The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  In the middle of "Like a Virgin," Eliot said, "I don't really want to stay here. Let's go somewhere else."

  Philip faltered. "Yes, sure," he said.

  They slipped away, then, and went to Uncle Charlie's, where, in the midst of a massive and undifferentiated crowd of men, they ran into someone they both knew, Desmond, and his friend Brian, and a dancer named Martin. It was too loud and crowded to talk, so Martin suggested they go to the River Club to watch the wet jockey shorts contest "as a joke," but when they got there, it turned out the wet jockey shorts contest was on Tuesday night. They danced some more, and in the middle of dancing Eliot moved close to Philip, Philip thought, in order to suggest leaving, or deliver some whispered confidence, but when he bent his ear to Eliot's mouth, Eliot's nose hit his mouth. "Oh Christ, I'm sorry!" Philip said to Eliot, who was reeling against the wall, his hand over his nose. But Eliot said, "No, no, I'm fine. I was just trying to kiss you." "What?" Philip said. "Louder!" Eliot mouthed the words: I'm trying to kiss you. Then he kissed him. Philip was so surprised he almost laughed, but he caught himself, and kissed Eliot back, and put his arms around his neck.

  They stayed a while longer at the club, until they lost Brian and Desmond, and Martin decided to go home, which was uptown. Philip noticeably didn't offer to share a cab with him. "Well," Eliot said, as they stood outside on the curb. "Would you like to go to Boy Bar?"

  Philip smiled. "Sure," he said.

  At Boy Bar, the bouncers, two tall, emaciated young men with shellacked hair under their bowler hats, were standing just inside the door to escape the cold. "Good to see you, Eliot," one of them said. He was reading from a large red sociology textbook. Philip told Eliot a story about the one gay bar in the town where he'd gone to college. The owner employed his mother washing dishes. When the bar closed at three, and you were waiting in line to get your coat, you'd see her in the back—a pasty old woman with a white apron twisted around her middle, putting hundreds of beer steins through a big industrial washer. Eliot laughed. They were standing in a room painted in Necco wafer shades of green and pink, and The Exorcist was playing on a video screen. A dozen or so men stood lined up against the wall, their eyes large and bright as those of nocturnal animals, and occasionally threw each other needful glances. Philip knew from experience that they didn't really expect to pick anyone up this late but were staying out of a simple fear of going home alone. He watched the movie. During the scene where Linda Blair masturbates with a crucifix, Eliot began to rub Philip's back and shoulders without ever taking his eyes from the screen. His hands bunched the tightened muscles together, and Philip's eyes closed.

  "Let's go," Eliot said.

  Then they walked silently together from Boy Bar to East Sixth Street, where Eliot lived. There were ten or twenty tiny Indian restaurants on the block, their names glared from all directions. Philip's clothes were thick with cigarette smoke from all the bars and clubs. He sneezed, and the phlegm on his handkerchief was black. They walked down East Sixth Street, and Eliot turned the key in the door to his building. Cumin scented the hallways. They climbed three flights of stairs to the apartment, and Eliot put his fingers to his lips. Inside the door a figure thrashed and breathed on a small cot in the kitchen. Jerene, he mouthed.My roommate. They tiptoed past Jerene, into the second room. A blue futon lay in the middle of the floor, clothes strewn around it. They sat down, and their arms went around each other, their lips touched. Eliot's breath was warm and faintly sweet. Philip's hand moved slowly down the length of Eliot's left leg, until finally it lifted the cuff of his jeans. His socks were brilliant, as Sally had promised: royal blue, with a ring of white snowflakes around the fringe.

