Ask Eleanor (Special Edition With Alternate Ending)

by Briggs, Laura

  “Don’t think of them as revisions,” suggested Lucy. “Think of them as opportunities. A chance to grow and expand and collaborate creatively with someone –”

  “I’m interested in making the necessary changes, since this book is due in a matter of weeks now,” Eleanor interrupted. “And I have only a short amount of time in which to finish.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Lucy, reassuringly. “I’m prepared to work all night if necessary. We have hours ahead of us to get this right.”

  *****

  Two hours later, Lucy had settled herself comfortably against the sofa with an open tablet computer and snap-on keyboard balanced on her lap. Her energy levels were unchanged; whereas Eleanor’s had begun to show the strains of mental exertion. Combat for each change, persistent arguments turned aside only by her most forceful assertions, and a feeling of general stomach disagreement for some ingredient in the salad dressing.

  They were still wrestling over the changes to chapter eight when Eleanor’s intercom buzzed.

  “Yes?” She pressed the button.

  “It’s me, Eleanor.” She recognized the sound of Brandon’s voice on the other end.

  With surprise, she pressed the button for the door. What Brandon would be doing here at this hour, she couldn’t imagine. Her curiosity was only answered when she opened the door for his knock and saw him standing there with a large cardboard box. He was wearing an open brown trench coat, beneath which a rather nappy blue pullover and worn grey jeans were visible.

  “Your canna,” he said. Presenting her with the box as he entered.

  “My – canna. Oh.” She recalled now that Brandon had offered her a transplant from one of the plants from his apartment she had admired, if he ever found time to divide them individually. Red was the color scheme of her patio flowers, a series of hardy bulbs and impatiens in terracotta pots.

  “Thank you,” she said, dutifully. “Does it need water? I suppose I should put it in the kitchen for now and take it onto the patio in the morning.” She shifted the box more securely in her arms as Brandon stalked after her, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat.

  “I meant to bring it earlier, but a friend called. And then I waited forever for my takeout delivery –” he stopped talking as he entered the living room, where he stopped short as well. From her position before the sofa, Lucy waved cheerfully.

  “Good evening, Mr. Brandon,” she called. He stared at her briefly as if she were a mutant puppy tied to the sofa’s leg, then entered the kitchen behind Eleanor.

  “What is Miss Deane doing here?” His voice was low, but not low enough for Eleanor’s tastes at this moment.

  “We’re working.” Eleanor set the box on the table and removed the potted plants from within it. There was a certain edge to her voice with this statement. She didn’t want to hear Brandon’s opinion on this subject at the moment.

  “Working? It’s ten o’ clock at night,” persisted Brandon. “What possessed you to start now?”

  “She’s been here since before seven. And we still have a great deal to do,” Eleanor continued, pouring a glass of water into the canna’s pot and busying herself with the task of folding the cardboard box into something flat and compact.

  “You don’t even like this girl –”

  “Lower your voice,” Eleanor hissed. “She can hear you, you know.” Lucy was not visible from behind the kitchen’s half-wall, but Brandon didn’t even bother to turn around to ascertain this fact.

  “What I said was true and you know it –” he said.

  “Regardless, she’s here and we’re busy, so you should go,” said Eleanor, placing the glass in the sink.

  “You look exhausted.” Brandon’s voice was gruff.

  “I am,” Eleanor answered, keeping her voice lowered to a whisper. She closed the door to the narrow little pantry beside her refrigerator, where cardboard was stored in neat division for reuse or recycling. “But she’s here and we’re working –”

  “Then send her away,” Brandon interrupted, his voice lowered to her level.

  “I can’t just throw her out. She means to be helpful –”

  “You don’t find her helpful, so what does it matter?” said Brandon. “Since when have you been interested in grinding your nose in your work?”

  “I have nothing else in my life,” answered Eleanor.

