The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  “Well, that was quite a surprise, seeing Rhea Mutter again,” Rose said to Owen in bed that night. “It made me remember a lot of things. I think I’d like to go back to Rome someday. Would you?”

  From inside his book he nodded. She knew they would never go. They rarely spoke about Rome these days, or about Owen’s brief shining hour on the limelit stage of Renaissance Studies. The work on the Etruscans, half-finished, lay in his desk drawer, abandoned.

  “Owen,” she said. “Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if you’d stayed in academia?” And added to herself, Would we have been closer? Would we have been happier?

  Owen pretended not to hear her. Of course he did wonder, though he spoke about it to no one. His days as a scholar seemed so much a different lifetime that he hardly believed in them. When on occasion he thumbed through the yellowing pages of his dissertation, the elegant argument in which he had once taken such pleasure made so little sense that he could barely follow it. Sometimes the work seemed the product of another mind—one infinitely more precise and scrutinizing than his own. At other times he would feel a glimmer of recognition, and a wave of nostalgia for those lost days would ripple through him. It never lasted long. Soon enough he would fling the thing away and wonder to himself what kind of fool he must have been to have wasted two and a half years and three hundred pages on a bunch of poets no one was ever going to read anyway.

  Eliot was sitting at the big drafting table in the living room of his apartment, his head bent over in concentration, his Rapidograph pen making scratching noises against the paper in the light of a two-hundred-watt bulb. He was working on a promotional flyer for the children’s book division of Derek Moulthorp’s publisher. He did not speak, did not even seem to notice that Philip was in the room, watching him. Then, after a few minutes, he put the pen down, cracked his knuckles, stood up and looked at the work-in-progress from several angles. “Not bad,” he said. Philip gazed at him. He walked over to the futon, folded now into a sofa, and sat down on it. “What are you doing here on your lunch hour, anyway?” Eliot asked. “I missed you,” Philip said. He sat down next to him. He put one hand on his shoulder and one on his thigh. Then he reached over to kiss him, and Eliot lowered his head down so that their foreheads collided and rolled against each other like ball bearings. Hands on shoulders, hands on thighs, Eliot slid back against the futon, content for once to let Philip do the work.

  There was a peculiarly competitive aspect to their regular nighttime lovemaking which was absent this afternoon. Usually Eliot insisted on controlling everything, on being the purveyor as well as the receiver of pleasure. He liked to surprise Philip by doing exactly what Philip wanted him to do before Philip even had a chance to ask. When they made love at night, Eliot always made sure that Philip came first and thereby assured his own status as supreme sensualist, expert lover. For a while Philip resisted this effort on Eliot’s part, but no matter how hard he tried to make Eliot come first, no matter what tricks he employed to gain an advantage, no matter how subtly and skillfully he caressed and probed to make Eliot reveal his points of vulnerability, he simply couldn’t do it. Eliot could always hold out longer, and thus always won the orgasm-postponement battle that underscored their otherwise zealously affectionate lovemaking. Today was the exception. Today, for whatever reason—time constraints, tiredness, affection, boredom—Eliot just lay back, fully dressed, his jeans opened and his underwear pulled back, and let Philip make love to him, taking in the sight of his closed eyes and open, breathing mouth, his bare white feet, the springy, erect penis jutting out from his open pants. And when, in due time, Eliot started to moan and his hips started to gyrate and his hands, instead of gently stroking, began to pull at Philip’s hair, Philip thought he might die from loving him, and tried to record in his memory all the simultaneous sensations he was experiencing. Eliot pulled and pushed in and out of his mouth, which was a signal to reach up under his shirt and pinch his nipples. He let out a low heave, and without warning thick, salty liquid squirted into Philip’s mouth—a slight disappointment, as he hoped for violent spewing, hosing the back of his throat. Eliot breathed deeply, his mouth open, and his hands embraced Philip’s head.

  Respectfully, in spite of health warnings, Philip did what with other men he had never done: he swallowed.

