Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  She spent her afternoons doing “research” from one of the few Wi-Fi cafés on a three-block stretch of Lark Street, the neighborhood that felt the most like an imperfect clone of similar streets in the city and in her friend’s town: strings of storefronts that had been transformed in performatively organic and then shamelessly mercenary ways to attract just the kind of customer Eleanor—with her laptop and smartphone and boots, with her self-conscious melancholy—was. Half expecting Danny K.M. to walk into the café she had chosen on a given afternoon, she would sit within view of the door so that she could look up whenever someone entered and compare the face of the newcomer with her mental image of the snapshot of Danny that remained undisturbed, tucked into her wallet behind her Visa. It seemed Albany did not teem with the kind of customer Eleanor was; no matter which café she chose, she rarely had occasion to look up.

  On what would turn out to be her last day in town, but before she knew that to be the case, Eleanor was sitting in her usual spot at the Muddy Cup, laptop closed on the table in front of her, mood poisoned by the futility of the afternoon’s research and a creeping anxiety about money, triggered by the arrival of her credit card bill to her in-box, then duly compartmentalized by way of another one-click minimum payment. She heard the door open and looked up: Danny K.M. entered, followed immediately by Ross, who had to duck to fit through the door of the basement-level café. Danny, in denim and white canvas sneakers, walked to the counter to order. Ross walked to Eleanor’s table and hovered, or loomed.

  “Hel-ló!” Ross said to Eleanor.

  “Hel-ló,” Eleanor said, her heart invading her throat.

  ELEANOR TRIED TO FOCUS on Ross, who had been only kind to her in her time at the hostel, keeping the promise he’d made once Devin failed to show that first night to let her stay alone in the semi-private room.

  “Are you fine?” Ross asked, his head tilting down and to the left, eyes in a slight squint.

  “I’m fine,” said Eleanor, smiling wide. “Do I look not-fine?”

  By pretending to crack her back in a yoga-like maneuver she would not normally perform, she was able to catch a glimpse of Danny K.M. as he sat down at a small table just behind hers and picked up a magazine some previous customer had abandoned.

  “I always ask people if they’re fíne or nót because they’re more likely to tell me the trúth that way, whereas nobody really héars you when you ask them How áre you?—”

  Ross pulled back the chair opposite Eleanor and sat.

  “—How áre you isn’t even a quéstion anymore, it’s like a bránd náme, you know, when the méaning has been effectively drained oút of the words, leaving behind only sóunds . . . like Chéerio! or Twisted Síster or Nirvána—I álways forget what that’s called!” Ross grinned as he spoke.

  “I forget too,” said Eleanor. “But I’m really fine. I’m just finishing up with my work.”

  Pretending to be scratching her ankle, she reached down and extracted her phone from her bag, then placed it on her right thigh, keeping her eyes, as much as was possible, on Ross.

  “How well do you know the Hudson River?” asked Ross, his tone dropping momentarily both in volume and in eccentricity.

  Eleanor said, “Huh?” glancing down to type her pass code and click “Contacts.”

  “The Húdson Ríver.” He leaned in. “This fláwed, majéstíc vein, which on the second Thursday of every month, well of every súmmer month, is the site of a cítywíde—Oh! Stein!”

  A used copy of Composition as Explanation, which she’d picked up at the bookstore-bar, sat closed on her table.

  “I find her unbéarable as a persona,” he went on, “Excépt! Excépt for the recordings of her magnificent voíce! Have you ever heard—”

  Ross didn’t wait for Eleanor to tell him that she had, in fact, heard several recordings of Gertrude Stein reading, that she played one routinely during the ekphrasis unit when she taught composition, although that had become less frequent as she climbed the socalled adjunct ladder. She couldn’t take in, let alone engage, Ross’s ambivalence about Stein or the fact that this ambivalence was a sentiment they shared. She could feel Danny K.M.’s presence behind her, could hear him sipping his iced drink through a straw, flipping pages, she imagined, in his magazine.

  “Móst people like her recording of the ‘Pórtrait of Picásso,’ which is obviously gréat, but there are bétter ones, like ‘Matísse’—and the bits from The Máking of Américans, which are my fávorite . . .”

