The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Some afternoons, walking home from work, she would look up at the multi-storied buildings that surrounded her and see them transformed, in the blink of an eye, to heaps of bodies, the live limbs wriggling among the dead. The thought of so much life, boxed in, piled seventeen stories high, made her nauseous.

  Philip came over sometimes to stand with his parents in their shell shock. His heart was elsewhere these days, across town, in love for the first time, and hardly had space left in it for grief. Still, sitting with his parents in the living room, he felt a sudden longing for his childhood, and he imagined he might say "goodnight," and turn, and discover his old room as it was, his homework laid out on the desk. Most of his life he had eaten his dinner here, done his homework, washed his hands, watched television and read his books, and gone to bed. Thinking of these things, tears came to his eyes, and he felt a gratifying lump rise in his throat.

  But what Rose and Owen felt, as they went to bed, was pain, pure and simple. It started in their stomachs, a hoarse growl, and rose to their heads and threatened to burst through their chests. There was nothing pleasurable about it. They didn't enjoy it. They wanted it gone. The selling of the apartment was the beginning of the end for them. It was the beginning of the beginning for Philip, who longed for something that would signal the irrevocable start of his adulthood. There was no part of his life he wanted to relive, and he was glad of it. He had no regrets except luxurious ones. He looked only forward, hungering for the future, while his parents, suddenly helpless in the face of change, looked back at all they had taken for granted. No matter what else might have happened, the neutral years, the years they remembered as painless, were over. At night they lay awake, far apart, each clinging to the extreme edge of the bed, and assumed the other to be sleeping. Cars passed outside, casting their shadows twelve stories high, and the shadows swept like swift birds over the carpet.

  MOST SUNDAYS Rose and Owen spent apart. It wasn't a rule, it just worked out that way. For the first year after he was back from college, there was another Sunday tradition, that Philip come over for dinner, but recently his visits had become irregular. He would call and say, "I just can't make it this week. But how about lunch, Mom?" Since they worked in the same part of town, lunch was a possibility for them.

  Rose had worked twenty years for T. S. Motherwell, a small literary publishing house. She had her cubicle neatly arranged. In the morning she would have some coffee with her friend Carole Schneebaum, then disappear behind the door to do her methodical readings. Every hour or ten pages (whichever came first) she'd get up, stretch, have some coffee. Elsewhere in the office people were panicking about poor sales and bad reviews, but none of this meant much to her. At lunch with Philip she listened to him talk about packaging and product marketing, but none of this meant much to her either. He worked for a company that churned out paperback romance novels. She wondered somewhat at his enthusiasm for the job, but Philip's life had a different scale than hers. "The computer training is invaluable," he explained. "Everything at the office is done on a computer monitor, Mom. Not a typewriter to be seen."

  Rose had a Royal which was thirty-five years old. It shouldn't have surprised her that the world had moved ahead of her, but it did. Philip lived on a dirty street in a part of town she had thought white people could not walk through. But no, he assured her, his once-devastated neighborhood was on the upswing now; it was nearly chic. The tiny apartment in which he lived was a jewel, even though it had only two rooms, and the tub was in the kitchen. One weekend when Owen was away at a conference he had invited her over for dinner, and to see the place. Rose didn't like the look of the street, the Puerto Rican teenagers with their radios slung over their shoulders, the stray kittens mewing on the sidewalk. There was graffiti on the buildings, empty rum bottles on the stoop. Inside, however, was exposed brick and mauve walls hung with framed posters. Philip had painted the outside of the tub bright red.

  After they ate dinner, Philip put on his coat to walk his mother to Broadway, where she could catch a cab. "This is a very African area," he said as they maneuvered their way among covens of menacing children. "The hallways of the buildings smell like Berber pepper."

  On the way out of the door they had to step over a man asleep in the vestibule. "Our doorman," Philip said, and laughed.

  "Philip," Rose said, "is that man all right?"

  "Don't worry," Philip said. "He lives here. Sometimes he just has trouble making it up the stairs."

  "I see."

  They walked down 106th Street. "How long do you think you'll stay in this place?" Rose asked.