  Then he stood up, kissed Eliot on the mouth, and went to have a drink of water. Eliot zipped himself up neatly, a package rewrapped, an envelope resealed. He followed him to the kitchen; he kissed him back. Once again they rubbed their foreheads together.

  “Eliot,” Philip said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Remember how you said when we met that you might introduce me to Derek and Geoffrey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—do you think maybe we could have them over to dinner or something?”

  Eliot took a sip of coffee and didn’t answer. Philip drew in his breath, for he was convinced that every request he made of Eliot, every inch he insinuated himself into his life, would be one demand too many, one step too far, and Eliot would turn away from him.

  But in fact Eliot put down his coffee mug and said, “I think that could probably be arranged.”

  “Really?” Philip said.

  “Sure,” Eliot said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll call Geoffrey this afternoon.”

  “Thank you,” said Philip. “Thank you, thank you.” And hugged him. Then he said, “Eliot?”

  “Yes?”

  “How old were you when you were adopted?”

  He breathed in and out, evenly. “Three,” he said.

  “So you don’t remember much about your parents?”

  “Not very much. I was pretty young.” He pulled away from Philip. “Do you know what time it is?” he said.

  “Oh, don’t tell me.”

  “You told me to tell you.”

  “Yes, I know. But don’t.”

  “You don’t want to lose your job, do you?”

  “Yes,” Philip said. He walked up to where Eliot stood and wrapped himself around him. “Let’s just stay like this a few seconds more,” he said. More than sex, more than talking, it was this he loved—resting his head against Eliot’s shoulder. In the background they heard the dull yowl of a badly scratched Jimi Hendrix album, along with the adolescent voices of Menudo coming out of a little girl’s radio. The kitchen window framed an afternoon that was steel gray, sunless but mercilessly bright.

  “You don’t like to talk about your parents much, do you?” Philip said. “How come? You can trust me.”

  Eliot didn’t answer. He let Philip go, walked across the room to the window. “Did I say something wrong?” Philip said, suddenly fearful that he had offended him. “I’m sorry if I said something wrong.” He followed Eliot across the room, put his arms around him. Eliot’s body was arched.

  “You’re getting sick of me, aren’t you?” Philip said. “I knew it.”

  “Philip, please! For Christ’s sake!”

  “Oh God, I’m really blowing it today, aren’t I?” Philip said. He buried his head in Eliot’s shoulder.

  “Just lighten up,” Eliot said. “Don’t be so worried all the time.” He sunk his hand into Philip’s shoulder, gave it a hard knead, and Philip winced with pain. “You worry too much,” Eliot said. “Try not to.”

  “Okay.”

  They rocked back and forth on the old linoleum as if they were a couple in an old-fashioned ballroom, a mirrored ball twirling above their heads. It was like a cartoon Philip remembered from his childhood, where musical notes danced together and trumpets and saxophones played themselves with agile, white-gloved hands.

  Eliot called Philip at work and said, “We’re on for Saturday night at eight. Derek’s house.”

  “Oh, that’s great!” Philip said. “That’s terrific! I can’t wait!”

  “It should be fun,” Eliot said. “But listen. I don’t think I can see you for a few days. It’s this project I’m working on. They just called me and told
me they want me to have it done by Friday.”

  Philip was in a cubicle on the nineteenth floor of a building on Lexington Avenue. Around him typewriters clicked, phones rang, someone giggled by the coffee machine. “Oh,” he said, then realized he was obligated to say more. “Listen, don’t worry,” he said. “I understand. But . . . well, I have an idea. I have some work to do myself tonight. Some manuscripts to look over. Maybe I could come over and do my editing while you do your drawing.”

  “I don’t think so, Philip. You know what happens when we try to work together. Neither of us gets a thing done. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem, but I’m afraid that for the next few days I really have to buckle down.”

  “Do I distract you? I’m sorry,” Philip said, and felt ashamed and inferior for having no project in his life of equal importance, no work he could put before passion.

  For a moment they breathed silently. “Well, look,” Eliot said, “we did have our little lunchtime antics, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “You bet we did.” He laughed. “Listen, I’ve got to get going. I’m really panicked about this project. But I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay. But—Eliot?”

