The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  "Or a child," Philip said. "Remember how free you left me when I was a kid? I wandered wherever I wanted, walked alone from Gerard's building, even at night."

  "I was stupid," Rose said. "You couldn't do it now with a child. Look at them all. They won't let go of each other."

  It was true. All the children in the park were firmly attached to their mothers, or linked together in chains. Rose wondered whose idea the chain was—the children's or the parents'—and decided it would be more like a child to believe that there was safety in numbers. The children, after all, were as scared, if not more so, than their parents. At school, they were being taught songs to "empower" themselves, songs with lyrics like "My body is my body..." Rose knew because she was at that moment copy-editing a book of such songs, and its companion volume, a comic book in which Batman taught children what to do if a stranger approached.

  Among the frightened children they walked, a family. Philip at least had made it to adulthood. He was safe from kidnapping, from molestation. He could run or walk alone in the park. But of course, survival only meant graduating to other dangers.

  "So how's it going, old man?" Owen asked his son, as they neared Fifth Avenue, the museum, the old world.

  "Okay," he said. They walked a moment in silence. "I guess there's no point in my keeping this from you. Eliot and I broke up."

  "Eliot—" Rose frowned. Then she remembered and fixed her eyes on the ground ahead of her.

  "Oh, I'm sorry about that."

  "I really wanted you to meet him, see how happy I could be with another man. Now I guess you're probably thinking all sorts of terrible things, like all gay relationships are very transitory and can't last and things like that."

  "No, Philip," Rose said. "I wasn't thinking anything of the sort, to be frank."

  "Because it isn't true." He looked at the ground. "I don't know about Eliot. I guess he's just afraid of commitment or something. A lot of people are afraid of commitment these days."

  "Are you bearing up?" Owen said.

  "Yes," Philip said. "But I'm sad all the time."

  By now they had reached the East Side, and Rose turned around, as if the border of the park was also the border of their walk together, the border of the common ground between their sides of the city, their opposed lives.

  "Well, you're young," she said to Philip, putting a hand on his wet shoulder. "I know it hurts now. But you'll get over it. Trust me."

  "I guess," he said. He looked at her, for a moment, a little pleadingly, as if he was hoping she might ask him home for dinner.

  "Thanks for walking your old parents through the park," Rose said instead. "We do appreciate it." And she reached out her cheek to be kissed.

  "I've missed you," Philip said. "I feel like we hardly see each other anymore. Remember when I used to come home every Sunday night for dinner?"

  "Oh, tonight's just leftovers anyway," Rose said, hardly believing how wicked she sounded. "But I'll tell you what. Why don't you plan on coming to dinner next Sunday? Wouldn't that be a good idea, Owen?"

  "Oh yes," Owen said. "A great idea."

  Philip smiled. "I'd like that," he said. "I'm just sorry I can't bring Eliot. You know, I had dinner with his stepfather, Derek Moulthorp? And I told him you'd copy-edited some of his books. He was very pleased."

  "I'm sure he was, dear. A wonderful writer, a wonderful children's writer."

  "Goodbye, son," Owen said. He shook Philip's hand. It was a gesture that radiated finalness, as if Philip were going off to Europe, or to war.

  But he was only going back to the West Side, to his apartment. "Goodbye," he said. "I'll talk to you during the week."

  Then he was running off, away from them, fast, fast, as if he wanted nothing more than to be as far from them as he could.

  Owen watched him. He looked handsome in his shorts and too-big T-shirt, fleet. Owen had been tall and gangly too as a young man, and the resemblance pleased him. "You know," he said to Rose as they walked out of the park, "he still runs funny. Remember how we used to worry because he was always walking into things, always loping to the wrong side of the sidewalk?"

  "I remember," Rose said.

  "We certainly worried a lot about nothing," Owen said. "He looks good, our son. But then again, he's always looked good, in his own way."

  "Don't start this," Rose said. "I'm in a rotten mood."

  "Do you want a Tofutti?" Owen asked. "Tofutti usually cheers you up."

