The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  Now, in the cab, he turned, thinking he might share this memory with Eliot, when the driver slammed on his brakes and they lurched forward. “What’s wrong?” Eliot asked.

  “Ay dios,” the cab driver said quietly.

  Then Philip looked out the window and saw that the intersection was full of white mice. Thousands of them. They swarmed the street in panicked hordes, like tiny indistinguishable sufferers in a fourteenth-century vision of hell. They cascaded over the sidewalk curbs and plunged after each other into gutters. Against the new snow they were nearly invisible, small quakings of motion.

  “My God,” Philip said. The driver opened his door and got out of the cab, and Philip and Eliot followed him. None of the cars at the intersection were honking, nor were they making any effort to move. Even the passersby—mostly old women who might have screamed had they seen just one of these creatures dart out from behind a garbage can—hung back while the mice poured out of a small white truck that rested on a corner, its front wheels on the sidewalk, its hood bent around a lamppost. “Poor little things,” Philip heard someone say—a voice emerging from the low hum of the crowd which seemed so disembodied that after a moment he wondered if he had imagined it. The mice ran in circles or huddled in clumps as horns began to honk and drivers too far back to see what was going on yelled, “Hey, will you move it?” But no one moved it.

  The cab driver shook his head. Nearby, other cab drivers were conferring in Spanish. Then they got back in their cars. Philip and Eliot followed. “I hope no one was hurt,” Philip said.

  “There’d be ambulances if anyone was hurt badly.”

  In the distance, police sirens wailed. The driver swore, spat, honked his horn, and began to move the cab forward slowly, but without stopping. The cab parted the sea of mice, and turned onto Ninety-sixth Street. Philip closed his eyes, fearful that he might be compelled to look behind himself for small clots of blood in the snow.

  “I guess they were being taken up to Columbia, to the labs there,” Philip said a few minutes later, when they were safely deposited on the West Side Highway. “In some ways, they were lucky. Probably they’ve escaped having horrible things done to them.” He was thinking of a book he read as a child about rats who escape from some sort of government institution.

  “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” Eliot said. “It was one of my favorites when I was a kid. Derek used to read it to me. Yes, I think those mice were being transported up to Columbia for some horrible experiment to test their pain thresholds. They’d be injected with varying quantities of morphine and set on top of gas burners, and the researchers would measure how long it took each mouse to scream. Or jump. Or whatever mice do when they’re in pain. That really happened, you know. Some scientists did it to freak out a group of anti-vivisectionists who were marching in front of their building every day.”

  “Jesus,” Philip said.

  Now the taxi driver turned and delivered to them, in bad English, his own private explanation for the event. They listened, trying to extract what they could. “The shit of the world” was all Philip understood.

  “Well, in any case, we can read all about it in the Post tomorrow,” Eliot said, as if in conclusion. “The Post will put this on its front page. MICE ATTACK UPPER MANHATTAN.”

  He lifted his arm and stretched it out behind Philip’s head. A beam of light from a truck going the other way passed over Eliot’s face, illuminating for a fraction of a second his pale skin, his eyes, the small hairs coming over his cheek like a grass. Philip reached over and stroked the cheek, a gesture that even now seemed to him grand and terrifying, though Eliot hardly noticed it. Such efforts of affection were nothing for him; his life had been full of them, pats and caresses and casual kisses, whereas for Philip to touch a hand to a cheek was an action of such magnitude that it had to be treasured, preserved. It radiated power; it demanded bravery. Philip understood that there were people in the world like Eliot for whom love and sex came easy, without active solicitation, like a strong wind to which they had only to turn their faces and it would blow over them. He also understood that he was not one of those people. Instead, he seemed always to be eking out signals, interpreting glances, trying to extract some knowledge of another person’s feelings from the most trivial conversations. Nothing came easy for him, and more often than not, nothing came of any of his efforts.

