The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Respectfully, in spite of health warnings, Philip did what with other men he had never done: he swallowed.

  Then he stood up, kissed Eliot on the mouth, and went to have a drink of water. Eliot zipped himself up neatly, a package re-wrapped, an envelope resealed. He followed him to the kitchen; he kissed him back. Once again they rubbed their foreheads together.

  "Eliot," Philip said. "Hmm?"

  "Remember how you said when we met that you might introduce me to Derek and Geoffrey?"

  "Yes."

  "Well—do you think maybe we could have them over to dinner or something?"

  Eliot took a sip of coffee and didn't answer. Philip drew in his breath, for he was convinced that every request he made of Eliot, every inch he insinuated himself into his life, would be one demand too many, one step too far, and Eliot would turn away from him.

  But in fact Eliot put down his coffee mug and said, "I think that could probably be arranged."

  "Really?" Philip said.

  "Sure," Eliot said. "I'll tell you what. I'll call Geoffrey this afternoon."

  "Thank you," said Philip. "Thank you, thank you." And hugged him. Then he said, "Eliot?"

  "Yes?"

  "How old were you when you were adopted?"

  He breathed in and out, evenly. "Three," he said.

  "So you don't remember much about your parents?"

  "Not very much. I was pretty young." He pulled away from Philip. "Do you know what time it is?" he said.

  "Oh, don't tell me."

  "You told me to tell you."

  "Yes, I know. But don't."

  "You don't want to lose your job, do you?"

  "Yes," Philip said. He walked up to where Eliot stood and wrapped himself around him. "Let's just stay like this a few seconds more," he said. More than sex, more than talking, it was this he loved—resting his head against Eliot's shoulder. In the background they heard the dull yowl of a badly scratched Jimi Hendrix album, along with the adolescent voices of Menudo coming out of a little girl's radio. The kitchen window framed an afternoon that was steel gray, sunless but mercilessly bright.

  "You don't like to talk about your parents much, do you?" Philip said. "How come? You can trust me."

  Eliot didn't answer. He let Philip go, walked across the room to the window. "Did I say something wrong?" Philip said, suddenly fearful that he had offended him. "I'm sorry if I said something wrong." He followed Eliot across the room, put his arms around him. Eliot's body was arched.

  "You're getting sick of me, aren't you?" Philip said. "I knew it."

  "Philip, please! For Christ's sake!"

  "Oh God, I'm really blowing it today, aren't I?" Philip said. He buried his head in Eliot's shoulder.

  "Just lighten up," Eliot said. "Don't be so worried all the time." He sunk his hand into Philip's shoulder, gave it a hard knead, and Philip winced with pain. "You worry too much," Eliot said. "Try not to."

  "Okay."

  They rocked back and forth on the old linoleum as if they were a couple in an old-fashioned ballroom, a mirrored ball twirling above their heads. It was like a cartoon Philip remembered from his childhood, where musical notes danced together and trumpets and saxophones played themselves with agile, white-gloved hands.

  Eliot called Philip at work and said, "We're on for Saturday night at eight. Derek's house."

  "Oh, that's great!" Philip said. "That's terrific! I can't wait!"

  "It should be fun," Eliot said. "But listen. I don't think I can see you for a few days. It's this project I'm working on. They just called me and told me they want me to have it done by Friday."

  Philip was in a cubicle on the nineteenth floor of a building on Lexington Avenue. Around him typewriters clicked, phones rang, someone giggled by the coffee machine. "Oh," he said, then realized he was obligated to say more. "Listen, don't worry," he said. "I understand. But. . . well, I have an idea. I have some work to do myself tonight. Some manuscripts to look over. Maybe I could come over and do my editing while you do your drawing."

  "I don't think so, Philip. You know what happens when we try to work together. Neither of us gets a thing done. Up until now it hasn't been a problem, but I'm afraid that for the next few days I really have to buckle down."

  "Do I distract you? I'm sorry," Philip said, and felt ashamed and inferior for having no project in his life of equal importance, no work he could put before passion.

  For a moment they breathed silently. "Well, look," Eliot said, "we did have our little lunchtime antics, didn't we?"

  "Yes, we did."

