Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  She slid the postage stamp–sized photo into her wallet, behind her newly activated Visa, and typed on her phone:

  Hi Danny,

  I thought maybe we could meet this afternoon and you could give me the DVDs, whatever you’ve managed to copy. I’ll be at the coffee place on 4th and President, the one with the sandwich board outside and no windows to the street. I’ll be there from 12:00 to 2:00. My skin is pale. I’m wearing a light-brown dress. My hair is brown.

  Eleanor

  It was 9:30 when she left the apartment. The humidity had caught up to the heat, and as Eleanor wove through the partially blocked sidewalks that bordered construction sites for more new high-rises, she felt her dress cling to the backs and insides of her thighs. She’d proposed a meeting at the café where her laptop had disappeared because of her ambivalence about encountering Danny, an ambivalence that shifted sharply from one pole to the other based on the unknown variable of his guilt. A quick search on her phone while she walked confirmed that, indeed, the cliché about people returning to the scenes of their crimes was reinforced by the U.S. government, which claims in its FBI Crime Classification Manual that at least “disorganized” serial killers—those “more susceptible to feelings of fear or regret”—are likely to haunt the sites of their deeds. If Danny K.M. was a classifiable criminal, Eleanor reasoned, he would count as a “disorganized” one. What could have motivated him to contact her other than some kind of feeling—of regret, or fear of cosmic retribution?

  The lenses of her sunglasses weren’t sufficiently dark and she squinted behind them, feeling the wrinkles that fanned from her eyes grow deeper. Five or six workers in hard hats, all men, younger than Eleanor and of varied ethnicities, stood in a clump on the corner ahead, peeling cellophane off sandwiches and popping the lids on cans of soda. She would have to pass within ten feet of them or conspicuously cross the street—she was the only pedestrian on her stretch of sidewalk—and she braced herself for the catcalls, comments, overt or covert once-overs. She pulled the fabric of her dress from her legs, but the separation and modesty afforded by this gesture lasted only a few steps.

  It was possible, of course, that the interaction she’d come to expect from years of walking through cities as a woman alone, a woman with pale skin and brown hair who was neither obese nor undernourished, who could breathe on her own and without the help of some machine, would not reproduce itself this time. That the uninvited attention she got from men was usually of the ostensibly genial kind rather than the ostensibly hostile kind, and that the corollary of this generality—when she did want attention, she was able to obtain it—could, and often did, translate into material advantage had felt like a dull and immutable fact of Eleanor’s life. She could deny neither its injustice nor its use-value; she could rail against it but she could not get outside of it completely. It was surely a cause of the shame she experienced—though often unnoticed—as a kind of vibration undergirding her every move, like a refrigerator’s hum. It made her wary of nearly all male attention and, as an extension, of male authority and authority in general, which had set her on a path of, among other things, academic failure, self- and underemployment, and a fierce loyalty to the women in her life. But so many of those women, whom she’d thought to be just like her—to think just like her, as best friends assume to be the case when they’re young and waiting together for their lives to begin—turned out to be just slightly not like her, and those slight differences had led, over the years, to more consequential differences, until the moment when she discovered—this may be related, she thought now, to the thing that had happened, that she had made or let happen—that the women to whom she was so fiercely loyal had made choices that were in fact fundamentally different, especially in relation to male authority and to authority in general, from hers, and that even though their mutual fierce loyalty might well continue in the face of this difference, it was a difference nonetheless, and one that contributed to Eleanor’s feeling of special loneliness in this moment, as she walked somewhat quickly by five or six male road workers, humid in her dress, attempting both to ignore and to interpret the expressions on their faces.

  This time—and an objective observer would have noted that this was becoming gradually more common—there were no catcalls, no overtures attempting to intimidate or to charm; but then one of the men said Have a good afternoon to Eleanor’s back. Good afternoon, said Eleanor under her breath, relieved, then doubting the basis for her relief.

  Emmi Kurowski, the house-cleaning heroine from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is desired by Ali (many years her junior) but by no one else. Gena Rowlands was forty-seven when Opening Night premiered in 1977, likely forty-six at the time of filming; Susan Sarandon was forty-five when she played Louise and is now, at near seventy, still called “steamy” in the press. Eleanor had heard her great-aunt Iphigenia, once undeniably beautiful in a conventional way, explain that the erotic attention comes earlier and lasts longer than you expect, until one day you realize it has stopped altogether.

  She walked several long blocks up the shallow slope toward the park, pausing to buy a bottle of water imported from Fiji from a man glued to a televised soccer match behind the counter of an un-air-conditioned, cramped bodega. She could see up ahead the peaked white tents of the farmers’ market, where on Wednesdays and Saturdays, especially in summer, the beautiful people turned out with their bikes and strollers, their scooters—the foot-powered kind and the gas-powered kind and sometimes the electric kind—and retro plaid rolling carts, to meet the producers of their organic and humanely raised food. On this particular Wednesday there was also, to the side of the market’s main entrance, a small stand set up by the local SPCA with a sign inviting passersby to ADOPT A FRIEND FOR LIFE. Eleanor accepted a flyer from one of the preteens staffing the booth, then immediately threw it out.