  Only three weeks before, at a dinner party at their friend Sally’s, in a gesture of drunken self-confidence he still found hard to believe, he had slipped his foot out of his shoe and rubbed it against Eliot’s calf. And Eliot—without even looking at him, without even breaking the flow of his conversation with the woman next to him—grasped Philip’s foot between his legs and held it there, trapping him for the rest of the dinner. That simply, his life changed.

  “Your face feels like Velcro,” Philip said now, suddenly remembering a mouse he had stroked as a child—how oddly soft, almost synthetic, its fur had felt.

  Eliot laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll shave when we get back to my house.” He was eager to see if he’d gotten any mail, and to check in with his roommate, a lanky black woman named Jerene who made Philip shy. There was no talk of their spending the night apart, and Philip wondered if he seemed overeager.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said now. “Do you want me to come down with you tonight? I mean, we could eat, and then I could go back uptown. It would be no problem.”

  Eliot looked at him. “Philip,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  Philip was quiet for a moment. “I don’t want you to get sick of me,” he said at last.

  “If I’m sick of you, I’ll tell you,” Eliot said, taking his hand away, and turned to look out the window.

  Philip stared into the side of Eliot’s face. He felt like one of those crazed vivisectors Eliot had spoken of, determined to know the exact boundaries of pain. How far can I go before I feel it? How long before something happens that hurts?

  The cab was passing through midtown now, past warehouses and towering garages, and the sidewalks were dotted with tired-looking prostitutes in hot pants, rubbing their stockinged legs in the cold. A garbage truck pulled up to the curb, and three or four of the women approached its enormous door. The wind blew, but their hair stayed perfectly in place.

  “I’d like to stay with you tonight,” Philip said.

  “Yes,” Eliot said. He stroked Philip’s hand, looking at the prostitutes. “That’s fine.”

  Philip was tall like his father, and gangly. More than anything else he resembled one of those awkward, loping dogs who seem always to be getting caught between people’s legs. His face inspired trust in old women in elevators: even-keeled, the features all in proportion to one another and nothing too striking except the eyes, which were a brilliant blue. It was a face so well composed, so familiar-seeming, that people who had never met Philip before insisted that they had (although they could never remember where), then afterwards were unable to recall a single detail of his physiognomy. He had straight brown hair that turned wheaten in summer, a likable grin, a tendency to laugh too loudly at inappropriate moments. Something about his very ordinariness, the fact that nothing in his appearance betrayed his homosexuality, made him attractive to other young men; he was the childhood neighbor they’d dreamed of jacking off with in bunk beds, and usually that was all they wanted. Philip longed for passion and romantic gestures, not play-acting, but somehow the men he slept with found the idea of being loved by him laughable. Wide-eyed in his infatuations, he had made a fool of himself in college, proclaiming his affections too publicly and scaring away whoever it was he had a crush on. Rejection seemed his lot in life. Most Friday nights he ended up at the local gay bar, where graduate students smelling of hydrogen sulphide would lure him to their rooms with dirty talk, pull out old jockstraps, and go to work re-creating the Urbana High School locker room, circa 1977.

  In college he had come out late, but with a bang. He was earnestly political, and felt guilty f
or his years of closetedness, as if somehow he had been personally responsible for the oppression of untold numbers of gay men and women. To make up for the enormity of his cowardice, he told everyone he knew, sometimes approaching near-strangers on the streets of the campus and saying, “Hi—I just wanted to let you know, I’m gay!” to which the bewildered respondent, usually a serious-minded female graduate student who was still trying to remember his name, would stutter something like, “Oh—how nice for you!” smile, and turn away.

