“So tell me about Aruba, I said, warming my hands on the giant mug.
“Aruba?” He looked genuinely confused.
“Isn’t that what your manuscript is called?”
He smiled. “No. That was from an American television commercial you must be too young to remember. The book”—he looked down at his mug on the table—“the book is called”—now he stared frankly in my eyes, “The Fourth Flight. It’s an . . . experimental memoir.”
I nodded, waited. My patience was infinite. Someone banged on the door; the woman who had brought us coffee unlocked it and Chip entered, said “Motherfúcker!” but not to any of us, grabbed a backpack from behind the counter, and exited.
Aidan stood up, downed half of his coffee, spun around, and walked through the gallery to where the restrooms hid behind a translucent glass wall. He was gone for at least ten minutes, maybe longer, and I began to wonder whether he had habits more illegal, if not more dangerous, than drinking, began to wonder at what point it would be justifiable for me to go knock on the door. The mix of brazenness and helplessness that increasingly characterized his behavior no longer surprised me—it was evident in public displays of men like him everywhere, but I had spent my adult life avoiding close contact with the type: he was my first.
When he returned he seemed unchanged, save for what I can only describe as an increased wattage of the light that registered in his eyes.
“It’s about the winter I spent unable to descend the four flights of stairs from my flat to the street. I read Endgame a hundred times; the fourth flight is also the fourth wall. The literary agent they fobbed me off on says never mind the Caméra d’Or, we’d be lucky to place it at a university press out of the midwest or Cambridge. In the U.K. He isn’t happy.”
He sat back down, sipped from his mug, pressed it to his lower lip.
“Cám-bridge. I’d prefer to have nothing more to do with Cám-bridge.”
The woman behind the counter was putting on her backpack. She opened a cupboard and shoved the cash box inside.
“He says it’s depressing in an unmarketable way.” He set down his empty mug. “Or maybe he said in an unremarkable way.”
I bussed our table and put on my coat, but he hadn’t moved.
“It’s about the paralysis of my generation. I thought they’d eat it up.”
“It sounds like something I would like to read,” I said, “and I mean that, but”—I picked up his keys from the table—“we’re getting in the way here. So let’s get in your Zipcar and you can tell me why you used me the way you did.”
We pulled into a parking spot facing the river—my train didn’t leave for another twenty minutes—and the critic (he’d retreated into his role) reached in his jacket pocket for an e-cigarette, which we shared as he failed to explain himself.
He said something to the effect of What do you mean I used you, to which I said something to the effect of Well, for one thing, making me determine whether you’re a danger to yourself—should I be worried? to which he said, “I don’t know,” exhaling vanilla steam. “And this story you fabricated?” “I did order the test, but I cancelled the order,” he said. “Because I already know the truth. The dentist’s daughter”—he looked at me for a fraction of a second—“is real, but her project only received honorable mention” (this made him smile). “I watched my mother celebrate when my grandfather died, but then Dad followed soon after, death by whiskey. He was a gentle man. His students loved him but everyone else just thought he was a drunk. Another Irish English drunk.”
He reclined his seat and closed his eyes, their wattage already dimmed. I gazed at the river, gray beneath gray. I thought about his mother and her husband, the decisions they had made. I tried to imagine the critic, son of privilege and of trauma, as a schoolchild: tiny glasses on a sharp, narrow head.
I was disappointed by his explanation, which failed to satisfy completely as either fiction or fact, but my disappointment bred a complicated sympathy, and that sympathy a kind of loyalty; we were friends—no longer new friends, just friends.
“I need to ask you a favor,” he said, his eyes still closed, the hair at his temples grayer than I had previously noticed.
“I want you to come with me to a thing, as my date. As my fake date.”
My mouth opened, closed.
“It involves getting on a plane. Domestic. I’ll pay. It will be dreadful, but in an amusing kind of way. Say yes.”
He paused.
“Please. I need you to say yes.”
I said “Fuck” as the train’s horn announced its arrival. I opened the door, leaned over to kiss his cheek, grabbed my bag, and ran.
On the train, I realized I’d forgotten to bring up the question of my title. I had too many of them—at least a dozen—and had the idea of borrowing the form of Clarice Lispector’s frontispiece for The Hour of the Star, as a kind of homage. I logged into the train’s internet, made a PDF of the page, typed in the critic’s address, and hit “Send.”
