The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  She wanted to understand Rhea. She invited her over for lunch and said, "You know, I can't believe you take all that crap Karl gives you. I wouldn't."

  Rhea looked at her, surprised. "It's not crap," she said. "He's very funny. He's all right. It's me."

  "You!"

  "Yes," Rhea said. "He's explained it all very well. You see, he's got this real talent for making people like him, and he's very popular with other women. And I get jealous. He says that kind of love is too needy, too intense. He can't respond to it. As long as I refuse to relax, as long as I insist on feeling inadequate, or getting jealous every time he makes another woman laugh, he's not going to be able to love me. And he's right. I've got to relax. I've got to ease off. But it's easier said than done for me."

  "Forgive me for butting in," Rose said. "But I don't think that's the whole story. Doesn't he have to give something too? Don't you think you'd be happier if he didn't flirt so much?"

  "It's all in the eye of the beholder," Rhea said. "I see it as flirting. He sees it as just being friendly, just being nice."

  At that moment Philip burst into the kitchen with Mira, the Mutters' little daughter. She and Philip were talking to one another in Italian, having picked up the language much more easily than their parents. Now they spoke with each other all the time in this private tongue of theirs, passing back and forth small secrets, going through complex verbal rituals. This worried Rhea; it impressed Rose, who found herself much less at ease in negotiating Rome than her little son, upon whom she often relied to translate when irate or confused shopkeepers threw up their hands at her, unable to understand her requests. Philip had, at some mysterious and crucial point when her back was turned, changed from a baby into a child. It seemed to have happened quite suddenly, sometime during his third year. All at once he had a face that she recognized as his face. The photographs she took of him now were the sort that people would look at years later and say, "You look just the same." His name was suddenly his name, marking him, and not just a testament to the hours Rose and Owen had spent choosing it. He spoke, and more alarmingly, did not speak, while behind his eyes a mind just beginning to recognize itself generated thoughts that had nothing to do with her. Soon he would be keeping secrets from her; soon after that lying. And then, of course, he would leave her.

  It was already happening. As he grew older, Rose seemed to know less and less about him. He was industrious and diligent, and spent his evenings in his room, working on exhaustive projects. Early on he had his stuffed animals arranged in his room according to a precise and private geography. Later, he became fascinated by road maps and would draw elaborate plans for imaginary cities and suburbs. Then he created a whole series of subway systems with numbered, named, and color-coded lines and would toil for hours striving to make a perfectly proportioned map. He never shared these projects with his parents unless they asked him to. He seemed to have no real need for their attention or approval. He took care of himself.

  In Rome, this independent-mindedness surprised Rose. She was used to Philip's babyhood, when he had liked nothing better than to sit on her lap and gaze at her face. Now, when he wasn't running around the neighborhood with Mira, he stayed by himself in his room, busy with some project. He hardly seemed to notice her. Perhaps that was why she didn't bother to close his door that afternoon, after Rhea left, when Karl came over. She supposed later that on some level she had been expecting Karl. He sat with her, talking, and she found herself, to her own surprise, wanting to touch his thick, well-fed body. With his rich laugh and quick eyes, he radiated the corpulent, easy good humor of a fertility god. He sat very close to her, so close that his breath, sweet as a child's, tickled her cheek. He had been admiring her breasts for a long time, he told her. She looked away, surprised by his frankness, by the lust in his eyes, which did not waver from hers. Then he told her exactly how he wanted to touch her, and what he wanted to do to her; how good it would feel. She felt his hand on her skirt. "Karl," she said, "I'm not sure what to say." But she knew what she was going to do. She was going to find out what made Rhea so hungry.

  Two o'clock churchbells rang all over the city.

  Near the end of their stay, the Benjamins went with the Mutters to spend a weekend at a friend's villa in the Umbrian countryside. It was an elegant villa, the halls dry and stony and lined with terra-cotta Madonnas. In the back was an old topiary garden, shrubs carved into the shapes of wild birds, curlicues, Romulus and Remus and the wolf giving suck. The Benjamins arrived first. While his parents unpacked, Philip sat on the stony gravel of the courtyard, staring up at the umbrella pines overhead, and the columns of noble cypress, and beyond them the walls of a tiny hill town where they were going the next evening to eat wild boar. Soon he heard the sound of wheels against the gravel. It was Rhea and Karl and Mira, in their ancient Citroen. They parked near where Philip sat, and as Rhea got out she called to him, "Philip, help me with some of this food." He didn't hear her. His attention had been caught by a fountain in the garden, and he ran off to stick his hand under the slimy water dribbling from the mouth of an ancient stone fish.

