Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  Another text came in, this one containing only a bit.ly address and a signature: “XO A.”

  The link led to a ride report on the mobile version of a site called advrider.com, which she knew from Abraham’s obsession with it stood for “adventure rider” and hosted a community of motor cycle enthusiasts who undertook long, often international trips, alone or in pairs or small groups, a community of (mostly, but not exclusively) men who nurtured inexhaustible appetites for riding into the night in all sorts of weather, camping on the sides of roads and eating reconstituted freeze-dried food out of bags using utensils un-nested from Leathermans. At the top of the ride report—beneath the title, “TLH”—was a snapshot of opened boxes filled with crumpled fabric and metal bits and jugs of something all scattered on a parquet floor, followed by several paragraphs of text:

  My setup was decent for touring but I wanted a better one, so to the GIVI racks I already had I added Wolfman Expedition Dry panniers. I installed a CJ Designs tail rack with Rotopax mount and a two-gallon gas can for that 260-mile stretch from Goose Bay to Port Hope Simpson. And on top of the Rotopax went the Twisted Throttle DrySpec tail luggage system, which complements the Wolfman panniers perfectly. All my crap fit in the luggage nicely, complemented by the Oxford four-strap tank bag I’d already bought years ago to hold my camera and other quick-access stuff.

  This was a language in which Abraham was fluent, and she felt sad for not taking an interest in it before. A pair of women wearing vintage ’60s eyeglasses and straight-cut bangs carried pints of amber beer to the table next to hers; one of the women jostled her elbow as she sat, then smiled an apology. Eleanor nodded and kept reading:

  I mounted an IRC TR8 front tire and a Full Bore M-40 rear—the IRC is very similar to a TKC-80 in the 90/90-21 size, but the tread is spaced ever so slightly wider, and the tire costs about half of what the TKC does; and the Full Bore rear, while similar to a Shinko 705, also has slightly wider-spaced tread lugs and wears a lot better than the Shinko, yet works far better off pavement than it looks like it should. I debated getting a rear TKC-80 or Heidenau K60, but the Full Bore is literally half the price, and considering the gravel would only account for about 15% of my trip, I settled on the Full Bore as the most sensible choice.

  She could not decipher what she was reading, and only when she saw the second photo, which appeared below the text, a photo she finally understood to be of Abraham’s motorcycle—though it was all but unrecognizable beneath the Twisted Throttle DrySpec tail luggage system and the IRC TR8 and the Full Bore M-40 rear—parked by the curb of what she now understood to be Abraham’s street, did it become clear that this was Abraham’s own ride report, the beginning of his adventure. She thought of the first time he’d mentioned this trip long ago, when for all the usual reasons, mostly money, it had seemed impossible. She was moved: something had broken; something had been broken through.

  When her head hit the pink princess pillow on the lower bunk in her friend’s kids’ room, Eleanor could feel the accumulated sensations of her night out—the desirous loneliness and the ambivalent longing, the unexpected alienation and familiar anonymity—seep out of her head and her slowly graying hair and her sticky legs and her sore feet, out of her chest cavity and her back and her tattoo-free forearms, and disappear into the pink princess sheets, or into some quieter, less tangible place, as defended from the aggressions of the present tense as was the now-still Rocket, tucked into her bag in its pink protective sheath.

  “WHAT I WANT TO SAY,” I typed to the critic, “is that when Eleanor sleeps, the rearrangement of her mind’s furniture happens without her direction, and often without her recall in the morning; but when she does recall, in glimpses, the results of these acts of redecoration, she becomes aware that the rearrangement has taken place not on the level of things exchanging positions in a room, but on the level of molecules and atoms changing position in the things, so that the things—the furniture, whether object, thought, or emotion—have themselves become unfamiliar, that they are in effect strokes of genius, sui generis acts of the imagination: that they are novel.

  “Eleanor once learned—in college, no doubt—to see this becoming-unfamiliar as a state of breakdown, an interruption of fluency or flow (the status quo). Maybe that was Heidegger. And then she learned to appreciate the value of such an interruption: maybe that was Kristeva, or Thiong’o—she isn’t sure herself. Her unsureness is part of what makes her suffer, by supporting a flawed belief that her reality—by which I mean the interpretation of conditions, not the conditions themselves—is only superficially transformable. A belief that in fundamental ways her reality (by which I mean her right to her reality) is constrained.

  “But this is the work, isn’t it? Asymmetrically, but for us all?”

