The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  * * *

  So let me get this straight. You took a picture without permission. And then decided—still without permission—to turn it into a show. You do not tell my wife. But neither do you, Misha said, turning to me. You don’t tell me anything. You go to Claire and reporters and galleries. And so I am standing around like an idiot. I have to wait for someone to call me at work to find out that anything is going on.

  * * *

  He mimed answering the phone.

  * * *

  “Oh, hi, do you believe your wife?” Again like an idiot I am saying, “Who is this?” and “Sure I do.” “Oh, okay,” she says. “How is this affecting your relationship at home?” As if I’d say anything so personal over the phone! But of course the answer is not so good. It isn’t affecting my relationship well. I am telling you all the time not to give out our information. This is why.

  At some point during this speech, Misha had managed to slip his thin arms into his overcoat. The hem of it flapped around his ankles as he paced, substantiating speed. He strode across the carpet to the stack of poster boards, tucked them under his arm.

  Misha, I said.

  Is there something else you would like to tell me, or do I have it right?

  I was silent.

  Good. Then I am set.

  He stepped onto the landing. The door closed with a click.

  * * *

  I stood for a moment in the center of the room. I could hear Misha’s beleaguered progress as he maneuvered an entire presentation down the stairs. Then I hurried. I took my purse by its strap, lifted my totes. Leaving proved no easier than arriving; stacks of Am J Tra Las eased from the canvas and onto the floor. I turned to my fiancé. Keep them, I said.

  * * *

  At the door, I paused. My fiancé was again sitting on the bed, as he had when I presented to him the other exhibition, the one that couldn’t be viewed. I couldn’t decide what feeling it was I harbored for him. I pitied him, I suppose, for being just as inept as I was, in life and in love. Well, it was nice to see you, he said. He looked into the kitchen, through the wall, toward the street. You probably should have told him, he added. I nodded. I wrapped my arms around my totes. It seemed I’d arrived years ago. I took one last look at the apartment, rested a hand on the knob of the door. Look, I said. If anyone asks, can you just tell them the truth? My fiancé turned an empty shot glass in his hands. Of course, he said. I’ll try.

  * * *

  Perhaps you never know you love something until it is under threat. Outside, I stood in the drizzle, looking up and down the block with a sense of mild terror. Then I saw Misha lumbering to the corner, encumbered by poster boards and printouts of his slides. I easily caught up. Here, I said. Let me help. I siphoned off a cardboard triptych and slipped it under my arm. It was the size of a man, and progress was even slower with my totes. We passed through the narrow chamber of a stretch of scaffolding. The green supports rose to either side, like trees. The drizzle turned to rain, and there was no more snow. I tucked my chin into my collar as other couples hurried past. Heels clacked on wet cement. Arms wrapped around shoulders as beautiful people disappeared into foyers, doorways, bars. Posters pinned, Misha and I moved like penguins to the corner, where he raised his free arm and hailed a cab. He opened the door, tossed the sodden presentation into the back. I ran around to the other side and slid into the opposite seat before he could drive off. The cabbie glanced into the rearview mirror. Where do you want to go? Misha mumbled the address. Then he directed his gaze out the window, away from me. The car set off with a splash.

  * * *

  We rode in silence, trapped in our thoughts. The driver must have intuited something had come between us. Can’t you see they’re breaking up? He shuttered the plastic divider separating the seats. I wished he’d turn the radio on. Then I wouldn’t have to think at all. Outside, people huddled beneath umbrellas, collapsed umbrellas into spires, righted spokes turned inside out. There were always people caught without cover in the rain, and yet, it seemed to me, enough umbrellas to go around. The cabs glistened like persimmons. Shoppers mulled under awnings and in doorways, sprinted across the street, eliciting horns. Misha gathered the handles to my totes and pulled the weight of them across the seats. We looked into the jumble of tea and tampons and books and knives.

  Let me take these, he said.

  It’s fine.

  The rule of thumb is don’t lift more than twenty pounds.

