The Exhibition of Persephone Q
Page 12
I began with the bed, which seemed most charged with mystery, and so most likely to be withholding information. I stripped the duvet, the pillowcases. I lifted a corner of the mattress and looked beneath. There, spread across the springs, was a dress I had not worn in many years. I must have placed it there in order to press the pleats, the way I’d read about in Russian novels. I slipped it on over my jeans, examined my reflection in the mirror. The wool skirt swished. When I slipped my hand into the pockets, my fingers met a dog-eared photograph. I held it to the light. It was a wallet-sized portrait. Of my fiancé. The purview cleaved to his face, centered his large, bored eyes. I studied it for a long moment. It was evidence enough.
* * *
At the computer, I composed what must have been my twentieth reply. This one I actually sent.
Have you ever read about men pressing their suits overnight under mattresses back when they lived in boardinghouses and didn’t have irons?
Well, I have.
I just found a dress I haven’t worn in—get this—ten years!!
It still fits. The pockets are very fruitful, if you know what I mean.
Kind regards,
Percy
How amazing, the way things turn up! A fundamental principle of life in any city is accumulation, but I find it holds especially true in New York, where all the open space is privatized, and one’s apartment is too small. Under such conditions, things get lost. Earrings in the sink. Toothpaste in the fridge. Saltines in the teapot, because that’s simply where I found them one day when I woke up. The stubborn inflow of matter collects in a terrain confined. The waste piles high in landfills, and we build over it, making land. Memories cling to every corner, shellacking Ninth Ave, until there are entire neighborhoods one feels one ought to avoid, whole shopping carts of associations to push down every street: the man who chased you across Third to grab your wrist; a green grate into which were vomited three doses of ibuprofen and the better part of a bottle of vodka from the night before; another man who looped around and around the park at Forsyth, in ridiculous circles, on your heels, complaining of the torments you’d inflicted on his heart. I will always feel a little bit with child, maybe, when I pass the 92Y. And this general sense of saturation is further exacerbated, I find, by the phenomenon of the tote, in which accrues the detritus of a day. I harnessed my caravan of canvas to the crook of my arm. There were other errands I had to run besides returning knives: I wanted to see Yvette at the hospital, Misha’s presentation was that evening, there were materials to return to NYU Law. And really there is nothing so graceful as “stepping out” when your errands are so far-flung. The knives went into a tote, and half the apartment seemed to follow: papers, the self-help author’s latest draft, the exhibition book, issues of Am J Tra La, and a copy of Misha’s slides. Soon all the totes were full. I sidled down the stairs and onto the street, resolved.
* * *
I made it as far as the deli on the corner, where I ordered baklava, eggs, and toast.
* * *
The café tables were empty and lemon-scented. The man behind the counter was wiping down the meat slicer, and he watched me as I ate. I didn’t mind. There was no one else there. I would have watched me, too. I looked at my plate. For weeks, Misha and I had avoided ordering cakes and baklavas. Dessert had seemed so discordant with the general mood, I’d almost forgotten how much we used to like coming here for sweets. I ordered a second baklava to bring home for him. We’d celebrate his presentation that evening, I thought, over pastries and pilaf. A new chapter would dawn in our apartment when baklavas were once again exchanged as gifts. And one could easily make a pilaf absent knives. The second pastry arrived on a square of wax paper on a thick white plate. I ate it immediately. I was like a predator, overwhelmed by a second wave of hunger. I swept a finger around the vacant dish, collecting phyllo crumbs, wishing I’d ordered three baklavas at once.