  I was writing to the critic after finally opening his emails. Work on my revision had been going acceptably for a stretch of nights-and-weekends, and I was suddenly worried about his well-being. Nothing had changed in my understanding of our dynamic, but a minor shift in my perception of my own abilities had allowed for my concern—which belonged to the part of our friendship that was laid on equal ground—to rise above the rest.

  Before writing to him, I read through the messages in the folder labeled “*”.

  June 6, 11:30 p.m.:

  When you told me that you like to fall asleep in public, I couldn’t remember the term “martymachlia” and called you an exhibitionist; but in fact there’s no technical term for what you are. The first mention of flashing in Western literature is in Herodotus, and it is, interestingly, woman-on-woman—the context was provincial humiliation staged as sexual superiority. If I discover something I can’t live with, there will be decisions to be made. My celebrity is not the celebrity of David Foster Wallace or Amy Winehouse, but it is more than the celebrity I enjoyed only last year—though “enjoyed” is not the most applicable term, and I’m not quite sure what “I” it is that is supposedly doing the enjoying. Or the decision-making, for that matter.

  June 8, 6:00 a.m.:

  time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time pssst passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time pssst passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed ti
me passed time passed time passed time passed time past time time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time pssst time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time past time passed time pssst passed time past time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time passed time past time

  I think this is what you really want to write.

  June 11, 2:13 p.m.:

  Here is a portrait of me posing with the panelists at the Norwegian premiere. Note that the crowd is small. The film was subtitled. There are no accurate data about the number of speakers of Norwegian currently alive on our planet. The Norwegian word for cigarette is sigarett. The word for play is teaterstykke. There is no word for please; instead of pardon they say flytt deg! which means “move yourself!” My handler had her baby, three weeks early. Everybody is fine. I haven’t called my mother or heard from Laurance. I know not the status of the cube of ice. The word for pregnant is gravid. The word for sick is syk. I have forgotten several of my English words and am counting on you to restore them. The word for home is hjem. I’ll be hjem soon.

  I felt instinctively that his mention of famous-artist suicides was a drunken flourish rather than an actual threat that required intervention, but still it seemed that responding to his correspondence was the right thing to do. I decided to leave his messages alone and started a new thread about my revision in which I typed everything I wanted to say about it to the critic.

  “Is there a way out of this misunderstanding—the passivity it breeds?” I typed.

  “What I want to say is that Eleanor doesn’t know.”

  ELEANOR BREAKFASTED with her friend and listened to her recount the story of the previous night’s date, during which the friend had confessed her ambivalent feelings to the man who had invited her as his guest to an extravagant dinner of locally slaughtered meats at a restaurant he knew she couldn’t afford. Since the confession came just as they were finishing their entrées, the man had asked the friend if she wanted to “treat him” to coffee and dessert, betraying (in the friend’s words) the contingencies of his chivalry: his voice had quivered as he pronounced “dessert.” Eleanor and her friend laughed, but there was a vertigo to their laughter that nauseated Eleanor, and as truly fond as she was of her friend—as truly fond as she was of all her friends—she was relieved when it was time to pack up her overnight bag and walk the three blocks to the train station to catch the 12:17 north to Albany, where she had called ahead to reserve a spot in a semi-private room at the city’s only surviving youth hostel.

  When she emerged at the Albany-Rensselaer stop, she consulted her phone: the hostel was 6.2 miles away. Unwilling to navigate an unfamiliar, perhaps nonexistent system of public transport or to spend money on a cab, she set out on foot: first across the river, then along an interminable stretch of Central Avenue. Her overnight bag pulled at her right shoulder, and she could feel the sun burn her forehead, deepening the horizontal creases she had first noticed beginning to develop years ago but that she had only recently started to recognize as the onset of inevitable corporeal decline.

  “Sure, you look older now than when we met,” Abraham had said when she expressed her concern about the appearance of the lines. She’d conducted erratic searches for holistic remedies and natural collagen simulators; her favorite came from a site called faceyogamethod.com, which promoted a simple technique of controlled squinting as a free DIY alternative to Botox. Now, marching slowly down the broad treeless avenue—devoid also of pedestrians or open businesses—she began to perform the exercises.

  1) Encircling your eyes and brows with your thumbs and forefingers, press hard into your forehead.

  2) Open your eyes wide, then squint, then open, then squint, keeping your brows and forehead stationary, until you feel the years melt away and your youthful vitality return.

