The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  * * *

  The poets had been in New York all this time. They grumbled about how the city had changed, how they missed the metropolis of decades past. They mourned the sixties, the eighties, the bars that had closed. The sailors, they said, had disappeared. As had the docks. They’d seen everything, these poets, and perhaps this was what made them so ruthless when it came to judging verse. There was a high bar for audience applause, and if a poem was no good, it was met with silence. I don’t think you could have paid me, really, to read a poem of my own. I touched my hair. I missed saltines. Misha and I were among the very few not actively practicing lines, and I watched the nervous woman at my side mumble stanzas to herself. She paused now and then to slip a note card from her breast pocket. Her eyes darted across the text. Boots of lead, she said softly. Boots of lead. Boots of lead. The poem returned to the folds of her floral shirt as she continued reciting under her breath, lips moving soundlessly over the rhymes.

  * * *

  I must have been staring. A cracker broke in my hand when I missed my mouth and hit my chin. I went searching for the crumbs. I wore a mauve velvet dress that billowed over my belly, though the bust was tighter than it had ever been. When I glanced down, my own breasts seemed to me obscene. Misha whispered as I fished in my bra.

  What are you doing?

  Stand in front of me.

  * * *

  When I glanced up again, cracker retrieved, Doyle was sitting in his usual chair in front of the buffet, looking noticeably subdued. Normally he sang under his breath. He wore pastels. Often he had the final say. Today, however, his suit was deliberately drab, and when he spoke he was pensive, fingers tented beneath his jaw. He was saying something about the trains, the long tunnels at Times Square that he took to work. I feel so unsafe, he said. Katherine and the other readers resounded agreement, replaced celery sticks on paper plates. Misha cavalierly crunched a carrot.

  I wouldn’t worry, he said.

  * * *

  I was familiar with Misha’s opinions regarding American fear. In the weeks after the towers fell, when we were mostly lying in my bed, trading discs and Discmans, he had expressed confusion. The national response streamed into our room through every available outlet: the radio, the telephone, the muffled murmur of the pundits on the television next door. Even Misha’s friends at home, in Sofia, were consuming American footage, American news. The radio reported the national traffic, the bumper-to-bumper queues that snaked through the plains like kudzu as SUVs lined up outside of gas stations, for gas. I wondered what I’d missed. Where was everyone driving, that they found it so crucial to refill the tank? Misha, flat on his back in my bed, slipped his headphones from his ears. To Americans, he said, war is always elsewhere. Maybe they were driving there. He stretched his arms over his head, as he did whenever he was lost in thought. The sun was bright in the sheets. I didn’t know if he was right or not. I found it difficult to generalize about my country. That was the trouble—I deferred. The radio purred. I listened to the absence of the rumbling of trains. Maybe it was true, as Misha said, that war took place abroad, but at the moment it felt near. Or nearer. Or at least, in the rest of the city, the subject was still raw. Lower Manhattan was raw, a whole block ragged and agape, and the self-help author’s apartment was crowded with poets who were still struggling to assign verse to the rupture of that day. It wasn’t exactly the place, I thought, for Misha to expound on his personal views. I reached for his shoulder to tell him to leave things be—were we not here for poems?—but he was already too far along. You live in one of the safest places on earth, he was saying, in one of the most powerful empires ever known. He waved a spear of cheese cubes like a tiny plastic sword.

  This is one of the safest cities around.

  Doyle raised his eyebrows.

  Have you ever walked these streets as a black man?

  Obviously not, Misha said.

  I was downtown that day, said someone else.

  So was I.

  Another poet wondered, in a whisper, Where is this guy from?

  Misha flourished his cheese kebab.

  Statistically speaking, the trains are very safe. So I am only saying there’s no need to feel afraid of additional terrorism on subways—

  * * *

  The woman who’d wondered as to Misha’s origins sat back in her seat. Katherine crossed her arms over the straps of her body brace, as if daring Misha to go on. I looked to the corner, where the self-help author was still pleading with Buck, exhorting him to find help for his sore. I placed a hand on Misha’s arm.

