The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  “Uh-huh,” Owen said.

  “And how do you feel about that?” Jerene asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m confused—very confused—”

  “Well,” Jerene said, “why don’t we start by talking about exactly what’s confusing to you?”

  “You don’t understand,” Owen said. “These things—they’re very hard for me to talk about. I mean, I’ve never—” He faltered.

  “Listen,” Jerene said. “It’s okay to talk about them with me. I’m not here to pass judgments, just to offer some help, a little advice. We all need someone to talk to every now and then, don’t we? And that’s what I’m here for.”

  “My son—” Owen said. “I’ve never been enough of a father to him. Always involved in my own life. And I can’t help but wonder—”

  “If it’s your fault?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, you shouldn’t worry about that,” Jerene said. “It’s not a question of fault. Your son is what and who he is. That’s not going to change. Now the important thing is to make things as good for him as you can.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Owen said. “It’s not him I’m worried about—it’s me.”

  There was a pause.

  “Okay,” Jerene said. “Go on.”

  Owen hung up. He poured some more of the bourbon into his glass and drank it down. A little spilled on his suit. He took a tissue and tried to wipe it off. From the wall, Rose and Philip stared at him, his Ph.D. stared at him, all the posed Harte boys stared at him. He looked at them for a few minutes and then he picked up the phone and dialled again, this time a number he had long since memorized. After one ring, a frantic-sounding man’s voice answered.

  “Is Alex there?” Owen said.

  “Just a second, I’ll check,” the voice said. “Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “Bowen,” Owen said.

  “Hold on.”

  Owen held his hand before his face, watched for shaking. After a few seconds, Alex Melchor picked up the phone.

  “This is Bowen,” Owen said.

  “Bowen?” Alex Melchor said. “Do I know you?”

  “We talked on the phone a while ago,” Owen said. “Remember, I thought you’d left me your number? But it all turned out to be a big mix-up.”

  “Oh right, of course. Well, uh, what can I do for you, Bowen?”

  “I was wondering if we could meet, have a drink, maybe,” Owen said, his voice shaking. “A lot’s been going on in my life. I’m very confused about some things and I just need someone to talk to. We all need someone to talk to sometimes, don’t we?”

  “Uh—sure. Gee, Bowen,” Alex said. “I wish I could help you, but you know I’m awfully busy this week and next week I—”

  “It won’t take long,” Owen said. “Please, even over the phone. My son, you see, he came home last week to tell me and his mother—”

  “Bowen, you know, I’m sure this is very hard for you. Listen, have you thought of maybe seeing a shrink? Because it sounds to me like you may need some professional help, certainly better than I can give you, God knows. I’ve been seeing a shrink myself for twenty years now, and believe me, I’d be loony as a tune if I hadn’t—”

  “My son, you see, he’s a homosexual. And I’m worried that it’s my fault. I mean, it’s not that I’m a homosexual myself. I am a bisexual. But you see, I’ve never been enough of a father to him and now I’m scared.”

  “Bowen, that’s very unfortunate, but I really don’t know how I can help you. Listen, why don’t you call one of those hotline things? They have professional people who can talk to you about things like this—”

  “I’m scared,” Owen said.

  “Listen, I’m looking in the phone book right now. Now stay calm. Here—the Gay Hotline. Bowen? Do you have a pencil? Can you write down the number?”

  Owen hung up.

  The next number he dialled was Philip’s.

  “Hello,” Philip said. “This is Philip.”

  “Philip, it’s your father.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave me a message when you hear the beep—”

  “Fag, fag, fag, your father is a goddamned fag,” Owen screamed into the phone.

  “—happy to call you back as soon as I can.”

  “Fag,” Owen said morosely.

  “Thank you for calling.”

  “Fag father of fag son,” Owen said.

  The beep sounded.

  Owen hung up.