  She shook her head no, silent in her wretchedness, and they walked on; but Owen continued to wave his secret pride in Philip, as if it were a flag only he could see.

  ROSE'S OFFICE was a tiny cubicle, one-fourth of a swastika. Carole Schneebaum, with whom she sometimes traded information or had idle conversations through the thin divider, was kitty-corner to her in the swastika, and had been there ten years out of Rose's twenty. The other two cubicles never had the same occupants for more than a few months at a time. Copy editing was not a profession people often thought of as permanent; more and more these days, freelancers took on the bulk of the work, and Rose's job involved assigning books as much as actually editing them. The freelancers on her list drifted in and out of sublets, moved away, went back to graduate school, all of which confirmed Rose's impression that while the world moved on, she and Carole were destined always to stay in the same place, patient and dependable, never changing, never promoted. The publisher, on the rare occasions that he spoke to them, made them feel like national landmarks. Ambition for a better position would have been perceived as unpatriotic. Rose was always getting flowers, and cards that read, "What would we do without you, Rose?" They were needed. Editors called them up on the phone to ask questions about syntax, or because they'd forgotten the code for figuring out the cross street from an avenue address.

  Roger Bell had been in the swastika for a year now; a British woman named Penelope with two last names for six months. They were friends of sorts. Roger was tall, with a careful, clipped beard; he worked out at a Nautilus center every morning before work, and arrived puffed up in a tight white T-shirt. Penelope always complimented him on his musculature. She used that word, "musculature." She was glamorous, irritating, with wild pitch-black hair and makeup caked on her cheeks. She had lived most of her life in Indonesia, where her American ex-husband was in the diplomatic corps, and was now in New York "on the run" from the ex-husband. Often she asked Rose to answer her phone for her in order to help her avoid the detectives she was convinced the ex-husband had set on her trail. She dressed in boldly patterned bright red and green Indonesian blouses and skirts with little mirrors embroidered into them, and was willing to talk loudly to anyone about anything, it seemed to Rose, but mostly about her ex-husband. She left him, she said during a lunch, because she had found him in bed one afternoon with three Indonesian prostitutes. "Darryl was nothing if not excessive," she added. To which Roger, in the middle of his Pork Kew, responded with a throaty guffaw that people could hear all the way across the office. Every day at lunch the two of them ate take-out Chinese food at a little table by the coffee machine and talked about their "personal lives"—an expression Rose had always found peculiar; what about life wasn't personal? Occasionally they would whisper in each other's ears, then laugh outrageously. Roger, it seemed, had once aspired to be a chef. Now no one invited him to dinner, he said, because he wouldn't eat anything he hadn't cooked himself. "Everyone gets real mad at me," Rose heard him explain to Penelope. "They decide I'm just a selfish crazy because I criticize their cooking. But the fact is, I am a better cook than they are, that's just the way it is. My friend Leonie made a vichyssoise? I'm sorry, it was sacrilegious. My therapist says I have to be honest about this, otherwise I wouldn't be being true to myself. So I don't get invited to dinner a whole lot anymore. So what? I'm too old to lie, too old to pretend about what's important to me." Where they sat in Rose's cubicle, eating modest sandwiches, Rose and Carole looked at each other and raised their eyes to heaven.

  One Tuesday in
March, Penelope confessed to Roger over lunch that her seventeen-year-old son, Miles, was gay. "I have no problems talking about it," she said. "Nothing like that." It was a little past one, and Rose, in her cubicle with Carole, was just closing her mouth on a bite of sandwich. "Oh, believe me, I was shocked at first," Penelope continued. "But now I've really come to accept it. He has a great boyfriend, very cute, who comes and stays over at the apartment sometimes, and we all have a lot of fun. And it's opened my mind. I mean, I've just never thought about the possibility of being attracted to women before; it just never entered my head. I'm very man-centered, very oriented toward men, you might say, because of my mother, who was married three times and had lots of affairs. I was raised by my mother to appreciate the male physique. But then, with Miles being gay, well, on one level, it gave us something in common, I mean, men, but on another, it made me think—why not women? And I realized I really was attracted to women sometimes, that I was probably in love with my best friend Fanny in comprehensive school. So you could say it's been a mind-expanding experience."