  Misha, I said quietly. Maybe not right now.

  * * *

  The self-help author tapped a spoon against a glass, sent around a bottle of wine. Then the poems commenced. A tensile silence settled over the cheese as, one by one, each poet stood to read. This is a poem about a mermaid, a man began. And by mermaid I mean a woman I once loved. The woman with the floral blouse and note cards in her pockets, thoughts of leaden boots, lulled the room into an iambic dream. A Plank in Treason broke / And I Fell down, and down. That’s plagiarism, Doyle said. But it was a nice poem, in the end. There were nature poems and odes. A man with multiple totes hanging from either shoulder stood and read from the wrinkled receipt in his hand: Listen to the waters laughing / Feel the moonlight hug you / Look up into a diamond sky and countless miles of blackness / Listen, feel, look and watch / Taste the sweet summer air / These are the things of the night / To which nothing can compare.

  * * *

  Misha’s applause was the only sound in the room. I like it, it’s simple, he said. Too simplistic, Doyle replied. Who would ever disagree with a poem like that? The self-help author interrupted. Since when was polemic the purpose of an ode? I glanced at the atlases on the walls. The whole world was at our shoulder blades. Across the room, Buck slouched in a stool, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, nose bent toward the anthology I’d brought. Each time he turned a page he closed his eyes and paused. I stared at the deep sore in the center of his face. It poured slowly over his features, like a lava spill, abutting the smooth skin of his cheeks. The wound had a gravity that drew me in. The room, the food, the atlases and snacks, the sound of other people’s voices, fell away. Buck must have sensed me staring. He opened his eyes, looked up from his poems. His gaze met mine. I had the feeling then that I had gotten it wrong. I had no such gravity, I thought, at the center of myself.

  20

  A whole week had passed without my making any headway against the exhibition. Ditto my fiancé’s email. The only real progress was with respect to keeping house—I’d developed a passion for keeping the apartment alarmingly pristine. The stove shone like a commercial. The floorboards were bright with wax. The whole apartment reeked of ammonia. No more cleaning, Misha said. Instead I cooked. I chopped and broiled and trimmed. After the poetry reading, I set to work on the ultimate audition of a cook’s ability to concassé: the ratatouille. Bowls crowded the credenza. I used all the bowls we had, in fact. The doors to the cupboards swung wide, the shelves within bereft, as if we’d been burgled. I rescued those onions from the refrigerator and finally reduced them into a sordid soup. It was tranquilizing, watching the translucent rings brown to a deep caramel. I found it pleasant to be with Misha. He was my only comfort at the time, the only person around whom I felt compos mentis—even if I was, to him, a threat. And this made it all the more important not to tell my husband about the other me, the one who posed on gallery walls. I didn’t want to lose him, too.

  * * *

  I stood at the credenza, thoughts still attuned to iambic verse, slicing plum tomatoes. Misha was on the bed, going over his accounts. He was sullen after the scene downstairs.

  Misha.

  Yes?

  I started to say one thing, then changed course.

  Would you say Bulgaria is Balkan or European? And if European, Central or Eastern?

  He chewed his pen.

  It’s complicated. Depends on who you ask.
/>   * * *

  I brought him a tomato steak doused with salt, sat on the edge of the bed. I felt tenderly toward my husband. I missed evenings like this. The two of us at home, working on our separate tasks. I lay back on the mattress, watched his ribs press against the cotton of his shirt as he swallowed. He jotted something on his palm.

  They have a point downstairs. But still, it is no reason to go to war.

  I don’t think anyone meant that, I said.

  What about all the ones who do?

  At least we’re not related to them.

  He nodded.

  I wonder if I’d feel differently if I had kids.

  I rose in a cool shock of alarm.

  What do you mean?

  Misha shrugged, reached for my thigh.

