The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Jerene and Brad now moved across the room to join them by the stove. "Jerene's just been telling me about her work on the Gay Crisis Hotline," Brad said.

  "I've thought about doing that kind of thing myself," Laura said. "I think I'd be a pretty good counselor-type person; in fact, I'm thinking about it as a career. But as Jerene can tell you, I have this phone phobia. I mean, I'm terrified of the phone. I guess it's because my first stepfather, when I was little, was kind of a sicko—he never molested me or anything, but he used to make me talk to him on the phone while he masturbated sometimes." And suddenly a look of mortification came over her face, and she slapped her forehead. "What am I doing?" she said. "I always do this. Just interrupt and stuff myself into a conversation. I'm terribly self-involved, just Miss Self-Centered. Please forgive me. Jerene, go on and finish what you were saying."

  They moved toward the living room, each bearing a steaming bowl of food. Like the kitchen, it had been transformed. Flowers hung in pots before the windows. A big brass bed stood where Eliot's futon had been curled, and next to it, a big vanity table full of makeup and perfumes and scatterings of lace. There was an Oriental rug on the floor, stuffed animals thrown here and there. The gray walls had been painted sky blue. The only thing that seemed to be the same was the old ugly radiator, silent now in the warm weather. All through the dinner Philip kept looking around the room, expecting to see something that would spark strong feeling in him, but even the most potent of his memories refused to surface. Nothing was left. Everything of the past had been buried under all the strong frippery of Laura's presence.

  She told them everything. It was as if she hoped that by dumping the whole mess of herself onto them at once they might be struck, almost against their will, by the good mixed in with the nonsense. "Since I dropped out of Hampshire I've just been travelling," she explained, while Jerene scurried about, spicing things, getting salt and pepper. "I was in Morocco, in Paris, in Tangiers. Then I lived in San Francisco for a while. I was working in the women's music industry out there. I knew some sign language, so I got this job interpreting for this singer named Melissa Swallow—you know, for the deaf?" She laughed. "You should've seen me. I wore nothing but turtlenecks and hiking boots, to the dismay of mytrès sophistiqués New York parents, and lived in this communal women's house in Mill Valley and smoked a lot of grass. It was fun, but it wasn't for me, so I headed back East, and my mother—my blessed heart of a mother—got me the job at the Laura Ashley store, figuring that was one place I'd be safe. Little did she know," she said, looking up at Jerene, "who'd be walking in."

  Jerene blushed.

  "You know," Laura said, "when I told her, she said, 'I can't believe it. I set it up myself. Why did I get you that job?' As if it was her fault. And you know what? Sometimes I believe her. I get so sucked up in her paranoia I start to regret it myself and blame her. You see, I'm basically still a very insecure person, still searching a lot, which is what I was doing then, in San Francisco, and what I'm still doing now, I guess, which is why my mother is such a terrible influence on my life. But I feel very happy, very secure with Jerene. Almost as if I'm settled." Then she leaned confidentially toward Philip, and said, "So have you heard from Eliot lately?" She spoke in such intimate tones of "Eliot" that for a moment Philip forgot what Jerene had told him on the phone: that Laura had met Eliot only once, for about five minutes. She smiled now, eager for his confidence. It was as if, by this intimacy, she hoped to bulldoze her way into what she must have perceived to be a pre-existing group of friends—he and Eliot and Brad and Jerene. Although her impression of them as a group could not have been farther from the truth, her eagerness not to be left out touched Philip.

  "Well, I got a letter," he said.

  "You did?" asked Brad. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  He shrugged. "I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, that's all," he said. "It wasn't a big-deal letter. He just said he'd been travelling, but now he's settled in Paris. He says he has a nice, depressed boyfriend with a strange name. I can't remember what."

  Laura swallowed a bite of couscous to clear her mouth for talking. "Thierry," she said.

  "Yes," said Philip. "That's it. How did you know?"

  She smiled. "I set them up," she said proudly.

  Philip gazed at her. "You set them up?"