  "You bet we did." He laughed. "Listen, I've got to get going. I'm really panicked about this project. But I'll call you tomorrow."

  "Okay. But—Eliot?"

  "What?"

  "It isn't that you're mad at me—is it?"

  "For Christ's sake, Philip!" He sighed in frustration. "Look," he said, "I'm not mad at you. I'll miss you very much."

  "You will?"

  "Yes. Now I have to go, okay? I'll talk to you tomorrow."

  "Okay. Bye."

  He hung up. Philip held onto the receiver until he heard the click and the dial tone start up again. He had fantasized the phone call Eliot had just made so often that it had become, for him, unreal, like something from one of his romance novels. He could not believe Eliot had really said what he'd just said, and for a moment wondered if he'd dreamed the call.

  A few days, Eliot had said. Given that they'd spent every night together since they'd met, Philip had anticipated with dread his wanting just one night. Now he would have gratefully given him one night.

  He sat upright in his desk. What was he thinking? Why couldn't he take Eliot at his word? Eliot loved him, was taking him to meet Derek and Geoffrey on Saturday night. He simply needed time to work. And he did have a point about the two of them not getting much work done together. Philip pretended to read. Eliot pretended to draw. One would tell a joke, or try to distract the other. Soon Philip would find he couldn't help giving Eliot a kiss on the neck.

  Flushed warm by the memory, Philip went back to work on the manuscript he was editing, a novel called Tides of Flame. Sylvia, the brash and hardy heroine, had dressed up like a boy and joined the crew of the Black Serpent, Captain Dick Tolliver's pirate ship. She hoped to find out the truth about the disappearance of her fiancé, Steve Lionel, whose own ship had met its unfortunate end at Tolliver's hand. Now, to her horror, she was finding herself strangely attracted to the brooding, one-armed Tolliver. "He would not give her the time of day," wrote the author, Fiona Carpentier, who was also Jack T. Spelvin and Marlena McCoy, and was really Lynnea Seligman of Springfield, Illinois. Yet Sylvia would win in the end. She always did.

  Half an hour later he heard a sharp rap on the side of his cubicle. "Philip?" a voice said, and he turned. It was Marsha Collins, the editor-in-chief famous for her twelve-toned hair, and she was standing with a pair of middle-aged women, both of whom were wearing enormous blue butterfly-shaped glasses and fur coats. "Philip," Marsha Collins said, "I want you to meet Laurene and Gladys Cooper, from El Cerrito, California. They're Vanessa Southwood. We're going to make you ladies a big success," she said, turning to the giddy women. "And Philip as your line editor is going to be very important in the process."

  She plopped them down in plastic chairs and walked off.

  "I enjoyed The Serpent and the Flame a lot," Philip said, and smiled.

  "We're so happy to hear that, Mr. Phillips," Laurene Cooper said. "It's our twenty-seventh book."

  "But the first that's got accepted," Gladys added. Both had bright red hair, and lips the color of Hawaiian Punch. Though he knew that they were mother and daughter, he wasn't sure which was which.

  "It's terrific," Philip said. "I especially liked the Tahitian sequence, and that scene in the volcano."

  "Mother spent a week in the library researching that one," said Laurene.

  "But I think we may have to do a little work on the love scenes. That one between Mallory and Raoul,
for instance—"

  Laurene's mouth opened and didn't close. But Gladys nudged her and said, "Mr. Phillips, whatever you want is fine by us. We're just so excited to have our book accepted."

  "The one thing is, we want to keep the romance," Laurene threw in. "Mallory's a passionate woman, and that's very important to us."

  "Oh yes," Gladys reiterated.

  "Well, don't worry," Philip said. "I'd never—"

  "There isn't enough real romance in romance fiction, if you ask me," Laurene said. "Too much cheap sex and not enough romance. It's a gyp."

  "That's why we started writing," Gladys said.

  "I couldn't agree with you more," Philip said. "And I can assure you, we won't compromise any of the romance."

  "Well, I'm glad we're set on that. Like I said, we're very excited to be working with an editor."

  "Vanessa's excited too." Gladys chuckled.