  I mean, who knows what is going through your mind once you are having a child?

  * * *

  He ran a hand through my hair, kissed me, drew his feet onto the bed. Cross-legged, he returned to his accounts. I folded my hands over the velvet bodice of my dress, suddenly distraught. It bothered me that, of the two of us, Misha seemed the one more naturally disposed to motherhood.

  * * *

  At three in the morning, zucchini peels slid slick as fish across the floor, Misha was in bed, and I was at the sink, wrapping a bandage around my thumb. One moment I had been whole and dexterous, and in the next a pink chasm burrowed, like a geological event, through the flat of my nail bed. I looked helplessly at the red isthmus to which the corner of my nail clung. I had half a mind to finish the job. Instead I wrapped it in a bandage, eliciting pain. Then I turned on the faucet and vomited into the sink.

  * * *

  On those rare evenings when I am feeling truly low, when not even the library, Encarta, Napster, beauty blogs, the self-help author’s website and message box, asking Jeeves or the AIM chatbot, when not even the porn star or the scientist can effect some improvement in my mood, I take refuge on the roof. The roof will remind you that in the grander scheme of things, you are doing okay. So Misha always said. Our building was seven stories tall and it was true that from this vantage the world was much improved. Outside, I breathed in the cool syrup of the night and felt my nausea calm. I nursed my thumb. The laundry I had hung the day before floated on the line, laced with snow. Misha’s sleeves tangled with mine. Bras lifted and fell like sighs. I caught one. The cups were half frozen and stiff.

  * * *

  I released a sweater from its clothespins and pulled it over my head. It was my mother’s, though I had been wearing it since I was young. Down below, Manhattan unfurled itself into 4:00 a.m. Traffic flowed through the avenues, soft and steady as waves. Misha had installed a lawn chair by the balustrade in the summer, and I reached between the plastic belts of the seat for the biscuit tin in which I kept a stash of cigarettes. Inside, a book of matches and three packs of Camel Lights. I had smoked sporadically for many years—what else is there to do, on late-night walks?—but after Misha moved in, my cigarettes had begun to disappear. I’d counter-hid them in this tin. I looked into the shallow basin now, lit a Camel, then immediately tossed it into the street. Leaning over the balustrade, I watched it flutter to the ground. I reached for another. Luxury Assorted, advised the biscuit lid.

  * * *

  I was still at the cornice, trying not to smoke, when I heard someone at the hatch. The door swung slightly open. It was barely ajar. Then a woman slunk through the narrow gap. It was Claire from across the hall. Her eyes were swollen and sad and settled on me with a kind of quiet greed, as if finding me here, on the roof, might sate some kind of hunger. Her running tights shimmered with patterns, and over these she wore a loose cranberry sweater. I tucked my thumb, concealing gauze. She delicately cleared her throat.

  Could I have one of those?

  I offered her the tin.

  Have them all, I said. I’m trying to quit.

  21

  I can’t say I’d ever really taken to Claire. She was the sort of woman whose athletic apparel matched. Who knows why I accepted the invitation, then, to join her in her apartment that night. I suppose I was lonely. Her nails flared pinkly on the banister as I followed her down the stairs and into her unit, where she cracked the window and groped through drawers. She lifted the top of Harold’s old desk, searching for an ashtray.

  It’s in here somewhere, she said.

  * * *

  Whenever I saw Claire, it seemed she was always going for or returning from a jog. She took off daily and at length through the sloping paths of Central Park. She went early and much too late. I heard her in the hours I couldn’t sleep—I could always tell it was her footsteps on the stairs, because she took them two at a time, bounding. Had I ever enjoyed such a salubrious state, perhaps I, too, would have developed an appreciation for exertion. But as I had not, it seemed to me a public nuisance and its benefits opaque. The self-help author was especially bewildered by this prodigal display of energy. Poor Claire, she said. There were other people who endured whole lifetimes of suffering and managed not to go insane.

