Later, at home, I sat in the window with a plate of toast and watched debris gather in the air shaft. Really, I said out loud to the room. I think it’s for the best.
THREE
1
How far away my fiancé seemed! He was all the way on the other side of the room. It might have been a mile. But I suppose I’ve never been one for keeping track of distances or time. Minutes, hours, the whole of my youth: I looked up and saw that they had gone. I was still crouched on the doormat, and my limbs were radios out of range, full of static, asleep. I lowered my forehead to my knees as a fresh spell of nausea constricted my throat.
* * *
There is something about feeling ill that has always made me especially formal and polite. On the subway, in the moment before I sense I am about to faint, I become a perfect lady. I’m sorry, I hate to bother you. So sorry, excuse me, but I believe I need to sit down. Now I brought my palms to my cheeks and felt they were damp with sweat. The apartment dilated, and within that exaggerated scope I could sense some locus of concern. Perhaps it belonged to my fiancé. I gathered the skirts of my traveling dress. Pardon me, I said. The floor acquired a certain tilt, and I took this opportunity to pitch toward the bath, where I knelt on the tiles that had always been such a pain to clean, I remembered, back when I was responsible for cleaning them. I shifted my knees. Locked the door. This is a reason to marry, I thought. To have someone always at your side when you are about to retch.
* * *
It is a strange feeling, to be shut in a bathroom that once belonged to you. I washed my face. The faucet struck the same shrill notes it always had, and thin streetlight filtered through the narrow window. I looked around. There was the porcelain sink. The tub. Peering behind the curtain, I found an unfamiliar brand of soap.
* * *
I stood at the sink, water dripping down my nose and onto the dress. My reflection hovered in the mirror. I was pale. I opened the flimsy door of the medicine cabinet and looked in at the toothpaste, mouthwash, the little spools of floss, a single bottle of perfume. I lifted it, spritzed. The rest of the apartment was conspicuously absent any sign of woman. And yet here she was. She had a whole shelf of her own. I recalled retreating to my parents’ bedroom as a girl to search through the drawers that still held my mother’s things. The woman my fiancé was seeing now had similar tastes. Lipstick, blush, nail files of various lengths and grains. No eye makeup, as far as I could tell. I touched the pink handle of a razor. A vial of varnish capped in gold. In the wilderness of a boar’s brush alighted a bramble of hair a few shades lighter than my own. I selected the lipstick, unwound a fresh inch of maroon, brought it partway to my lips. Then I looked in the mirror. I silently recapped the tube, replaced everything just as it had been.
A lot of life, maybe, rests on a profound misremembering. On the substitution of the familiar for the strange. It is all too tempting to look for meaningful connections, signs of fate, when most relationships amount to no more than a terrible coincidence, a grand confusion of crimson paints. Perhaps my fiancé was right: the link between Persephone Q and me was no stronger than the bonds I formed with contemporaneous browsers on America Online, in the annals of the Shopping page. Those exchanges of proximity and contingency so easily mistaken for direct address. I thought they were speaking to me! But of course they don’t think twice about you, these other users, they click away and never know you at all. The idea made me feel sick once more, and also very tired. I thought of the Russian in the Met. The sadness in his eyes.
* * *
I emerged from the bath plain and damp. My fiancé was still seated on the bed, staring at some invisible point of interest on the floor. Maybe he was remembering. Certainly I was remembering. Only, it seemed we were remembering different things. The rug undulated blue. Seasick, I made my way to the sofa and lay down. The ceiling pressed in like the prow of an incoming ship. There was Persephone, the figurehead. I closed my eyes. I recalled how victorious it used to feel to be out in the city with my fiancé. I was too admiring, too prone to starstruck states. But you can’t admire everything, not everything can be a surprise. That’s the thing, with taste. Eventually you have to choose. I looked down the length of the sofa at my bare and calloused feet.
Are you all right?
My fiancé was standing before the bed, still holding his keys.
Only pregnant, I said.
Congratulations.
You don’t think it’s a good idea, do you?
I never said that.
I plan on being an excellent mother.
I’m sure you will be, he said.
* * *
I missed Misha. Also Brahms. There must be some way to find a joke in all this, I thought, and together they would know how. I glanced at the clock. There was half an hour until Misha was due to give his presentation. Just enough time, if I rushed. I ought to call a cab. Instead I shivered, turned onto my side. As soon as I was sure that I could stand, I’d go.
Tell me, did you send that package?
What package?
I looked at him.
Never mind.
* * *
My fiancé disappeared from view. I heard the faucet singing in the sink. Then he reappeared with a glass of water. Here, he said. I took a cautious sip, handed it back to him. He hovered, glass half full. I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. He must have felt it, too. Just then he stepped away. He glanced at the poster overhead.
You’re really sure it’s you?
My body stretched before me on the sofa.
I said, I know how we can check.
