Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  The barista was steaming a carafe of milk. Eleanor texted Dawit her email address, saying Carolyn had sent her and she didn’t have a local number. She had not yet visited the city’s internet cafés or the computer stalls that occupied the gaps between buildings near the university. But when she did, it would be nice to find a message from Dawit.

  She returned the phone and ordered a bowl of spiced lentil soup, which she ate at the counter while reading her book. After paying her check (twenty birr) she returned to her apartment, and succumbing at last to jet lag, fell asleep.

  HE HAD APPARENTLY slept in and wasn’t responding to my texts. I was hesitant to use the key card he’d insisted on giving me as we said good-night, not knowing what I would find if I entered his room, not knowing if I wanted to know. But—although I resented the accuracy of his assumption that I was the more responsible one—I wanted to spare him the embarrassment of showing up late. I slid the card through the slot and, after a couple of failed attempts, the door popped open.

  He was sitting at the glass-topped hotel desk facing the window, bent over his laptop. The sweater he’d removed the night before was draped over his shoulders; the bottle of wine we’d ordered but not finished stood empty by his side.

  “It’s getting close,” he said, “but you’re going to have to tell us more about Eleanor’s position.”

  “Position toward what?” I asked, crossing over to the bottle and, not seeing a recycling bin, placing it on the floor beside the trash. “You should shower. We’re going to be late.”

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you might be playing it safe.”

  I held out my hand. He took it, stood.

  “I mean are you articulating an argument for personal experience and against some straw man of deconstruction, insisting that the thing that happened to Eleanor, though contained in language—even if lost or destroyed—is not identical to that language? That the thing that happened has import both personal and something like trans-subjective, and that the aftermath of any individual experience is endowed with a . . . prelinguistic maybe, or at least an embodied, value? Could you be missing a gesture that—”

  He dropped my hand and closed the lid of his laptop, removed his glasses, and held them between two fingers.

  “What I mean is: Is this question of data versus identity working toward a theoretical stance?”

  I handed him a towel. He was paying my expenses; it was hard not to take on the role of assistant, though I assuaged some of my anxiety about this tendency by calling it care.

  She stepped into the shower and turned the handle to hot. The water stayed cold, then gradually warmed to tepid. There were the missing paragraphs, yes, and the lost site for thinking. There was the temptation to dwell on that loss, to cave. There was also the cloud and her reluctance to use it, and there was what she’d put in it despite her reluctance. Several worlds of content to choose from. So.

  I turned my back. The critic undressed and got in the shower.

  “What if I said that I’m not writing an argument? Maybe the thing—maybe all the things—can just live in the same space for a while.” My heart lodged in my throat. I pushed it back down where it belonged.

  “Also, you’re reading last month’s draft.”

  I heard him step out of the shower and dry himself off. When I turned, he had wrapped the towel around his waist. He was smiling, his eyes extraluminated by several watts.

  He said, “I couldn’t hear a word you were saying in there”—relief, then shame at my relief—“I want to know”—his hand on my back, the hallway door—“but I can’t have you here while I put on this ludicrous suit.”

  On the sixth day she walked south to the neighborhood favored by expatriates and stopped for a coffee at the Sheraton, where she saw her first concentration of tourists speaking in too-loud English—though they were balanced in number by what looked like business meetings between locals—and sat for an hour, reading and nursing a four-dollar macchiato. Her whiteness and her foreignness felt different here than they did at the octagonal neighborhood café and when she walked through the city streets; reflected back to her and recontextualized by the high-priced coffee, these markers felt acute, a sharp embarrassment—a word that, thanks to Mr. Brandt, she knew to be related to “burden” and “pregnant,” associations that made her cringe. She resolved not to return to the Sheraton, not to return to the neighborhood favored by expatriates, though she was, despite herself, beginning to feel like one.

  Now, on day seven, a Saturday, she was going to the one physical address on the sheet of paper, the address of an artist-run gallery on the outskirts of town whose founders Carolyn had particularly wanted Eleanor to meet. “Just stop by,” she’d written between asterisks on her note.

