He skimmed the first two paragraphs. Arrival in Italy, funny little pensions, a medieval church happened upon. Undiscovered beauty, untouristed countryside. Then Paris, and Roland LeClerc, a photographer friend of Derek’s, “a ‘bohème’ of the old school,” Eliot wrote, “always dressed in paisley and ascots. He lives in a big, ugly apartment in the Fifth, high ceilings and hideous furniture, everything dusty. But it’s wonderful. In the morning I can smell that Paris smell, coffee and croissants, sweet jam and cigars and car fumes rising up.” There was an afternoon tea party attended by very, very old gay men, and a woman who Roland insisted was a former lover of Colette’s.
“I feel like I owe you an explanation for my sudden departure,” the letter went on,
for not saying goodbye. You’re perfectly right to think me cruel. But it was very hard for me, Philip. Ridiculous as you may think it is for me to say at this point, I did love you, in my own particular way. The problem is, loving someone is not the same as wanting to spend your life paired with him. That kind of compatability is a rare thing, and frankly, I just didn’t feel it. Is this cruel of me to say? Perhaps. But I think you deserve the truth from me. My strong feelings for you made it that much harder for me to ease things off. The more I loosened the grip, it seemed, the more you tightened. And I’ve said it before: your need oppressed me. I began to feel it was something I had to escape, and when you start thinking in those terms—well, it’s only a few steps to lies, to cruelty. I didn’t want to let myself go that far, Philip, but it seemed there was no way I could not hurt you. I wanted you, at least, to have the benefit of being able to be angry at me, to hate me a little, because I know that makes it easier.
Here I feel renewed, revivified. I feel as if I can start my life over. I’ve met a young Frenchman, a student—he is droopy-eyed and handsome and given to bouts of depression, and I think we will be good for each other. I’ve gotten some connections established, have some possibilities for work. Thierry lives across town, near the Alésia metro, and I’ll probably be moving in with him for a few weeks while I look for an apartment.
And you—I am sure your life is going well. If there’s one thing I know about you, Philip, it is that you are, whether you like it or not, helplessly optimistic. No matter how much you may want to remain in a stupor of depression, you’ll rise up from it. Sometimes I think you are doomed to happiness.
Please write me c/o Thierry. I miss you.
Eliot
Philip read the letter over twice, pacing the tiny confines in his room. Then he folded it carefully in thirds, replaced it in its envelope and stuck it inside his desk drawer. Outside the open window, at the far end of an alley full of garbage cans, a bunch of little girls jumped rope double-dutch, chanting in Spanish. He watched them. He thought: I can smell that New York smell—frying grease and sesame oil, menudo and beans and bus exhaust. He thought: I hardly knew him. Little chips of old paint were stuck inside the window frame—dirty white and red and blue fragments of the apartment’s past—and methodically he scooped some up in his hand, a fine powder interspersed with jagged-edged chunks, like puzzle pieces. He examined them for a little while, curious about their age, their hardness. Then, experimentally, he dropped some out the window. The bigger pieces fluttered down, crashed silently on the ground. When he opened his hands to the air, the powder blew into the wind, whirling for a few seconds before falling like a last, late snowfall to the garbage-strewn landscape below.
A few days later, Jerene called Philip up at work. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “The last time we talked you seemed so upset. Are you feeling better?”
At his desk, Philip smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Much better.” He was quiet for a moment. “I told my parents,” he said.
“Oh, Philip,” Jerene said. “How are they taking the news?”
“I don’t know,” Philip said. “I saw my father this week, and it was pretty weird. He’d been drinking, I think, and he asked me all sorts of questions about myself, which was okay, but it really surprised me—I mean, he’s always been very closed. It’s a big change.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jerene said. “Any interest is good.”
“I know. As for my mother—well, things aren’t so good. She hardly talks to me. I’m supposed to go over for dinner on Sunday, and believe it or not, my father’s invited this teacher from his school he says he wants to fix me up with. That’ll be peculiar, to say the least. I don’t know if my mother knows anything about it.”
“You mean a man?” Jerene asked.
“Yes. A man. I know, I know. My friend Brad thinks it’s weird too. Some sort of mid-life crisis, I guess. But enough of that. How are you?”
“Good,” Jerene said.
“Still working at the hotline?”
