The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  "My Rose," he said, and embraced her. He wanted suddenly to tell her all about this man, this Alex Melchor, this number the first three digits of which added up to the same sum as the last lour digits. He wished she were his friend, his confidante. Such absurd urges to confess had come on him before, however, and he had learned to control them. She was his wife. And thinking of Alex Melchor, his hand, his eyeglasses, Owen was taken by sudden desire; he bent and kissed her. Then he pulled away. "It was nice running into you today," he said.

  "Yes," she said. "Funny, wasn't it?" She went back to hanging his coat on the towel rack.

  "I'll be in the living room," he said, walking away from her. Well, he thought, perhaps I've gone to that movie theatre for the last time. He smiled at that thought, remembering the first time—the horror he had felt, the sudden stab of realization that he was, as he had always feared, a homosexual. And what had he done? He had gone flying out of that theatre and straightaway practically raped poor Rose on the living room couch, trying to see her, only her, to force the images from that screen out of his mind. But when he came, it was men he was thinking of, even though he said, "Rose, Rose," and she answered him, "Yes, I'm here, I'm here. I won't let you go." That he had lied to her—that he had built a marriage with her on the basis of a sexual lie—was a regret of such magnitude that he could not get around it; it was therefore one which, at this moment, he chose to ignore. For years, after all, he had told himself that if someone were to ask him, pursue him, if someone were to give him a chance, he would take it. He'd never imagined it would actually happen; he was, after all, a married man, completely heterosexual in the eyes of the world. Now it had. The chance lay in his pocket. Someone named Alex Melchor desired him. It would be simple. He would call. He would call and say—oh, never mind what he would say. He moved across the living room, sat down in his chair, took up his book. He knew he could live off this possibility just as a possibility for a long time; he knew it could keep him going for days now, because a starving man has a different notion of plenty.

  Rose sat in the bathroom, staring at Owen's coat. Across the room her face, in the mirror, was obscured by mist. She put her hand to the place on her cheek that Owen had just kissed.

  JERENE, Eliot's roommate, was typing at the kitchen table when Philip and Eliot got home. Her fingers flew across the keys in a whirl of motion, faster than Philip had ever seen. To her left was a pile of color-coded notebooks; to her right, a neat stack of paper, dense with prose. This was the text of Jerene's mysterious dissertation, on which she had been at work for seven years. The current title was "The Phenomenon of Invented Languages," but Eliot had told Philip that it changed every month.

  Jerene had been up since seven. In the course of the day she had done the dishes, worked five hours at her job at the library, read three articles, and typed twenty-seven pages. But even though the sun was setting, it was still morning for Philip and Eliot; they shuffled through the door like jet-lagged travelers, people out-of-sync with time. "Ah, the decadence of youth," she said, ripping a sheet from her typewriter with a dramatic flourish. Then she stood up, unbending from her sitting position like a crane stretching itself out to demolish a building. She was just over six feet tall, and her height was accented by her sinuousness. She had long legs, the muscles braided like rope. Short-cropped hair, dark and dense as algae, clung to her scalp.

  She slept on a cot in the corner of the kitchen. It had a monastic look about it, the corners tight and angular, the covers smooth, but when Eliot sat down it softened, as if giving in to the temptations of the flesh. "I see you've been your usual productive self today," he said.

  Jerene nodded. She had always risen early. A mental alarm clock rang through her nerves every morning, sending through her spasms of anxiety that only work seemed to alleviate. She worked all the time. When there was no work she invented it, or helped other people with theirs.

  "What were you writing about today?" Eliot asked. He had taken a cardboard half-gallon of orange juice from the refrigerator and was drinking from it.

  "Today?" Jerene said. "Today I've been writing my chapter on these famous twins who invented their own language. Little girls. I don't know if you've heard of the case, but after they were discovered there was a big debate over whether they should be separated and forced to learn English, or kept together so the language could be studied. As you can probably guess, the social workers won out, for the good of the children. I suppose it was the right thing. Still, when I think of what could have been learned... There are tapes of them talking, you know. The sounds are like nothing you've ever heard before, nothing you could even imitate. It makes me sad. It seems to me the world has enough lost languages."

