* * *
I’d been avoiding the hospital of late, now that I was beginning to show. My veins adorned my chest in a maze of alarming blue. I’d been gaining weight, as Misha said, though I subsisted mostly on saltines. I hadn’t seen Yvette in weeks, though she was my oldest, my closest friend. We were an unlikely pair. She put her confidence in protocols and moral flowcharts: This is what you do, what you don’t. The Hippocratic Oath. I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm … After my fiancé and I split, I’d sat in her kitchen, drinking tomato juice, as she set about separating our actions like fallen pieces on a game board, bishops from pawns, red from black. We were both guilty, by her assessment. You didn’t deliver life-altering news in a letter, as my fiancé had. You did not show up to someone’s apartment unannounced, after you’d already moved out, as I had done. Above all, she said, you didn’t break off an engagement with the casualness of going for a walk. I loved her anyway.
hey are you around? there’s something i want you to see
Her screen name flashed from idle yellow to active green.
(typing…)
brb
* * *
I watched the chatbox, willing her return. The roach shuffled behind the stove. How many times had Yvette seen me sleeping, changing, padding around the dorm in a towel, putting on my bra? We used to trade clothes, Yvette and I. I marauded her closet whenever I had an interview, she plundered mine when we went to the bar. I remembered her leaning against my dresser while wearing my skirt, a faded floral print, and looking down the length of her marvelous legs. I’d rather not look like myself, just for a night, she said.
* * *
The computer chimed.
tmrw?
yes! it’ll only take an hour
* * *
My reflection was faint in the window of the kitchenette, cast in the blue light of the screen. Yvette knew me almost as well as I did myself. She’d have to recognize me.
17
I slept for sixteen hours. When I woke up, in a panic, I leapt immediately from the bed, relieved to see that Misha was already gone. On his pillow, a Post-it note: See you tonight, for poems? I added a smiley and taped it to the wall. Then I sat at the computer and entered “eleven weeks” AND “what to expect.” Yvette and I had planned to meet at the gallery in the afternoon, and I had a few hours yet. I read about my veins, my feet, the hampered ability to take a shit. The symptoms went on and on, and yet sudden acts of violence against your husband was not one.
* * *
In the air shaft, a string of lights had appeared overnight; it sank through the shadows like a slender flame down a magician’s throat. I watched the pale torches tap against the brick. I messaged Yvette: see you soon. Then I slipped on a coat. Outside, it was just beginning to snow.
* * *
From Misha, I had learned a cardinal rule of the start-up world, adopted after the dot-com bust: entertain the worst. At Insta-Ad, everything was calculated according to a weighted average, and the most important thing to weigh was the greatest failure that could possibly occur. This meant that with a 10 percent chance of losing a million, 90 of making off with a hundred thousand for oneself, estimated earnings left you ten thousand in the hole. The key to such calculations, of course, was that even an infinitesimal probability of losing everything could tip outcomes toward the negative, making your prospective project a very bad gamble indeed. As I walked to the train, head down and hood raised, avoiding flurries, reflections, the stray passerby’s gaze, I performed a little estimate of my own. There was an iota of a chance that the receptionist and the mother-and-daughter pair were in fact correct: the woman in the photographs was not me. This iota-sized coefficient, however, applied to an outsized risk. To pursue the cause in error—to insist that I was Persephone Q, when in fact the woman was someone else—meant veritably misidentifying myself. And to do so in front of Misha, my fiancé, the public jury of the internet, only amplified the estimated loss. The whole world would respond with one of Misha’s shrugs. The thing to do, I resolved, was reduce the probability that I was wrong to zero. And this struck me as not so difficult—certainty was so close.
