The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  In these photographs, the disappearance of major landmarks, including the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, and, most notably, the towers, challenges received ideas about America’s most recognizable skyline. The juxtaposition of these manipulated scenes suggests that any one of these variations might be the “original.” The viewer wonders: Which is “authentic”? Which is “correct”?

  A blue night tunneled down the air shaft. The hum of a television filtered through the wall, not quite masking the sound of the psych student’s retching as she expelled a very late lunch.

  Though the world within the photographs grows increasingly menacing and strange, the woman on the bed seems unconcerned. The passage of historical time, recorded in the destruction of the city out the window and in the deterioration of the room, has no effect on her …

  This seemed a little unfair. She was asleep, after all. Who knows what she would have felt if she’d woken up?

  * * *

  Ten years ago, I suppose I understood ambition less. Naïveté was my only talent. Perhaps this was still the case—I had trouble remembering that not everyone’s approach to life was quite the same as mine. People were after power, IRAs, two bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths. They worried about their children, fluoride levels, lead paint leaching into lungs. It never occurred to me to fear the water, the paint, the rest of the world, until it was too late, and I was already sick. When I was still with my fiancé, I was the one who had a claim to the arts, and he worked in a bank, structuring debt, which is to say he wasn’t a photographer at all. He thought of things in terms of p’s and q’s, where p parameterizes the likelihood of success, q failure, such that p + q = 1. Tickets for shows arrived months in advance. If we’re still together, we should go … I was curious and half in love, I waited around to see. I hadn’t been in the city long, wasn’t so long out of college. I was anxious to see how people lived. It mattered less to me what my fiancé’s view on things was than that he had one: If … We went to the movies, to the river, dismantled paper dosas. He opened a bagel and passed me his lox. I was spending more and more time with him, soon enough I didn’t have a bed of my own. If we weren’t together … was a phrase I picked up all on my own, only after we were engaged. I lay awake at night, slightly stunned. I felt the rest of my life closing in, like a lake narrowing into a stream. I was twenty-three, curious in a way that ran counter to love. I suppose curiosity won.

  * * *

  I turned the page. I hoped he was happier now with this woman on the bed. The curators had a point—she looked very stationary indeed. Reliable. The mattress was an exponent of inertia. The light was low and flattering, highlighting her knees.

  Who, after all, is Persephone Q?

  —The Curators

  I am slow to anger, fear, to recover purses stolen on the street or say the things I ought to say. Once, at Insta-Ad, I dropped a box of CDs on my bare foot from some height, and I stood there for a long moment, toes crushed, so transfixed by how a simple task could turn so utterly against me that the pain set in at an unaccountable delay. Ouch, I said. As a girl, in school, there was one year during which a very fine overcoat spent months on a hook by the classroom door. No one knew whose it was. It hung there solemnly through spring, until the faux-fur collar began to lose its shape, and it was only on the last day of school, when the classroom was empty, the walls stripped, that the coat took on an aura of familiarity. I lifted it from the hook, turned it around. My mother produced it from the closet for special occasions only. How could I not have noticed it was mine? So it was with the pictures. I’d been flipping through the book for nearly an hour before I realized. I looked at the woman. I looked at myself. Alone in the kitchen, I said it out loud.

  Hey, I said. That’s me.

  * * *

  It should not take so long to identify oneself.

  * * *

  And I’m afraid my capacity for self-recognition was even worse than that—I did not recall myself so much as I recalled the room. The walls were red. The sheets were white. The skyline asserted itself against the sky. The Chrysler Building was prim beneath its pearly crown. Ten years ago I too had fallen asleep to such a vantage. I was living in Brooklyn, by the river, where, out my window, on a very clear day, I had a Manhattan view. I imagined my fiancé standing in the doorway with his camera, the memory of an argument still fresh in his mind. On a coatrack in the corner hung a long silk robe, and there was no reason to think that it could not be mine. In fact I could feel it on my skin. I always felt fantastic in that robe. I was queen of my red room, in silk. And it dawned on me then that I, of course, was Persephone Q. That was my bed. My robe. My bright red room.

  * * *

  I flipped forward through the book. The same woman was on display over and over again, lying on the bed before the window. Her back, hips, thighs, and elbows were flush to the mattress. Her face was turned to the side. She’d fallen asleep looking across the river, just as, incidentally, I used to do. The eye traveled along the cliff of her jaw, the thick of the belly, the flat of the hips, the cunt. Nothing was left to the imagination except the woman’s face … The privacy of the scene positions the viewer in the role of “voyeur” … The purview reached her neck, her chin, the lobe of an ear, then stopped. She turned her head away.

