The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  I sat at my desk and tried to concentrate. It was no use. I’m afraid my primary preoccupations were imagining a dive off the roof of the astronomy building, the menu for dinner, the general humiliation of being eighteen. Because few things are as dispiriting, I find, as being contradicted ad infinitum. My father, surfacing from his whodunit, disagreed.

  That spring, I landed myself in the art history building, where we were learning about the relationship of parts to whole, background to foreground. I settled into a seat. Disparate planes snapped together on a nylon projector screen. The result was a productive tension. The paintings were unstable even as they were whole. I was introduced to Mondrian. Black lines laid themselves across a blank white plane. They crossed at perpendicular junctures, sectioning the painting into small squares of white, blue, red, or yellow, and this layering of borders, pigments, the banality of the plane, made it difficult to see in the end, the professor said, which was the subject and which was the support. Was this a lattice of lines overlaid, or white squares painted on a sheet of solid black? Or did the foundation of the painting exist primarily as a variegated outcrop of red, yellow, blue that the white squares, the black lines, eclipsed? It was impossible to tell. And because you couldn’t tell, the professor said, you continued to search, such that the viewer remains within the painting. The composition holds her gaze as the eye cycles through the iterations. First the lattice of lines floats into the foreground, then the primary colors, the canvas itself. The hierarchy of the planes is perpetually revised, and it is the constant motion that makes it whole. The disruption itself is the most stable thing. The professor clicked the remote. New slide.

  This kind of reasoning felt extremely important to me. For a while, I, too, became an idealist, not unlike Mondrian. I shifted my life into these new rooms. The atmosphere was far superior to the dour auditoriums in which I was taught chemistry and math. The sting of fresh paint was sharp in the halls. Classes convened pleasantly in the sun-soaked galleries of the museum. I stayed. I found it an immediate relief to know that whatever we were learning was not especially applicable to the outside world. On a Tuesday afternoon, we waded through the hermeneutics of being-here versus being-for-ourselves, resisted being-for-others, though we always were a little bit. We were here for ourselves and others all at once. That was the tragedy, I supposed. Although it seemed the less one knew, the less certain one was, the less one ran the risk of sounding stupid. For once I even felt a little smart. I knew nothing about the arts, and it proved better to understand nothing of Dasein than to internalize but half. My professors, disinterestedly contemplating manifolds, graded leniently. I had a knack for disinterested contemplation myself. I saw Yvette a little less. One day, over lunch, our trays lined up edge to edge, she said, Maybe I should take art. I watched a cardinal land on a pliable branch out the window. The limb bobbed with the red weight of the bird. Sure, I said. I was relieved, when it came time to register for classes, that she chose electromagnetism instead.

  The way you worked through the problem of a painting wasn’t so different, in the end, from the way you addressed a problem in math, or in life. Or at least the way I did. Crudely torn squares of paper fell randomly to pale blue and there were glued in place. Three standard stoppages, measured by meter-length strings and dropped from some height, were subsequently carved in wood. Of all the possible permutations, why should this be the one that wound up in MoMA, under glass? In curatorial studies, we examined the voice that emanated directly from gallery walls. How should a work be presented and described, assuming it should be described at all? It was the one space I had away from Yvette where I felt at peace, even if it was a world bent on critiquing itself into oblivion, its status obsolete.