  "Philip," Rhea called again. "Philip!" Her voice was suddenly, unexpectedly furious, but for what reason? He turned around to see. She was standing there, staring at him, her hands on her hips. Her huge eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks streaked with tears. She marched up to him, pulled him onto his feet, and slapped him on the hand. "Philip Benjamin," she said, "I have never met such a selfish, inconsiderate boy in my life! Did you hear me calling you? I said, did you hear me calling you?"

  He looked up at her, dazed, and did not answer.

  "Answer me!" she shouted. Her voice was hoarse with rage, nearly cracking. "Answer me when I ask you a question. Did you hear me calling you?"

  He did not answer. He stood before her, and she raised her hand, as if to strike him. He screamed, and shielded his face with his fists. But when he opened his eyes again, her hand was still motionless in front of her face, and she was looking at it as if it was something inanimate, a flower or a stick she'd picked up.

  Rose, who had heard the shouting in the kitchen, ran out to see what was going on. "What's happened?" she shouted. "Is anyone hurt?"

  "I asked him to help me and he refused," Rhea said, her voice suddenly calm, distant. "He sat there and deliberately disregarded me."

  "Philip," Rose said. "Is this true?"

  He did not answer her.

  "Philip, answer me," she said.

  Still he said nothing. Rose grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward her. "Is this true?" Rose said, and her voice was panicked. "You just sat there when Rhea asked you to help her?"

  It was then that he started crying. Rose looked at him, looked at Rhea (her wild, enraged eyes), pushed Philip away. He pawed frantically, trying to get back to her. "Oh, God," Rose said suddenly. "Philip, honey, come here." But before she could catch him up in her arms, he had run to the back of the house and crawled inside a thorny shrub carved into the shape of a bird.

  "What's going on?" Karl called, emerging from the side of the house. "What's happened here?" Owen followed him, coming down from upstairs. They stared across the garden at the bush. "Philip?" the men called. "Philip?"

  He would not come out. When Rhea approached to apologize, he crawled farther in, farther back, and she walked off, shaking her head and muttering to herself, "Jesus Christ." The men lay down on their stomachs, reached in their hands, and he pushed to the back, keeping himself from them. "Philip, honey, come out," Owen said. "We understand. It wasn't your fault. Rhea's sorry she yelled at you."

  It started to get dark. Rose sat down on the ground next to the bush. "I'm not leaving without you," she called into its murky interior. "I can stay here as long as you can." Crickets chirped, and the sky filled with stars. "I'll tell you what," she said. "I'll sing to you."

  Half an hour later, in the middle of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" he crawled out, dirty, on all fours. She was shaking violently
from the chill on her skin, and she pulled him into her arms as much to calm herself as to comfort him. "I'm sorry, honey," she said, beginning to cry now herself. She stroked his back, bit his hair. There were small, dried-up tracks of blood on his arms and legs, where the thorns had scratched him. Bits of leaf stuck to his hair and clothes and she pulled them off. "I'm sorry, honey, I'm sorry, honey," she said again and again.

  She carried him in, washed him, and put him to bed. The children asleep, the two couples slunk separately through the vast, dark halls of the villa, turning away at any sound of an approaching footstep, avoiding each other. Only late at night, when the men were asleep, did Rose and Rhea meet, as if by prior agreement, in the big cook's kitchen. They made coffee before they started fighting. Then they sat down at the table. "Why did you have to yell at him like that?" Rose asked.

  "Why did you have to sleep with my husband?" Rhea shot back.

  Rose was silent. She stared into her coffee cup. "He told me in the car on the way up," Rhea said. "As if it was nothing. As if it was the most casual piece of news in the world. 'And I won't apologize,' he said. 'That's just the way it's going to be. If I can't get what I need from you, I'll go somewhere else.' Then I started to cry, and he started the radio blasting and opened the windows so Mira wouldn't hear."

