The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  He passes the theatre. The brick wall is painted red. Behind twin glass doors and a glass partition, a woman with peroxide blond hair sits and files her nails. She is the fulcrum of his circling. The first time he passed he almost went in, but then an old woman hobbled by, and he couldn't.

  The feature film is called Strap.

  Enough. He walks directly up to the theatre. No one is passing in front; no reprieve awaits him. He has his money counted out in his front pocket, no wallet in his back pocket. Nothing for pickpockets, no identity. He is no one. To the woman behind the pane of glass, he hardly exists. She has a large, artificial-looking mole on her cheek and is certainly real enough to him as she takes the money from his shaking hand through a slot in the glass. Then she reaches under herself—a gesture that in itself seems obscene, prophetic—and pulls at something. The turnstile loosens, and he passes through it, counted, a click, then through a curtain, into darkness.

  Ahead of him is a screen, and on the screen a penis six feet long lunges at a back, over and over, seeming to miss the opening deliberately. It slaps the back. It bounces. There is jazz music. He can see nothing except the huge screen—no seats, no faces—and he gropes behind himself for a wall, for something to lean on until his eyes adjust. The wall is tattered velvet. He feels the soft, diamond-shaped mounds, as well as the bald patches worn down by years of leaning. He is blind and helpless. The wall is sticky. His shoes stick to the floor. He feels as if he has walked into a spider's web.

  Slowly he begins to see. People are sitting in the rows of seats—most singly, some in pairs or trios. A number of young men lean against the side wall, themselves on display, as if in rivalry with the film. Most of the people in the theatre are pacing up and down the aisles, occasionally turning into the men's room, the door marked "Lounge."

  He gropes for a seat at the end of the aisle. He thinks that this will make it easier for him to escape if need be. On the screen ahead of him, three of them go at it, wildly, violently. They are vocal, and that is the best part. They grunt out what they want and how good it feels; they scream words and phrases Philip must whisper even in his imagination. Ahead of him a pair of shadows grope, meld, separate again. Which is the film and which is real? One slides below the other. A third comes to watch, to join in, if possible. They push him away. Philip turns his head up, determined to watch only the screen.

  The film has a plot. According to the plot, a young man about to be married sneaks into his brother's room, discovers a gay pornographic magazine, and begins to masturbate. The brother finds him. "Hey, I'm straight," says the groom. "Then if you don't want your bride to find out, you better do what I say and suck my cock," the brother says. The groom is hesitant, but complies.

  Philip is fascinated by the film. He hardly notices, after a few minutes, that a man in his fifties—one of the pacers—has taken a seat in front of Philip, just to his right. Philip immediately feels his back tense up. Up until this point, he has assumed that the people pacing the aisles were employees of the theatre, there to make sure nobody did anything they weren't supposed to. He was grateful for this imagined protection, for he really only wants to watch. But now the man who has embodied security—who might hoist other men off their knees by the scruff of the neck and put them out the door—is sitting in front of him, and his hand is cradling the empty seat in front of Philip's seat, as if there is a person there, a date, a girl, and the man is a nervous teenager, making his first, tentative move. Once the man turns around, looks at Philip, then turns back. He looks him straight in the eye and doesn't smile. His face is chunky, stubbled with gray; he has some sort of cap on. He sits in front of Philip and his arm squeezes the shoulder of the seat, the imaginary date. Philip almost laughs, and then the arm dips down over the back of the seat and brushes his leg.

  He gasps, and closes his eyes—not because he is surprised, but because it seems so inevitable, this first touch. The hand strokes Philip's thigh, back and forth, gently, and the capped head does not turn around. The hand goes in circles, larger and larger, over his lap, landing on his groin, but not resting there. Instead—to Philip's surprise—the hand reaches for his own hand, and coils around his thumb. He can see the forearm—watchless, thick. He can feel the tiny hairs brushing against his hand.

  The man removes his hand from Philip's lap, gets up and walks to the aisle, where he stands right next to Philip. He gestures for Philip to move in one seat so he can sit next to him, and Philip does. He had not planned to; he had told himself, I'll just nod my head no; but now he is doing it, he is moving in one more seat. On the screen, the giant genitals are back, going about their business, and the strange man's hand unzips Philip's fly and burrows into him. How strange it looks there—rustling in his pants like an animal making a home in a tree. By the time the hand has found what it is looking for, Philip's mind is blank, his body is soaked in sweat, and his penis is soft.

