The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  The third woman—Rose couldn’t even remember her name . . . Betty? Biffy?—let out a shrill laugh just upon hearing the riddle. For her, apparently, the punch line wasn’t going to be necessary.

  “I don’t know,” Owen had said. “Why do mice have such small balls?”

  “Very simple. Because very few mice know how to dance.”

  He let out his famous laugh—a clipped series of squawks, each following the one before it with a confident regularity. There was something almost consoling about that laugh, like the sound of a car engine finally turning over on a cold winter morning. It put Rose at ease.

  She had understood the joke at once, and laughed out loud to be polite. It took a few more seconds for the others to figure it out. Only Rhea didn’t laugh. She looked at her husband pleadingly and said, “I don’t get it.”

  He let out a thin, frustrated breath. “Rhea,” he said, “come on, think. Balls. Balls. What do you do at balls? You dance, right? You go dancing at balls.”

  Her mouth opened in confusion, then shut again.

  “Jesus,” Karl muttered under his breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Rhea said. “I’m just stupid. I’m just a stupid moron, that’s all.” Her lips were pressed together, her eyes wide. On top of the table she tore a napkin in half, then in quarters, then in eighths.

  “You’re just deaf to puns,” Karl said. Rhea didn’t look up. Her lips trembled.

  Karl shrugged his shoulders, looked at Rhea, and said, “What’s a mother to do?” He leaned back in his chair. He looked again at Rhea, whose eyes were still pointing down. Very suddenly he formed his face into a cunning parody of hers—tongue stuck out, eyes bulging wildly, cheeks sucked in. Owen was taking a gulp from his drink and it spurted out the corners of his mouth. Betty or Biffy smiled broadly, then covered her mouth with her hand. But by the time Rhea had looked up, Karl was back to normal, red-cheeked, beaming, as harmless-looking as a little fat Bacchus. Rhea eyed him suspiciously. He leaned toward her and made the face again. Her eyes bulged in horror, and he took her hand.

  “Rhea, honey,” he said, “learn to laugh a little. Have fun. We’re all having fun.”

  She looked around the table. Everyone was smiling uncomfortably. Rose was amazed, in retrospect, that Rhea had been able to keep her composure at all.

  Those eyes. Rose would never forget them. Sometimes they opened so wide you could see the red, bloody edges. Years later, when she saw A Clockwork Orange, Rose was reminded of Rhea by the scene in which Malcolm McDowell’s eyes are pried open and he is forced to watch hours of footage of Holocaust torture, mayhem and maiming. In their merciless openness, Rhea’s eyes had that same nakedness about them, that quality of having witnessed inconceivable horror. Or so Rose thought.

  Little about Rhea attracted Rose. She was sullen, indolent. She put up with anything from Karl, who seemed to abuse her primarily in order to test the limits of her adoration, to see how much he could get away with. He could get away with anything, it seemed. Rhea was possessed by a passion for her husband so complete and absorbing it overshadowed even her instinct for self-preservation, her need for dignity. By comparison, Rose’s love for Owen seemed like nothing at all. Could a different man than Owen inspire in Rose a similar passionate devotion, or did it perhaps have nothing to do with the men at all? Perhaps it was a quality of certain women, women like Rhea, to live in the thrall of a man.

  She wanted to understand Rhea. She invited her over for lunch and said, “You know, I can’t believe you take all that crap Karl gives you. I wouldn’t.”

  Rhea looked at her, surprised. “It’s not crap,” she said. “He’s very funny. He’s all right. It’s me.”

  “You!”

  “Yes,” Rhea said. “He’s explained it all very well. You see, he’s got this real talent for making people like him, and he’s very popular with other women. And I get jealous. He says that kind of love is too needy, too intense. He can’t respond to it. As long as I refuse to relax, as long as I insist on feeling inadequate, or getting jealous every time he makes another woman laugh, he’s not going to be able to love me. And he’s right. I’ve got to relax. I’ve got to ease off. But it’s easier said than done for me.”

  “Forgive me for butting in,” Rose said. “But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Doesn’t he have to give something too? Don’t you think you’d be happier if he didn’t flirt so much?”

