The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Philip looked at the ground before him. Weren't pain and worry supposed to be private things? he wondered, affronted that he was not even allowed to suffer in silence. But he was too embarrassed to be angry.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry that you think that. But I think I really love you, and I just get very scared." He looked up at Eliot, who had audibly caught back his breath for a second. It was a desperate move, saying those words, but he hadn't expected this from Eliot: at least not so soon.

  They continued to walk, more slowly, and Eliot said, "What are you scared of, Philip?"

  "Of having this conversation." His voice was trembling a little. "I've dreaded it so much. I've tried so hard to avoid it. I thought that my loving you—I thought it could keep it from happening."

  "But, Philip," Eliot said, "that's been the problem, don't you see? You don't trust yourself enough to trust us. So I can't help but wonder, has it really been me you've been loving? Do you oven really know me, know anything about me?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, sometimes it seems to me you haven't gotten to know me at all. You haven't even tried."

  For a moment Philip just stared, astonished, into the intricate weave of Eliot's sweater. Then he turned clumsily. "I have to go home," he said, and began marching very fast toward Second Avenue.

  "Philip. Philip, stop."

  He stopped.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm going home."

  "Why are you going home?" Eliot turned him to face him.

  "Goddamnit," he said, "to say that to me—how dare you say that to me! It's just not fair of you to—"

  "What's not fair?"

  He frowned. "It's just—all right, maybe I didn't see you, maybe I don't really know you. But is that all my fault? Whenever I try to ask you anything, you just clam up or get mad. If I don't know you, it's because you won't let me know you."

  Eliot laughed—a brief snort Philip had never heard before. "You know it's not that simple," he said.

  "Then how is it?"

  Eliot took a long breath, turned away from him. "I'm sorry," he said, "but the fact is, from the very start, this thing has been you and yourself, and I've just been a mannequin; I've been an emblem of the sort of person you could imagine loving, not a person you loved. I haven't hidden myself from you, Philip. But you have to learn to ask the right questions in the right way if you expect to get answers." He ground his fists into his pockets. "This is hard for me to say," he said. "But it's the way it is. You say you're in love with me, but clearly you don't know anything about being in love, because this is nothing—"

  "Stop," Philip said. "Stop."

  Once again, Eliot turned and looked at him. He was standing there, silent against a wall, his eyes closed. "Philip."

  "I don't know how true what you say is, but you have no right to tell me I didn't love you. I have felt it—here." And he punched his own heart, hard, like a paramedic trying to restart a life. "You can tell me I'm selfish. You can tell me I'm childish and self-involved and unaware sometimes. But you cannot tell me that what I feel isn't real. That's going too far."

  Eliot looked at the ground before him. "I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. It is going too far."

  "All right."

  He turned and began walking.

  "Where are you going?" Eliot called.

  "Home," Philip said.

  "Stop," Eliot said.

  He stopped. Eliot walked up to him. "Philip," he said. He turned him around, arms on his shoulders. "It's late. Do you really want to go home by yourself now, in the cold?" He smiled, and his hands took Philip's face, one hand on each cheek. His hands were warm and sure against Philip's cold face, like the Kamarov brothers that distant graduation Sunday, holding him in against danger. Or so it felt. Why, why did he have to do this? Philip wondered. Why now, when he needed so much to hate him, did Eliot have to be kind?

  "I'm sorry I brought it up this way," he said. "I was just angry. Look, let's go home."

  Philip was suspicious. "What about tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow is tomorrow. Tonight I want you to stay with me."

  He tried to look down, but Eliot held his face up and would not let it wander. "You tell me I've been terrible to you, you tell me I haven't loved you, I've just used you, and now, suddenly, you want me to spend the night with you? I don't understand this."

  "Look, I said what I wanted to say, what I had to say, because it's been on my mind, it's been bothering me," Eliot said. "I care about you. Would someone who cares about you as much as I do let you make that huge trip home, on the subway, at this hour? By yourself?" He moved his face closer to Philip's, so close that Philip could feel his breath. "I want to be with you tonight," he said. "Don't you believe me?"