  The address was close to four miles away. Eleanor carried water and Band-Aids, though her blisters had calloused over. As she walked north on the divided boulevard—crawling with blue taxis and minivans and the occasional black Humvee—that housed the Italian embassy, the Russian embassy, the U.S. embassy, and probably other embassies, she passed a stream of young women who had the look of locals, who were walking and carrying themselves the way she walked and carried herself in her own city, and who were for the most part dressed as she was—in jeans and a light sweater and canvas sneakers—and each time one of the women caught her eye, she smiled and looked away.

  Her destination was a large Victorian house atop a hill in a verdant public park. Eleanor hiked up the gravel path—blue-painted arrows pointed to the sky—until she reached a level clearing with a broad city view. In addition to the house there was a metal outbuilding bearing a white-on-red sign that, though it was written in the national alphabet, clearly spelled COCA-COLA.

  The air was a few degrees colder than on the boulevard below. There were signs of art-making—discarded sculptural elements made of wood or metal; a few unfinished paintings leaned against the gallery’s exterior, their canvasses hanging from their stretchers, dislodged by the rains. The door to the house was locked, and the door to the outbuilding was locked, and on each locked door was a sign written in a cascade of languages ending with English: THANK YOU FOR FIVE WONDERFUL YEARS. WE ARE NOW CLOSED.

  She walked to a bench positioned for the view and sat. The city sprawled and crawled up the bordering hills, bisected by an articulated river that narrowed in places to a creek. She remembered reading, not long ago, though it felt like long ago, about parallel worlds and Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment, and she had a feeling that each person in the city below was just one version of him- or her- or themself, and she had a feeling that each of those selves would be made more alive by the fact of its possible twin, and that the more-alive character of the selves would be felt by them like an aura, not an aura exactly but a thickened stroke, as if the act of conceptualizing ineffable difference—difference she knew was meant to inhere in the world but that still was expressed by the individual self—was like hitting command+B to make every detail bold.

  Then she had the feeling that maybe the selves below did not require emboldening, that maybe no self did, that maybe a self, as Ali Jimale Ahmed had written in the introduction to The Road Less Traveled: Reflections on the Literatures of the Horn of Africa, really is just a thing made to occupy empty time.

  Eleanor sat with her feelings, with her series of feelings, for as long as it took for Michel, a stocky man in a gray tracksuit, to jog from the boulevard below up the gravel path to the clearing, do three laps around the Victorian house, perform his stretches against the wall of the closed café, and sit down on the far end of Eleanor’s bench to retie his shoes.

  Michel spoke French, English, and Amharic, in that order of competency, and Eleanor spoke English, French, and Greek, in that order of competency, and after establishing this fact they made small talk in his competent English and her semicompetent French, and he explained that he was close friends with the gallery owners; that they were on an extended visit to see family who had immigrated
to D.C.; that he himself was an immigrant from France but now taught political science at the international school, had met his wife—a singer—here, and had two children with her, one still an infant; that he had known and liked Carolyn though they had fallen out of touch. And he asked Eleanor what she most wanted to see in the city, and Eleanor said what she would like to see is the night. So he invited her to meet him and his wife for dinner in their neighborhood, near the part of town favored by expatriates, to be followed, he promised, by a chance to see the night. And Eleanor smiled and said yes, and she marked the restaurant’s location on her map.

  When he knocked, I was pulling on heels in front of the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door, trying to compose something articulate to say about Eleanor’s position. I opened. He smiled, extended an elbow for me to take.

  After the server had cleared their table, after the meat dishes and the vegetable dishes had been appreciatively consumed, after the beer and honey wine had been drunk and the stories had been offered and received in a multilingual interpretive dance—stories of the courtship of Michel and his wife (she has a name—Alem—and speaks Oromo, Amharic, French, and English, in that order) and of the gentrification of their neighborhood once the Sheraton was built—after a certain kind of exchange had occurred, in which Eleanor and Michel and Alem compared notes about their work lives and home lives and thinking lives, about the current state of friendship and the impacts of technology, about education and child-rearing and transnationality, about the ways in which language intersects with tribal and national identity, about untranslatability and the origins of the term “wax and gold,” they placed their money on the table, they rose and donned their light coats, and Alem kissed Eleanor warmly on both cheeks, said something to the effect of On va boire un café ensemble bientôt and then something to the effect of I’m going to walk home now to feed the baby: Michel will drive you, but make him take you first to the bars on Chechenya Street.