  She had not meant to say it the way the words emerged. As if the thought of the past few weeks, Marianne’s distance and Lucy’s powerful presence, had been crushing against her. Perhaps even longer in time than that, as if her column’s milestone was a sign of twilight. Waning success and dwindling future on the horizon, just beyond her sight. She didn’t say any of this part aloud. Instead, she laughed slightly – a hollow sound, to her ears, and perhaps to Brandon’s as well. His grim face softened somewhat.

  “And what does that mean?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Only that I have a very small personal life and a great deal of time on my hands. So why shouldn’t I be working?”

  “There are other things you could do,” he ventured. “You could – take up a hobby, for instance. Or travel. You could travel. Or you could write –”

  “Another book?” she finished. Giving him a look before she left the kitchen.

  Lucy was giving serious consideration to something on one of the manuscript’s pages, her little mouth twisted beneath its glossy lip balm. Brandon surveyed her with a final begrudging look.

  “Goodnight, Miss Deane,” he said. She looked up from her work.

  “Oh, goodnight, Mr. Brandon,” she said. The door opened, then closed behind Brandon as he left.

  Eleanor had waited near the kitchen doorway until he was gone, giving herself a moment for thought. Perhaps she should have brewed a pot of coffee. Or maybe she should simply tell Lucy to go home for the night and they would finish tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.

  She smoothed some of the escaped strands of hair from her face. “Let’s at least finish chapter eight tonight,” she said to Lucy, as she returned to her seat on the other side of the coffee table.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Dead Despair. Wasted earth turned to garbage. A cry from the retchings in the gutter. Like vomit stain on concrete. Dead Despair.”

  At the conclusion of these lines, the woman standing before the circle of listeners, a militant figure in an army jacket and several strands of skull beads, sat down to the tune of snapping applause. She didn’t seem particularly enamored with the enthusiasm of her peers, Eleanor noticed, for her face wore the same sullen glare visible during her recitation.

  “Who among us will share next?” The man officiating the poetry session spoke now, his t-shirt bearing the image of a dead third-world dictator styled like a woodcut imprint. “Who has a word for the words?” A voice sultry, hissing slightly like a snake.

  There were no seats at the Friday afternoon poetry session. There were a handful of chairs, yes, claimed by early arrivals, but Marianne preferred to be late, so only beanbag cushions and floor pillows remained.

  Eleanor’s had an unidentifiable stain on one side. She shrank away from it, keeping her hands folded instead on her denim-clad knees. Beside her, Will looked almost bored during the session, his gaze fixed on the dark concrete floor beneath them rather than on the front of the room. It surprised Eleanor, since she had been under the impression this location for their outing had been his idea.

  She sneaked a glance at him, a studious one made with all the guilt of a spy watching an enemy nation. His arms were wrapped around his legs, body leaning or hunched forwards from the beanbag cushion, his face hidden from sight by the thick waves of black hair. One finger traced something on the floor. A series of letters someone had scratched there, Eleanor saw.

  The other hand moved, resting upon Marianne’s leg, lightly tracing her skin from ankle to shin in small, graceful curves. Persisting until she looked at him, a secretive smile on her face. The looks between them
lasted long, the signs of love, deep and early in its stages of passion, both spoken and unspoken.

  The main poet of the Electric Bluebird’s poetry session had already recited. He had been a small, pale figure with a shaved head, his physical being almost electrified with energy as he bounced up and down slowly before the mic. A series of long and complicated pieces read from his latest book – one which Marianne had picked up secondhand at her place of employment a few buildings down, where his posters were plastered over the shop’s windows – the pages containing confusing thoughts on city skyscrapers, electric fences, plastic waste, and waiting for a dentist appointment.

  Marianne was enraptured by it, her eyes fixed upon the performance for its duration, five or six poems from the book held open in the poet’s hands. An identical one was in Marianne’s own, along with a fabric-covered notebook studded with miniature clay decals, a personal poetry journal covered with refuse bits of artwork.

  She was equally enthused by the poets who followed: Eleanor learned by whispered inquiry that they were regulars to the poetry circle. “Amateur” and “professional” were terms shunned here, as was the description “published,” which gave no distinction in introduction between the militant poet and the cityscape dweller.

