Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  Time passed. Viz’s physical characteristics continued to draw Eleanor’s body toward him while her mind fought for control of the margins of her experience, in which were inscribed a mortal fear of false consciousness along with an injunction against the belief that expressions of desire should be simple, reciprocal, and free.

  The conversation turned to the question of Crescent Farm’s economy, and Viz and Eleanor found themselves in frequent accord during what turned into a prolonged disagreement over whether the farm’s ultimate goal should be to reject the dollar completely or, instead, to follow the example of the nearby, defunct Oneida Community, which at the time of its collapse due to interpersonal and ideological discord still managed to retain millions of dollars in assets, a nest egg the Oneida Corporation reinvested into its line of flatware.

  “I think we should take Buddhist economics more seriously,” said Cole.

  “I am just so allergic to the word investment,” said Krystal.

  “There’s nothing wrong with having a business plan,” said Bin.

  Viz and Eleanor were agnostic about the question of ditching the dollar, were agnostic about sustainable enterprise, social business, strategic inclusion, and radical separatism. But they shared a skepticism about the stakes of such a discussion among people who all had access, if not to savings accounts, at least to student loans and high-limit credit cards that allowed them, for now, to sit beneath twenty-foot dust-free ceilings and discuss these options; and they shared, it turned out, a suspicion that emerged during the course of the conversation, almost a belief (based partly on the historical record, partly on related personal experience), that groups like this live and die by the charisma of their leaders. Conjoined to their hunch that a sustainable, consensual, nonhierarchical society was almost certainly beyond reach was their near-total melancholy in the face of this fact, a melancholy that seemed to bind them together across the wide wood table and that blurred Eleanor at her edges, just where the structure of her feeling met the margin of her thought.

  She got up, crossed the concrete floor diagonally, and opened a door marked with a cartoon sketch of Rodin’s Thinker sitting on a bucket. She entered a room lined in cedar boards with a claw-foot tub at its center, a pedestal sink on one side, and around a corner separated from the bath area by a drop cloth curtain, a large wooden structure that resembled a throne but that, after a closer look, Eleanor determined was a composting toilet. A few fig- and patchouli-scented candles had been placed on a shelf and lit, but the odor, not exactly like that of a traditional outhouse but not exactly unlike it either, persisted. Eleanor lifted her dress and listened to the sound of her urine falling on sawdust.

  THE CRITIC HAD written me a one-line email that I’d hesitated to return: “I’m back and I’d like very much to see you.”

  Now, a week later, I sat down to respond.

  I typed, “From the margins, the text appears as an undifferentiated block. Paragraphs resemble one another. In romance novels, all the action is contained inside the block: For this reason, they are printed with almost no margin. For this reason, the decision to enter is fraught with risk. One’s bearings can be lost. An anti-Sublime, or a post-Sublime: the machinery has been effaced. There is something about this entering and its fraughtness, something I sense is important to the revision. Though this is emphatically not a romance.”

  I typed, “I have a question for you about the title of my book.”

  I typed, “I would like to see you too. I would like for you to suggest a plan.”

  THE MIRROR BY the toilet was confusing Eleanor, and not only because her reflection was partially effaced in the candlelight. One of her eyes was now higher than the other, and her chin had lost its symmetry. But she didn’t linger on her confusion. She was stoned—on top of the circulating joints, the kale had been sautéed in pot butter (Couchsurfer’s Speciale)—and she was waiting for Viz. She was so certain that he would come for her, that he would remove himself from the table without notice at a sufficiently engrossing point in the group conversation, that at this moment, in fact, he would be making his way diagonally across the concrete floor toward the cedar-lined bathroom that smelled of patchouli and shit; of all of this she was so certain that when she stood up from the toilet, closed its heavy wooden lid, and opened the curtain, she would accept no alternative to the sight of him there, ready to pin her torso to the wall with his nice chest, and to use his nice arms and hands in desired but unrequested ways, and to kiss her in the way she liked with his nice lips and regaling tongue, and so then he was there, pinning and using and kissing the way she liked, and Eleanor removed his pants and her own underwear, and his very nice parts, the cock-part and the ball-parts, were revealed and Eleanor held them, and he hoisted her onto the elevated throne and spread apart her legs. And so in the manner of a romance, they met at the edge of their shared potential for total pleasure and total melancholy, the common constitution they had recognized in each other; and so after a time in the same manner, they came together without the stress of expectation, and the scent of their coming mingled with the scents of the cedar boards and candles and composting toilet, and Eleanor took note of it; and Viz’s breathing was the labored breathing of a young and otherwise healthy smoker, and she took note of it; and neither one of them had mentioned protection and she took note of it; and her orgasm occurred without the aid of technology and she took note of it, and it was at this moment that the manner lost its purchase on the event; it was at this moment that the margin became more crowded than the text; and it was at this moment that she felt the work of gravity on his ejaculate inside her, and she tightened her grip to contain what was already gone.

  “WERE HER PARENTS on board Malaysia Flight 370?” he asked, broad silhouette of a man feeling his way along the cinder block walls.