  "Well, sort of. Remember I told you I used to live in Paris, with a bunch of Algerians? Well, Thierry was lovers with one of them, Mustapha, for a while. He lived with his mother in Neuilly or someplace like that. Anyway, we got to be friends, and we stayed friends even after he and Mustapha broke up and I'd moved out of the apartment. So when Eliot told me he was going to Paris, of course I gave him Thierry's number, never in a million years expecting—" She gestured vaguely with her hands, and swallowed another mouthful of couscous.

  "Oh," Philip said. He looked at the table, and Jerene, seeing his crestfallen face, added, "I don't think it's really all that serious, Philip, r mean, Eliot doesn't even know how long he'll be in Paris." She looked at him earnestly. He appreciated that she cared. Still, he was embarrassed to be caught mooning like that. He no longer wished to call attention to his old grief, now that he was finally getting over it—especially in front of Brad.

  "Jerene," he said, "you're very sweet to be so kind to me. But it really isn't necessary. You can tell me the truth, I'm not going to freak out. Eliot told me himself that he was going to be moving in with Thierry for a while, and I think that's just fine. I hope they're very happy, I hope it works out. He's getting on with his life, and I realize, now, that I've got to get on with mine."

  "It looks to me like you're doing that already," Laura said. She glanced significantly at Philip, then at Brad, then at Philip again.

  "Married life," Laura said, "is the greatest." And faking Jerene's hand, she held it on the table. Jerene was sitting straight up, her back like a board. She looked like the tin woodsman of Oz. "For Jerene and me, it's been a healing kind of process. For instance—I'm trying to convince her to go and talk to her parents. We've even done some research. Tell them, Jerene."

  Jerene laughed nervously. "Well," she said, "I went and saw my grandmother the other day—it was the first time in years."

  "Oh, Jerene," Philip said. "That's wonderful. Was it okay? I mean, was it a good thing, was she happy to see you?"

  Jerene nodded. "It was very sad," she said. "Of course, she didn't know anything. She's pretty out of it to begin with, and besides, she hardly speaks to my parents, hardly has any more of a relationship with them than I do. She barely knew anything about me, she's been in this nursing home so long. It isn't a bad place, but I think she's lonely." Jerene smiled. "You can't imagine how scared I was going in there. It was the first time I'd had contact with my family for six years."

  "The next step," Laura said, "is going to be a letter, from Jerene to her parents, telling them she's seeing her grandmother and insisting they come and visit her. Because you see, in this case, it's not just Jerene and her parents—it's the whole family. A whole history of disownment, of children rejecting parents and parents rejecting children. I think about this a lot, because of my plans to get my degree in family counseling. For instance, I've been reading up lately in systems theory, and I really think there's a lot to it. What's happened to Jerene—well, it's all part of a family system which is unique. In my family, disownment wasn't even something people thought about. But damn it, here I go again, blathering on about myself. Please forgive me. Let me ask: Did you ever worry about being disowned?"

  "Oh, no," Philip said. And Brad said: "Certainly not in my case. My parents are very supportive."

  "Which means," Laura said, "that we've all got to be supportive of Jerene in this, because she doesn't have that support; And she needs it."

  They all looked at Jerene, who got up, went into the kitchen, and returned with a large multi-hued salad. Laura tossed and distributed it. "So how long have you two been involved?" she asked casually as she finished, and Brad and Philip
both choked.

  "Well—"

  "I mean, we've known each other—"

  "The fact is, we're not really involved, in a traditional way. We're just good friends," Philip said.

  "Aha." Laura leaned back in her chair.

  "Friends," Philip repeated.

  "I understand," Laura said. "Of course. But—romantic friends, perhaps?" For this last phrase, she affected a clipped, mock-British accent, batted her eyelashes, stretched her lips thin.

  "You might say that."

  "So," Jerene said, "has anyone here heard the new Ferron album?"

  Everyone had. They discussed it as, for a half an hour or so, the dinner wound itself down. It was like a ride through an amusement park fun house, lurching along through narrow corridors of frenzied display, then suddenly finding yourself at the end, ejected, dizzy on the cold street, a little sick to your stomach.