  "As long as I can. The rent's dirt cheap, and the landlord would kill to get rid of me so he can up it. But it can't go co-op. I checked. Some obscure footnote to the building code, having to do with pipes or something."

  "This place?Co-op?" Rose was incredulous.

  "Believe it or not, it's happening all over the neighborhood."

  "My."

  They kept walking. On Amsterdam Avenue, a man was urinating in the gutter. "Is this where you go out?" Rose asked, looking away from the man.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know," Rose said. "What you do. With your friends."

  "Oh no," Philip said. "Not around here. In fact, lately I've been spending a lot of time in the East Village. It's a wild neighborhood—full of punks and street people and bad artists dressed up in outlandish clothes."

  "You're not any of those things," Rose said.

  Philip's mouth opened at that statement, but he didn't answer.

  Instead he looked away and wrapped his scarf tighter against his throat.

  Rose had the sense that she had asked the wrong question. Or asked it in the wrong way. What she meant was, Will you please explain to me what happened, why your life is so different from mine? But Philip said, "Have you decided if you're going to buy the apartment or not?"

  She smiled, and shook her head. "We're waiting to hear what the accountant has to say. And then what the lawyer has to say. But it's hard. Your father and I are so set in our ways."

  "I can't imagine you living anywhere else, quite frankly," Philip said. He looked away from her. "I hope it works out for you. Look, here comes a cab. I'll get it."

  Forget the cab, Rose wanted to say. Tell me something, anything. I am tired of living in the past. But the yellow cab had pulled up, and she had no choice but to get in.

  Philip's hand was cold as it took hers, his lips cold as he kissed her on the cheek. "I'll see you soon," he said. "Maybe lunch next week?"

  "Yes," she said, and wanted to say, No, not lunch. Then the cab door closed, and she was speeding downtown.

  "Cold night, huh, lady?" the driver said.

  "Sure is," said Rose.

  "I like working nights. Lots of guys prefer the days, but nights, you get more interesting customers. The later it is, the more interesting. I took a lady home to Fifth Avenue the other night? She asked for change, right? It turned out she was a guy."

  "Really," Rose said.

  "You bet," the driver said. "But I say, 'Live and let live.'"

  The driver was young. From above the glove compartment, a photograph of a pitted face with a bushy mustache contrasted oddly with the long, clean-shaven neck Rose stared at. A triptych of little girls was taped to the sunvisor: Slavic faces, big smiles on two, the one in the center thin and dangerous-looking.

  "Well, the world is changing, that's for sure," the driver said. "A lot of things you wouldn't have seen twenty years ago don't surprise you too much today."

  "So true," Rose said.

  When Rose woke up, late, on Sunday, Owen was already gone. As always, he'd be back in the evening. She wouldn't ask him where he'd been. It wouldn't be polite.

  Still, she wondered. He knew perfectly well what she did with her Sundays. She drank coffee and read the paper, and then she took out one of her manuscripts, and worked until it was time for "Sixty Minutes." She enjoyed the quiet of the apartment, the luxury of having the who
le place to herself. Owen was always out. Was he at school? Maybe there was a woman. But only on Sundays.

  Today she sat at her desk and read the manuscript of a manual on how to take care of elderly parents. The chapters had titles like "Diseases of the Brain" and "Incontinence: Fact and Myth." She liked the book; it seemed to her oddly comforting.

  On page 165, she attached to the manuscript a small yellow sheet of paper on which she wrote, "When one is standing up, one doesn't have a lap." She reread the sentence with some satisfaction and went on. Then, in the midst of "How to Say 'No!'—Nicely," Rose suddenly had a flash of suspicion that she had missed something a few pages back. She backtracked, and indeed, on page 172, found a misplaced modifier, unmarked. What had happened? She reread the paragraph again and did not recognize it. The paragraph described symptoms of senile dementia: forgetfulness, paranoia, compulsive hiding. She was certain she had never read it before. "The straying of the mind," she read. She put the manuscript aside.

