The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  She hardly knew what had driven her to the Laura Ashley store. But she had walked in, remembering her mother, the lacy dresses that had been foisted upon her as a little girl and the hand tightening her hair into ringlets. The salesgirl was Pre-Raphaelite, pale. Long blond hair swept her shoulders. If it had been Shescape, if it had been a Saturday night and she had had on her leather jacket, Jerene would have made her move. Thin like a snake, she was good at winding her way through dance floors, getting where she wanted to be. The girl would have been scared at first, then fascinated when Jerene asked, “Have you got a light?”

  She said instead, “I’m looking for a dress”—anticipating surprise with a challenge.

  The manageress—an older woman in a suit—lowered her ornamental half-glasses to give Jerene a frank, suspicious gaze. There she stood, six feet tall and denim and leather from head to toe, in a low room full of sachets and potpourris and wallpaper patterned with lilacs. The steel-gray manageress stared at her as if she feared Jerene might break something accidentally, or even on purpose. But the pale girl didn’t flinch and showed her dress after dress, and when none of them hung right offered a gift of alteration. Her name was Laura (though not Ashley) and she lived with her mother on Park Avenue, and by the end of the afternoon Jerene had her phone number and a tentative drinks date when the dress was ready, in three days. Walking out of the store, she thought of a friend of hers—a gay man from Louisiana—who after coming out to his parents had honored their request for a new photograph by sending them a picture of himself with a girl, a friend of his named Lucy, standing under a broken piñata at a party. A week later they sent him a check for fifty dollars. At first he was shocked, and wanted to call them up, to challenge them. But in fact he was able to use the fifty dollars. Now every time he needed money, he simply had his picture taken with a different woman friend. If he sent a series with the same girl, the checks got larger.

  Jerene wondered what effect a photo of herself in a dress—a Laura Ashley dress—might have on her mother, whose one weakness was lace. Could that be all it would take? Of course she would never do it, although she found herself contemplating such actions often these days, imagining her mother at her door, tears in her eyes, crying, “You’re cured!” And once again it seemed strange to her that six years had passed without even the slightest contact. What would her parents think if they received such a picture in the mail? Would it mean anything to them? Would they even recognize her as their daughter?

  It seemed to Jerene funny that after all these years of rebellion she was now finding herself thinking so much like her mother. Buying shirts at Macy’s one afternoon, she had been shocked to realize how naturally she applied Margaret’s standards of taste and quality, the little rules she had been taught for rooting out the good buys from the sales table. A few years earlier she would have rejected that guidance on principle, bought only what her mother would have thought hideous. It was a gesture of political as well as personal rebellion to mock the taste of mothers. For a long time now it had been the fashion among her friends to be as unornamented as possible. Simplicity was sexy, because it was a rejection of male standards of beauty; what was left was something fleet and unadorned, pure form. She had known women in her first days in New York with whispers of beard, pale mustaches which they cultivated, almost as a challenge. Like the preened and oiled men who wore dabs of eyeshadow and had their muscular backs waxed, these women marched shirtless and proud on Gay Pride Sunday—but of course it was a different kind of pride, one that had more to do with denying sexual attraction than flaunting it. All along, Jerene cheated in small ways. As her mother had taught her, she bleached the small hairs on her upper lip once a month, after which, during the course of a morning or an evening, she would wander around her apartment looking like a child with a milk mustache. No one ever knew but Eliot, who laughed at her for feeling so guilty about it. Jerene dressed every day for years in the jeans and lumberjack shirts that were the only wardrobe possible for a serious lesbian leftist, but anyone with an eye for detail would have noticed that there was embroidery on her sleeves. Now things were changing. These days her friends were wearing pink, wearing maid’s uniforms, wearing nose rings. Many wrote stories in their spare times for women’s pornographic magazines with names like Bad Attitude. Lust, like fashion, they were proclaiming, was a radical woman’s prerogative, too—as long as it was her lust, her fashion; and over the years since her break with her parents—slow, painful years, years in which she had never let her hair grow thick enough to hide her scalp—she had found herself eyeing women in pretty dresses on the street in summer. She was eyeing the women, but she was also eyeing the dresses.

  Tonight she had her date with Laura. In the bathroom, she washed the shaving cream from her legs, while Philip and Eliot stared, then slipped the new dress awkwardly over her head.

