The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  "I'm not going to ask any questions," she said. "I don't want to know anything. But I want you to promise me one thing. I want you to promise me that the next time you go out until two-thirty in the morning, you will call and warn me so I won't worry myself to death wondering if you're dead."

  "You're right, honey," Owen said. "I'm sorry. I will."

  After a few seconds Rose got up. "I'm going to bed," she said.

  "Rose," Owen said.

  She shook her head vigorously no, then disappeared into the bedroom, leaving him alone in the living room with the vast, silent expanse of New York outside the window. Unconsciously he cupped his genitals.

  Then it all came back—the panic, the turmoil, the sense of the world flying out of orbit—and they were bag people again, roaming the ruined streets of their lives, looking for scraps to live on or live in. Owen closed his eyes and mouth tight against screaming, and the scream burst inside him, ricocheted off the walls of his body. What had he done? Good God, what had he said? How could he have been so reckless, so obvious? Panic exploded in him. He remembered Rose's expression, the pain in her eyes, the way she held her hands together on her lap, calmly, the fingers pulling at each other like cracking party favors. He wanted to comfort her, to reassure her; but how could he, when he was the source and cause of all her pain? No matter how much empathy he felt, he was what was hurting her, and it could not be stopped, even by him.

  He sat down in her chair, still warm with her imprint, then stood up again immediately, like someone burned on a vinyl car seat on a scorching hot day. Then he walked to the window, pressed his face to it, and felt the cold air outside seep through, into his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth. He breathed, watched the patterns his breath made on the glass.

  After that he stood quietly for a moment, waiting for the shaking to subside.

  In the bedroom, Rose lay stiff and knotted. He started to undress, looked down at her. But he had made up his mind and only wished he could find some way to save himself without killing her.

  In bed, he reached over from his side to touch her shoulder. A spasm racked her body at his touch, did not subside. She lay there shaking, but would not look at him.

  "Rose," he said.

  She wept softly, did not answer, would not look at him.

  SPRING HAD COME LATE, and the ring of ice around Philip's heart finally cracked. Then it was as if something had been freed in him, though against his will or better judgment. He woke up in the morning not feeling bad; he couldn't help it. It seemed the small pleasures of the world, elusive all winter, were now conspiring to assault him, to beat misery out of him, and no matter how he tried he just could not hold them off. The sun on his face, waiting for the bus early in the morning, or the sight of the super's wife taking her little girl to school, a Cabbage Patch lunchbox clutched in her hand—these things brought an unexpected, even unwanted smile to his face on breezy mornings in late March—small, unnoticeable to anyone but him, really, but enough to make him realize that he was perhaps recovering, that Eliot's spectre had faded.

  He was less lonely than he had been—or, perhaps more accurately, he had learned how to be alone. He found himself looking forward to the prospect of a night in his apartment with the manuscript of Island Rhapsody and a foil container of sesame noodles. Other nights he saw Brad. They had dinner together, went to the movies. "All I want," Brad said, as they leaned together against a wall of Boy Bar, "all I've ever wanted, is someone to settle down with," and Philip agreed, both of them surprisingly unconscious of the extent to which they had settled with each other. Often they stood like this, staring into the dark, shoe-smelling depths of bars, scanning the room for faces, trying to pick out which ones they could fall in love with. But the faces were familiar by now and looked as tired of looking as theirs did. Perhaps these faces were mourning the old days of catch-as-catch-can, free love, guiltless ecstasy, the days when you could wink at someone, smile, and that would be enough: You'd be off together to a room somewhere to make love. Now monogamy was in fashion, but it had taken on the status of a safety tactic, an unappetizing but necessary catastrophe measure, like one of those World War II recipes for stretching precious rationed meat. "Find ten buddies and agree to fuck only with them," Philip had read in a porn magazine early on in the crisis. Then ten was reduced to five, five to two. Men found themselves stranded in couples, reduced to a choice of living alone or continuing with a person who, if he was going to infect you at all, had already done it, so what was there to risk? Thus couples formed; fear became an indirect route to monogamy and, sometimes, to happiness.