  One semester, I led a discussion section for the professor who’d taught us how to view a Mondrian. I stood dutifully in the front of the room, my palms yellow with chalk. The students, it turned out, did not at all share the assigned reading’s enthusiasm for the arts, irreproducible or otherwise. Honestly, someone said, the more difficult something is to read, the less I want to read it. Others nodded. A young man stabbed his finger into the pages piled on his desk and proclaimed, This guy writes like a dick. A mathematical boy in glasses, who I knew for a fact was capable of higher-order thinking, raised his hand. I don’t get the aura, he said. I asked if someone else might be so kind as to explain. A sophomore in sailor stripes made a valiant effort, relying heavily on gesticulations with her hands. It’s like how when you see the David, she said, it’s just there. Like—oomph. She brought a fist to the center of her chest for emphasis. The class stared blankly. I myself hadn’t been to Florence, so I was reluctant to weigh in. Sounds a lot like nostalgia to me, the thin, bespectacled student said, proving he was capable indeed. That isn’t an argument at all. It might be more useful, I suggested, to take on the idea of authenticity. Together we considered the painting versus the print. The print of a painting has a referent hanging somewhere in the Louvre, I said. But then take the film. It’s manipulated and spliced. Its actual making exists nowhere but in the minds of those who performed the many disparate takes, spread across many days. Therefore, the film didn’t re-present anything. It was its own representation of itself. And yet, for this reason it was the least authentic genre of all, for the film aims to appear what it decidedly is not, a natural, cohesive, uninterrupted whole, a continuous stretch of time. There was a silence in the room. I jotted some notes on the board. A precocious freshman lifted her cheek from her hand. So it’s kind of like memory? I looked at her. Yes, exactly like that.

  My father had grown bitter, living in two separate houses on his own, surrounded by stacks of books he’d already read, mysteries he’d already solved. Come home soon, he said, when I called a month or so before my graduation. He suggested I get a job in the lab. I could still retrain. It wasn’t too late, he’d teach me himself. All right, I said. Then I hung up the phone. I looked at the receiver on my desk. I hadn’t known how badly I did not want to return to those silent rooms, the woodstove, the glow of the old TV, until my father suggested it.

  It was May, and the blackflies had arrived. When I reached beneath my hair, a scab sloughed off neatly in my nail. The whole school was outside, languid, as if struck dead in the grass. I wandered across campus to the library, which was silent and empty and cool. The windows above the thesis carrels were stuffed with air-conditioning units, and the whole space hummed. At a computer terminal, I logged on to search a database of jobs. In the entry for “major,” I typed “art.” I could be a teacher, the computer offered. Only I didn’t really enjoy standing in front of a crowd. Before an audience, I lost my way. I searched again. The database suggested ventures in culture, diplomacy, interior decorating, and, inexplicably, the FBI. I clicked the help button, and a dialog box appeared. It asked how it could be of service. I wanted to know what it was my experiences had prepared me for, and whether, in the event I did not like those options, it was too late to become someone else.

  I drifted across the lawn toward the art and architecture building in the hope that my advisor was in. I couldn’t say why this professor had taken such an interest in me. He had hired me as his assistant, offered me a campus job, generally treated and graded me generously. Once or twice, I’d babysat his children. He lived in a small white house in town with a trampoline in the yard, and I spent the evening considering my level of responsibility should one of his sons leap and, with the compact mass of his small body, draw a perfect arc across the lawn. It’s possible I might have shown some aptitude for research, or at least for babysitting, managing a discussion section he did not have time to lead. In each of these departments, however, I was sure that I was average. I stood in the door to his office now, wondering what it was he had seen in me, and whether it was monetizable in any way.

  I knocked. Come in, he said. I settled into the chair across from his desk. The office was lined with hundreds of books, and above the shelves hung a framed print of Les Demoiselles d’Avig
non. So, Percy. What can I do for you? It was a good question, one that had seemed much easier to answer while I was still outside waiting in the hall. I sat in silence. Then I laid out my conundrum. I did not have a job, I said, and after graduation it was impossible to go home. My professor nodded. I was very grateful that he did not ask me to expand. I see, he said. Well, is there anything you’d like to do? I noticed his books were organized chronologically rather than alphabetically, according to developments in painting through time. I looked at my hands. Maybe I’d like to work in a museum, I said. Or an archive. Anywhere, really, that was not my father’s lab. My professor nodded again. Then he reached for his phone. When he hung up, I had officially applied and been hired for a temporary position at a small East Side gallery devoted to Himalayan art, not so far from Yvette’s apartment, and for which I was grossly underqualified.

