Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  “He’s not the one who stole it. His friend probably stole it, or bought it stolen. He was trying to give me back my data. I’m just trying to file a—”

  “His friend stole it?”

  “I don’t want to report him. It’s for the insurance. I thought . . .”

  Eleanor blushed at the untenability of her position. The cop leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms against his chest. Eleanor thought she could see him shake his head, just slightly, in disdain or disbelief or some prefabricated combination of the two.

  “Suspect or no suspect. Those are your choices.”

  Eleanor, quietly: “No suspect.”

  “Right! Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

  The cop, who had removed his glasses and regained some of his lotharioness, stapled together the pages of Eleanor’s incident report and tossed it somewhere by his feet. Then he swiveled his chair to the right and busied himself with a stack of paperwork piled high on the long wooden desk.

  If he did come home, he would be drunk. If he did not come home, she would feel indefensibly lonely—indefensibly because of their arrangement, which was as old as their relationship, and which had to do with the disavowal or at least suppression of certain feelings, specifically those of possession, jealousy, complacency.

  Eleanor had left the police station and automatically turned in the direction of Abraham’s apartment. The lights were on inside a newly settled stretch of boutiques, the usual influx into neighborhoods in the late stages of gentrification—designer maternity store, coffee roaster, purveyor of handmade gifts—and inside them workers swept, cashed out, turned signs from OPEN to CLOSED. The street was near empty. Her arms crossed tightly like the lothario cop’s, Eleanor walked slowly, her thoughts turning from the cop to Abraham to Danny K.M.

  Those are your choices.

  Happens.

  Please, understand.

  Three teenagers overtook her from behind, shrieking and falling into each other as they raced to the block’s end, trailed by the scent of pot. Possession, jealousy, complacency—these, she and her lover had agreed, were feelings that lead to unhappiness and, inevitably, despair, and they had organized their situation so as to stave them off. For Abraham, the arrangement was close to ideal.

  Eleanor turned and began walking in the opposite direction.

  “I know how it feels,” Danny K.M. had written. Eleanor took this—a cliché, at best a well-meaning but weak speech act, like the similarly intentioned “you are not alone”—literally. She took it to mean that some person in the world, some Danny K.M., sitting in front of an ill-begotten keyboard somewhere, had felt, if only for an instant, what she felt, and had been moved to tell her so at some risk to himself, and the reciprocal fellow-feeling this gesture sparked in her was—though she was not yet able to take note of it—vast, unknowably vast and growing.

  Some time ago, after the thing that happened had happened, she’d signed a month-to-month lease on a room in a house in an adjacent part of the borough. Her room was a ten-by-twelve-foot box, painted a warm brown, with a single window overlooking the polluted canal. She spent little time there now, but it was a peaceful place, with housemates who were friendly but not intrusive, and who made her feel both older (they were in their twenties) and younger than she was. Today when she entered they were sitting in the living area, their figures partially effaced by smoke, watching one of Jonas Mekas’s Walden films on a giant laptop poised atop the coffee-table clutter.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Eleanor joined them and sank into the film, which was so beautiful—so full of tenderness and nostalgia and mute observation, of people walking on grass, sunlight caught on celluloid, kaleidoscopic portraits of beloveds—she felt herself slide away, and slide away again, and again, until it began to seem ridiculous—all of this sliding without destination—and she got up, excused herself, retired to her room, and fell asleep on the unmade bed.

  In her sleep she wrote an email to Danny K.M., only fragments of which she would recall in the morning:

  WHEN I FINALLY received word from the critic, nearly a week had passed since he’d left for his tour. I was juggling stress at work (my supervising editor at the magazine had been indicted for fraud) and at home: my girlfriend, Kat, and I were separating, and she’d moved into what had been our shared office until she could find a new place to live.