  "Is that what your dissertation is about?" Philip asked. "Lost languages?"

  Jerene smiled at him. "More or less," she said. "More or less." She really did not want to explain about the seven years right now, or the dozens of topic and tide changes. She had friends who encouraged her not to finish, urging process as more important than product—a kind of Marxist-feminist, anti-capitalist, non-goal-oriented academics, they said. She knew only that as long as the Philosophy Department gave her money to fill her life with work, she was going to do just that. Library work was the kind she liked most, the kind that best calmed her, kept her grounded. She could spend hours examining sociological abstracts, or browsing through back issues of arcane periodicals, or sitting in a brightly lit cubicle taking notes from old monographs. She needed work that would completely occupy her, that would leave no space for rumination on her own life or condition.

  "Anyway," she continued to Philip and Eliot, "I've decided to focus this chapter not on the language itself but on the response, which is in a sense more central to my thesis: what it means that a private, invented language must be sacrificed 'for the good of the child.'"

  "So I presume the little girls were successfully taught English?" Eliot asked. He was breaking eggs into a pan, cooking breakfast.

  "Oh yes. They were separated, and kept apart by the social workers. For days and days afterwards, of course, they probably cried, probably spoke the language to themselves and wondered why no one responded. After a while they lapsed into silence. And then they began to adjust. Bit by bit they started to pick up the new language. Now they're nearly twenty; they're probably in college. I wonder if they remember the secret language, if they still speak it in private, or dream in it. Probably not. Probably their early childhood is like a dream to them, the way it's supposed to be for children who are kidnapped and raised by different parents. Something they're not even sure happened, something they can hardly believe is real when people tell them about it."

  "It must have had something to do with what they heard," Philip said. "The language, I mean. It couldn't have just popped out of thin air."

  "No one knows," Jerene said. "But language can begin as a very arbitrary thing. A woman was committed to a mental hospital for something like forty-eight years because the doctors said she 'babbled.' And then it turned out she was a Ukrainian immigrant. No one at the hospital recognized that she was speaking Ukrainian."

  "It seems like a shame that the twins' language couldn't have been somehow recorded or preserved."

  "Yes," Jerene said, "it is a shame." The smell of eggs frying was making her queasy. She steadied her gaze on the window. "I would love to compare the twins' language with some others," she said. "With Basque, perhaps, or the dialects of Hunza, to see if people invent languages the same way, if in a different kind of world the twins' language could have flourished, could have become the language of a culture. But I've realized that's something I can never do. What's relevant really is that the only possible choice, in the case of these twins, was the choice that was made. The language had to die. It's the integration of those little girls which is pertinent—that, and what was lost with it."

  She sighed, and Eliot slid the eggs from the pan onto a plate. Philip was looking at her with confusion and curiosity, and she wo
ndered why she always ended up in this position, explaining herself to Eliot's lovers. How odd and foolish she must sound to Philip, the perpetual graduate student lost in the fog of her obscure interests, without perspective on larger matters of the "real world."

  Eliot she loved. When her writing was going badly, he came to her, his voice that of a mother assuring her ugly-duckling daughter that love will soon blossom in her path. "It'll come," he'd say, rubbing her shoulders as she wept at the typewriter. "It'll come."

  She herself had no lover. She considered her work enough of a lover—sometimes gentle and comradely, sometimes fickle, elusive, frustrating, sometimes bringing her to unimagined heights of gratification, or reducing her to rage and inarticulate despair. Occasionally, on the days of rage and inarticulate despair, she put on her leather jacket and ventured uptown to an elegant women's disco called Shescape, and there she stood against a wall, a lit cigarette in her hand, and waited. Usually the women looked at her first. Because she was both very tall and very black, they almost always expected her to take control, to do with them what she would, and this saddened her; once in a while she would have liked to have given up that control to someone else. Still, she fulfilled their fantasies, even binding one girl's small wrists with ribbon when she asked her to. And then in the mornings she would ride the subway home, tiptoe into the apartment, where Eliot lay utterly still in his close, fetid room. Nothing stirred him. She showered, changed her clothes, and headed to the library, where the work—object of her true passion—awaited her, and after a few hours came home to find the apartment steamy from the shower, and Eliot, wrapped in a towel, shaving.