* * *
I felt ashamed about abandoning Claire. She had already been so abandoned. I should have left a note. Be back soon! Changed my mind! But we heartbroken people are so easily left behind. Truthfully, I was wary of Claire in the same way I imagine Constance and Yvette were wary of me, as if my woes might be contagious. I regretted accepting her invitation to knock. I hoped she’d forget. I hoped she’d sleep all day and go for a long run at night, and on those lamplit miles conclude she wanted nothing to do with me. I looked across the street at the laundromat where the self-help author had mistaken another man for Harold a month before. That life seemed quaint to me now. I missed it: wandering the neighborhood, searching for friends. Tomatoes with Misha on Saturdays, consumed whole and raw. Where had that life gone? The traces were right here, out the window, only my mother’s divinations were démodé. Empirical processes were rendered impotent in the face of metaphysical moods. The only way to reassemble my life, I felt, was to confront my fiancé. All at once, it seemed I had no time to lose. Abruptly, I stood from the table and gathered my totes. Change scattered when I paid. I hurried toward the train as quickly as I could, hitched to such a load.
* * *
I had never intended for my dealings with the exhibition to go so far. But intentions are fragile things. Suddenly I was southbound, too far south, Columbus Circle was in the past. I emerged into the Garment District, turning down streets I had not walked for years. Glass buildings proliferated, as if a lid that had previously suppressed them had been lifted; they grew as diaphanous and out of place as orchids among weeds. I couldn’t remember what it had looked like before. As a girl, I only ever came to the city in winter, when it was too cold to look at anything beyond the rubber toes of my boots and the grip of my mother’s hand, which held mine fast as we sloshed through the snowy streets. She brought me to the ballet, for music, for jazz, plays I couldn’t understand but whose sense of menace I could feel. I wonder now if she was trying to acclimatize me to that menace, vaccinate me against it, so that, later on, when I found out much of life was just a Pinter play with larger casts, worse dialogue—mere drafts of what we hoped to say—I would not be surprised. I’d been duped all the same.
* * *
Every visit requires a gift, but who knew what petty pleasures my fiancé indulged in these days? I ducked into a deli for a tin of biscuits and a box of tea, exited instead with saltines, a pot of jam, and, sheepishly, bananas. I could smell them bruising in the totes. I wished it were night. As a general rule, all that is ridiculous by day takes on a borrowed dignity after dark. Once, while standing outside a fabric dealer’s on one of my late-night walks, when I was still living with my fiancé, I watched two men tumble out the exit. The larger bellowed and his friend dragged him to the curb. A woman appeared at the door to watch them go, and the bellower called after her. When will you open again? When can we come back? Now imagine the same scene by day. It isn’t even worth retelling. This is exactly how I felt as I mounted the steps at my fiancé’s. It was entirely the wrong time to arrive.
* * *
I stood at the door. Through the low windows, I could see the same armchairs and lamps—the downstairs neighbors had not left. The pink paint of the exterior was chipped, and the red of the brick showed through. I adjusted my totes, juggling knives and bananas and legal journals, like a nanny lost at noon. I didn’t even know if my fiancé lived here anymore. He might have long since vanished into the city, like Harold. I looked at the buzzer and saw that it still bore his name. But a name means nothing these days. I rang. A man’s steps sounded on the stairs. The door opened. It was my fiancé, in a blue sweater I had always encouraged him to wear, a blue that clashed with the pink of the house.
Of course it’s you, he said.
23
Entering the pink house all these years later, it seemed too little had changed. The antique vanity in the vestibule was still flooded with menus and magazines. At the bottom of the stairwell, someone had pinned a flyer for my fiancé’s show—it was probably him. There was the feature photograph. A woman (me) lay on
a bed. Smoke rose over the city skyline through the window, and moss crept along the baseboards. I did not know whether to be flattered or repelled. There was something tender and tentative about the picture. The camera’s approach was silk. The shadows, demure. I nodded toward the photo.
It’s like I never left.
My fiancé frowned.
Not sure I’d say that.
* * *
I followed him up five flights of steps. On the landing, he had built a shoe rack just outside the door, and here lined up three pairs of shoes. Please, he said, and I removed my own. They looked strange on the rack next to his. I looked down at my feet, disappointed to discover I’d forgotten socks.
