Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  It was the final “alas” that Eleanor could not understand, and she tried to reproduce an image of the student whose name was at the top of the paper but no face came to mind, and only when she checked her attendance roster did she confirm that this student, who had written a paper twice as long as the five-page minimum, a paper full of ideas—chaotically expressed but ingeniously developed—had attended her fifteen-week class exactly once.

  She recalled a past class, years earlier, in which she had also assigned Woman at Point Zero, and one of her students had written a critical analysis of empathy in the relationship between the narrator and the imprisoned protagonist, Firdaus, that made her weep.

  Maybe fiction is a cultural background, she thought as she finished her peanut butter sandwich. What do I know?

  Maybe I should dig a hole, she thought as she got up, crumpled the napkin she’d wrapped her sandwich in and, not finding a garbage can nearby, tucked it in her bag. Alas.

  ELEANOR KNEW OF the artist and of some of her previous performances: the one in which she carved a pentagram into her abdomen which she whipped until it bled, and the one in which she and her lover walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China toward each other, for three months, only to meet in the middle and break up. Eleanor, conscious that she was in danger of losing herself completely to the intensified repercussions of thing-prime as brought on by the vicissitudes of thing #2, had decided to take a break from all of it to see the artist’s new show, the one everyone was talking about, that was being advertised on the sides of buses and on posters in subway cars. She took one of those subway cars, was nearly felled by tourists stopping short on the escalator, and stepped into the bright and crowded streets. There was a line for the exhibit and Eleanor joined it, taking her place behind a group of three young bored-looking women in pastel clogs and an elderly man with watery azure eyes.

  She had friends who hated the artist and friends who were obsessed with her; one friend, who shared with the artist both her national provenance and a childhood similarly devoid of love, was transformed so much by the experience of looking into her eyes that for the last two months she’d been wandering from state to state, deepening her already substantial credit card debt to stage performances that tried her physical and emotional limits. In one, she erected a twig teepee near the eighteenth hole of a five-star golf course in Montana—her absentee father had been a semi-pro golfer—and spent a freezing night there, braving skunks and the shadow of the Unabomber, only to wake to a confrontation with security guards that resulted in her returning home with swaths of black and blue on her wrists and a contusion on her right leg.

  Eleanor squinted at her phone, on which she’d called up the museum’s website, and read [“re-performance,” “retrospective,” “audience participation,” “1946,” “opening hours”].

  She searched the title of the exhibition and found a series of blogs devoted to it. She read [“life-changing,” “pretentious,” “cried and cried”].

  Time passed. Eleanor crept toward the head of the line.

  Time passed. The group that contained Eleanor was let into the museum and flowed as one past the exhibits and to the gallery where the artist was present, and where the artwork—herself, seated at a table—was on display. The line of people waiting to sit across from the artist was long, but it was different from the line outside, in that most of the people in it were sitting rather than standing, and whereas outside the people had no single thing to look at, their attention divided between the streets of the city and each other, inside they had a singular thing to watch: the artist and her performance.

  Eleanor watched a man approach the artist and sit. The artist lifted her eyes and held the man’s gaze. The man had a thick black mustache, not unlike the lothario cop’s, though he was skinnier and he looked, Eleanor caught herself thinking, more soulful. He sat for five minutes, wept, and left.

  She watched a young woman approach the artist. The young woman, who was wearing a summery dress, who could have been one of Eleanor’s students but wasn’t, did not sit down right away as had the mustachioed man but remained standing in front of the artist, then reached down and grabbed the hemline of her dress, pulling it over her head to reveal her naked body, a pale and thin, young body, which was seized immediately by two large security guards who appeared from nowhere, whisking it—the body—away from the artist, who had lowered her head already and closed her eyes, the gesture she’d come to make, not impolitely, when gathering herself between encounters.

