Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  ALSO BY ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

  They and We Will Get into Trouble for This

  You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

  I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

  Copyright © 2018 by Anna Moschovakis

  Cover art © Rose-Lynn Fisher

  Cover design by Carlos Esparza

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Moschovakis, Anna, author.

  Title: Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love / by Anna Moschovakis.

  Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017056242 | ISBN 9781566895248 (eBook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.O7787 E43 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056242

  Excerpts from “Barbarian” by Arthur Rimbaud are from Illuminations, translated by John Ashbery. Copyright © 2012 by John Ashbery. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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  There is rupture and dissonance everywhere.

  I am exhausted. I am.

  —Vi Khi Nao, Fish in Exile

  Obscured, the world’s terrific

  —Jane Gregory, Yeah No

  Any thing may produce any thing.

  —David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

  THE STORY SHE WAS READING was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become “agitated” by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been “texting loudly.” Popcorn had been thrown.

  She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folk singer arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.

  “He was a good, genuine person,” it was said of the deceased.

  “He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.”

  “Fate brought these two people together—it was ridiculous.”

  None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy SEALS on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.

  She stared at the spot and then back at her thumb, where fresh blood coagulated. She thought again of the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the expressway, from which she could hear the variegated moan of afternoon traffic. She was having a hard time getting up.

  Charles Cummings, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who left the theater with the victim’s blood on his clothes, said he was shocked and saddened by the incident, which took place on his sixty-eighth birthday.

  “I can’t believe anybody would bring a gun to a movie,” said Cummings.

  “I can’t believe I got shot,” said the victim before he died.

  The recipient of the texts was the man’s three-year-old daughter, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

  She looked away from the screen and then back again. When she clicked on the surveillance footage, popcorn filled the foreground like snow.

  Contents

  1. Spring

  2. Summer

  3. Fall

  Acknowledgments

  Funder Acknowledgments

  1

  SPRING

  SHE GOT UP.

  Through the hollow door typical of the city’s new high-rises she could hear the voice of her friend, who had interrupted her work to make a call to someone or answer a call from someone and was emitting a satisfied murmur the content of which was as indecipherable as its tone was clear.

  She put on her coat, exited the spare room that doubled as her occasional office, kissed her friend—still listening and murmuring—on the cheek, returned the friend’s wink with a wave, and left. She was alone in the hallway and in the elevator: mirrored walls coated with gray construction dust. She examined her reflection during the quick descent, then emerged into an empty lobby with plate-glass walls still covered in butcher paper and blue painter’s tape; at its far end, she pushed open the massive plate-glass door.

  It was cold—not as cold as was usual for early March, but colder than it had been for the last several weeks. People were out walking, dressed for fall or else for spring, having adjusted once and not wanting to adjust again, and now they were shivering and pulling their fall or spring coats around them, tilting toward the wind. She clutched and tilted with the rest, watched her boots cross a system of circling debris and slipped into the first coffee shop she saw, an unfamiliar place with a sidewalk board outside: COFFEE HERE.

  She closed her eyes, opened them. The room was dim and sheathed in wood. The floor was light wood, the walls were dark wood, the ceiling was wood from which ivory paint had been scraped; ivory gauze curtains hung before the reclaimed wood-framed windows, which encased, instead of glass, sheets of plywood. A row of small barnwood tables lined the long sidewall opposite the counter, and at four of the five tables sat young people, alone or in pairs, silently drinking from mugs and, with one exception, absorbed in their devices. At the fifth table, next to the exception—a man of fifty in a plaid work shirt—she sat. The woman to her left was watching a movie, hot-pink buds in her ears. A desert car chase crossed the miniature screen.

  The thing that had happened—that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening—was as common as losing a tooth, as falling. It had come to define her. But was it of any consequence at all?

  On the screen, Thelma and Louise’s convertible sped past rocks, dunes.

  Time passed. She stood, removed her coat, draped it over the chairback to hold her place, nodded to her unshaven temporary neighbor, and ordered a coffee. She took out her laptop and began surfing the internet in the ways she used to, which brought her momentarily closer to the thing that had happened. Time passed. She rose to find the bathroom, not more than a storeroom out fitted with slop sink, toilet, and a wall coated in chalkboard paint on which was printed EMPLOYEES WASH HANDS.

  Back at her table, the feeling of closeness to a time before—the familiar melancholy that came from surfing the internet in the ways she used to—had receded and been replaced by the new feeling, the one she struggled to describe.

  The new feeling: a flesh-eating virus expanding its appetite beneath the skin.

