The man was named Alex Melchor, and he was going to save Owen's life—that is, if Owen could only get up the nerve to call back. He had been sitting now for forty-five minutes, his hand cradling the black receiver, which was already slick with sweat.
Occasionally panic seized him. He would get up and pace the room, his mind gripped by a sense of the madness and danger of what he was doing so potent it could have been something he had only just conceived, not lived with for years. On his desk, pictures of Rose and Philip stared up at him with an almost pornographic intensity. Periodically he would sit down again at his desk, calmly dial the number (though his hands were shaking), then press down the two nubs on top of the phone with terrible violence and hold them there, to make sure he had actually cut the call off. His office was purgatory, a middle ground where rest was impossible. He knew he could not leave until he had made the call he could not bring himself to make. And yet, as the night wore on, he wondered, if he didn't make the call, which would be stronger: the feeling of relief at having resisted temptation and evaded potential danger, or the feeling of pain as he walked through the dark, empty streets of the Eighties toward the subway, the longing to touch and be touched by another man beginning again its wail inside of him. That longing pulsed stronger in him tonight than it had for years. He must make the call, he told himself. It was no longer a matter of choice. He must make the call, and for the first time in his life speak of these things, and he would not leave this room until he'd done it.
But what if this Alex Melchor wasn't home? Then the ersatz ringing in the phone's heart would go on and on, and no human voice would interrupt it. He could walk all the way home easily, propelled by the beat of a heart pounding in his chest, then decelerating, easing. No one could accuse him of cowardice, of not trying. (No one but himself.) He would wash his hands, and sit down in his favorite chair, and read, and eat a piece of Rose's apple cake. Or would he? He remembered Alex Melchor's voice, shaky with breath as he whispered in the dark theatre: "Please. I can't do it here. Can't we go somewhere else?"—words so unexpected, so unlikely in a place like that, so surprisingly tender. He was in love with Alex Melchor, with all he knew of him, his underwear and his voice and his telephone number, and as fiercely as fear pulled him away from the telephone, desire pushed him toward it. Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair. And why now? He didn't want hope. He didn't believe in hope. He didn't even think he needed hope. Yet he was in its grip.
He was imagining things that would have been unimaginable to him just a year ago, a month ago. It was the same fantasy that had carried him through prep school, only recast to fit his current life and shrunken expectations. Over the years, as it gained in intensity, Owen's desire had become less and less specific; now what was growing in him was simple, undifferentiated need. The man no longer had to have dark curly hair, or be over six feet tall, it no longer had to be perfect, enviable love of the sort that bloomed in the movies of his adolescence. All he wanted was a man to make love with—fully, exhaustingly, more than once—and perhaps a little companionship. And yet, even that was as impossible now as it had been then. He had a job, a wife, a son. Perhaps he could have pulled it off if he were younger and less established; but it seemed to him that each year he lived as a hypocrite, his identity as a family man, a husband, a professional hardened in the minds of those around him, not to mention those he loved. For twenty-seven years, after all, he had been Rose's husband; he held her fate like a hand grenade. To break out of that mold now—well, he would lose his job. He would lose Rose. He would lose Philip. And still he knew he would not leave this office until he had dialed that number, spoken to that voice; that if not tonight, he would come back tomorrow night, and the next night. It was out of his hands now.
So he sat there, his heart pounding, and the phone squatted shamelessly before him, offering to unlock for him the secret safe at its heart for which the seven long-memorized digits of Alex Melchor's phone number were the combination.
He picked up the phone. He dialed in a kind of delirium, and it was only when he was finished, and the ringing started, that he came to consciousness and realized what he had done so easily, and that there was no turning back. He could hang up, but he wasn't going to. He would let it ring five times. One. Two. Three.
There was a clicking noise. He took in his breath. A crash sounded. "Oh shit!" a male voice said. He heard music in the background—he couldn't recognize exactly what. For some unknown reason, relief flooded him. His pulse slackened. He wanted to laugh.