  “It’s all in the eye of the beholder,” Rhea said. “I see it as flirting. He sees it as just being friendly, just being nice.”

  At that moment Philip burst into the kitchen with Mira, the Mutters’ little daughter. She and Philip were talking to one another in Italian, having picked up the language much more easily than their parents. Now they spoke with each other all the time in this private tongue of theirs, passing back and forth small secrets, going through complex verbal rituals. This worried Rhea; it impressed Rose, who found herself much less at ease in negotiating Rome than her little son, upon whom she often relied to translate when irate or confused shopkeepers threw up their hands at her, unable to understand her requests. Philip had, at some mysterious and crucial point when her back was turned, changed from a baby into a child. It seemed to have happened quite suddenly, sometime during his third year. All at once he had a face that she recognized as his face. The photographs she took of him now were the sort that people would look at years later and say, “You look just the same.” His name was suddenly his name, marking him, and not just a testament to the hours Rose and Owen had spent choosing it. He spoke, and more alarmingly, did not speak, while behind his eyes a mind just beginning to recognize itself generated thoughts that had nothing to do with her. Soon he would be keeping secrets from her; soon after that lying. And then, of course, he would leave her.

  It was already happening. As he grew older, Rose seemed to know less and less about him. He was industrious and diligent, and spent his evenings in his room, working on exhaustive projects. Early on he had his stuffed animals arranged in his room according to a precise and private geography. Later, he became fascinated by road maps and would draw elaborate plans for imaginary cities and suburbs. Then he created a whole series of subway systems with numbered, named, and color-coded lines and would toil for hours striving to make a perfectly proportioned map. He never shared these projects with his parents unless they asked him to. He seemed to have no real need for their attention or approval. He took care of himself.

  In Rome, this independent-mindedness surprised Rose. She was used to Philip’s babyhood, when he had liked nothing better than to sit on her lap and gaze at her face. Now, when he wasn’t running around the neighborhood with Mira, he stayed by himself in his room, busy with some project. He hardly seemed to notice her. Perhaps that was why she didn’t bother to close his door that afternoon, after Rhea left, when Karl came over. She supposed later that on some level she had been expecting Karl. He sat with her, talking, and she found herself, to her own surprise, wanting to touch his thick, well-fed body. With his rich laugh and quick eyes, he radiated the corpulent, easy good humor of a fertility god. He sat very close to her, so close that his breath, sweet as a child’s, tickled her cheek. He had been admiring her breasts for a long time, he told her. She looked away, surprised by his frankness, by the lust in his eyes, which did not waver from hers. Then he told her exactly how he wanted to touch her, and what he wanted to do to her; how good it would feel. She felt his hand on her skirt. “Karl,” she said, “I’m not sure what to say.” But she knew what she was going to do. She was going to find out what made Rhea so hungry.

  Two o’clock churchbells rang all over the city.

  Near the end of their stay, the Benjamins went with the Mutters to spend a weekend at a friend’s villa in the Umbrian countryside. It was an elegant villa, the halls dry and stony and lined with terra-cotta Madonnas. In the back was an old topiary garden, shrubs carved into the shapes of wild birds, curlicues, Romulus and Remus and the wolf giving suck. The Benjamin
s arrived first. While his parents unpacked, Philip sat on the stony gravel of the courtyard, staring up at the umbrella pines overhead, and the columns of noble cypress, and beyond them the walls of a tiny hill town where they were going the next evening to eat wild boar. Soon he heard the sound of wheels against the gravel. It was Rhea and Karl and Mira, in their ancient Citrön. They parked near where Philip sat, and as Rhea got out she called to him, “Philip, help me with some of this food.” He didn’t hear her. His attention had been caught by a fountain in the garden, and he ran off to stick his hand under the slimy water dribbling from the mouth of an ancient stone fish.

  “Philip,” Rhea called again. “Philip!” Her voice was suddenly, unexpectedly furious, but for what reason? He turned around to see. She was standing there, staring at him, her hands on her hips. Her huge eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks streaked with tears. She marched up to him, pulled him onto his feet, and slapped him on the hand. “Philip Benjamin,” she said, “I have never met such a selfish, inconsiderate boy in my life! Did you hear me calling you? I said, did you hear me calling you?”