* * *
I’d borrowed Misha’s jacket. It was too large for me, too blue—my usual trench was pink—but it offered breakfast complimentary and continental: I reached into a pocket and found a slice of toast; in the opposite pouch, an orange. I imagined my fiancé breakfasting in some regal teahouse along the park. He must have heard by now of my continued insistence, and yet he refused to entertain the truth. His email slammed like a storm door in my thoughts: Luck—I don’t usually take pictures of Americans. This was the problem with communication online. Everyone was so accessible, trackable, and yet, like a pop-up, easily dodged. In a way, email wasn’t intrusive enough. The web diverts unwanted women into folders full of spam. A pay phone stood a few blocks from the entrance to the train, and I wedged myself through the accordion doors. I’d used this phone only once before, after Harold disappeared, and it was Yvette I’d called. Now I punched in my fiancé’s number—what had once been my number—and slipped in the coins. A prerecorded operator informed me she could not complete my request. With a wave of anxiety, I wondered if he’d moved, bought himself a house in Berkeley, like Miłosz. Then I dialed again, and the call went through. The ringing rolled into the signal to record. I hung up quickly, suddenly afraid to hear his voice.
* * *
It was a bit of a struggle, extricating myself from the booth. I stumbled into the street. A passing mother took one glance at me, then pressed her child against her thigh. I wanted to tell her I had a child, too. They hurried into the snow.
* * *
Underground, downtown, past the naked corner now stripped of its paper shrine. I met Yvette in the street. She’d arrived in her mint-blue scrubs and opera coat and not in the mood for art at all. I hoped this wouldn’t bias her response.
So, she said. What’s this about?
* * *
Yvette had a way of upturning my hypotheses, rendering them null. I had told her nothing about the exhibition, and so she had no idea of the treatment she was about to receive. Her visit to the gallery was a sort of blind experiment, as the hospital might say. We walked west. At the gallery steps, I paused. I cupped my hands to the glass and peered through the doors. The same receptionist was there, at the enamel desk, beneath her canopy of orchids, and I had no desire to repeat the scene from a few days before. Abruptly, I pulled away. So here’s what we’ll do, I said. You go in, I’ll stay. Then, when you come out, we’ll talk about what you think you’ve seen. Yvette stared at the door. Her dark hair was loose beneath her cap, and snowflakes settled in her curls. Low violet bruises bloomed beneath her eyes from lack of sleep.
Percy, she said wearily. What did you do now?
Nothing.
She studied me a moment.
Well, you look like shit.
* * *
She disappeared inside. I stood on the sidewalk, obscured by snow, counting down from ten over and over, like one of Misha’s loops: do i = 10 to 1; n = i; output; end. I counted the other visitors who entered. Three. Five. Eleven. I tried to catch their eyes as they came and went. But they were absorbed in the tops of their shoes, in each other, in the hazardous descent of the snow-glazed steps. I ran my loop again. As I waited, some of Yvette’s more recent accusations returned to me: Who gets engaged and married in a single day? I pushed these thoughts aside. I watched a group of art students, college-age, file through the door. A girl draped to her knees in leather reached into her knapsack and produced a dollar. Here, she said. I looked up, surprised. Oh, that’s all right. The bill fluttered between us in the snow. I admired her persistence. I gave in. Thanks, I said.
* * *
When Yvette reemerged, I fell in beside her. Together, we set off toward the train. The warehouses passed in silence beneath the thick gray sky. Deflated bicycles claimed signposts, rims flush to the cement.
&nbs
p; So, what did you think?
Yvette shoved her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat.
Give me a second, she said.
* * *
On the train, we slumped. Yvette uncapped a tube of lip balm, applied it, handed the cartridge to me. I had a habit of accepting on reflex whatever Yvette offered. Sometimes it seemed that’s all our friendship was, one long one-way street. I slicked on the gloss. On an advertisement overhead, a salivating pup chased a coupon for pet food, redeemable online. I wondered how it was they tracked the impact of those ads, absent direct clicks: if purchase then n = 1; else … I turned to my friend.
* * *
Did you notice the artist?
Yes.
And the woman in the photographs?
Yvette looked into the woolen palms of her gloves.
It doesn’t not look like you, she said.
I told her how the exhibition book had arrived at my door, unmarked. How I’d opened it late at night to find my furniture, my walls, my view. The red was a red you never forget. I told her it happens sometimes, in life, that you fail to see yourself as you are. And then, all at once, you do.
