* * *
We went for coffee, returned, rehearsed some more. Further exclamation marks were trimmed, and Misha was able to appear less obviously bored when discussing financial trends. Then it was dark. The radiator had quieted hours ago, and the room was chilled. Misha switched off the projector, closed the windows. He gathered the metal detecting wand, his Walkman, my hand. Together, we descended the stairs and emerged onto the street, where Misha fitted headphones over his ears. I did the same. It was that sort of night, that sort of mood, when we were in need of Brahms. We walked in silence. I wished that it would snow. We passed the Turkish baths. The doors opened, and bathers emerged. Eucalyptus billowed down the street. Lanterns splashed the walkways in Washington Square. Misha gripped my bare fingers in his gloves. He gave my hand a squeeze. I felt so close to him, and also a little afraid.
11
I spent the night in sleepless deliberation, wandering the streets. By the time I reached home, it was Tuesday, and I’d come to a decision: I’d visit the gallery after all, see the pictures for myself. Just once. Then I’d set this whole business of the exhibition aside.
* * *
That morning, after Misha left, his pockets full of toast, I dressed carefully, sliding hangers to the side until I found a blouse I hadn’t worn in years. The stiff white bib hung like a dried flower in the sheath of the dry-cleaning bag. I reached for the shelf above and found a yellow silk scarf with a smattering of daisies. Why not? I draped it over my shoulders. When I was finished, I studied my reflection in the mirror. The blouse puffed up with shoulder pads. The silk scarf shone. I had almost masked the nervousness I felt.
* * *
I checked my email. No messages. I replied-all to my fiancé’s triumvirate:
Just wondering if you got my message!
Main question again is why you never told me about the pictures?
A response would be nice.
Thanks!
By the way this is Percy.
(Again.)
Percy Q.
Outside, on the street, couples filled the windows of every café, and this tableau, multiplied across storefronts, applied itself to lowering my mood. They nursed glasses of orange juice and mugs of coffee, gazed sleepily at plates of buttered rolls and hollandaise. A man in a window, his fork poised over a plateful of eggs, glanced my way, and I felt a loose seam within me zip. Then I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of a beautiful woman in a cornflower coat disappearing into a marble lobby. I felt myself moving in parallel worlds, two lives, one in which I was always on view, the other in which no one thought to look twice.
* * *
The train platform was filled with high-spirited people. I followed them onto the downtown car. On baby-blue seats, I listened to the music others streamed through headphones. None of it was Brahms. A child began to cry, and I wondered at its desperation. My stop arrived. I threaded toggles through my pink trench and emerged onto postindustrial Chelsea streets that I had long avoided. Things had changed. A small park claimed a corner. The warehouses had been made over and fitted with glass, and in reflection, people loitered. I paused to pay my respects at a small and makeshift shrine: flyers of the missing, pasted to the brick. In the photos, they posed at weddings and graduations, blew wishes at birthday cakes. A laminated Post-it rose above the array like an exhibit label: I never met you but I miss you. There were a number of these impromptu memorials, and the city was quietly disappearing them, citing public safety: the damp papers released, like slick sighs, to the streets, bringing pedestrians down. I took a cold sip of air. I thought of my psychic, how she had reached for me, and felt the same tightness in my throat. Then I walked on, down abandoned blocks, drawing nearer to the river. I walked until there was no one around and stood outside the tall glass doors, a little surprised that I wasn’t immediately recognized.
* * *
Inside, the gallery was open and white and silent, and I was the only viewer there. A brochure holder was fixed to the wall. I slipped a pamphlet from the stack. The glossy paper crackled … a provocative show that arrives a little too late, or perhaps too soon … I stuffed it into my purse. A woman behind a white enamel desk glanced at me. She said, encouragingly, Go on in. Then I felt obliged.
* * *
It is common knowledge how mutable a picture can be. An artwork changes with the light, the setting, the time and place. Would we look twice at Campbell’s soup cans, I wonder, if they debuted above a mantel in a living room? Similar transformations occur, of course, when moving from your pantry into a gallery. Which is to say that nothing could have prepared me to see the photographs on such a scale. They were supersized. Leviathan. Enlarged beyond what one would ever willingly inflict upon an image of oneself.
* * *
What a difference simply zooming in can make! I had missed these dimensions while slicing through the catalog. The frames were blown up to the billboard proportions of a Pollock and hung regularly as windows on the walls. The scale made the viewer feel small. I took a slow turn around the gallery. Windows onto windows—I fell through. The red room was sparsely furnished: a coat stand, a chair, a bed with a ribbon tied to a post. I did love a ribbon, I couldn’t ever bring myself to throw one away. Even today, when I receive a gift, a box of chocolates, a bouquet, I tie the ribbon to a doorknob or a post. And he was always buying flowers, I recalled. Sometimes for me. Sometimes for himself. I stood to the side of the picture and looked into the photograph from an angle, crouching to re-create more accurately the pillow-talk perspective from which I used to admire a very similar view. The Chrysler Building was distinct, it rose just so above the sill. I remembered it like a personal moon.