  As a child, he had been solitary and quiet, and often—particularly on windy afternoons when the stores and the streets filled up with warm, yellow midtown light—New York itself had seemed his best companion. But now, when he and his friends got together, in dark candlelit West Side apartments, or Indian restaurants draped with tapestries, or huge, crowded nightclubs, he rarely felt that familiarity the city had once offered him. Instead he and his friends got together to be alone together, to smoke cigarettes and commiserate on their lack of boyfriends or girlfriends, to ease the anxiety of their solitary lives with talk and vodka. His evenings with his friends would run a predictable course, and then they would all say goodnight and go home alone to tiny apartments with one window, or big apartments full of closed doors, or perhaps (on particularly bad nights) to bars, where warmth or a human touch is cheaper. They travelled in loosely formed packs, friends from work and their friends and their friends, and roommates thrown into intimacy by ads in the Voice, two in one bedroom or three in two bedrooms or four in three bedrooms. They were all on the prowl, in the market, on the lookout, and had the thin, questing aspect of people desperate to find lovers. Often Philip wondered if this urgent need wasn’t the very thing that scared lovers off. It seemed to him a grave injustice that in New York, to get what you needed, you had above all never to look hungry. Everyone was hungry; but everyone else was better at hiding it. Or were they? Soon, Philip believed, he too might look unapproachable, and then, he imagined, it would only be a few short steps to being that way.

  His friend Sally was different. She was the first person Philip had ever come out to, and she had taken him in hand, sitting with him in the college dining hall and identifying who, among the men who passed, was gay (it was an astonishing number), while his leg shook violently beneath the table. Now Sally was a tax analyst. She made money and lived alone in a co-op apartment she had bought by herself, which to Philip was amazing. One night in late September she called him up and asked him to come to a dinner party she was having. “I’m trying to get a lot of people from school together,” she explained. “The old gang. But there’s also going to be a new person, a guy I just met. I think you’ll really like him.”

  Philip began to make up an excuse, but Sally interrupted him. “I’m serious,” she said. “His name is Eliot Abrams, and he’s just your type—tall and thin, with curly hair. And he’s had a very interesting life. His parents died when he was little in some awful car crash, and he was raised in a townhouse in the Village by—are you ready for this?—Derek Moulthorp—you know, the guy who wrote all those children’s books—and his lover.”

  Philip knew. “Wow,” he said. “I read all those books. My mother brought them home. She was his copy editor for a while.”

  “No shit. Well, you’ve got a great opening line. Apparently his parents—his natural parents—were important Jewish intellectuals or something. And rich, because he has a trust fund. Derek Moulthorp and his lover were their best friends. Anyway, he’s a really terrific guy, and the minute I met him, I thought of you. So—can you come?”

  “Well,” Philip said, and changed his mind. “Sure,” he said. Then, cautiously: “I didn’t know Derek Moulthorp was gay.”

  “Philip!” Sally said. “Everyone knows that.”

  Philip was quiet. “You know, of course, what I’m wondering,” he said.

  “Yes, and I don’t think it matters. I think what matters is that Eliot’s a terrific guy, and that he’s apparently benefitted from a terrific upbringing. And he wears the best socks. You’ll love his socks. He collects them—incredible colors, weird patterns. At this party last week he had some on that he was showing everybody—they had what looked like little root beer floats on them.”

  “Really.”

  “I don’t know where he finds them. Anyway—can you be there?”

  “How could I miss it?” Philip said.

  But a few nights later, when he walked into Sally’s apartment, he almost turned around and went out again. The room was full of distant familiar faces he hadn’t seen in years. There was Joshua Treadwell, and Connie Moss, and Chris Fletcher, and a host of other people he had spent most of his time in college avoiding. Indeed, the only person he saw whom he knew and liked was Brad Robinson, who had been his friend in the Gay and Lesbian Campus Coalition. They waved to each other across the room, and then Sally ran up to him, smiling. “Philip,” she said, “I’m glad you came. Come meet Eliot.”

  Then, from behind some plants near the sofa, where he stood admiring her view of the Hudson, she beckoned a tall young man with curly dark hair, a cigarette in his hand. Philip’s eyes widened, and Eliot threw him a smile so intense and unwavering he had to turn from it.