“Yes. But I quit the other job. I got some teaching work at N.Y.U.—freshman comp. Nothing great, but I was getting sick of being a bouncer.” She paused. “The good news is, Laura’s just moved in, and we’ve been fixing the place up. And we were wondering if you might be free for dinner tomorrow night. We want you to be our inaugural guest. And this friend, this Brad of yours—bring him too!”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“But Eliot’s gone, Philip. The place is completely changed, a different apartment, thanks to Laura.”
He closed his eyes. “All right,” he said finally, although the prospect frightened him. “What time?”
“Eight o’clock,” said Jerene.
Brad lived in a pleasant, dark apartment into which his parents had delivered intact the furniture of his childhood bedroom in New Jersey. There was a pair of big lacquered bunk beds, a white activity table, three beanbag chairs. “I’m almost ready,” Brad said when Philip came by to pick him up the next evening. He pulled off his tie and shirt, and Philip could not help noticing his chest—white, well formed, and covered with pale, downy hair. Brad took a jersey from a white child’s dresser which, like all the furniture in the apartment, was made for a boy, completely stripped of ornament, of anything that might be even mildly construed as frilly or feminine. “Are you nervous?” he asked Philip, as they headed out, once more, into the street. Philip thought about it. “Yes,” he said finally, “a little. But not too much.” He had not yet mentioned the letter from Eliot—indeed, he saw no reason to mention it. Lately he had been practicing restraint as a general policy, and had mostly forgotten the letter, except for that last annoying remark Eliot had made about his being “doomed to happiness.” What could it mean to be doomed to happiness? The phrase made it sound as if happiness was some kind of imprisoning lie, a form of brainwashing; as if a valiant life made miserable by knowledge was necessarily better than one that was happy but ignorant. It infuriated him, the tyranny implicit in Eliot’s smug, cynical tone, with its cryptic hints of foreknowledge, its wry psychiatrist’s wit. And yet he could not deny that he could imagine no more pleasurable life than the kind led within the cozy confines of a half-hour situation comedy, that he really wanted each day in his life to collapse into a neat dot of light, to end the way an episode of “The Brady Bunch” ended, with everything in its place, all the gentle, soft conflicts put away or stuffed under the bunk beds, or smoothed like frosting on a birthday cake.
Eliot’s building was unchanged when they got there, except that the name under the mailbox had been altered, the little tag of paper now reading FINLEY/PARKS instead of ABRAMS/PARKS. They stood there for a moment, Philip examining the pink linoleum walls of the foyer, the dirt caked into the mailboxes, Brad watching Philip for warning signs of emotional upheaval. But Philip only sighed loudly. They rang the buzzer and were duly admitted. Up the stairs, Jerene’s new friend, Laura, was waiting for them at the door.
She was extraordinarily pale, with hair so thin and wispy it might have been woven out of sand. “Now let me get this right,” she said, and her voice had grain, was sandy. “You’re Philip,” she said, pointing to Philip. “And you’re Brad.”
“That’s right,”
Philip said. He worried he might call her Sandy.
She smiled and reached out her hand. “Well, I’m glad I got that right,” she said. “I’m Laura. Come on in.”
Inside, the apartment was much changed. New blueberry-patterned curtains hung on the windows. A matching tablecloth covered the table, and a bright, overstuffed couch perched where Jerene’s spartan cot had once been. “I’m glad you could make it,” Jerene said, parting herself from the stove to kiss Philip on the cheek and introduce herself to Brad. “We’re making couscous.”
The strains of a melancholy song by the Roches wound through the room, along with a faint smell of incense. “My recipe,” said Laura, pointing proudly to the boiling red sauce. “Taste?” She reached a wooden spoon toward Philip, and an acrid sizzle touched his lips. “Fabulous, isn’t it?” Laura said. “I got the recipe from a bunch of Algerians I used to live with in Paris. But then I lost it. For years I’ve been trying to get it back, get it right, and tonight—” She kissed her fingers dramatically, then returned to stirring the tiny buds. She was wearing a knee-length linen dress the color of blueberry yoghurt and had a row of tiny pearls studded into each of her ears. A girl who was almost transparent in her appearance, whom you would imagine would be allergic to everything and live in a Victorian house, and spend her days doing things like rubbing sandalwood oil into the faint freckles of her skin, or crocheting flowers into curtains.
“It’s wonderful sauce,” Philip said. “I’m glad Jerene’s got someone to cook so well for her.”