  They took Michel’s jeep into the crowded boulevard full of minibuses that stopped at each corner, spilling or absorbing passengers laden with parcels and bags. It was no brighter or louder or more chaotic than home, but it wasn’t home, and Eleanor had the feeling that she was on a massive ship on open water, simultaneously protected by powerful, if compromised, forces and vulnerable to the untamed sea; and the farther they drove from the neighborhood favored by expatriates through the quieter, darker section of town between Michel’s address and her own—in a district where government-built complexes housed families, drivers parked their taxis, and chickens grazed in shared backyards—the farther they drove into the occluded in-between section, which Eleanor had walked through during the day without hesitation, the more the twinned feelings of safety and vulnerability consolidated into a single euphoric sensation for which she could not find a word.

  The dinner was early, at 5:00 p.m., to accommodate the 7:00 p.m. ceremony, which he had assured me was less a ceremony than a photo op. If it had taken place as scheduled, the previous spring, it would have been tied into regular graduation, but after the shootings the university shut down early and didn’t open again until fall.

  The afternoon reception with students had been uneventful; Aidan spoke generously about the process of making his film, then spent a half hour fielding questions about the state of reviewing and Beckett’s continued influence on contemporary theater. When the subject of his next project came up he was quick to demur, not quite setting his head down, but almost. After, there was not a long enough break for us to return to the hotel to rest, but we declined a ride to the restaurant; it was only four blocks away, we had time to walk, and he wanted to smoke.

  “I think,” he said, pulling on his e-cigarette, blue light gleaming from its end, “we should skip the dinner altogether.” He was not stable—that was obvious—and my role was clear: to prop him up while letting him, helping him, do whatever he felt like doing. I had thought I was succeeding at holding my ground, but now I wondered when—how—I had accepted this role, when the abstraction of his position wouldn’t let the abstraction of my position onto the mat.

  Even four blocks would be a trial; I rarely wore heels. If I got blisters, I was ready to make him pay.

  They parked near a string of diminutive tin edifices with multicolored Christmas lights strung over their doors. Michel poked his head into one and said, “Empty—it’s early.” So they walked a few doors down to another bar, with a small square window in the tin facade through which a warm glow cast the silhouette of a bartender in relief.

  The lighting was dim red and gold. Michel greeted the bartender and ordered beers, then led Eleanor to one of four tiny round bar-height tables where they sat in closer proximity to each other than they had been all evening. Music issued from a pair of small wall-mounted speakers, the same music Eleanor had heard at the airport, or nearly the same—she thought she detected a techno beat beneath the jazz.

  Two young women emerged from a narrow door in the back, and from their appearance and behavior Eleanor made a series of assumptions: that the women were working, that they were fond of Michel but that he was not a customer, that they were amused by or indifferent to the occasional presence of a ferengi like Eleanor. A man entered through the front door, and the women stopped chatting with Michel and flirting wordlessly with Eleanor, and turned away.

  “The question is: How will you make these real things real?”

  During dinner, Eleanor had spoken mostly in English, which both Michel and his wife understood, and they spoke in French, at Eleanor’s insistence, because she sensed that, of the options, it was what Alem preferred.

  But here, out of necessity caused by the volume of the music, she and Michel switched strategies and each spoke, or shouted, in the other’s dominant tongue, though Eleanor had to cut her inexpert French with English words.

  Michel: I come here sometime around this time for a beer and chat. You know chat?

  Eleanor: Vous voulez dire vous aimez parler?

  Michel: Not chat, chat. It is also called quat. Like a drug. It’s very mild if you eat only a little bit.

  Eleanor had hoped to learn about the flirting women, to learn whether Alem ever came to this bar.

  Eleanor: Ah! Je suis toujours curieux avec les drogues.

  Michel: You like cocaine?

  Eleanor: Quelquefois, mais pas beaucoup.

  Michel: Chat is like cocaine but it’s not so strong. It’s nice. We can try some if you want.

  Back on the ship. Out on the open sea.

  Eleanor: O.K., oui.

  He made a motion to the bartender, a slim twenty-something guy in a striped polo shirt with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, who went behind the counter and returned with a bouquet of what looked like sage leaves to which a glossy surface had been applied.