  The man gives a few tugs, and turns to look at Philip. "What's wrong?" he asks. "What do you want me to do?" Philip closes his eyes, and shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes. He feels as if he can't breathe.

  The man removes his hand and zips Philip's fly, as his father zipped his fly after helping him to pee out of it when he was five. They were in Europe, then, on a mountaintop. All around was air and snow and green, green hills.

  The man pats Philip's stomach. Keeping his eyes closed, Philip is still five years old, and he is still on the mountaintop near Lausanne, and his father is pointing to the distant village where they are staying.

  He opens his eyes. Faces now. A man with a beard sits on a diving board and caresses the crotch of his blue Speedo. Nearby, a blond boy watches him and does the same. They stare at each other, their eyes never moving.

  "Come to Daddy, boy," the bearded man says.

  BECAUSE HE WAS A SHY MAN, not given to self-advertisement, few people knew that Owen had a Ph.D. His dissertation had compared the ideas of history espoused by several English and Italian Renaissance poets most people had never heard of, and won him a post-doctoral fellowship and an adjunct position at a small women's college just outside Boston. This hardly pleased Owen's father, who had a different idea of success. "Why the hell do you want to waste two years and three hundred pages on some poets no one's ever going to read in the first place?" he'd cry to Owen, thrashing through the pages of The Wall Street Journal with a violence that had nothing to do with reading. "Just look at this," he'd say, and point to news of some catastrophe. "With the world in the shape it's in now, you want to go off and write about poetry." He was the sort of man who believed that to offer aid to starving peasants was to deny them the chance to succeed on their own. "Every man has the God-given, fundamental right to make his family proud of him," he used to say, while Owen sat across from him and pulled at his fingers until they cracked, a mute smile planted on his face. He had spent most of his life not listening to his father, and he hardly intended to start now. It was 1963. Rebellion was in the atmosphere, taking many forms; it took in Owen the form of a Marxist psychoanalytic reading of Spenser that meant little to his students at the Belmont College for Women and even less to Rose, whose main goal at this point was getting Philip to talk. He was almost one-and-a-half, and he still hadn't said a word, to the secret satisfaction of the other young mothers in the Belmont faculty ghetto, who seemed to be conducting a competition to see who could get her baby to speak earliest. Fortunately, Philip didn't keep her waiting. He surprised everybody by opening up his mouth one day, pointing to his teddy bear, and saying, "Gimme animal"—much better, she thought, than the "dada" Sandy Eisenberg's Naomi had uttered at eight months.

  A few years later, Owen was offered a tenure-track position at a small college on Long Island. They moved to New York—to the city—because Rose was getting itchy just sitting around the house with Philip (who, in spite of his early burst of articulation, was turning out to be a rather taciturn child), and her cousin Gabrielle had promised that she could get her a job in book publishi
ng. Every morning at seven on the dot, Owen left the apartment on Second Avenue and rode the train out to Long Island, the lone white male in a car full of black and Hispanic maids. From the beginning, the head of the English Department, an old man named Maxon who had read Owen's dissertation (and been principally responsible for hiring him), made it clear that he considered Owen's ideas juvenile and pretentious, the product of a young mind bent on making trouble and too influenced by what he termed the "fashionable" ideologies of certain youngsters up at Yale. He hinted that Owen had better change his ways if he wanted tenure; his mind, he said, was too good to be allowed to "spoil." It was characteristic of the kind of man Owen was at that time that he did not defend himself and his ideas against this attack, and at the same time did not (as Rose suggested) ingratiate himself to "the old fart" while privately pursuing his own interests in the classroom. Instead, six months into the year, after a particularly bad lunch in which Maxon had gone after him a bit more mercilessly than usual, he quietly and abruptly quit. Maxon was infinitely more angered by this action than he would have been by yelling and raging—he rather liked an "angry young man" attitude in his juniors, having once had one himself—because it left his already understaffed department short one basic composition instructor. Maxon told Owen in no uncertain terms that if he walked out on the college now, he would make sure that he never taught again as long as he lived. Owen was sufficiently convinced of Maxon's power to believe him. He slammed the door soundly. So ended his career in academia.