"Sorry, I dropped the phone. Hello?" The voice was raspy, slightly effeminate.
"Is this Alex Melchor?" Owen said. He was bent over in his chair, his feet tucked under his buttocks, smiling broadly and holding back laughter.
"No, just a second, I'll get him. Oh, who's calling?"
"You can tell him my name is Owen Benjamin. But he won't recognize it." He could hear the voice that said these words distinctly, although it seemed to have nothing to do with him.
"Okay, just a second. Al-ex! He's in the kitchen, hold on a minute."
It was Vivaldi.The Four Seasons. Owen closed his eyes and concentrated on the birdsong of the violin, the tiny pips of music as the bow darted back and forth. He tried to think of birds in trees in parks in summer, as his music appreciation teacher had taught him to do in fourth grade. Birds in trees in parks in summer. He had never forgotten that. Strange, he thought, how things come back. Things are not lost.
More crashing. Then the music was obliterated by a hand over the phone.
"Hello, Alex Melchor," said a new voice, this one deeper, more threatening. Some sort of muffling noise sounded. Owen, frozen, couldn't identify it. For a few seconds, he said nothing, expecting his other voice, the confident voice, to take over, but it had run off, leaving him high and dry and alone. Strings broke on a violin somewhere.
"Alex," he said. "This is Owen Benjamin. Owen. Oh—you don't know my name, do you? But you—we—met—you gave me your name and number and said I should call you, I should give you a call."
There. That was fine. That sounded fine.
"I did what?" the voice said. The muffling noise continued. Food. He was eating. And Owen thought, Don't destroy me, please, don't destroy me.
"You left it for me. Your name. You said to call."
"Um—Owen—I don't think so," Alex Melchor said. "Are you sure it was my name, and my number? That you didn't dial wrong?"
"Yes. Work and home." Owen repeated the numbers.
"Those are right. I'm sorry, but I really can't recall giving you this note. Where did I supposedly do it?"
Owen stammered, strangled. "A theatre," he said.
"At the theatre!"
"Yes." "What show? I was at the theatre twice last week. We saw Tango Argentina and that new Sondheim thing—"
"No, no—not the theatre—a theatre."
"A movie theatre?"
Owen faltered. "Yes."
"Well, which one?" He sounded impatient.
"The Bijou," Owen said. He closed his eyes.
"Did you say the Bijou?”
"Yes."
Alex Melchor started to laugh. Hard. Loud. "Then, honey, that note must be pretty old, because I haven't been in that dump for ten years! Are you someone from my deep dark past?" he asked. "Hey, Leo! My deep dark past is on the phone!"
Owen was close to tears. "I'm sorry, there must be a mistake. I'm sorry. Something's wrong." He gritted his teeth, prepared to slam down the receiver.
"Hold on," Alex Melchor said. "Don't hang up. I'm curious about this. Now, you're saying that someone at a porno theatre gave you my name and number? Needless to say, I'm very curious to know who this person was."
"No. It was a mistake. I'm sorry."
"Don't hang up! You sound upset. What did you say your name was, Bowen? Listen, Bowen, don't mind me, my shrink tells me fifty thousand times a day my bark is worse than my bite. Now calm down. Just calm down."
"It's Owen," Owen said. "Owen, not Bowen." He laughed a little. Who would have the nerve to name a kid Bowen? he wondered. His voice shook. His throat seemed to constrict. But he did not hang up.
"Now, Owen, can you describe the man who gave you my number?"
"It was dark."
"It certainly was," Alex Melchor murmured.
"Anyway, I told you. I think it was a mistake. After he left, I found the note on his chair."
"You found the note on the—" There was a moment of silence. "Oh my God!" Alex Melchor said. "What day was this?"
"Sunday."
Suddenly the voice on the other end of the phone burst into a fit of hysterical laughter. "It was Bob Haber!" he said. "Hey, Leo!" he called away from the phone. "Guess who's been hanging out at the Bijou! Bob Haber!"