  They made love, that night, with passion and industry, then afterwards lay on the blue futon, Eliot asleep, Philip wide awake, his heart beating too fast. In the morning he realized that he must have been asleep for some of that night, but that his mind had been so full of Eliot that he had dreamed he was still awake, gazing at him; he was living, at that moment, the strongest wish-fulfillment fantasy he could muster; his dreams ran parallel to his reality. The radiator in Eliot's apartment made wheezing noises. Inside its world of pipes water sloshed and high-pitched whistles sounded, like wind in the country in winter. At one point Eliot woke to find Philip staring at him, wide-eyed. "You can't sleep," Eliot said. "Here, let me rub your back." Philip rolled over and Eliot's fingers began their tugging. "Imagine that inside that radiator is a tropical island," Eliot whispered, "and a hurricane, and a little raft. And on that raft is a little bed—our bed. The wind howling, the rain pouring. But we're safe on our raft. It tosses and turns, but it will never sink." A sound like rushing water came out of the radiator, as if on cue. Philip's mind was full of thunder-swept islands, boats, arms clutching for survival. Images from the novel he was editing. Or was it from that poem his mother used to read to him before he went to bed? What were the words? "Far and few... far and few... they went to sea in a sieve..."

  Far and few, far and few

  Are the lands where the Jumblies live.

  Their heads are green and their hands are blue

  And they went to sea in a sieve...

  The voice was Eliot's. Philip opened his eyes, and turned over.

  "I was just thinking of that poem," Philip said.

  "You were?" said Eliot. "Well, keep thinking of it."

  Philip looked up at him, puzzled. Then he closed his eyes. The raft rocked, but he was safe.

  Three Sundays later winter started. The wind was so fierce that on a certain block of Madison Avenue, where huge buildings towered over brownstones and tenements and the street tilted upward at a sharp angle, two parked cars were blown wholeacross the street. Hardly anyone witnessed this spectacle except the bag ladies who had staked out territories for the night in the dark indentations of grilled and grated storefronts. Newspapers clutched to their chests, they sat back and watched the refuse of the world blow by—mangled umbrellas, lost gloves, a child's tricycle. At the intersection of Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, most of the mice had died from cold or shock or from having been run over by cars. Caught up in a dust of snow, their carcasses blew down the boulevard, block after block, as if in flight. Philip, in the taxicab with Eliot, found himself, just for a moment, turning to notice the mosaic of bright yellow squares encrusting the horizon of skyscraper spires, and beyond it, the resonant glow of more distant East Side lights, flickering and splintering, as if seen through water. The snow fell before this vision of the city, and Philip imagined that he was inside one of those tiny globed worlds where the air is viscous water, and the bright snowflakes little chips of plastic that fly up when the globe is shaken, then slowly fall back to earth. He looked up at the sky and tried to make out the vast, transparent shell, with its faint hint of reflection. My God, he was thinking, I live in that thing.

  ROSE TOLD PHILIP a story. A woman from her office had gone with her husband on a cruise around the world, a dream second honeymoon, and they had gotten off the ship to spend a day on the island of Crete. Somewhere in the course of that hot afternoon spent bargaining for trinkets and staring at ruins in the sun, a delivery boy rode a rusty Solex around a blind corner andinto that woman's husband, knocking him against the street and killing him. In a split second, the husband, who only moments before had been worrying to her about the squat toilets, was dead, gone, out of the world twenty years too early, on a day trip they had debated not making, on an island they had no ties with and would never again visit in their lives. Then that woman was a widow, and she was being escorted by two policemen to a cool, dark office, sat face to face opposite the pimple-faced killer, a boy of fourteen who shook and wept and cried out in Greek, "Don't kill me! Don't kill me!" It was funny, the woman told Rose, but sitting there, her first instinct had been to go over and put her arms around the boy and tell him everything was all right. But she didn't. A man with a mustache that extended from earlobe to earlobe asked her questions in an English she could hardly understand. What co
uld she tell him? Her husband had wanted to stay on the ship because his stomach was bothering him; that fish last night, she'd warned him against it. She was curious about the shopping. He came with her at the last minute, on the spur of the moment. Of course, somewhere she still believed it hadn't happened at all, because it shouldn't have; it was all too fast, and nobody's fault. His clothes were still in the closet of their cabin, the soap still wet from the last time he'd washed his hands. Only as she approached the ship that afternoon, escorted by the captain and the cruise director, and the whistle blew, a high, piercing wail against which she had to cover her ears, did the protective membrane burst, making her cry out as loudly (she thought) as the ship's horn cried out, announcing that departure was imminent, and she must leave him there forever.

