The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  “Was it always secret?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Eliot said. “One of the house monitors happened upon us one afternoon in the shower. Now this was Jasper Ridge, mind you, the hippie school to end all hippie schools, but homosexuality was still not exactly a thriving thing there. We had to talk to the Jaspers themselves, and Mr. Jasper, who was this old ex-Beat with a lot of money, he kept saying, ‘Wow, that’s really great. I can really relate to that.’ He wanted Ben and me to go before the whole school and announce ourselves, because he thought it would be very consciousness-raising for the other kids.” Eliot laughed. “Thank God we talked him out of it. Most of those kids were little thugs. They’d have killed us.”

  “Whatever happened to Ben Hartley?” Philip asked.

  “He went to Colgate. We lost touch. Last I heard he was out in California, working as a carpenter or something.”

  Philip was silent. “My first love affair—if you can call it that—wasn’t nearly so much fun,” he said.

  “You mean Dmitri?”

  “Have I mentioned Dmitri?”

  “Only in passing.”

  “Dmitri was a physics major,” Philip said. “He was very dark, and he had these mad-scientist eyes that would kind of zero in on you and just not turn away. It was hard to resist. My first lover.” He laughed. “You know,” he said, “he hated the word ‘lovers.’ He preferred to say we were ‘friends who had sex,’ and of course only between us, because he was insistent that none of his friends or, God forbid, his professors ever find out he was gay. He made it clear from day one that if I mentioned our relationship to anyone, even to Sally, he wouldn’t speak to me again. But even though he was so secretive, he was very promiscuous. He used to claim to be able to identify how much hair a man had on his ass by how much he had on his wrists. That kind of thing was very important to him.”

  “How long were you together?” Eliot asked.

  “Six months, I guess, give or take a few weeks. The last semester of college. But he never loved me. He had an older brother, Alex, who was also gay, and also a physicist, and I think if he loved anyone it was him. Not sexually, of course, just in a sort of worshipful way.” He smiled. “I remember at graduation I finally met Alex. He looked just like Dmitri, except he worked out, so he had muscles, and his boyfriend was a male model. They were there with their parents—the father was some sort of industrialist, and their mother was this very thin spacey woman from Texas—and also their grandmother. She was something. Maybe four foot eleven, and built like a tank. She had this little camera, and she was so proud she kept insisting on taking pictures of Dmitri—first alone, and then with Alex, and then with both of us. And standing there, it felt so strange to me, to think that this old woman worshipped them so much, and didn’t have the slightest inkling, not the slightest idea about them. Of course, it must have been very hard, both of them being gay after all, and the only sons. I guess they really believed they’d be disowned if they told their parents, and probably they were right. But what amazed me was, it was as if they couldn’t care less. They just made joke after joke about it. In fact, I thought I’d feel very nervous standing between them like that, I thought I’d be afraid every second the parents would see something. But somehow I felt safe, safer than I’d felt all that year. I think Dmitri and Alex protected each other, and it was as if their protection covered me as well—does that make sense?”

  “Completely,” Eliot said. His eyes were closed.

  “After that,” Philip said, “they walked over to their grandmother and picked her up. Literally. Just put their hands under her behind, and paraded her around the campus while everyone watched, and she laughed and screamed and begged them to put her down. I just stood back with the parents and smiled, until my parents came back to get me.”

  “Was that the end with Dmitri?”

  “Oh, more or less,” Philip said. “I visited him once after that, in the summer, at his parents’ place in Southampton. He had a whole filing cabinet full of pornography. And I remember I told him that my great fantasy of domestic happiness would be if we put all our underwear in the same drawer and got them mixed up so we couldn’t tell whose was whose.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Oh, just what you’d expect. He said, ‘That’s funny, because my brother Alex and I used to do that when we shared a room, but I always knew which was which.’ Apparently Dmitri was secretly turned on by wearing his brother’s underwear. It’s funny, he had no compunction about admitting things like that, even though he would have murdered someone before anyone in his department found out about him. Anyway, after that the weekend just sort of dragged on, and we spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, and Dmitri and his father would talk about engineering, and Dmitri’s mother would say things to me like, ‘Well, Philip, I know how you feel—when the men in this family start talking science, I just feel left out at sea. The next time, we’ll go into the kitchen and talk about literature.’ But we never did. Then I went home.”