  I spent whatever free time I had revising the first section of my manuscript, though I found myself also reading up on the dangers—mainly immune-related, as the critic had suggested—of “suboptimal genetic diversity.” Our night at the bar had both intensified and complicated my interest in the critic: he was self-absorbed and entitled (Kat would sneer narc! and run), but there were introspection, curiosity, and vulnerability there too, and the combination, when mixed with our secret history, touched me. That I couldn’t tell to what degree he was flirting with me specifically or with me as a genre didn’t matter, since my interest in that part of our dynamic was (and not only because he was engaged and I was mostly off men) academic, and I was determined to keep it so.

  He had sent me, before leaving, his itinerary, so I could share his amusement at the language it contained. It had been written in imperfect English by the pr person for his Swedish distributor who was (inexplicably, he said, as Sweden is full of fluent English speakers) a native Austrian, recently migrated to the north. The list of screenings and interviews and luncheons was punctuated by the kind of inadvertent innuendo—“We hope you will be satisfied by your escort,” “The menus have been designed to your affections”—that only the resolutely monolingual would ridicule, and I remembered that this Beckett expert had failed (though he claimed to have tried) to learn French. In the flurry of messages we exchanged after our night at the bar, he hadn’t mentioned the dilemma he’d divulged there, nor did I bring it up—I didn’t know how. So I was both surprised and not surprised by what he wrote to me now.

  I am still in Stockholm but tomorrow I’ll be in Copenhagen, wishing I were in Christiania. I have always wanted to see Christiania, and I asked my distributors if they could arrange it, but they said no. Do you know what happens in Christiania. It has become Disneyland. But you can still buy hash.

  I am drunk. They have given me a lot of aquavit. They have given it to me at dinner, and they have left it in my room. I have drunk the aquavit they left in my room. I have drunk it all. It was a small bottle. It tasted like a tonic. I drank it to cure my ills.

  I have been spending time with my handler. She told me she hates experimental documentary. She’s a self-described left-populist who believes in TV. I don’t think she hated my film but I think she wanted to. Hate it. She reminds me of you. Do you hate my film.

  That was the end of the first email, but a second followed immediately.

  I’m not really drunk. I haven’t told Laurance anything. When I left for the airport she said, I love you, you know. My handler is pregnant, I mean she is very very pregnant. Big as a house. Laurance doesn’t want kids, but I’ve always thought I’d have three. Tell me what I’m supposed to do.

  The brochure says Dogs run wild and play in the narrow streets where no cars are allowed. The mild scent of cannabis is in the air when you walk through the famous Pusher Street. Groups of foreign tourists on guided tours blend in with chilled-out youngsters and the locals who work in the various small shops and cafees where you can pay with a special Christiania currency.

  I would like the opportunity to buy hash as part of a guided tour.

  I want to go to a cafee.

  I am lost.

  There was a third email in the same thread but sent, according to the time stamp, two hours later. I could see that it was long, and I went and poured myself a glass of wine—a third glass of wine; it was after dinner and I was alone—before beginning to read.

  You realize that you are now—for how long I don’t know, but at least for now, and possibly for all time—in a category, with relation to
my biography, all by yourself. I have been thinking about this. Because, what do you really know about me: That I wrestled in school, that I like to drink whiskey. That I’m shit at maths. What do I know about you: even less. What I know about you—what I know about you could fit on a Post-it note. Could fit on a postage stamp. Could fit on the head of a pin. I barely know how to pronounce your name. Is your name Russian. How do you pronounce your name.

