The Exhibition of Persephone Q
Page 11
* * *
Winter sifted through the open window, and we watched the curtains breathe. Seated in the armchair, in a beam of streetlight, Claire reminded me of a Penelope, or a Helen, perched at a window with an Adriatic view; outside, the city flashed the plankton of its restless streets. I picked at the bandage on my thumb. The white gauze was now stained a deep maroon.
You must miss him.
Claire shrugged.
He’ll be back.
* * *
I sipped cold tea. The trees reflected in the windows of the building across the avenue, foliage fragmented in the darkened panes. I felt I’d been unfair to Claire. I felt many things, chief among them loss. Outside, notices cropped up in bursts, like desperate plants, clambering over telephone poles, the entrances to trains, fences, the gallery. The city was filled with pictures of people who’d gone to work one day and never come home, and it seemed almost plausible that Harold had been one of them. Still, the police brushed Claire aside. They were completely overwhelmed. There was no time to spare on a woman mad with heartbreak. Meanwhile, she ran.
* * *
She became absorbed in her sweater, smoothing the wool before her like a newspaper she was trying to read. I watched her lift away a tuft of fur. For months, I had only ever seen Claire in the violet windbreaker. That evening, however, she wore the dressy geometric tights and the cranberry sweater to which the cat’s fur clung. She’d applied makeup. She was beautiful, I thought. I noticed a hint of blush on her cheeks. Shadow softened her eyes. For whom? She looked lovely there in the pale light from the street. Lovely and severe. I tried to remember if she had always drawn attention this way, if she’d been beautiful all along, but I could not. I looked out the window. I nursed my tea.
You know, I said, something strange happened to me the other day.
Claire looked up from her ministrations to the wool.
Oh?
* * *
For at least the third time since I had left the gallery, I told the story of The Exhibition of Persephone Q. My search. The surprise I felt. The receptionist’s disbelief. In the warmth of Claire’s attention, I became more loquacious than I had been in days.
* * *
I said:
To be honest, I never really thought my fiancé would make it in the arts. We knew so many people who wanted to back then. Success was not a trend. Though I suppose he was a little more resilient than the rest. He snapped the shutter every few blocks, searching for tableaus. Sometimes I felt I was collected on such a search. I was also a tableau. He used to joke about making art of me. At the time it seemed benign. The idea flattered me, I guess. He was always telling me things about myself that I had missed. No one lives as literally, Percy, as you try to live. It isn’t practical at all. He had endless opinions about who I was and what I ought to do. I was too smart, too stupid, too smart in a way that made me stupid, I should write a book. In bed, he traced the moles on my back. You must be Slavic, he said, with moles like that. I felt clearer around him, the way a little anger always focuses your head. I wrote a poem. I wore my hair pinned up in Swedish braids. I kept a diary of everything I thought. Then, one day, I remembered that it had been a performance all along. Or maybe he reminded me. It was all so long ago. In any case, I left. I never heard from him again. Then, last week, this package arrived. And what do I find inside but a catalog of his show? He’s become some kind of sensation. And he’s done it by way of using me after all. Which is to say I’m the subject of his exhibition. The only trouble is, it’s hard to see who I am. That’s the funny thing. No one believes me. Not even my best friends. They think I’m picking at old wounds, making false connections. Not even the internet is on my side. Every search comes up blank. And the worst part is, I don’t have any proof. I never was one for photographs or keepsakes. I threw a lot of things away. Whole storage lockers, really. Now I can’t help but think. All that evidence! But how was I to know beforehand what was worth keeping, what was trash?
* * *
Claire slumped against the wings of the chair, listening. As I spoke, I kept having to shift my eyes away from her, out the window or into my tea, and whenever I returned my gaze I found that hers had never moved. I pressed at the bandage on my thumb. I looked at her, then away.
I have an idea, she said.
* * *
She disappeared into the other room. I could hear drawers being opened, papers riffled through. A binder chirped as the rings were pried apart. She returned with an index card in hand. On it was printed the telephone number and email address of a journalist at the Times. Claire spoke rapidly and with conviction. This journalist was a friend of hers, well aware of her predicament. She wanted to help, she’d said. She really did. Run a story. Raise awareness. Whatever she could do. Except she was on the culture desk, and a single disappearance wasn’t news.
But two disappearances, and one of them art? Now, that’s an event, Claire said.
* * *
I’d like to say I was aware of the severe contrast between our situations. That I realized my own elision was not at all the same. That it was rather the opposite problem, in fact, to have been made too visible for comfort. But I’m afraid, in the moment, I was rather focused on myself. When Claire told me what a story we would make together, she and Harold and I, I readily agreed. I was seduced. I found myself consenting eagerly to everything she said. I may even have egged her on. I nodded when she insisted that a journalist need not even take us at our word. Publicity was the aim. I would have agreed to anything, I was so relieved to have met someone who shared my view: I was Persephone Q.
