The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  (You should have stayed in touch.

  But I did, you know that.)

  There is a particular persona to adopt when writing text for galleries or the pages of an auction magazine. I suppose I had it. It was rather my natural state to present the subjective as a kind of universal truth. Or else I didn’t have such a strong definition of my own subjectivity to start, so it wasn’t hard to set it aside. Borrowed authority is easy to perform. Upstairs, at the risk analysis firm, you saw things the other way around. Simple truths were always qualified with doubt.

  The first day, at the elevator bank:

  After you.

  The second:

  You again.

  The third, the fourth:

  You don’t talk much, do you?

  The fifth:

  If I were being forward, I’d give you my card.

  I should have known, as you already knew, how stories that begin this way tend to end.

  I can be slow, my reactions delayed, but I was no simpleton. I should have known, I knew.

  At the time, however, the outcome had not seemed so certain. Over dinner, you explained. In any scenario, p was the chance that something terrible would come to pass, and q was the status quo. The coin flipped day to day. I was all for disruption back then. But look at you now. I suppose I’m the one who stayed the same.

  My new room was in Brooklyn, in an apartment filled with samovars and first-edition books. The room itself was very red and small, and I’d rented it because the owner, Mme Popov, often went home to the Soviet Union to visit her mother for weeks at a time. It’s Latvia, she said. I thought when she left that I would have the apartment to myself. It was true that she was often gone. What I had not anticipated, however, was that other women would come to take her place. Madame used the extra rent to fund her flights. It was not such a lie when I told you the apartment was chaotic, you ought not to come. I was more afraid, however, that you might choose one of the women I lived with instead, if only you had the opportunity to meet them. The roommates rotated. A ballerina, a medical student, an actress who smoked more than she ate and yet who was always delving into cupboards and leaving dishes in the sink, where the roaches skittered. The only common theme among them was that they all relied on me. I was temporary super of the fourth floor. The pipes froze, the heat sputtered, someone smashed the glass. It was curious that these things happened only when Mme Popov was gone, as if her very presence kept the building secure, temperate, and pumping steam. The women who came to stay in her stead looked to me for guidance, to kill the roaches, to call the actual super about restoring hot water to the faucet, as if I were in charge. I didn’t feel in charge at all. And yet, I was always reminding the actress, especially, to be more careful about leaving food and soiled plates and teacups on the counters. I left notes on cupboard doors. No dirty dishes in the sink! No ashtrays on the books! After a while I started smoking inside, too, and ashed onto the Nabokovs.

  I was spending less and less time in my red room. I was always out, on a roof, at a movie with you. I was living the life I imagined the women I worked with had when they left the office at half past five. Who needed the internet when I had your brain nearby? I queried and you replied. You knew more about everything, and if there was ever a disagreement, I was quick to yield. I gave up ground on geography, calculating tips, on match girls from Vienna—I hadn’t realized those nudes had been so shrilly sketched. The only area in which I excelled was in remembering things you didn’t. Walking past Penn Station, along the high steps of the post office, I recalled the fight we’d had outside the DMV. The old Malaysian place was now a French café. I was good at knowing when things would disappear. I liked to guess who people were, the relationships between them. On the train, a father and son were lovers instead, when the young man put a hand on the elder’s knee and asked, Which one is our stop again?

  I wonder if I was relieved, in a way, to be told what to do. At Mme Popov’s, I was the authority in the room. The actress was in many respects even less equipped to handle life than I, and I could never decide whether my primary reaction to this was superiority or envy. When she asked me questions about how she ought to live her life, with all the sincerity of a child, as if certain I would know the answer, I felt wise. Then again, the options she had to choose among were always so glamorous, it was hard not to wish that they were mine. She yelled from the bathroom one night, This man on the subway gave me his card! Should I call him up? She appeared in the door and leaned against the jamb, sank a curling iron into her hair. Only there’s a casting party, she said. I was at the table, eating toast. The clamp released, a buoyant spiral fell. I watched its celebratory bounce. Percy, she said. What to do with myself?