  Rose, protected by the thin walls of her cubicle, held the half-eaten sandwich in the air halfway to her mouth, then realizing that that gesture—that ceasing to eat—might give her away to Carole, quickly took another bite. Soft bread and lukewarm tuna salad clotted in her mouth, gagging her. Carole shook her head, silently mouthed, "That woman," and Rose excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  In the bathroom, Rose blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She looked at herself in the mirror. She did not look like Penelope. She had a thoughtful child's eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips. All in all a gentle, trustworthy, maternal face, but one, she thought, with an edge of impishness, an edge of sophistication. Her hair was graying, her eyes ringed with shadow. She wondered: Have I ever been attracted to women? then decided the question was absurd, an evasion. She was not Penelope. Penelope's situation was not her situation.

  "My situation," Rose said to herself. Unacknowledged, locked inside her imagination, it remained unreal. She was determined to keep it that way. She wanted not to know the truth but to avoid it, to continue as long as possible under the delusion that she might just be imagining things. Like a sleeper whose blanket has fallen away on a cold night, she was always shivering, her eyes clenched shut against the reality of waking. Nothing had changed in her practical, day-to-day life, after all. She still went to work on the same bus, still cooked dinner for Owen, sat with Owen reading in the living room and sometimes watching television. Visibly, their lives were the same.

  But it was the invisible that worried her. Did she bear some extra chromosome, she wondered sometimes, some bizarre, deleterious gene, emit some strange pheromone that made men love other men? Looking at herself in the mirror, she tried to see the flaw in her face, the gap between the teeth, tried to recognize herself as evil. Maenad, harpie, castrating bitch. Synonyms assailed her, the endlessly rich vocabulary of what evil women might do to men. When she thought of Penelope's husband, caught in bed with three Indonesian prostitutes, envy flared in her.

  Sometimes Rose caught a glimpse of herself in mirrors or reflecting shop windows and didn't recognize herself. She was surprised by what she saw: a face that was startlingly normal, almost not hers, a face that could have belonged to anyone. Now, in the bathroom, she searched for that stranger's face and couldn't find it. Instead her face seemed so inexorably her own it made her choke; staring at herself in the mirror, she was overcome by the claustrophobia of selfhood, a suffocating consciousness of her entrapment in that face in the mirror—complacent, unemotive, ragged with worry, a face that would change, liven, deaden, according to nothing more or less than her own grief or joy, her mind, her will. She rubbed her cheeks, pulled at her eyelids, straightened her mouth into a thin line. Even the act of masking, of molding the face into studied normalness, was a matter of will. But at least she looked normal.

  She headed out into the hall. By the copy machine, two editors greeted her with lifted coffee cups: "Hi, Ducky." She nodded to them and kept walking, circling the office with a pretense of purpose. She could not, somehow, sit down. She was remembering how Owen had cried so fiercely that night, and later. And anyway, where had he been, where had he been going every Sunday afternoon for twenty years? He was always silent during sex, never praiseful. Maybe he just hated her. Maybe that was all. She had had her own life, after all, as she reminded herself now, and it had had nothing to do with Owen, that secret life in which she had been so fiercely needed and desired by a man. Owen never knew that across the office, at the other end of a complicated circuit of hallways and doors, was an editor with whom she had had a five-year affair. She and Nick had met often on their lunch hour, and sometimes, when Owen was working late, in the early evenings, taking a room at a big midtown hotel, usually the same room, on the twenty-fifth floor. There was always the smell of room deodorizer and Carpet Fresh and Nick's aftershave in the air, while they made passionate noontime love. But then Nick's wife had gotten sick; it was not cancer. Relieved, he and Nadia had gone off to the Bahamas for two weeks, and when he came back, Nick was sorry, he couldn't anymore, he felt too guilty. Nadia had almost died. He realized how much he loved her. He worried about her finding out, about hurting her. Rose understood. No hard feelings.