  Rose knew. He knew she knew. But somehow they never talked about it; they must never talk about it. Instead they talked, endlessly and obsessively, about the apartment which, if they didn’t buy, they would have to vacate in August. If they didn’t buy, there would soon begin an onslaught of prospective buyers, people who were rich enough to displace them. The ultimate shame, Rose felt, would be having to clean up for the arrival of those people. If they had to be out, she wanted it to be before that stage. Every Sunday, now, instead of going their separate ways, she and Owen scanned the “Real Estate” section of the Times, and on Wednesdays did the same with the Voice. It became apparent early on that they were not going to get anything for under fifteen hundred a month, an unthinkably high price, but one they could just barely manage. More than anything else, the immense downpayment a co-op would require boggled them. They had never owned anything, not even a car.

  One Sunday there was an ad which read:

  Lrg 1-bdrm, lux drmn bldg. Eat-in ktchn w/DW.

  Sthrn expsr. A steal.

  They went in the afternoon to see the place. It was in a tall, dirty building on West Eighty-sixth Street, near Amsterdam. The agent, a small woman with blue fingernails, led them up in the cranky elevator to an old, crumbly apartment with a marble bathtub in the bathroom, no views, and a bedroom the size of Rose’s closet. She told them that it was a steal at seventeen hundred a month.

  “Now if you’re interested,” the agent said, “I’ll really have to know by this evening, because, needless to say, there’s a lot of other people who want into an apartment house like this, a big old-fashioned West Side apartment. These are hard to come by these days. I have a lot of clients who are very interested, but depending on how enthusiastic you folks are, maybe we could arrange something.”

  They promised to call her if they were still interested.

  Outside, in the street, Owen could feel his arms shaking in the sleeves of his coat. It was a cold spring day, windy and bright. By evening there would be rain.

  “What are we going to do?” Rose asked.

  Without much conviction, Owen said, “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll find something. You just have to keep looking. Remember you said it took your friend Donna six months to find her place?”

  Rose kept her eyes on the ground. “I’m a little scared, frankly,” she said.

  Owen looked away. “Don’t be scared,” he said. “Things will work out.”

  “I don’t want to move to Queens,” Rose said with sorrow and distaste.

  “We won’t have to move to Queens. We’ll stay right here in Manhattan. Don’t worry.”

  They approached the park, and Rose said, “Owen, are you sure we can’t stay where we are? Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you tried to work out the finances? Let’s try to stay, Owen, please? We’ve got good, long employment histories. We’re such good credit risks, I’m sure they’ll give us a loan. And maybe we can borrow some money from Gabrielle and Jack, some money from your sister—”

  “I don’t know,” Owen said. His voice cracked. She took his arm as they entered the park, clinging hard to him. A few blocks downtown Yoko Ono was still building Strawberry Fields. Yoko Ono had four or five apartments in the Dakota, Rose had read. Did she really need them all? Couldn’t Rose and Owen have just one of them? Or perhaps they deserved to be homeless.

  From behind them, swift as a mugger, Philip leapt, a gangly dog in running clothes. R
ose screamed. “What’s wrong?” Owen shouted.

  Out of breath, all arms and long legs, Philip reeled back. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said. “I was running, and then, all of a sudden, there you were. I had to sprint to catch up with you.” He wiped his mouth off on his sleeve, and smiled. He smelled of cold sweat, cotton, grass.

  Owen looked around himself. Searching for signs, his eyes found the hill where, even on this cold spring day, men lay shirtless in the sun.

  “I’ll walk with you a little way,” Philip said.

  “Yes,” Rose said. “Please do.”

  They headed east. “So where are you guys coming from?” Philip asked.

  “We were just looking at an apartment on Eighty-sixth Street,” Rose said.

  “West Eighty-sixth Street?” Philip said. “Wow, it’d be great if you lived there, you’d be so close to me.”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “It’s expensive.”

  They passed a playground where a group of black children walked strung together like paper dolls in a chain. “Everyone is so afraid of losing their children these days,” Rose said. “So afraid of kidnappers. It’s hard for me to imagine what it must be like to be a mother now, scared all the time.”

  “Or a child,” Philip said. “Remember how free you left me when I was a kid? I wandered wherever I wanted, walked alone from Gerard’s building, even at night.”