  “What?”

  “It isn’t that you’re mad at me—is it?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Philip!” He sighed in frustration. “Look,” he said, “I’m not mad at you. I’ll miss you very much.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes. Now I have to go, okay? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  He hung up. Philip held onto the receiver until he heard the click and the dial tone start up again. He had fantasized the phone call Eliot had just made so often that it had become, for him, unreal, like something from one of his romance novels. He could not believe Eliot had really said what he’d just said, and for a moment wondered if he’d dreamed the call.

  A few days, Eliot had said. Given that they’d spent every night together since they’d met, Philip had anticipated with dread his wanting just one night. Now he would have gratefully given him one night.

  He sat upright in his desk. What was he thinking? Why couldn’t he take Eliot at his word? Eliot loved him, was taking him to meet Derek and Geoffrey on Saturday night. He simply needed time to work. And he did have a point about the two of them not getting much work done together. Philip pretended to read. Eliot pretended to draw. One would tell a joke, or try to distract the other. Soon Philip would find he couldn’t help giving Eliot a kiss on the neck.

  Flushed warm by the memory, Philip went back to work on the manuscript he was editing, a novel called Tides of Flame. Sylvia, the brash and hardy heroine, had dressed up like a boy and joined the crew of the Black Serpent, Captain Dick Tolliver’s pirate ship. She hoped to find out the truth about the disappearance of her fiancé, Steve Lionel, whose own ship had met its unfortunate end at Tolliver’s hand. Now, to her horror, she was finding herself strangely attracted to the brooding, one-armed Tolliver. “He would not give her the time of day,” wrote the author, Fiona Carpentier, who was also Jack T. Spelvin and Marlena McCoy, and was really Lynnea Seligman of Springfield, Illinois. Yet Sylvia would win in the end. She always did.

  Half an hour later he heard a sharp rap on the side of his cubicle. “Philip?” a voice said, and he turned. It was Marsha Collins, the editor-in-chief famous for her twelve-toned hair, and she was standing with a pair of middle-aged women, both of whom were wearing enormous blue butterfly-shaped glasses and fur coats. “Philip,” Marsha Collins said, “I want you to meet Laurene and Gladys Cooper, from El Cerrito, California. They’re Vanessa Southwood. We’re going to make you ladies a big success,” she said, turning to the giddy women. “And Philip as your line editor is going to be very important in the process.”

  She plopped them down in plastic chairs and walked off.

  “I enjoyed The Serpent and the Flame a lot,” Philip said, and smiled.

  “We’re so happy to hear that, Mr. Phillips,” Laurene Cooper said. “It’s our twenty-seventh book.”

  “But the first that’s got accepted,” Gladys added. Both had bright red hair, and lips the color of Hawaiian Punch. Though he knew that they were mother and daughter, he wasn’t sure which was which.

  “It’s terrific,” Philip said. “I especially liked the Tahitian sequence, and that scene in the volcano.”

  “Mother spent a week in the library researching that one,” said Laurene.

  “But I think we may have to do a little work on the love scenes. That one between Mallory and Raoul, for instance—”

  Laurene’s mouth opened and didn’t close. But Gladys nudged her and said, “Mr. Phillips, whatever you want is fine by us. We’re just so excited to have our book accepted.”

  “The one thing is, we want to keep the romance,” Laurene threw in. “Mallory’s a passionate woman, and that’s very important to us.”

  “Oh yes,” Gladys reiterated.

  “Well, don’t worry,” Philip said. “I’d never—”

  “There isn’t enough real romance in romance fiction, if you ask me,” Laurene said. “Too much cheap sex and not enough romance. It’s a gyp.”

  “That’s why we started writing,” Gladys said.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Philip said. “And I can assure you, we won’t compromise any of the romance.”

  “Well, I’m glad we’re set on that. Like I said, we’re very excited to be working with an editor.”

  “Vanessa’s excited too.” Gladys chuckled.

