Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  Despite her distance from news of it, the stream of events flowed on. The White House, in what some deemed a late-term legacy move, had announced an opening of relations with Cuba. The grand jury verdict was just days away; Ferguson and the world stood by. Some documentary filmmakers were being accused of treason, and just that morning more than five thousand acres of California desert had been burned in a fire. She stopped the stream temporarily, closing the window. She got up.

  Lizette and I took turns swapping his whiskey for water. He thanked us each time, then went back to the bar for another.

  In two days she had moved to an extended-stay room in the hotel, equipped with a kitchenette.

  In four days she had bought a prepaid phone from which she could send international texts.

  In seven days, thanks to a series of small coincidences and her language skills, she had landed an unofficial job at the Rimbaud House, filling in for an assistant who had just given birth. She was trained quickly to clean and maintain the exhibits and give occasional tours in English and in broken French.

  She met a woman named Maaza, who had grown up in Addis and Harar but studied at UCLA and was writing a thesis about the effect of the country’s new tribal identification mandate on community ties. Maaza was staying with her brother, Tadese, an organizer in the struggling national labor movement, whom Eleanor liked talking with and who seemed to find her amusing—which at first she took to mean that he found her ridiculous. The day after they met, Tadese took her on a tour of Harar that was geographically similar to the one led by the professional guide (a friend of Hanna’s brother-in-law, whose offer of an introduction she hadn’t wanted to refuse). In place of the guide’s enthusiastic but canned patter and prescribed photo ops, Tadese offered a running history lesson, grounding each site in contextualizing facts—about the class politics of agricultural land use and labor, about the structures of power and resistance during the Italian years, the Derg years, and more recent years—in a sense embodying the things Eleanor had been reading about in books with a clarity and generosity that she took note of, both to herself and, shyly over lunch, to Tadese himself.

  “I can’t explain why. I’ve always told the wrong secrets to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Also, my lie to you was closer to truth than when I tell the truth.”

  On the eighth day she texted a picture to Abraham of a touring motorcycle—a BMW RT1100, with metal side panniers—parked on the corner of her street.

  One afternoon at work she received an envelope in the mail: the chapbook, slim and bound by hand with waxed thread, from her old poet-friend. Its title was Robot Hug from Behind, and the poems it contained were about friendship, or they were about class and race and the prison-industrial complex, or about technology and authenticity, or they were about the news.

  “The opposite of suicide / is learning and creating with friends / the necessary social tries to trick us,” she read, sitting on the warm steps of Bet Rimbo, her sunglasses on.

  She kept reading until she finished. She had the thought or the feeling that she was all-in with these poems, and took note. She had the feeling or the thought that this book was sent from her future: six blank pages at its end.

  After two weeks had passed, she bought paper and envelopes.

  To the friend whose comforter she had stained with the blood from her thumb she wrote _______.

  To the friend who had let her sleep in her daughter’s bunk bed she wrote _______.

  To Alem and Michel she wrote: Rendez-moi visite! Vous me manquez!

  To Ross she wrote a long letter about the holdings of the museum, quoting portions of Arthur’s correspondence that were exhibited in the vitrines.

  To her poet-friend she sent a sun-faded notebook she’d bought on the street and a handwritten copy of three of her paragraphs, signed with a heart.

  To Crescent Farm she sent the Polaroid of herself feeding the hyenas. On the back she printed in capital letters: WE ARE PERFORMANCE THAT IS QUALITY LIFE TRY NOW.

  She didn’t have Genet’s postal address so she texted her instead: “I’ll be in Harar for at least the next six weeks. I’m sorry to miss the Goethe-Institut, but I hope we can still go before my visa and my Visa run out. Until then, amasaganalo for the hospitality and all the delicious bunna!” After some thought, she signed her text: “Warmly, Eleanor.”

  We cabbed home from the airport and he dropped me off. We each looked out our separate windows as the lights streaked by. He promised to send me The Fourth Flight in installments—it would read best that way; he didn’t want me flipping around. He closed his eyes and I thought he’d fallen asleep until he spoke: “Footless tights. You always left early. I figured you had to get to a dance class or something, so I didn’t mind.” I opened my mouth to speak, though I didn’t know what I would say, but he went on: “Also. Also—I like what you did with your title. Though you didn’t use my favorite. My favorite was She Got Up.”