* * *
It was strange to think that he’d been here all along. I felt I’d rather lost the capacity for staying put. And yet here he was. The apartment was far neater now than when I’d shared it with him. There was the main room, a kitchenette, the bath, the ladder that led to the loft where we used to sleep, only now the bed was in the living room. I confronted it when I came through the door.
* * *
He did not invite me to sit, and so I stayed standing in my bare feet and traveling dress, looking around the room to see what else had changed. The organization of the shoes. The clean doormat inside the door. There was a metal wine rack strung with lights, a Duchampian Christmas tree, and the walls were bare where previously there had hung prints of Schieles (mine) and his own photographs. The loft was now an atelier, judging by what I could see over the lip of the dark wooden beam: two computers glowed, and on a shelf stood an array of equipment, including an old Polaroid that I remembered well, plus a digital camera I did not. My fiancé sat on the mattress and crossed his arms. He looked up, looked away. We both glanced up at the loft.
How did you get the bed down here?
He paused.
That’s right, he mused. It used to be up there.
* * *
The slanted ceiling had the effect of compressing windows on the far wall to half the usual size. Through the shrunken panes I could see the courtyard, wild and ruinous. A row of sunflowers bowed their heavy, desiccated blooms, freighted with snow. Someone had built a deck. On this sloping ceiling hung another poster from the exhibition. There she was again. Or there I was. Some version of me, asleep on the bed. The mixed response returned: revulsion and envy and also pride. I was getting used to this contradictory bouquet. It stood like a centerpiece on the mantel of my mind.
* * *
I studied my fiancé’s wrists, his face. He’d grown a beard. Gained some weight. It showed in his cheeks, settled around him like a mood. I looked down the length of my own self: the traveling dress, the jacket, the daisy-showered scarf. The nebula was rising in me like a knob of dough. What a work in progress I was. I rummaged through the totes.
So you do remember me, I said.
I’m not so old.
* * *
I reached into the folds of my skirt for the wallet-sized photo and held it up.
He said, Who’s that?
Didn’t you get my email?
Yes. I’m not sure it made a lot of sense.
I went to the gallery, I said.
He nodded. I searched his face for a trace of mockery.
Those pictures, I said. They’re all of me.
The corners of his eyes softened with a sadness I found persuasive. He shook his head.
Percy, he said softly. You know that that’s absurd.
* * *
The trouble with that apartment, I recalled, was how difficult it always was to argue in it. I wonder if we would have made it, my fiancé and I, had we only been able to enforce, at crucial moments, some kind of separation. As things stood, there was no way to slam the door. Emotions swirled like a gas leak, diffused over the lip of the loft. We used to hurl insults from uneven altitudes, he above, I below. Then we switched, a ridiculous game of musical floors. Things often spun out of control.
* * *
I began to unpack my totes. It was something to do. I reached into an envelope with a stack of Misha’s slides. Bidding Logic: Applications of Directed Acyclic Graphs. I discarded lipsticks and tampons and, inexplicably, a tiny silver spoon. The photographs I’d sliced were nowhere to be found. I lifted my purse and turned it upside down. Knives tumbled out—I hoped the warranty covered this kind of accident. There were fistfuls of change, coupons, legal documents, the box of tea. Bananas. Refuse rattled and came to a halt beneath the sofa. Finally the photographs sluiced from a folder. I spread them one by one across the floor, like tarot cards, in no particular order. There I was, with a book and a brush by the bed. The end table disappeared. One frame later, everything came back. Mold marched across the walls. The iterations struck me as gratuitous, verbose. There was no need to belabor it so: life was going by fast—it was careening on toward death—and I had no idea at all. I placed my hands on my hips and studied the mess. I was having trouble remembering, now, what I’d imagined producing the photos might achieve.
* * *
Outside, it had begun to rain. Through one of the windows, across the courtyard, a man appeared on the brand-new deck. The snow receded from the rails. He opened an umbrella and began to smoke. He would be able to see us, I thought. I was a veritable soap opera on dollhouse screens. I moved away, toward the doormat, knelt on the floor. I felt I might be sick. I drew in my legs and rolled my forehead against my kneecaps, the way my mother had instructed me to do whenever I felt ill. In the car she’d say, Percy, put your head to your knees.