  Time passed. Eleanor tasted, sipped, met her producers.

  She sat on her book bag on the grass, ate a veggie tamale from the food truck, paged through a copy of the free weekly that someone had left for trash. There was a story in it about an indie-rock band that had been on the verge of crossing over with its first six albums finally gaining traction in the mainstream with the seventh. She studied the picture of the band, a full-color spread in which four men in early middle age, with slight paunches and lines fanning from their eyes like hers, posed stiffly on a rooftop against the city skyline, staring bleakly at the camera as if it might steal something from them.

  Time passed. Eleanor walked. At 11:55, she entered the wood-lined coffee shop to which she had not returned since the wintry afternoon that now seemed so long ago, though fewer than twelve weeks had gone by. The plywood in the windows had been replaced by glass, bright beams of dust-trapping light transforming the atmosphere of the place. She ordered a macchiato, installed herself at the same table she’d been sitting at on the day of the theft, and opened up Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, a book she had not yet begun reading, that she had ordered impulsively after hearing it described in conversation as being critical of the idealization of collaboration and pessimistic about the political potential of art. It was the kind of drunken online purchase she made sometimes late at night amid a surge of active curiosity about her future, an emergent uprising of the question she spent most of her time suppressing: What, if anything, can I do in the time I have left?

  Artificial Hells was a thick book, and Eleanor began with the illustrations. There were pictures of Total Participation (1966) by El Groupo de los Artes de los Medios Masivos and of 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis (1965) by Jean-Jacques Lebel; pictures with captions like “View of the container” or “Installation view . . . after being destroyed.” The picture of a woman washing her crotch with a rag made Eleanor think of a Degas pastel she had stared at for an afternoon once at the Met, the folded pose of the model as she bent over her washing cloth and tub expressing—simultaneously and incongruously—fatigue, stability, and submission. The p
icture of the skinny 1970s bodies in To Exorcise the Spirit of Catastrophe made her think of the hunger strike in an Israeli jail that she’d read about that morning, in which two Palestinian political prisoners being held without charge had refused meals for close to three months in a performance the intended audience for which was also the commissioning body.

  The pictures and the titles and the tangents they led to occupied Eleanor’s attention in exactly the right way for someone whose purpose sitting in a café and nursing a macchiato was not to be reading a book but to be waiting for the appearance within a two-hour window of a person whose identity might not be easy to verify and who, in all likelihood, would not show up at all.

  Time passed. Having taken in all the information she could glean from the pictures and their captions, and feeling already too full of information to consider reading a word of the text itself, she saw that it was 2:00. Danny K.M. had not come. Her retro active recognition of the inevitability of this outcome caused the heat of a private embarrassment to perforate her skin. She uncrossed her legs—still slick with sweat—put away her book, got up, bussed her table, and walked into the heat and sun, squinting from the moment she opened the door.

  WE HAD NOT BEEN in contact for nearly two weeks, but I couldn’t reclaim the space the critic had come to occupy in my mind. He had not stopped emailing just because I stopped responding. I saved his messages, unread, in a folder labeled “*”.

  It required discipline not to open his messages, but I was afraid of what reading them might do to the revision. His credentials as a reviewer and the author of three influential books, along with his innate—and/or inherited, and/or developed—confidence, meant that the critic had from the beginning assumed the position of power in our literary discussions. It was not so much the fact of this but the way the fact of it seemed natural that enraged me, once I’d granted myself space to think. Other points of connection between us—common interests; my genuine concern for his physical and psychic well-being and my equally genuine curiosity about how the uncovering of a traumatizing origin story might affect a person living in the public eye, especially one already anxious about that eye and his changing role before it—were so contaminated by the master-pupil dynamic they’d lost their purchase. Of course all of this movement and stagnation, this battle, was occurring in me alone, a civil war in which I was commander of both sides.

  The Ukrainian folk style bilij holos—“white voice”—exploits the chest register and is akin to controlled screaming. When I got the urge to correspond with the critic, I would stream recordings of it on YouTube. My favorite was a song called “Hilka - Ne hody y, ulane.” On the screen a static misty mountain scene.

  You could say that I was becoming blurred at my edges. When I worked on my revision, the critic’s marginalia invaded my mind.

  Limerent bonds are characterized by “entropy” crystallization, as described by Stendhal in On Love. The new troubles in Crimea had yet to begin. Some listeners describe bilij holos as just shrieking.

  THE TEXT MESSAGE CAME from an unknown number, minutes after Eleanor had left the café. She read:

  SORRY I CAN’T COME. I’M IN

  ALBANY NOW I NEVER GOT

  THE DVDS NO MONEY SO

  I’M SORRY AGAIN

  BLESSINGS,, DANNY

  She let her pace slow as she reviewed her options, holding each gingerly in her imagination for one second, two seconds, before dropping it for its competition. This toggling occupied her mind to such a degree that her body (what we know about Eleanor: she is subject to binaries) took charge of its own operations and delivered her, less than an hour later, to her building’s front door.