  The critic had accepted a visiting gig at an upstate arts program that takes place in the summer and had suggested that we meet midday at a nearby sculpture park to walk and talk; he’d been trying, since returning from Scandinavia, not to drink. It meant a short train ride for me, and I welcomed the chance to escape the heat and humidity that had settled over the city.

  I was anxious about seeing him, especially outside of a bar (the closest thing we had to a comfort zone). I spent the trip staring out the window of the café car at the river, imagining various ways in which the encounter could go wrong.

  He picked me up from the station in a lime-green Zipcar, for which he was already apologizing as I put on my seat belt after an awkward half embrace during which his glasses and my sunglasses crashed. “Laurance signed us up last year. I feel like I’m driving a billboard,” he said, the car beeping as he backed it out of the loading zone.

  He drove with surprising conservatism, adhering to each minor change in speed limit as we traversed a handful of small towns and unincorporated hamlets while making small talk about the week’s events on the world stage. Germany had won the World Cup after trouncing its host, Brazil, in a disturbing show of domination, while Israel, in the inaugural days of Operation Protective Edge, had murdered four Palestinian children playing soccer on a beach in addition to numerous other civilians; meanwhile, over the contested territories of Ukraine, the Russians had shot a missile at a Boeing 777, among whose doomed passengers were a hundred medical researchers en route to Melbourne for the twentieth international conference on AIDS.

  With windows and sunroof open, our conversation was limited to declarative sentences that had to be yelled to be heard.

  “The death toll in Gaza is approaching 300—”

  “There were 298 on that plane and not all of them researchers—”

  “Now innocent children are no longer innocent—”

  “The soccer players—”

  “The Guatemalan kids we’re supposed to want to deport—”

  “The students hosted a vigil for the victims of Israel—”

  “I’m going to find some good news on my phone—”

  “There is no goo
d news anywhere—”

  “Oklahoma’s ban on gay marriage was overturned on appeal—”

  “Those girls in Nigeria are still missing, you know—”

  “I forget how many girls they took. Not that it—”

  “In the mid-200s I think. Look, we’ve arrived—”

  The sculpture park occupied 150 acres of undulating terrain, and as we walked from one monumental work to the next, the critic regaled me with tales of his media blitz, anecdotes betraying his ambivalence about his career’s sharp turn.

  At the entrance to A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, a scruffy teenager named Chip gave us a brusque introduction to the work, followed by a warning about adverse reactions in claustrophobes. I went down the ladder first, succumbing to modesty; I was wearing a skirt.

  “Were her parents on board Malaysia Flight 370?” he asked, broad silhouette of a man feeling his way along the cinder block walls, “or”—he extended his hand to hoist me into the last of the sculpture’s five tunnels—“did she slit her wrists after going off her meds?”

  The critic had chosen this cramped setting to grill me about Eleanor’s past. At issue was the question of whether the benefits of withholding the particulars of the thing that had happened were worth any frustration such withholding might cause in a reader. He sat down, his back against the wall, legs extended nearly the width of the tunnel. I sat too, my feet just reaching his ankles, and tried not to think about the damage the damp concrete would do to my skirt. The morning had seen a rash of brief summer storms, but now the sun shone through the vertical opening at the end of our tunnel. Dust swirled in the column of light.

  “I feel it’s important that the thing not be explicated,” I said, drawing my knees to my chest. There was barely room for us both in the tunnel, and I was experiencing a sense of intimacy with the critic that I hadn’t felt since I sunk into the plastic-covered chair at the bar. “It’s a stand-in—it’s like the form of a feeling,” I said, to which he said something about references to philosophers being off-putting in a novel, to which I said we weren’t in a novel and I could refer to whatever I want. When he pulled out a flask and opened it—bourbon—I realized he’d been drinking since before he picked me up. But still, he droned, raising the flask to his lips, Give me something, at least: Did her parrot die? Her lover? Did she get a divorce? A late-term abortion? Cancer? Was she the victim of an attack? Did she humiliate herself on social media? Did it have to do with Bernie Madoff? Fannie Mae? Or Sallie Mae? Mae West? Or some other, crueler American May?

  He took another sip, then chuckled and sputtered, By the way, your continuity is atrocious, what year is this supposed to be happening anyway, it’s like a sandwich of years, like a . . .

  I turned to the critic as his rant trailed off. He had removed his glasses and was holding them in one hand, his eyes a universe away. The contour of his face looked both stark and delicate in the shadows, less Wittgenstein now than the more familiar profile shot of a young Virginia Woolf. I touched the sleeve of his jacket and called him by his name—a double dose of direct address that had not yet occurred between us—and said How about all of the above, including the sandwich; let’s get up. To which he said Let’s not, and then he handed me the flask, and then I lifted my hand from his sleeve—Aidan—to take it.

  THE FIRST NEW photo was of handlebars.

  The second was taken from a ferry.

  The third and fourth suggested the presence of an other. Abraham had, evidently, picked up a companion.