  One Friday night, Philip and Brad took the subway uptown to Columbia, where the Gay Student Union was sponsoring a dance, and there they danced wildly, exuberantly, until sweat showed on their faces and their clothes smelled like tar. Afterwards, they ate cheeseburgers at an all-night diner on Broadway, and at six in the morning hiked the length of Manhattan to its very tip, marching through sleepy-eyed, hung-over Harlem, heedless of the dangers, until dawn found them at the fortlike Cloisters, triumphant as mountain climbers. After which they went separately home. As a matter of principle, as well as fear, they never slept with anyone, not even each other. They had never known that time when sex existed without the threat of disease yoked to it, and the fear of sickness was at the root of their consciousness—something of which they were seemingly unaware, yet which ruled them, formed their attitudes and determined their behavior.

  That Sunday they spent the early part of the afternoon at the movies, watching cartoons. Afterwards, when the sun came out, they wandered through the zoo in Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. Philip loved that afternoon, with its faint whiff of childhood. On springy rainy mornings, he would wake up to hear the drizzle of water splashing against a drain, and wish for nothing more than the coziness of being ten years old and home from school with a cold, watching hours of game shows on television—"Match Game," "Wheel of Fortune," "The Twenty Thousand Dollar Pyramid." Around noon on those distant dizzy days, his mother would come home and prepare him chicken noodle soup for lunch, and then, after she left, as morning gave way to afternoon, the incomprehensible soap operas would come on, and fade, and it would be the time of old science-fiction movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, movies that, if you changed the channel constantly, you could watch simultaneously with Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Speed Racer, Gigantor, Kimba the Heroic White Lion. Lying in his bed on wet mornings in his own apartment, Philip could still recite to himself the exact sequence of shows. If only he had a color television, he'd think; if only he had a cold. And then he would remember that no cold could be just a cold for him anymore; no cold could be enjoyed or indulged. A cold meant anxious countings of how many times he'd been sick that year and a frantic prodding of the glands in his neck. And remembering this anxiety of colds, remembering the threat of pain, fast decline, and death, he'd bound out of bed, leap in the shower, and practically run to work.

  One afternoon he came home from work and found a letter from Eliot in his mailbox. At first he put it down on his desk and tried to ignore it, but finally he could not help himself, and he opened the envelope and read what was inside. The letter, sent from Paris, was on blue airmail stationery.

  He skimmed the first two paragraphs. Arrival in Italy, funny little pensions, a medieval church happened upon. Undiscovered beauty, untouristed countryside. Then Paris, and Roland LeClerc, a photographer friend of Derek's, "a 'bohème' of the old school," Eliot wrote, "always dressed in paisley and ascots. He lives in a big, ugly apartment in the Fifth, high ceilings and hideous furniture, everything dusty. But it's wonderful. In the morning I can smell that Paris smell, coffee and croissants, sweet jam and cigars and car fumes rising up." There was an afternoon tea party attended by very, very old gay men, and a woman who Roland insisted was a former lover of Colette's.

  "I feel like I owe you an explanation for my sudden departure," the letter went on,

/>   for not saying goodbye. You're perfectly right to think me cruel. But it was very hard for me, Philip. Ridiculous as you may think it is for me to say at this point, I did love you, in my own particular way. The problem is, loving someone is not the same as wanting to spend your life paired with him. That kind of compatibility is a rare thing, and frankly, I just didn't feel it. Is this cruel of me to say? Perhaps. But I think you deserve the truth from me. My strong feelings for you made it that much harder for me to ease things off. The more I loosened the grip, it seemed, the more you tightened. And I've said it before: your need oppressed me. I began to feel it was something I had to escape, and when you start thinking in those terms—well, it's only a few steps to lies, to cruelty. I didn't want to let myself go that far, Philip, but it seemed there was no way I could not hurt you. I wanted you, at least, to have the benefit of being able to be angry at me, to hate me a little, because I know that makes it easier.

  Here I feel renewed, revivified. I feel as if I can start my life over. I've met a young Frenchman, a student—he is droopy-eyed and handsome and given to bouts of depression, and I think we will be good for each other. I've gotten some connections established, have some possibilities for work. Thierry lives across town, near the Alésia metro, and I'll probably be moving in with him for a few weeks while I look for an apartment.