* * *
Before I knew it, I had acquiesced to a meeting with the journalist and Claire. We’d tell all, and at once. Tomorrow, Claire said. I’ll knock. She reminded me that I was not to give up. The air was tense with the shiver of glass, and I felt so full of gratitude I could hardly speak. At the door, I turned to thank her. Then I paused. In the light of the hall, Claire’s face seemed strange. I studied her, confused. I saw she had applied makeup to only one of her wide and lustrous eyes. Her whole face seemed off-balance, Picassoesque, and the tilt only worsened when she smiled.
Two women whom no one will believe? You have to admit, it’s the perfect weekend read.
* * *
I slept for a few hours at the credenza, dreaming of that eye.
22
I still had not responded to my fiancé’s email. I woke up in the kitchenette, nauseated and ravenous, with a digit that more resembled a date than an opposable thumb. I mangled the mouse. On the computer, I sifted through the folder where I’d saved my many drafts.
12/10 2:01 AM
What do you mean you don’t take pictures of Americans? I looked you up—multiple times. Aside from me, all you’ve shown is self-portraits!
12/12 12:14 PM
There must be better ways to get even with an ex. What else do you think the internet is for??
12/13 7:38 PM
I’m not threatening, I just don’t understand why you won’t admit it’s me.
By the way—I’m MARRIED.
None of these seemed right.
* * *
I navigated to AOL to check in on the women of the waxing kits.
pandaBRR: Lol
Anjul45: poor kid! ask ur mom.
I scrolled and scrolled and, to my surprise, failed to reach the bottom of the page. It was becoming a popular thread:
Roequentin609: wat matters is that its ur CHOICE. like ur DYING for smooth cooch bc that’s just who u are at <3. only a problem if ur pleasing ur wo/man or whatever out of some DUTY. u read? so wrt to original q, i say u wax only as often as u feel is right for u!!
Panopticus: umm sry but prescription of ‘u do u!’ presupposes freedom of thought > freedom of choice >> total myth bc we all grew up in sick racist misogynist society internalizing the shit they flush down airwaves to keep white male patriarchy alive.
Nicomachean: Hello. I am glad to have stumbled upon s
uch a lively debate. It is my belief that manipulation of free will is an oft-overlooked component in contemporary discussions of structural violence. Roequentin and Panopticus offer excellent summaries of modernist and structuralist approaches here. It is easy to forget, however, that the concept of free will is itself predated by the idea of chance, for which concept we are indebted to the classical world. Accident and serendipity productively rupture the predetermined course of cosmic fate. Within such fissures, one is able to ask: What if? What next? And is not free will predicated on such opportunities for imagination? In which case, one ought to welcome into one’s life some element of chance, including as a component of one’s choice to wax. As a leading scholar of classical and early modern thought, I invite you to read more about this in my book, Heraclitus to Aristotle: Why the Ancient World Matters for Americans Today, forthcoming from Nebraska University Press. Also check out my website: http://www.classix.org. Also I will be signing books after my talk at NYPL on March 12, 2002, at 7:30 p.m. I have a Ph.D.
AnonymousScotsman: It has been shown in exhaustive and largely overlooked treatises on human nature (overlooked at least by those for whom reading has become a form of amusement that precludes serious study) … it has been shown, by those still capable of earnest inquiry, that the mind grasps nothing but that which it holds in perceptions. In other words, behind each simple idea is a simple impression, gained through experience. The complex idea is constituted, more complexly, of linked impressions, which as a network may or may not resemble the simple impressions from which it has been derived. For example, consider a world in which people renounce the ego and agree henceforth to act rationally, with dignity, without delusion and against all hope, a world I may happily and readily consider despite the fact that such a world is something I myself have not as yet EXPERIENCED in aggregate. The constituent parts of dignified, humble, and rational behaviors, however—and however rare—are phenomena I have encountered in the observable world and upon which I have reflected. They become fantastical only in connection and extrapolation, such that the complex idea formed by their amalgamation NO LONGER RESEMBLES the observable world. And yet the combination is imaginable nonetheless. Since all impressions depend on experience and as such are proved to be furnished by means other than a priori knowledge, it follows that most ideas are as dubious as we are. Which is to say, as dubious as human experience. Only those conclusions that do NOT depend on existential and/or experiential impressions can be known certainly in any superlative sense of the word. For example, the simple sum of 2 + 2 may be shown to yield 4, indefinitely. But even this is in fact no a priori axiom but an inference dependent on the experience of 2s. It is possible, of course, that some other philosopher in this estimable comment section has gathered such an existential familiarity with the 2 as to eliminate all doubt of its a priori truth, but speaking solely for myself, this is a numerical sense-impression I have never nor indeed ever hope to strip of the mystery of experience. And yet I am quite able to buy groceries, follow recipes, and compute change all the same. I need no certainty of 2 in order to wield the idea of the 