  “Remember,” Jerene said, “I haven’t done this either for six years.”

  She stepped out into the hall, and looked in the mirror.

  “My God,” she said. “I look like a pinhead.”

  “Earrings,” Philip said. “You need earrings.”

  “Yes. I guess.” She turned and rummaged through her drawer, where she found a pair of spikes she wore when she wanted to intimidate one of her professors into giving her an extension on a paper. But these were not right for tonight. She dug some more and found an old pair from high school—two long strings of fired blue beads—and attached them.

  “Yes,” Eliot said. “Exactly.”

  They were ready. Philip stood in front of the mirror, playing with the knot of his bow tie. “I can’t believe I’m finally going to get to meet Derek,” he said as he put on his coat. “After reading all those books—to finally meet him—it means a lot to me.”

  “I’m glad you’re so excited.”

  Outside, a light wind blew along the street. The ice from the previous weekend had started to melt, creating an illusion of spring, and Philip felt proud and happy as he walked—proud of Eliot, who looked so handsome, so self-assured in his pink shirt and sweater; also proud of Jerene, proud that he knew this strange, beautiful woman, so surprising-looking that people would turn and stare at her as they passed. From Sixth Avenue, Eliot had turned them onto Thirteenth Street, where dark trees shone in the blue haze of the streetlamps, and the subtle neon of a basement restaurant occasionally shone below the brick townhouses. They walked up steps to a dark walnut door with a brass knocker. The house was indistinguishable from the row of elegant brownstones in which it stood—boxy, many-windowed, hairy with vines. “Well,” Jerene said, “this is where I say good-bye.”

  “Where’s your date?” Philip asked.

  “Café Luxembourg, if you can believe it.” She shrugged her shoulders, cast her eyes to heaven, and Eliot bent to kiss her goodbye. “Good luck, honey,” he said. She waved and disappeared down the street.

  Eliot lifted the knocker and let it drop, then pulling keys from his pocket, clicked one easily into the door. They walked into a foyer, and beyond it into a living room illuminated by firelight.

  “Hello, Geoffrey,” Eliot said.

  “Eliot!” A red-cheeked man emerged from the dark, holding out his arms in greeting. He was roughly pear-shaped, and wore the loose clothes of a father—a yellow cardigan sweater over an Oxford shirt, simple brown slacks, a macraméd belt that appeared to be left over from a child’s arts-and-crafts class. “And you must be—” he said, clasping one of Philip’s hands in both of his.

  “Philip,” Philip said.

  “Philip, of course!” said Geoffrey. “We’ve certainly heard about you.”

  “You have?” Philip grinned.

  “Oh yes,” Geoffrey said. He leaned closer, as if to deliver a confidence, and Philip saw that the palest of blond beards covered his cheeks, so pale it was practically invisible. Geoffrey’s eyes were small but bright, like a hunting dog’s, and they held Philip in a reassuring stare. But there was no confidence to be given. “Let me int
roduce you to our other guest,” Geoffrey said, and led them into the living room, where a sinewy man in blue jeans leaned against the wall, nervously shuffling through a book of Etruscan vase-paintings. “This is John Malcolmson, a noted gay journalist,” Geoffrey said, and the man put down the book and looked at Philip briefly. “I’m sure you’ve read John’s columns in the Voice.”

  “Certainly,” Philip said. “They’re terrific.”

  “John, Philip is an editor—right?”

  Philip nodded.

  “Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see to the muffins.”

  He had only soft backless slippers on over his socks, and the soles flopped noisily as he padded across the wooden floor and out of the room.

  The three of them stood there.

  “Where’s Derek?” Eliot asked.

  “In the kitchen,” said John. “He’s preparing one of his color meals. Blue tonight. Can I get you a drink?”

  He was looking at Philip. He had an inscrutable, acne-scarred face and wore around his neck a single strand of black leather, like a noose. “Just a glass of white wine,” Philip said. He was only now beginning to make out the shapes and the colors of the room. To his pleasure, what appeared to be an original colorplate illustration of Tintin, the French boy reporter, and his dog, Milou, hung over the fireplace. There were other pictures as well—Babar and Celeste, Curious George, Maurice Sendak’s wild things—all signed originals inscribed with loving dedications to Derek. Then there were the clocks—at least twenty of them, including a gold-painted cuckoo from which a smiling mermaid occasionally emerged. A zooful of noises announced the half-hour—chirps, roars, barks, meows, and whinnies, along with an assortment of cuckoos, clucks, and clacks. Astonished by this concert, Philip looked at Eliot, who smiled, lit a cigarette, and blew a stream of smoke into Tintin’s face. Beyond the dark living room and the lighted foyer, an ivory-colored staircase glowed.