  I glanced at him, confused.

  When pregnant, that is.

  I sighed.

  Oh, Misha. How did you know?

  He shrugged.

  I found the test in the trash weeks ago.

  * * *

  I folded my hands over the rise of my belly. What a fool I was. Misha had known all along. It was worse than discovering old pictures of yourself. He’d broken the fourth wall of my own charade.

  I meant to tell you so many times, I said. Then there was this package, the exhibition—

  The cab halted abruptly as a woman dashed across the street.

  No one believed me, I said.

  * * *

  Warehouses loomed at the end of the block. The taxi crawled between luxury buildings with Hudson views. Traffic accumulated at the entrance to the highway, and we came to a halt. Our voices were loud without the rush of the car. Misha looked at his hands.

  Do you like being married to me?

  Of course I do.

  Really?

  Yes, how can you ask?

  Then why don’t you tell me anything and never come to bed?

  I propped my elbows on my knees, my head in my palms. I was forgetting what it was like not to feel nauseated all the time.

  What if I told you it’s because I accidentally tried to kill you? And not just once.

  Misha frowned.

  Are you sure?

  * * *

  The car lurched forward, and we jostled back. Misha’s profile was bleak in the window. I noticed how his cheeks had sharpened, the usual hollows burrowing deeper between the bones. His cowlick had grown severe. How much we’d changed, I thought, in no time at all. I’d loved Misha completely before the package arrived, before I pinched his nose. And yet I felt I loved him much more now. It was impossible, illogical, for both to be true at once. He released his seat belt as we drew into the lot.

  You should probably ask Yvette about that hand.

  I looked at the bandage, where the tape was coming loose.

  I already did, I said.

  * * *

  In front of the expo center, men milled about in suits. Misha straightened his tweed jacket, smoothed his jeans. He gathered his posters, my totes. Together we stood on the curb, beneath the banner. TechHype 2001! Let me help, I said. I wanted to be there to hear him give his talk. Misha hitched the totes on his shoulders and the poster boards under his arm, shook his head. I started to follow, and he held up his hand. I am sorry, he said. I can’t think with you around.

  * * *

  He disappeared through the mouth of the warehouse like another consumer good. I watched him go. I admired Misha very much for his work, his view of the world. For the very fact that he had somewhere to be, while I did not. The cab pulled away in a spray of rain and oil. Alone, I turned up the street. I felt decidedly vulnerable, unsubstantiated, stripped of all my totes.

  3

  It’s funny now to think how easily I might have missed my own exhibition. I might not have opened that package, might not have received any mail at all. The glass of the door had been shattered, and someone else could have reached through the gap. Upon tearing away the tape, maybe she, too, would have seen herself in that series of photographs. I had been so certain, when I returned to the pink house, that I was Persephone Q. Now I no longer knew what to believe. I wondered what the sender of the package had meant for me to see.

  * * *

  I caught an uptown train to City College, roamed the empty streets. I felt sick of my old haunts, my block, the
laundromat. I was tired of being alone. I took to Broadway, where the vegetable stands were closed. No bicycles spun in the street, though the rain had eased. I veered east and sat for a while on a wet swing set, looking out onto Hamilton’s house, until the soft swaying coaxed forth the urge to be sick. How much history should we preserve? I thought. Just enough to make it seem that not much has been lost. I walked on, calculating the hours until Misha came home. He would not even have begun his talk by this time. Then would come all the presentations after his, the drinks and networking, the exchanging of business cards, all the little ceremonies I ought to be there for. I sighed. A rat darted out of a trash can, another on its tail. I stepped aside. I abandoned the playground for quiet, brownstoned blocks. The storefront churches were asleep, corrugated tin drawn over their mouths. Black plastic bundles piled high along the curbs. A flyer fluttered by and I fixed it flat against the pavement with my sneaker: it was an invitation to a block party, dated yesterday.

