Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  In the photo, only about two-thirds of his face was visible in the frame; he was evidently holding his phone at arm’s length to provide a view of the market behind him, identifiable not only by the signage and general vibe of the crowd but by some extravisual quality that came across through the screen, improbably, as smell.

  I typed something to the effect of You look happy there; I wish I could see all the places you’re seeing, to which he replied something to the effect of The thing about the smorgasbord is there’s only the illusion of choice. I typed something to the effect of Sometimes your comments on my pages are overbearing, though I’m grateful for them, to which he replied with a picture of a dog with three legs and pink-dyed fur. Our conversation continued in this way until a feeling I’d been slowly identifying over the previous weeks began to solidify into an image of myself as a prop, an actual prop—a bottle of fake whiskey, or a plastic gun—in the critic’s drama of transformation, a drama which (though I didn’t doubt its authenticity) was beginning to read as farce. My role as prop, moreover, was usurping my role as significant new friend—itself a part I’d been cast in, not exactly against my will but also not as a result of it, on the day he chose to let me in on his family secret—and when I formulated this thought to myself I typed something to the effect of I feel sick, to which he replied It’s starting to rain. Finally, I realized the only way I could cleave some air between my thoughts and the anxious influence of the critic would be by deliberately, and not without difficulty, falling silent for a while.

  IN ONE AFTERNOON Eleanor picked up and discarded The Uprising, Gunslinger II, The Wisdom of Sustainability, and Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta. She was propped up on her bed, the door to her room closed against the clutter of her absent housemates, the window swung open to a cloudless day. It was the first of June. She had at last put on the taupe dress, though she had no plans to go out, and was wearing it still, its white cardboard tag dangling from a sleeve. A pile of books took up half of her double bed, the space of a human being.

  This was how she’d spent the days since she collected her final paycheck and cashed it, and since Abraham asked, not in these words but effectively, for some space. She read the news on the internet, maxing out her free page views on the corporate sites, maxing out her tolerance of user-generated content on the far-left and far-right blogs she felt compelled to read in tandem, as if doing so would somehow grant her a more complete picture of the world as it really was. She read opinions on both sides of the gun debate, the immigration debate, the copyright debate, the Indian casino debate, the domestic drone debate. She was unable to muster any of the outrage she expected to feel at the opinions she read, leaning instead toward the seductive embrace of sleep.

  She had lately found herself envisioning a life in which the thing that had happened had not happened at all, a parallel life unfolding next to the one she was living, next to it but not visible from it, a coyote in the shadows beside the road. She would awaken from a nap and feel uncertain which life she was in, the one she knew or the one she envisioned, and the two would toggle back and forth for a time, like when she used to wake up in bed next to one body and for a few seconds believe it belonged to someone else.

  She wept often and openly at her imaginings, while knowing that any coherent theory of parallel lives would not support such acute grieving, that the Twin Earth thought experiment as proposed by Hilary Putnam in a book she’d pulled recently from her pile called The Meaning of “Meaning” was instead concerned with the question of reference, of whether a twin-Eleanor to whom something different but identically affecting had happened—something that left an imprint on her mental and emotional state that was identical to the imprint left by the thing that had happened on Eleanor herself, identical even on the molecular level—whether that twin-Eleanor, when she referred to the thing that had happened, could be said to be referring to the selfsame thing to which Eleanor, so often, if only to herself, and especially during the days she was now spending alone in her room, referred.

  The answer, for Putnam, was no. Eleanor and twin-Eleanor, though they might be having virtually, even molecularly indistinguishable experiences, could not be said to be having those experiences about the same thing.

  Added to this was the problem that whenever Eleanor read the word “causality” she mistook it for “casualty” and found her mind populated with images of untreated wounds and detached limbs, images that were common on the front pages of the news sites that purported to tell the true and complete story of the world as it really was. The result was that whatever acute grief Eleanor felt or almost felt when her thoughts turned to the thing that had happened—whatever sense of alienated proximity or proximate alienation she had cultivated, albeit unconsciously, in relation to the thing—was never quite fully expressed, even to herself, despite the open and frequent weeping, despite the diagnosably extreme seductions of sleep. It was never fully expressed because never singularly caused: any rational person when confronted with the spate of school shootings, murderous cops and their defenders, and remote-controlled bombings of unarmed civilians—and those were only the major headlines, and only this week—would be excused for believing that the particular referent, any day’s unique tragedy, was of little importance, if any at all.

  Between picking up and discarding books and reading the news on the internet, she would take out her Pocket Rocket. Across the canal was a red brick warehouse that had been renovated into upmarket lofts, and as she availed herself of the compact instrument’s efficiency, she would leave her window open and her curtains tied back, though it was unclear to her what, if anything, could be seen from the lofts’ windows without the aid of some sort of technology.