  (My fiancé frowned.

  I don’t think I ever met Yvette.

  Of course you did, I said.)

  It isn’t easy to find a room. The summer after I graduated, I spent a number of weeks living with Yvette and her mother. It was a temporary arrangement that lasted longer, I think, than anyone had planned. Her bedroom was dark green, and through the upper pane of the windows I could see the tops of smokestacks rising over Queens. We sat together in the kitchen reviewing flashcards for her matriculation to medical school that fall. Yvette liked to plan ahead. The apartment was very still and silent, with long, pale halls, and fans in every room, to aid the passage of cigarette smoke out the open windows. Her mother was the smoker. She was retired, and she swept through those halls all day in a robe, trailing ash, retracing the same path from kitchen to parlor to her bedroom, where she spent her afternoons at a desk, typing up her memoirs. The dark steel of her bedspread echoed the power plant out the window. Our own room was sweltering, and at night I lay awake in Yvette’s trundle, level with the floor, legs arranged to catch the current of the air conditioner. It was too hot to sleep. My father’s warnings had followed me. The city was expensive and difficult, he’d said, and what would I do when my internship came to an end, armed with only the blunt instrument of an art history major? I lived in sustained fear of wearing out my welcome. For a while I kept a jar of peanut butter and a bag of bread in the cupboard and ate mostly that. I made PB&Js standing up, jar wedged beneath my arm. What is she doing? Yvette’s mother whispered, addressing her daughter and looking at me. Percy, Yvette said. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’ll eat with us.

  The gallery was on Second Avenue, a twenty-minute walk. I had my own key and was often there alone all day. There was no one around to tell me to leave after closing up, and so sometimes I just stayed. I locked the door and took a turn through the displays. I slipped on a sixteenth-century pendant made of jade, lowering the necklace onto my chest the way I’d seen in infomercials, where faceless women were adorned by disembodied hands. I took walks through the semi-deserted blocks, pausing at the eastern edge of Turtle Bay to watch traffic accumulating on the FDR. I stopped in bodegas for buttered bagels. Bouquets of flowers grouped, wilting, in green bins, begging to be bought. I chose some for myself. I carried them back through the last of the night, just as the first commuters began to appear. Back on Second Ave, I glided seven floors to the reception area, arranged the coterie of gladioli in an ancient vase. Then I folded my arms at the kidney-shaped desk and fell asleep.

  The showroom was installed in one of those old buildings favored by offices of the estates of the deceased, dentists, acupuncturists. A directory referred visitors to one of nine floors, each littered with LLCs. The elevator creaked. I opened a broom closet and out fell a dermatologist’s lamp. I shoved it back inside. From the reception area in the mornings, when I lifted my head and rubbed my eyes, I had a view of the avenue and glass cases filled with rare objects of Himalayan origin in which the gallery specialized. My job was to sit at the desk and answer a phone that almost never rang. Occasionally I showed a potential buyer the sixteenth-century pendant, a gongshi evocative of a human face. I wrote an auction label for a copper bodhisattva, deftly seated, one divine palm turned outward in a sign of blessing. I hosted general visitors with no intention to buy. They were intrepid characters who came in from the street, European tourists in backpacks and sneakers who’d already exhausted the museums along the park. They wandered through the room, whispering, pleased to have found the gallery at all. We had recently acquired panels from an elaborate Tibetan almanac, quite rare, and, relying heavily on the text on the wall, I helped my guests uncover the animal and element corresponding to the year in which they were born. How hungry everyone was for the exegesis of herself. They were pessimistic and empathetic and shy. They ought to avoid poor weather and dangerous sports. I myself didn’t want to know what 1989 had in store. Though I took preemptive measures to shore up luck. There was a prayer wheel installed in the corner, fixed atop a large armoire, and when I was alone in the gallery, after the European tourists and speculators had cleared, I stood on a stool to reach the red wheel and delivered a single turn. The Sanskrit slid by inscrutably. I spun it again. I wondered if these recitations still counted, karmically, if I could not grasp conceptually the prayer that I had made.

