Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  “Happens.”

  Abraham’s relationship to death, to talking about death, was unlike Eleanor’s. Abraham talked about death as if it were something that happened every day, while Eleanor—fully knowing that it does happen every day, every second, more frequently than that—still spoke of death as if it were remarkable, imbued with import. Especially when there was something improbable about its delivery.

  “Like Barthes and the laundry truck.”

  Silence.

  “Frank O’Hara and the dune buggy.”

  “Who?”

  The lack of shared references between herself and her lover was, Eleanor mostly believed, a key ingredient of their dynamic, was what enabled their continued erotic connection amid a seeming drought of eros in the relationships of people they knew. She also interpreted certain elements of his personality—this relation to death, for instance, an embodiment of Sein-zum-Tode—as living examples of things she’d read about in the very books that distinguished her intellectual territory from his.

  She stood up, walked over to her lover, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

  “So, something happened. So someone stole my laptop, and I can’t think yet of what I might have lost.”

  She had realized immediately what she’d lost. But she wasn’t ready to think about what the loss might mean. Abraham kept his plans to meet a friend for drinks, and Eleanor stayed in to sit on his futon and watch something on his computer. There was a small stack of kung fu movies and dance documentaries she wasn’t in the mood for. She streamed Tropic Thunder and laughed until she cried. Then she put in Pina and watched the first twenty minutes, which ends with three dancers, two men and a woman, repeating a series of moves on a stage set suggestive of a café. First one of the men, in the role of director, entwines the limbs of the other two dancers and guides them through their choreography until they’ve learned it. Then he leaves them to perform.

  The woman flings herself limply into the man’s waiting arms, which extend, bent at the elbow, from his waist like a shelf. She falls: the man is pure passivity. She scrambles to her feet. They repeat the sequence dozens of times, increasing the tempo with each round. She flings, falls, regroups, tries again. She flings, falls, regroups, each attempt more frantic but no less determined than the last.

  Examining the dancers’ faces, Eleanor was struck by the difference between them. The stress of the imperative of self-restraint—not to react, not to prevent a fall—is unmistakable in the features of the man, while the expression of the woman, the one who will go home bruised, is open.

  She ejected Pina and streamed My Dinner with Andre, and then she went to sleep. Wallace Shawn lay in bed next to her, fully clothed, on top of the covers. He spoke to her as if she were Andre Gregory, as if the film had slid effortlessly from the computer screen onto Abraham’s bed.

  “And I mean, I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, or, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, still there for me to drink in the morning!” said Wallace Shawn.

  “And no cockroach or fly has died in it overnight. I mean, I’m just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there just the way I wanted it, I mean, I just can’t imagine how anybody could enjoy something else any more than that! I mean . . . I mean, obviously, if the cockroach—if there is a dead cockroach in it, well, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I’m sad.”

  Eleanor looked at Wallace Shawn when he said this, but he continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “But I mean, I just don’t think I feel the need for anything more than all this.”

  “But Mr. Shawn,” she said after pausing to work up the nerve, “you haven’t answered my question. My question is not about disappointment per se. My question is not about sadness. My question—”

  Wallace Shawn turned to face Eleanor with a look of unadulterated tenderness. She began to whisper:

  “When a person doesn’t catch another person but it’s a planned not-catching, it’s a choreographed not-catching, and the not-caught person gets bruised as a result, how are we supposed to feel? Have you followed the discourse on sadomasochism since the ’80s, since we were told we can’t play with power, that nobody can? I’m confused about power, Wally—can I call you Wally? I’m confused about roles and the edges of roles. My question is not about the pleasure of the coffee or the disappointment of the cockroach. My question”—and here her whisper became nearly inaudible—“is about the bruise—”

  In the morning, Wallace Shawn was gone. Eleanor was on her side, one wrist hanging off the bed. Abraham lay behind her, the fronts of his knees tucked into the backs of hers, his arm around her torso as if to hold her up.

  “THERE’S SOMETHING ON MY MIND that I need to tell somebody. I don’t think I can talk to anyone who’s already invested in my life. Can I tell you this thing?” The critic’s eyes shone as we started in on drink number four.

  He has a name—it’s Aidan—but he was still the critic to me.

  We had met in broad daylight, though it was overcast, to discuss the comments he’d sent about my manuscript, first taking in an exhibit at a museum downtown, a retrospective of a performance artist in whom we were both only mildly interested except for some of his early works, which were underrepresented in the show. The bar we’d wandered into was a neighborhood fixture, virtually unchanged since the 1990s, with smoke-stained walls and plastic covers on its brocade couches and chairs; the critic and I sat across from each other, a tabletop Ms. Pac-Man between us. He took off his glasses—his face transformed, I had to adjust—and set them on the game’s screen. We drank three whiskeys each in quick succession, attempting small talk until the alcohol took effect.