  He smiled again, even more sweetly. Philip looked at Eliot's sweater, at their feet facing each other on the mottled sidewalk, at the Indian restaurants still lit up at this late hour. There was nothing Eliot had said that didn't make sense to him, that didn't have the frightening resonance of truth. Yet when he imagined storming off, saw himself waiting forty minutes on the cold subway platform riding the rattling train miles uptown to the small, dark room where nothing awaited him, he could not bear it. The prospect of that uptown journey drowned out his desire for showy revenge. It seemed there was to be no dignity for him in any of this.

  "I believe you," he said. Then he began to cry, just a little. Smiling, Eliot took him in his arms, held him and rocked him and kissed his forehead the way Philip's mother had kissed it when he was a child with a fever. And Philip let himself burst into a fit of real sobbing and buried his face in Eliot's sweater, murmuring inaudibly, over and over again, "I love you, I love you," until a little wet spot had gathered on the sweater, over Eliot's heart.

  "Come on," Eliot said. "Let's go home."

  And they began to walk, arm in arm, toward Eliot's apartment.

  When they got back, they made love with a sweetness and clarity Philip would always remember, even long after his other memories of Eliot had faded. It seemed to him that in the strange pocket of that single lost night, the simple instinct to take care of someone he had hurt had generated a new feeling in Eliot, one that had nothing to do with the troubled, arguable love he claimed he could no longer abide.

  "Eliot," Philip said later, when they were lying quietly in the dark, listening to the traffic, "I think I'm going to go and shave."

  "Wouldn't you rather wait till morning?"

  "No, I think I'll shave now. I feel grimy. It would make it easier for me to sleep."

  "Well, it's up to you. Just be careful not to wake Jerene."

  "Okay," Philip said. Naked, he tiptoed past Jerene's cot into the bathroom, and closed the door. He shook the bottle of shaving cream, turned on the tap, and began to splash hot water on his face.

  After a few seconds, Eliot came in to pee. Philip listened to the gentle, almost musical tinkling, spread shaving cream on his face, and almost immediately cut himself.

  "What are you doing," Eliot said, joining him in front of the mirror.

  "I cut myself."

  Eliot shook his head crossly. "Clearly you're doing it all wrong. Here, wash off all that shaving cream and let me show you."

  Philip complied. "The trick," Eliot said, "is making sure your face is really drenched in good, hot water before you put on the shaving cream. Like this."

  The heated, wet slap of Eliot's hand against his face shocked him. "There," Eliot said, satisfied, and spread shaving cream on Philip's cheeks, smoothed it over his upper lip, down below his ears. "You better let me do it," he said, "or you'll cut yourself again." It was true. When he did it himself, Philip always cut himself.

  Eliot took the blade and began deftly to drag it down the length of Philip's face. In the blade's wake Philip's cheeks tingled, suddenly smooth, and he remembered distant comic scenes from the TV shows of his childhood, of fathers teaching sons to shave for the first time, awkward laughter, men and boys in flann
el pants and T-shirts attacking each other with spray cans of shaving cream. His own father had never shown him how to shave, and he had been too embarrassed to ask. Such awkward bonding was unthinkable with Owen. He had taught himself, in secret, hoping neither his mother nor his father would notice the mistakes, the scabs on his neck and chin, and as a result, he had never really learned the tricks of wetting his face, angling the blade and arching his cheek with his tongue. But now Eliot was teaching him, and he thought how this intimacy—Eliot carefully maneuvering the razor around his chin, washing off the extra shaving cream, patting his face dry; this thrill of smooth, wet skin, shining—this belonged to men who were lovers alone. It seemed to him a kind of celebration.

  Afterwards, while Eliot lay sleeping on the futon, Philip sat up, staring out the window. His fingers beat against the hard cotton futon; his leg shook as he counted the minutes till dawn.