  Eleanor nodded. It was “Picasso” that she had played to her class. Ross fell silent for a moment, and she tried again, this time successfully, to call up the Contacts screen on her phone.

  “Eleanor,” said Ross, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” said Eleanor, blindly thumb-typing “Da” into the search bar.

  Ross paused for a few seconds, and then:

  “Eleanor, would you dáte a guy like me? I mean, if I asked you to go on a dáte, like to go to second Thursdays with me, ás my date, would you say yes, or would you even say máybe? Or would you say nó, because I’m just not the kind of guy that you would want to dáte, even though you probably think I’m an O.K. gúy, but just not someone you think of ín thát wáy, right? I mean, that’s what you would say, isn’t it?”

  Eleanor looked at Ross, but he had turned away. She looked down and thumb-typed “Muddy Cup?” She looked up at Ross, who had turned back toward her with a closed-lipped smile and humid eyes. She hit “Send” without looking, and a joop! rose from her thigh. “Excuse me,” Ross said and pushed back his chair. The espresso machine wailed. She heard no ping or vibration from Danny K.M.’s phone, but the screech of chair legs or the wail of the machine might have been covering one up. Ross stood behind a young couple waiting in line at the counter, holding hands. Eleanor pried her attention from Danny and tried to think of a response to Ross’s question, a response she felt he deserved. He was kind and considerate; he was knowledgeable and he listened; his clothing and lifestyle indicated an immunity to consumerism that she ought to have admired, and did, though she also suspected that something of a reaction formation was at play in the quaint clothing and belabored pattern of speech.

  He was probably two decades her senior, or close. She thought of saying, But what about that nice age-appropriate lady over there? She thought of saying, We all hope someone else’s youth will rub off on us. She thought of saying no to his invitation, and she thought of saying yes. She might have thought of Emmi and Ali from Fassbinder’s film, but then Ross was standing over her, holding a to-go cup of coffee and pulling crumbling morsels of scone from a waxed-paper bag. Eleanor wanted to tell him he shouldn’t stoop, that his uprightness alone, if he would take possession of it, could attract someone who might give him what he needed. She said nothing. She heard Danny K.M. get up from the table behind her.

  “Ross,” said Eleanor without intention.

  She knew that her time at the hostel was over, knew that she would try to repair things with Ross, whom she had come to consider a kind of friend. She knew, also, that repair would not be simple or immediate.

  “I’m going to gó now,” said Ross, and he did.

  Danny K.M. had gotten up for a refill. Eleanor brought her hand to her neck and breathed into her pulse. With her other hand she touched the circular green icon on her screen. She turned: The flip phone on the table behind her did not vibrate or ring. Its light didn’t light. The barista called out, “Iced white for Steve!” and Danny K.M., who was no longer Danny K.M. but an older man, a man at least in his thirties, a man apparently named Steve—whose resemblance to Danny K.M. was limited to the contours of his body and face in profile, his skin tone, and Eleanor’s own desire—returned to his table with his iced white latte, and he nodded to Eleanor as if he often caught women staring expectantly at his phone, and Eleanor, without thinking, as something broke deep inside her, nodded back.

  WHAT YOU MIGHT be thinking about Eleanor: that she is impulsive, that if
she keeps going like this she will never find her way, that she would do well to move with more caution through this phase of her life, a phase that might appear on a map of her trajectory—if there were such a map, and if it could be trusted to portray her life with any degree of accuracy—as a smudge. Or: that where matters of importance are at stake, she is not nearly impulsive enough. Is it necessary to say that both judgments are equally valid, which is to say, also, that they are equally suspect? Is it necessary, furthermore, to recall that even when the events of the day temporarily overshadow it, the thing that had happened—thing-prime—and this is exacerbated by the missing paragraphs and the vanished site for a certain kind of thinking—continues to create and shed its residue on Eleanor’s trajectory, like the finest dust settling on our imagined map?