  “City lights breathe on me, spit on me, trample the sod grass of my heritage beneath the treads of tanks and march of police boots...”

  This latest poet, a young woman with a quavering, nervous voice who read everything as a monotone single sentence, was a friend of Marianne’s. After the session, Marianne and Will had navigated the room in a leisurely drift, introducing Eleanor to various people present.

  The girl with the nervous voice had pressed Eleanor’s hand limply upon meeting her and then confined herself to talking to Marianne in the same tone as her recitation. She didn’t seem to know Will, nor did she seem to care, but Marianne showed no signs of caring, either.

  “So this is Marianne’s sister.” The woman in the military jacket – named Lafita, apparently – spoke about Eleanor rather than to her, in a tone which suggested she had heard several stories about Eleanor in the past and found them all to be unflattering caricatures.

  “How do you do,” was Eleanor’s response. The hand gripping her own was tough and bony, she couldn’t help but notice.

  “A refuge from the conventional world,” said the poet. “And how do you like our little haven from the world’s prostitution?”

  “I find it very...educational,” ventured Eleanor. In response, Lafita, and two or three others who were standing nearby, smiled and glanced at each other as if they were all privy to the same joke.

  “Lafita is absolutely brilliant,” said Marianne. “One of her poems was included in a time capsule commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Ohio campus strike – isn’t that amazing? I’ve been trying to convince Will that he has to let her be work be a part of bringing his poetry site to life.”

  It would be a short contribution, Eleanor suspected. But she smiled, nevertheless, and glanced politely at Will, who was standing by.

  “I have offered to let her sculpt its early stages,” said Will. “And there are only a handful of voices that I’ve offered it to – but Lafita knows her own mind.”

  “I hate organization,” said Lafita. “I don’t compromise myself for anybody. Not even for this gorgeous poetry patron that is Marianne’s.” Her voice dropped to a sultry level as she looked at Will, then she burst into harsh laughter and draped her arms around Marianne’s shoulders in a hug which was returned with equal warmth.

  There had not been any sign of jealousy in Marianne’s face – apparently, she was used to admiration for her boyfriend. Lafita seemed to know them both equally well, which made Eleanor wonder if this poetry circle was a circle of mutual friends – or if Will was simply very quick in adapting to Marianne’s world.

  “But there’s a soul of poetry in you, woman friend,” said Lafita to Marianne. “Just drip onto the page the rest of those words of your meeting him, the ones you wrote down that time. Two in a loft, sweet silence and the grind against the city’s nasty, mechanical motions...”

  Marianne blushed. “I can’t ever show my scribblings to anyone. They’re too private. That whole poem is ... too raw and real for anyone else.”

  The blush on her face was what held Eleanor’s eye a second longer than usual. The thought of its possible implications – what did Lafita mean by the two of them “meeting” in a loft? Was it Marianne’s studio? In her story of their meeting, it hadn’t appeared.

  An embarrassed silence followed momentarily, in which Marianne avoided Eleanor’s eye and Lafita had turned to speak to someone else. There was nothing to say which could be said in this moment, amidst this crowd, so Eleanor forced her mind elsewhere. She turned to Will, attempting a polite smile as if nothing strange had been spoken a moment before.

  “Is Lafita a colleague of sorts?” she asked. “Is she part of the artistic circle who will launch your website, for instance?”

  Will smiled wryly. “They don’t think of themselves that way, but yes,” he said. “She’s one of the voices I couldn’t do without. Which reminds me, I need to get George Kapkis’s number from her…” He pushed through the conversing individuals between him and the militant poet, who was now talking to a man in a silk jacket.

  Eleanor and Marianne were left standing together. Alone, except for the surrounding bodies of people currently indifferent to their presence. Marianne toyed with the beads around her neck, yellow plastic splattered with paint across their faceted sides and smooth spheres, the corners of blocky square-shaped ornaments and stars.