  He was standing with Eliot, close enough that the tendrils of wool on their sweaters were touching (a delicious, barely perceptible sensation). They looked each other in the eye. Eliot’s were framed by round gold glasses. Philip’s mouth was open and words were coming out of it, though he hardly knew what they were, and he had to fight to bring each sentence to the end. He felt as if something was blooming in him—a flower, a fire, a possibility that moment by moment became, unbelievably, more real, as they kept smiling, as Eliot did not stop staring straight into Philip’s eyes. For the first time in his life there seemed no doubt. The answer was yes.

  “Sally tells me you work in publishing,” Eliot said. A slight shifting of the knees. Eyes unwavering. Philip was relying completely on peripheral vision to make out the tuft of hair emerging from Eliot’s collar, the clean, close-cropped fingernails, all the tiny, erotic details.

  “Well, actually I work for what’s called a packaging company,” Philip said. “We’re in the romance field. What I do is edit and rewrite these terrible novels—all about desert islands, pirate ships, cruise ships; the line’s called Wavecrest Books. Right now, for instance, I’m working on Tides of Flame, which is all about how hardy and tempestuous Sylvia falls in love with evil Captain Dick Tolliver.”

  Eliot laughed, and Philip was relieved.

  “Are you living uptown too?”

  “More uptown than this—105th Street, off Amsterdam. How about you?”

  “I live in the East Village.”

  “How’s the rent down there?”

  “Mine isn’t bad. I was lucky.”

  “Do you have a lease, or is it a sublet?”

  “Oh no, it’s my lease.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Then there was nothing else to say. They stood there, not looking away. Philip was studying Eliot’s eyes. They were dark, almost black, but when he looked at them closely he could see pulsating rings of green and yellow encircling the pupils.

  A minute passed without a word, and still they stared. Every now and then Philip let out a snort of breath, almost a laugh, and his smile widened a little, and Eliot smiled too and let out a thin stream of smoke.

  “So what do you do?” Philip asked finally, mostly because there was no one else there to interrupt, no Sally, no dinner bell.

  “I’m sort of self-employed,” Eliot said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Oh, I write copy for ad agencies and publishers. And draw. I’m working on a book cover now. A jack-of-all-trades, I guess you could say.”

  “That’s great,” Philip said. He’s rich, he thought enviously, but then, because he was trying to fall in love with Eliot, he changed his mind. Freedom, he thought. Integrity.

  “You must like the freedom,”
Philip said. “It must be great not to be stuck in the nine-to-five grind.”

  “I love it,” Eliot said. “And anyway, I doubt I’d be able to live any other way. I don’t like planning things more than a few days ahead if I can help it. It’s just not a comfortable way of being for me.”

  “You know,” Philip said, suddenly remembering Sally’s game plan, “my mother was your father’s copy editor. Or, I mean, your stepfather. Or—I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to call him.”

  “Really!” Eliot said. “She copy edited Derek’s books? Which ones?”

  A new panic replaced the old one. He didn’t know. “I’m not sure, exactly—” he said. “The ones that Motherwell published.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Eliot said.

  “You think so?” Philip said. He sputtered out a little laugh. “I thought it was a pretty neat coincidence myself. Of course, they never met. Though Mom always wanted to meet him. She loved his books. I did too.”

  “Yes, they’re great. Derek’s a remarkable person, a real character. You’d like him.”

  Something in the way Eliot said “You’d like him” alarmed Philip. He wondered if perhaps he was all wrong, if Eliot was going to shake his hand and say, “We should have lunch sometime.”

  Then Sally was between them, flashing a tight smile. For the first time they observed the party. People stood around in nervous little groups. “You two sit across from each other,” Sally said, ushering them to the table, then arranged the other guests according to some elaborate plan of her own invention.

  The dinner was long. Philip hardly had a chance to talk to Eliot, who was caught up in a conversation about the legitimacy or fraudulence of certain East Village performance artists. Every now and then someone at the table would make a half-hearted effort at nostalgia but always ended up slipping back into the inevitable refrain: “I’ll quit if I don’t get a raise by next month”; “It’s an illegal sublet, so unless the landlord finds out, I’ll be fine.”