions that have followed. An extraordinary debut from one of New York’s most promising photographers, The Exhibition of Persephone Q constitutes a profound exploration of privacy, memory, and the instability of truth …

  I set these explorations to the side.
>
  * * *

  I had not spoken to the provocateur in question for over a decade. Ours was a familiar story: he was older, and at the time I was too young, too malleable, in search of models for how to live. It was all so long ago, and I wouldn’t say I had any particular resentment toward my fiancé now. I was glad for his success. Even still, one must always be suspicious of a superlative. There are many captivating debuts in this city—in any city—every year. Forays into the avant-garde. Much snubbing of tradition. New York is endlessly capable of swallowing them up. My fiancé, back when that’s what he was to me, was a financier who spent his free time with a camera slung around his neck. I wasn’t aware he’d had greater ambitions then.

  * * *

  I read:

  Photographs are so often received as factual records of the past, but here the artist draws our attention to the fragility of historical narrative in an age when digital editing software will soon become a staple in the average American home …

  On the computer, geometric forms folded in on themselves, drifting between the borders of the screen. I looked at Misha, asleep in our bed. Were we another demographic staple, an average American home? I glanced again at the image on the title page and frowned. I wondered if it wasn’t a little cheap to stake a debut on tragedy this way.