  THE NIGHT AFTER Philip told them, Rose kept dreaming that she was keeping a vigil outside a hospital room. After she woke up, though, she couldn't remember who was inside the door, dying—only the hazy yellow hospital light at the edge of things, and a child wandering the halls, clutching the decapitated head of a doll. How strange that child looked; she held the smiling, glassy-eyed head by the hair, like Judith with the head of Holofernes. When Rose asked the mother—no face, no hair, just the idea of mother—what happened to the rest of the doll, the mother hissed. "Be quiet. Don't mention it," the mother whispered, "or she'll cry and cry. She'll start crying and she'll never stop."

  "Who was the person who was dying? Who was I waiting for?" Rose asked Owen the next morning, when there seemed nothing better to do than talk about dreams. It was drizzly outside their window, and though neither had slept much, they were filled with giddy energy simply from their relief at having made it through the night.

  "It was me," Owen said. His eyes were wide and red this morning. "That's obvious."

  "And the child?" Rose asked, taking a sip from her coffee cup. "The child?"

  "Again, obvious," said Owen, who seemed to have all the answers. "It was Philip."

  Into the dark, regular calm of their weeknight life Philip had come, unannounced. "We're watching 'The Jewel and the Crown,'" Rose said. "It's almost over."

  "Dad's here?" Philip asked.

  "Yes. Be quiet, something important's happening."

  He looked at the floor. "Well, I guess there's no getting around it now," he said softly.

  Rose was too eager to get back to the television to hear him, or at least, to extract the sense from what he said. He sat with them until the program was over. "Another week," she said. "Will I be able to wait another week?"

  Philip unceremoniously snapped off the television. There was a pop and a hiss as the picture shrunk to a tiny nugget of light before disappearing. Rose and Owen looked at him oddly, wondering what had compelled him to turn it off. Then the room filled with an almost tangible silence.

  "I have something to say to you," Philip said. "It's very important."

  Rose looked up at him, surprised at the seriousness of his tone. His face was blanched, his hands curled into fists. He still hadn't taken his coat off.

  "Philip," she said, taking off her glasses. "What is it?"

  Philip didn't say anything, just stood there, huffing; finally he took off his coat.

  "Do you want to sit down?" Rose said.

  "I'd rather stand."

  More silence. "Philip," Rose said again. "Is something wrong? Tell us, honey."

  "All right," he said. "Here goes." He looked away from them. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time," he said, "and I haven't gotten around to it, because I guess I've been afraid—"

  "Well," Rose said, "what?"

  He closed his eyes. "I'm gay," he said. Then again, as if they hadn't heard: "I'm gay." He opened his eyes, looked at them, but their faces were blank. "Does this come as a shock to you? Are you surprised?"

  His words ran together very fast. "This isn't something new. I've been out at work and to my friends for a long time now. Just not to you. I don't know why. I guess I've been scared of disappointing you. I wanted to wait until I felt my life was good enough so that I could show it to you and not be ashamed. I wanted to wait until I could show you that a homosexual life could be a good thing." He was suddenly crying a little. Rose kept blinking her eyes, as if she had been sitting in a dark room and the light had just gone on. Owen was hunched over, his shoulders tight in his white shirt, his hands kneading together between his knees. Philip went on talking—about political orthodoxy, personal choice, about the children's book writer Derek Moulthorp (but why?)—then suddenly stopped, took a tissue, and blew his nose.

  It all went past Rose. Oh, she was not naïve. She knew homosexuals. There were a number of homosexuals in her office. But up until this moment she had thought about their lives as occasionally and as casually as she thought about the lives of the doormen in the building, whom she passed sometimes and wondered, Where do they live? Do they have families? Children? Now, suddenly, it was as if she had been thrown head-first into a distant, distasteful world about which she had little curiosity and toward which she felt a casual, unstated aversion. She blinked.

  Does this mean, she wondered, that from now on, every time I read the word "homosexual" in a book, or hear it on the news, I will have to cover my ears?

  She thought, suddenly, of AIDS and wanted to cover her ears.