  Or, the new feeling: a helixed grating, eternal return.

  Thelma: “Something has crossed over in me. I can’t go back.”

  She checked the headlines. She read about a political prisoner in Cuba who had died at the end of a months-long hunger strike protesting a twenty-year sentence for an alleged infraction the details of which were hidden behind the Times’s paywall. She signed into her email, scrolled up and down her in-box, signed out.

  She put on her coat, then thought better about leaving without revisiting the makeshift bathroom. When she returned, her
neighbor was nodding over his mug; her laptop, which she’d left shut on her table, was gone.

  Her reaction to sudden misfortune was programmatic: dis belief, followed by outrage, followed by self-abnegation. But unlike the stages of grief, which are said to progress toward acceptance, her pattern instead folded back on itself: disbelief, outrage, self-abnegation, outrage over the self-abnegation, disbelief at the outrage over the self-abnegation, etc.

  She approached the counter and said something to the effect of My laptop’s gone, did you see anything? The barista, staring at a phone through clear plastic–rim glasses, said something about Angelopoulos (which she pronounced with a hard “g”) having been run down by a motorcycle; this comment was directed over the barista’s shoulder, presumably to someone in the shallow, semi-hidden kitchen.

  She felt a shift in her guts—subcutaneous creature—at the transition from disbelief to outrage. She repeated something about the laptop while pointing to her table, which she now saw was hidden by the tall back of her vacant chair. The café had become crowded, raucous: 3:35. School was out. A swarm of tweens and teens.

  The barista winced in an approximation of sympathy and said something about a police station, gesturing around the corner to the right. Her pale arm was tattooed with a diagram of some kind of electronic circuit; at one edge of the circuit was a badly covered heart.

  Nodding to the barista, she gathered her things and left, pausing for two teens to finish fake-wrestling between her body and the door.

  She knew exactly how it would go. She would walk down Fourth Avenue toward Flatbush, past the silent army of men wiping down suvs at the Golden Touch; past PL$ Check Cashing, empty as usual; past the tiny Oaxacan taco place and the overpriced organic bodega, replaying the last half hour in her head. She would berate herself in all the usual ways—over the problem of her relationship to techno-convenience and capitalism, her problem with focus, with priorities, with time. The wind would lacerate through her too-thin coat. It would feel good.

  Eventually she would turn up Bergen Street, quieter and comparatively sheltered from the wind, and she would have sunk into the abandon of self-abnegation, which would allow her to notice things of beauty but always despite herself, so that the striped awnings of the corner deli would be beautiful despite herself, the sound of conversation caught through an opening door would be beautiful despite herself, and despite herself she would notice how her body moved the way she wanted it to, how she was neither obese nor undernourished, how she was breathing on her own and not with some machine or the help of an inhaler, how she was more autonomous than most and still not halfway to death (according to statistics, and what else could she go by?), and how despite herself there was something good, something awful and good about being alive.

  By the time she crossed Underhill she would be thinking about her lover, hoping he’d be home when she arrived at his door, knowing that she would enter the apartment and look for him in whatever corner he was hiding, reading, a dark t-shirt draped over his arced back, smoking; and that she would take his cigarette from his hand and extinguish it, then remove his shirt and kneel clumsily beside him, lean around his chest while he unbuckled his belt; that she would tug down his jeans and that despite herself, she would feel a generosity toward this man, toward his beauty and the beauty of all of his parts—of the Texas-shaped birthmark next to his navel and the pink light from the window illuminating Texas—and that after taking in all of this various beauty she would take certain of his parts into her mouth, and that this act would eclipse the events of the afternoon, the lingering response to the thing that had happened and the acute response to the theft by some kid of her laptop; that it would eclipse her feeling of specific culpability for these things and of vague culpability for the other things (the Cuban prisoner, the Tampa Bay gunman and the dead Greek auteur); that there would then be nothing left but the parts and their beauty and the pink light and its beauty and the awful and good sound of her lover’s breathing and then, for a moment, not.

  After he’d gotten up to shower, she would take her Doc Johnson Pocket Rocket from her bag, turn it on and press it against the crotch of her jeans, close her eyes, and imagine a room full of tattooed baristas and fake-wrestling teenagers, none of them paying any attention to her at all.

  Halfway down the block of her lover’s apartment, she was reaching into her bag to feel for her keys. She pulled them out and held them in her fist like a weapon while the top edges of the canvas book bag, too empty with the laptop gone, flapped in the wind.

  Her name is Eleanor. Did you think she didn’t have a name?