  He set it down on the table along with a small bowl of nuts.

  Michel: You have also to eat peanuts with salt. I don’t know why, but we do it like this. Maybe for digestion.

  He handed a sprig to Eleanor and demonstrated, breaking off a couple of leaves and chewing them slowly, following up with a swallow of beer and a few nuts. Eleanor imitated. The chat smelled sharp and tasted bitter, but it wasn’t unpleasant, nor did she notice any immediate effect.

  Michel: The Egyptians call it a drug for the gods. I think you would have to chew a lot.

  Now she had the beginnings of cottonmouth. Now she was moving her jaw back and forth.

  Eleanor: Mon bouche est un peu . . . numb.

  Michel: Do you like it? I shouldn’t chew it. I have elevated blood pressure. But I like it because I like to talk. (He laughed. He had gold caps on three of his molars.) Like you said earlier—I like very much to chat!

  The restaurant was in a recuperated factory building with large uncurtained windows facing the street. We stood outside for five minutes—the diners seemed unaware of their audience—before he touched my wrist and said, “I can’t.”

  There was a silence during wh
ich they both continued to chew, during which they both experienced a strong desire to converse and a frustration at the limits of their idioms, and Eleanor tired of feeling desirous and frustrated, and she nodded toward the girl smoking a cigarette at the bar and asked, “Est-ce que vouz pensez que les filles voir beaucoup d’americaines dans cet bar?” and Michel said, “I don’t think they see many Americans like you, but it’s their job to be nice to everyone except their competition.” And Eleanor said, “Est-ce qu’elle penses que Alem est le competition?” and Michel said, “Ce sont les sage filles parfois, qui vont à l’université mais qui n’ont pas de fric. C’est la même histoire que partout, même chez vous,” and Eleanor, realizing she had understood every word, said “Parlons français.”

  More beer appeared, and more chat, and Eleanor and Michel talked in French: She asked about the women in the back room and he told her what he knew, about the outskirts of the city and the government-built shelters, about sex-worker laws and health services and HIV; they talked about how Michel had come to leave Marseille, how he had done his military service in Senegal and then returned to Toulouse to earn a master’s degree in Sciences-Po, how he had seen an ad and applied for a yearlong teaching job here, which he’d now held for fourteen. They talked about poetry, for which they felt a similar ambivalence—not so much for what it was but for what it could and couldn’t do—and each recited a few lines from the poem “Barbarian,” he in French and she in John Ashbery’s English, and the chat made only a minor difference in their conversation, made it so they did not find it unusual that they knew the same poem, so they did not find it unusual to be out late together in a bar, becoming friends; and they talked about the author of the poem and his time in Harar, and then they talked about Harar, not far from Alem’s hometown and one of Michel’s favorite places to visit. They talked about Michel’s family history, his Canadian mother’s death when he was not yet two and his subsequent removal by his father back to France; his communist upbringing there in a banlieue of Paris and his discomfort with certain elements of his present situation—how it had taken him years to adjust to having domestic help (a teenage girl from the provinces, following custom), and how his position on many things had been altered, in welcome but sometimes challenging ways, by his relationship with Alem. They talked about Eleanor, about the events that had led her here, about Abraham and Danny K.M. and Ross and Crescent Farm; about the months after her ousting, which she spent at her friend’s house, one station-stop south of Albany, sleeping alternately in the daughter’s lower bunk and on the sofa, depending on whose week it was with the kids, and—between trips to the city to put a few things in storage, return the keys to her shared office and wish Abraham, who’d returned only to leave again, bon voyage—working first at the book counter and then behind the bar at the place with the many tattooed forearms; and about how at precisely 11:24 p.m. on September the fifth she had left her thirties behind in the middle of her shift, and each of the forearms had raised its glass for a toast. And after even more chat and peanuts and beer, they talked at last and at length about the thing that had happened; and as they talked they took note of the particular pleasure of talking, and as they talked about the pleasure of talking they laughed, and he may or may not have understood everything she said, and she may or may not have understood everything he said, and when there finally was a pause in the conversation they smiled shyly at each other, pulled out their wallets, split the cost of their drugs and their beers, and stepped out into the now-bustling street.