  Her room was at the opposite end of the apartment, and we slept separated by the tiny kitchen and the jacquard chaise, over which she stepped each morning, bare knees parting a yellow silk robe. She undressed while in the vestibule, depositing coat and skirt and boots in a pile in the hall. Once inside, she never wore anything but that yellow robe. Standing on the kitchen tiles, drinking coffee, she reached into a pocket and produced a second pair of panties, held them to her waist. Should I wear these? she asked. Or these? She was invested in her undergarments. Those, I said. She nodded. I think that’s right. It was around this time, as I showered the actress with simple advice, that I began to wonder about my conversations with you. It wasn’t statistically sound, for me to be wrong all the time.

  The problem with seeing someone so much older than you is that memory flows in only one direction. I liked to hear how the city had changed, how everything was twenty years ago. As the younger party, however, it was always better if I had no past, no parents, no dramas outside of you. No trouble finding a room, for example, or another place to stay. If I interrupted a Tuesday movie, pressed pause on the VCR to call my father, you seemed surprised. It was as if you’d forgotten I’d had one all this time. I took the phone into the bathroom and shut the door. My father was growing more eccentric by the day. He had four dogs now, a greenhouse in which to nurture cultures, curate slides. He’d built an annex to the shed. The pine in the front yard, he said, had caught a fungus, and the trunk was compromised. He’d have to cut it down. Was he sure? He was. It was a hazard. It might come crashing onto the roof, the car. Already it had nearly killed at least one of us. I implored him to get a second opinion, but my father had made up his mind. I loved that tree. I hung up in a gloom. No one is ever listening to me, I said, once I was sure that no one was.

  (My fiancé sighed.

  I’m sure that’s not true.)

  I followed the actress to parties. I wore her clothes. A skirt. Her boots. I let her curl my hair. Occasionally I exchanged numbers with someone more my age. I followed people home, where we sat silently on sofas. There wasn’t ever much to say. This was not the place for arguments about art, preferences for Caravaggio over Raphael. The man I was with never did care to pick apart my reasoning with respect to Schiele versus Klimt. I drew out the conversation, parroting opinions, until that moment he kissed me abruptly, wetly, pressed play. The sequence of events was always the same, and I was always surprised. Once supine, I realized I hadn’t thought things through this far. I was reminded of my father’s planing machine, into which he fed and shaped a crooked wooden board. My mind wandered. I was complacent and still. Though there was a struggle from time to time. One night I fell asleep. When I woke up, the man whose bed I was borrowing was plying away, shoving himself in. Extracting, I suppose, what he was due in rent. I pushed, elbowed, applied my fists. He pinned. What a trick! Through some acrobatics, I maneuvered away. There was a quiet moment in which we both attempted to make sense of what had just occurred. I reached through the dark, feeling for my bra and the actress’s shirt. Then I stood and straightened my clothes. I have to go, I said. He looked at me a moment, suddenly harmless, sheepish. He offered to walk me to the train. That’s okay, I said.

  You were always taking pictures. The shutter snapped at
the post office, in the deli, as I was coming out of the shower, wreathed in steam. I never liked to be in pictures, though I liked that you were looking at me. What a composition I would have made that night, waiting for the subway! My reflection was stark in the window of the train. I looked away. At home, the apartment felt unusually silent. The actress was out. I scraped a dusting of cocaine from the table with a Playbill and threw everything away. I slipped on her robe. I looked into a cookbook, into the fridge at a half carton of eggs, and contemplated making a soufflé. Instead I washed all the dishes in the sink. Ran a bath. The actress’s silk pooled on the floor. Through the narrow window, I caught a sliver of the sky. I brought the phone into the tub and sat with it a moment. Then I dialed.

  If we’re still together, I said, could you come over right now?

  That was the one time you came to my red room. The windows were cracked, and winter came through. The Chrysler Building rose over the sill. The apartment reeked of cabbage and parsnip and other kinds of soup that the actress, in her lower moods, had learned to make. I remember I was pleased to have you, finally, in my bed instead of yours. I turned off the lights. In the morning, I woke up alone.

  The phone rang.

  Let’s not see other people anymore.

