The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  In memory of my mother

  GLORIA ROSENTHAL LEAVITT

  Forgive me if you read this . . .

  I had gone so long without loving,

  I hardly knew what I was thinking.

  —James Merrill, “Days of 1964”

  Contents

  Preface

  Voyages

  Myths of Origin

  The Crane-Child

  Father and Son

  By the Same Author

  More from David Leavitt

  Preface

  Of the books that I have written, The Lost Language of Cranes is probably the one with which I am today most closely identified; at the time of its publication, however, the critics and pundits of the publishing world roundly dismissed the novel as a disappointment, or a case of “sophomore slump.” I think it was taken for granted that a very young writer who had been greatly praised for his first book would necessarily fumble with his second, and in many ways The Lost Language of Cranes was something of a fumble. “Artful transparency” was the phrase Richard Sennett used to describe the stories in Family Dancing; “the people and the scenes evoked in them are so vivid, so immediate, that we are unaware of their creator.” But by the time The Lost Language of Cranes came along, the detached observer of those stories—a little boy who had seen a great deal but done nearly nothing—had grown into a young man beginning to be implicated in human experience. The result is a messier if more intimate novel, less beautiful, I think, because more alive.

  E. M. Forster, in his commonplace book, wrote that the novel “must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.” The Lost Language of Cranes, if it succeeds at all, succeeds on the first grounds. Rereading it recently, I was appalled by the naive clumsiness that marks much of the prose, and went so far as to correct what seemed to me the most glaring infelicities. And yet the central characters—Rose, Owen, and Philip—strike me as being as alive today as they were when I invented them more than a decade ago. Voyaging forth to contend with the consequences of heretofore unspoken desire and need, all three are versions of the mysterious crane-child who seesaws at the novel’s center, struggling toward a sense of self in a world where feeling love is a certainty even if being loved is not.

  Probably the question I am most commonly asked concerning this novel is what I meant in the first place by that crane-child. By way of answer, I think the best I can do is pose a further question: Does a love object, particularly an unconventional one, confer identity upon the person who loves it? (Or him? Or her?) When I wrote the novel, I believed that the answer was yes, that an erotic attraction to men was, as Philip puts it to his mother, by necessity “the most crucial, most elemental force” in a gay man’s life. “Whatever it is that we love, that is who we are”: this I still believe. And yet age has inclined me to define that “whatever” less in the ideological language of post-Stonewall gay liberation and more in terms of Forster’s creed of personal relations. After all, an erotic attraction to men only becomes real once it has been translated into a love for one man or for particular men. Perhaps the line should read, “Whoever it is that we love, that is what we are.”

  Finally, this: as I write, AIDS has been around half my life. In 1986, by contrast, both I and the disease were young. The Lost Language of Cranes thus engages in a kind of denial of the epidemic’s importance, even as it articulates the muddle of resentment and uncertainty that characterized the attitude of those years. Like Philip, most of us back then were slapdash in our practice of “safer sex”; superstitious in deciding what we were willing to do, and with whom; condescending to the John Malcolmsons of the world and to the odd mix of rage and nostalgia that qualified their recollections. Even more surprising to me—and in this case I can speak only for myself—is the memory of taking for granted that a “cure” was surely only a few years away. Now, in the age of protease inhibitors, no one talks about a cure anymore. Instead we talk about “maintenance.” We talk about “long-term survival.” The world has changed, and the result—strangely enough—is that I feel historical. Hard to imagine that “compound Q” should have become a footnote in a highly accelerated history, but it has.

  I used to say that I wrote The Lost Language of Cranes to fill a gap: to provide for young readers the very book that I never found on the shelf in the gay section of my local bookstore, back in the days when the gay section of my local bookstore consisted of the collected works of Gordon Merrick. Well, in the years since then, that gay section has grown, and transmuted, and been subject to heated ideological debate; it has evolved into whole shops, canons, mail-order catalogues; it has become the subject not just of university courses but university departments, on the curriculum lists of which are featured not only my books but those old chestnuts of Gordon Merrick. And for this I am glad, even as I worry that to young readers weaned on Dennis Cooper and Dale Peck, The Lost Language of Cranes may seem ridiculously unsophisticated. Which, I cannot deny, it is: as unsophisticated as its author was, those cold afternoons in the early eighties when he pounded it out on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. Yet it is its sincerity, I believe, that makes this first novel, for all its flaws, live and breathe.

  May 4, 1997

  Rome

  Voyages

  Early on a rainy Sunday afternoon in November a man was hurrying down Third Avenue, past closed and barred florist shops and newsstands, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his head bent against the wind. The avenue was deserted except for an occasional cab, which parted the gray water puddled in the potholes and sent it streaming. Behind the lighted windows of apartment buildings people stretched, divided the Sunday Times, poured coffee into glazed mugs, but in the street it was a different scene: A bum covered by soggy shopping bags huddled in a closed storefront; a woman in a brown coat held a paper over her head and ran; a pair of cops whose walkie-talkies blared distorted voices listened to an old woman weep in front of a pink enamelled building. What, the man wondered, was he, a decent and respectable man, with a well-heated apartment, good books to read, a coffee maker, doing out among these people, out in the street on a cold Sunday afternoon? He laughed at himself for still asking the question and pressed on. No matter what he pretended, he knew, he was going where he was going.