  The blanket pulled away, and Eliot turned onto his side, facing the window. Philip looked up at the stars on the ceiling, which were fading fast. Now streams of sunlight were beginning to pour through the window, keeping the little stars steady and faint. It annoyed Philip that after a night of happy sleeplessness, exhaustion would still punch him awake with the alarm clock in the morning; he would shave, dress, head off to work, while Eliot shifted in the bed and gave a small sigh of contentment. He never said goodbye. Once Eliot was asleep he was dead to the world. There was no waking him.

  “Eliot?” Philip said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m thinking of telling my parents. About us. Which of course, means telling them about me.”

  Eliot said nothing.

  “I’m thinking of telling them this Sunday,” Philip went on. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “I don’t know your parents,” Eliot said.

  “Well I do. And I can tell you now, I don’t think this is going to be a big shock for them. They’re going to think ‘Of course.’ Then they’ll understand why I never had a girlfriend and all. I mean, my parents are liberal people. They won’t be destroyed by this.”

  “Probably not,” Eliot said.

  Philip nodded to himself. “No,” he said, “the problem is not going to be my being gay, as much as getting beyond that. Because it’s not enough, you know, just telling them and shutting up and never talking about it again. I feel like I should let them know what it’s been like for me—what it felt like, growing up, keeping this secret. I feel like I should let them know what it means, having the life I have, having you. They deserve to know.”

  “That’s what Jerene thought,” Eliot said. “Look what happened to her.”

  “My parents are not like Jerene’s parents,” Philip said, a hint of anger in his voice.

  “Oh, probably they won’t disown you. But don’t be sure it’s going to be all sweetness and light, Philip. It’s hard for you to realize how new this thing is going to be for them because you’ve lived with it all your life. But they haven’t. They probably haven’t even thought about it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ve thought about it. They’re not stupid.”

  “Even so, the fact remains that no matter how well you explain to your mother why it is you like getting fucked up the ass, she’s probably not going to be happy about it.”

  Philip glared.

  “Look,” Eliot said, “I’m not saying you shouldn’t tell them. I’m just saying that you should think about it very carefully before you do anything rash. And you should be sure you’re doing it for them and not for yourself. This is going to be a big deal. Be careful. I know Jerene’s case is an extreme, but think about it. The terrible tragedy of all this is that she still loves her parents. And they love her. And if she hadn’t told them—well, they could all still have that.”

  He yawned, closed his eyes. Philip stared at the ceiling. What was his motive in telling his parents, h
e wondered, when for years he had so successfully avoided this confrontation? Was it for them that he wanted to make this revelation, because they deserved to know the truth? Or was it for himself, as Eliot had suggested, to relieve himself at last of the burden of secrecy? It didn’t seem to him there was anything wrong with that. Anyway, he had Eliot now. He could show his parents Eliot, scion of Derek Moulthorp, and then how could they say he was throwing his life away? How could they argue he was making a mistake, damning himself to a life of eternal solitude? He wanted to stick Eliot in front of their distracted faces the way he used to stick finger paintings and cookie-dough Santa Clauses—only now they couldn’t turn away from him, they couldn’t absently say, “How nice.” They would have to pay attention.

  “Eliot?” he said. “If I tell them, would you come with me to meet them? Would you come to dinner some time?”

  “Sure,” Eliot said. He was falling asleep. “Sure.” He shuffled a few times, settling. A half an hour later his breath was coming in even rhythmic waves. In only a few minutes the alarm clock would blare. Philip lay in bed, his shoulders rigid, waiting for it.