  When I was twelve—this was in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, during the years my dad was a postdoc—there was a kid in my class named Sasha. He was one of three boys from Moscow who had come over at the same time. The others were Yuri and Boris, I kid you not. It was around the time that Sting song came out, you remember—“I hope the Russians love their children too”—and the whole experience, these three Russkies coming to this midwestern school—we called it the Russian invasion—was a formative event for a lot of the kids in my class. I don’t think anyone else even understood that they were Jews—that that’s why they had left the Soviet Union, they were the children of dissidents, they’d been pushed out—but my family was European and political so somehow we knew. I became friends with them, with Sasha especially—he was a wrestler too, we were both in the same weight class, 103 lbs if you can believe that—and we would sit together in the cafeteria. We smoked grass for the first time together too, a roach I’d nicked from my sister (do you even know I have a sister) in the alley behind the school with a homeless guy taking a shit ten feet away. The Russkies and I and a couple of girls from our class (that’s a different story: the girls, Lizette Tanikawa . . .) all volunteered for the Walter Mondale campaign in the fall of ’84. I think the Russian parents leaned Republican, the Cold War Reaganite thing, but since the sons were friends with me, and though my parents couldn’t vote they liked to lecture kids about the fragility of democracy—do you remember how the yuppies all fell hard for trickle-down?—the young Russians joined up. We rode around after school in a van and offered people lawn signs, that kind of thing. I can’t remember who was driving the van, I guess some older volunteer. One day, after we’d run out of signs, we asked to be dropped off at the lake, and we were all messing around; the girls were flirting with Sasha and Yuri, who were the attractive ones, and Boris—who had a sort of capsized face—and I were throwing rocks at the little waves, trying to land them right on the break. The sun was going down and creating this glare from the water, so I couldn’t see that Sasha and one of the girls—Colleen, or Corrine, I’ve managed to forget—were crouched together at the shore’s edge, and I hurled a rock in the air and it was the best throw I had probably ever executed in my life, and Boris and I looked up as it arced across the variegated pink and orange sky, and then Sasha was flat on the sand and blood was everywhere.

  He survived, but with impaired speech and cognition. It turned out he was epileptic—the family had been hiding it. They didn’t press charges, but his parents wouldn’t let me near him anymore. When we finally saw each other on his front lawn on Yom Kippur, he attempted a single leg takedown, which I countered with a poorly executed sprawl. We both laughed a little, and then he went back inside. My family returned to London that spring. Sasha died after a grand mal seizure the week the rest of them graduated high school.

  The sun is coming up. My window looks out over the Stockholm archipelago. Boat masts swaying. Kayaks being let into the sea. A kid throwing rocks, or is he dancing. The colors—what I notice—what any of us notices—

  The string of emails ended there. I finished my glass of wine, wandered out of habit into what had been the office, stumbling immediately into a pile of Kat’s vintage stilettos, and looked out the window at the illuminated street. I took a picture of what I saw and emailed it to the critic with the caption “for the Post-it, more soon.”

  AMONG THE THINGS Abraham knows about Eleanor: She’s a boring dresser. She’s aroused by sleeping in public. She reads fitfully but often. She cries on the subway. She’s hopeless at math. She’s fond of sex toys, especially vibrators, blindfolds, nipple clamps, and anything made of fur. Her favorite thing to watch on television is reruns of M*A*S*H.

  Among the things Eleanor knows about Abraham: He hates the word “practice” as a stand-in for “work.” He knows his way around the butchering of a chicken. He has an extra vertebra in his lower back. He can take or leave most sex toys—cock rings, blindfolds, clamps—though he enjoys the use of restraints. He watches television in hotels, where he favors sports, news, and porn.

  Among the things Eleanor knows about Danny K.M.:

  “Please, understand that I am trying to help.”

  “I consider this chapter closed.”

  Among the things Danny K.M. knows about Eleanor:

  DEVICES

  iDisk

  Google SketchUp 6.0 Installer

  SHARED

  PLACES

  Dropbox

  Desktop

  Noteleanor

  Documents

  Applications

  SEARCH FOR

  Today

  Yesterday

  Past Week

  All Images

  All Movies

  All Documents

  SPRING BREAK FELL unusually close to the end of the semester, and under ordinary circumstances Eleanor would have spent it at cafés with her laptop fielding emails from a few overly ambitious students already worrying about their final grades. Now—the week lost to the occurrence and effects of thing #2, and consequently to the renewed repercussions of the first thing, thing-prime—except when she was at Abraham’s apartment, she had to field emails on her phone. On the Saturday before break ended, she thumb-typed a message to Danny K.M. She was barefoot and freshly showered, sprawled on the bed in her brown room; the window was cracked open to welcome a tentative spring breeze from the canal.