  Elsewhere in the exhibit, a naked woman hung from a peg on the wall as if from a bicycle seat. Elsewhere in the exhibit, a naked woman lay beneath a human skeleton, in the missionary position. Elsewhere in the exhibit a man and a woman, and then a man and a man, and then a woman and a woman stood facing each other on opposite sides of a narrow doorway, naked, forcing museum visitors, even the slimmest among them, to choose one of the bodies to touch with their front side, and another with their backside, as they squeezed through the narrow opening.

  Eleanor did not want to take off her dress, though it was warm in the room, which looked more like a film set—or what Eleanor imagined a film set to look like—than like an exhibition space or even a performance space, and she concluded that the lights that were making the space look like a film set were also the cause of the warmth, though not the cause of the young woman’s desire to make herself naked in front of the artist. The young woman was now standing not far from where Eleanor sat and was being interviewed by a man with a large video camera, a professional with a fuzzy microphone and an assistant, and she, the woman, was weeping and gesticulating and explaining that she didn’t mean any disrespect but wanted only to make herself as vulnerable in front of the artist as the artist was claiming to be in front of her. She only wanted to take the artist at her word.

  Eleanor took out her pen and wrote on her palm: relational aesthetics book.

  She put away her pen. She watched.

  She took out her pen and wrote on her wrist: milk granola tampons.

  She did not get the opportunity to sit in front of the artist and gaze into her eyes. She wasn’t far from the front of the line, but the person three spots ahead of her had taken seventy-six minutes, and the person two spots ahead of her had taken forty-three minutes, and the person just ahead of her had sat down for ten minutes and then was escorted out, along with Eleanor and everybody else except the artist herself, by a guard who intoned somberly that the museum was closing and they were welcome to come back tomorrow.

  Eleanor would not come back tomorrow. She did not know what she thought of the artist and her project. She disliked the vitriol some directed at her, but she couldn’t seem to come wholly to the artist’s defense, even in the privacy of her mind. She thought of the well-known artists about whom she had changed or solidified her opinion after meeting one of their assistants and finding out how often they yelled and how much they paid.

  She looked again at the middle-aged woman who had been sitting for seven hours locking eyes with strangers, a few friends and acquaintances surely among them. The artist seemed sad, and Eleanor wondered what the thing was that had happened to her, that she had caused or not-caused or that was beyond her control, and as she kept looking at the artist over her shoulder, even as she was being ushered out of the gallery with the other museum goers who either had or had not been given the chance to lock eyes with the artist, Eleanor felt her life lift a few millimeters away from her skin, as if attracted by a magnetic field suddenly encircling only her and the artist; and the vibrating feeling of her life as it hovered near her skin gave her a sensation of nearness to the artist about whose work she was ambivalent, so that with each step of increasing distance she felt closer to the artist and farther from her ambivalence, as if the artist was both the source of and solution to that ambivalence—until the door to the exhibition hall closed behind her, and without any transition the field was dissolved and her life fell back into her skin and her ambivalence
returned and she no longer felt close to the artist but very far away.

  DAYLIGHT SAVINGS BEGAN; night fell later. People who had spent months beneath wool hats and scarves got haircuts, went shopping for clothes in bright colors and pale neutrals—especially pale neutrals since the shows that year were full of beige, ecru, and taupe, a fact she knew only because a talkative friend’s livelihood depended on it. Eleanor too went shopping one day and bought a silk-blend dress—in taupe—which she would not be able to wear until the weather warmed another fifteen degrees, but which she kept on a hanger slung over a nail in the door to her room, the tag from the sample sale still attached.

  She went back to her books. She read Two Serious Ladies and The Descent of Alette. She read parts of Reader’s Block and of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. She read almost all of Wittgenstein’s Nephew and started Rameau’s Nephew again. She thought about projects and their abandonment. Her missing paragraphs nagged. Time passed.

  She had received no reply from Danny K.M. The closer she got to “letting go” of thing #2, the more forcefully the thing that had happened before returned. When she tried on the dress in a shared dressing room beside strangers, it was there. When she walked in slow motion from her room to the bathroom, where the shower provided barely a trickle of warm water in the afternoons, it was there. When she rode the subway and regarded the faces across from her, she thought she saw evidence in each of them of a thing that had happened, that they had caused or not-caused and that could come back to crush them; she got caught staring, trying to imagine what the thing, in each case, might be.