  “This is a great house,” Philip said to Eliot. “It’s hard for me to imagine growing up here.”

  “Oh, in a few days you’d get used to it. It’s no different from any other house.”

  “How can you say that?” Philip asked, his voice rising slightly. “To have grown up here—it must have been wonderful.” But before Eliot could answer him, John was back from the bar and handing Philip a small glass of wine. “So what kind of editor are you?”

  “Romance novels. Or, as they’re called in the trade, bodice-rippers.”

  “Aha,” John said. “Those certainly are popular. I have a friend who’s writing gay ones. What do you think those will be called? Codpiece rippers?”

  Philip let out a spurt of laughter. “Maybe,” he said. The stem of the glass he held was elaborately fluted; unconsciously he stroked its indentations. Then a flapping sound announced Geoffrey’s return. “The muffins are perfect,” he said, “just perfect.” He grinned at Philip. His face, though now somewhat bloated, had clearly once been handsome; beneath the puffiness Philip could see the outlines of high-arched cheekbones, a square jaw.

  The clocks ticked. A stray cuckoo let out an attenuated cluck, and Geoffrey said, “I knew I forgot to wind that one.” Then he turned to Philip. “Why don’t you come and meet Derek now? He’s refusing to leave the stove tonight.”

  Gulping, Philip looked at Eliot, who motioned him to go on. “Yes, I’d like to. Excuse me,” he said to John.

  “Sure, sure,” John said. He walked across the room and poured himself another glass of wine. Geoffrey took Philip’s arm in his firm grip and led him into the kitchen—a vast room, gleaming and metallic, where a huge man presided over pots of varicolored blue paste.

  “Derek,” Geoffrey said, “this is Eliot’s friend Philip.”

  Derek turned from the stove. He was at least six foot five; wild ringlets of gray hair fell over his forehead, which was damp with steam. He wiped his hands on his apron, said in a clipped British accent, “Philip, it’s a pleasure,” and offered a hand that was huge and hairy, but shook Philip’s with extraordinary care—the handshake of a strongman who, if he wasn’t careful, might crush the fingers of a child to dust. Philip smiled. “Boy,” he said, “you’re really cooking up a storm.”

  “Oh, don’t think we do blue every day. Only for the most special company. Now this,” he said, pointing to one of the pots, “is mashed potatoes.”

  “Is it dyed?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. I just added some ripe plum skins. You’ll be surprised by the flavor. Very—” He smiled, looking for the proper descriptive flourish. “Nouvelle Californienne.”

  “Sounds great,” Philip said. “What’s in the other pots?”

  “Oh, let’s see. That’s blueberry sauce for the duck, and that’s a Roquefort sauce for the pasta, and there, on the counter, that’s blueberry butter for the muffins, which are Geoffrey’s specialty.”

  “I am the family baker,” Geoffrey said. He was leaning against the counter, kicking it occasionally.

  “It’s really a pleasure to meet you,” Philip said to Derek, remembering the introduction he had rehearsed last night in bed. “I don’t know if Eliot told you, but your books—well, I was practically raised reading them. In fact, my mother was your copy editor. At Motherwell.”

  “Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” Derek said.

  “Oh yes,” said Philip. “She started me reading them. They really meant a lot to me.” He laughed, looked away. “But I suppose you hear that from everyone, don’t you?”

  Derek turned from the stove and smiled warmly at Philip. “Well, nonetheless, that’s very sweet of you,” he said. “Geoffrey, why don’t you go get Philip a copy of the new book?”

  Geoffrey nodded yes, and whistling, walked out of the room. “A new book?” Philip asked.

  “Yes. Not one of my best, I fear. But that’s really up to you to judge. At this point I just crank them out when the bank account becomes depleted, and my public demands.”

  Philip was surprised by this revelation. “What’s it called?” he asked.

