He turned around and saw a darkly handsome, oddly familiar face. Philip’s lips parted as he groped for a name, and the man grabbed his hand and said, “Philip, good to see you, buddy. Alex Kamarov. You know, Dmitri’s brother.”
“Alex!” Philip said, his voice sputtering with relief. “Of course. At first I couldn’t place you. But now—”
“Sure, sure!” Alex said. “It’s been a while.” They shook hands. “I’m living in New York now,” Alex said. “Just moved.”
“Really, how great! What are you doing?”
“I’m working over at Rockefeller University. You know, in a lab.”
“Oh, great,” Philip said. “That’s just great.”
They were still shaking hands, and so they stopped abruptly. “Hey, I hear from Dmitri a lot,” Alex said. “He asks about you, asks if I’ve run into you.”
“Oh yeah? How’s he doing?”
“Oh, he’s doing just great. You know Dmitri. Right now he’s taking a semester off; he’s doing his tour of Europe thing. I gave him my old Spartacus guide as a going-away present, and I gather it’s come in pretty useful, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure, knowing Dmitri, he’s made a lot of friends,” Philip said.
“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Alex said. “The latest is this guy in Florence, someone he met in the men’s room at the train station. He sent me a postcard all about it. It was a close-up of the David’s cock with lipstick smeared around it. Anyway, now it’s Matteo. Before, there was Ernst, Jean-Christophe, Nils. He’s really running a one-man diplomatic route there.”
“Yes, it certainly sounds that way.”
They laughed for a good few seconds. “And you,” Alex said, “how are you doing? Enjoying the fruits of New York?” He looked around the bar suggestively.
“Well, I’ve been seeing someone for a while now,” Philip said. “I’ll introduce you to him.” But when he looked where Eliot had been standing, Eliot wasn’t there.
“I don’t understand this,” Philip said. “He was there a second ago.”
“Philip,” Geoffrey said, “I think we’re going to be going now. It’s been fun, but it’s a little past our bedtimes.”
“Oh, really? That’s too bad,” Philip said. “Oh, Alex, I’d like you to meet Derek, Geoffrey, John.” Once again his eyes roamed the room.
“Pleased to meet you,” Alex said, shaking their hands.
“Have you seen Eliot?” Philip asked.
“He’s upstairs,” Derek said. “We just said our goodbyes to him. But as I said, we really do have to be going.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, it’s been a pleasure, my dear,” Geoffrey said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again sometime.” He bent over, kissed him wetly on the cheek; Philip held back from wiping away the wet imprint.
“Goodbye.”
A few seconds passed. “Who were they?” Alex asked, laughing a little.
Philip grimaced. “Just—” He faltered. “Believe it or not,” he said, “they are my in-laws.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said, drumming his foot on the floor.
“Have you ever heard of Derek Moulthorp?” Philip asked.
“Derek who?”
“Derek Moulthorp,” Philip said. “He’s a famous children’s book writer.”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“Too bad,” Philip said. “He was the tall one. He’s really great —a great writer, I mean.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Alex was staring resolutely into the dark. “Listen, Philip,” he said, “I just made eye contact with this hunk I’ve been cruising all night, and I think I’d better make my move while it’s still hot. But it was great seeing you.” Once again he was shaking Philip’s hand. “And I’ll give your regards to Dmitri.”
“Yes,” Philip said, imagining the letter Alex would write: “I think one of these old guys was his boyfriend.” Again, he grimaced. “Tell him to call me.”
“Will do,” Alex said.
And he was gone.
Alone again, Philip moved upstairs; the crowd was thinning out, he noticed. Eliot stood leaning against a wall, his eyes closed, drinking Perrier water.
“I lost you,” Philip said.
“Yes, well—I was talking to some people and we ended up here.”
Philip looked away. “Are you ready to go, or do you want to stay a while?” he asked.
“No, I’ll go.”
He finished his Perrier in one gulp; then they headed down the stairs and out the door.