  She went upstairs and packed an overnight bag, wrote a note for her housemates, and locked the door to her room, hesitating for a moment before leaving the key in the lock.

  An hour later she was at Penn Station, buying a ticket from an automated kiosk.

  An hour later she was eating bibimbap at one of the Korean restaurants on Thirty-Fifth.

  An hour after that she was boarding the train at gate 5e, and two hours after that she woke to the sound of the conductor brushing past and chanting the name of her destination, the station stop before Albany, in a partly gentrified town where she had a friend to whom she’d texted news of her arrival after boarding the train.

  As she got up and recuperated her bag from the overhead rack, she took in the view of the summer river outside, the summer trees and summer sailboats, the summer-sunset sky, a midtoned blue slashed by orange and white that looked different outside the city, though the colors and their arrangement were the same; then, turning to the opposite side of the train as it pulled into the station, she took in the view of the summer people outside, in their summer dresses and summer sandals, their summer smiles spread across their sun-kissed summer faces.

  While the other descending passengers greeted and embraced and climbed into cars and taxis, Eleanor walked the three blocks to her friend’s apartment, where she would spend the night despite the fact that her friend, who was recently divorced and dating a man about whom she was ambivalent, would be out for the night. Eleanor let herself in with the key she’d been instructed to retrieve from behind a potted jade, lay down in her clothes on the lower bunk in the room of her friend’s kids, who were with their father for the week, took out her Pocket Rocket and made quick use of it—aided by a mental image of the sun-kissed summer faces—then fell, as evening fell, into a dreamless sleep.

  She woke and looked at her phone: 11:07. Her friend wouldn’t be home for hours. She woke, as she often did, wanting bodies around her. She grabbed her wallet and her phone and Artificial Hells and walked to the nearest bar—also a bookstore—a place she’d been once or twice before, where she correctly assumed there would be bodies on a night like this.

  Is it necessary to note that Eleanor is the type who is capable of both intense solitude and intense sociability? Usually it was clear which tendency governed a given moment, and the extent of her satisfaction or discomfort in a situation was often tethered to the extent to which her need for one or the other extreme was being met. But at this moment, in the gentrified summery bar in the partly gentrified summery upriver town, Eleanor felt the stirrings of a different desire, not unlike the feeling she’d experienced while being ejected from the artist’s performance at which the young woman had been moved to take off her dress, and not unlike the feeling she’d experienced in Abraham’s apartment the day she decided to read her cards, but not completely like either of those feelings either.

  As she sipped her locally brewed stout and flipped through the pages of Claire Bishop’s book, she was not in fact reading the book’s ample text but was trying, rather, to identify the new and unfamiliar desire, which fell outside of the solitude/sociability binary, that now flowed through her body, collecting especially between her elbows and the tips of her fingers. In what she had taken to be a dreamless sleep she had in fact had a dream, an image more than a dream, of a narrow ring being tattooed around her left forearm, just below the elbow.

  She rubbed her left forearm with her right hand. While she had come out for the bodies, for the bodies of other people, of strangers, while she had come out to be near them and to sense their sociality, once she found herself amid them she retreated into her own body, fled to that other pole, and she wondered what it was about her that made her crave this being-alone without being alone, this being-alone as a way of being-with. The bodies around her now, of which she finally began to take note, were not uniform in appearance or attitude: There were slim ones covered in too-loose clothing and larger ones covered in too-tight clothing; there were effortlessly elegant ones and proudly overdetermined ones; there were countless forearm tattoos. There was enough of an urban sensibility in the town that she felt as anonymous as she did in the city, even more so because her expectations of the town were different from her expectations of the city. She ran her hand through her hair; a crinkled gray strand appeared in her fingers,
followed by a sudden need to be noticed, but only just, only for a minute.

  But nobody noticed Eleanor. She had a powerful intuition that she might actually disappear. A line from her lost paragraphs came to mind and she recited it silently to herself: Like a halo of death around each and every head that had the misfortune of being attached to a body.

  When a text came in of a picture of the outside of a Tim Hortons, she understood it to be telling her that Abraham had made it to Canada, that he had survived the first portion of his trip, and she was happy to see from the way the sky looked in the picture that the weather was fine in Quebec. Abraham was texting her, which meant he was thinking about her at that moment—although the photo, with its blue sky, must have been taken earlier, during the day.

  Did she miss Abraham? There were certain things about him that she did miss, but which things were they? She may have missed the way he both knew her and didn’t know her, and the fact that he refused categorically to promise anything he couldn’t deliver. But she did not miss the missing of those things that, as a result of or indication of his refusing to promise them, he was not able to deliver—even or especially if she couldn’t identify just what those things were.