  Only a few blocks uptown, on the twelfth floor of a once inconspicuous white brick building that had been painted a conspicuous baby blue, a woman sat at a desk, patiently waving a red pencil over a manuscript. She was barely aware of the clacking of rain against the drainpipe as it cascaded down her window in sheets. Her lips moved without sound, repeating the words before her. On the television, which was turned on but without volume, an elderly cartoon dinosaur limped across a chalk-gray landscape, its hair a white mophead, a satchel tied to a stick it held between its teeth. Unaware of the dinosaur, the woman breathed in rhythm with the kitchen clock, and her pencil passed over the manuscript like a wand, healing all it touched. She did not think of her husband, who walked alone, fighting the sheeted rain.

  Rose often referred to her neighborhood, with its pink and blue and bright red skyscrapers, as the Middle East. It was in fact full of dark-skinned men who wore sunglasses at midnight, and white-robed sheiks in limousines, and black-veiled women who haggled with the tired old proprietress of the Korean grocery store. Where she lived, she liked to explain, was too far west for Sutton Place, too far east for midtown, too far north for Murray Hill, too far south for the Upper East Side. According to maps it was Turtle Bay, but Rose, who had a copy editor’s sense of exactitude, knew that Turtle Bay was meant to connote only lamplit side streets with lush trees and townhouses. Rose and Owen lived on Second Avenue proper. The master bedroom looked out over cars and
cabs and street traffic. Sirens blared through the night, so that lately Owen had taken to stuffing wax plugs in his ears when he went to bed.

  Twenty-one years ago, when they had moved into the apartment, the neighborhood had been the humble, resiliently middle-class domain of people who might have identified themselves with Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, except that they did nothing so glamorous as work in nightclubs. Over the years it had become more and more affluent. By the grace of rent stabilization, Rose and Owen continued to pay the rent of a perished age, while the future slithered past them, uptown and downtown, on Second Avenue. Little changed visibly in their immediate vicinity, but Rose knew it was the invisible changes that in the end would be the most damning.

  For twenty years Rose had been a copy editor, possessed of the rare capacity to sit all day in a small cubicle, like a monk in a cell, and read with an almost penitential rigor. In moments of tension she calmed herself by thinking up synonyms: feel, empathize, sympathize; rage, fulminate, fly off the handle; mollify, placate, calm. It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her, as sitting at her desk she put sentences in order, mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel. Cooking was her other pleasure. She gloried in foods that in no way resembled their ingredients: miniature fruits made of marzipan; perfect, silky icings. (The cake was an afterthought, a triviality, an excuse for the idea.) Owen sat before the cakes Rose made and gazed, his face filled with a kind of awe, for he had grown up in a house without frosting, fed on dry, heavy nutbreads and fruitcakes. A quiet man, he ate Rose’s cakes with a ferocity of which most people would not have thought him capable.

  They had a son, Philip; he was twenty-five, and lived on the West Side. For him, one particular image of his parents had a kind of primal character: Owen and Rose are sitting across the living room from each other in the twin corduroy La-Z-Rockers they had once rented a car and driven all the way to Jersey to buy. It is late at night. Through the crack beneath the door to his bedroom, the light of four one-hundred-watt bulbs glares. There is no sound but that of pages turning, bodies shifting, an occasional stretch. “Two hundred pages to go,” says Owen. He is reading a densely footnoted biography of Lytton Strachey. Then he moves into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. The cake is there, the icing gleaming in the light that goes on when the door opens, one or two slices already missing and the knife—coated with white silk and yellow crumbs—lying on the plate next to it. Rose joins him. She takes the plate out of the refrigerator, puts it down on the counter, and sinks the knife into its softness. He stands by, helpless, watching her as she hoists two pieces of cake onto dessert plates and carries them to the table. All without a word. Then they sit down, prop their books open in front of them, and eat.

  One fall afternoon, in the elevator, Mrs. Lubin—a widow who had lived in the building even longer than the Benjamins—confided in Rose. The landlord, she suspected, was capable of dark treacheries.

  A letter a few days later confirmed her worst fears. The building was going co-op. Because they were not rent-controlled and under sixty-five, they had an option to buy at a reduced price, but they could not continue as renters.

  Of course there had been portents, rumors, finally letters; but the thing seemed to have been put off indefinitely, and finally they had stopped believing it could really happen. Now it had happened. “Can we afford it?” Rose asked Owen. He took off his reading glasses, put down the letter, and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose we have enough money. I’ll have to talk it over with an accountant. I’ve never imagined spending so much money before, not since Philip went to college.”

  “We have a few months, at least,” Rose said. “Before we lose our option.” She looked around herself. Give or take a few new pieces of furniture, and some re-upholstering, it was the same living room they had moved into twenty-one years ago. On the rug, a seventeen-year-old urine stain alone testified to the existence of Doodles, the poodle puppy hit by a car when he was only eight months old. They had lived there so long it no longer seemed like a place to her.