  For the last five minutes of the ride we touched each other’s hands.

  THE NEXT MORNING she’ll stop at the café on her way to work. She’ll read about a boat carrying several hundred refugees that has capsized outside Lampedusa, close enough to shore that the cries of the drowning were audible from land. She’ll read that the death toll of the migrants, most of them from Somalia and Eritrea, is rising into the hundreds. She won’t read about the rapes these same migrants endured before dying so close to their destination because these facts won’t emerge for weeks or months, and the delay of these facts will be merciful because Eleanor’s stores of tolerance for the stream of intolerable events has shrunk. She will not cry for the refugees—her temporary neighbors—because the feeling produced by their fate will not be one of melancholia, though what it will be won’t be easy to name; and she will read instead another item about the death from illness, days after his release from decades in prison, of a member of the Angola Three, and her response to this too will be subtly different from what she knew. She will note the difference, which she’ll carry with her through her day at Bet Rimbo, through her solitary walk home via the flesh market, the spice market, and the chat market; she’ll find herself periodically throughout the day succumbing to a sensation of being broken apart like a wishbone, followed immediately by a sensation of sliding on a freshly polished concrete floor, and she’ll note the strange juxtaposition of these images and their lack of attachment to any direct memory or experience, and she’ll note the discomfort and pleasure attending this lack; and when she arrives at her building and exchanges nods with her downstairs neighbor and climbs up the three flights of stairs, she’ll open the door to an ordinary room containing an ordinary table and bed and an ordinary stove, and she’ll walk to the stove and light it with a match to bring a luminously ordinary pot of water to life.

  Later, she’ll walk up the hill to the brewery for shiro and beers with Maaza and Tadese.

  THE DAY AFTER the ceremony we had the morning free—our flight didn’t leave until five-thirty. After breakfast, we’d decided to take a walk through campus. Outside the art museum, a massive brutalist structure amid the friendly brick, a small sign read: Alfred Leslie’s The Killing Cycle.

  Six canvases and three watercolors occupied the main gallery. Aidan sat before one of the paintings and didn’t move for an hour. I looked at them all and then went into the adjacent room, where the cinematic collaboration between Leslie and Frank O’Hara, The Last Clean Shirt, was being projected in a loop. In it, a black man drives a white woman around the East Village in a convertible. It’s 1964. They are young, fashionable, full of life. The man has taped a clock to the dashboard; the film is a single take, seven minutes long. The man remains silent—though expressive in his gestures—while the woman keeps up an incomprehensible monologue of what the wall text calls “Finnish gibberish.” She pauses once to light a cigarette and twice more in moments of apparent self-consciousness, when a cloud passes over her otherwise carefree face. The film is composed of three iterations of the same
take: one with no subtitles, one with subtitles ostensibly translating the woman’s speech, one in which the subtitles seem to express the thoughts of the silent man.

  “It’s in the nature of all of us to want to be unconnected,” she says. “To want to be unconnected / And you should pull us all together / like Humpty Dumpty / or something.”

  “I could do this a lot easier with chewing gum,” he thinks, taping the clock once more to the dash.

  “I really am upset about things,” she says. “I mean it’s a rotten life / Everything that goes on around you is ridiculous.”

  When I emerged from the darkened room he was still there, seated on the tufted bench, alone with The Cocktail Party. According to the catalog, this was one of the paintings Leslie had edited out of his famous sequence depicting O’Hara’s death, at forty, on the beach at Fire Island. Now the painter had allowed the gallery to reassemble all of the extant canvasses—six, to the three of his edited version—and had added subtitles beneath two of them. The hand-lettered text that now captioned The Cocktail Party was taken from O’Hara’s script for The Last Clean Shirt, a quote from the woman’s monologue that I spent some time trying to parse before giving up:

  I have the other idea about guilt. It’s not in us, it’s in the situation. You don’t say that the victim is responsible for a concentration camp or a Mack truck.