* * *
I had not loved that room when I was living there. I never love where I am, I would always rather be somewhere else. Now I missed those days when all my furniture was borrowed and the walls were red. How peaceful I looked, blown up, diffuse. Although it was rather public. I looked around the empty gallery. The receptionist was watching me from the corner of her eye. I placed a palm on my belly, below my ribs, and took long, deep breaths, quelling the midmorning nausea climbing up my spine.
* * *
Two women entered from the street. I turned with a jolt. They arrived in a flurry of sighs and adjustments and unbuttonings of coats, had similar movements and manners and hair that swooped and grayed. A mother and daughter, I thought, out for a walk. I wondered if they’d recognize me in tandem, the same way they rearranged their scarves, shed gloves. The daughter dived into brochures while her mother tapped across cement, leaning heavily on her walker. I watched her peer through her glasses at my body. She stared for a long while, as if the fact of me did not compute. I knew the feeling. She was looking into the final frame, in which I lay naked and alone in an empty room, below an empty window. Only the stars had been spared deletion. She clucked her disapproval. Her daughter rolled her eyes.
Mum, she said. It’s art.
* * *
I wondered what was taking them so long. Hey, I felt like shouting. That’s me! The daughter, for her part, ignored me completely. She wended through the room, wool overcoat folded neatly in her arms. I followed. I wanted to track her expressions. I wanted to be seen. Perhaps I stood too close—I held my breath when she caught my eye. I could have sworn a flash of recognition crossed her face. She looked at me as if I were someone she had known in the distant past. Then she glanced back at the photographs. I felt a little shock, as if I’d won a raffle. I was about to say something corroborating, such as I could hardly believe it myself. Then she turned on a heel and rejoined her mum. I watched her whisper something into the old woman’s ear.
What?
12
Once, in the eighties, a famous sculptor threw his much younger girlfriend, another artist, up-and-coming and Cuban-born, from the thirty-fourth-story window of the apartment they shared on Mercer Street. Ana Mendieta landed on a deli roof like a kind of human bomb. Perhaps the sculptor was afra
id, as some men are, that she would consume his art. His sense of self. Or perhaps, as he testified, they were simply drunk and careless with their lives: she slipped. Although, no matter how drunk the husband, how does a woman slip up and out a window so surreptitiously he hardly notices? The poor man, said all the sculptor’s friends, following his swift acquittal. He was made a scapegoat by the feminist mob. I knew of the affair in part because for years his work had sold at a premium. Everyone wanted to own a piece of a murderer’s mind. As for my fiancé’s show, beyond the fact that in the photographs I looked a little dead, a little dumb, the pictures carried no trace of violence. It wasn’t apparent he’d done anything wrong. I found it confusing, really, that critics had expressed any interest at all.
* * *
In all my experience of art, I could find no precedent for how to proceed. I might not have proceeded. One thing I had learned from the self-help author, however, is that from time to time a woman must take matters of publicity into her own hands. I would be the first to break the news: I was Persephone Q. I was curious, too, about my fiancé’s motives. Why, when he could have chosen anyone, any woman at all, had he used a picture of me?
* * *
In the back of my mind, there lurked the promise I had made to myself to set the exhibition aside. I meant to. But matters of aesthetic integrity were now at stake. The choice to present an ordinary woman in such gargantuan proportions struck me as artistically and exegetically significant. That the body lying on the bed was a real person the artist had known, an average citizen who buys her potatoes in the street, completely altered the interpretation spouted by the text on the wall. Was not a tension introduced, if the woman was mythically enlarged and at the same time everyday? Also, what did it mean to erase a lover from your past, elide both her belongings and her name? The hermeneutics went on and on. It was valuable, in the end, for me to come forth. A good gallerist could sell such a richly layered composition for upwards of ten thousand a piece, in which case there would soon be hundreds of thousands of dollars hanging on the walls. They might even sell one to the daughter here, who was at that very moment taking down the titles in a little notebook. Untitled 1, Untitled 2. I was no untitled. And yet, if a percentage of such a sale were to come my way, well—those were my belongings he was digitally expunging, after all.
* * *
I approached the reception area fully confident that my omission from the exhibition could be rectified efficiently, cordially, no trouble at all. It must have been an innocent mistake. My fiancé, absentminded as ever, would simply have forgotten to fill in some form. To fill me in on his art. An image of Claire, in her violet windbreaker, dashed through my mind, and I watched her go. I applauded myself on my neutral, placid manner, when, by most accounts, it would have been perfectly acceptable to indulge in a little angst. At the enamel enclave of the reception, a flurry of orchids rose from a vase, extending a subtle canopy over the desk. The blooms swayed softly as I cleared my throat. The receptionist looked up.
How can I help?
That woman in the photographs in there. She’s me.