  There are any number of arguments that last a lifetime. Ours was simple enough. Which one of us was right? I suppose differences in taste in art transpose to different tastes in life. One day, not long after I moved in, on the steps of the Met I pointed out an especially beautiful couple standing silently side by side. He was tall and dark and thin. She was in heels and the darker mood. We were on our way to see a photography exhibit, photography-cum-architecture, or pictures of parts of a house. Only I was transfixed by this scene outside. Look, I said, still standing on the steps. They’re splitting up. Can’t you tell? You always were reluctant to pass judgment on a work in progress. On this one point, however, it felt important to hold my ground, and soon we were having an argument ourselves. You turned to go into the museum. I stayed on the steps. I looked toward the fountain. The woman was now walking away, as fast as one can in heels through the Saturday crowds. Then the man ran after her, caught her in an embrace. She accepted it stiffly, arms at her sides.

  Considering only the parts of things, I think, will make you feel sad. That day, after the small scene on the steps, we drifted through the exhibition, apologetic. There was little to say about the parceled roofs and porches and split-level homes split further between two frames. I was the first to break the silence. I said, I have a new favorite painting. I led us through sculpture, through landscapes, past the series of bathers, in which the wet curves of a woman are tinged with green, past the many variations on la coiffure, of older women tugging a younger woman’s hair over the back of a wooden chair, ready to comb, to cut. I was looking for the portrait of the Russian author who’d thrown himself down the stairs, but when we arrived at the corner where I expected him to be, it appeared he’d fled. Instead we stood in front of Mäda Primavesi. She poses in an addled room, fat flowers floating in the background. The perspective is wrong. The walls threaten to fold into a horizontal line. The placard states that at the time of painting the girl was eight, but with her direct stare and solid stance, Mäda could be twenty. For all I know she could be hiding a knife in her drop-waist tulle. These days I prefer paintings whose subjects, were they ever to escape from the picture plane, seem less likely to wreak havoc. That is a concession I can make. That there is something noble in the rigor of balance and design. In standing still for extended periods of time. I admired all those women who posed, who only pretended to step into a bath. Arms straining, they held their own weight. It takes a long time to make a painting. One ought to take breaks.

  I suppose it was a little late for me to begin thinking in ifs. I no longer had a room of my own. I’d moved in with you. I pressed pause on the VCR. You stiffened. I always had to call my father, I did so once a week, and still it always came as a surprise. One night I lost heart. You were in the middle of explaining Hollywood production codes, according to which du Maurier’s novel had been adapted for the screen. I looked at the phone in my hand. At Joan Fontaine, frozen mid-scene. I always found it difficult to straddle two worlds at once. I’m experiencing an absence of confidence, I said, about what we want. Percy, you replied, that’s absurd.

  How nice to have production codes! In Hollywood a spousal murderer never goes unpunished. Every narrative must follow the rule. There are too many possibilities otherwise. One has to keep from living all of them at once. I had no plans. At the same time, I packed a bag. I kept it in the closet. I found an apartment, signed a lease. Also organized a wedding. I stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, contemplating my descent. I’m going out for a walk, I yelled. Where to? you asked. I shouldered my duffel bag. I did not consider the p’s or q’s of what might happen next. On this side of the screen, I think, most things come down to timing and proximity, to chance. One claims credit where one can and tries not to die ashamed. I walked three miles north. The sky threatened snow. In Morningside, the landlord met me at the door to hand off the keys. He pointed inside at the phone, rolled his eyes. It’s for you, he said. And again with timing and proximity! I should have answered. But I was busy, I was moving in. No matter that there was hardly anything to unpack. The phone rang again, and again. Except I was already in bed, the cordless was across the room. And besides, I didn’t know what to say.

  (You could have gotten an answering machine.

  The guy at RadioShack told me they were already becoming obsolete.)