* * *
I never did discover where my mother went that night she took the car out on her own. We asked around. We had to ask around. It had to do with how you price a death, because not all deaths are worth the same. For a long time I imagined she had a lover, or a friend, people she visited whom my father and I had never met. These fragile affiliations grew elaborately, like daisy chains, in my child mind. Now I often wonder if she simply drove to the city to walk the streets alone at night, see the things she liked to see. I doubt she ever meant to leave us so permanently. I liked to imagine her, sometimes, weaving through the same blocks that I frequented from day to day. She was there in the Garment District, watching her reflection leap between the windows, admiring the glitter of the sequins on display. She sat on a bench by the Egyptian obelisk, behind the Met, and wondered, as I have from time to time, How many of these monuments were uprooted from the deserts, and how many still remain? She was there in the laundromat, converting dollars into coins. This was the upside to not knowing enough. I could imagine her however I pleased. I wondered if I’d recognize her, were I to see her now. If, in my visions of her, she’d recognize herself.
* * *
I was still unstable as I followed my fiancé up the ladder and to the atelier. My hands shook. My face was damp. I wore my pink trench, hat, scarf, prepared to dash. I checked my pockets for cash and keys while he sat at his desk.
You’ll be quick?
My fiancé nodded.
It’s easy, he said.
* * *
The monitor illuminated. He tapped a password into the dialog box. The skylight was a black square in the ceiling, and beneath it, where we used to keep our bed, a space had been cleared to accommodate a reflector screen and a small wooden portrait chair. I peeked over the edge of the loft, into the living room. Then I returned to my fiancé’s shoulder to watch the hourglass slowly spin.
Oh, come on, he said.
* * *
One thing I had not told my fiancé was how long I had lain there on the bed that morning after the shutter snapped. The flash lingered in the room. I was pinioned, maybe, by a sense of premonition. But I’ve always lived my life too slow. As a girl, after departing from the upper stories of the tree in our front yard, I could sense that something serious in me had shifted, and yet I was not sufficiently alarmed. The branches hashed the blue sky overhead. How many hours passed, I wo
nder, before two arms came to scoop me up from the snow and carry me to the car?
* * *
On-screen, the hourglass yielded. He entered commands, navigating fluidly. Windows opened onto further windows until an image of Persephone Q appeared. The room was furnished. The skyline, complete. It was the original image from the show, the one on which all the other, emptier versions were based. Though I was wary of making assumptions. I thought by now I’d have been desensitized to the sight of myself, catatonic on the bed. Standing so close to the man who’d captured it, however, I saw it fresh. It was a portrait of stubborn slumber. Only those with too much trust are able to sleep that way.
I pointed at my rib cage.
The scar is here, I said.
* * *
My fiancé nodded. Then he set to work. He partitioned the image the way you lay claim to a piece of land. The selected area drew near. The surrounding room, the walls, the furniture, the skyline were pushed from view. He staked another claim, cropped my ribs, tapped a key. We drew nearer still. A drop-down menu appeared, and he navigated it, manipulated the pixels-per-parts, the digital thread count. The image sharpened. My body was becoming a pale, abstract thing: a shape, a color swatch. We were far too close for comfort. You need to be at some distance, I think, to appreciate humanity. Perhaps that’s what all the trouble is. We do our gazing far too close, or else too far away. Like Rothkos. No one ever looks at them correctly. The artist thought the ideal distance from which to view his six-foot swaths of color was six inches. He wanted you to stand right there with the canvas against your nose. You can’t see anything that close. The whole composition dissolves. So it was with Persephone. We zoomed. A bit of texture appeared beneath an arm. Is that it? my fiancé asked. He refined the image again. The quality was poor and pixelated, a block of scaled skin. It looked less like me than ever. I don’t know, I said. I reached. The screen met my fingertip convexly, delivered a shock of static. And the doorbell rang.
* * *
Few sounds were more upsetting than the motor of that buzzer. It ground into our thoughts. My fiancé checked his watch once more. After another moment, he pushed himself from the desk, descended the ladder. He paused for a moment at the door, staring at his shoes. Then disappeared into the hall.
2
Alone, I looked at the screen. At the abstruse beauty of what may or may not have been a scar. Then I crossed the atelier and collapsed into the portrait chair. The poster of Persephone Q hung before me in the rafters. I sat. Very still. Having a staring contest with myself. I was really sick of her.
* * *
It strikes me there are fewer private moments now. There is a great race on, really. The goal is to gather your own impressions before someone else can tell you what you saw, what you are seeing. To be the consumer rather than the consumed. Information proliferates not in pursuit of the new but according to the law of averages: extremes converge, and we hover dumbly around the mean. I find myself more and more sympathetic, of late, to adventurers, tornado chasers, collectors of orchids and exotic fish. I look them up online. I suppose they are only in search of something of their own, for the chance to be alone, arrest the subtle slippage of the self that occurs whenever other people are around. I stood to go. Downstairs, a door crashed distantly. Two sets of footsteps sounded on the steps, voices in the vestibule. I buttoned my coat. It would be the owner of the lipstick in the medicine cabinet, maybe, and I was hardly eager for us to meet. I wished her well. Then the door opened, and my fiancé appeared. I paused. There, behind him, I was astonished to find not the woman I’d extrapolated from the razor and the lipstick, a deep maroon, but Misha. He looked only slightly less surprised to see me.