  OR DO I MEAN that it had come to create her? Things don’t necessarily happen in order.

  By the time the critic offered to read my manuscript, our interactions had progressed from a logistical email exchange about a photo shoot at his apartment for the magazine where I work to a late-night three-hour session at a bar, followed by a volley of text messages in which logistics played no part. Since he has a reputation for being careful with his time and, I believed, would not ask twice (once in person while admittedly drunk on whiskey, but then again in a clear-eyed morning email) to look at something unless he meant it, I sent him the file.

  While waiting to hear back, I couldn’t work on the book. I turned to other, mostly mundane, commitments I’d been neglecting, my process of revision reduced to a sequence of emails (subject: novel) typed to myself from work or on my phone while walking.

  I typed, “the erotics of conversation”—which autocorrected to “the erotica of conversation”—and determined this belonged in the scene between Eleanor and the Frenchman in part 3.

  I typed, “this is about numbness not about toys / no toys.”

  I typed, “the continuity of identity after a rupture,” which was a direct quote from the critic’s initial response, at the bar, to my attempt to describe my book’s “plot.” I left the notes in my in-box where they were quickly buried beneath incoming requests and reminders of things owed.

  There was a backstory to my interest in the critic, but only I knew it. His recent high dive from theory into practice had resulted in a Caméra d’Or–winning film, Audience, for which he’d spun five minutes of Hi8 footage from a youthful encounter with Samuel Beckett on his deathbed into an extended meditation on theater, failure, and the anxiety of influence. Though he was raised mostly in England he was an Irish national; the win was a first for that country, the attention copious and laudatory. In an interview for T Magazine, below a photo of him dressed in Lagerfeld at the White Horse Tavern, the critic was quoted saying the film had “made itself,” a claim I thought crumbled under scrutiny. His film was built like a Lego tower—wild but sturdy, its connections airtight. The pressure points, he explained to me over our first drink together, came not from his telling of the encounter itself but from the way the film troubles the gap between what’s desired and what’s delivered in a story, a troubling he termed—dramatically—the wreck.

  Some of this phrasing was familiar to me. Nearly twenty years earlier, when he was a graduate student and I a part-time undergrad, I had taken his survey course in twentieth-century drama theory, “Artaud, Beckett, Brecht.” I was diligent. I wrote in my notebook: pressure. I wrote delivered ≤ wreck. I never raised my hand.

  Now, the critic’s comments on my still-fragile manuscript—both in person at the first bar and in subsequent bars and also in the margins of the document itself—would call for greater and more specified points of pressure; “pressure” became the paradigm of the radiating diagram I composed over the course of an afternoon, after two pots of coffee, on a sheet of fresh graph paper when beginning the new revision. “Pressure” was represented by arrows between two or more terms circled with ballpoint pen.

  I wasn’t interested in replicating the critic’s formula on the page. But I knew that my novel—if that’s what it was—needed help. It had begun to seem like a sequence of nested clauses, an interminable sentence requiring too many readings
to locate the verb. The task of the revision, which I hoped would be my last, was to remedy this defect without bending, submissively, to the critic’s significant will.

  In place of Legos, I imagined a Jenga tower, one move before collapse.

  Or: one move before the expectation of collapse.

  HER LOVER, TOO, has a name. It’s Abraham.

  They sat against the southwest-facing wall of Abraham’s corner apartment, sharing a smoke. He wore a beige towel wrapped around his waist; the skin on his shoulders and chest was still moist, like condensation on a glass. Eleanor’s boots and sweater lay beside her on the floor. The radiator clucked, emitting an unnecessary amount of heat. The sun was gone, the sky a glowing field partitioned by buildings.

  “Skybluepink,” murmured Eleanor.

  “Huh?” Abraham took a drag.

  She was deep in self-abnegation now. She let it fill her while the cigarette was extinguished, another rolled and lit.

  “Did you hear about Angelopoulos?” Eleanor asked.

  “Who?”

  “Remember the movie with Lenin’s head floating down the river?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He was hit by a motorcycle in Athens.”

  In clement weather, Abraham rode a motorcycle.

  “Was he riding?”

  “Walking.”

  “Oh.”

  Abraham got up, stretched his arms over his head, his dance training evident in their form. Winter had turned his olive skin wan. The towel fell from his waist and he bent to retrieve it from the parquet floor.

  “Did he die?”

  Eleanor nodded.

  He pulled the towel back around himself, tucked in the ends. A string dangled from the bottom edge where the terry cloth had frayed.