  Rose told Philip this story one afternoon when he was sitting in her kitchen, eating cake and looking distracted. She said that the woman had told it over and over to everyone at the office, as if by perpetual telling she might find some logic that would prove once and for all that this death couldn't have been avoided. And there lay the horror of it. All it had taken was one wrong move, one wrong step. If they had browsed a bit longer at the little store, if they had crossed the street a bit faster, it wouldn't have happened. The boy couldn't have known; it wasn't his fault. If anyone was to blame, it was the city, for not installing a proper stoplight, but cities—particularly foreign cities—were generally indifferent to grief and sorrow.

  Rose finished. Philip looked at her respectfully. "I hardly know what to say," he said, and went back to the piece of cake she'd put before him. What was there to say? In fact, the story didn't seem nearly as awful to Philip as it did to his mother. Chance made sense to him, more sense than cause. He believed that all the turnings of life, including its turn into death, were purely arbitrary; and he felt wiser than Rose, who was as bewildered by the meanderings that had led her to where she sat now, alive, as she was by the leisurely steps that had brought a stranger to be hurled against the ancient stones of that faraway street. Of course, such feelings were a new phenomenon for him, and had entirely to do with Eliot. Before Eliot, Philip had lived so long without physical love that he believed it to be the only thing in the world he needed. He had fluctuated from one extreme to another, and this, he believed, put him in a very different position from that of his mother, who had, as far as Philip could see, dwelled for years in that middle ground between emptiness and fulfillment, a realm where contentment and despair coexist as dual sensations so similar, and so faint, that they become impossible to distinguish, like the hiss of the radiator and the hum of the dishwasher.

  This Sunday, she arrived home from her voyage downtown wet and disoriented, pulled off her raincoat and clothes, stumbled into the shower, and stood there under the rush of steam and water until she was warm again. Then she dusted herself with lavender-scented powder, put on a long, loose bathrobe, and sat: down in her favorite chair to read.

  A few minutes into her book she looked at the clock. It was nearly dinnertime, and still Owen wasn't home. She could not quite believe that she had run into him this afternoon, that she had spoken with him as if he were a passing acquaintance. It was as if someone else had been living with her all those years, eating dinner with her, sleeping in her bed, and raising her child. Owen had been replaced; he had replaced himself, gone somewhere else. Or perhaps it was Rose who was gone, Rose who had been walking entranced or asleep for twenty years and was just waking up to discover, like an invalid emerging from a coma, how much time had actually passed. Twenty-seven years.

  She put her book away, settled down on the sofa, and turned 0n the television. A nurse who was gentle and kindly the last time Rose had watched the series had become, over a month's interval, a psychopathic murderer. Rose was confused. She tried to follow the story line, to figure out what had happened to the nurse; but where was Owen? To her surprise, she found herself wishing more than anything that it had not happened, that she might relive the day and take another route, miss seeing Owen. But of course it had happened, she had seen him. The strangeness of the meeting altered things; she could not concentrate, and remembered the years of Sunday nights watching television, so taken for granted, as precious and rare.

  The television show was getting out of hand, so Rose switched it off, stood up, and walked to the window. Outside, the wind blew the hat off a woman on the street, who ran after it, past a bus, a cab, onto the sidewalk. She thought, Really, you're exaggerating. It hasn't been that long. For the first fourteen years or so, anyway, Philip was growing up, they had a child to occupy them. Maybe five years Owen had been gone, at most. And certainly, there had been moments when a great desire for change welled up in Rose, moments when, as she had long ago read in Proust (and she always, always remembered), the heartstrings yearn to be plucked at any cost, the soul tires of contentment, the body craves any kind of change, even decimation, even death. During those rare episodes of wanting, Rose had always looked to someone else, not to Owen. Could that have been it? she wondered now. It had all happened years ago, and besides, he could never have found out; she covered her tracks. But what if he did know? What if he knew, and had decided, rather than leave her outright, simply to disappear, and see if she noticed? And had she noticed? Not until today.