  I have typed, by mistake, more than once here, “Frank O’Harar.”

  The painting is rectangular, landscape view. The left third is occupied by two figures in bathing suits, both slim, both tall, with tanned white skin. They are looking down on the beach from a balcony or ledge. Her back is to us, her hands clasped behind red-and-white-striped bikini bottoms. He, at her side, is half turned to the right, cocktail in hand. They seem to overlap rather than touch, as if they are together in the space of the painting but not in the space of the world. They’re lit from behind—which means we too are lit from behind—by an electric light or the moon, we can’t know which. In the foreground, on a small table next to the man’s hip, are a plate of potato chips and Oreos, a rotary phone with a white business card beside it, a flowered mug, two lemon wedges, and a small brown dome that might be a chocolate truffle or macaroon. We see his face in profile; he is lost in thought, maybe gazing at the last traces of twilight on the cove. On the beach below: two vehicles, the glow of headlights, an illegible but ominous scene. Perhaps there is faraway yelling: A poet has been killed while sleeping on the beach. An accident. Any thing may produce any thing.

  Aidan was doing the thing with his fingers again: pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb. His lips had settled into a faraway smile, and I watched him not weep while clearly weeping in his mind. He’d never reminded me so much of Eleanor.

  The sounds of honking and traffic and the woman’s shrill speech filtered in from the other room. I looked from the painting to my friend and back again.

  The phone on the table is black. The glow from the headlights is yellow. The cocktail is red.

  It’s night, but the sky is blue. A variegated blue.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all of the writers and artists who are mentioned or quoted in this book; to Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre for their film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present; and to the curators of the 2014 exhibition Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. Facts and propositions about Rimbaud’s later years are drawn mostly from Charles Nicholl’s book Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa. Thanks to Jacqueline Waters for publishing She Got Up—this novel’s prototext—as a pamphlet from The Physiocrats in 2012, to Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang for publishing an early excerpt on their Exact Change app, and to all three for their friendship and examples as artist-publishers.

  Significant work was made possible—and pleasurable—by two residencies at Writers OMI and one at Headlands Center for the Arts. Thanks to DW Gibson, Sean Uyehara, Holly Blake, my fellow residents, and the wonderful staff of both. I am grateful to Steven Rand and apexart for facilitating the outbound residency program that brought me to Ethiopia in 2009, and to Siri Hustvedt for nominating me. Following the intent of that program, I formed no expectations about producing work related to my experience, and only years later did fragments of it become reference points for Eleanor’s story. I offer my affectionate gratitude to Konjit Seyoum and her family, Mihret Kebede, Azeb Worku and her family, Emma Lochery, Surafel Wondimu, the late Michael Daniel Ambachew, Asni arts, NETSA arts village, the Goethe-Institut Äthiopien, and the many artists, scholars, neighbors, and others who welcomed me and shared their knowlege and experience during my stay and after.

  Thanks to Amanda Annis for stalwart guidance, generosity, and friendship; to Erika Stevens, Carla Valadez, Mandy Medley, Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, Carlos Esparza, and everyone at Coffee House Press; and to Rose-Lynn Fisher for the cover image and the story behind it. Thanks to markbvt at advrider.com for the lingo.

  Warm thanks to my friends and fellow writers who offered feedback, insight, and support, including Jarrod Annis, Mirene Arsanios, David Buuck, Amina Cain, Kelli Cain, Corina Copp, Ellie Ga, Renee Gladman, Jane Gregory, Jennifer Kabat, Jonathan Lethem, Ben Lerner, Sarah McCarry, Maaza Mengiste, Maggie Nelson, rectangle, Nelly Reifler, Sarah Riggs, DglsN.Rthsjchld, Shelby Shaw, Anna Stein, Simone White, Rebecca Wolff, and Matvei Yankelevich; to Rachel Wasserman; to Lara Durback for writing Robot Hug From Behind and sending it to me just in time; to Joan, Yiannis, and Nick Moschovakis; to Trevor Wilson; and to Carin Besser, without whose encouragement and labor this book would not have found its shape, and without whose lifelong friendship and dialogue I could not have begun to find mine. This is dedicated to her.

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