  And you—I am sure your life is going well. If there's one thing I know about you, Philip, it is that you are, whether you like it or not, helplessly optimistic. No matter how much you may want to remain in a stupor of depression, you'll rise up from it. Sometimes I think you are doomed to happiness.

  Please write me c/o Thierry. I miss you.

  Eliot

  Philip read the letter over twice, pacing the tiny confines in his room. Then he folded it carefully in thirds, replaced it in its envelope and stuck it inside his desk drawer. Outside the open window, at the far end of an alley full of garbage cans, a bunch of little girls jumped rope double-dutch, chanting in Spanish. He watched them. He thought: I can smell that New York smell—frying grease and sesame oil,menudo and beans and bus exhaust. He thought: I hardly knew him. Little chips of old paint were stuck inside the window frame—dirty white and red and blue fragments of the apartment's past—and methodically he scooped some up in his hand, a fine powder interspersed with jagged-edged chunks, like puzzle pieces. He examined them for a little while, curious about their age, their hardness. Then, experimentally, he dropped some out the window. The bigger pieces fluttered down, crashed silently on the ground. When he opened his hands to the air, the powder blew into the wind, whirling for a few seconds before falling like a last, late snowfall to the garbage-strewn landscape below.

  A few days later, Jerene called Philip up at work. "It's been a long time," she said. "The last time we talked you seemed so upset. Are you feeling better?"

  At his desk, Philip smiled. "Yes," he said. "Much better." He was quiet for a moment. "I told my parents," he said.

  "Oh, Philip," Jerene said. "How are they taking the news?"

  "I don't know," Philip said. "I saw my father this week, and it was pretty weird. He'd been drinking, I think, and he asked me all sorts of questions about myself, which was okay, but it really surprised me—I mean, he's always been very closed. It's a big change."

  "Well, that's good," Jerene said. "Any interest is good."

  "I know. As for my mother—well, things aren't so good. She hardly talks to me. I'm supposed to go over for dinner on Sunday, and believe it or not, my father's invited this teacher from his school he says he wants to fix me up with. That'll be peculiar, to say the least. I don't know if my mother knows anything about it."

  "You mean a man?" Jerene asked.

  "Yes. A man. I know, I know. My friend Brad thinks it's weird too. Some sort of mid-life crisis, I guess. But enough of that. How are you?"

  "Good," Jerene said.

  "Still working at the hotline?"

  "Yes. But I quit the other job. I got some teaching work at N.Y.U.—freshman comp. Nothing great, but I was getting sick of being a bouncer." She paused. "The good news is, Laura's just moved in, and we've been fixing the place up. And we were wondering if you might be free for dinner tomorrow night. We want you to be our inaugural guest. And this friend, this Brad of yours—bring him too!"

  "I'm not sure," he said.

  "But Eliot's gone, Philip. The place is completely changed, a different apartment, thanks to Laura."

  He closed his eyes. "All right," he said finally, although the prospect frightened him. "What time?"

  "Eight o'clock," said Jerene.

  Brad lived in a pleasant, dark apartment into which his parents had delivered intact the furniture of his childhood bedroom in New Jersey. There was a pair of big lacquered bunk beds, a white activity table, three beanbag chairs. "I'm almost ready," Brad said when Philip came by to pick him up the next evening. He pulled off his tie and shirt, and Philip could not help noticing his chest—white, well formed, and covered with pale, downy hair. Brad took a jersey from a white child's dresser which, like all the furniture in the apartment, was made for a boy, completely stripped of ornament, of anything that might be even mildly construed as frilly or feminine. "Are you nervous?" he asked Philip, as they headed out, once more, into the street. Philip thought about it. "Yes," he said finally, "a little. But not too much." He had not yet mentioned the letter from Eliot—indeed, he saw no reason to mention it. Lately he had been practicing restraint as a general policy, and had mostly forgotten the letter, except for that last annoying remark Eliot had made about his being "doomed to happiness." What could it mean to be doomed to happiness? The phrase made it sound as if happiness was some kind of imprisoning lie, a form of brainwashing; as if a valiant life made miserable by knowledge was necessarily better than one that was happy but ignorant. It infuriated him, the tyranny implicit in Eliot's smug, cynical tone, with its cryptic hints of foreknowledge, its wry psychiatrist's wit. And yet he could not deny that he could imagine no more pleasurable life than the kind led within the cozy confines of a half-hour situation comedy, that he really wanted each day in his life to collapse into a neat dot of light, to end the way an episode of "The Brady Bunch" ended, with everything in its place, all the gentle, soft conflicts put away or stuffed under the bunk beds, or smoothed like frosting on a birthday cake.