  “I was stupid,” Rose said. “You couldn’t do it now with a child. Look at them all. They won’t let go of each other.”

  It was true. All the children in the park were firmly attached to their mothers, or linked together in chains. Rose wondered whose idea the chain was—the children’s or the parents’—and decided it would be more like a child to believe that there was safety in numbers. The children, after all, were as scared, if not more so, than their parents. At school, they were being taught songs to “empower” themselves, songs with lyrics like “My body is my body . . .” Rose knew because she was at that moment copy-editing a book of such songs, and its companion volume, a comic book in which Batman taught children what to do if a stranger approached.

  Among the frightened children they walked, a family. Philip at least had made it to adulthood. He was safe from kidnapping, from molestation. He could run or walk alone in the park. But of course, survival only meant graduating to other dangers.

  “So how’s it going, old man?” Owen asked his son, as they neared Fifth Avenue, the museum, the old world.

  “Okay,” he said. They walked a moment in silence. “I guess there’s no point in my keeping this from you. Eliot and I broke up.”

  “Eliot—” Rose frowned. Then she remembered and fixed her eyes on the ground ahead of her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry about that.”

  “I really wanted you to meet him, see how happy I could be with another man. Now I guess you’re probably thinking all sorts of terrible things, like all gay relationships are very transitory and can’t last and things like that.”

  “No, Philip,” Rose said. “I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort, to be frank.”

  “Because it isn’t true.” He looked at the ground. “I don’t know about Eliot. I guess he’s just afraid of commitment or something. A lot of people are afraid of commitment these days.”

  “Are you bearing up?” Owen said.

  “Yes,” Philip said. “But I’m sad all the time.”

  By now they had reached the East Side, and Rose turned around, as if the border of the park was also the border of their walk together, the border of the common ground between their sides of the city, their opposed lives.

  “Well, you’re young,” she said to Philip, putting a hand on his wet shoulder. “I know it hurts now. But you’ll get over it. Trust me.”

  “I guess,” he said. He looked at her, for a moment, a little pleadingly, as if he was hoping she might ask him home for dinner.

  “Thanks for walking your old parents through the park,” Rose said instead. “We do appreciate it.” And she reached out her cheek to be kissed.

  “I’ve missed you,” Philip said. “I feel like we hardly see each other anymore. Remember when I used to come home every Sunday night for dinner?”

  “Oh, tonight’s just leftovers anyway,” Rose said, hardly believing how wicked she sounded. “But I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you plan on coming to dinner next Sunday? Wouldn’t that be a good idea, Owen?”

  “Oh yes,” Owen said. “A great idea.”

  Philip smiled. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’m just sorry I can’t bring Eliot. You know, I had dinner with his stepfather, Derek Moulthorp? And I told him you’d copy-edited some of his books. He was very pleased.”

  “I’m sure he was, dear. A wonderful writer, a wonderful children’s writer.”

  “Goodbye, son,” Owen said. He shook Philip’s hand. It was a gesture that radiated finalness, as if Philip were going off to Europe, or to war.

  But he was only going back to the West Side, to his apartment. “Goodbye,” he said. “I’ll talk to you during the week.”

  Then he was running off, away from them, fast, fast, as if he wanted nothing more than to be as far from them as he could. Owen watched him. He looked handsome in his shorts and too-big T-shirt, fleet. Owen had been tall and gangly too as a young man, and the resemblance pleased him. “You know,” he said to Rose as they walked out of the park, “he still runs funny. Remember how we used to worry because he was always walking into things, always loping to the wrong side of the sidewalk?”

  “I remember,” Rose said.

  “We certainly worried a lot about nothing,” Owen said. “He looks good, our son. But then again, he’s always looked good, in his own way.”

  “Don’t start this,” Rose said. “I’m in a rotten mood.”

  “Do you want a Tofutti?” Owen asked. “Tofutti usually cheers you up.”

  She shook her head no, silent in her wretchedness, and they walked on; but Owen continued to wave his secret pride in Philip, as if it were a flag only he could see.

