* * *
It is characteristic, maybe, for women of my age, of this era, to cram ourselves with information. To overprepare. To search until the evidence mounts in favor of what one already believes, in order that one may believe it. I read art historical decisions on the definition of fine art. I studied suits lodged by unwilling extras who’d appeared in movies they’d gone to see in theaters, not expecting to see themselves. Most of what I found, however, stood in defense of the artist’s right to make his art regardless of opposition. At long tables with low lamps, the city’s future crop of public defenders, corporate lawyers, counselors of every sort hunched over legal dictionaries, parsing court opinion. I wished one of them might litigate my mind, because the annals of Questioning Aesthetics, Quarterly certainly could not. The longer I was away from the gallery, the less sure I was of what I’d seen. It seemed almost possible I’d made a mistake. And yet. To misidentify myself—not even I was capable of so gross an oversight.
* * *
There were no windows in the basement reading room. Who knows how many hours passed? The law students rotated. They opened and closed their tomes, left, others took their places. I remained until I’d read myself into the company of peers.
* * *
There is a long tradition, of course, of artist-model symbiosis. For centuries painters have been falling for their models, marrying their models, replacing their wives with mistresses-as-models. It was always complicated, and the models rarely won. I read of Schiele’s Wally and the wife he later married, for money; of Leonardo’s model-pupil Salai, whom the genius sculptor kept like a pet in his home, a boy to be reproduced in bronze and plaster and marble until he died, three decades later, at the tender age of forty-four. Then there were the cases of Rembrandt and Saskia, his model-wife, and after her the servant girl Hendrickje—it was painting her that led him to propose. And of course there was Picasso, always Picasso, I perused whole diaries of his affairs. Olgas, Doras, Jackies. Round, beautiful women with doorstops for names. And I couldn’t help but notice that when I compared the photographs of these women to the paintings in which they appeared, they almost never resembled themselves. They were either much improved, like Wally, or else their natural homeliness was exaggerated, as with Matisse’s Marguerite. The lover’s perspective transformed her. She was no longer the woman that she herself, glancing into the mirror behind the easel, would expect to see. Of course she wasn’t. I could have laughed, I felt so relieved. I gathered the relevant copies of The American Journal of Transdisciplinary Legal Aesthetics into a stack and shoved them beneath my blouse, obscuring the bulk with pink trench and purse. I held them close on the train.
* * *
At home, the apartment was dark and Misha was asleep. I unloaded the journals onto the credenza, reached into the teapot for a handful of saltines. On the computer, there was a message waiting for me. It was from my fiancé.
Dear Percy,
Sorry, but I don’t usually take pictures of Americans.
Luck to you—
This performance of amnesia disarmed me to my seat. I reread the message until the words began to blur. I went straight to the teapot for more saltines.
14
I do not know how many days passed between the arrival of my fiancé’s email and my eventual reply, but I can say it was at least one, and that it was spent primarily in bed, composing mental drafts. I rose occasionally for handfuls of saltines. I cleaned and cooked. No, I thought, munching crackers in the stairwell, I was not crazy. I was certain. Though I suppose self-assurance was no defense. In fact, it strengthened the charge.
* * *
Through Friday, whenever Misha left for Insta-Ad, I settled at the credenza to make my inquiries. I was always disappointed. The curators at the gallery did not return my calls. I only ever reached the voice mail. Hello, this is the woman featured in The Exhibition of Persephone Q? I’m calling to say, well, she is me. Or I am she. I paused. Anyway, I’m calling to express my disappointment, I said, that no one let me know. I recited my own number. Once, twice. I articulated every digit, crisp and clear. I look forward to your response, I said. I returned the phone to its lilac cradle. No one called me back.
* * *
Photography and I have never been a match. It was a primal and instinctive impulse, for me, to turn away from the lens. Whenever a camera emerged, I edged out of the frame. I hid my face. In my hands, in my lap, behind a book, behind a sudden interest in something over my shoulder, far away. Family albums feature ample studies of the back of my head. After that day in the gallery, however, I found that my feelings about being seen and photographed had changed. Documentation took on new meaning for me. My breasts were strange. My ankles swelled. I was exhausted all the time. On my nightly ramble, after dark, my mind chock-full of women—Doras, Wallys, Persephones—I slipped my hands into my pockets and felt the slight swell of my belly through the silk lining of my coat. Soon I’d stretch around four, six, nine months of life, and then I really wouldn’t be the same. My bones would condense into the thick gray ash that fills an urn. This fate unfurled itself like a red carpet through the center aisle of my mind. I felt as though I might as well insist on my existential imprint while I still could.