  “The maintenance alone is going to be twice our rent,” Owen said. “Still, from what I hear, even that’s a bargain.” He looked out the window. “You know, Arnold Selensky tells me that every other building on the block has already gone co-op.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” Rose said. Like old Mrs. Lubin, she panicked at the prospect of change, had heard the stories of the landlords who hired thugs and dropped pets out of windows, feared homelessness. Not everyone felt that way, of course. Owen’s spirited friend in the penthouse, Arnold Selensky, rich and getting richer in the video rental business, invited them up for dinner one night, wagged his cognac glass at them across the plexiglass table, and applauded change. “I myself believe in keeping up with the times,” he explained. “That music on the stereo, for instance. Eurythmics. Not The Eurythmics, just Eurythmics. Nice, huh? The latest thing. That compact disc player is also the latest thing. No reason just because one’s getting on one should lose touch. So many of the old women in this building, they’re killing themselves, it seems to me; they’re still listening to Lawrence Welk.”

  Rose thought, Living in the past. Anachronistic. Bag lady.

  “There is just no future in rentals,” Arnold Selensky said. “And there is quite a future in co-ops. Think about it. We get a good deal, we buy, we sell for twice as much on the open market, and we’re on Fifth Avenue. Well, maybe not Fifth, but very likely Park in the Thirties. Or in my case, Tribeca. Loft living, Owen, that’s the way. More space than you’ve ever dreamed of. Like a ranch house in the city. Incredible.”

  That night Owen woke in a sweat. “What’s wrong?” Rose asked him. He shook his head and wouldn’t tell her that he had dreamed everything had slipped out from under him, and he had been forced to take to the streets. In the dream, he had no legs. He rode up and down the length of moving subway cars on a skateboard, shaking a tin can for change. Unlike Arnold Selensky, he was not in a job with a future. For ten years he had made a decent salary assessing the value systems and moral character and S.S.A.T. scores of the little boys whose parents wanted to enroll them in the Harte School, a private boys’ school in the East Nineties. He spent his mornings reading letters of recommendation from chairmen of the board and conducting interviews with seven- to twelve-year-olds, and in the afternoons taught one class, a Renaissance literature seminar with three bright students. He had thick graying hair he kept cut short, and though he rarely exercised, his body was strung tight as a harpstring. It was as if tension itself had taken a physical form.

  Rose always shopped at the little Italian grocery store on the corner, and now that it was a little Korean grocery store she continued to shop there. Twenty-one years ago she had bought at that store the ingredients for the first dinner she ever cooked in the apartment—an underdone chicken that she and Owen ate off of paper plates—and she had been amazed that vegetables could be so fresh, even in New York City. She and the lady behind the counter, whose name she had never learned, knew each other well; chatted in the afternoons about asparagus; grew middle-aged together. One day the lady changed race; that was how it felt to Rose. She went on as before with the Korean proprietress. Visibly, their little block was no different than it had been. And yet, Arnold Selensky had told her, every other building had gone co-op. It seemed traitorous.

  The phone calls started. Real-estate agents, brokers, people who had heard from people who had heard from people. “Excuse me,” the voice would say. “Am I correct that there is a five-room apartment available in this building?”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  “Ma’am, if there is a five-room apartment available in this building, we could be of service to you.”

  “No thank you. Goodbye.”

  The phone calls came more and more frequently, and later at night. If Owen was home, he’d ans
wer sternly. Weekday evenings, when Rose got back from the office, the machine was full of little pleas.

  One Sunday, seventeen people called. Rose was irate. “This apartment is not available,” she said to the eighteenth caller. “We live here. Why can’t you people leave us alone?”

  “Look, listen here for a minute,” the voice said. It was small and nasal. “Now I’ll have you know there is a client who is looking for an apartment in your neighborhood, and will pay good money for it. But I don’t care. I’m sick of being screamed at. All you people do is scream and scream. Well, enough. I’m quitting this stupid job. I could make better money doing anything else besides making these stupid phone calls. I’ve got three kids and no husband and we’re living with my mother in Queens. I call you people because I have to, to feed the kids. I don’t enjoy it. The least you could do is have a little understanding, a little sympathy before you start yelling.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.” Rose lapsed into guilt. “You must understand, though. We’ve been bothered very frequently. We’re quiet people, and—”

  “I’m sure you’re real cozy up there on the East Side. Well, you may not be for long. I know the score. Born and bred in New York, and look what it gets you. A slap in the face.”

  Rose hung up, pushing the receiver down hard. She looked at the phone. Among the many things in the apartment that she took for granted, the phone suddenly seemed very special to her. It was a shade of gray you didn’t see very often anymore. There were vultures out there, she decided, returning to her armchair and her reading; they were clutching the phone wires, eager to rip the phone cord out of the wall, knock the walls down, strip the apartment of its furniture and memories, re-paint it and remake it for themselves, without a thought for the life that had been interrupted, the life that had been thrown into the streets.