  Illustrations deleted from the fourth draft

  1.Diagram showing points of pressure

  2.Thelma and Louise flying off cliff

  3.Pina Bausch’s dancers: A planned not-catching

  4.Mustachioed kiss: A first lesson

  5.“Russians” (Sting)

  6.A magnetic field, produced by moving electric charges and the intrinsic magnetic movements of elementary particles associated with a fundamental quantum property, their spin

  7.Women, mirrors, tears (Gena Rowlands): Between technology and authenticity

  8.Props (fake whiskey, gun)

  9.Fissures lit from below

  10.Calculations from the mean lifetime (table)

  11.Dirty Dancing: The women are caught by the men

  12.Degas: Fatigue, stability, submission

  13.Faceyogamethod.com: Eyes open

  14.Faceyogamethod.com: Squint

  15.Motorcycle handlebars

  16.View from ferry

  17.Two bikes, one with sheepskin seat cover

  18.The open road; cotton balls in the sky

  19.A simple network of underground wells and tunnels (the form of a feeling)

  HER NAME WAS CAROLYN, though she looked more like a River or a Calliope or a Tree. She had collected Eleanor from the bus drop-off in a new-model red pickup truck, which she drove without shoes. “Psyched to show you the fa-arm,” she sang lightly, her eyes on the road.

  Carolyn had glitter in her hair and glitter on her face; she wore a heavily embroidered white tunic and a faded green hoodie. She had yarn tied around her ankles, just below twin California-poppy tattoos, and she walked barefoot on the gravel paths as she led Eleanor on the “short-form” tour of Crescent Farm. Eleanor took in her host’s résumé—she was born in a hamlet in western PA, held a BA from Harvard and an MA from Oxford, and had returned five months ago from a yearlong Rotary scholarship in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—as they proceeded single file from yurt #1 (with solar power) to yurt #2 (without); from the ungainly vegetable garden to the towering compost heap; from the neat row of mail-order beehives to the roiling swimming hole; from the chicken coop to the pond.

  As they walked, they encountered three of the six other full-time members of the Crescent Farm community: Sol (tall, happy, stoned); Krystal (plump and pierced, the “fairy godmother” of the compound, which Eleanor took to mean she’d had something to do with funding its construction); and Cole (buzz cut, possibly transor agender, smiling: “the mediator around here”). Eleanor should not have been surprised to see people who looked like punks and people who looked like hippies living together in a cutting-edge eco squat; it had been a long time, she knew, since fashion was a reliable marker for anything. The residents all appeared to be in their late twenties or thereabouts. The other three members, Carolyn explained to Eleanor, were inside the main house preparing dinner. ‘Couchsurfer’s Spe-cia-le,’ she sang, flicking a sparkly fingernail against Eleanor’s arm.

  Set back a quarter of a mile from the road and the small gravel pad where Carolyn had parked the truck, the main house sat in isolation in a clearing, oriented toward the south to maximize solar gain. A mountain of grass-covered earth (“man-made thermal mass,” chanted Carolyn) hugged the length of its north face. Approaching from the south, the two women were greeted by a wall of windows at least fifty feet long and twenty feet high. Carolyn gestured across the facade and spoke words that meant nothing to Eleanor: Trombe wall, spectral glazing, solar chimney, selective surface. What Eleanor saw was a sleek, modern, wood-clad house lacking the support structures that give most rural and exurban homes their sense of limitation: the strung-up power lines, propane tank, matching two-car garage.

  The main room was vast, with a polished concrete floor and slanted plywood ceiling pierced by a row of tiny skylights. The living area consisted of an L-shaped sofa, a scattering of beanbags, a top-of-the-line ping-pong table, a wall of bookshelves, and a gray pit bull asleep on a white flokati rug. It was very neat. The kind of place, Eleanor thought, that would be christened “eco-minimalist” by a fawning journalist for the Style section of the Times. On the kitchen end, where Eleanor and Carolyn had entered, small hills of produce—radishes and baby beets, purple pod beans, symmetrical heads of lettuce and copious amounts of kale—were lined up on a long wooden counter, flanked by little piles of dirt where the roots had been jostled as the plants were set down.

  The cooks were Bin (a citizen of Myanmar who’d recently graduated from Cornell), Matt (a surfer or snowboarder, probably both), and Ophelia, a stern, bespectacled woman from Ithaca who looked about eighteen and greeted Eleanor with a nod. “Any allergies?” she asked, tossing a handful of walnuts into an oblong wooden bowl. With the exception of Bin, the residents were white or appeared so, and their exposed skin showed a range of sensitivity to the sun: Ophelia’s shoulders were so burned they made Eleanor wince.