  * * *

  I turned back toward the playground, spied into lit apartments lined with books. At the intersection, I caught sight of a dim red glow. My heart leapt a little. My psychic was in! I hadn’t seen her in what felt like months but could have only been a week. I hurried one block south.

  * * *

  My psychic kept irregular and impulsive hours. It was impossible to plan. I often had better luck walking by her storefront lair in the very early morning or late at night on a whim, rather than arriving during the hours listed on her door.

  * * *

  I stood outside. The neon sign seared its advertisement onto the night: TAROT READINGS. I buzzed. An anthropomorphic moon and sun occupied the awning, surrounded by a smattering of stars. The lock released, and I pushed through. The plush curtains were drawn over the windows and along the walls, blocking out the light and absorbing all the sound. It was a sensory vacuum, that velvet room. The street, the swing set, Hamilton’s house could have been miles away. Who knew what time it was? All sense of time was moot. The scalloped patterns on the carpet fluttered across the floor to where my psychic was sitting on a pouf, knitting. I stood in the entrance and watched her loop new yarn onto the needle. Knit, purl. Knit, purl. The garment growing into her lap had the shape of a mitten, or maybe a hat. Either way, I was not about to interrupt. I watched her knit another row. Then she carefully counted her stitches and set her work aside. Percy, she said. I knew you’d be back.

  * * *

  I slid into a folding chair. Crystals swung from my psychic’s neck as she set the kettle on the hot plate, clusters of pendants that glinted violet and sand and gray. Her hair was gathered high and pinned in place, and in the low lamplight it shone not unlike a crown. My psychic was the most imperious woman I knew, I decided. Not even the self-help author could compete. As the water boiled, she slid the knitting needles through her hair. A stack of tarot cards appeared from the pocket of an apron wrapped snugly around her waist. Percy, she said. You’re a diamond in the rough. How can I help? She held out her hands and I gave her my wrists. Her thumbs were cool on my veins. Tense, she said. I can feel it. Your blood is taut. She took up the deck and shuffled it into three separate stacks, flipped the top cards with a knowing hum. The Empress. The Hermit. The Seven of Cups. My psychic pressed. What’s on your mind? I watched the kettle shiver on the plate. Remember, I said, a little while ago, when you said I had those spirits in me? She nodded. They’re in you still, she said. She closed her eyes, waded through the energies in the room. Even more now than there were before? I asked. Yes, I think that’s right. The neon sign crackled behind the curtains, blinking on and off. The office was open, closed, open, closed, even as I sat inside. I smoothed the wool of my traveling dress. I’m pregnant, I said. The psychic smiled, tapped a card. That explains the Empress, she replied. Though I sat very still in the folding chair, I could feel something in me respond. The nebula seemed to quiver. For the first time I felt I could register its presence, nascent. My psychic reached for another card. I watched her slow, deliberate hands. It occurred to me that she was only repeating everything I said. I was telling her the truth of me, rather than the other way around. This was no use. I wanted to rid myself of whatever it was, resident in me, that had pushed Misha and those I loved aside. I didn’t want to disappear from Morningside. But the others, I said. Can’t you just … evict them? My psychic laughed, then sadly shook her head. It doesn’t work like that, she said. She revealed the Magician. The Lovers, reversed. The Five of Cups. I no longer wished to know my fate or have my fortune told. I reached into my pocket for crumpled cash. My hand met the dog-eared photograph. I’ll pay you back, I promise, I said. But right now I have to go.

  * * *

  There aren’t so many comforts in this life. Maybe that’s how you know that you are growing old. You burn through solace more quickly than before, though conservation is the required mode. It used to be enough to sprawl on the carpet while my mother vacuumed around my limbs, accept protective charms, clip coupons with Yvette’s mother as she nursed a cigarette—in my mind’s eye I watched the orange tip of her menthol recede into the past. I felt an acute sense of finitude. The profundity of all I lacked. There was no one left to plug me in so that my world lit up like a neon sign. I put a hand to my belly, where the nebula buzzed. From now on it might be just you and me, I thought.