Percy, he said. What are you doing up there?
* * *
For a brief moment before that buzzer sounded, I had enjoyed a spell of resolution. Maybe it wasn’t me in the picture. Maybe it was, if only in my mind. And what was the difference, really, between empirical evidence and personal belief? I was convinced. Now that Misha had arrived, however, empiricism quickly regained the upper hand. It was empirically bad that I was here, in my fiancé’s loft, rather than at the expo center, where I’d said I’d be. It was empirically bad that a large nude photograph of my person hung overhead, visible to both my former and my current lovers, deleterious indeed that in order to exit the loft I had to turn my back on these men and slowly make my way down the ladder, thus presenting my ass, which was not, empirically, my most attractive feature. It was a disaster all around. There was nothing to say. I descended slowly, carefully, too resigned to rush. My whole body seemed disposable, a little tuft of tissue tucked around a gift. I reached the floor quite sick, certain that Misha had come to dispose of me.
* * *
Outside, it was dark. A silence passed. Everyone was waiting for me to speak. I was the reason we were here, after all. I wanted to say, Let’s all go home. But it was rather too late to retreat. My fiancé took pity on me. So, he said. I guess you two know each other? He offered tea, whiskey, wine, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be hosting us. I wanted to leave that instant and was about to explain we couldn’t stay. Misha slipped off his coat.
I’ll take vodka.
Right, my fiancé said. Vodka it is.
He turned to the kitchenette.
* * *
I looked at my husband. He was dressed for his presentation. Tweed jacket and jeans, the shoes, as we’d discussed. A stack of poster boards was pinned beneath his arm. He set it down. The contents of my totes were still scattered across the floor, and it struck me that this was as good a time as any to gather them. I knelt, chasing lip balms and pens, legal precedents. Misha stooped and selected one of the images I’d sliced from the exhibition book. In this particular iteration, the red room was especially empty, and I seemed especially exposed. Misha held it to the light.
I’ve had an interesting call from a reporter. It seems that this is you?
I sighed.
I guess that’s a matter of debate.
* * *
Misha folded the photograph into his pocket. Then he crossed the room and sat on the sofa, directly below the poster of Persephone. I sat beside him, running my palms along the embossed velvet of the upholstery, up and down, up and down, until he placed his hands on mine to bring them to a halt.
How did you know where I was?
Misha shrugged.
It’s the only pink house on the street.
I frowned.
I didn’t know I told you that.
* * *
My fiancé emerged from the kitchenette, bottle of vodka wedged under his arm. Three glasses chimed on the table. He poured a shot into each and placed one before me—conspicuously, I thought. I watched Misha tip his back in a single swallow. Then he poured another. And another. Misha often enjoyed a vodka or two, or three. At home, his chess set doubled as a fleet of vials: the king’s crown was a hinge. Why not? I myself had drunk the volume of a fallen bishop. I always lost when we played chess, I couldn’t keep up, and Misha drank the contents of my captured pieces for me. He held his liquor better than anyone I knew. However, discovering your wife clinging to a ladder in her ex-fiancé’s loft will leave even the strongest liver compromised. He should slow down. Misha, I said. I was about to tell him to stop. Then he downed my vodka, too, and energetically began to pace the room.
* * *
Pacing was a hobby of Misha’s. He used to study this way, crossing the bedroom back and forth with a textbook balanced in his palms. When he reached a challenging passage he paused to run a finger down the page. He went to the river to think. In my fiancé’s apartment, the ceiling sloped so low that Misha had to stoop as he traversed the room. The windows caught flashes of his reflection as he passed, caches for a rapidly moving data set. Outside, through the rain, the skyline had emerged. How many more months, I wondered, until I was no longer shocked whenever I looked south? Ground level, the city stirred. Anticipation drifted u
p from the streets. People were going for drinks, for dinner, to functions like the one to which Misha should have already arrived, and which he very much needed to attend. The whole event was beginning now. Instead, he paced my fiancé’s floors. I watched his sharp shoulders, thin face, his wrists and legs, the small belly nestled beneath the high button of his jacket. He was so pale the light seemed to sink into him an inch, it filtered through him like one of Claire’s figurines, illuminating subcutaneous layers of being. And currently that core flushed red. I had seen Misha this agitated only once before, and that was when the Patriot Act was passed. There was nothing patriotic about it, he said. The public’s obsession with tapping phones only distracted from the far greater danger of legalizing cyber spies. The only thing worse, he felt, than sharing your name, email, browsing history, library records, and IP address with a corporation like Insta-Ad was to cede it to the government instead. It was the Iron Curtain all over again. He was just as worked up now, as he addressed my fiancé:
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 16