2. In all other matters, likewise, we face the inconvenient truth of doubt. It would appear that most of the subjects about which we care to make claims, including identity and causation and whether or not to wax, are relegated to the category of probable as opposed to certain knowledge. We may CONJECTURE that apparently causal relationships such as that observed between fire and smoke may IN THE FUTURE HOLD. However, these inferences are predicated on the assumption that the future will be like the past—THE SUN WILL RISE TOMORROW—rather than on certain knowledge that fire causes smoke. But pity she who does not also assume that one day the future may change! And rudely! Thus, the prudent thinker refrains from the temptation of making bolder claims to certainty. She is left to reckon with the unknowability of the self. For while I must grant to my estimable colleagues here the POSSIBILITY of having observed themselves—THEIR VERY SELVES—I, like most, lack the proper distance for the empirical study of who and what I am. In contemplating my SELF I find nothing more than a collection of perceptions. This is not to conclude that the SELF does not exist at all, but only that we cannot know whether it does or not. It is a mystery. As are the laws that govern its behavior and according to which it is subject to moral judgment. Certainly morality, the oughts and ought-nots, are not nearly so self-evident as arithmetic. Would that universal laws dropped like forbidden fruit from some forbidden tree! (And whether such a tree of knowledge—which, by the way, was theorized to produce pomegranates, not conceptions—ever existed is of course impossible to know, for reasons that to even the half-conscious reader will now seem obvious.) Panopticus is quite right to cast suspicion on the above claims to authenticity, though she does so for the wrong reasons entirely. Truth claims to authenticity are judgments made not by REASON but by EXPERIENCE. By which a priori law can one judge an action as authentic? None! WHICH ACTIONS ARE EVEN SUBJECT TO MORAL JUDGMENT? Excuse my emphasis. But even if such an a priori order were to exist (and it doesn’t), one could counter that reason never motivated the sentient being, who is influenced instead by passion and feeling. Lacking a priori criteria, the individual judges the morality of her actions but ex post facto, according to her impression of the impression the act has made on those around her. Thus she EXPERIENCES the moral effect as a collection of SENSE-IMPRESSIONS. On these impressions she bases her ideas of morality and authenticity, according to which she may judge the action she has performed. In other words, U DO U insofar as the DO is something that U expect, given past experience—because one assumes here that the future will be like the past—that others would perceive to be moral and good. To wax or not to wax is a question whose answer can be framed only as a claim of PROBABLE as opposed to CERTAIN knowledge based on your past EXPERIENCE of others’ perceptions of your actions. As for Ph.D.s, I’d rather tutor lunatics. Humbly yours,
yuppie1967: fuck all ya’ll. waxing’s only a thing because of porn.
I was strangely moved: yuppie1967, in that moment, felt like the only friend I had.
* * *
Claire and my cause had seemed so valiant to me the night before, in front of an audience of glass. Outside the theater of that evening, however, it appeared a misguided scheme. I thought of what the receptionist at the gallery had said: I was free to go to the press. It was my right. But it occurred to me now, in the morning gray of the kitchenette, that in exercising it I would be playing straight into her hands. The press was on the gallery’s side. As for approaching the artist, my fiancé—this was also my right. Who could deny it? The cursor hovered for a long moment over the dialog box before I typed a lackluster reply.
qwerty123: thx <3
My wound had burrowed deeper in the night, sinking a sunset through my thumb. I changed my bandage at the sink. I had half a mind to go return the knives, demand a refund—they’d rather assaulted me, after all, and I ought to be compensated for that. I had hoped they might transform me into a cook, maybe a mother. How utterly they had failed me. I gathered the blades into their sheaths. The receipt was still taped to the wall.
* * *
Something about these beauty posts told me it was not wise to yoke my fate to Claire’s. I was on my own. The idea of the storage locker had begun to haunt me. I wished once again that I hadn’t been so hasty clearing it. Perhaps I’d even thrown away a copy of Persephone Q herself. Oh, but could I have used those photographs now! I longed for them so thoroughly, in fact, that for a moment I convinced myself they must be near. It was my apartment against me, at war for the evidence that I was sure it hid.
* * *
Misha had already left for the Rockaways. For the Rockaways, then his presentation. I bolted the door. Then I divided the apartment into five—the kitchenette, the bed, the bath, the closet, and the shelves—just as my mother used to do when I was growing up. When I was a child, I lost crucial school-related missives so often that she devised a special system: sectioning the house, she’d comb e
ach territory separately and in order of likelihood. A similar approach had once been used by the U.S. Navy, she explained, to retrieve a nuclear warhead that had slipped, accidentally, from a bomber into the Mediterranean Sea, during what was technically a time of peace. As a method of retrieval, it was endlessly scalable.
* * *
I regarded the chaos of my single room. At least it wasn’t a sea.
* * *