  By the time the conversation turned to my book, the first question he had was about the function of Eleanor’s lover in the story. It was clear from the start that the critic was under the assumption—and perhaps this should not have surprised me; he’d just made a personal film—that in essential ways I was Eleanor and Eleanor was me. He had been suspicious, in our first conversation before I’d sent him my draft, even of the fact that I’d chosen to write in the third person, but then—in the manner of people who think like the critic—he theorized the choice by suggesting that a character who’s lost her data has lost her “I.” Still, he was bothered by a sense that the lover was tossed in out of some obligation to my “real life”—about which, to be clear, he knew nothing.

  (I had experimented, after reading his comments, with removing the lover completely, which entailed among other things losing several scenes in which sex acts were described. But my decision to include these in the first place was made deliberately, in response to a sense—which I didn’t share with the critic now, too embarrassed to bring it up in person while still absorbing his candid marginal responses to my portrayal of said acts—that depictions of sex and sexual dynamics in novels, especially heterodynamics, especially in novels by women, tend to invite a particular kind of reductive critique, or else sensationalism when such dynamics happen to be central to a book. For reasons that remained obscure to me, I had an urge to face this vulnerability—to some extent, at least—rather than defend against it by writing a novel in which nobody fucks.)

  When speaking of literature, even of my flawed draft, the critic was one of those men—every example that comes to mind is a man—who speak only in subordinated sentences, developed theories: he would part his lips (his accent underscored the effect) and whatever insight emerged was of an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and rehearsal before a mirror.

  But on other subjects, he was capable of a frankness and spontaneity that saved our conversation from becoming a one-sided drill. We talked about our diagnosed and undiagnosed disorders and about a shared obsession with psychological self-tests—
I feel sad / I feel discouraged about the future / All of the time / Good part of the time—some of which I’d been both imitating and incorporating wholesale into my writing, though I was uncertain about how much of that material to let stand in the book because of what seemed to have become a minor literary zeitgeist. We sparred tentatively about politics and gossiped freely about the few people we knew in common, using the act of gossiping less for its prurient pleasures than for the pleasure of the alliance it establishes between participants.

  My concern about the zeitgeist embarrassed me, and I returned to the subject to confess this to the critic. When he asked why, I cited my book’s many unoriginal traits: its episodic structure, its banal story line tracing the alienation of the individual in late capitalism, and more. But what really embarrassed me was that I imagined a readership at all.

  The music the bartender was playing was, like the décor, a fossil from when the bar was new and popular, when I went there frequently at the end of long nights waitressing and drinking, to drink more. Now, decades later, I felt no different; it was as if I were still inside my twenty-three-year-old body, as if I were listening with its ears to the caterwauling of Kristin Hersh and Mudhoney, looking with its eyes at the bartender’s faded band t-shirt and slack posture; as if I were feeling in its chest the bliss of getting drunk in good company, that gradual dissolving of boundaries between the body and its setting. The critic, who had turned around to watch the bartender pop open a row of cans of Genesee, said something about how Meyerhold would take his actors to study the gestures of factory workers, and at that moment all of the sensory data—the feeling of the plastic covering on the chair cushion beneath me; the stillness of my slouched position, which belied the attention I was paying to the critic’s every word; the awareness of an unskilled pool game playing out in the darkened back of the bar and of the weeknight procession past the windows behind me—became incoherent, scrambled, as if pointing in two directions at once. As this eruption of feeling tempered by thought was occurring, I stared weakly at the critic—it was the longest moment of silence we’d shared—and although he couldn’t know the palimpsestic time warp I was in, he stared back with an attention that felt like company, and it was at that moment that our acquaintance began to feel something like friendship.

  When he returned from the bar with the fourth round of whiskeys, the critic’s demeanor had changed. He brought his hands together on the Ms. Pac-Man screen and began to rub his left fingers, one by one, with his right thumb. “Of course you can tell me,” I said in response to his unexpected request. “You can tell me anything you want, because we are new friends and this is what new friends can do for each other.” I don’t know why I said that.

  He stopped rubbing to sip from his glass.

  “My dentist’s daughter—my dentist and I are friendly, I’ve been seeing him for years—goes to an elite private school. And for this year’s science fair, she wanted to take advantage of the art department’s new 3-D printer. She devised a project”—he stopped to extract his scarf from under his coat on the chairback and drape it over his shoulders, as if whatever he was about to say would precipitate a drop in temperature in the room—“a project that has to do with genetic codes, sequencing. She’s adopted and wanted to know more about her biological identity, so she got her code read at one of those online genome-mapping sites. They aren’t allowed to interpret health-related results anymore, so she resorted to probability: she researched the diseases with the greatest impact on mortality in the parts of the world that showed up significantly in her code—a broad spread, from East Asia to southern Africa—then crunched the statistics and made an annotated model of the death data, as she called it, using the 3-D printer. This girl is in middle school, mind you.”

  He took a sip from his whiskey. Plastic squeaked as I shifted position in my chair. “She must be—”

  He raised a finger to silence my interjection.

  “So while I’m in the chair waiting for the novocaine to take effect, she’s in the exam room distracting me with this description of her entry—which would go on to win first prize, of course—and when I got home that night, in a fever of sorts, I ordered one of the test kits myself. What I knew, but she didn’t, was that although the company that provides the results won’t fully interpret them because of liability, it’s easy enough to find another company that will.”