  Dear Danny,

  I understand that you don’t want to be in touch. I understand that you feel you’ve done all you can do. I appreciate that you wanted to help me, I do. I believe your intentions are good. Most of what I lost on that laptop I can live without, but there is one document I would like very much to see again [. . .]

  She finished her email and hit “Send,” and then she checked the news. She was still following the story of the Tampa Bay movie house shooting—following it above other stories she believed were more important, stories of revolution and corruption and race and class war. She followed it for reasons she could scarcely defend to herself. Maybe it was a question of scale; the story felt small enough to psychically manage. The facts of the case were few: The motive was annoyance at public texting. The shooter was charged with second-degree murder. The lethal bullet had also grazed the hand of the victim’s wife, which she had raised in an effort to protect her husband. The wife’s name was Nicole. She was in her early forties. He was a good, genuine person. Their daughter was three.

  She read some poems that were posted to a blog she sometimes looked at. The poems were about revolution, corruption, race, and class war. She agreed with the poems—nodding along as she read—but she felt, simultaneous with the nodding and just as involuntarily, a familiar sense that agreement wasn’t enough.

  She looked up second-degree murder:

  1) an intentional killing that is not premeditated or planned, nor committed in a reasonable “heat of passion,” or 2) a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life.

  As Eleanor wondered what might count as a “reasonable heat of passion,” Abraham texted to ask if she was coming to see him that night. Her last free days passed much like this, and then they were over.

  Her students, apart from the overly ambitious ones, returned refreshed from vacation or were still away, so she had small, focused classes and enjoyed her first days back, until inertia took over and she began to count the weeks to semester’s end.

  She had received no response from Danny K.M., no phone call from the police. The value of her lost data, though it contained years’ worth of
unarchived photographs and more, had been reduced in her mind to the twenty pages of notes in the document she’d asked Danny to send, the contents of which she could scarcely recall. Paragraphs, disjointed and belonging to no fixed genre, that she had written over the course of the past year, that she had saved on the desktop rather than in one of the directories she backed up at random intervals to an old hard drive, because there was no place in her directories where the paragraphs belonged—not “Freelance,” not “Teaching,” not “Dissertation_notes” (the latter had been moribund for years, since she abandoned her thesis and her program after, like a sick child, failing to thrive). Despite what she had imagined writing to Danny K.M. in her dream, despite what she had actually written to Danny K.M., she did not engage in magical thinking about these paragraphs. She did not believe that they could transform her, even that they could help her to “process” the thing that had happened. What she believed, what she knew, was that with them she had built a site for a certain kind of thinking that was difficult but necessary for her to do, and that deprived of the site she had built for it, that kind of thinking was now—perhaps dangerously—at large.

  The final project she had assigned her Modern World Lit students was a comparative essay about Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi and Forever Valley by Marie Redonnet. The novels were short and among her favorites, so she had put them on the syllabus without as much consideration as, she now realized, was merited. Overall, the drafts she received reflected either a basic understanding of the conventional essay form but a lack of insight into the novels themselves, or the converse. “Woman throughout time have been pushed down by a male dominated society as depicted by the cultural backgrounds of the two novels, one in the Arab world and one of fiction,” began one. Another contained this sentence, which Eleanor puzzled over at lunch one afternoon, sitting on a bench in the hall outside the office she shared with too many other adjuncts to make it useful to any of them: “The narrator of Forever Vally is poor and illiterate but not stupid, in fact not reading can mean being smart, which is the case with this character who sold her soul using sex so she can do her project; to dig a hole that has no meaning but is meaningful anyways to her, alas.”