  "She is something," Brad said.

  Philip nodded.

  "And your friend Jerene seems nice, too, though I guess she didn't have a chance to talk much."

  "Oh, she's like that," Philip said. "She's always very quiet with company. Listen, do you want to have a cup of coffee or something?"

  Brad was silent. In the light of Laura's coy questioning, anything could sound like a proposition. Anything. And, miserably, Philip remembered the evening last month when he had tried to say "Anything" seductively, and made a fool of himself.

  "I mean at the Kiev," he added.

  Brad shrugged. "I think I'm probably too tired," he said. "I kind of want to get home."

  "I understand," Philip said. "I'm tired, too." He paused. "You know, I couldn't believe it when she asked us how long we'd been seeing each other. I felt very embarrassed. I'm mentioning it only because I don't want you to think that I said anything to her, that I suggested—"

  "Philip," Brad said. "Of course not. Don't worry about it." He seemed annoyed.

  "No," Philip said. "Of course not. I shouldn't have said anything."

  Silently they moved on toward Brad's building, Philip remembering that uncomfortable night back when it had still been winter. Now a warm breeze blew. They walked ungloved, unhatted, without umbrellas. And Philip thought how nice it must be to be able, like Eliot, just to take off from a place you've come to call home, to eject yourself from the complex and dangerous network of friends, lovers, apartments, to sever all ties and leap into the startling newness of the unknown. Sometimes he tried to imagine doing it, just buying a ticket somewhere, say, to Paris, and going there, and he could almost feel the shock, the relief of knowing no one, smelling strange smells, feeling new breezes. But then he would remember that he hardly knew the language, that he had no friends to stay with in Paris; he would realize that once there, he'd have to begin again a ceaseless cycle of worrying—about laundry, about eating out alone and being mistreated by the waiters, about finding a boyfriend. Such concerns apparently didn't faze Eliot. He knew people everywhere, always had places to stay. And once again Philip envisioned Eliot in a trenchcoat, riding on a fast-moving train through some unspeakably beautiful landscape, with no luggage; he was standing on a sort of old-fashioned caboose balcony, the wind blowing through his hair. Probably he was going to Venice. Philip imagined Eliot and his lover, Thierry, riding a gondola through a jade-colored canal, strange, barnacle-caked towers rising above them on all sides. Some people left, some were left; it seemed the world required the two extremes, for balance. There would be no refuge in travel for Philip; he was too much of a coward for adventure, too yoked to routine and familiar comforts. Doomed, Eliot had said. Perhaps that was what he meant, as he sat writing in that dusty room in the Fifth, smelling "that Paris smell." Perhaps he was simply thinking of his own good fortune, and he had written "doomed," and added "to happiness" to cut the cruelty.

  They arrived at Brad's building. Once again, they were standing on the stoop, and Philip found himself facing the trial of saying goodbye when he would have so much rather gone upstairs with Brad, settled himself into one of the bunk beds, and watched television or talked. Then Brad said, "Why don't you stay down here tonight? There's no point in your making that trip uptown when I've got plenty of room."

  Philip's cheeks reddened. "Well—okay," he said, and laughed, he was so surprised, so thankful, so nervous. Clearly Brad was nervous too. "Okay, then," Brad said, and tripped on the stoop, and was short of breath as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. It had taken only a moment for everything to change.

  Once inside, Brad flipped on the light, took his jacket off, and headed straight to the answering machine, which was pulsing red with enthusiasm to tell what it had to tell. There were messages from his mother, from Sally, from his friend Gwen at work, all of which he jotted down disappointedly. "The boy of my dreams didn't call," he said, and Philip turned away, almost but not quite brave enough to ask, "Will I do?"

  Brad was reaching into his closet to fetch linen. "Do you prefer the top or the bottom?" he asked.

  "Oh, I don't care," Philip said. "It's up to you."

  "I actually kind of like to sleep up top, so I'll put you on the bottom." On his knees inside the crawlspace of the bottom bunk, Brad shook out a sheet. Philip sat at his white desk, his leg shaking. For once, it seemed they had nothing to say to each other.