  She decided not to do any more work today. Her mind was full of anxious thoughts about the apartment and about Philip, and rather than let them interfere with her work, she concluded, she might as well give them free reign to work themselves out or do themselves in. So she put on her coat and gloves and went outside, to walk a bit and breathe the cold air and clear her head. It had stopped raining. She pulled her scarf tight and headed north.

  Because it was Sunday, and mid-afternoon, most of the mid-town shops and restaurants were closed. The office towers announced their emptiness with patterns of lit windows and fluorescent, lifeless lobbies. The world was in apartments today, behind warmly illuminated curtains. Only bums were out, and people who looked lost. Smashed umbrellas tangled around her feet; on the avenue cars roared by, splashing her with puddled water. Still, she walked. She came to the intersection where the F.D.R. Drive grazes Sutton Place so closely that cars roar within inches of pedestrians, and stepped back, astounded by the maze of skyscrapers thrusting at contrary angles into the sky. Here a white-brick apartment building jutted out over the highway, and she wondered what the cars must look like from the apartment windows as they were sucked underneath it. Beyond the highway and its traffic and speed was the wild, choppy river, and beyond that Roosevelt Island, and the churring tramway, and the Pepsi-Cola sign. Queens. All this hugeness made Rose feel extraordinarily tiny, so she turned around and headed back to First Avenue, and made her way downtown. The sounds of the highway and the river were immediately muffled, as if the city had drawn its breath and was holding it in. She remembered an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in which an astronaut had run hopelessly through an empty town, trying to awaken life by screaming until he was hoarse. There was nothing there. It turned out that the town was his dream, that he was in an isolation tank, being tested for his eventual ejection into outer space. Godspeed, John Glenn. We're all with you.

  Other people, Rose thought, were camouflage. If someone were to jump her right now, drag her into an alley, who would hear? The noise certainly wouldn't carry up to the apartments. Hadn't a woman once been raped under her window while she slept or read or just sat there, never bothering to look outside?

  She ducked into the Horn & Hardart Automat at Forty-second Street. Christmas music chimed through the cavernous cafeteria, bouncing off Art Deco pillars and creating a stuttering chorus, the voices out-of-sync with one another. Behind that was a low hum of life, of talking. Rose stared at the little metal cubbyholes, each of which contained one discrete thing: a tuna fish sandwich with its accompanying mound of potato chips; a goblet of slick red Jell-O cubes. Most of them were empty. This place had entranced her twenty-five years ago, when it had seemed like something from the future. It had been featured prominently in a Depression-era comedy she had been taken to as a child in Chicago. Now she knew enough about the future to know that the Automat was an antique, an anachronism, a thing of the past. She got a cup of coffee from an elderly black woman with a stocking pulled over her hair and sat down and drank it. All the people in the Automat were old, and they were eating things like roast turkey with green beans or Salisbury steak. They ate slowly, and chewed each mouthful methodically, as Rose's mother had instructed her to do, to make it last. Most were alone, some in couples, and several looked as if they lived in the streets. What she wanted was a cheeseburger, a Whopper from Burger King, dripping with mayonnaise and mustard and soggy pickles. She indulged this secret vice only occasionally, and then with great guilt, wolfing down the criminal burger in a corner so she could get out as soon as possible, afraid of being seen, although she realized that anyone who saw her would probably be eating the same thing. Now, in the Automat, Rose saw herself, a tall middle-aged woman in a tightly buttoned coat, drinking a cup of coffee alone, and felt such pity for that woman that she drew her breath and put her hand on the table for ballast. Fifty-two years old, pensive-eyed, dark-haired; men called her "handsome." She gulped down what was left of her coffee and hurried out the door.