  Often she saw, superimposed on one of the strangers’ faces, an image from a Cassavetes film—she couldn’t remember which one—in which a woman stares at her reflection, drunk, her made-up face maligned by tears, wailing from some unidentified pain unknowable even to her. (What she didn’t realize, but you may, is that she was confusing scenes and cineastes, that she had conflated the shot of the streaked makeup on the wailing woman from the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s with one of any number of scenes in Cassavetes’s films—for instance, the dressing-room scene from Opening Night in which Gena Rowlands’s aging actress, Myrtle, witnesses her fragmentation in an array of mirrors.)

  And what can be said about Abraham? Eleanor had very little to say about Abraham. During this time, when she was back at work and preoccupied (in a last-ditch effort to increase her effectiveness) with helping her students revise their papers and prepare their final portfolios, she saw her lover only every third or fourth night.

  She was aware of what might look like a lack of intimacy in their proceedings. When they fucked they didn’t look at each other, they didn’t talk: there was what you might call an instrumentality to the thing. But she rejected the theory—put forth by one of her male friends with whom she occasionally discussed her relationship—that her reliance on toys and props and nonmutual fantasy play was itself indicative of a suboptimal level of intimacy. She and her lover were not perfectly matched, she was the first to admit. He couldn’t read her mind, and she didn’t want to instruct; often he did the right thing at the wrong time. But neither did she recognize a simple opposition between (to use the words of her theorizing friend) technology and authenticity. Even when pressed, she couldn’t come up with meaningful definitions for either term, the first becoming so broad it seemed to encompass almost everything, and the second so narrow it disappeared under the vaguest pressure. Whereas when Eleanor imagined superimposing the image of the distraught woman—not exactly an image, but a complex pastiche—onto the faces of strangers, she felt certain that she was extending something real to them, which meant only something living, as authentic or inauthentic as flesh-to-flesh contact, as placing her hands on theirs.

  She read The Left-Handed Woman. She read Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, which she immediately read again. She read Creature and The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi. She read the first three chapters of Dawn. She fell asleep, content, her cheek resting on the page.

  What is the essence of really good sex? she read on her phone at the café when she should have been grading.

  •Really good sex has no guilt or shame coming with it.

  •Really good sex is not just about relief of tension or anxiety, but entails positive emotions such as love and emotional intimacy.

  •Really good sex arouses feelings that last much longer than the span of the moment. The afterglow can last for hours or days.

  •Really good sex is experienced at a much deeper level than sex that is casual. It has meaning because it is connected to important values.

  •Really good sex is mutually enjoyable, it is not a one-way street. Each partner takes a selfish pleasure in both getting and receiving.

  She wondered if “getting” was a typo for “giving” or a Freudian slip, and then she wondered if the authors or algorithms responsible for articles like these were vulnerable to Freudian slips, and then she put down her phone.

  Time passed. Eleanor taught, walked, visited the library. She found a first edition of Maud Martha on the reference shelf and read it in an afternoon. One morning, she received a surprise package: a box of unsold sale items from an ex-roommate who’d moved to San Francisco to work at Good Vibrations.

  Time passed.

  Abraham [goggles, measuring tape, SKILSAW]

  They had sex using the Intima Silk Blindfold and the black ostrich feather.

  Time passed. Eleanor taught, walked, sat in the park with a friend.

  Abraham [hammer drill, router, glue]

  They had sex using the Sidekick Silicone Anal Plug and the Nipple Teasers Vibrating Nipple Clamps. Eleanor’s thoughts when she came flashed to Danny K.M.

  Time passed. Eleanor taught, walked, read the news on the internet. She read about protesters in Syria and upheaval in Athens.

  Abraham [cigarette, flirting, goggles]

  They had sex using the Bound to Please Neoprene Restraints and the Naughty and Nice Plush Paddle. With Velcro straps holding her ankles and wrists to the bed, Eleanor took the pleasure of both getting and receiving; the afterglow lasted for hours, lasted for days.