Once on the street, they walked south, toward Eliot’s apartment. They did not speak, and they did not hold hands. Occasionally Eliot’s shoulder brushed Philip’s, but it was casual, accidental—not like the first night they had made this walk, when every brush, every touch might have been a planned endeavor. Now, for some reason, Eliot seemed far-off in his small round glasses, like someone viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
They crossed Second Avenue, and Eliot said, “You know, if you’d wanted to know about my parents, you could have asked me. You didn’t have to get it from Geoffrey.”
They did not stop walking. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Philip said. “It was just conversation.”
“It was a conversation I would have preferred not to have had to listen to. I don’t enjoy having my life held up to public scrutiny, even if it is by Geoffrey.”
“Eliot, it wasn’t public scrutiny. It was just me wanting to know about your childhood. What could Geoffrey ever say that would make you feel that way? Geoffrey loves you very—”
“Don’t tell me about Geoffrey,” Eliot said. “I know Geoffrey. I’m talking about what you did to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Philip said hotly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Well, I don’t know what you want from me. You say I should have asked you instead of them, but you never gave me a chance. You made it very clear earlier you weren’t about to talk about—”
“I have the right to be private about what I wish to be private about.” Eliot was almost shouting, walking very fast.
Philip was silent for a moment. “Eliot, I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am sorry.”
They stopped suddenly, and Eliot shook his head, and sighed loudly. Finally he looked up at Philip and said, “I don’t mean to throw a hundred things at you at once, but I really do have to tell you that I am having doubts about our relationship.”
Philip buried his hands in his pockets. “What?” he said.
“Just that,” Eliot said. “Doubts. Your need is frightening to me, Philip. Those nights we spent apart, all the way across the city I could feel your anxiety. Miles away you were clinging, you wouldn’t let go.”
Philip looked at the ground before him. Weren’t pain and worry supposed to be private things? he wondered, affronted that he was not even allowed to suffer in silence. But he was too embarrassed to be angry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that you think that. But I think I really love you, and I just get very scared.” He looked up at Eliot, who had audibly caught back his breath for a second. It was a desperate move, saying those words, but he hadn’t expected this from Eliot: at least not so soon.
They continued to walk, more slowly, and Eliot said, “What are you scared of, Philip?”
“Of having this conversation.” His voice was trembling a little. “I’ve dreaded it so much. I’ve tried so hard to avoid it. I thought that my loving you—I thought it could keep it from happening.”
“But, Philip,” Eliot said, “that’s been the problem, don’t you see? You don’t trust yourself enough to trust us. So I can’t help but wonder, has it really been me you’ve been loving? Do you even really know me, know anything about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, sometimes it seems to me you haven’t gotten to know me at all. You haven’t even tried.”
For a moment Philip just stared, astoni
shed, into the intricate weave of Eliot’s sweater. Then he turned clumsily. “I have to go home,” he said, and began marching very fast toward Second Avenue.
“Philip. Philip, stop.”
He stopped.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going home.”
“Why are you going home?” Eliot turned him to face him.
“Goddamnit,” he said, “to say that to me—how dare you say that to me! It’s just not fair of you to—”
“What’s not fair?”
He frowned. “It’s just—all right, maybe I didn’t see you, maybe I don’t really know you. But is that all my fault? Whenever I try to ask you anything, you just clam up or get mad. If I don’t know you, it’s because you won’t let me know you.”
Eliot laughed—a brief snort Philip had never heard before. “You know it’s not that simple,” he said.
“Then how is it?”
Eliot took a long breath, turned away from him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the fact is, from the very start, this thing has been you and yourself, and I’ve just been a mannequin; I’ve been an emblem of the sort of person you could imagine loving, not a person you loved. I haven’t hidden myself from you, Philip. But you have to learn to ask the right questions in the right way if you expect to get answers.” He ground his fists into his pockets. “This is hard for me to say,” he said. “But it’s the way it is. You say you’re in love with me, but clearly you don’t know anything about being in love, because this is nothing—”
“Stop,” Philip said. “Stop.”