  "He's a bastard," Rose said softly.

  "Shut up about him," said Rhea. "You have no right to criticize my husband. You of all people."

  "No, I guess I don't," Rose said, lifting her head from the table. "But you had no right to attack my son, and you went ahead anyway. Christ, I did it to you, not Philip."

  "Don't act like you're such a great mother," Rhea said. "It's true I was hard on him, and I'm sorry. But you! You could have defended him against me. Instead you pushed him away. Your own son. Because you were scared of what I might have said in front of Owen, weren't you?"

  Rose resumed her previous position, eyes focused on the coffee cup. Rhea was right. She had done it to cover her own tracks. "There's nothing I can say," she said. Then she walked out of the room and headed upstairs, where Philip lay asleep, his mouth open, the blanket thrown across the bed. She sat down next to him and took him in her arms, hugging him fiercely, waking him. Her guilt was so acute and so painful that she imagined she would go insane if she did not obtain his forgiveness, and was willing to do anything—even hurt him more—in order to get it from him. She rocked him. "Philip," she whispered, "I'm sorry, honey. I love you, honey, I love you, honey." Philip lay there in her arms, neither resistant nor affectionate, his body as limp and unresponsive as a bag of wet laundry. It felt to Rose like a bag of wet laundry.

  Of course, she broke off the affair—regrettably, since Karl was a skillful lover and had brought her to pleasures she had never approached with Owen. Still, her sympathy for Rhea was so acute, her rage at Karl so intense, that she momentarily forgot the extent to which she was implicated in her friend's suffering. They barely spoke throughout the weekend; hurt and hushed, Rhea stuck inexplicably by Karl's side, and the couples went about their business separately. There was no expedition to the hill town to eat wild boar. Rose made frugal cheese sandwiches which she and Owen and Philip ate outdoors, in a field far from the house at the bleakest hour of dusk. All through it, of course, Owen believed that Rhea's rage at Philip (the product of a generally unstable nature, he felt) was the true subject of the fight. The families went back to Rome separately. The Benjamins didn't see much of the Mutters after that weekend, for in a month they were returning to New York and they had a lot of packing to do.

  Ten years later Rose got an unexpected phone call from Rhea. "I'm in New York for some lectures," she said. "Boy, I'll bet you're surprised to be hearing from me after all this time, aren't you, Rose? But I'm happy to hear your voice. I've thought of you a lot, all these years."

  Rhea had a new husband now, she told Rose, and a teaching position at Arizona State and a fellowship to go to Mexico for the next academic year. "You might also want to know," she said, "that it was me who left Karl, and not the other way around. Si months after we got back from Rome, I just decided I'd had enough of his shenanigans. He really was the most selfish man in the world. And, Rose, don't think I hold any grudge toward you, because I don't. I was just crazy that weekend. God knows I understand what was attractive about him."

  She said all this quickly, with barely a pause to take a breath.

  "Where is Karl now?" Rose asked.

  "In Rome again, actually, leaching. Remarried. I never met her, but I hear she's beautiful. Younger, of course."

  "Yes, that figures," Rose said. Ten years had passed—ten years of long workdays, two-week vacations, rising early and going to bed early—and Rome to her was a distant dream.

  "And your life?" Rhea said. "Tell me about your life, Rose."

  Rose thought about it for a second. What could she say? That they had returned to New York after Rome, returned to the apartment. That Rose's cousin had gotten her a long-promised job in publishing. That Owen, refusing to have anything more to do with university life, had started teaching at a private school on the West Side. She had advanced to copy editor. He was promoted to assistant principal, then hired away by the Harte School as its director of admissions.

  "And Philip," Rhea said. "How is Philip?"

  "Philip?" Rose said. "He's grown up. A junior in high school."

  Two nights later she came to dinner. She was dressed in black, as gaunt and strange-looking as ever, and told long stories about her experiences in Baja California, about her new husband and his passion for pedigreed terriers, about Mira and her S.A.T. scores and where she wanted to go to college. Somewhere along the road, Rose noticed, she had acquired... not a sense of humor, not quite, but a relaxed and pleasant affect, a conventionality at odds with her bizarre appearance.