  “Me and my husband didn’t get a date night very often,” said the wife of the victim of the Tampa Bay shooting to reporters. “It’s just so hard and so unbearable.”

  When all the toys had been used in most of their permutations, Eleanor and Abraham sat down.

  Abraham said something to the effect of I need some space.

  Eleanor responded.

  Abraham said something to the effect of I have a lot to do to get ready for my trip—he had been planning a month-long motor cycle trip along the Trans-Labrador Highway in Canada, an adventure that apparently required a great deal of preparation, mostly by sitting in front of a computer ordering specialty gear—and I don’t want to feel the pressure of being a good boyfriend.

  These were not the actual words he used, you understand.

  Eleanor stared.

  Abraham reassured her to the tune of I don’t want us to stop seeing each other completely.

  The next day, she collected her students’ portfolios. One student, a woman Eleanor’s age who had three children and was trying to complete an abandoned BA, had brought her a homemade brownie. She ate the brownie while walking down the fluorescent corridor to the faculty mailboxes to pick up her final paycheck for the semester. Then she walked two blocks with her head down, counting the number of broken bottles in the gutter—eleven—to the student union store where she bought, on credit, from an aloof former student, a refurbished laptop with a carrying case. Then she walked three miles through the dissolving light to the adjacent part of the borough, where she unpacked her new computer in her brown box of a room.

  I WAS BEGINNING to wonder what was really going on with the critic. He was writing often now, at least four or five times each day, and the messages were becoming less and less legible: noisier, as if complicated by static. I responded to his story about
Sasha with an equally revealing if less dramatic childhood tale of my own—hoping this would restore an equilibrium to our friendship—and he continued to ask for and comment on pages of my novel as I made progress on its revision. I had become convinced he would never remember me from that long-ago class unless I prompted him (and I seemed to enjoy not doing so); I’d become convinced, too, that his interest in reading my text so closely was, though not completely scrutable, genuine. But I noticed that his increased attentiveness—which I admit kept me company as I got used to watching Kat come and go, mostly go, with her suddenly numerous young friends—was accompanied by an increased evasiveness. I asked him directly more than once to update me about Laurance and whether he’d opted to take the gene test: no reply. I sent a one-line email: “Have you talked to your mother?” and he responded by texting me a picture of himself on Pusher Street in Christiania, where he had finally convinced his Danish distributors to take him on his afternoon off.

  It was after midnight on a Sunday when I received his selfie, and I’d been working on my revision since morning. My writing had been interrupted several times already by the emails he’d sent every few hours during the day, presumably from his phone. I was incapable of ignoring the incoming messages; even when I went offline for stretches, whenever I did check my in-box, the most recent message would be from him. He seemed to write spontaneously and not to reread before sending, and what I could discern through the typos and autocorrects and missing words was that he had gotten his hands on a lot of hash, which he was smoking regularly in semihiding while being ferried from one press event to another by an assortment of interns, invariably young and handsome. He would write to me after being interviewed by journalists and talk-show hosts he described interchangeably as “perfectly nice,” “morons,” or “loons,” often providing something of the nature of the interaction—the questions were straight from the press release, the host had not seen the film, the interviewer looked like she was fourteen—but mostly he would share a detail of whatever environment he was in when he wrote, informing me in his offhandedly pedantic way of the amenities in the men’s bathroom, the specifics of Scandinavian hotel porn, the average height of the people drinking at the bar. He switched rapidly between topics within a single message: He’d seen an intriguing exhibit in Malmö by the artist-in-residence on a research vessel owned by a French fashion designer that had been ice-locked near the North Pole for the better part of a year; his description of her photograph of ice fissures lit from below led to a quote from the poet Inger Christensen that he’d encountered in a bookstore window—“I always thought reality / was something you became / when you grew up”—which led in turn to a critique of the social media activities of someone we both vaguely knew, which reminded him of everything wrong with the world today.