Once again, Eliot turned and looked at him. He was standing there, silent against a wall, his eyes closed.
“Philip.”
“I don’t know how true what you say is, but you have no right to tell me I didn’t love you. I have felt it—here.” And he punched his own heart, hard, like a paramedic trying to restart a life. “You can tell me I’m selfish. You can tell me I’m childish and self-involved and unaware sometimes. But you cannot tell me that what I feel isn’t real. That’s going too far.”
Eliot looked at the ground before him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. It is going too far.”
“All right.”
He turned and began walking.
“Where are you going?” Eliot called.
“Home,” Philip said.
“Stop,” Eliot said.
He stopped. Eliot walked up to him. “Philip,” he said. He turned him around, arms on his shoulders. “It’s late. Do you really want to go home by yourself now, in the cold?” He smiled, and his hands took Philip’s face, one hand on each cheek. His hands were warm and sure against Philip’s cold face, like the Kamarov brothers that distant graduation Sunday, holding him in against danger. Or so it felt. Why, why did he have to do this? Philip wondered. Why now, when he needed so much to hate him, did Eliot have to be kind?
“I’m sorry I brought it up this way,” he said. “I was just angry. Look, let’s go home.”
Philip was suspicious. “What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is tomorrow. Tonight I want you to stay with me.”
He tried to look down, but Eliot held his face up and would not let it wander. “You tell me I’ve been terrible to you, you tell me I haven’t loved you, I’ve just used you, and now, suddenly, you want me to spend the night with you? I don’t understand this.”
“Look, I said what I wanted to say, what I had to say, because it’s been on my mind, it’s been bothering me,” Eliot said. “I care about you. Would someone who cares about you as much as I do let you make that huge trip home, on the subway, at this hour? By yourself?” He moved his face closer to Philip’s, so close that Philip could feel his breath. “I want to be with you tonight,” he said. “Don’t you believe me?”
He smiled again, even more sweetly. Philip looked at Eliot’s sweater, at their feet facing each other on the mottled sidewalk, at the Indian restaurants still lit up at this late hour. There was nothing Eliot had said that didn’t make sense to him, that didn’t have the frightening resonance of truth. Yet when he imagined storming off, saw himself waiting forty minutes on the cold subway platform, riding the rattling train miles uptown to the small, dark room where nothing awaited him, he could not bear it. The prospect of that uptown journey drowned out his desire for showy revenge. It seemed there was to be no dignity for him in any of this.
“I believe you,” he said. Then he began to cry, just a little. Smiling, Eliot took him in his arms, held him and rocked him and kissed his forehead the way Philip’s mother had kissed it when he was a child with a fever. And Philip let himself burst into a fit of real sobbing and buried his face in Eliot’s sweater, murmuring inaudibly, over and over again, “I love you, I love you,” until a little wet spot had gathered on the sweater, over Eliot’s heart.
“Come on,” Eliot said. “Let’s go home.”
And they began to walk, arm in arm, toward Eliot’s apartment.
When they got back, they made love with a sweetness and clarity Philip would always remember, even long after his other memories of Eliot had faded. It seemed to him that in the strange pocket of that single lost night, the simple instinct to take care of someone he had hurt had generated a new feeling in Eliot, one that had nothing to do with the troubled, arguable love he claimed he could no longer abide.
“Eliot,” Philip said later, when they were lying quietly in the dark, listening to the traffic, “I think I’m going to go and shave.”
“Wouldn’t you rather wait till morning?”
“No, I think I’ll shave now. I feel grimy. It would make it easier for me to sleep.”
“Well, it’s up to you. Just be careful not to wake Jerene.”
“Okay,” Philip said. Naked, he tiptoed past Jerene’s cot into the bathroom, and closed the door. He shook the bottle of shaving cream, turned on the tap, and began to splash hot water on his face.