  He looked up at her, dazed, and did not answer.

  “Answer me!” she shouted. Her voice was hoarse with rage, nearly cracking. “Answer me when I ask you a question. Did you hear me calling you?”

  He did not answer. He stood before her, and she raised her hand, as if to strike him. He screamed, and shielded his face with his fists. But when he opened his eyes again, her hand was still motionless in front of her face, and she was looking at it as if it was something inanimate, a flower or a stick she’d picked up.

  Rose, who had heard the shouting in the kitchen, ran out to see what was going on. “What’s happened?” she shouted. “Is anyone hurt?”

  “I asked him to help me and he refused,” Rhea said, her voice suddenly calm, distant. “He sat there and deliberately disregarded me.”

  “Philip,” Rose said. “Is this true?”

  He did not answer her.

  “Philip, answer me,” she said.

  Still he said nothing. Rose grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward her. “Is this true?” Rose said, and her voice was panicked. “You just sat there when Rhea asked you to help her?”

  It was then that he started crying. Rose looked at him, looked at Rhea (her wild, enraged eyes), pushed Philip away. He pawed frantically, trying to get back to her. “Oh, God,” Rose said suddenly. “Philip, honey, come here.” But before she could catch him up in her arms, he had run to the back of the house and crawled inside a thorny shrub carved into the shape of a bird.

  “What’s going on?” Karl called, emerging from the side of the house. “What’s happened here?” Owen followed him, coming down from upstairs. They stared across the garden at the bush. “Philip?” the men called. “Philip?”

  He would not come out. When Rhea approached to apologize, he crawled farther in, farther back, and she walked off, shaking her head and muttering to herself, “Jesus Christ.” The men lay down on their stomachs, reached in their hands, and he pushed to the back, keeping himself from them. “Philip, honey, come out,” Owen said. “We understand. It wasn’t your fault. Rhea’s sorry she yelled at you.”

  It started to get dark. Rose sat down on the ground next to the bush. “I’m not leaving without you,” she called into its murky interior: “I can stay here as long as you can.” Crickets chirped, and the sky filled with stars. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll sing to you.”

  Half an hour later, in the middle of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” he crawled out, dirty, on all fours. She was shaking violently from the chill on her skin, and she pulled him into her arms as much to calm herself as to comfort him. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, beginning to cry now herself. She stroked his back, bit his hair. There were small, dried-up tracks of blood on his arms and legs, where the thorns had scratched him. Bits of leaf stuck to his hair and clothes and she pulled them off. “I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry, honey,” she said again and again.

  She carried him in, washed him, and put him to bed. The children asleep, the two couples slunk separately through the vast, dark halls of the villa, turning away at any sound of an approaching footstep, avoiding each other. Only late at night, when the men were asleep, did Rose and Rhea meet, as if by prior agreement, in the big cook’s kitchen. They made coffee before they started fighting. Then they sat down at the table. “Why did you have to yell at him like that?” Rose asked.

  “Why did you have to sleep with my husband?” Rhea shot back.

  Rose was silent. She stared into her coffee cup. “He told me in the car on the way up,” Rhea said. “As if it was nothing. As if it was the most casual piece of news in the world. ‘And I won’t apologize,’ he said. ‘That’s just the way it’s going to be. If I can’t get what I need from you, I’ll go somewhere else.’ Then I started to cry, and he started the radio blasting and opened the windows so Mira wouldn’t hear.”

  “He’s a bastard,” Rose said softly.

  “Shut up about him,” said Rhea. “You have no right to criticize my husband. You of all people.”

  “No, I guess I don’t,” Rose said, lifting her head from the table. “But you had no right to attack my son, and you went ahead anyway. Christ, I did it to you, not Philip.”

  “Don’t act like you’re such a great mother,” Rhea said. “It’s true I was hard on him, and I’m sorry. But you! You could have defended him against me. Instead you pushed him away. Your own son. Because you were scared of what I might have said in front of Owen, weren’t you?”