  “Archie and Gumba,” Derek said. “Archie is a child whose parents are anthropologists of the twenty-second century, sent out to check up on a planetary colony which has been left completely isolated for two hundred years, as an experiment. The people on the planet have developed a quasi-technological, quasi–Stone Age culture; that’s what the book’s really about—the culture. Gumba’s a little girl Archie befriends.”

  Geoffrey returned, waving a small green book in his hand. “Are you going to sign it?” he asked.

  “Of course, of course.” Taking the book from Geoffrey, Derek leaned over the kitchen counter. “Let’s see.” He chewed on his pen, then scribbled something fast, closed the book, and handed it to Philip. On the cover was an illustration of two children with pots on their heads maneuvering their way through a space-age, alien-ridden bazaar.

  “Thank you,” Philip said. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to reading it.”

  “Oh, don’t bother to read it,” Derek said. “So where’s Eliot, anyway? Eliot!”

  “Coming,” Eliot called from the living room.

  “Would you like to see some old pictures of Eliot?” Geoffrey asked. He led Philip across the kitchen to a large corkboard covered with snapshots. Philip immediately recognized Eliot, with hair down to his shoulders and black plastic-rimmed glasses, in what must have been a high-school graduation picture. His eyes scanned the board, settling on a snapshot of Derek and Geoffrey, much younger. Geoffrey had indeed been handsome in his youth; shirtless in the picture, his short wheaten hair wind-blown, he stood smiling next to Derek, who was dressed in a heavy sweater, stooped, gangly. Between them, Eliot, a little boy in a sailor shirt and no pants, leaped and grinned on a sandy terrain. “That was taken on the Lido in Venice,” Geoffrey said. “Eliot was five.”

  “He was very cute,” Philip said. Above the photo was another of Geoffrey, in a black suit and tie, his hair crewcut. It looked like a professional head shot for an actor
. And above that, Derek, wild- (and at that point, black-) haired Derek, lifting a tiny, joyful Eliot into the air. He reminded Philip of the selfish giant (or was it the sleeping giant?)—that gargantuan who lived in a walled garden and was terrifying to all but one wise and innocent child. And who, after all, had invented that giant but stoop-shouldered, seven-foot-tall Oscar Wilde, himself so ungainly in his massive velvet suits?

  There was one more photograph—an old discolored Kodachrome of Derek and Geoffrey seated around a table lit with red-net candles. Between them sat a thin, balding man with a broad smile and a girl with red hair, high cheekbones darkened by shadow, dark red lips. Her eyes had caught the light of the flashbulb and seemed to glow gold-green. “Are those Eliot’s parents?” Philip asked, and Geoffrey nodded. “That was taken a year before they died.”

  Now Eliot and John stepped into the kitchen, and the room was suddenly filled with the commerce of greeting. Derek hugged Eliot. “You’re just in time for one of my horrendous blue meals,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “He’s been making these for years,” Eliot called to Philip from inside the warm circle of Derek’s arms. “And I’ve always hated them.”

  “You never have understood the appeal of the cunning, Eliot.” Derek grinned.

  “Dinner will be ready any second,” Geoffrey said, checking the pots. And Philip, unnoticed for the moment, stole a glance into his copy of Archie and Gumba: “To Philip,” the dedication read, “if he wants it! With fondest regards, Derek Moulthorp.”

  At dinner, Philip sat next to Geoffrey and across from Eliot, and stared at the blue food on his plate—duck piled with thick berries, blue muffins, and the plum-flavored mashed potatoes. He avoided the pasta which, cooked, had turned an unappealing gray color. (“Every great experiment has its little failures,” Derek apologized.) Every few minutes Geoffrey disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a basket of muffins or another bottle of wine. He was wearing a heavy gold ring which made scraping noises against the silverware as he spooned more potatoes onto Derek’s plate, or tipped wine into his glass. Derek was telling a long, rambling story about an Italian poet who liked to make love to his dog. On his deathbed, he had finally “come out,” as it were, and declared to a visiting interviewer, “There is nothing closer to divinity than the taste of a dog’s tongue.” Everyone laughed, and Philip, who as a child had secretly French-kissed his poodle puppy more than once, tried to remember the flavor: alkaline, he thought he recalled, with an aftertaste of metal.