  The owner was an infrequent presence. When she did stop by, it was usually to replenish a bowl of pomegranates that sat on the large dining table in the frontmost room. Her daughter lived in California, on a plot with bumper crop, and she was always sending more. If I eat another I’ll be sick, she said. The sanguine fruits poured from a paper bag. I was tasked with disposing of the old batch in the dumpster downstairs. I can still smell the sweet-rot of the bulbs, hear the faint wet thud the small globes made, so reminiscent of flesh, falling into the bin. After, I washed the copper bowl in the sink and set it, gleaming and empty, in its place on the oblong table. It was never long before the gallerist appeared with a new shipment and braced a razor blade against the thick seams of tape. Christ, she packs these like cocaine, she said. The seal tore, and twenty or thirty new pomegranates tumbled forth. I started bringing them home to Yvette’s, where we made pomegranate cakes, juices, jams.

  Yvette and her mother were wonderful friends, I thought. They screamed and slammed doors. I sat in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal, listening to them argue. They shouted down the corkboard halls. Later, Yvette peeled an onion to help her mother make a sauce. She borrowed and ruined lipstick. Again they fought. I had never argued so violently with anyone in my life, not even Yvette. I was too afraid that if I did, then I really would be sent away. That Yvette’s mother could condescend her choice in clothes as we sidled out the door on Saturdays seemed to me evidence of a profound trust I did not recognize in my own life. When my father and I were angry with each other, he retreated across the yard, and I rolled the television set from the coat closet. There was no arguing with my father’s decisions. We waited out his anger like a storm. At the edge of our relationship there lay a sudden drop, and I was careful not to plunge.

  In the fall, when Yvette moved away for school, her mother and I sat alone in the kitchen in the evenings, exerting a quiet influence on each other. She took up peanut butter sandwiches. I took up smoking. On weekends, we clipped coupons, and they fluttered to the floor, forming coded recipes derived from weekly deals. Ritz, cheddar, Chicken of the Sea. Together, they alluded to a discount tuna melt. I looked around at the place I’d come to think of as a home. The floors were slick and shone. Lemons gathered in a bowl. Teacups hung on silver hooks above two stainless cake stands. It pained me that Yvette’s mother and I had so much more trouble talking now that her daughter was gone. My position at the gallery was expiring soon, and late at night, when I came home, I sat in the kitchen by the lemon bowl and wrote and rewrote applications. Yvette’s mother juiced a lemon into a water glass—for her skin, she said—and asked me about my day, how was work, what I was thinking of doing next. I juiced a lemon, too. I don’t really know, I said. It was distressing how difficult I found answering these questions. I s
tayed up, thinking, after she retired to her room.

  One night, the chatter of the typewriter paused. I listened for the sound of slippers in the hall. Yvette’s mother appeared, offered me a cigarette. Thanks, I said. I was at my usual spot at the table, staring blankly at a page, surrounded by coupons and abandoned cover letters. I was having little luck finding another job. She filled the kettle, took two teacups from their hooks. As we waited for the chamomile to steep, she considered the résumés strewn across the floor and frowned. Let me see what I can do.

  Quite a lot, it turned out. She knew someone at the French Embassy, who knew someone in a downtown gallery, who knew yet another woman capable of pulling strings at the art auction house in Midtown, which was in need of copy editors. I hadn’t realized nepotism had so long a reach. I soon found myself at a desk in Rockefeller Plaza, alongside the likes of Constance. For one final week, Yvette’s mother and I composed an awkward duet in that kitchen, trading cigarettes and peanut butter knives. I didn’t have the words to express my gratitude. The morning I left, I placed a note by the lemon bowl that had taken me all night to draft. Thank you so much, it read. I have never felt so at home.