Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  But what if Eleanor was wrong in her assumptions about the provinces; or what if Hanna was, out of consideration for her guest, switching codes? She might not show up until 3:00 the next day, for a late lunch, which would leave Eleanor on her own for the evening. This concern dented but did not destroy Eleanor’s good mood—and it was somewhat balanced out by a separate worry that, if they were to dine together that evening, the two women would exhaust their repertoire of gestures before their meals arrived.

  Her worries vanished into sleep. When she woke it was 8:55. She stepped onto the balcony and looked down: Hanna in front of a mustard-yellow Peugeot, smiling broadly and waving both her hands.

  “Look, there’s only one real subject: the relation of being to time.”

  “You mean beings,” I corrected.

  “What?”

  “The relation of beings to time.”

  The driver of the taxi spoke English. He explained to Eleanor that he was Hanna’s brother-in-law, that he owned the car and drove it part-time as a taxi but that, really, he was a student of business at the university in nearby Dire Dawa. He explained that his wife—Hanna’s sister—was home with their new baby, but he and Hanna would be showing Eleanor the town that night. He said, “Leave it to me.”

  Eleanor was grateful for the brother-in-law’s knowledge of English, grateful for being inside his car and for the exhortation to leave it to him. As they drove through the gate in the high stone walls that surrounded the old city, and then as they mounted a twisting road to the top of a hill, Eleanor made use of the brother-in-law’s abilities as an interpreter to have a polite conversation with Hanna, in which she mostly thanked her repeatedly for her hospitality and help.

  In the middle of the back seat, next to Eleanor, sat a large quantity of chat wrapped loosely in a clear plastic bag. The brother-in-law laughed: “You don’t know about Harar, the chat capital of the world! Anywhere else you don’t chew before evening. Here, as long as it’s after noon, everyone chews.” Eleanor recalled the circles of crouching men from earlier in the day. “Pass it up,” said the brother-in-law, and Eleanor did, taking none, this time, for herself.

  At the top of the hill was a double row of cars parked near a compound consisting of an old windowed warehouse and an adjacent one-story stucco building, both well kept and lit from the exterior. An animated foursome was entering the building; Eleanor and her party followed.

  Inside was a vast room lined with long communal tables at which large and small groups of people of varying ages drank pitchers of beer and ate from shared platters of fragrant food; another version of the music Eleanor heard everywhere filled whatever part of the air wasn’t already full with conversation.

  While downloading e-books at the airport she’d also BitTorrented the 2-D version of the new 3-D film by Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language.

  Among the fragments, a repeated refrain: “Monsieur, est-ce qu’il est possible de construire un concept d’Afrique?”

  A woman entered just as I was emerging from the stall. “I’m an old friend of one of the honorees,” she volunteered, leaning over the bank of sinks to arrange her hair. “But I can’t decide if I want to go talk to him or not.”

  “I’ve been there,” I said, smiling at her reflection and looking for a way to dry my hands.

  Eleanor, Hanna, and Hanna’s brother-in-law drank from pitchers of beer and ate from platters of fragrant food and talked, the brother-in-law interpreting for the two women but never without editorializing, so that by the end of their meal Eleanor had been treated less to any deep understanding of Hanna’s life and character than to the complete worldview of the aspiring entrepreneur. He would make vast sums of money and travel the world. He would own apartments in New York and Tokyo, to start. He’d been saving the proceeds from driving the taxi for a number of years, and if all went as planned he’d be leaving as early as May.

  It struck Eleanor that the brother-in-law did not mention his wife and baby daughter, that his plans were built on a jet-setting lifestyle that Eleanor assumed—perhaps wrongly, she acknowledged to herself—would be challenging with an infant in tow. As additional pitchers of beer were emptied and more chat chewed—though not by Eleanor, whose appetite for intoxication had dimmed after her series of indulgences, beginning with the pot-butter kale and ending with her night out with Michel—it struck her that if she were to trust her ability to read people at all, if she knew anything about the performance of seduction and the aura of illicit love, she would suspect that these two, Hanna and her brother-in-law, were the real couple of his imagined future. Their chemistry—a word Eleanor disliked using in this way, but she was linguistically tired from the evening so far—hit Eleanor at a point on the side of her neck near her collarbone. She rubbed the spot with her hand, pretending to scratch an itch.

  There was talk of dancing. They climbed into the Peugeot, which was parked pointing down the hill toward the walled city below, a security measure Eleanor understood when after a few tries the car failed to start. The brother-in-law ordered Eleanor and Hanna to stay in their seats and shifted the car into neutral, pawing at the pavement with his left foot. They glided down the hill in this manner until he pulled into a conveniently located gas station where, with some help from Hanna and the station attendant, he concocted a paste from chewing gum, water, and tissue, and used it to plug a hole somewhere in the abdomen of the car.