The Task of the Revision
or
Eleanor
or
The Rejection of “The Progress of Love”
or
The Hour of the Star
(Clarice Lispector)
or
I Have the Other Idea about Guilt
or
She Knew Exactly How It Would Go
or
Kindly Inform Me When I Will Be Taken Aboard the Ship
or
What Is the Weight of Light
or
Cotard’s Delusion
or
It Was Just So Unbearable
or
The Form of a Feeling
or
She Got Up
or
I Consider This Chapter Closed
EMERGED FROM THE BATHROOM now, small pile in the corner of the giant room, Eleanor, yes, safe, but barely, and now here were the bodies, the ones she had come to know to a minor degree, entering in streams from the outside, naked, wet, screaming in laughter, towels shared and more laughter or screaming and the opening of wine and—was she seeing correctly—the bodies slow and deliberate, the tall dark one and the plump blond one, and the bald one and the one with muscles everywhere and the one with no muscles at all, and their things and where they put them, their manifold things, arms and legs and tongues and things that were between the legs of some of them, that were each multiplied several times over, and she knew in some preserved invigilating part of herself that what she was seeing was not fact, but that part of it might be fact, and she thought then of Abraham and his parts and the bike with the sheepskin seat cover; and she thought then of Viz and his parts and how he’d pulled back the curtain; and she thought then of Danny K.M. as he spun his anonymous partner on the gymnasium floor; she thought in quick succession without knowing why of Woolf, Wittgenstein, and Artaud, and then she thought, really thought, of the thing that had happened, and of the corner of paper she had saved in its honor from her contribution to the fire. She thought then that she was a bad invigilator, and she thought then that the Nature was in fact Moist, that the performance was in fact quality, the méat absolutely blóody; and at the return of the pennant of bloody meat to the cinema of her mind, what she was seeing took a turn and the skins came off, and the things that were multiple became violent, mechanical, oil rigs in the desert, pumping and striking, disassembling and reassembling, recombining in their multiple ways before her eyes, and in some preserved part of herself she knew she was invisible but not nonexistent, and she was never gladder for her invisibility or for her not-nonexistence, never gladder for her form of being-alone by being-with, and from her eyes in their asymmetry fell white and boiling tears, and they tumbled on her body with the rhythm of a drum, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 2/4, O Sweetness, O World, O Music! O Wórld! We are performance that is quality life try now!
TIME PASSED.
“Still out, huh.”
“Hmm. I wonder how long she’s planni
ng to stay.”
“She’s O.K.”
“I don’t know. I thought she might be more fun.”
“Whatever. She’s not hurting anyone.”
“I think she’s nice.”
Time passed. Eleanor could not unfurl.
Cole: Data, you O.K. there? Come sit on the couch.
Eleanor: Phhht.
Carolyn: Seriously, Data. I’m making tea. Come on.
(Pause.)
Carolyn: Eleanor. Up. Now.
Eleanor unfurled, got herself over to the couch, let Carolyn hand her a cup of tea and Cole put a hand on her shoulder.
She opened her mouth, and then she closed it, and then she opened.
3
FALL
THE FORM OF A FEELING. Almost.
Data. Tzaddi.
Addis.
She touched down. The sky was blue.
Eleanor, wake up.
Addis ≥ new. Ababa ≥ flower. The window. Sky is blue.
She was outside. The plane behind her. Jostled on the stairs. The sky a brilliant blue. Eleanor looked up.
She was inside. The walls were gray, the floors gray. The temperature was neutral; she was comfortable. The building smelled of cigarettes. There was familiar music playing. She recognized it; she had prepared. Through the windows, the sky was still there, still blue. October.
I took the cup from his hand and folded his tray table. He had taken a tranquilizer, possibly two, washed them down with Chardonnay. We had a layover in Chicago in just under an hour. He was a lean man, but he was tall and he was stubborn. I wondered if I was physically capable of holding him up.
I swiped my card in the slot by the screen. The menu was limited. I watched E! Entertainment News. Photos of a makeup-free Renée Zellweger had set off rumors about plastic surgery. The remake of Dirty Dancing had been postponed another year. I drank the rest of the Chardonnay and looked out the window. Sky is blue.
She stood with the others in front of the long wooden table. Those with local passports, which bore a star emblem she found beautiful, moved past her.
Time passed. Her own passport with its dull golden crest was stamped, her visa filled out. She is not the only Eleanor, after all. There was Eleanor Boardman, the silent film actress, and Eleanor Gehrig, wife of Lou, for whom the disease is named.
She had been told the rain was ending. That it would be green. She looked through the window at the mountain range in the distance. Green.
Everything, so far, as promised.
He followed me from one people-mover to the next, pulling his wheelie bag. As we glided slowly, bypassing walking travelers and being passed by running ones, he leaned against the railing and stared at the ceiling like a bored adolescent. I realized how little time I’d spent with him in populated places. He projected a kind of indifference to his surroundings that made me want to ask if, away from the wrestling mat, he had ever been afraid of losing a fight.
“Let’s get a drink,” he said. “We have time.” He took his hand off the railing to scratch his neck.
“One drink,” I said. He bowed, his hands in prayer.
Eleanor is white.
One witnesses one’s invention by life.
She is white, and around her on the streets and in the shops, on the university campus and throughout the new city were the almost exclusively not-white inhabitants of the place to which she had traveled. A word in the language she held inside her rose to her lips, emerged, and hovered like a prayer: “Xenía.” Female stranger, welcomed guest.
As she walked, she carried four things with her in addition to her whiteness: a map, a notebook, her un-networked phone, and the piece of paper Carolyn had slipped into her bag the morning she was gently, if abruptly, ejected from the farm. The paper contained a short list of names, numbers and addresses that Eleanor did not yet have a use for, still acquiring, as she was, a familiarity with the place’s infrastructure.