  Eleanor’s youthful vitality did not return, but she did find that intermittent repetition of the movements made the time pass more quickly, and soon she had reached her halfway point, the Honest Weight Food Co-op. She went in and ate lunch in its small windowless café, something made with quinoa and vegetables and no discernible salt.

  The hostel was in a run-down three-story brick building on Swan Street, directly across from a concrete monolith that, from the signage, apparently housed the bulk of the state government. She imagined that when it was erected, a row of houses identical to the one that contained this one had been razed. The hostel was on the lucky side of the street.

  The manager, a giant man with a sunburned bald head and vintage corduroy suit who introduced himself too loudly as Ross, greeted her from the stoop. All she wanted was to lie down.

  Ross: Só! You’ve come to Albany on fóot! From whence do you háil?

  Eleanor: Oh, I’ve only come from the Amtrak on foot. I don’t have a sleep sack. Do you sell those?

  Ross: Almost all the way from Troy, then! My journey began in Cánada, not nearly as auspícious, eh? Yés we have sleep sacks. How long have you been on the róad?

  Eleanor: I’m not sure I’m on a road . . .

  She had no notion of how to finish her sentence. This did not deter Ross.

  Ross: You are on the páth! Which is not the same thíng as a road. Bureaucracy, meetings, engineers, eminent domáin—nothing good in a road. But a páth—you can cut a path through almost ánything—

  Besides his accent, Ross had a way of speaking that incorporated stress on certain words and syllables, not always corresponding to their importance but imparting a musical cadence to his sentences that Eleanor might have found charming were she not so enervated from her walk.

  Eleanor (valiantly): Sleep sack?

  Ross (extracting a plastic-wrapped sleep sack from somewhere behind the counter): We have to remember the difference between wándering and being lóst. Twelve dollars. Room number 8. You’re sharing with someone named Dévin, provided he gets here before eleven. We close at eleven.

  Ross’s hyperstimulated affect had almost normalized by the end of his last sentence, and Eleanor smiled, handed him her card, signed the slip, and trudged upstairs to room number 8.

  That morning, before she had left for the train, Eleanor’s friend had asked her over breakfast what in the hell she thought she was doing. Eleanor had responded, Well what are you doing? I don’t know, said the friend. Midlife crisis? Maybe this is what that looks like, said Eleanor. Maybe it is, said the friend, and there was silence.

  But seriously, Eleanor, said the friend after the silence, what are you doing, going to godforsaken Albany to stay in a youth hostel and hunt down someone whose character is unknown to you, who may or may not be in possession of your data and who won’t tell you how to find him? Eleanor had no answer. All she knew was that she was going to godforsaken Albany, at least in part, to do those things.

  Her fantasies about Danny K.M. weren’t usually sexual. She imagined talking to him about his past and his future, their conversation lubricated by the alcoholic drink of his choice. She imagined interviewing him about his job skills and helping him with his résumé, something she was trained to do for others, though she largely failed on her own behalf. She imagined, once or twice, telling him about the thing that had happened. She wanted to expose herself to Danny K.M.—the way the girl in the summery dress had wanted to expose herself to the artist. She wanted to meet his gesture of what she took to be frank generosity w
ith her own equally frank gesture. But she wanted all of this while simultaneously not wanting it, or more accurately, while wanting the buffer of a margin (of what kind, she didn’t know) around whatever encounter might eventually occur. In this sense, her fantasies did not belong to the romance of novels with covers featuring mustachioed lotharios, but to something less singular—part maternal care, part Romantic Sublime.

  She was proactive: She sent emails and texts to Danny directly, to which he did not reply. She discovered a nongovernmental organization that managed the resettlement of asylum seekers in the area and offered aid to other immigrants with limited resources, including legal help, language instruction, and a job placement service that, thanks to budgetary rules or just the economy, was forced to sacrifice fit for immediacy. She learned that some of those being resettled were from Eastern Africa. Her assumption that Danny K.M. might be from that region and in those circumstances was founded, hastily and tentatively, on a handful of details including an internet search on his family name, his pixilated appearance in the dancing photo, his allusions in their correspondence to being newly arrived and without money, and the fact that he had traveled from the state’s cultural capital, which did not house resettlement offices, to its administrative capital, which did. She called the organization to ask if it were possible to locate a recent arrival by name, but the receptionist told her that data was not public and invited Eleanor to attend the next orientation for volunteers in two months’ time.