  Without much of a choice, Eleanor agreed to whatever plans were proposed for the remainder of the evening: the raucous drive through the interior of the walled city, preceded by the obligatory stop at the gates to be photographed feeding the hyenas—a tourist trap Hanna insisted Eleanor experience—and followed by several more hours at a small club where Hanna and her brother-in-law lost their discretion and made out deliriously in plain sight. Eleanor sat alone, drinking a beer and rubbing her neck. Watching people dance reminded her of the picture of Danny K.M. she’d found on the kizomba website, the grainy printout of which she removed now from her wallet. She could hardly distinguish his face in the dark club. She smiled at Danny K.M., then placed him on the table beside her drink. At irregular intervals, possibly keyed to changes in the music too subtle for Eleanor to recognize, Hanna or her companion or one or more of the other dancers would switch into the restrained shoulder-shiver of eskista. Yewch guday new, Eleanor said softly, repeating the words Hanna had taught her in the car. Yewch guday ferengi, too, she thought. A foreigner, perhaps a barbarian.

  I am—eimai—xenía, she interpreted for nobody but herself.

  When an argument broke out between two of the club’s patrons, Hanna grinned and made the gesture for Let’s get out of here, and they ran for the car. And when Eleanor looked around and thought she understood that she was just a few long blocks from her hotel, and when she sought and gained confirmation from the brother-in-law that this was the case, she decided not to get back into the Peugeot, whose ignition might or might not turn over anyway.

  She felt in this decision the echo of other decisions, of all the central and marginal decisions that, in their determining powers over the course of a life, form much of the content that replaces empty time; and she knew that the effects of the decision were consequential, even if minor, even if still unknown; and she watched the swaying couple and hoped for nothing more for them than that the car would or would not start according to their desire; and she looked up and saw the moon—just shy of perfection—and heard herself announce, though she couldn’t be sure the words were coming from her mouth, that she would walk home, which she did after a last round of gestures and grins.

  He had handed me the diploma when he came offstage and asked if I could carry it in my bag, and now its presence there annoyed me as I felt around, at his request, for a pen. I gave him the bag—“You do it”—and walked away.

  Lizette Tanikawa stood alone by the drinks table. I hadn’t known it was her in the bathroom before, but when I saw his face as he recognized her across the room, I guessed. I walk
ed over to the bar, ordered a club soda with bitters, and hovered by her side.

  He was chatting with a few admirers, presumably faculty or grad students in film, signing the occasional book. Above his head on the wood-paneled walls hung a muted tapestry—beige, ecru, and taupe—the central image of which was a man with an elephant’s trunk in place of a nose. Above the image was an embroidered banner spelling out the word “Africa.”

  “Weird tapestry,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she replied, gesturing across the room to a similar one bearing an image of a dragon-headed woman and, in even larger letters, “Asia.”

  As she walked to the hotel, she thought of Arthur and the probability he had—maybe routinely—passed the same way. She thought of the crouching men from earlier in the afternoon, and of the Degas drawing she’d seen at the Met—fatigue, stability, submission—and then she thought of her tarot deck’s illustration for The Star: a sturdy female figure, naked, with yellow hair and tan skin, bent at the knee and gazing down into a pool of water, a pitcher in each hand. With one, she fills up the pool itself; the other she empties on the bank, releasing rivulets that spill to the margins of the card. In the distance is a mountain dwarfed by the woman, the water, the banks, and—in a plane that’s neither foreground nor background—all eight iterations of the illustrated star itself.

  A kind of luminous ordinariness. Or another revision, a sweep—to fix errors and identify signs of excess, signs of confusion or desire.

  “It’s strange to teach in your hometown,” she said, nodding back to a passing student.

  “What department are you in?”

  “Art History. And just History.” The bartender refilled her wine.

  The next morning she found, in her jacket’s inner pocket, the corner she had ripped from the page before throwing it in the fire. She swallowed it. It wasn’t like her to do this. But what was Eleanor like?

  “I’m writing an article,” she said, “on The Progress of Love. Do you know it?” I laughed. “If only!” An image of Kat the previous morning leaving for good, bags in hand. Sweet smile and eyes flashing into the future.

  And what does it mean to ask what she was like?

  “The sequence of paintings by Fragonard. I’m fascinated not only by their eroticism but by their trajectory—their commission, their completion in the wake of the revolution, their installation in the Château du Barry and subsequent rejection and removal. The fickleness of the patron is interesting, but my book isn’t about any of that. It’s about the role of the written word in the paintings. So”—she lowered her voice and leaned in—“there’s the one-handed book the girl reads in The Lover Crowned, which was painted after the rejection and which, to my mind, is the most erotic moment in the narrative, and then in the original set that final, platonic rereading of the love letters: completely tame! The Platonism in general could fill a book—God, I’m sorry, I slipped into lecture mode. I just taught this stuff all week.”

  Before I had the chance to respond, her attention went elsewhere: “Oh look,” she said, “I guess he’s decided to come say hello.”

  Aidan was walking toward us. He looked unsteady but firm, though not firm enough to deflect the pleasantries of another admirer, this one in catering uniform carrying an empty drinks tray.

  She spent an afternoon with her notebook, barely leaving her bed. The sentences and paragraphs found her, then arranged themselves of their own accord, the way sleep had a way, though less so of late—as if the quantity of new information she absorbed each day required a deeper nightly evacuation—of rearranging her mind. Later, she read the entirety of what she had written out loud to herself, marking the gaps in her text with the gesture for More content shall be inserted here once that content is both knowable and known.