  Philip was talking, his eyes frantic, as if he were afraid to stop. "It's not just homosexuality," he was saying. "It's really a question of secrets. I know it must be a shock to you that so much of my life I've had to keep secret from you. I mean, I know all kids keep secrets from their parents. But usually those secrets don't make up such a huge part of their lives. Well, I decided it wasn't fair to any of us. No more secrets. No more." He was looking out the window now, at night traffic and stars. Suddenly he turned, looked at them in challenge, and said, "You know I kept pornography for years in that little suitcase, the one in my closet. I kept it hidden there. Did you know that?"

  "No, I didn't," Rose said, taking up the challenge, and suddenly remembered how once she had caught a glimpse of something under his bed—a photograph of naked men, she now vividly remembered it—and had thought little of it, had thought, He must have found that in the garbage; one of his friends must have given it to him as a joke. The memory was vague, insubstantial, but it was the thing that shook her out of numbness. Why hadn't she noticed that detail? She of all people noticed the details.

  "Well, now you know," Philip said. He seemed to be having difficulty swallowing. He stared at them, waiting for the worst. But Rose said nothing. Her face was a blank sheet of paper, her mouth closed up into a very small knot.

  Then she stood up, her hands corded together, and walked in a small circle.

  "Won't you say anything to me?" Philip said.

  "I'm not sure what to say."

  "Maybe—'I'm glad you told me.'"

  "I'm not sure I'm glad you told me."

  "You'd rather I'd kept it secret even longer?"

  "We all have secrets, Philip. I have secrets, lots of secrets. Does that mean they should all be revealed?"

  "Sometimes it's better to be honest."

  "Better for whom?"

  He was quiet a moment. "For all of us," he said.

  "I wish I could be so sure," Rose said. She fingered a dying flower in a vase on top of the television. "But I am not a woman without prejudices," she said, then thought, Where did that line come from? She wondered for a moment if she had read it in one of her manuscripts.

  "Well," she said, "it's too late now. What's said can't be unsaid."

  "Do you think you can't love me anymore? Is that it?" Philip asked softly, from the corner chair in which he had taken refuge.

  She looked at him, surprised. Why was he saying that? Then it hit her that of course her approval, her "love," was what this was really all about. To reassure him as a mother was supposed to, sh
e saw then, she should march over to him and hug him, but the best she could manage was a bitter little laugh. "Oh, Philip, of course not," she said. "Nothing like that." She turned away. "This is just very new for us. It's something we haven't had to confront before. You've explained yourself very well, but you will—you will have to give us time. Right, Owen?"

  From the corner, where he sat crumpled, Owen nodded.

  "Time," Rose said. "We just need time. You're right—this is news."

  She looked out the window at the night clouds, and rubbed her hands together.

  "Mother," Philip said.

  She didn't answer.

  "Mother."

  Still she didn't answer. She was close to crying herself.

  "So you're not talking to me now, is that it?" Philip said. "Well, that really helps, Mom, let me tell you." Enraged, he clapped his hands together, marched in a furious little circle. "Don't just stand there like that, like I'm not here," he said. "You can't do that."

  "Don't tell me what I can and can't do, young man," Rose threw back, turning suddenly. "For God's sake, it is not fair of you to expect me just to take this lightly. To come into my house, thinking you can tell me how to act—well you can't. You've sprung this on us, we didn't ask for it."

  She turned around again, her arms tight around her chest.

  Philip looked down at the floor. "I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. I'm overreacting."

  He sat down, slumped, in the sofa next to his father. Their legs crossed in front of them, they stared blankly ahead of themselves like a pair of glassy-eyed husbands lost in a football game. There was a long silence. Then Philip said, "It's just that it was an ordeal for me to come to you with this. I mean, I've been waiting years now, worrying, wondering. Afraid you might not love me anymore." Rose looked away. He stood again, approached his mother from behind, put an arm on her shoulder. "I just didn't think it was fair for you not to know such an important thing about my life, Mom, for you to miss such an important part of my life."