"I knew it. I knew it," Leo said in the background.
"Forgive me for leaving you on the hook like that," Alex Melchor said. "I think I've figured out the answer to this dilemma. You see, I gave my number and name to this actor named Bob Haber. He's an old college friend of Leo's—that's my lover—and I met him at this dinner party. I'm an agent, you see, and he had a lot of—well, to be perfectly honest, I liked his looks. So I gave him my number and told him to give me a call and we'd have lunch. That was on Saturday. And on Sunday—"
"It fell out of his pocket. I know."
"So the mystery's solved."
"Yes. I'm sorry to have—"
"Oh, don't worry. I'm sorry too. I mean, Owen, you sound like a very nice guy. But I am sort of married to Leo. And Bob Haber—well, I wouldn't recommend him to you. He's a real closet case."
"Sure," Owen said, and wanted to say, "Tell me, show me. Invite me to dinner. Introduce me to Bob Haber. Save me." But he did not.
"Goodbye," he said.
"Bye now." Then Alex Melchor hung up the phone.
Owen fell back in his chair. He could feel his heartbeat, a tiny persistent pulsing in his forehead. Sweat trickled down and dried under his arms. Through his half-closed eyes, he saw that it was past eleven. He realized, quite suddenly, that he had been breathing through his mouth. His throat was dry, his lips chapped to the point of bleeding.
He went into the bathroom. It was a classic boys' school bathroom, with a big trough instead of urinals and three tiny toilets for the first-graders. At one of a row of white enamel sinks he washed his face with a cake of industrial soap. The room smelled strongly of disinfectant. After he had combed his hair, he went back into his office, straightened his desk, put on his coat, and left. It was a cold night out, but windless. He pushed his hands into his coat and started off. The sky was still and clear and full of stars.
For the first twenty blocks he hardly knew what he was feeling. Fragments of the conversation replayed in his head, out of order, along with bits of The Four Seasons. Then, around Seventy-second Street, he realized to his great surprise that he did not feel bad. No, not bad at all. To his own shock, he discovered that his hope was still alive—greatly reduced in bulk, it was true, modest and a little ashamed, but there, alive, and fighting fiercely to hold onto him this cold night as he briskly marched downtown. It no longer had a firm grip. It crawled on him, rather, like a baby kangaroo that must struggle blind, in earnest, to find its mother's pouch. Hope breathed choppily but defiantly in Owen, searching for a place to grow again.
He pushed up the collar of his coat and walked faster. His breath became visible in the dark and cold. He had done it. He had made the call. He had come through it alive, still himself. That mattered more to him than the fact that there had been no note, no last-minute offering. He had set a goal and carried through on it, as his father might have put it to him when he was a child, trying to build a model of a car, a Ford Model-T, and if it hadn't turned out quite perfect—Well, what of it? his father had said. You did your best. I'm proud of you, and you deserve a reward.
Owen did deserve a reward. Right now. So he walked into an all-night newsstand and bought himself a Hershey bar, with almonds.
THE EVENING of Derek Moulthorp's dinner Jerene stood with her foot on the edge of the tub. She was wearing a pale silk slip; below her knees, her legs were half covered with shaving cream.
"Wow," Philip said. "You look—"
"I know, I know," she said. "Don't tell me. It's ridiculous."
"Do you ever cut yourself?" Philip asked. "I cut myself a lot."
"Remember," Jerene said, "I haven't done this in six years."
The scraping noise of the razor against her skin made Philip wince. He sat down on Jerene's cot, being careful not to muss the dark blue wool dress splattered with wildflowers which had been carefully laid out next to him. He gazed at her. Jerene had a date.
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 alight?"
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 must
aches which they cultivated, almost as a challenge. Like the preened and oiled men who wore dabs of eye shadow 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.
The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel Page 14