That’s my room.
Yvette thumbed a highlight of gloss from her chin.
Even if it was, what good can come of insisting that everyone know?
You don’t believe me.
That’s not true.
Then why won’t you agree?
It’s just—it seems a little unlikely.
* * *
The train careened through a turn. I spoke over the shrill cry of the tracks, and this lent an unpleasant, exclamatory quality to everything I said next. That’s the difference between you and Misha, I told her. He respects what I think. I expounded on the foundations of love, and how its cornerstone was exactly what Misha and I had: profound agreement. I told her I didn’t care about prudence or good sense or planning ahead. For once, I did not want to follow her moral flowcharts to the end. She ought to simply take me at my word. Yvette studied the pet food ad for many stops. Then she shook her head.
Sometimes, Percy, I think you can’t be happy with what you have.
* * *
We crawled to a halt at Manhattan’s eastern edge. Aboveground, I followed her to the hospital, walking north on York. The shops thinned and the streets cleared. The wind came in off the river cold and sharp. Yvette tried to persuade me to see things from her point of view. She reminded me what I had been like when I was with my fiancé. You weren’t yourself around him, she said. You got competitive. Also kind of mean. I nodded. Only I seemed to remember it differently. I didn’t recall it being so trying—I had agreed to marry him, after all. But I suppose certain frames go missing from ten years of film. That I could concede. I trailed her through the hospital doors, where teams of doctors and other personnel glided across the linoleum sheen, crowded into elevators. Yvette checked her pager, pocketed it again. She had a few minutes. Do you want something to eat? she said. She stood with her opera coat folded over an arm, plain in her uniform. She was already distant, distracted. Part of me wanted very much to accept, to follow her to the cafeteria and, over a steaming slice of quiche, ask if the exhaustion, the nausea, the swelling I felt all over, as if my body were attempting to molt, if these things were normal after all. I felt like a tired child who’s been offered a bed. Yet there was something in accepting, I knew, that would amount to giving up, giving in, a quid pro quo agreement never to mention the exhibition again. I smiled.
No, thanks.
Yvette lingered another moment.
Are you sure?
I nodded. She turned to go.
Wait, I said. If it isn’t me, then who? Who is that in the pictures, in my very room?
Yvette placed a firm hand on my arm.
I don’t think it matters now.
* * *
Defeated, I looked around at the sea of interns sleepwalking through their shifts in scrubs. They swept me up in a current of green, deposited me in the ER waiting room. I took a seat. I was inclined to stay here until Yvette’s break, when I might reconcile our perspectives. I always found it distressing when she and I did not see the world the same. There was a time, in college, when we, too, had agreed profoundly. We made unanimous decisions about when to study, what to eat, whether wooden sandals could be worn with socks (indeed). Things had changed. I wished she’d lived with me back when I was the sole occupant of my red room, and so borne witness to that crimson era. I drew into the hood of Misha’s jacket, depressed. The ER was sparsely populated. There was a TV mounted to the ceiling, and I tuned in to a documentary on British royalty. I watched a princess emerge from a car, signature clutch pressed to her chest, concealing cleavage. My own breasts protested against the zipper of the otherwise enormous coat. Across the room, a woman rocked in a chair nailed to the floor as if for the express purpose of keeping her in place. She reached into her purse, extracted a hot dog wrapped in foil. It had all the fixings: mustard, onions, relish. She ate. She withdrew a second hot dog from the bag. Then another, another. At least four more frankfurters emerged, and, transfixed, I watched her consume them all before I realized it was time to go, Yvette would not be coming back.
18
I went for a long walk. Out the sliding hospital doors, heading west. Ambulances faded. Delis disappeared from corners as the rents began to rise. Doormen guarded awnings, and the avenues grew wide. The side streets distended rarefied stoops and delivered me, finally, to museum row, where kiosks claimed the curbs, pumping halal steam.