  “Vanessa is Mother’s cat,” Laurene said, and chuckled too. “Pure-bred Maltese. We bought her with the advance money and figured there wasn’t a more fitting name. Don’t you think?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “Having a nice chat?” Marsha Collins said, returning to Philip’s cubicle. “Hate to break it up, but I’ve got to introduce these ladies to marketing. We’ll talk soon, Philip.”

  “Yes,” Philip said, as Gladys and Laurene stood and gathered their bags, “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  “Us too!” Laurene winked at him as Marsha led them away.

  Philip returned to Tides of Flame. He was reading happily until the middle of chapter twenty, when his anxiety came storming back. As he read through that long chapter, which recalled Sylvia and Steve’s first wild night together, it occurred to him that for the first time there was a schedule with Eliot, a plan to be made or to be broken. Of course, he had known all along the spontaneous passion that had carried him this far wasn’t going to last forever. He had known that eventually they would have to talk about what “they” meant, where “they” fit into the larger contexts of their lives. Up until now it was enough that each night they seemed to consume each other, like Sylvia and Steve, “licked by white-hot flame, the fire of their urgent need.” That was fine. That was how love affairs were supposed to begin, in the real world as well as the stormy seas of Fiona Carpentier’s novels. But Philip knew that in his case the fire was burning out a cavern inside of him, an emptiness, a need where before there had been no need. He knew he was less than he had been before he met Eliot. A void now ached in him to be filled—so much so that the thought of even one night without Eliot seemed impossible to bear. And there lay the difference between them; for when it ended, Eliot would have things to return to, “projects,” whereas Philip would have less than he’d started with, would have a gaping hole in him. Before Eliot, he had at least been self-contained, content with his aloneness, having known nothing else.

  A sudden urge to call Derek Moulthorp’s publisher—to confirm that Eliot’s project was in fact due early, that he really was going to be working these days—stole over Philip, and just as quickly dissipated. It would be a ridiculous call. He was ashamed, suddenly, of his own suspicion, which seemed to him mad, excessive, and he cursed himself for doubting Eliot, who had never given him any reason, who had never lied to him about anything, who was taking him to meet his
adoptive fathers, one of whom (and he felt a thickening of anticipation in his stomach) was Derek Moulthorp himself, whose books Philip had so loved all through his childhood.

  He left work in the dark. A fierce wind flapped the flags in front of the Waldorf-Astoria, where doormen ushered fur-capped women out of taxicabs and into revolving doors. Ahead of him, an ungainly girl in a purple down coat pushed her way up Lexington Avenue, struggling against the wind. On any weeknight the East Side was full of women like her, straggling into small delis and grocery stores to buy diet Coke, Häagen-Dazs, chicken hot dogs. They had on blouses with complicated, frilly collars—big bow ties and ruffles of pink or eggshell satin—and carried enormous handbags, and tried to fix their hair in the convex spy mirrors that hung over the frozen foods. Giant buildings filled with luxury and pomp towered over blocks of crabbed tenements, and even this early, everything was plastered with Christmas decorations, as if the whole world were a pile of presents for somebody else: reindeer strung along laundry lines, Santa Clauses peering out of windows, bright chains of lights.

  Somehow the thought of being alone in his apartment tonight was unbearable to Philip, and so he pushed his way across town to Second Avenue, to his parents’ apartment. The doormen had been dying off lately. A new one stood resolutely inside the glass doors and did not recognize him, and Philip was annoyed to have to wait while he rang up. “I have a key,” Philip said, irritated, his teeth chattering.

  “See that sign?” said the doorman. “All visitors must be announced.” He read it slowly, like a third-grader. Into the phone by his stool he said, “A young man who says he’s your son is here, Mrs. Benjamin.” A pause. “Okay, go on up.” Old Mrs. Lubin, wrapped in furs, waited by the elevator. “It’s slow these days,” she said, and Philip nodded. She smiled at him. After a few seconds she said, “Cold, isn’t it?” and Philip nodded again. “I can’t remember a November this cold,” she said. “Not since the fifties.”