  On the morning when Viz was discovered to have left, the group was shaken only to the extent that there was a conversation over breakfast about how to collect or absorb the $750, give or take, that he owed to the house coffers. (Maybe he’ll Venmo it to us, Cole offered. Or not, countered Krystal.) Eleanor alone regretted his departure, but both her regret and the reason for it went unnoticed.

  Later that day, Eleanor was recruited to help dig up a row of early beets and plant wild arugula in their place.

  The day after she dug beets, Eleanor was recruited to empty the composting toilet and help stack the firewood that Kicker and Matt had spent the last week “bucking up” and splitting with (respectively) a chainsaw and an ax.

  Now, on her fourth morning at Crescent Farm, she sat at the picnic table next to the garden, checking email on her phone. Was it important that Abraham had picked up a companion, and was it significant that he would have done so without mentioning it to Eleanor, though he had sent her an “all’s well” text message some time after—she made a quick calculation—posting the picture of the other biker on the curvy road, and the one of his motorcycle’s little sheepskin-seated sidekick? That his companion was a woman she was certain; but was this detail relevant? If so, what exactly was its relevance?

  Ophelia was at the opposite end of the garden in an ankle-length yellow dress, harvesting something, while behind her someone whose identity was obscured by a faded pink hoodie extracted an armful of bamboo torches from the shed. It was the summer solstice, and that evening there would be a feast and a bonfire and a ritual moonlight swim, and Eleanor got the sense that there would be other things that went without saying, although for her that meant they also went without being understood.

  She bent over her legs, stretched out on the orange-painted bench. She was sore; she wasn’t habituated to physical labor other than walking, and the muscles activated by digging and stacking were not the ones she usually employed. The soreness, concentrated mostly in the fronts of her thighs and the backs of her arms, was not unpleasant and, combined with the heat produced by the midday sun and the aftermath of her encounter with Viz, contributed to a feeling of intensified embodiment and diffuse, all-sensory arousal. She put down her phone and lay back on the bench, closed her eyes and let her arms fall, her fingers touch the ground.

  They would lie like that, the fronts of his knees pressed into the backs of hers, without speaking. His grief was not her grief. Whatever the thing was that may have happened to him or not happened to him was not accessible to her; what they had were his knees and her knees and the silence between them. Abraham.

  By one o’clock the feast was under preparation:

  Krystal [washing, spinning, chopping]

  Cole [scraping, peeling, slicing]

  Bin [mixing, beating, folding]

  Ophelia [stirring, tossing, stirring]

  Kicker [stacking, building, leaning]

  Time passed.

  Eleanor (Data) [tablecloth, napkins]

  Carolyn [forks, spoons, knives]

  Sol [plates, bowls, cups]

  Matt [wine, basement, wine]

  Biscuit [candles, torches]

  And so the feast was prepared and was eaten with relish, and the conversation was good and right for the occasion, and the wine was plentiful and contributed to the goodness, and the air was warm and soft and contributed to the rightness, and the moon was swollen and just shy of perfection, and Eleanor and the others did not rush to the next step, though they knew themselves to be at the beginning of something; but Eleanor and the others, when it was time, did rise from the table, did bring with them their wine, and did eventually walk in pairs or threesomes to the site of the fire, a clearing inside of a clearing, where logs and old chairs and scraps of wood and intricately interwoven branches and cardboard and bark formed a towering assemblage of kindling that would last, Kicker promised, until morning. The fire was lit with the help of some kerosene; flames rose several stories high, and everyone stepped back as a quart-size mason jar filled with translucent brown liquid made the rounds.

  Eleanor watched while the jar was passed from one reveler to the next. She had kept her distance from drugs for years, since before so many new ones had come onto the market, or migrated from portions of the market where she was unlikely to come across them to portions of the market where she was. The new drugs could be sorted into the shamanistic (iboga, ayahuasca, DMT, and their legally available relations Salvia divinorum, Datura
, Jenkem, DXM, San Pedro cactus); varieties and imitators of MDMA (Molly, which she had tried once with Abraham at a studio party with underwhelming results, and Sparkle); so-called street drugs (ketamine, bath salts); and the much-discussed proliferation of prescription drugs that didn’t exist when Eleanor was the age at which they were now given out routinely for conditions that had not then been named.

  The steeped psilocybin was a throwback, the large jar warm in her hands.

  THE LADDER WAS ONLY some eight feet away, but I would have had to step over his legs to reach it, and despite my increasing physical discomfort I was unmotivated to leave our subterranean world. The bourbon was gone. He was eating the crumbs from a small bag of yogurt pretzels he’d found in my purse. I told him I’d been wanting to thank him for the careful attention he had given my manuscript and its revision, but that it had taken some time for me to learn to separate the authority of his tone from the use-value of the comments, some of which—I said this gently—were of no use at all. He had no reaction to this admission except to crush the now-empty baggie slowly in his fist and tuck it into his shirt pocket.

  He said, all but slurring now: I’m going to tell you three things and you are going to guess which of them is true. We can attach a monetary reward to your correct answer, if you like. I am, as you know, quite well paid as far as critics of avant-garde theater and makers of experimental documentary go.