* * *
It was a long time since I’d been to the Met. I no longer knew where anything was. I used to visit on some of my more ambitious wanderings at night, back when Harold still lived across the hall. I liked to sit on the steps, long after the galleries had closed, and watch the mansions across the avenue for flashes of life. It was never long before a policeman came to shoo me away. Now I passed through the double doors and into the lobby, where I lowered the hood of Misha’s coat. Flower arrangements erupted from the keystone of a vase. A mother dragged her daughter, a little flower herself festooned in fuchsia hat and bow, down the hall to see sarcophagi. The museum was filled with children at this hour, and I tried to imagine the apartments from whence they came: juice boxes in the cupboards, small stools to reach the sink. At the ticket booth, I paid what I wished. Then I went in search of period rooms. I used to love those preserved interiors, whole rooms imported from afar. I went whenever I had the urge to visit someone else’s home. In the American Wing, I found Europe instead: a bedroom exhumed from the ashes of Pompeii. It had been dusted, deconstructed, airlifted, to appear among the galleries frescoed in red and trompe l’oeil. I longed to crawl into a Venetian four-poster in the following display, replete with matching bedroom set, and close my eyes. The wallpaper was reminiscent, I imagined, of the silver algae in the Grand Canal. Tourists lifted cameras into sight lines. So that’s what it was like. The object labels agreed:… curators used to aim to create a “period feeling,” such as in the Nur al-Din room, in order to capture an emotional or atmospheric truth. More recently, however, the standard has been to re-create each room in exact detail … In the Syrian reception hall, a fountain gurgled over tiles of olive, amber, toothy white, and velvet ropes barred entry. Because that’s the thing, with fantasy. You have to stay on your side. I passed through a roomful of clocks competing for the hour in syncopated chimes, made my way outside.
* * *
At the edge of the park, I looked back into the glass greenhouse of the Egyptian Wing, where I caught a glimpse of the fussy bow. The little girl was splashing fuchsia in the reflecting pool. I turned up the path. The obelisk rose gray in the garden, blocking sun. How far it was from home.
* * *
Back at the apartment, I heard from Constance again. The phone rang, and I lunged for it. The news was not good. Honey, she said. Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake? I was sure. I insisted on the familiarity of the scene. The bed. The v
iew. I had lived there a whole year, I said, before moving in with my fiancé. She sighed. As far as I can tell, no one knows who the woman in the pictures is. Not even the artist himself. There was a long and awkward pause.
Sweetheart, she said. Don’t you have any evidence at all?
19
It was unsettling to think that so many of the people who mattered in my life didn’t believe me when I told them who I was. That is me, I said. It’s me in the photographs. No one seemed to value my conviction. Yvette and Constance were the most perceptive women I knew. I admired them both for being so incisive and opinionated where I was not. I knew they wouldn’t lie, not even by omission. And yet, while I would have readily deferred to them in nearly every other matter, I was sure that in this one instance they were wrong. I was reminded that the people closest to you suffer from a bias. They get used to your habits, used to your face. They hardly see you at all.
* * *
That evening, Misha and I attended the poetry reading. I put some effort into my hair. The self-help author greeted us at the door, her own locks offset by a bright green blouse. Thank you, love, she said, when I handed her the book. It has Miłosz, I pointed out. Her heels, leopard-print, clacked across the exceptionally clean floors as she ferried it to the shelves. The poets milled about the coffee table, snacking on cubes of cheese. We joined. These readings were organized rather like the clubs of which the ex–professional dancer spoke, by word of mouth, and so the crowd was always shifting. Only the self-help author knew everyone by name. She opened another bag of crackers and poured the rounds into a bowl. Misha, she said, put that wine here. Doyle, I saved your seat. Katherine, she said to a woman with a foam brace belted darkly around her middle, how is the back? Buck was a regular not even I could forget. He’d suffered a flash of frostbite the year before, and the sore was slowly tracking its way across the pale bridge of his nose. Buck, the self-help author said when he arrived, you have got to get that checked. He hesitated in the doorway, leaning on his cane, then shuffled unevenly across the room, making a beeline for the Brie.
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 9