  "How did the night go?"

  "Okay," she'd say. "Yours?"

  "The same. I went to a stupid party in SoHo, and then to the Palladium. Danced a lot."

  She enjoyed standing there on those afternoons, watching him shave. After he finished, they'd sometimes head downstairs to the Indian restaurant run by their neighbors and dip strange breads in hot curries. He was often and casually in love, and talked about it over these dinners. "His name is Philip."

  "What's he like?"

  "Oh—bright-eyed, eager to please.Very sweet, very unsure of himself. I met him through Sally—you know, that girl who works at Goldman, Sachs?"

  "Do you love him? " Jerene asked.

  Eliot smiled. "No, alas."

  "But he loves you."

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  In the oncoming dark she walked with him through the streets of the East Village. Invariably he had some social engagement he had to get to. She kissed his cheek and headed home. During the evenings she read eighteenth-century novels no one had ever heard of, except on Saturdays, when without fail she watched "The Facts of Life" on Eliot's little television. She was asleep by the time he got home. Sometimes, in the mornings, she'd find strange socks in the bathroom, or contact lenses boiling on the kitchen stove, and know he had brought someone home.

  Once she startled a naked young man in the toilet, and he practically screamed.

  "Sorry," she said, backing away and closing the door.

  In a few minutes he came out, sheepish, wrapped in a towel. "I'm Philip," he said.

  "Nice to meet you, Philip. I'm Jerene, Eliot's roommate."

  "He told me. He's still asleep."

  "Go back to bed," Jerene said. "You look exhausted."

  "We were out really late," he said, and smiled, pleased and surprised to be part of a "we." "Well. It was nice to meet you."

  "It was nice to meet you, too."

  "Good night, then—or, I mean, good morning."

  "Bye."

  He pulled back the Japanese door that separated the living room from the kitchen and disappeared from her.

  In the kitchen, now, eating eggs, this same Philip stared at her.

  "It sounds wonderful, really fascinating to me," he said, and she smiled. "What?" she said.

  "Your dissertation. I'd love to read it."

  She looked toward the window, smiling away her life. "Just the tedious pontifications of a graduate student," she said. "Nothing earth-shattering. I wouldn't waste your time with it if I were you."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that," he said. He took another bite of his eggs and turned back toward Eliot.

  Jerene was adopted. She believed that her earliest memory—of a swatch of light bisecting a pink rabbit-patterned blanket—came from before her adoption, from some moment in the first three months of her life, if for no other reason than because she could find no such blanket among her baby relics, stowed for years by her mother in a cedar-scented trunk in the attic. Her adoptive parents were a wealthy lawyer and his wife who in 1957 held the distinction of being the only black couple to own a home in Westport, Connecticut. Jerene had a photograph of herself that was taken just after the adoption, her hair done up with pink velvet ribbons, posed between her father and her mother in front of an absurdly overdecorated, white-frosted Christmas tree. In the picture, Sam looks out at the camera, unsmiling, dressed as usual in a tie and black pin-striped suit, while Margaret, her hair piled on her head in puffed whorls, holds her baby daughter up on a table, clinging to her tiny knees as if for dear life. Jerene has just barely learned to stand, but she is standing in the picture. Her mouth is open, her legs buckling, as if she might topple any second. All three of them are stiff with discomfort, like people posed in costumes from another century for comic effect. When Jerene looked at the picture these days, she felt sorry for all of them.