  It was drizzling again, but she kept walking. In the low Thirties and high Twenties there was a sudden burst of life—busy delis and warm, noisy Chinese restaurants and big, busy buildings with couples standing in front of them, hailing cabs. Then a dead region around Fourteenth Street, which made her think about Philip. A gang of Hispanic boys huddled under the marquee of an abandoned theatre, watching her. She kept going. There was no stopping now, even though it was getting dark and the wind was fierce. The voyage had her now. She walked down Third Avenue to St. Mark's Place, and turned into what she knew was the East Village. There were signs of the weekend everywhere: broken bottles; splotches of urine on the walls; purple-haired girls sitting on stoops, rubbing white, freckled arms for warmth. The quiet of an aftermath. She kept walking, through the Ukrainian district, past the Kiev and the other twenty-four-hour restaurants, and turned down Sixth Street,' where a flourish of Indian restaurants bloomed brightly, like exotic flowers: Ganges, Romna, Anar Bagh. What was here? She was going in circles now.

  At the corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue, holding her head down against the rain, she ran into Owen. It was like running into a friend from the office. The wind was blowing the tails of his trenchcoat up, and the ends of the red scarf she had knitted him were whipping his cheeks. He was walking very fast toward Ninth Street, his face pale and agitated, and then he was in front of her.

  "Hello," he said.

  "Hello," she said. "I took a walk, and—it just got longer and longer."

  "Uh-huh," he said. He burrowed his hands in his pockets and looked over his shoulder, lifted one foot from the ground and then the other.

  "I decided I felt like walking," Rose said.

  "Yes," Owen said. "I felt like it, too."

  "It's some day for it, let me tell you," Rose said.

  They stood there for a moment in the rain and the cold, lifting their feet up and down. Rose's toes were numb.

  "I'm thinking of going to that bookstore on St. Mark's Place," Owen said. "Would you like to join me?"

  Rose smiled, shook her head. "That's okay," she said. "I should be getting back. I have that Alzheimer's manuscript to finish for next week." She faltered. "Are you coming home soon?"

  "No, not quite yet," Owen said. "I have some things to do."

  "Okay. Well, I'll see you soon."

  Owen smiled. "Yes," he said. "Soon."

  "Okay. Well, bye."

  "Bye."

  They stood facing each other for a few more awkward seconds. Then Owen lifted his hand tentatively—half a wave—and walked away from her.

  She had to stay there on the corner a minute before she could move. She was stunned beyond surprise. They collided with each other every day in the living room, after all. Twenty-seven years of marriage, she thought, and this is the first time I've seen what he looked like when he thought I wasn't there, the first time I've stumbled on the life he leads alone. And what was he doing so far downtown? What was she doing? Why hadn't they had a cup of coffee together, ridden hom
e together?

  She turned and walked north. Her legs ached from the long voyage, and she hailed a cab, got in, was thankful that it was well heated. Inside her boots, her wet toes were thawing. She thought, Twenty-seven years of marriage, and I hardly know him. Riding in the cab she felt numb and stupid, cocooned by her life, for she had stumbled into her husband on a strange street corner, running some mysterious errand she knew nothing of, and they had spoken briefly like strangers, parted like strangers. What was surprising was that she hardly felt surprised at all.

  Owen walked on Sundays. That was all she knew. Perhaps he had someplace to go. Perhaps not. And now it was as if this tiny fact of his walking was all she knew about him. The slate of his life was clean, emptied in an instant. Who had she been living with all this time?

  It was snowing. The snow fell in wet gobs outside the cab's windows. The city brightened as night fell, until, through the fogged windows of Rose's cab, it looked as if it were lit by candles.

  Owen walked. It was not an activity; it was a condition. For miles, in thick boots, over the length of an island, he walked. He had no destination. His destination was a circle. He walked so that when he arrived home, to the warm light of the living room and the smell of dinner, these things would seem real to him, home would seem real. He walked to ward off the encroaching panic of a wet Sunday, an apartment about to be lost, a life nearing the beginning of its end. When he walked, he stopped only at newsstands. He observed the covers of the pornographic magazines, scrutinizing them without sentiment. It was a rotten day to be outdoors. Young men still wearing pajamas under their coats dashed from under awnings to grab copies of the Sunday paper. Others lingered on street corners or leaned against walls—prostitutes and hustlers, drug peddlers, hare krishna, anyone for sale or with something to sell—while the buyers wandered, circling their targets, searching faces for the proper nod, wink, smile. The signal. Owen was an expert at Sundays. He recognized the traps.