  The apartment was empty, silent, neat. There were no roaches, no boarders, nothing in my room but a mattress on the floor. It felt clean. I made toast and instant coffee. Downstairs, at a neighbor’s, I watched hospital dramas on TV. I called Yvette. For once, she did not try to counsel me, ask questions, say I was making a mistake. She told me it was all right not to know what I wanted, all right to take my time. I said the same to you, I need a little time. I was taking a moment to think things over. That was all. I’d hardly brought anything, the closets were empty, I went to East End Avenue to borrow clothes. I arrived late for work in Yvette’s dresses and slacks, outfits that no longer fit her and which she’d left behind. I wore her skirts, too snug. When my colleagues asked me why my object labels were late, I said I didn’t know. Maybe I was becoming sentimental. Only, there was no time for sentiment. The inventory for the auction had already arrived, and buyers needed guidance from the catalog. I couldn’t concentrate, however. You were just upstairs. I could have heard you if you’d stomped.

  I wasn’t planning to quit on the day that I did. I woke up with a large bruise. I’d fallen asleep on a chopstick, and it left a deep mark on my face that wouldn’t fade. I studied it in the mirror. I pressed it. There was no pain. Then I pulled back my hair and descended to the street. I bought my coffee at the cart. The vendor paused. The glass globe of the pot was suspended in his hand. He pointed at my face. What happened? I studied my reflection in the window of the pastry case, behind which lay rows of buns and rolls. The bruise extended to my temple and was of a dark purple color that carried the echo of abuse. I shrugged. I slept funny, I said. He looked at me an extra beat. Poured. On the house, he said.

  At work, other women lingered in the break room. I walked by them with my bruise. I sharpened a pencil and sat down at my desk. I set a page into my typewriter and wrote, This image. I paused, trying to think of what to say other than is salable. I felt like walking upstairs and asking you directly, What is this bruise I have? Instead I ran through the list of objects I was supposed to be describing, portraits of Surrealist painters with their pets. Muralists emerged from the Parisian Métro with anteaters on leashes. They posed with ocelots. The pet was a muse, the inspiration, or so I was supposed to say. Only I couldn’t. Constance had told me these photographs were brilliant. What did she see in them that I could not? I wondered who would ever pay so much for a photo of Magritte’s dog
. I pushed myself from the desk and went down the hall to ask my boss.

  I would have rather been working on the collection of pastels Constance had been assigned. They weren’t even for sale. I loved the bathers, French prostitutes stepping in and out of claw-footed tubs, thick flanks streaked with green. I went to visit them after work. The bathers always kept a date, and I loved them for that. They went away on loan and came back soon. It was my mother who’d told me Impressionists collected shades of green. They kept lists. Emeralds. Teal. The lime of a sun-stricken leaf. The whole world was slightly green.

  I stopped at the door and knocked, twisted my hands in the fabric of my clothes. My boss was on the phone. It’s an investment, she was saying. It’s of a piece with its time. It is time, she said, and in that statement I could hear the echo of the wall text I had written, the sort of declaration that failed me now. And why? That’s all I had come to discuss. My boss fiddled with the spiral phone cord. Can you hold? She hushed the receiver and looked at me, waiting for me to speak. I felt very aware of my appearance in that moment. The arrangement of my body. The bruise on my face. My hair was falling from its knob, pins slipping, and my chest failed to fill the front of the dress. The bruise was a shadow, a deep and muddy purple, and could easily have been mistaken for a streak of dirt. I felt her look at me in the same way I had just been looking at those pictures: unsure what to make of the image in front of her. I wanted to ask, would it be possible for me to work anywhere but in this building, where you were just upstairs? I thought of the actress from Mme Popov’s. After auditions, she paced the apartment, complaining at the top of her lungs, silk ribbons to her kimono flying. Once someone yelled back from the street, Keep trying, baby! and she flung open the window and leaned over the sill to reply, What the fuck else do you think I’m trying to do? My boss sat in silence, still muffling the receiver. And before I could stop myself, before I was able to recall that I was no actress, really, I had no other parts to audition for, I told her I would like to quit. Just a second, she said, then put the buyer back on hold. I stood in the door in my too-large dress. I thought my boss might try to dissuade me, she would make a case for me to stay. I hoped she would. I had done so well, I was precocious, I should return to my desk. But what she said was, Are you sure? I tilted on my borrowed heels. Yes. She nodded. Good luck to you, she said.