  On this afternoon as she sat on the bed, half-reclined and wearing her taupe silk-blend dress, wearing also a pair of transparent stockings held up by clips and a belt because of a scene she remembered or thought she did, she chose one of the loft windows—the fourth floor in the center—and positioned herself with respect to it and to her own window to occupy center frame. She also had three windows open on her new laptop: Iraq Veterans Against the War, the e-book of My Struggle: Vol. I, which everyone suddenly was reading, and the search results page for “lone survivor” + “war” + “porn.” She wasn’t reading in any of those windows now; she wasn’t reading the books piled on her bed; she was working the Rocket slowly down the front of her dress and across the tops of her stockings; she was not swinging her actual leg, but she was swinging a projection of her leg in her mind, just as she was not reading the reviews of Lone Survivor but was reviewing them in her mind; she could not actually see the inhabitant of the loft across the way—the art director or real-estate broker or whoever could afford to rent it—but she saw him nonetheless—business-suited, a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy, nose to glass, hands in pockets as he put away his phone—as a projection in her mind; and she did not catch her knee in her hand, but she saw herself catch it; and the instrument she employed expertly came around the bottom edge of her dress, and as she worked with it she thought about the subset of returning vets whose PTSD has led to impotence; she thought—against her will—about the lothario cop, his sparkly glasses and folded arms and his incomprehension; she thought about Danny K.M. and her unanswered letter to him and about his likely compromised legal status in her country of citizenship; she thought about how she might be able to help him find a job, then was ashamed at her thought and then angered by her shame; she thought about the scene she’d just read in My Struggle in which an adolescent Karl Ove discovers his sexual maturity in his pants; and she thought about Pina Bausch’s dancers embracing and falling, fighting the dead weight of their supplicant limbs; and as she was thinking these things, and as she was wielding the instrument in the manner for which it was designed, the figure in the loft—she actually saw this, you understand—threw open the warehouse window across the canal, and at that instant the sun dropped into the view from her room, causi
ng a glare to reflect off the water, and something, a rock or tennis shoe or bottle, was hurled out the loft window in her general direction, and she looked up at the thing, which meant looking up at the sun, and before she could instinctively turn away she saw the object’s indeterminate silhouette arc through the air, travel up and then down toward the polluted water, where, dropping below the bottom edge of her frame, it vanished.

  She got up and walked to the window, adjusting the waistband of her dress. A kayak floated silently down the canal. The woman in the kayak saw her watching and waved. Eleanor lifted her hand.

  2

  SUMMER

  SOME PEOPLE HAVE the experience of feeling that other people, objects, and the world around them are not real. Some people have the experience of feeling that their body does not seem to belong to them. Some people have the experience of sometimes remembering a past event so vividly that they feel as if they were reliving that event. Some people find that they sometimes sit staring off into space, thinking of nothing, and are not aware of the passage of time. Some people sometimes feel as if they are looking at the world through a fog so that people and objects appear faraway or unclear.

  She let her hand fall after waving to the kayaker, who had turned and was drifting down the canal, dispersing multicolored flotsam through the surface scum, as a barge breaks through ice.

  The image of ice reminded Eleanor of Abraham, who had left that morning for his motorcycle trip north. They’d said goodbye the night before over a hash cigarette and the TARA Rotating Rechargeable Couples’ Vibrator, and she’d returned to her room to sleep so he could spend the night packing and repacking supplies.

  Time passed. She walked and read and visited friends. Those whose work didn’t die off in summer invited her to concerts and lunch and drinks, but her paycheck had gone to rent, student loans, and the phone, and she stopped accepting invitations when she grew tired of not being able to pay. She entered a phase of exclusively remote conversation with a small subset of her friends, consisting mostly of text messages to the effect of “miss u” and “lets see eo soon, been 2 long!” These interactions seemed to satisfy the needs of all parties, as if the standard by which friendship required embodied interaction really was passé, as if it wasn’t just her friendships that were changing but the nature of friendship itself that had changed. She scanned the results of an Amazon search for books on the subject: scant offerings providing little solace with titles like The Friendship Book, The Friendship Crisis, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, &tc.

  Abraham’s departure and her own retreat from sociality simplified Eleanor’s daily life, exposing previously occupied territory that was reconquered almost immediately by the thing that had happened. In these moments its effects were undiminished; it seemed to have no half-life, was less like radium than like inflation, compounding interest, or a malignant tumor, subject not to exponential delay but to what she’d once learned in anthropology class to call “doubling time.”

  She never knew when it would come back to slay her. It could inflect equally any scene or encounter, regardless of content-relevance. On a corner near her apartment, outside the mediocre bagel shop to which she remained unaccountably loyal, for example, she ran into an acquaintance with a new baby, and the acquaintance handed her the baby, which was less than a month old, which nestled into Eleanor’s shoulder and fell promptly asleep, its hand digging into her neck; and the acquaintance said to her, Eleanor, you should be a mother.