* * *
One afternoon, I decided to call the women I used to work with at the art auction house. It seemed important not to use my own phone, in case the gallerists had shared my carefully articulated number with other people I might call, so I was at the self-help author’s when I dialed, going over proofs. It was late afternoon, and she had just stepped out to clear her head. This was usually how the editing process went. We worked until one of us wandered off. Or until the self-help author wandered off, while I stayed behind to implement the edits we had made on a large computer at her desk. As we worked, she paced back and forth across her studio, holding the manuscript before her like a lantern and reading aloud. I captured any mistakes we found, editing on the fly. That particular afternoon, we were polishing a passage on communication: Saying What You Want and Mean. It was not such an easy subject to explain, and we ourselves were having trouble knowing what we wanted and saying what we meant. Around three, she came to a halt in the center of the room and announced she was going out for air. I can’t see straight, she said. She tucked her crimson hair beneath a scarf and slipped into her coat. Then she was out the door, her footsteps disappearing down the hall.
* * *
The last couple sentences she’d read aloud echoed in my brain: Communication, communication, communication! (There’s no shame in lubrication!) I was feeling suspicious of exclamation marks these days. I nixed one in a dash of red. It was sobering: There’s no shame in lubrication. I read on: Lack of desire is the most common complaint … Then I glanced at the clock. The self-help author’s breaks could last anywhere from ten minutes to an hour. I took the cordless from its cradle on the desk and held it to my ear.
* * *
I dialed my old office from memory, prepared for further disappointment. The women I had known would have families, senior positions at the Met, and who knew what else, I could only remember so many items from their ten-year plans. In any case, they’d gone. As the phone rang, I recalled our lunchtime powwows with some regret, wishing I’d turned out more like them.
* * *
Then a woman answered. Hello? It was Constance’s assistant. Constance and her supernatural memory! Of course she had her own assistant now. We’re old friends, I told the woman on the other end, who connected me directly.
Percy?
I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear your voice, I said.
* * *
Constance had been promoted. Well, well. Look at you. On the up-and-up. Oh, stop, she said. She filled me in. Who’d gone, who’d stayed. Ten years was a long time—I didn’t recognize any of these names. From her office, she could see the famous Rockefeller tree and the tourists twirling on ice. They’re wiping out left and right, she reported. That’s Constance for you:
looking down on the world from on high. I imagined her there. In a corner of glass. Then her keyboard clacked on the line, drawing me back to the favor I’d called to ask. By the way, I said. Have you heard of that gallery, the photographs on view? Of course she had. She even was thinking of acquiring one herself. I paused. Really? Why not? she said. They were wonderful, no? I asked her what she thought of the woman featured in them, lying languid on the bed. She was confused.
I hadn’t thought. Why do you ask?
* * *
I told Constance the real question we should be asking was why that woman was me. I gave her the facts. The artist was my former fiancé, and I was the woman on the bed. That’s my room, I said. My bed. There was a silence on the line. Then the soft tapping of further keys. I wondered if she was taking notes. I could see Constance at her desk, phone pressed to her ear, framed posters from recent auctions reflecting the tourists sliding across the ice. So that’s him, then, she finally said. She promised to place some calls on my behalf. I thanked her. I couldn’t thank her enough, in fact.
Only, don’t call back here! Call me at home.
* * *
I finished reciting my number just as the self-help author stepped through the door.
* * *
I felt lighter knowing Constance was on my side. Upstairs, I reached into the teapot for more saltines. Misha and I split a deli sandwich. I made too much cucumber salad; it was soothing to chop. Whole bushels reduced to cubes as we talked through those aspects of his presentation that were still weighing on his mind. I hate the finances, he said. I patted his arm. A complaint made only by those who have enough money to start, I replied. He looked at me. That’s exactly the problem, he said. We don’t. The holiday lights hollowed his cheeks, and the telegraphic notes we’d written to each other made pastel patterns on the wall: Poetry Reading, Sunday @ 6 and also Cancel poems! The kitchenette was narrow and dark, like a confessional, and I felt, for a moment, like divulging. But too often those things that seemed to me worthy of shock and surprise were not so notable to Misha. I could already imagine his answer, the casual shrug, were I to tell him of the exhibition. Sometimes bowls just fall from shelves. Sometimes you mistake yourself for someone else. And some things, I thought, you simply cannot set aside. Misha bit into his sandwich. He lifted an Am J Tra La from the stolen scholarship strewn across the table.
What is going on?
Self-help, I replied.
15
At the end of a long Saturday reviewing proofs, the self-help author often stood me in the hall just outside her apartment to sprinkle invisible substances over my head, like a baker powdering a cake. These charms were meant to protect me from the evil corporate forces that governed the streets beyond our doors.
I’m only going to the Village. I’ll be fine.
She shook her head.
Doesn’t matter where you go, they’re everywhere these days.