Who?
Me.
She leaned forward in her chair, looking past my ear and into the gallery.
I’m afraid that’s not possible.
Oh, it is, I said.
* * *
I told her about the Chrysler Building, the ribbon, my view. I’d lived in that very room, I explained, the year before I moved in with my fiancé, a decade ago. He would have taken the picture then. And by the way, who better qualified to identify myself than me? You see what I mean, I said. The receptionist began to rearrange the papers on her desk, though I was fairly certain they were already in order.
Thank you for your concern.
You’re welcome.
I waited. I cleared my throat.
So, what do you propose we do?
Her face was blank. The pendulums of her earrings swung.
Maybe if you referred me to the artist himself…?
She thought for a moment.
No, I don’t think so.
* * *
I stood beneath the orchids as she explained. She walked me through the latticework of relative liability, how I was a liability they were not liable to take on. How it was against gallery policy to become involved in personal disputes.
But this isn’t personal. I am Persephone Q.
That really isn’t possible.
Why not?
It just isn’t the sort of thing the artist would do.
I spent every night looking at that view.
She gave me a weary look.
Honey, those pictures have nothing to do with you.
* * *
I was not the first one, she suggested, to react so strongly to a show. For this reason, it was protocol to refrain from sharing artists’ personal information with visitors and fans. Like yourself, she said. The staff was likewise not responsible for the models their artists employed. Except I’d never been paid, that was the whole point. This was a candid, private photograph. And it happened to be of me. Given the pace of media of late, news would surely travel. She knew how it was. I wondered what I should say when people came asking about the show, and how I felt about appearing in it. I stood at her desk, palms pressed to the enamel. I considered stripping right there in the lobby, for proof, but it struck me as not worth the effort. I was wearing a lot of layers, after all. And she was no connoisseur.
Why would I lie?
The receptionist shrugged.
People say anything these days.
* * *
I have to say, I was impressed. When I was working at the auction house, we prided ourselves on our visual and historical intelligence, cultivated capacious memories for facts; the information was forever at our fingertips. Office lunches erupted in debates for or against the influence of Caravaggio on Rothko, whether Surrealism was the beginning of the end. Personally, I was a defender of the Dadaists. My lunch mate, Constance, was an office star. She had a genius memory for art, had famously rescued a Dutch Renaissance work that had been misattributed before it came through our doors. The receptionist at the gallery, by contrast, didn’t seem nearly as sharp. And yet she was behaving as if I were the ignorant one. That was rather clever, I supposed. I reached out to touch an orchid petal, something real and benign. She grasped the vase with both hands and lugged it an arm’s length away. I looked at her. Her oval ivory face and hair that shone like wax. I felt sorry for her, really. She was a bit of an orchid herself, pretty, delicate, aloof. Decidedly out of reach. I had no doubt that this was the sort of thing the artist would do. This was my fiancé par excellence, and I was the woman on the bed.
* * *
The mother and daughter had by this point joined us in the lobby, drawn by our debate. They loitered, pretending not to listen. But since of course they were eavesdropping, I turned to them. The woman in the photographs, I said. Can’t you see that she is me? They blinked. The daughter rested the notepad against her chest in a gesture of mild shock. The old woman widened her eyes, and her thick glasses magnified them further still, revealing the pale blue of washed-out skies. That’s my old room, I said. I used to live there. That’s my bed, that’s me. Do you really think I’d forget? The lobby was very silent. All three women stared. I felt betrayed. The receptionist coughed politely. She took a few deep breaths, as if this were all very distressing, poor for her health, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. She announced that she would happily bring my complaints to the attention of the curators and the artist himself. And I was quite free to go to the press. That was my right. Meanwhile, I could have her card. She rose to present it over the precipitous edge of the desk. Her voice, soft and low, struck a lullaby note meant to placate those who might erupt at any moment. Only I don’t get angry with stupid people, I haven’t the energy for that. As I turned to go, she pressed into my hands yet another exhibition book.
Here, she said. Have one of these on
us.
13
I’m afraid my exit was less than alliance-forming. I turned on a heel and retraced my steps, past the victims’ shrine and the park and the newly planted trees, the trunks nestled tenderly in mulch. Outside an old warehouse, a rat scurried into the street. It looked around, then retreated behind a rubble heap.
* * *
I walked without aim or end in mind, as if walking itself might lead me to some new world of unanimous accord. Instead I arrived at NYU. In Washington Square, the fountain sprayed. A cello player was performing beneath the arch, scales scooping along the stone. The sun had emerged, and the benches were draped with people who seemed to me without worry. They rewrapped scarves, discarded coffees, covered one another’s mouths with mittens, stifling screams. I crossed the lawn to the law library, where, by way of an expired ID for an affiliate medical school (Yvette’s), I gained entry to the stacks. The grotto of the basement reading room was cool and dark. I sank into a carrel behind the polished walnut shelves and set to work in search of legal precedent.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 7