  But Eleanor didn’t want to be a mother. She knew too many of them, and they were too much the same. The ones who weren’t the same before they were mothers became the same after. It wasn’t that they talked too much about their children; what bothered her about the mothers was something more diffuse, something—she was not conscious of this structure of feeling even as it overcame her—that reproduced an aspect of the effect of the thing that had happened. It was like the feeling she got surfing the internet the way she used to, or waking from a dream set in an alternate universe of the past. But the feeling she got when she spent too much time with the mothers, individually or severally, did not originate in her as a habit or a projection; it was a by-product of the feeling the mothers themselves gave off, most strongly but not exclusively when they compared the before to the after of the era of unconditional love they felt for their spawn.

  It was something about the certainty with which they asserted this shift. Her reaction was to the certainty itself.

  She checked email into the night, monitoring her bodily response to each click. Mostly she felt numb, except when she would reread the thread of her correspondence with Danny K.M., which spurred a flickering near her diaphragm, a jolt. She would eventually tire, then wake at dawn in her chair, her cheek on the CAPS LOCK key.

  No more security breaches had occurred. Nothing, apparently, had been done with her data. Nor had the single file she’d requested been sent, and though she considered trying to re-create the paragraphs therein—to rebuild a site for the thinking that had now been free-floating, dangerously, for weeks—she could not. Her paralysis around the paragraphs was physical too: when she thought about them, her arteries turned to ice. She formed ideas about Danny; the ideas spread like a thaw.

  One night in the middle of June, she woke to the sound of her housemate grinding metal in the living room. The sound prompted a shift in Eleanor that she experienced as a minor organ somewhere in her lower torso moving approximately one half inch to the left. She put in earplugs, took down the taupe dress, and detached the safety-pinned tag. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and removed a small envelope containing a new credit card she’d vowed not to use, picked up her phone, and called the number on the sticker to activate the account. She typed two words into her laptop, waited.

  This was not the first time she’d searched Danny K.M.’s name; it was the first thing she’d done after receiving his initial email. She’d found only one trace of him then, enough to verify a scant if convincing online presence, but little more: a question about unlocking iPhones posted to a hacking listserv. From this she did not conclude that he was a petty technocriminal, manifestly capable of stealing her laptop, but, rather, that he had told the truth about one thing at least—his familiarity with Apple products—and this act of truth-telling formed in Eleanor’s mind the very premise and promise of Danny K.M.’s character, a container for her growing collection of ideas about him.

  This time she clicked “Images” and a single photo tagged with his name appeared at the top of the screen above a mass of other photos—a fighter jet, a wasted woman in a beaded gown, two butterflies perched on a branch—proposed as close matches by Google’s unfathomable algorithm. The picture was low-res and taken in dim light, apparently on a dance floor, though closer inspection revealed its resemblance to a gym. The man tagged in the image was locked in a nontrivial maneuver with a woman in shorts and heels whose head, which led her torso in an acrobatic backward arch, was cut off by the left edge of the frame. A click on “View page” led to a blog called Kizomba Senga Adore, a fan site for a kind of music and accompanying dance style that were unfamiliar to Eleanor but which she quickly learned were variations on the Angolan folk tradition that had been taken up recently—especially kizomba, the newer iteration of the two—as forms of dirty dancing (this allusion was not Eleanor’s but the site’s) in clubs across both hemispheres.

  What we know about dirty dancing: Some time after Abraham had left but before the rest of her relationships had been reduced to the exchange of texts, Eleanor had streamed the 1987 movie on her new laptop after hearing its theme song—“[I’ve Had] The Time of My Life”—blare from the window of a passing Prius. Streaming Dirty Dancing led her to stream All That Heaven Allows, which led her to stream Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. She did not stream Far from Heaven because she had seen it not long before in the Todd Haynes retrospective at the Cinemathèque. She had thought about the relation of these films to class and race, but she had not
thought about the relation of them to her interest in Danny K.M. She had thought about how the centrality of the relationship of female aging to desire in three of the films relates to the more standard coming-of-age narrative in the fourth, but she had not thought of this in terms of the effect of time on her own aging cells. When Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was released in 1974, the lead actress, Brigitte Mira, was sixty-four years old. Eleanor was now thirty-nine. Patrick Swayze, the muscled star of Dirty Dancing—a sleeper hit worth more than $200 million and counting—died in 2009 at fifty-seven after a battle with pancreatic cancer waged in the public eye. In that film’s B story—it’s set in 1963—a working-class white dancer’s botched back-alley abortion is fixed by the doctor-father of the Jewish ingénue, Baby, who has to confront her class privilege before earning the dancer’s gratitude. In the A story, Baby discovers her sexuality on an integrated staff dance floor. In both the A and B stories, the women are caught by the men. No further information could be gleaned about Danny from Kizomba Senga Adore. Eleanor sent the photo to her housemates’ Epson and, holding the printout at arm’s length, trimmed off all but Danny’s face. In black and white, pixilated and in profile, the specifics of his features were hard to make out. He looked young, but out of his teens. His skin was dark and his face was round. He seemed self-conscious about dancing, or about having his photo taken while dancing.