After a few seconds, Eliot came in to pee. Philip listened to the gentle, almost musical tinkling, spread shaving cream on his face, and almost immediately cut himself.
“What are you doing?” Eliot said, joining him in front of the mirror.
“I cut myself.”
Eliot shook his head crossly. “Clearly you’re doing it all wrong. Here, wash off all that shaving cream and let me show you.”
Philip complied. “The trick,” Eliot said, “is making sure your face is really drenched in good, hot water before you put on the shaving cream. Like this.”
The heated, wet slap of Eliot’s hand against his face shocked him. “There,” Eliot said, satisfied, and spread shaving cream on Philip’s cheeks, smoothed it over his upper lip, down below his ears. “You better let me do it,” he said, “or you’ll cut yourself again.” It was true. When he did it himself, Philip always cut himself.
Eliot took the blade and began deftly to drag it down the length of Philip’s face. In the blade’s wake Philip’s cheeks tingled, suddenly smooth, and he remembered distant comic scenes from the TV shows of his childhood, of fathers teaching sons to shave for the first time, awkward laughter, men and boys in flannel pants and T-shirts attacking each other with spray cans of shaving cream. His own father had never shown him how to shave, and he had been too embarrassed to ask. Such awkward bonding was unthinkable with Owen. He had taught himself, in secret, hoping neither his mother nor his father would notice the mistakes, the scabs on his neck and chin, and as a result, he had never really learned the tricks of wetting his face, angling the blade and arching his cheek with his tongue. But now Eliot was teaching him, and he thought how this intimacy—Eliot carefully maneuvering the razor around his chin, washing off the extra shaving cream, patting his face dry; this thrill of smooth, wet skin, shining—this belonged to men who were lovers alone. It seemed to him a kind of celebration.
Afterwards, while Eliot lay sleeping on the futon, Philip sat up, staring out the window. His fingers beat against the hard cotton futon; his leg shook as he counted th
e minutes till dawn.
The night after Philip told them, Rose kept dreaming that she was keeping a vigil outside a hospital room. After she woke up, though, she couldn’t remember who was inside the door, dying—only the hazy yellow hospital light at the edge of things, and a child wandering the halls, clutching the decapitated head of a doll. How strange that child looked; she held the smiling, glassy-eyed head by the hair, like Judith with the head of Holofernes. When Rose asked the mother—no face, no hair, just the idea of mother—what happened to the rest of the doll, the mother hissed. “Be quiet. Don’t mention it,” the mother whispered, “or she’ll cry and cry. She’ll start crying and she’ll never stop.”
“Who was the person who was dying? Who was I waiting for?” Rose asked Owen the next morning, when there seemed nothing better to do than talk about dreams. It was drizzly outside their window, and though neither had slept much, they were filled with giddy energy simply from their relief at having made it through the night.
“It was me,” Owen said. His eyes were wide and red this morning. “That’s obvious.”
“And the child?” Rose asked, taking a sip from her coffee cup. “The child?”
“Again, obvious,” said Owen, who seemed to have all the answers. “It was Philip.”
Into the dark, regular calm of their weeknight life Philip had come, unannounced. “We’re watching ‘The Jewel and the Crown,’ ” Rose said. “It’s almost over.”
“Dad’s here?” Philip asked.
“Yes. Be quiet, something important’s happening.”
He looked at the floor. “Well, I guess there’s no getting around it now,” he said softly.
Rose was too eager to get back to the television to hear him, or at least, to extract the sense from what he said. He sat with them until the program was over. “Another week,” she said. “Will I be able to wait another week?”
Philip unceremoniously snapped off the television. There was a pop and a hiss as the picture shrunk to a tiny nugget of light before disappearing. Rose and Owen looked at him oddly, wondering what had compelled him to turn it off. Then the room filled with an almost tangible silence.
The Lost Language of Cranes Page 17
