The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Her shoulder flinched at the touch of his hand, and he removed it. She laughed, shook her head. "Philip," she said, "there are things I could tell you. Things I've never told a living soul."

  "Tell them," Philip said.

  "No."

  "Why not? I'm prepared."

  She turned, looked at Owen slumped on the sofa. "Because I don't believe that just because something's a secret it therefore by definition has to be revealed," Rose said. "Keeping certain secrets secret is important to—the general balance of life, the common utility."

  "Maybe," Philip said. "Maybe some things. But why should this be a secret? What I'm saying is, imagine you had to keep your heterosexuality a secret. Never tell anyone when you met Dad that you were in love with him. Never be able to live with him and invite your parents to dinner. It would be hard. It wouldn't be fair."

  Rose turned away. "It's not the same," she said.

  "Why not?"

  She was silent for a moment. Facing the window, she saw the onrushing cars streaming down Second Avenue. "I was raised in a different world from you," she said. "In my day, people cared about more than just self-gratification. There were more important things. You did without for the larger good. You had a family. Nowadays, everyone has to gratify whatever little desire comes into his head, no matter who it hurts. And I'm not just talking about you. I'm talking about everybody, all you young people, out for yourselves. I read the papers. I know what's going on."

  "But, Mother," Philip said, "being gay isn't just—gratifying some urge. It's a matter of your life." He slapped his hands against his sides and looked toward the ceiling. "I mean, what do you want?" he asked. "That I should marry a woman I'm not the least bit sexually attracted to? who makes me feel nothing sexual, just anxiety because I'm feeling nothing sexual? Okay. Say I do. Maybe we can have sex once in a while, if I think about men while we're doing it. And maybe she won't notice when I stare at men in the street. But in the long run—think of the wear on that marriage. Is it fair to her, when she could be married to a man who really could love her sexually? And more important, would it be fair to me, when I could be with someone I did love sexually?" He shook his head. "If I were to wake up thirty years from now and look back and see I'd wasted my life—well, it would be awful. Because it's important, Mother. My sexuality, my attraction to men, is the most crucial, most elemental force in my life, and to deny it, to pretend it wasn't there because I was afraid of what people would think—that would be a tragedy."

  "Most people," Rose said, "would consider a homosexual life a tragedy—the bars and all." She turned to face him. "What happens when you're my age? It's one thing to do what you want when you're young. But later. To be alone. No family."

  "I don't intend to be alone," Philip said. "I intend to be with my lover. And anyway, gay people can have families too. More and more, gay men and lesbians are finding ways of having children, either through adoption—"

  "And what kind of life would that be for a child?"

  "A fine life," Philip said. "As I was telling you, Derek Moulthorp and his lover raised Eliot, the person I'm seeing now, and he's one of the happiest, most well-adjusted people I know."

  Rose stared out the window. "I consider this a tragedy," she said. "I'm sorry, but that's the way it is." "The tragedy," Philip said, "is that you insist on making it into a tragedy. You're creating your own tragedy; I'm not. I just want to make that clear."

  At that, Owen stood up from the sofa. He had been sitting quietly all this time, his hands tented over his temples, his eyes closed, listening. He looked at Rose and Philip, his lower lip trembling a little, as if he was about to speak some revelation. But the impulse passed. He put his hand on his head, and sat down again.

  "Were you going to say something, Dad?" Philip asked.

  "No, nothing," Owen said. "I don't feel so well all of a sudden. Will you excuse me?"

  "Dad," Philip said. "You haven't said anything at all about this. Are you okay?"

  "Yes, I'm fine. I'm sorry, son. I mean—I'm sorry I haven't said anything. I think—I think it's o-kay." He pronounced the word oddly, drawing apart the two syllables and giving it great emphasis. "Yes," he said. "O-kay."

  Then, suddenly, there were no more words.

  "I should probably go," Philip said. "I need to get home." He walked to the closet and pulled out his coat.

  "Are you healthy?" Rose said as he was putting it on. She turned to him, her eyes suddenly anguished.

  He stopped in mid-sleeve. "Yes," he said. "As far as I know I'm totally healthy."