  He stopped short and turned his head slightly to the left, like someone looking for something he doesn’t expect to find. The indentation of a closed-up piercing was just visible on his earlobe. In the days of “Artaud, Beckett, Brecht” I’d thought he looked like Artaud (suspecting even that he cultivated the resemblance), but now I saw Wittgenstein as he was once shot in half-profile, with a far gaze, set jaw, and open-collared shirt just like the one the critic now wore beneath his scarf. I tried to figure out what was required of me in my capacity as new friend, but before I could say anything, he turned to face me and went on.

  “That was weeks ago. The test came, but I haven’t sent it in. I have—”

  The music cut out and he looked momentarily confused. “I haven’t been able to sleep. Two days ago I asked Laurance”—Laurance was the name of the critic’s girlfriend, about whom I knew exactly what had been revealed in my magazine’s fluff piece, which wasn’t much—“to marry me, and she said she would love to if it weren’t for the ice cube in my heart.”

  I tried not to laugh; his face was ash.

  “She’s right, you know. And I got to wondering if maybe I really should do the test, if it might answer certain . . . questions, or a certain question . . . that has lingered.”

  At this point he set his head down on Ms. Pac-Man and left it there for a full minute at least.

  “He used to do that, you know,” he said after lifting it. The Breeders came on: “Cannonball.”

  “Who did?”

  “Beckett. Just bow out for a moment. Not impolitely, according to reports.”

  I looked at him.

  “So what is it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The . . . question?” I couldn’t tell which one of us was being thick.

  “Oh.” He upended his glass and drained it. “Just the usual. Whether my grandfather was also my father.”

  There was nothing, at this point, that I could think to say, so I sat in silence, wearing what I hoped was an alert and kind expression as the critic told me how his mother had always refused to talk about her estranged father; how his dad’s early death, a probable suicide, was never discussed or explained; how he himself had always suffered from hormone imbalance and a compromised immune system, two known risks of inbreeding (a word he pronounced with scare quotes). “Could you talk to your mother . . .?” I asked tentatively. His head went down on the table again.

  “What I don’t know,” he said when he raised it, “is whether it’s kinder, whether it is righter”—here he coughed, suddenly shy—“to try to find out before Laurance makes her decision, or if . . .” His dilemma didn’t seem to have a second branch, but I nodded encouragingly in case one would manifest. It didn’t.

  We sat in silence as I finished my drink. I felt unable or unwilling to offer advice, my instincts tempered by my clouded sense of his confession—his disclosure, presented as confession. The bar was empty now except for us and the pool players, and in the wake of the critic’s narrative this lack of company, along with the fact that the music had stopped again, created an aura of intimacy for which we were unprepared. He was still doing the thing with his fingers, methodically rubbing one after the other—pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb—his palm turned to the ceiling. As soon as he finished with one hand he switched to the other: thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky. I wanted to place my hands on his, to make a gesture that might transmit the full weight of my sympathy. But our friendship was new, the question of physical contact unresolved.

  He was going to be gone for three weeks on tour overseas—his film was appearing in festivals in
several Scandinavian countries—and before parting, we stood outside the bar as it began to drizzle and waited for a smoker to come out. I bummed an American Spirit and we smoked it together, pressed against the building for shelter, and watched cars pass by on the shimmering asphalt. Without preface and without shifting his gaze from the street, the critic raised his free hand to my throat and palpated roughly on both sides of my esophagus.

  “The thyroid gland is a butterfly-shaped organ composed of two wings connected by the isthmus,” he said in the voice of a BBC announcer, then dropped his hand and flicked the cigarette to the curb.

  On his way home he texted me a video of an inflated giraffe levitating outside a storefront, illuminated by streetlights, bowing gently in the rain.

  PERHAPS IT WASN’T the case that she had caused the thing that had happened, or even that she’d allowed it. Perhaps the thing—the first thing, that is, which had come to define her, which was equal parts a happening and a not-happening—would have happened or not-happened no matter what she had done or said or felt, no matter how she had interpreted the words and events and emotions surrounding it.

  Perhaps it was, as people sometimes say, “beyond her control.”

  She thought about control. That led her to think about religion, which led her to think about progress.

  The previous morning, she’d picked up a book from Abraham’s bathroom shelf while she was sitting on the toilet, a collection of essays—The Idea of Progress Since the Renaissance—that she’d bought for a dollar at the neighborhood used bookstore. The opening chapter’s thesis—as far as she could tell from the pages she’d skimmed before Abraham’s voice called her back to the morning, the coffee, the grapefruit and toast—was that Christianity and progress are inextricably entwined in the story of Western thought. This made sense to Eleanor; she was not a Christian, and she found the notion of progress alien. (She was less alienated by the notion of progression, though it too was not above suspicion. There were so many instances in which it wasn’t clear if one thing preceded another or followed it, and whether the distinction mattered.)