  It would be at least another hour until Misha came home. If he did come home. I imagined the two of us in summer, on East Tenth, walking arm in arm to the tune of Hungarian Dance. How far away that seemed. The avenue before me was deserted, abandoned to the dark and the mist that brews after rain. I walked the length of Morningside Park. The landscape rose out of the shadows, presenting luminous boulders, the flat of the pond. I ducked into a bodega for a jar of olives. Who could explain these cravings? They came to me, and I obeyed. Back on the damp paths of the park, I braced the jar against a knee and wrestled with the lid. The safety seal would not budge. I tried again. In my fiancé’s exhibition I had seemed so powerfully serene. I was a veritable symbol, a woman immune to the passage of time. What a mythic force she was, that woman on the bed. And why is it always a woman, I wondered, who knows all but stands aside, indifferent as the Fates? I thought of my mother. I wrestled the jar. Perhaps I should have aspired to a life of more Homeric proportions. As things stood, it was nine o’clock, and I was on the street, in the mist, at war with a condiment.

  * * *

  The night was ornate with after-rain. Lampposts glistened. The lights of the college rolled through the trees, down the hill, diffused over the grass and ragged outcrops of snow. I looked down the length of the lawn, to the point where the avenue kinks and splits, and the old apartment buildings stand ornery and overwrought. Someone was walking north beneath the canopy of elms. He wasn’t moving very fast. Jar in hand, I set off at a clip. This was my hero. A knight sent to open the jar. Then his gait grew familiar as I neared. He seemed to sway. I wondered, could it really be? I recalled my trek to the laundromat with the self-help author to see if it was Harold she’d spotted at the dryers. For a moment I was afraid. He couldn’t be back. And if he was—what an apology he owed! As did we. We hadn’t believed Claire, we’d called her insane, and she had been right all along. No matter how kind Harold had been to me—moving furniture, loaning blenders, granting entry whenever I forgot my keys—he’d rather put Claire through hell. Only to return, as she knew he would. But that’s how it goes. It isn’t so simple to disappear, I was learning. In fact, nothing goes. Everything resurfaces in time. I was mentally drafting a self-righteous manifesto along these lines when the figure entered a pool of lamplight. The face that appeared was extremely recognizable. It wasn’t Harold’s at all.

  * * *

  Each time I saw Buck, I had to relearn not to stare. After a poetry reading, he lingered in my thoughts. I worried about him. Then I forgot. The sore on his nose slipped my mind until I ran into him like this on the street, or at the diner, where he went daily for a slice of quiche, newsp
aper tucked under his arm. The cashier greeted him: The same? It was always the same. I wondered if Buck returned so often because that way people never forgot, or else they grew so used to him they no longer had a reason to stare. I stood on the sidewalk now, determined not to gawk.

  * * *

  The sore glimmered faintly, like an oil spill. I focused on his clothes. Buck’s pants were cinched high around a very thin waist, revealing anemic, opalescent ankles, his skin stretched tightly around the bone. The temperature had dropped and his overcoat struck me as too thin. The wool fell loosely over his arms and failed to cover his pale wrists. He stared at me with an intensity I found difficult to bear.

  I held up the jar.

  I was just trying to open these olives, I said.

  * * *

  We watched the green fruits bobbing in the marinade, the pimientos flashing orange. I asked Buck where he was off to, what he was doing out on this dreary night. He’d gotten a late start on his trip to the diner that day. In fact, he was on his way now. He tapped his cane on the sidewalk and turned to me. Did I care to join? Oh, Buck, I said. He nearly broke my heart with his old-fashioned ideas about how to treat a woman you meet on the street: of course you ask her along. TVs flared blue in windows. Across the avenue, a kitchen bloomed with light. I watched a silhouette empty a bowl. I was unsure what to do about Buck, and also reluctant to leave. Here he was, in the cold, poking his nose into exactly those conditions it ought to avoid. I thought of bringing him to the self-help author’s, but that would mean going home. I wasn’t ready to face the apartment on my own.