  "I'm only asking," Rose said, "because I read the Times, I read those stories, and I—" Her voice broke. "I would hate to see you—"

  He smiled, and put his hand on her shoulder. "Mom, don't worry," he said. "I'm fine. Anyway, I have no intention of ever taking any sexual risks. I'll be fine."

  She smiled a little bit.

  "Can I call you tomorrow?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Good."

  He kissed her on the cheek.

  "Goodbye, Dad," he said. "I hope you're feeling better."

  Owen nodded. But his face was the same color as his white shirt, and as crumpled.

  "Mother?" Philip said. "Please try not to be angry."

  "I'm not angry with you," Rose said softly. "I'm feeling, if anything at all—I'm feeling a sadness. A grief. As long as we're all being so big on honesty, I just have to say that. I'm sorry."

  She looked away.

  "Well," he said. "I'm sorry too. But I do think it will pass. You'll see. I'll prove it to you. This is nothing to grieve about." He moved nervously from one foot to the other. "I have a wonderful new boyfriend, Mom. I want you to meet him—well, maybe this should wait. Anyway, goodbye."

  "Goodbye."

  Awkwardly, Philip put his hands on his mother's shoulders and kissed her cheek. He hesitated for a moment before letting go—imagining, she supposed, that she still might take him in her arms. That neediness was almost enough to break her.

  "I'll make some coffee," Rose said to Owen after he was gone. She went into the kitchen and started the pot brewing, and when she came out again Owen was weeping quietly into his sleeve.

  She stood against the wall. "Owen," she said. "Owen." He did not answer her. He wept the way the Watergate conspirators had wept at their trials.

  "Owen," she said. He wept and did not answer. She touched his shoulder. His back was tense as a board.

  She had no idea what to say, what to do. She didn't think she'd ever seen him cry before. "Owen," she said, faltering, clumsy, "I know this is hard, but really, sweetheart, it'll be okay. He's a good boy. He'll take care of himself. He said so himself; it doesn't have to be the end of the world." But at those words Owen only wept more, louder and louder, as if there was nothing that could console him.

  And now, very softly, she thought she heard him say, "It is the end of the world."

  "What, honey? What did you say?"

  He cried. She heard the percolator bell ring. "Owen, let me get the coffee," Rose said. Cautiously she removed her arm, leaving him hunched on the sofa, went into the kitchen, turned off the percolator. Above her, on a shelf, were the cups, the same white china they'd had for years, the same pots, the same glasses. Every detail of the world was the same. It shouldn't have been.

  Rose went back into the living room, and he was gone. "Owen?" she called. "Owen?" but no one answered. Panicked, she hurried into their bedroom and saw that the bathroom door was closed and heard the shower running. The sound of water streaming against tile barely masked the noise of Owen's sobbing.

  She sat down on the bed. At its foot were Owen's shoes, the socks neatly balled up and stuffed inside; tomorrow's pants draped neatly over a chair. From behind the bathroom door she could hear him weeping loudly, his breath heaving in guttural wails which rose suddenly to throaty whines. Did he actually think that the sound of a shower running could cover up such a noise? She stood, walked to the bathroom door, cautiously
leaned against it. A thin tail of steam was escaping from underneath, like smoke from a pipe. She knocked once. "Owen?" she said, "Owen, please, honey," and tried the knob. He had locked it.

  "Oh dear," she said, and closed her eyes.

  Then the truth hit her with all the irrevocable force of revelation. She felt for balance against the door.

  Just as fast as it had entered her head, she hurled it out, overhand, like a baseball, a fireball, passing miles over the heads of the astonished, silent onlookers.

  She moved out of the bedroom, back toward the kitchen; she poured out coffee. It was nearly eleven o'clock, she saw, nearly time for the news. Trembling, she tried to drink the coffee.

  She went back into the living room. In the living room she picked the dead flower out of the vase, brushed some dust off a table with her hand; even here she could hear him.

  Oh, would he never stop? She sat down with her coffee, tried to ignore it, the wretched wail, the thrumming jets of water.