  Rose resumed her previous position, eyes focussed on the coffee cup. Rhea was right. She had done it to cover her own tracks. “There’s nothing I can say,” she said. Then she walked out of the room and headed upstairs, where Philip lay asleep, his mouth open, the blanket thrown across the bed. She sat down next to him and took him in her arms, hugging him fiercely, waking him. Her guilt was so acute and so painful that she imagined she would go insane if she did not obtain his forgiveness, and was willing to do anything—even hurt him more—in order to get it from him. She rocked him. “Philip,” she whispered, “I’m sorry, honey. I love you, honey, I love you, honey.” Philip lay there in her arms, neither resistant nor affectionate, his body as limp and unresponsive as a bag of wet laundry. It felt to Rose like a bag of wet laundry.

  Of course, she broke off the affair—regrettably, since Karl was a skillful lover and had brought her to pleasures she had never approached with Owen. Still, her sympathy for Rhea was so acute, her rage at Karl so intense, that she momentarily forgot the extent to which she was implicated in her friend’s suffering. They barely spoke throughout the weekend; hurt and hushed, Rhea stuck inexplicably by Karl’s side, and the couples went about their business separately. There was no expedition to the hill town to eat wild boar. Rose made frugal cheese sandwiches which she and Owen and Philip ate outdoors, in a field far from the house at the bleakest hour of dusk. All through it, of course, Owen believed that Rhea’s rage at Philip (the product of a generally unstable nature, he felt) was the true subject of the fight. The families went back to Rome separately. The Benjamins didn’t see much of the Mutters after that weekend, for in a month they were returning to New York and they had a lot of packing to do.

  Ten years later Rose got an unexpected phone call from Rhea. “I’m in New York for some lectures,” she said. “Boy, I’ll bet you’re surprised to be hearing from me after all this time, aren’t you, Rose? But I’m happy to hear your voice. I’ve thought of you a lot, all these years.”

  Rhea had a new husband now, she told Rose, and a teaching position at Arizona State and a fellowship to go to Mexico for the next academic year. “You might also want to know,” she said, “that it was me who left Karl, and not the other way around. Six months after we got back from Rome, I just decided I’d had enough of his shenanigans. He really was the most selfish man in the world. And, Rose, don’t think I hold any grudge toward you, bec
ause I don’t. I was just crazy that weekend. God knows I understand what was attractive about him.”

  She said all this quickly, with barely a pause to take a breath.

  “Where is Karl now?” Rose asked.

  “In Rome again, actually. Teaching. Remarried. I never met her, but I hear she’s beautiful. Younger, of course.”

  “Yes, that figures,” Rose said. Ten years had passed—ten years of long workdays, two-week vacations, rising early and going to bed early—and Rome to her was a distant dream.

  “And your life?” Rhea said. “Tell me about your life, Rose.”

  Rose thought about it for a second. What could she say? That they had returned to New York after Rome, returned to the apartment. That Rose’s cousin had gotten her a long-promised job in publishing. That Owen, refusing to have anything more to do with university life, had started teaching at a private school on the West Side. She had advanced to copy editor. He was promoted to assistant principal, then hired away by the Harte School as its director of admissions.

  “And Philip,” Rhea said. “How is Philip?”

  “Philip?” Rose said. “He’s grown up. A junior in high school.”

  Two nights later she came to dinner. She was dressed in black, as gaunt and strange-looking as ever, and told long stories about her experiences in Baja California, about her new husband and his passion for pedigreed terriers, about Mira and her S.A.T. scores and where she wanted to go to college. Somewhere along the road, Rose noticed, she had acquired . . . not a sense of humor, not quite, but a relaxed and pleasant affect, a conventionality at odds with her bizarre appearance.

  She was particularly interested in Philip. All through dinner she asked him questions—about his school, his ambitions, his plans for college. Even now, Rose noticed a certain distance, a reserve in her son, who sat across the table from this sad-eyed woman and would not return her insistent, searching gaze. How much did he remember, she wondered, of that afternoon he had spent wrapped in the thorny wings of a topiary bird? How much had he understood?