  When Philip remembered his adolescence, he remembered the hidden parts. Hiding had been so important, so essential a part of his life, that even now—grown-up, more or less, and living on his own—he still kept every book with the word “homosexual” in the title hidden, even in his own apartment. These days, when he thought of himself at twelve or thirteen, he did not think of school, his friend Gerard, board games and playground injustice and gold stars in workbooks. He did not envision himself sitting in a classroom, or with his parents at dinner, or in front of the television. Instead, he saw himself always and only lying on the bathroom floor and masturbating, the steam billowing from the shower, the wallpaper curling at the edges. He could remember nothing else, nothing but this forbidden activity, as if his memory was now capable of creating only a negative image, exposing only those things which were then in shadow. Philip’s sexual awakening had not been uncommon: a chance collision of penis and thigh, the unexpected, intense terror of orgasm, the shock of the white liquid squirting onto his bedsheet. But what was different for him was that it never ended, this period when sex was only masturbation, it never developed into another stage. For his friend Gerard, there was talk of girls, and then there were girls, sex, talk of love. For Philip there was only this solipsistic stroking, by definition nameless. Of course he realized, from the magazines he glimpsed at the corner newsstand and later bought in profusion, that there were many other men in the world with similar visions in their heads. But he did not think to seek them out, to match himself to one of them, to make love to one of them, because sex for him had never had anything to do with anyone but himself, and certainly had nothing to do with his life, through which he now stumbled, no longer the pensive little boy who at six or seven had spent whole afternoons patiently constructing sand forts or drawing elaborate imaginary subway maps. In school, he laughed too loud and talked too much; his hair, when blown by the wind, stuck straight up; and he had a bad habit of scratching between his legs in public, which his parents were too embarrassed to mention, much less scold him for. Other boys routinely called him “faggot” or “fairy,” though he hardly fit the stereotype of the sensitive, silent, “different” boy who knows how to sew, is friends with the teacher and subject to colds. Rather, Philip epitomized what happened when that quiet, unusual sort of boy tried to plow his way back into the exclusive and cruel society of children, becoming, as Philip did, a loudmouth, a clown, foolish in his zeal to be likable, gullible in his need to be wanted. At thirteen, when Philip was invited to a party and was standing with his best friend, the ever popular Gerard, before a feast of Doritos and Chee-tos and Barbequed Potato Chips, he farted so loudly that the whole party of children began to shriek with laughter, flung open the windows, and panted dramatically for air. And Philip, in shock, standing in the center of a crowd of children who ran from him in all directions, laughed too, figuring that this would be his lot in life, to fart at parties and win that peculiar furious attention which seemed perhaps as close as he would get to love. When the boys called him a faggot, curiously neither he nor they ever connected the word with any reality, or with his by-then highly evolved masturbatory life. The girls stared at him, some with their lips upturned in sneers, or their tongues out, the smart, quiet ones pityingly, in groups, at the library tables. He absorbed and steered right around their disapproval—it was attention after all.

  One afternoon Gerard, his once-fat, dogged best friend since kindergarten, his beloved Gerard with whom he had stolen candy and stared at dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History—one afternoon Gerard had a girlfriend. He had been teasing Laura Dobler for weeks, had scoffed when other girls brought messages that she liked him. Then, to Philip’s immense shock and betrayal (for Gerard had sworn he would never do it), he “asked her,” and they were going steady. At recess they sat hand-in-hand on a bench in the playground, and the girls came up to them, to flirt and smile, or to ask their solemn advice. In the afternoons, in math class, Gerard wrote Laura love notes which he signed “Love Always,” in imitation of his sixteen-year-old brother, Stuart. Philip, in a panic of confusion, asked Tracy Micelli to go with him. He was desperately fearful of losing Gerard, who had been his faithful friend since infancy, and he imagined he and Tracy Micelli might double-date with Laura and Gerard, thus providing a reason for the friendship to continue. He asked Tracy Micelli to go steady in a long letter, written in red magic marker and complete with illustrations, which he slipped inside the grate of her locker. A few hours later, he saw her. She was with Laura and some other girls, and as soon as he came into their view, they ran into the girl’s room.