  * * *

  Stranger things were happening in the world of the frame. The same photograph was reproduced multiple times, as previewed in the exhibition text, except that in each iteration the room was emptier, as if someone were stealing the woman’s belongings while she slept. Objects went missing: lamps, books, posters. Hooks came down from the walls. Furniture moved out, butterflies and moths moved in. Nature, it seemed, was winning. Moss crept along the baseboards at the edges of the room, and damp stains colonized the plastered red, deepening the walls to a sanguine maroon. Buildings disappeared outside the window, just as the curators had described. It was strange to see them go. There went the Chrysler Building, the Empire State. The towers. I felt a pang. Meanwhile, The woman remains unchanged, suggesting two distinct timelines within the very same picture. It was true. Through all of this, she lay alone in the soft white sheets, one limp arm extended, as if reaching for something on the floor. I sympathized. I, too, reached for things in sleep. I was known to scream and talk and laugh. It used to drive Misha mad. What’s so funny? he said. What is so sad?

  With her intelligent limbs and languid pose, the woman is unperturbed. Her prominence recalls ancient symbols of woman as mythic force, arbiter of nature’s powers in civilization’s domain. And yet, she is subject to the male gaze.

  I looked out the window. I looked at the book. I gazed at my intelligent limbs.

  * * *

  It slips away from you, your name. As a girl, I was Marie Antoinette, eating cake. I was tree-limbed Daphne in the woods with my dogs. In Spanish class at school, I was Lupita. In German, Wilhelmine. As an adult, I still felt startled when people said my name aloud. Misha called me Babe. With the self-help author, I was Doll. My fiancé had assigned so many endearments and diminutives that I felt like a whole collection of women bound into one, a composite of -lets and -chens and -kins, in addition to further derivatives and declensions I’d rather not remember here. Now he had renamed me once again. Persephone Q. For all intents and purposes, we were one and the same.

  * * *

  It was upsetting to think that my fiancé had held on to this picture. Perhaps it should have made me furious. And yet I looked so peaceful there, asleep, so very asleep that I looked dead. I rarely slept so well anymore. I looked more closely. There was a tenderness in the camera’s approach. It struck a respectful distance that belied a longing, as in the photograph of a building you admire in a city that is not yours. I paused. I am no building, I thought. No attraction among the bombed-out boulevards of Warsaw, rebuilt as if nothing had happened there. I tried to coax forth a flame of spite. Only I was not furious. I hadn’t known he’d looked at me this way.

  * * *

&nbs
p; I wondered what I would have written, had my fiancé’s show come to me with a request for copy.

  … intelligent limbs, re-gifting woman the voice that she has lost …

  Probably much the same.

  * * *

  One cannot blame the curators. I myself had been in this position once, writing texts for galleries and catalogs, prose that appeared on whitewashed walls as authorless as dew. At the art auction house where I worked when I was still with my fiancé, I sat at my desk and deferred to something like consensus truth, a voice that belonged to the museum itself. You might even say it came to me too naturally. The two women with whom I took lunch, by contrast, were subjectivity machines. They held very strong opinions about very specific things. At the deli, they specified (half spinach, half iceberg, feta, pepperoni, carrots, and dressing on the side). I was prone to ordering the number seven. They were complete and at ease in what seemed to me an uneasy world—they made the world conform to them. Over our midday salads, I listened as they planned the rest of their lives. One would work at the auction house for two or three more years to pay off her student loans before beginning an art consultancy of her own. Constance, top of her class, master’s minted on scholarships, had no student debt, and she was busy forging contacts at MoMA and the Met. Both planned to have children between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine. They were women of considerable accomplishments and energies, capable of long-term commitments so correlative with individual success. As for me, I had no such hopes. I was going home to wash dishes, have sex. I had no idea what my life would look like in five years’ time. The way my fiancé spoke of the future, it seemed as unpredictable as a living thing: If we’re still together … I wondered, sometimes, as my colleagues composed their final forkfuls of salad, if I was missing some gland generative of the will to get ahead. Or perhaps I was simply too invested in staying behind.

  * * *

  I had half a mind to call these women and resurrect our lunchtime powwows. It struck me that they would know exactly what to do. They would have opinions on the ups and downs of love, the moral seriousness of pinching your husband’s nose, forcibly holding his breath; advice on caffeine intake and midwives and Lamaze, whether or not a nebula can hear a symphony played on computer speakers pressed against the womb. They would know whether my fiancé deserved the extravagant praise the exhibition book lavished upon his debut show. But it had been ten years since I’d set foot in an office cubicle. I was sure these women, too, had quit.

  * * *

  It’s hard not to believe a gallery wall. I could still hear the cadence of that voice, like a radio left on in my brain. There were a great many radios left on in my brain. If, if … To which should I be attuned? I had moved on from that life, as regular people do, by way of selective suppression of the truth. Though I suppose if elision is just another way to lie, then I was guilty of this, too.