  Eliot's building was unchanged when they got there, except that the name under the mailbox had been altered, the little tag of paper now reading FINLEY/PARKS instead of ABRAMS/PARKS. They stood there for a moment, Philip examining the pink linoleum walls of the foyer, the dirt caked into the mailboxes, Brad watching Philip for warning signs of emotional upheaval. But Philip only sighed loudly. They rang the buzzer and were duly admitted. Up the stairs, Jerene's new friend, Laura, was waiting for them at the door.

  She was extraordinarily pale, with hair so thin and wispy it might have been woven out of sand. "Now let me get this right," she said, and her voice had grain, was sandy. "You're Philip," she said, pointing to Philip. "And you're Brad."

  "That's right," Philip said. He worried he might call her Sandy.

  She smiled and reached out her hand. "Well, I'm glad I got that right," she said. "I'm Laura. Come on in."

  Inside, the apartment was much changed. New blueberry-patterned curtains hung on the windows. A matching tablecloth covered the table, and a bright, overstuffed couch perched where Jerene's spartan cot had once been. "I'm glad you could make it," Jerene said, parting herself from the stove to kiss Philip on the cheek and introduce herself to Brad. "We're making couscous."

  The strains of a melancholy song by the Roches wound through the room, along with a faint smell of incense. "My recipe," said Laura, pointing proudly to the boiling red sauce. "Taste?" She reached a wooden spoon toward Philip, and an acrid sizzle touched his lips. "Fabulous, isn't it?" Laura said. "I got the recipe from a bunch of Algerians I used to live with in Paris. But then I lost it. For years I've been trying to get it back, get it right, and
tonight—" She kissed her fingers dramatically, then returned to stirring the tiny buds. She was wearing a knee-length linen dress the color of blueberry yoghurt and had a row of tiny pearls studded into each of her ears. A girl who was almost transparent in her appearance, whom you would imagine would be allergic to everything and live in a Victorian house, and spend her days doing things like rubbing sandalwood oil into the faint freckles of her skin, or crocheting flowers into curtains.

  "It's wonderful sauce," Philip said. "I'm glad Jerene's got someone to cook so well for her."

  "Oh, she's not so bad herself," Laura said. "Anyway, I owe Jerene a lot more than meals. I don't know if she told you, but before I met her I was living with my mother in abject misery? And every day I had to listen to her have nervous breakdowns about me—you know, 'Why don't you marry a nice boy, it just breaks my heart?'" She turned to Jerene and kissed her on the forehead. "I'm very happy to be out of there, to have a new home," she said, and Philip nodded.

  If Laura's looks were Laura Wingfield—fragile and transparent as a tiny glass animal—her temperament was pure Amanda: loud and brash and indiscreet; full of hype and bombast; good-natured, loving, easy to hurt. "So how are things going with your parents, Philip?" she asked, as she handed Philip a glass of grapefruit juice. "Have they come around at all?"

  Philip gulped the grapefruit juice. How did Laura know about his parents? "Well," he said.

  "Up and down, huh? I know." Laura chewed a piece of ice. "The same thing was true with mine, at first. One minute all curiosity, the next they won't talk to me. I think it's a mid-life thing, ultimately, don't you?"

  "I suppose so."

  "I wouldn't worry," Laura went on. "I told my parents three, four years ago, and it was a rough road for a while, but now things are really fine—well, at least with my father. He's even given Jerene and me our own set of keys to his place in Bridgehampton for the summer. And that really pleases me. I mean, it makes me feel like he really cares about me, more than he cares about my being a lesbian. As for my mother—she's a different story."