  The stove was manned by one of three current “shorties”: short-term residents, Carolyn explained, who weren’t invested in the property but who could stay for between one and three months in exchange for designated hours of labor and a weekly donation to the house fund. The shorties—but not the full-timers, for a reason that was not explained—were given nicknames. Eleanor was introduced to the one at the stove, Kicker, and he gestured to the other two, who were outside smoking, their backs visible through the expanse of glass. “They like to name visitors too,” Kicker said over his shoulder. “Someone usually comes up with something during the first meal. You’ll see.” Eleanor wondered what Kicker had done to earn his name.

  Krystal emerged from the cellar carrying four unlabeled green champagne bottles. “Last of the crop!” she announced, depositing them on the counter. The previous October, during a banner year for fruit trees, they’d made several cases’ worth of hard cider from the wild apples that proliferated on the ten-acre property. Each bottle had fermented a little differently, Ophelia explained, “because we aren’t interested in controlling the process with commercial yeasts or aggressive sterilization.” Some were basically virgin; others were stronger than beer. Some were flat and others carbonated. Krystal opened all four bottles, distributing them across the long table, and everyone—including the smokers, whose entry was accompanied by an odor of tobacco breath and skin that triggered a sharp longing in Eleanor—sat at the table.

  Eleanor had taken the empty spot next to Cole, who opened the conversation only after swallowing a pint of cider.

  “So, what brings you here, Eleanor?”

  “Oh, they didn’t tell you?”

  She had found the listing on couchsurfing.com within five minutes of deciding that she needed to flee the hostel and Ross and the specter of Danny K.M.

  “No, I mean, why are you on the road?”

  “Oh, I’m not really. I’m . . . trying to plan my next move.”

  “What kind of move?”

  “I’m gathering data,” Eleanor said, after a silence.

  Carolyn intercepted her at the sink, where she was rinsing her glass before switching to wine, the cider supply having quickly been consumed. The bowls of fragrant food were half-empty; the smokers had gone back outside again. “Cole tells me you’re looking for a pl
ace to go,” Carolyn said conspiratorially. “You would absolutely love Addis, I guarantee it. I can put you in touch with some awesome folks.” She touched a hand to Eleanor’s arm and left it there, while Eleanor thought of the blogs satirizing voluntourists that she had discovered in her research into Danny K.M., while she wondered if Carolyn’s photos could even be among those she’d seen on said blogs, photos of dust-covered orphans propped on the sturdy hips of seemingly sturdy collegiates. “Yo, Data!”—a “shortie” named Biscuit had been lurking behind them and was now yelling practically in Eleanor’s ear—“Cole christened you. Now let’s get you some of this,” and a lit joint was placed in her hand.

  Seated across from Eleanor was the short-termer they called Vision, or Viz, not—according to Cole—because he was spiritual but because he had mentioned in passing on his first night that he had 20/15 eyesight, a diagnosis Eleanor always found confounding since it seems to describe a superpower. The first thing she noticed about Viz was that he was a regaler, one of those men in their thirties with apparently undramatic, comfortable backgrounds who have made an effort to compensate for their lack of childhood struggle by doing something daring or noble as adults, like dropping out of grad school or spending a couple of years in Jakarta writing for an English-language newspaper, and who keep themselves informed about current events and esoteric subjects alike to make it possible to hold court precisely at communal meals such as these. The second thing Eleanor noticed about Viz was that he had a very nice chest, which he flashed while removing his sweater midmeal. As the evening went on and more wine was drunk, and as night fell slowly outside the south-facing windows, as candles were lit and more joints passed around, Eleanor noticed—then felt self-conscious for noticing—the many very nice things that Viz had in addition to the chest (which she continued to picture beneath his thin checkered shirt), such as a very nice pair of hands, and a very nice tattoo of a wave form on his forearm, and a very nice full-lipped mouth, and a very nice flicker in his dark eyes—she also questioned the flicker—particularly when he looked across the table at Eleanor to approve of or take issue with her contribution to whatever debate was engaging the group.