  There was a familiar rattling noise at the door. Owen's key was a copy of a copy of a copy and didn't quite fit the lock; he always had to fiddle with it a few seconds before he could get the door open. For years he had been muttering about getting a new key made, and for years Rose had had a joke with him about what a convenient signal the rattling noise was when she was in bed with the doorman and had to shunt him quickly out the service entrance. Owen never got the key fixed, enjoying a little, she suspected, the secret knowledge he had acquired of its quirks and nuances.

  The door opened. Owen's raincoat dripped onto the carpet. He took his Totes hat and held it gingerly over the doormat, and bits of slush dropped to the floor. Only then did he look up and notice Rose, who had stood up from her chair and immediately sat down again.

  "Hello," she said.

  "Hello," he said.

  "My God, you're wet," she said. "Did you walk all the way home?" Then she caught her breath. Without ever intending to, she had acknowledged their meeting, that strange, numb moment on the street which had seemed to take place on the threshold of another life.

  "Yes, I did," Owen said. "I don't know why... I felt like it, for no particular reason."

  "Give me your coat," Rose said. She began unbuttoning, and Owen's hand dodged into the coat pocket, closed around the small, well-creased wedge of paper, and pulled it out as the coat pulled away from him into Rose's hands. Surreptitiously he replaced it in his pants pocket. His hand remained there, fondling it, re-creasing the edges.

  Rose was taking his coat. He felt a sudden stab of guilt, watching her, recognizing as if for the first time in years all the good she had done him, their comfortable life together, this home built to the precise measurements of their compatibility.

  "Thanks," he said. He could hardly say, "I'm sorry," though he wanted to. He tried to think how many Sundays he had done just this—come back from one or another pornographic movie theatre, purged (for the moment) of a week's tension, a week's need, and imagined that in a single afternoon the hell had been flushed from his life. Safe at home, he would feel the sort of relief that a child feels when he commits some act of petty theft and is not caught. He would think of the risk he had taken, contemplate the danger of the situation, and nestle in the absolute safety of his chair, with his book, his cake. Yet each week, it seemed, the hell would begin creeping back a little earlier, after just a day, an evening, an hour. With it came desire of a sort he had never imagined possible, and the only thing that kept him from going back to the theatre during the week was his immense fear of being seen. He would wait until Sunday, a day he figured was somehow hallowed, and therefore safe. He allowed himself Sundays. Yet each Sunday night, returning home, h
e would wonder how much longer he could keep this up. First he had been satisfied with the films alone; then a quick hand-job in the back row; then, over the years, being sucked, sucking, fingers up his anus; once, a muffled attempt at penetration. Sometimes his repulsion at his own actions was so great that he would find himself spitting onto the sidewalk, over and over, desperate to get that taste out of his mouth. Each week he wanted more.

  He stood in the hall while Rose hung his coat over the towel rack in the bathroom. He wrapped his arms around himself and thought: Alex Melchor. It amazed him to discover, after all this time, that he still had the capacity to feel joy, and his pleasure at feeling pleasure was itself such a remarkable sensation that in the end the actual note really didn't mean that much. Anyway, he reminded himself, things were as bad as ever. He and Rose still had to make a decision about the apartment. Nothing had changed. No, everything was as it had been. And as he repeated those words to himself, his hand felt inside his pocket and stroked the note. It had frightened him at first. On the way back he had had to duck into a coffee shop and wait until he was sure no one was looking before he dared unfold it and re-read it. It really did say what he thought it had said. There really was a phone number—he had already memorized it in case he should lose the note—although still, the idea of actually dialing the number was inconceivable. He was taking great pleasure, as he stood there, creating mathematical patterns out of the seven digits, figuring out keys to memory, adding and subtracting and multiplying.

  He walked into the bathroom and said, "Rose." She turned from where she stood, startled, and looked at him. He was smiling at her.