  Rose’s office was a tiny cubicle, one-fourth of a swastika. Carole Schneebaum, with whom she sometimes traded information or had idle conversations through the thin divider, was kitty-corner to her in the swastika, and had been there ten years out of Rose’s twenty. The other two cubicles never had the same occupants for more than a few months at a time. Copy editing was not a profession people often thought of as permanent; more and more these days, freelancers took on the bulk of the work, and Rose’s job involved assigning books as much as actually editing them. The freelancers on her list drifted in and out of sublets, moved away, went back to graduate school, all of which confirmed Rose’s impression that while the world moved on, she and Carole were destined always to stay in the same place, patient and dependable, never changing, never promoted. The publisher, on the rare occasions that he spoke to them, made them feel like national landmarks. Ambition for a better position would have been perceived as unpatriotic. Rose was always getting flowers, and cards that read, “What would we do without you, Rose?” They were needed. Editors called them up on the phone to ask questions about syntax, or because they’d forgotten the code for figuring out the cross street from an avenue address.

  Roger Bell had been in the swastika for a year now; a British woman named Penelope with two last names for six months. They were friends of sorts. Roger was tall, with a careful, clipped beard; he worked out at a Nautilus center every morning before work, and arrived puffed up in a tight white T-shirt. Penelope always complimented him on his musculature. She used that word, “musculature.” She was glamorous, irritating, with wild pitch-black hair and makeup caked on her cheeks. She had lived most of her life in Indonesia, where her American ex-husband was in the diplomatic corps, and was now in New York “on the run” from the ex-husband. Often she asked Rose to answer her phone for her in order to help her avoid the detectives she was convinced the ex-husband had set on her trail. She dressed in boldly patterned bri
ght red and green Indonesian blouses and skirts with little mirrors embroidered into them, and was willing to talk loudly to anyone about anything, it seemed to Rose, but mostly about her ex-husband. She left him, she said during a lunch, because she had found him in bed one afternoon with three Indonesian prostitutes. “Darryl was nothing if not excessive,” she added. To which Roger, in the middle of his Pork Kew, responded with a throaty guffaw that people could hear all the way across the office. Every day at lunch the two of them ate take-out Chinese food at a little table by the coffee machine and talked about their “personal lives”—an expression Rose had always found peculiar; what about life wasn’t personal? Occasionally they would whisper in each other’s ears, then laugh outrageously. Roger, it seemed, had once aspired to be a chef. Now no one invited him to dinner, he said, because he wouldn’t eat anything he hadn’t cooked himself. “Everyone gets real mad at me,” Rose heard him explain to Penelope. “They decide I’m just a selfish crazy because I criticize their cooking. But the fact is, I am a better cook than they are, that’s just the way it is. My friend Leonie made a vichyssoise? I’m sorry, it was sacrilegious. My therapist says I have to be honest about this, otherwise I wouldn’t be being true to myself. So I don’t get invited to dinner a whole lot anymore. So what? I’m too old to lie, too old to pretend about what’s important to me.” Where they sat in Rose’s cubicle, eating modest sandwiches, Rose and Carole looked at each other and raised their eyes to heaven.

  One Tuesday in March, Penelope confessed to Roger over lunch that her seventeen-year-old son, Miles, was gay. “I have no problems talking about it,” she said. “Nothing like that.” It was a little past one, and Rose, in her cubicle with Carole, was just closing her mouth on a bite of sandwich. “Oh, believe me, I was shocked at first,” Penelope continued. “But now I’ve really come to accept it. He has a great boyfriend, very cute, who comes and stays over at the apartment sometimes, and we all have a lot of fun. And it’s opened my mind. I mean, I’ve just never thought about the possibility of being attracted to women before; it just never entered my head. I’m very man-centered, very oriented toward men, you might say, because of my mother, who was married three times and had lots of affairs. I was raised by my mother to appreciate the male physique. But then, with Miles being gay, well, on one level, it gave us something in common, I mean, men, but on another, it made me think—why not women? And I realized I really was attracted to women sometimes, that I was probably in love with my best friend Fanny in comprehensive school. So you could say it’s been a mind-expanding experience.”