  * * *

  The last time I’d found myself inside 4C was soon after Harold disappeared. I remembered opening the door to look in on Claire, casserole in hand, and being struck dumb with surprise: every surface teetered with exquisite bijouterie. A transparent elephant, a Tiffany lamp. The shelves and end tables crowded with pitchers and the ripe gleam of blown-glass fruits. I was very careful making my way into the kitchen, so as not to set off a shrill and icy hum. The whole apartment, really, tinkled faintly when you walked. Meanwhile, the cat leapt among the menagerie of baubles and lemonade pitchers, nudged paperweights. I stood very still, afraid to lift an elbow. I was almost relieved when Claire locked the door against the world and banished us to the hall.

  * * *

  It was in this fragile state that 4C had remained. The glass glowed dimly. I watched Claire’s brittle hands as she lit a cigarette, pulled strings on lamps. There was something glassy, I felt, about Claire herself. It struck me she was much better suited to looking after this apartment whenever Harold went away. As he had. Quite permanently, in fact.

  * * *

  I looked around for some record of disruption. The figurines were all in place. The glass elephant raised its miniature trunk over the mantel. There were no women’s coats by the door, no ladies’ magazines. Aside from the collection of fragile curios, the only other clue of Claire’s arrival that I could find was a single pair of running sneakers on the mat by the door.

  You sure you don’t want one?

  I shook my head.

  Claire studied the pack in her hands.

  I quit, too, she said, but I suppose I’ve been on edge.

  She looked so dejected, snapping the lighter in front of her face, that I found myself blurting out, I would join you, really, it’s just I’m pregnant. She considered me, Camel poised.

  Congratulations, she said.

  * * *

  She smoked. I drank my tea. I told her again how much I’d always admired Harold and his work, that I regretted our having grown apart. Perhaps because I had expressed concern, or simply because she felt compelled to fill the silence, Claire began to relate to me the story of how she and Harold met.

  * * *

  She said:

  There is a time in every woman’s life when you can have whatever you want. I was that age. My senior year, I lived in a dorm right there on Broadway. That summer I won an internship at the publishing house. It was a big deal. I bought myself a skirt. I felt really on top of the world. It must have had an effect. People noticed me that summer. They remembered me. The man at the coffee cart said, Hey, beautiful. Every morning. Hey, beautiful, he said. At the office people came by my desk. Harold was one of them. Except he was different. He was older, for one, and didn’t talk much. He’d make these little observations about the weather, the city, the illustrations he was working on. He wasn’t in every day, but I was running into him whenever he was. I saw him at the water cooler
. At lunch. He waited for me at the elevators to walk me to the train. I could have reported him, but I guess I found it sweet. I told him he was too old for me. He didn’t seem to mind. He never really cared about that kind of thing. Then the summer was over, and I left. He sent me letters. They were forwarded all the way to California, and in them he asked me how was school. I reminded him I’d graduated. That I’d moved home, probably for good. I really thought that’d be it for Harold and me. For a while I didn’t think about him at all. Probably I would have forgotten him completely. Then the emails started. I wonder how he found my address. He wanted to know how I was, how he could help. I told him there wasn’t much I needed help with, and so he wrote about other things. Small things. Something he saw out his window. Out this window, I guess. He’d tell me what he ate for lunch. He sent poems. I really started to look forward to those emails, you know? It ruined my day, if he didn’t write. But you know how it is online. How easy it is to fall in love with someone who’s far away. I told myself it wouldn’t be the same in person, if he ever came to visit. Then he did, and it was. He said all the usual little things. Look at those bougainvilleas in the street. That mural on a wall. Lighten up, he said. He came a few times, always for work. Only, what cartoonist travels? This went on for years. Until one day he asked me to come back with him. I said yes. Then it was the two of us, here. He used to talk through his ideas with me. I gave him suggestions for his comics. It’s stupid, but I like to think I was a little bit Vera to his Vlad. Or whatever. I still have those emails. I read them all the time.