  She was particularly interested in Philip. All through dinner she asked him questions—about his school, his ambitions, his plans for college. Even now, Rose noticed a certain distance, a reserve in her son, who sat across the table from this sad-eyed woman and would not return her insistent, searching gaze. How much did he remember, she wondered, of that afternoon he had spent wrapped in the thorny wings of a topiary bird? How much had he understood?

  "Well, that was quite a surprise, seeing Rhea Mutter again," Rose said to Owen in bed that night. "It made me remember a lot of things. I think I'd like to go back to Rome someday. Would you?"

  From inside his book he nodded. She knew they would never go. They rarely spoke about Rome these days, or about Owen's brief shining hour on the limelit stage of Renaissance Studies. The work on the Etruscans, half-finished, lay in his desk drawer, abandoned.

  "Owen," she said. "Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if you'd stayed in academia?" And added to herself, Would we have been closer? Would we have been happier?

  Owen pretended not to hear her. Of course he did wonder, though he spoke about it to no one. His days as a scholar seemed so much a different lifetime that he hardly believed in them. When on occasion he thumbed through the yellowing pages of his dissertation, the elegant argument in which he had once taken such pleasure made so little sense that he could barely follow it. Sometimes the work seemed the product of another mind—one infinitely more precise and scrutinizing than his own. At other times he would feel a glimmer of recognition, and a wave of nostalgia for those lost days would ripple through him. It never lasted long. Soon enough he would fling the thing away and wonder to himself what kind of fool he must have been to have wasted two and a half years and three hundred pages on a bunch of poets no one was ever going to read anyway.

  ELIOT WAS SITTING at the big drafting table in the living room of his apartment, his head bent over in concentration, his Rapidograph pen making scratching noises against the paper in the light of a two-hundred-watt bulb. He was working on a promotional flyer for the children's book division of Derek Moulthorp's publisher. He did not speak, did not even seem to notice that Philip was in the ro
om, watching him. Then, after a few minutes, he put the pen down, cracked his knuckles, stood up and looked at the work-in-progress from several angles. "Not bad," he said. Philip gazed at him. He walked over to the futon, folded now into a sofa, and sat down on it. "What are you doing here on your lunch hour, anyway?" Eliot asked. "I missed you," Philip said. He sat down next to him. He put one hand on his shoulder and one on his thigh. Then he reached over to kiss him, and Eliot lowered his head down so that their foreheads collided and rolled against each other like ball bearings. Hands on shoulders, hands on thighs, Eliot slid back against the futon, content for once to let Philip do the work.

  There was a peculiarly competitive aspect to their regular nighttime lovemaking which was absent this afternoon. Usually Eliot insisted on controlling everything, on being the purveyor as well as the receiver of pleasure. He liked to surprise Philip by doing exactly what Philip wanted him to do before Philip even had a chance to ask. When they made love at night, Eliot always made sure that Philip came first and thereby assured his own status as supreme sensualist, expert lover. For a while Philip resisted this effort on Eliot's part, but no matter how hard he tried to make Eliot come first, no matter what tricks he employed to gain an advantage, no matter how subtly and skillfully he caressed and probed to make Eliot reveal his points of vulnerability, he simply couldn't do it. Eliot could always hold out longer, .and thus always won the orgasm-postponement battle that underscored their otherwise zealously affectionate lovemaking. Today was the exception. Today, for whatever reason—time constraints, tiredness, affection, boredom—Eliot just lay back, fully dressed, his jeans opened and his underwear pulled back, and let Philip make love to him, taking in the sight of his closed eyes and open, breathing mouth, his bare white feet, the springy, erect penis jutting out from his open pants. And when, in due time, Eliot started to moan and his hips started to gyrate and his hands, instead of gently stroking, began to pull at Philip's hair, Philip thought he might die from loving him, and tried to record in his memory all the simultaneous sensations he was experiencing. Eliot pulled and pushed in and out of his mouth, which was a signal to reach up under his shirt and pinch his nipples. He let out a low heave, and without warning thick, salty liquid squirted into Philip's mouth—a slight disappointment, as he hoped for violent spewing, hosing the back of his throat. Eliot breathed deeply, his mouth open, and his hands embraced Philip's head.