  After that, in the course of four days, Philip asked seventeen other girls to go steady with him, and they all turned him down. It became a minor scandal; even the teacher was aware of it. Finally Donna Gruber, who at thirteen was five foot ten and flat-chested, and as a result had a no-nonsense air about her, decided something had to be done. “You’re making a fool out of yourself,” she told Philip sternly in the library, her two best friends nodding on either side of her in corroboration. “You’re a nice boy, but you’re being stupid asking all those girls to go with you. And while we’re at it, you’ve got to stop scratching yourself. It’s very unattractive.”

  Philip’s mouth opened in shock. He had never thought anyone had noticed.

  “It’s my underwear,” he said meekly. “My underwear is too tight.”

  The girls on either side of Donna Gruber turned red.

  “Do you think that’s why they wouldn’t go with me?” Philip asked.

  “Oh, Philip!” Donna said. “You asked seventeen girls. Seventeen.”

  “Would you think about going with me?”

  “Philip!” they all shouted, exasperated. “Boy, are you stupid,” Donna said. “You really don’t get it, do you? Well, I’ve put in my bit. The rest you have to figure out for yourself.” And they left him.

  It was after that that he threw himself against the wall. No one saw. He went to Central Park to do it, to an obscure wooded corner where he could have gotten mugged or beaten up. Again and again he threw himself, unsure which he wanted to crack more—the wall or his head—or if he just wanted to get to the other side, where he might take tea with hedgehogs and be king.

  “Kid!” a voice said. “Kid! What are you doing?”

  A hand grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away from the wall. Philip’s eyes were red with tears, his fists red, little pieces of grass stuck in the creases.

  “Nothing!” Philip said, and wondered if the man was going to kill him. He was a tall man, in his thirties, with a black mustache and very short hair. Although he was dressed mostly in leather, he didn’t look dangerous.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the man said. “Do you know where you are?”

  “Where I am?” Philip said. “In the park. In Central Park.”

  �
��Kid, trust me, go somewhere else—go play with your friends on the grass, go to the zoo. Don’t stay here.”

  He let Philip go. Philip brushed grass from his pants and jacket, and started to walk away. Nearby, two or three other men stood among the trees, staring past each other, stroking erections that bulged from their pants. Philip watched them. They didn’t scare him; indeed, he was almost drawn to them, to their lonely circle, the way they didn’t look at but over each other. He watched the sad ritual of his kind and was not surprised. Then one of the men saw him. “Hi,” he said. He smiled, unzipped his fly. “You like what you see?” Philip ran away.

  Sometimes Philip thought about what would happen if his mother were to walk in on him one day and find him surrounded by the shiny magazines, mounds of them spread all over the floor, colorful as the toys and blocks with which, as a child, he had often built play castles to house himself. He imagined the look on her face—her eyes wide, her mouth open in confusion. Beyond that, he couldn’t imagine. His life, he presumed, would end in a flash, as it had begun. If he was lucky, he would be born again without this need.

  It was only many years later that Philip was finally able to face this possibility, to enact the scene that never took place, the scene where his mother walked in and caught him with his pornography. He imagined what it would have felt like to be forced to talk about it, to acknowledge the protruding erections and the “toys” in the ads and the sergeants in the stories, “planting liplocks” on willing recruits. His mother would probably have handled it relatively well, he decided. She would have left the room, let him clean up. Later, calmly, she would have brought it up with him, said something wise and never mentioned it again, imagining, he supposed, that this was a childish phase, something he’d get over. And he—what would he have said? His sexual life had been bred in secret; he had never spoken of it with anyone, not even himself. Could something so private be real, he wondered? Wouldn’t he someday soon meet a girl, fall in love with her? Wouldn’t there be some shifting in the hormones he was just learning about in science class, so that he could make love to a woman like any other man, marry her like any other man? He would be free of it, then, that other life, the secret life; it would fall away, unknown to anyone but him, and he would look back on it as a distant dream. Only if his mother found out, if she caught him—then he could never go back.