  The thinking reflected in the writing was both familiar and not, both reminded her of the site of her lost paragraphs and felt clearly like a new and unfamiliar field on which she had been invited, or invited herself, to play. At times during the writing she felt nervous, shameful, or exposed—especially when it seemed to reflect equally her ignorance and her curiosity about her surroundings—and she did her best to fold her nerves, shame, and exposure into the text itself, without relying on this tactic to provide a solution to her discomfort. The way the paragraphs arranged themselves was as an abecedary, a collection of sentences sorted by the English alphabet, which she had been staring at for days on a printed study sheet she’d found in the hotel-room desk, its twenty-six letters keyed more or less to the Amharic letters she was trying to learn.

  Before setting down the notebook, she pronounced the titles of the paragraphs again:

  A: Addis

  B: Bananas

  C: Carbon

  D: Danny K.M.

  E: English

  F: Ferengi

  G: Goethe

  H: Hagiography

  I: Italy

  J: Jazz

  K: Kettle of Fish

  L: Lucy

  M: Marathon

  N:

  O:

  P: Prayer

  Q: Quat (chat)

  R:

  S: Sex Work

  T: Teff

  U: Untranslatability

  V:

  W:

  X: Xenía

  Z: Zoo

  and then she took a nap.

  “Well,” Lizette continued, her eyes having dimmed, “I suppose also”—she brought her right hand to her lips and let out a short sigh through her nose, like a horse, then shook her head—“I am fascinated by what follows a major rejection. This one”—she waved her free hand toward Aidan, who had been intercepted once again, this time by the dean of Humanities, the convocation’s host—“I was supposed to marry. We were going to have three children and live in Spain, or was it Corsica. But before that could become more than just talk, he retreated”—she paused almost imperceptibly—“there was a horrible accident, and one of our classmates was injured as a result. Then my future husband and his family were gone. And the other one, Miranda”—she nodded toward the dean—“gave me a shoulder to cry on. You know the word rejection”—she paused, lips pursed—“once meant, or also meant, to throw something back, to return it to the field of play. Anyway. Miranda and I were friends for a decade before we got it together to fuck, but we never really attached to anyone else. We tried for years to have kids. We both tried, we had four miscarriages between us. And now we have two we adopted through the foster system. They’re brothers, eight and ten now. It’s funny: the way we look, and the way our kids look, if we were a straight couple we’d pass for a bio family. They were out of diapers when the dean’s job opened up, and the day she got it, I found out I’d been approved for tenure. It’s a miracle it all worked out so well.”

  Now he had a clear path in our direction.

  “I’d like to say I can’t imagine my life going a different way. But to be honest,”—she turned to look at me—“I can. Can’t you?”

  THE WOMAN CALLED ELEANOR emerges from her hotel wearing a taupe dress, canvas sneakers, a light sweater, and white plastic-rim sunglasses. The sun is strong. She squints up at the sky, smiles.

  An hour later she is intercepted by a professional guide at the southern entrance to the old town. They greet each other, walk together through the gate.

  An hour later, the woman and the guide have completed the loop, which ends at the flesh market in the central square. He points to the carcasses of goats with curled horns and to a severed camel’s head. “Go on, take a picture,” he urges. She tells him she can’t; she has forgotten to charge her phone.

  Seventeen minutes later, the guide and the woman sit drinking macchiatos at the counter of a small café. The woman asks to be shown Bet Rimbo. He gestures down a narrow street and says But it’s Tuesday; on Tuesdays the Rimbaud House is closed.

  Twenty minutes later they’re circling the walls of the city in an open-top jeep. The guide narrates the past; the woman asks questions. Again he encourages h
er to take pictures, again she demurs.

  Eighteen minutes before their time together is up, the woman thanks the guide, hands him some bills, smiles, and walks away. She can be seen removing her sunglasses and approaching a large Victorian house. She walks around the house, which is painted turquoise and yellow, and sits on the stoop. A careful observer would note a peculiar brightness in the air immediately surrounding the woman, as if the wattage within a certain radius of her body had increased.

  Time passes. The woman rises and walks into a nearby restaurant where she eats alone, her sunglasses perched on top of her head.

  At one point she leans her elbows on the table and places her chin in her hands.

  At one point she cocks her head to the right as if recalling something pleasant.

  At one point she takes a sharp breath as if recalling something painful.

  The next morning the woman, in the same dress and same canvas sneakers, with the same peculiar brightness in her margins, enters through the east gate to the city and sits down in an internet café.

  Don’t forget Eleanor in “Ease Down the Road,” its defense of fugitive desire between friends.

  There were 137 messages in her priority in-box. Among them were notes from her friends, including one from a poet she hadn’t heard from in years asking for Eleanor’s current address so she could send a copy of her latest handmade book. There were several updates from Abraham, the last of which showed him beginning to worry at her silence. There was a message from Dawit, who was eager to meet her. And there was an update from Ross, to which he’d attached a picture of himself sitting at one of the Formica tables at the Muddy Cup, shoulder to shoulder with a smiling woman whose silver hair was streaked with a becoming mauve.