  Then, quite suddenly, the shower was turned off and all she heard was the drip of the faucet. It sounded almost human to her, like the voice of a small child talking to himself.

  JERENE FOUND IT BY ACCIDENT. She was working in the library one afternoon—wasting time, really—skimming through indexes of psychoanalytic journals and papers in search of something, anything that would give her a clue, a new grounding, that would illuminate the way out of the mammoth, unruly dissertation in which she was lost. Over a period of seven years its subject had changed a dozen times from child abandonment to the phenomenology of adoption, and onto lost languages, children babbling in their bedrooms. Still her fellowship had been renewed, and would be renewed indefinitely, it seemed, for many of the professors on the philosophy faculty thought her a genius in the raw, a great philosophical mind, while the rest feared she might go off the deep end if they turned her down for money, feared she might come in with a sawed-off shotgun and blow their brains out, like that deranged mathematics graduate student at Stanford. Scanning the index, a little bored, beginning to think about lunch, she read the abstract of a case history that intrigued her. It was in a collection of psychoanalytic papers, shelved in a distant stack. She followed the trail of the call number; took the book from a shelf; read the article quickly the first time, a little anxious, skipping sentences to find the thesis as she had trained herself long ago to do. She read it again, slowly. By the time she was finished she was breathing unevenly, loudly, her foot drumming the dark metal floor of the stacks, her heart pounding.

  A baby, a boy, called Michel in the article, was born to a disoriented, possibly retarded teenager, the child of a rape. Until he was about two years old, he lived with his mother in a tenement next to a construction site. Every day she stumbled in and around and out of the apartment, lost in her own madness. She was hardly aware of the child, barely knew how to feed or care for him. The neighbors were alarmed at how Michel screamed, but when they went to knock at the door to ask her to quiet him, often she wasn't there. She would go out at all hours, leaving the child alone, unguarded. Then one day, quite suddenly, the crying stopped. The child did not scream, and he did not scream the next night either. For days there was hardly a sound. Police and social workers were called. They found the child lying on his cot by the window. He was alive and remarkably well, considering how severely he appeared to have been neglected. Quietly he played on his squalid cot, stopping every few seconds to look out the window. His play was unlike any they had ever seen. Looking out the window, he would raise his arms, then jerk them to a halt; stand up on his scrawny legs, then fall; bend and rise. He made strange noises, a kind of screeching in his throat. What was he doing? the social workers wondered. What kind of play could this be?

  Then they looked out the window, where some cranes were in operation, lifting girders and beams, stretching out wrecker balls on their single arms. The child was watching the crane nearest the window. As it lifted, he lifted; as it bent, he bent; as its gears screeched, its motor whirred, the child screeched between his teeth, whirred with his tongue.

  They took him away. He screamed hysterically and could not be quieted, so desolate was he to be divided from his beloved crane. Years later, Michel was an adolescent, living in a special institution for the mentally handicapped. He moved like a crane, made the noises of a crane, and although the doctors showed him many pictures and toys, he responded only to the pictures of cranes, played only with the toy cranes. Only cranes made him happy. He came to be known as the "crane-child." And the question Jerene kept coming up against, reading the article, was this: What did it sound like? What did it feel like? The language belonged to Michel alone; it was forever lost to her. How wondrous, how grand those cranes must have seemed to Michel, compared to the small and clumsy creatures who surrounded him. For each, in his own way, she believed, finds what it is he must love, and loves it; the window becomes a mirror; whatever it is that we love, that is who we are.

  After Jerene photocopied the article, she left the library. There was a brisk wind outdoors; she turned her collar up. Some construction was going on nearby—cranes working, lifting beams to the hardhatted men who swarmed the precarious frame of a rising condominium. The cranes looked like a species of gigantic, long-limbed insect. Transfixed, Jerene approached the makeshift wooden fence that surrounded the construction site. There was a crudely cut peephole in the fence, and through it she stared at the vast pit from which the building would rise, watched the cranes lunge and strain. She stood in the deafening roar of the cranes. In the grinding, the churring, the screeching, in the universe of the cranes, the womb of the cranes, she stood there, eyes open, and listened.