  Eleanor didn’t want to say it, but did, as if acknowledging the elephant in the room. “You didn’t tell me the part about the loft.” An evident meaning in her tone.

  “I didn’t,” said Marianne, shrugging.

  “Why?” asked Eleanor. “You told friends about it. That poet whom I’d never met before–”

  “Because she understands it, Elly. And you – you just find it shocking and disgusting.” Marianne’s tone was low, its emotions hushed. “Don’t you? You think it’s terrible of us –”

  “Of course I do.” Eleanor struggled to keep her voice low, aware that someone’s eye had flickered towards them. “Of course. What I can’t understand is how you don’t see it that way. He was a stranger, Marianne. A perfect stranger off the streets and the two of you were alone in a place where no one knew you were. Anything could have happened. Anything.”

  “Well, it didn’t, did it?” said Marianne. “I wish I could make you understand why. It was a moment – a thing of impulse that was – was something beyond me, beyond us. And I went with it.”

  “Against your better judgment, I hope,” said Eleanor. “And your silence was because you were embarrassed, perhaps, to tell me.” For Marianne’s cheeks were flushed scarlet as she turned aside.

  “Embarrassed?” Marianne laughed, a bitter, incredulous sound that drew the attention of two men standing by. “Embarrassed for you, yes. Because I knew this is just how you would take it.”

  “How was I supposed to feel?” Eleanor asked. “Happy for you?”

  “Oh, Eleanor.” Her full name, uttered with a disgust and anger equal to Eleanor’s own a few moments before, although she had taken more care not to let hers show. Marianne now pushed her way between the two men standing nearby, plunging herself into the next conversation as if escaping Eleanor by a door open to another room.

  Eleanor stood there, abandoned in their small spot of the floor. She herself felt small at this moment. Chastised in some manner by her sister, although she felt no desire to deny the truth of Marianne’s accusations.

  She couldn’t be happy for something like that to happen to Marianne. It was impossible, so why couldn’t Marianne see the reasons why? Why she worried about the frail and volatile neighborhood of the art loft, and the easy manner in which a stranger could be befriended – then embraced – as someone more than a slowly-d
eveloping acquaintance.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand desire. But to act upon it like that – no. Flirting in an airport with a stranger was not the same as whatever transpired for Marianne. Will no doubt departed at the same stop as she. They had talked all the way to the loft, where he carried her sculpture for her, up the stairs and into the chamber. And then –

  No, it was not the same. It was a line she couldn’t cross, even had someone like Edward done the same for her. And yet, she could think of it happening for Marianne with a strange pity and strange understanding, even as she drew away from its implications.

  Will slipped away from Lafita, in the act of scribbling something on a scrap of paper. He shoved it in his pocket and joined Eleanor with a smile of re-greeting. Hands tucked in his coat, an expression of affability for the room in general.

  “Where’s Marianne?” he asked. Those brilliant green eyes had been searching for her, Eleanor realized.

  “Over there. Behind the tall gentleman with the head scarf,” said Eleanor, indicating the general direction. Marianne became visible a moment later, a cloud of blond curls and a smile which creased the corners of her eyes ever so slightly.

  Will twitched in that direction, then stopped. He did not abandon Eleanor in this small island of floor space amidst conversation, for which she was grateful. Stirring herself, she looked at him with a friendly smile.

  “Are you a poet also?” Eleanor asked him. “Do you read as part of the circle?”

  “Only other people’s work,” he answered. “I have the soul of an artist – just not the voice or hands, I’m afraid.”

  “The friend of the artist only, I take it,” she responded. How quickly one forms those friendships, her mind thought.

  “My friends – in general – aren’t artistic,” he answered. “Except for these fringes of my university years, before my father’s corporate mindwash was set into motion, if you will. But he underestimated the power of beauty, I think. He saw me as the friend of art, but he didn’t quite see me as its lover.” He was looking at Marianne with these words, which had become slightly intense in tone.