  "Vanessa is Mother's cat," Laurene said, and chuckled too. "Pure-bred Maltese. We bought her with the advance money and figured there wasn't a more fitting name. Don't you think?"

  "Oh, absolutely."

  "Having a nice chat?" Marsha Collins said, returning to Philip's cubicle. "Hate to break it up, but I've got to introduce these ladies to marketing. We'll talk soon, Philip."

  "Yes," Philip said, as Gladys and Laurene stood and gathered their bags, "I'll be looking forward to it."

  "Us too!"Laurene winked at him as Marsha led them away.

  Philip returned to Tides of Flame. He was reading happily until the middle of chapter twenty, when his anxiety came storming back. As he read through that long chapter, which recalled Sylvia and Steve's first wild night together, it occurred to him that for the first time there was a schedule with Eliot, a plan to be made or to be broken. Of course, he had known all along the spontaneous passion that had carried him this far wasn't going to last forever. He had known that eventually they would have to talk about what "they" meant, where "they" fit into the larger contexts of their lives. Up until now it was enough that each night they seemed to consume each other, like Sylvia and Steve, "licked by white-hot flame, the fire of their urgent need." That was fine. That was how love affairs were supposed to begin, in the real world as well as the stormy seas of Fiona Carpentier's novels. But Philip knew that in his case the fire was burning out a cavern inside of him, an emptiness, a need where before there had been no need. He knew he was less than he had been before he met Eliot. A void now ached in him to be filled—so much so that the thought of even one night without Eliot seemed impossible to bear. And there lay the difference between them; for when it ended, Eliot would have things to return to, "projects," whereas Philip would have less than he'd started with, would have a gaping hole in him. Before Eliot, he had at least been self-contained, content with his aloneness, having known nothing else.

  A sudden urge to call Derek Moulthorp's publisher—to confirm that Eliot's project was in fact due early, that he really was going to be working these days—stole over Philip, and just as quickly dissipated. It would be a ridiculous call. He was ashamed, suddenly, of his own suspicion, which seemed to him mad, excessive, and he cursed himself for doubting Eliot, who had never given him any reason, who had never lied to him about anything, who was taking him to meet his adoptive fathers, one of whom (and he felt a thickening of anticipation in his stomach) was Derek Moulthorp himself, whose books Philip had so loved all through his childhood.

  He left work in the dark. A fierce wind flapped the flags in front of the Waldorf-Astoria, where doormen ushered furcapped women out of taxicabs and into revolving doors. Ahead of him, an ungainly girl in a purple down coat pushed her way up Lexington Avenue, struggling against the wind. On any weeknight the East Side was full of women like her, straggling into small delis and grocery stores to buy diet Coke, Häagen-Dazs, chicken hot dogs. They had on blouses with complicated, frilly collars—big bow ties and ruffles of pink or eggshell satin and carried enormous handbags, and tried to fix their hair in the convex spy mirrors that hung over the frozen foods. Giant buildings filled with luxury and pomp towered over blocks of crabbed tenements, and even this early, everything was plastered with Christmas decorations, as if the whole world were a pile of presents for somebody else: reindeer strung along laundry lines, Santa Clauses peering out of windows, bright chains of lights.

  Somehow the thought of being alone in his apartment tonight was unbearable to Philip, and so he pushed his way across town to Second Avenue, to his parents' apartment. The doormen had been dying off lately. A new one stood resolutely inside the glass doors and did not recognize him, and Philip was annoyed to have to wait while he rang up. "I have a key," Philip said, irritated, his teeth chattering.

  "See that sign?" said the doorman. "All visitors must be announced." He read it slowly, like a third-grader. Into the phone by his stool he said, "A young man who says he's your son is here, Mrs. Benjamin." A pause. "Okay, go on up." Old Mrs. Lubin, wrapped in furs, waited by the elevator. "It's slow these days," she said, and Philip nodded. She smiled at him. After a few seconds she said, "Cold, isn't it?" and Philip nodded again. "I can't remember a November this cold," she said. "Not since the fifties."

  "I wouldn't know. I wasn't born yet."

  She laughed. "No, I guess you weren't."