  They undressed modestly, trying not to notice each other's bodies. Climbing into the bottom bunk, Philip considered for a moment all that was implicitly sexual in this ritual of boys undressing, all that underlay that careful pose of disinterest. Then Brad turned out the light. Streetlamps shone up and through the thin gauzy curtain on the window. From where he lay on the bottom bunk, Philip watched Brad, also in his underwear, scurry up the little stepladder to the top bunk, his legs scrambling for a second before they disappeared. There was a soft thud as he landed.

  They were quiet. In the dark of the apartment the only sounds came from the street. He could hear Brad breathing above him, hear how his body settled on the top bunk. This same anonymity had titillated him in college; sometimes he'd masturbated quietly while fantasizing that his very straight roommate was doing the same right above him. He felt a little bit now as he had then—distrustful of the dark, fearful of getting caught doing something or saying something Brad would misinterpret or resent.

  "Brad," he said, when he was finally able to find words.

  "Yes?" His voice was surprisingly hollow, as if the room itself were speaking.

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Sure."

  "Why did you ask me to spend the night?"

  There was a long silence. "I didn't see the point in your going all the way uptown this late," Brad said.

  "But I've come down here a million times and you've never asked me to spend the night before."

  Brad shifted in his bed. "Well," he said, "you know that I'm a shy person, a very private person in a lot of ways. I don't trust people easily."

  "I know."

  "I consider my apartment my refuge, my haven." He stopped, as if to choose the proper words, which made Philip nervous. "I'm safe here," he said. "I guess before you, there was never anyone I trusted enough to have here with me without spoiling it." He paused. "It just took me a little while to get up the guts to ask you up."

  For a second, Philip's heart seemed to stop. "Really?" he said.

  "Really."

  "Thank you, Brad," he said. "I think I can say I feel the same way about you—even though my apartment isn't really very much to protect."

  They were quiet for a few moments. "Does it bother you," Philip said, "when people assume we're a couple?"

  "Aren't we?" Brad asked, and laughed, and Philip laughed too.

  "I suppose so in some ways. It's nice, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "Brad?" Philip said. "Forgive me for asking this—but do you ever think about the possibility of us becoming a couple—really?"

  "Sometimes," Brad said.

  "Good," said Philip. "I do, too."

  Above him
Brad shifted again, and Philip imagined he was turning to face the window. Moonlight was streaming through the Venetian blinds. Philip thought of Venice, and suddenly connected these blinds, these common things he had grown up with, with that mysterious, aquatic city he had only once visited, and hardly remembered. Did light shine through blinds like this in Venice? he wondered. Were lights shining on Eliot in Venice? He pretended that he was in Venice right now, that gondolas were passing on a canal below the window.

  Then he noticed Brad's hand, dangling from the top bunk, apparently without intent. Illuminated by the moonlight, it seemed to glow.

  Cautiously he reached up and took the hand. Brad's fingers were warm, as he'd imagined they would be, and Philip remembered how long it had been since he had touched someone. Gratefully he squeezed, and Brad squeezed back.

  They lay like that, holding hands, for several minutes, until finally Brad said, "You know, we probably won't be able to get to sleep this way."

  "I know," Philip said. He gave Brad's hand a last squeeze. Then they let go, and, saying goodnight, each curled toward the wall to fall asleep.

  LATE AT NIGHT, in bed, Laura clung to Jerene, could not sleep until her head was curled in her lover's breast, and, when she was sure Jerene was asleep, whispered like a charm, "Never leave me, never leave, never leave me." Everything frightened her: supermarkets, large dogs, men. Not to mention phones. When Jerene—finally convinced to seek out her grandmother—asked Laura to do her the favor of making the initial phone call to the Briteview Laundry, Bensonhurst, inquiring as to the current whereabouts of the former owner, Mrs. Nellie Parks, Laura shook her head wildly, and dissolved in a babble of apology and self-loathing. She was a wreck on the phone, she explained. Jerene had had to swallow her twenty-five years of fear and make the call herself. She was relieved when a child answered.