* * *
We’d spent the previous few hours re-articulating what we meant by Saying What You Mean and preparing her apartment for the poetry reading. The chairs were drawn into a circle around the coffee table. Empty bowls awaited fancy nuts. From the doorway, I could see past the soft slope of her shoulder, out the window, to the small park where I used to lie on a bench at night when I forgot my keys. The cacti stood in a row along the sill. Usually I was skeptical of the self-help author’s protective spells. Today, however, I felt they couldn’t hurt.
Actually, can I have an extra?
She looked at me.
Something on your mind?
Just a feeling, I said.
Her hands whirled through the air again.
* * *
I had not yet acquired the promised anthology of Eastern European poems. I went in search. At the very least it would take my mind off waiting for Constance to call. The train inched along its weekend schedule, regurgitated me into the market at Union Square, where greens piled high, each row crushing the one below. I stepped on a radish. It resisted. A slow spill crept along the pavement toward the drain. The shops on Broadway seemed once removed from what I remembered, derivatives of brands I couldn’t place. I paused on the sidewalk outside the movie theater and gazed up at the marquee. Misha had told me no one knew what the public wanted to watch these days. There were producers who’d ordered the World Trade Center erased from their films, others who’d asked special effects to digitally resurrect it, casting twain shadows against the sky. I felt strange. Perhaps the self-help author’s charms were working all too well.
* * *
The bookstore was another block. There really were miles of books. I didn’t know where to start. Inside, shoppers pushed and pardoned themselves. I moved through the maze and found two clerks on ladders restocking the uppermost shelves of Western Classics. I cleared my throat. Excuse me, I said. I’m looking for the Poetry section? The one stared at me. This happened from time to time. People stopped me eagerly on platforms, at corners, circled me like a cheap souvenir. Are you Ukrainian? Not that I could recall. I wondered what it was he saw in me, whether I struck him as especially familiar, or odd.
End of the aisle, he said.
* * *
I took a detour through Cookbooks, then made my way to poems. The shelf devoted to Central, Central Eastern, and/or Eastern European letters was not large. There were only two feet of books from which to choose, and perhaps this was for the best; everyone was writing on war and death. I found a cluster of Poles, self-segregated around a white sticker on the wood: Polish. After a war, Szymborska said, someone has to tidy up. I read some letters by Miłosz. He made Marxism sound like a housekeeper’s dream:… eliminates certain problems by the same principle that the blowing up of a city eliminates marital quarrels, concerns about the furniture, etc. I was full of questions. The clerks were still on their ladders, and I called to them.
Does Poland count as Eastern Europe?
The space between them seemed to tense as they descended into debate.
I’d say so.
Would you?
The cultural exchange with the West is asymmetrical—
* * *
I looked around and imagined all the books going up in flames.
* * *
The clerks’ voices faded as I took my place in line. At the register, I selected a packet of candies to eat on the train, and on the platform unwrapped the silver foil. I placed a sugar tablet on my tongue. It tasted like soap. I spat it into my palm. The car rattled uptown as I steadied the book in my lap.
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors …
I had rather left my whole life unlocked, I thought.
* * *
At home, Misha was lying crosswise on the bed, deeply absorbed in some problem of his own. He wore his tweed jacket—his one jacket—and his face was warped the way faces are when seen upside down. Hi, love, he said. Hi, I said. We kissed. Then I locked the bathroom door, turned on the faucet, and tried not to be sick.
16
At the sink, I splashed my face. I washed away smudges of mascara and the self-help author’s charms. Then, in a rare breach of my own rules, I went to the bed and placed my damp cheek on Misha’s chest. He looked at me, surprised. There was no thinking, no talking for a while. After, we lay for a long time as the light began to fade. I stared across the room into the channel of the air shaft, waiting for something to fall. Misha folded his hands behind his head, and I watched his breastbone strain against his breath. I drew the blankets to my chin.
I think I’ve gained some weight.
Misha nodded.
I like it.
You’re not supposed to say you notice.
Percy, I live with you. Of course I notice things.
* * *
At midnight, I stood in the kitchenette with the phone, debating whether to call Constance again. The dial tone emanated from my palm. I returned the receiver to its lilac embrace. Everythi
ng was quiet. I listened for the roach, for footsteps overhead, the sound of other people’s faucets drawing hot water through the walls. I was positive that I was Persephone Q. Who needed proof? Still, it worried me she hadn’t called.
* * *
Despair seeks an object: I glanced around in search of candidates. The holiday lights illuminated the gleaming kitchenette, the spotless stove. I was running out of things to clean. A dateless calendar of sticky notes advanced across the wall. At the computer, a chime announced the arrival of an incoming message, and my stomach leapt. But it was only another chain email from Yvette. I loaded the message and skimmed the threat within. I’d have bad luck in love, it read, unless I forwarded the message tenfold, fanning fear at an exponential rate. Sry, Yvette had added above the body text. I’m such an idiot about these things …
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 8