  PHILIP AND ELIOT may have been lovers, but they never got their underwear mixed up. Even if they'd tried, it would have been impossible. Eliot favored loose, soft boxer shorts patterned with things like crowns or roosters, while Philip was almost fetishistically attached to plain white jockey shorts. One of the signs he should have recognized, had he been less blind, less in love, was that Eliot never left any of his clothes at Philip's when he wasn't there. None of his underwear stayed after him in Philip's drawer; none of his shirts and none of his khakis; only a long time later, he discovered a single purple sock, its fringe fantastically garlanded with a pattern of dancing elephants. By that time, Eliot was long gone to Paris.

  It happened abruptly. One day, a few days after the dinner at Derek Moulthorp's, Eliot's phone machine came on and didn't go off.

  For three days Philip left messages, and Eliot didn't call him back. By the fourth day, the silence on the other end of the phone, when he spoke into it, began to terrify him. He stopped leaving messages, just listened hungrily to Eliot's calm voice on the tape: "If you leave your name and number, Eliot or Jerene will call you back as soon as they can."

  When no word came for a week, he left Jerene a note in her mailbox, begging her to meet him at a coffee shop the next afternoon. She was late, but she came. In a back booth, on ugly red vinyl benches patched with industrial tape, they drank coffee for which Philip insisted on paying. Jerene looked as thin and nervous as ever in her black leather jacket and jeans. "I'm glad you got my note," Philip said.

  "Yes, I got it."

  "It's been a long time. What have you been up to?"

  "Well," she said, "the main thing I've been up to is quitting graduate school."

  "Really? Why?"

  "I just decided it wasn't for me. I realized that I'm not finishing my dissertation because I really don't want to write a dissertation. So I quit. Instead I'm doing other things, better things." She smiled confidently. "I have a job as a bouncer at this dyke bar," she said. "I keep the men out. Isn't that a riot?"

  Philip smiled. "After seven years, it must be tough," he said.

  She nodded a vigorous no. "It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life. I just said, fuck it, and suddenly all the pressures were gone, totally gone. It's the best thing I could have done. Anyway, I'm much happier now. I have a nice new gir
lfriend—believe it or not, she's the one who works at Laura Ashley. And I'm volunteering, answering phone calls at the Gay Hotline. I can't tell you what it's like not to have to depend on a library for your sanity. I'm relaxed for the first time in seven years. I can think about my life and not just about that damned dissertation."

  Philip smiled. "That's great," he said. Then: "I was afraid you wouldn't come."

  She laughed. "Why wouldn't I come, Philip?"

  "I don't know. It feels right now like the world's in a conspiracy to isolate me. Or at least Eliot is." He laughed again, and then his lips froze in a parody of a smile, and tears welled in his eyes.

  "Philip," Jerene said. "Philip." She put down her coffee cup, rubbed her hands together like an insect. She did not seem able to touch him. "Look," she said. "I know how you feel. I've been let down, too. Anyway, I think Eliot's being a baby. I tell him every day what a child he's being."

  Philip blew his nose. "You do?" he said.

  Jerene nodded.

  "What does he say?"

  She looked away. "He says he doesn't want to see you. He says he can't face you."

  Philip's eyes widened, and he leaned forward in his seat. "Can't face me!" he said. "Can't face me!" And cried harder.

  "Please don't ask me to justify him," Jerene said. "He does this to people. He's done this to other boyfriends. He can be a real bastard at times."

  But Philip seemed not to hear her. He was really sobbing now. Across the way, a long-haired woman wearing dark circular glasses, as if inspired by him, began to cry as well.

  Then, afterwards, in the midst of the heaves and the tear-mopping: "He owes it to me."

  "Owes what to you?" Jerene asked.

  Philip stuttered. "He owes it to me—at least to—at least to talk to me."

  Jerene took his hand. "Philip," she said, "I know. You should be pissed off. He's being very immature, very irresponsible. He's a very weak person; very few people realize it, but he's very weak. I'm not trying to justify his behavior, nothing like that—just pointing out that weakness in his case makes him cruel."