  All that had ended seven years ago. These days she and Nick nodded at each other in the hall or talked in editorial meetings with a surprisingly genuine casualness in which there was masked neither denial of the past nor particular good feeling. They had both gotten heavier, softer. Different bodies had conducted that affair, which was mostly a matter of bodies anyway—bodies, and the romance of making love at noon in a midtown hotel, then getting dressed, eating something quickly, like a hot dog, heading back (separately, of course) to the office. Nick always put his shirt and tie on before his pants, Rose remembered. She would help him tie his tie, and sometimes reach down in a friendly way between his legs. It had excited her, the sight of him like that, in his shirt and tie, naked from the waist down. These days, occasionally, when she saw him in the hall, she would wonder: What does his body look like now? It was a faint kind of curiosity, not unpleasant at all. It almost moved her.

  And perhaps Owen knew. Perhaps he knew, and hated her. Peculiarly, the possibility was a relief to her, since at least it meant it was her he was crying for; at least it meant she had had a life, had mattered to him, was something more than an excuse, the victim of his lifelong lie. She was fifty-two years old. Her husband cried all the time, several times in a day, sometimes for no visible reason, and was drinking too much for the first time in his life. Her son—but why was so much of her anger directed at Philip? He was trying as hard as he could with her, called her often, clearly wanted to love her, to help her. Still, she could not look him in the face without wanting to slap him. He had to tell everyone; he had to break open that door in their lives which they would have been far happier having kept shut. Such anger was her right, she thought. Pain gave her the privilege of anger.

  In the oncoming dark, around five-thirty, she wandered by Nick's office and fingered outside, looking at the framed book jackets that lined the wall. She did this sometimes, curious, she supposed, to see what he looked like. He was standing by die window, watching night settle like a fine, hovering mist over midtown. He was a tall, soft man who should have been dark, who should have bronzed on islands, but who had instead chosen the pale life (and acquired the pale skin) of the bookworm, the perpetual library-dweller, white skin at odds with his black hair and eyes. Languorously he turned, saw her, smiled. "How's it going, Rose?"

  "Fine," she said. "I hadn't seen you for a while, so I just—thought I'd drop by."

  They went out for a drink. He told her how one of his sons had won a major award in graphic design at college, how another was starting medical school at Downstate in the fall. There was a daughter somewhere in the background, but she was a problem: drugs, obesity, abortion. He laid out the woes like an agenda for a meeting. The daughter was liv
ing in Seattle, in a house so filthy her mother had felt obliged to go out and buy Pine-Sol and Lysol and Ajax—but he didn't want to go into it all here, and poured some more Perrier into his glass.

  "How's Nadia's health?" Rose asked.

  "Fine, fine. No problems since that first surgery. She asks about you sometimes, by the way." They had met only once, at an office party. Nadia was a kind, smiling woman who had aged faster than Nick, had had to suffer for years looking too old for him.

  "And your family?" Nick asked.

  Rose shrugged. "Not much to tell," she said. "Philip's still working at the same job. Owen—well, he's depressed a lot of the time. There are some hard things going on."

  "Do you want to talk about them?"

  Rose smiled tightly, shook her head no.

  Afterwards, on the streetcorner outside the bar where they could not have gotten a cab if their lives depended on it, Rose said, "Nick, I just wanted to let you know, I think about you these days. Often. More often than I'd have guessed I would."

  He smiled. "I think about you, too," he said. But she knew it for a lie.

  Finally they found a cab. She climbed in, gave the driver the address. A triptych of little girls' faces stared at her from above the rearview mirror. Siren, witch, hag, Rose thought, and had a vague recollection of having ridden in this very same cab only a few months before.

  At the corner she got out, overtipped the driver, and hurrying back toward where the doorman rubbed his hands together and whistled, caught a glimpse of her face in a store window—the face of a worried, older woman, someone she might pass on the street and feel sorry for, someone, at an easier time in her life, she might have felt grateful not to be.

  FROM THE DEPTHS of his office, at five o'clock, Owen dialed, listened to ringing.