  The elevator arrived, and Mrs. Lubin got off on the second floor. He continued to the twelfth. His parents' apartment was at the end of a long mud-colored hall. Undoing the complicated series of locks, he went inside the apartment. His mother sat at her desk in the living room, bent over a long and messy manuscript, and, seeing him, she raised her head in the barest greeting. "Well, well, well," she said, taking off her glasses. "It isn't often we get a spontaneous visit from the likes of you." She stood, offering him her cheek to kiss. She smelled dusty, like pencil shavings, and more faintly, of lavender-scented soap. "What's the occasion?"

  "No occasion. I just had a free night and thought I'd drop by."

  She helped him off with his coat. "That's nice of you, Philip," she said. "But unfortunately your father's not here now. Tonight's the night he has to address the parents. He'll be in around ten. Anyway, I wasn't planning anything for dinner. I don't know what's in the fridge—"

  "Don't worry, Mom," he said, following her into the kitchen, "I'll order out some Chinese food or something. I was just thinking that I'd like to go through some of my old books, and I thought tonight might be a good night to do it."

  "Yes. Tonight." She seemed suddenly distracted.

  "Mom?" he said.

  "What? Oh, yes, tonight. Well, that sounds fine." She began opening up containers of pink Tupperware and dumping their contents into saucepans. "We've got leftover Stroganoff you can finish," she said. "And turkey Tetrazzini. You used to love that."

  "Really, Mom, you don't have to—"

  "But you're doing me a favor. No one's going to eat these leftovers if you don't."

  "Well—"

  "All right, then, it's settled." She stirred the contents of the saucepans with a wooden spoon while he sat at the kitchen table and read the paper. One of the models in a Bergdorf Goodman ad bore a strong resemblance to Eliot, he thought, and he almost mentioned the coincidence when he remembered that his mother knew nothing about Eliot, wouldn't even recognize his name. He would have liked to have said to her, "Mom, I'm in love." He would have liked to have told her that later in the week he was having dinner with Derek Moulthorp, that his lover was the adopted son of Derek Moulthorp, whose books she had copy-edited and loved so much she had brought them home for Philip to read. It was almost more than he could bear to keep from telling her. His mouth opened involuntarily, then closed again. He looked at the table. He had no more fear, as he had for years, that she would turn on him, reject him, deny he was her son. He was afraid only of the power he held to hurt her. And yet somehow the atmosphere of this cold night seemed too tender to bear such blows.

  He ate his dinner quietly while she sat across from him, rubbing the tip of a pencil eraser
against her teeth, her half-glasses hanging low on her nose. Then he went into his room. They had not done much with it since he'd left. The shelves were still filled with the books of his childhood, like all the books in the apartment, haphazardly crammed on top of one another. Off of the shelf he pulled an old gray and pink book with a slightly torn dust jacket. It was titled Questa and Nebular. All Philip remembered of the book was that there was a rich child who spent most of his time in a giant playhouse so ambitious in its scale and so accurate in its reproduction of adult reality that it might as well have been a real house. He opened the book to re-acquaint himself with the story, and soon it came flooding back. Of course it was not a real house, and the child's distracted parents worried that their son was "losing touch with reality." Clio, the rich boy's cousin (and the novel's heroine), appreciated her cousin's impulse to escape but didn't have such options herself. Determined not to expect too much, she expected too little; that was what all of Moulthorp's children were like.

  Like a child, Philip sat cross-legged on the floor. On the jacket cover of Questa and Nebular, three of Derek Moulthorp's famous fat-cheeked emerald-eyed children—the little girl, Clio, and her two odd neighbors, Romaine and Godfrey, a.k.a. Questa and Nebular—stood in a room full of toy robots. Moulthorp had painted them in a style that reminded Philip of the Japanese cartoon shows he had watched after school as a child, Speed Racer and Gigantor and Kimba the White Lion. It thrilled him to think that he had once read this book merely for the pleasure of it, merely because he had enjoyed Moulthorp's other books, and had not realized that someday he would fall in love with a man who had been raised in the benevolent atmosphere of the same mind, the same imagination that had generated these words, these pictures. And yet his nine-year-old self had sat here, lost in The Wish-Portal, and not known he was being offered a prophecy of his own life it would take him years to recognize. Eliot had always been there, in those books, on those shelves.