  If she knew anything about her parents' past, it was that they had fought hard to get to where they were. They told her so all the time, hoping, she supposed, to instill in her the kind of respect for hard work that would ensure that she never slip back into the poverty from which they had pulled her. About their own origins they were evasive, as if they feared that too much exposure to a less privileged world would lead to its engulfing her. Only rarely would they take her to visit her grandparents and aunts and uncles in the city and then only for the afternoon. When Jerene was seven, Margaret's mother, Irene, came to visit them in Westport, and Sam and Margaret took her to tea at an elegant restaurant, where elderly black women in white aprons served crumpets and petits fours from silver trays. The four of them sat there not speaking, and Irene, dressed in an out-of-style velvet hat with flowers on it, eyed the pastries suspiciously and refused to touch them. Everyone—the waitresses as well as the other patrons—gave the family curious, condescending glances, as if to question whether they belonged there. Still, for two hours they stuck it out, sitting stiff-backed in their chairs, smiling, pretending enjoyment as if their lives depended on it, and in certain ways their lives did depend on it. And even though she was just a child, Jerene sensed how unfair it was, that after all they had gone through, her parents should still be considered outsiders at that restaurant and in the town. Sometimes, on weekends, Sam and Margaret socialized with other wealthy black couples they had sought out or met through business. They drove to Larchmont or Noroton Heights, or the other couples came to their own big Tudor house and exclaimed over the reproduction Louis Quatorze furniture, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the new washer and dryer. These elaborate, formal dinner parties, presided over by a maid hired for the night, and full of the clinking of glasses and the peal of shy female laughs at gruff male jokes, confirmed Jerene's impression, at the age of seven, that the world consisted of two parallel and more or less identical sets of people—one dark, one light—just as the dolls on the toy store shelves always came in two versions, one dark, one light. Only the black dolls were hers, she knew. And yet there were more of the white ones, and they were prettier. Black dolls, she would tell Eliot years afterwards, provided her introduction to the politics of race.

  Jerene knew she was adopted, but from an early age she was instructed to keep this fact a secret within the family. "Just be glad you've got all the things you've got," her mother would tell her, when Jerene asked about her origins. "You would've grown up mighty differently if we
hadn't come along." Defeated, she would return to her room, her refugee's good fortune choking her. She could not get over the accidental nature of her blessed life; it made everything else wrong. With frantic exuberance Margaret dressed Jerene up in pink, lacy blouses, curled her hair and tied it with ribbons, sometimes painted her tiny but perfect nails bright red, until she resembled the black dolls that sat on her bedroom shelf—Black Barbie, Black Baby Talks-a-lot, Black Baby Alive—all identical to the originals, but dark, darkened, wrong, just as she was wrong, just as her parents were wrong and their friends were wrong, clinking their glasses in the Parkses' living room. They were alone in Westport. Across the street was a house with a FOR SALE sign that no one bought for a year, and Jerene understood, from conversations she heard between her parents, that somehow they were responsible not only for one family's leaving but for another family deciding at the last minute not to buy. Coming home from shopping with her mother, Jerene would see notes slipped under the door, notes her mother would snatch up and ball in her fist, unopened. Racism was genteel in Westport, she would later tell Eliot; it always came in an envelope.

  Once she was roused early in the morning, put in the car, driven through familiar streets of green lawns and houses, then down a long, grass-lined highway into a region of small, lopsided buildings where children her own age played in earnest among garbage cans and cars. They parked beside a glass door shot through with cracks, above which a sign announced BRITEVIEW LAUNDRY, and went inside, into that hot room full of steam and the sweet smell of fabric softener that Jerene would never forget. Her grandfather wore a T-shirt browned with sweat and tobacco juice; she did not want to touch him. But her grandmother, a bandanna twisted around her head, glowed and shone like something newly polished as she hoisted huge dripping sheets from washing machines. She turned, smiled, knew not to embrace Sam and Margaret in their suits. And then, as they all left together, Jerene's grandfather pulled the heavy metal grating down over the steamy glass windows of the laundromat, and they got into the back seat of the big car with Jerene. "It's a treat, riding," Jerene's grandmother Nellie said. She held Jerene on her lap, whispering nonsense in her ear as Sam drove them to the tiny apartment of his childhood, with its cracked, impossibly narrow halls, and there they sat for an hour on stiff-backed chairs in the little sitting room, eating cookies and drinking lemonade. Jerene always remembered the hand-shaped splotch on the kitchen wall, which she thought was a part of somebody's shadow; on the way home she would wonder who it was, the poor person whose shadow was missing a hand.