Many people in the new-flower city walked: along the busy four-lane avenues with paved sidewalks and the dust-covered rubble roads lined with construction sites; along the cobblestone streets of the old town and the asphalt ones of the Italian sector; along the alleys of the merkato and up the steep dirt paths that joined the city to the hills at its edge. Sometimes Eleanor received grins or hard stares from passing men, usually the younger ones, and she’d been proposed to once already while waiting for a light to turn green. But for the most part she felt invisible, genderless, more or less outside the scope of mattering for the majority of the people she passed. In certain areas—the plazas of churches and mosques, or large intersections—children would call out “Ferengi! Ferengi!” On the less populated streets, sometimes a woman her age—also walking alone, but with direction, like a local—would acknowledge her presence with a glance.
There was Eleanor Holm, the Olympic swimmer she’d learned about in third grade, though the controversial parts of her biography had been suppressed.
On the first day it was all she could do to feed herself: She walked to the university district through Arat Kilo and ate at an outdoor café, ordering a common dish made of chickpea flour she’d eaten before in restaurants but whose name—shiro—she now realized she’d always mispronounced.
On the second day it was all she could do to explore the area immediately surrounding her Airbnb and figure out where to buy groceries: red onions and tiny eggplants from the women set up on blankets lining the street; coffee and soap from the kiosks; bulk dairy and room-temperature eggs from the mini-supermarket on the main drag a couple of blocks away. Ophelia had taught her that fresh eggs don’t require refrigeration as long as they haven’t been allowed to get wet.
On the third day she went to the National Museum and visited the skeleton of the ancient hominid Lucy, or what turned out to be a replica of the skeleton of Lucy, the original being too fragile, too valuable to display.
Australopithecus afarensis. Sex indeterminate, body size suggests female; assigned female. Cause of death: unknown. Name: Lucy. Lucy in the sky. Blue.
On the fourth day she visited the zoo, where lions of the rare, endemic species Leopantels abyssinica paced in cages the size of Eleanor’s old brown room. The zoo was nearly empty of visitors. A small child sobbed while a larger one played with a phone.
On the fifth day she was tired and had blisters on her feet. She walked a few hundred yards to a small octagonal structure set on a large patch of gravel scattered with tables and chairs, where you could order a perfect macchiato for the equivalent of forty-five cents. The weather was fine, the sky a cloudless blue. The breeze was warm, invigorating. The rainy season had done its work; the dry stretch posed no immediate threat. She was alone at the outdoor tables. She pulled out The Road Less Traveled: Reflections on the Literatures of the Horn of Africa and a mechanical pencil, also blue.
She read: “By culture is meant the way of life of a community, which encompasses its values, knowledge about itself, and how that knowledge is described, mythologized, allegorized, and prescribed in discursive modes, developed over time.”
A group of chattering teenagers wearing backpacks and a uniform of forest-green shirts and pants passed in front of her; the smallest of them held a soccer ball beneath her arm.
For minutes nobody else passed by. An electrical wire strung between two posts across the street was weighed down on one side by a pair of black sneakers hung from their laces. Next to them was perched an unfamiliar gray bird with a long, bisected tail.
“You could have sent her anywhere,” the critic had written in the margins of my draft. But this is where she goes, I thought in response. I’m trying to get it right.
He ordered an old-fashioned and pulled out hand sanitizer. “I know I’m being paranoid,” he said, “but clearly the self-quarantine of returning health workers isn’t enough.”
She read: “In short: homogenous empty time alludes to the constructedness of all identities.” The bird flew off, causing the suspended sneakers to bounce.
&nbs
p; She drew checkmarks in the margins so she could find her way back. She underlined “homogenous,” “empty,” “time.”
She conjured an image of Danny K.M. approaching the café in forest green, smiling, her old laptop tucked beneath his arm.
“Suspect or no suspect?” Eyes steely over sparkly rims.
“No suspect.”
“Sorry: Do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
The woman wiped the steam wand of the espresso machine with a rag. She appeared to be between Eleanor’s age and that of her average student. She was smiling slightly, her answer to Eleanor’s question tentative.
“Is there a public phone I can use?”
“A public phone . . . not near here.”
She brushed her hands on her apron, pulled a cell phone from its pouch.
“You can borrow mine.”
“Thank you,” said Eleanor, smiling shyly, and accepted the phone, unfolded Carolyn’s list.
She called the first number, which went straight to voicemail: “You’ve reached Robert and Padma. Leave a message!”
She hung up. The second number was for someone named Dawit. Next to the number was a note: “Prefers text. Lived in Australia for a while. Sweet.”
We missed our connection not because he’d insisted on a drink but because we had both underestimated the time it would take to get to the gate. The next flight was overbooked, so we were given a travel voucher for the bus. A teenager traveling solo who shared our predicament latched onto us; during the two-hour ride as I stared out the window, across the aisle the critic and the teen talked softly until, eventually, all three of us drifted off.
Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love Page 12