  * * *

  My knives were still scattered across the table, blades fanned. I reached for one and placed the point to the spine of the book, drawing along the binding the way I had learned to section the membrane of an orange. A glossy page fell to the floor. I retrieved it. I sliced another page with care. It seemed like the logical thing to do. The holiday lights nested on the credenza, and I held the photographs to their weak light. Separated from the book, the pictures seemed benign. I admired the craftsmanship. I admired myself. I sliced another page and studied the severed image of the woman in her decaying room. For a moment it seemed she might be someone else. I was almost disappointed. She lay supine, breasts and belly profiled against the gray of the sky and the white of the bed. Flesh fell toward spine. She sank. I noticed the floral pattern of the pillow, the angle of the crooked lampshade by the bed—at least while the lamp was still there, before it was digitally ferried offstage. I looked for some sign of the small, reptilian scar that I carry like a stamp on my upper ribs, a vestige of the tubes that were once inserted to help me breathe when I was young. But the bedsheets rose so that you could not see. I was saddened to think that I could not recognize my body without the tattoo of the scar or some hint of my face. That I’d perennially underestimated my knees. I was no more qualified to identify myself, I thought, than any stranger might have been.

  * * *

  I did what one does in such a situation: I searched. Online, the pictures took an extremely long time to load. I typed in (“spouse” OR “girlfriend”) AND my fiancé’s name. I tried “Persephone Q” AND “who is the woman in.” Every query led me back to him. I was confused. The web was not wondering about the woman at all, despite the question the curators had posed. I searched “contact” AND “telephone” and found an email address. There were three, in fact. He could be reached via Yahoo, Earthlink, and AOL.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the night composing a note, addressed it to the trinity, bcc:

  Remember me? I’m the American who looks a little Slavic. Ha.

  It’s occurred to me I maybe look more American than I used to. Anyway.

  I’m sorry it’s been so long. I owe you a whole decade of Happy Birthdays: Happy Birthday, times ten!

  And congratulations! What a surprise to receive the exhibition catalog. Although I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t tell me about these pictures before. Maybe because you didn’t have my number? Or my name? Well, it’s right here, below, so maybe now you can add it.

  Here it is,

  Percy

  When I finished, I stood for a moment in the center of the room. The apartment was as still as it had been the night my mother’s serving bowl fell from the shelf, and I was more exhausted than I had been in days. I padded to the bed, where Misha was sound asleep. I watched his breath rising and falling in the sheets. I wished very much to wake him. I reached—then pulled away. For the first time since I had pinched his nose, I lifted the blankets and slipped in beside him. Folding my arms firmly across my chest, I composed myself a simple lullaby: I will not harm, I will not harm. I lay awake for what seemed like hours, vigilant.

  8

  I woke up in a terror and looked at my hands. Who knows what they’d been up to while I slept, but I was glad to find them empty now, and that I was alone in the bed. I fell back into the sheets, relieved.

  * * *

  Outside, it was still dark. I could hear Misha in the bath, washing his face. The same sounds as every morning drifted into the room: the little gulp he made when he cupped his hands and splashed away the soap. He emerged, zipped into multiple layers of down to protect against the Atlantic spray.

  You’re awake.

  I guess so.

  He looked down at his wool socks.

  Do you want to come?

  Maybe not today.

  * * *

  Misha slid four slices of rye into the toaster. I watched the wires orange. Out the window, in the air shaft, a fine powder glimmered. The first snow! It was almost enough to make me change my mind about accompanying my husband to the Rockaways. That I never went to comb the sands with him was a source of guilt. Then I saw it wasn’t snow at all, but a fine trail of flour. The white bag soon followed, drifting to the square of cement below.

  Misha, what if we moved to California?

  He nicked idly at the butter with a knife more appropriate for deboning chicken thighs.

  Think of the beaches, I said.

  He shrugged.

  I cannot drive.

  * * *

  Many people, recently, had thought of moving away. They pointed to security alerts of yellow and red and orange. The anthrax. The attacks. My reaction had always been the opposite: The threat was out there, so we ought to stay in, stay put. Look at the data, I said. We’re overdue for war. Look at the data, Misha replied. You are almost always safe. Meanwhile, probabilities hovered over Times Square like smog. I remembered the sirens, the radios, the commotion down the hall when the internet news stuttered, then crashed, as the second tower brought it down. I’d gone downstairs to borrow the self-hel
p author’s phone and found her cradling an armful of thorns: she’d gathered all the cacti from the window boxes, as if to protect them from the fumes. I dialed Misha to no avail. Hello, you’ve reached Insta-Ad … It would be just like him to take a downtown detour on a weekday whim. He was too curious, too receptive, too accommodating of a world out to take advantage of him. Then he was there, at the door. He’d walked sixty blocks. His bed at Insta-Ad was far away, separated from the city by sawhorse barriers and the strobe lights of police cars. For days we lay on the floor upstairs, listening to our Discmans. The apartment was mine, soon enough it was ours. Misha never really left.

  * * *

  The toaster chimed. He fished in the baskets with a fork—the ejection pedal had lost its leverage long ago. He retrieved a slice, wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped this, like a ticket, into the pocket of his coat.

  Misha, I said. You’ll burn your hand.

  He kissed my forehead.

  I’ll see you at noon, he said.

  * * *

  That morning, I tried hard not to think about the exhibition. It took some work. I walked Misha to the train. On the way home, I bought potatoes, selecting the tubers carefully, one by one. I took my time. There were no blue ones. I chose the red. I paid the vendor exactly, counting out the change.