  A few weeks later, he found out that he had won a fellowship he had forgotten he had applied for that would allow him to spend a year in Rome. The fellowship was to provide an opportunity for him to begin research on a new subject—attitudes toward Etrusciana in the Renaissance—an interest he had generated primarily in order to win the fellowship. Like fugitives, then—and they felt like fugitives—he and Rose sublet their apartment, took the money, and ran. Philip was five years old. He would remember this trip to Europe as the year of strange foods, strangely shaped pillows, three-tiered bunk beds on trains, and incomprehensible squat toilets. Philip was extremely important to Owen and Rose—more important than either of them probably could have guessed he would be. In those first years of marriage, following the fated double-date on which they had met, each trapped with the wrong partner, they had been a little like two casual friends who embark on a long and difficult trip together and are shocked to discover themselves thrust into a sudden, intense intimacy they are neither prepared for nor particularly desirous of. They longed for their child the way those friends might long to meet up with some jovial third party, amicable and unthreatening, who could add another voice to the endless conversation, and remind them that there were other people in the world, other lives outside the endless effort of travelling together. Rose was certainly in love with Owen, or so she assumed. She dreamed about him and longed for him and admired his messy hair and professorial absentmindedness and ability to make a point forcefully without raising his voice. But sometimes she would listen to her favorite scratched Billie Holiday record; she would hear that woman sing:

  I'd lie for you, I'd cry for you,

  I'd lay my body down and die for you,

  If that isn't love, it will have to do,

  Until the real thing comes along...

  Then her heart would sink at such absolute assurance, and she would wonder if she could ever feel that way for Owen, and even if she could, if she would want to. In those songs, all that was sure was the woman's love for the man. The man certainly wasn't sure; the world wasn't sure. For Rose the situation was almost exactly the opposite. She could count on everything but her own feelings. As for Owen, sometimes she almost wanted him to become that hurtful two-timer in the Billie Holiday songs, traipsing along and never particularly caring that this woman was holding the world in orbit with her voice, and all for his sake.

  Owen was steady, kind, attentive. In bed he always asked if he was hurting her. She appreciated that. But from the start he was distant. At dinner tables in restaurants, after they had finished eating, he would turn his chair out from the table and sit with his long legs stretched into the open space before him, his head slightly cocked in her direction, his eyes veering around to join his legs, and gently nudge a toothpick into his gums. There was never enough to say. The baby came as a relief. It was jubilant and sincere; it laughed or cried. Now there were no longer awkward gaps in their conversation. Philip filled every moment with his inexhaustible lungs, his desire for food, his efforts at affection and play. Suddenly they were happier than they'd ever been together, and Rose imagined (with relief and some shortsightedness) that perhaps it had just taken this baby to make them finally fall in love. They were lost in Philip. They spent hours by his crib. At night they pored over catalogues from Creative Playthings, trying to choose the best toys for him. They did all these things together, too; it was no illusion that during those first years after his birth they seemed to their friends happier, more self-contained and occupied, than they ever had before. And though he was just a baby, the innocent result of chance collisions during sex, they regarded him as some kind of minor deity, an angel sent down to save them, to bring light and color back into their lives.

  In Rome, they fell in with a group of expatriate Americans, mostly academics. Their best friends were a couple named Rhea and Karl Mutter, both of whom were archaeologists. Karl was a balding, paunchy man of forty who had a fellowship at the American Academy. He had the kind of broad humor that made people like to listen to him, and a jowly face and body Rose found repulsive and at the same time curiously appealing; he was like the Pillsbury doughboy, begging for a squeeze. Rhea, by contrast, had long, sun-bleached hair and cavernous cheeks and big eyes that were set oddly close together. Having (in Rose's opinion) no sense of humor to speak of, she was often the victim of her husband's. Every jovial remark Karl made, every peal of laughter he managed to prompt from a female mouth, seemed to plunge Rhea further into the abyss of sour depression where—lacking a fellowship herself, and having no reason to be in Rome (her specialty was Mexico)—she toiled most afternoons and evenings, nursing aperitifs in cafes, her wet eyes looking as if they were about to spill out onto the table. Rose suspected she would have liked to lead a less public life, but her husband's incessant cheerfulness not only made her glumness more visible, it aggravated it. One afternoon she and Owen and Rhea and Karl were sitting at a cafe with another couple, and Karl had said, "Hey, here's a good one. Now tell me: Why do mice have such small balls?"

  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.