* * *
My fiancé shifted on the mattress.
Look, I wouldn’t have used it if I’d thought it was of you.
* * *
He never lied. That was part of the problem. You have to lie a little, in love, in order to get along, and he was always qualifying, cutting closer to the truth. If we’re still together … I studied his stubborn face. His easy posture inside his loose blue wool. It was almost plausible, I thought, that he really had forgotten, and this struck me as worse than if he’d known. The versions of me were further proliferating. There was the woman I was with Misha, a wife who loved her husband and yet tried to kill him all the same; there was the woman in the pictures, peaceful and asleep, albeit a little bit dead; also a mother; a daughter; a somnambulist who could not sleep; and now, in addition, the woman who lived on in my fiancé’s head, and who had nothing to do with the exhibition. He glanced at his watch. In the atelier, the skylight began to percuss with rain.
On the deck, the smoker crouched beneath his umbrella, relit. I glanced at Persephone, who loomed overhead. My fiancé bounced his knee. He couldn’t really have forgotten, I thought. It had to be in him somewhere, the memory of me.
* * *
He stood, stretched, reached for his keys. He was stationed at the far window, looking down. I was still seated on the doormat, both hands pressed against the floor. He glanced at his watch.
It’s nice to see you, Percy, but I have somewhere to be.
Let me explain.
* * *
He looked at his watch again. Then sat on the bed.
Five minutes, he said.
I took a deep breath, sank against the door. Everything slowed down. As well as I can recall, this is what I said:
TWO
The state highway that leads from the city to the small, isolated Adirondacks town where I grew up is narrow and winding and in the winter shimmers with a lacquer of black ice. You would have to be crazy or desperate to take that road in the dead of February, after dark, as my mother did one night in 1981. The way to the prison rises up through the trees, the route to New York slopes down. Traffic moves in both directions the way that loose-leaf paper floats through air, to and fro, to and fro, carving sharp corners of descent. When two cars meet, there are questions, and the truckers tend to win. The logging roads radiate in all directions, like veins from a heart, gravel seams draw gashes through the forests. There, in the distance, is the flat disc of t
he lake, glossed with sun. Waves of fir and pine soften the topography of hills. The road sighs through them, pedals ease, engines hiss, the lumber is silent in the trucks and softly shifting. The cool air cools further still as cords of pine, freshly felled, are guided through a leveled woods, down to the level of the lake. Brakes steam. Logs, stripped and bare, roll against the belts. The trailers begin to rock and lumber, knocking etymologies loose from the verb. The sound of dead trunks striking pavement is dull and dumb. Here is the earth unloading itself, and the road registers the rhythms that it makes. The logs settle. The landscape holds its breath and then—a new kind of silence falls, I guess, at the valley’s lowest point. The road, the hill, the trees. They have no memory at all. There are only the cracks in the ice, the paths plowed through the snow. The trees fill with wind again. The birds begin to bleat.
(My fiancé shifted. He glanced at his watch.
I just want you to imagine it, I said.)
My mother often drove me to the city. I remember the low guardrails and the scent of pine and the easy splendor of the Palisades. It seems to me we were away most weekends. I didn’t mind. She was a different person on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. Doors opened. Coffees came free. Trains arrived as we descended platforms and passengers gave up seats. We came, ostensibly, for museums or plays or annual ballets, but more often we simply sat in a booth in the window of a pizza parlor where she used to waitress, watching people pass. We stayed always in apartments belonging to old friends. The friends were never home, though they’d left behind perfumes, candles, frozen chickens, sets of linen drawers that slid directly into the wall. I slept beside my mother on a pull-out sofa, listening to traffic swish in the streets. I often wondered what would happen if we never left. I often wished we’d stay.