“Oh, she’s not so bad herself,” Laura said. “Anyway, I owe Jerene a lot more than meals. I don’t know if she told you, but before I met her I was living with my mother in abject misery? And every day I had to listen to her have nervous breakdowns about me—you know, ‘Why don’t you marry a nice boy, it just breaks my heart?’ ” She turned to Jerene and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m very happy to be out of there, to have a new home,” she said, and Philip nodded.
If Laura’s looks were Laura Wingfield—fragile and transparent as a tiny glass animal—her temperament was pure Amanda: loud and brash and indiscreet; full of hype and bombast; good-natured, loving, easy to hurt. “So how are things going with your parents, Philip?” she asked, as she handed Philip a glass of grapefruit juice. “Have they come around at all?”
Philip gulped the grapefruit juice. How did Laura know about his parents? “Well,” he said.
“Up and down, huh? I know.” Laura chewed a piece of ice. “The same thing was true with mine, at first. One minute all curiosity, the next they won’t talk to me. I think it’s a mid-life thing, ultimately, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Laura went on. “I told my parents three, four years ago, and it was a rough road for a while, but now things are really fine—well, at least with my father. He’s even given Jerene and me our own set of keys to his place in Bridgehampton for the summer. And that really pleases me. I mean, it makes me feel like he really cares about me, more than he cares about my being a lesbian. As for my mother—she’s a different story.”
Jerene and Brad now moved across the room to join them by the stove. “Jerene’s just been telling me about her work on the Gay Crisis Hotline,” Brad said.
“I’ve thought about doing that kind of thing myself,” Laura said. “I think I’d be a pretty good counselor-type person; in fact, I’m thinking about it as a career. But as Jerene can tell you, I have this phone phobia. I mean, I’m terrified of the phone. I guess it’s because my first stepfather, when I was little, was kind of a sicko—he never molested me or anything, but he used to make me talk to him on the phone while he masturbated sometimes.” And suddenly a look of mortification came over her face, and she slapped her forehead. “What am I doing?” she said. “I always do this. Just interrupt and stuff myself into a conversation. I’m terribly self-involved, just Miss Self-Centered. Please forgive me. Jerene, go on and finish what you were saying.”
They moved toward the living room, each bearing a steaming bowl of food. Like the kitchen, it had been transformed. Flowers hung in pots before the windows. A big brass bed stood where Eliot’s futon had been curled, and next to it, a big vanity table full of makeup and perfumes and scatterings of lace. There was an Oriental rug on the floor, stuffed animals thrown here and there. The gray walls had been painted sky blue. The only thing that seemed to be the same was the old ugly radiator, silent now in the warm weather. All through the dinner Philip kept looking around the room, expecting to see something that would spark strong feeling in him, but even the most potent of his memories refused to surface. Nothing was left. Everything of the past had been buried under all the strong frippery of Laura’s presence.
She told them everything. It was as if she hoped that by dumping the whole mess of herself onto them at once they might be struck, almost against their will, by the good mixed in with the nonsense. “Since I dropped out of Hampshire I’ve just been travelling,” she explained, while Jerene scurried about, spicing things, getting salt and pepper. “I was in Morocco, in Paris, in Tangiers. Then I lived in San Francisco for a while. I was working in the women’s music industry out there. I knew some sign language, so I got this job interpreting for this singer named Melissa Swallow—you know, for the deaf?” She laughed. “You should’ve seen me. I wore nothing but turtlenecks and hiking boots, to the dismay of my très sophistiqùs New York parents, and lived in this communal women’s house in Mill Valley and smoked a lot of grass. It was fun, but it wasn’t for me, so I headed back East, and my mother—my blessed heart of a mother—got me the job at the Laura Ashley store, figuring that was one place I’d be safe. Little did she know,” she said, looking up at Jerene, “who’d be walking in.”
Jerene blushed.
“You know,” Laura said, “when I told her, she said, ‘I can’t believe it. I set it up myself. Why did I get you that job?’ As if it was her fault. And you know what? Sometimes I believe her. I get so sucked up in her paranoia I start to regret it myself and blame her. You see, I’m basically still a very insecure person, still searching a lot, which is what I was doing then, in San Francisco, and what I’m still doing now, I guess, which is why my mother is such a terrible influence on my life. But I feel very happy, very secure with Jerene. Almost as if I’m settled.” Then she leaned confidentially toward Philip, and said, “So have you heard from Eliot lately?” She spoke in such intimate tones of “Eliot” that for a moment Philip forgot what Jerene had told him on the phone: that Laura had met Eliot only once, for about five minutes. She smiled now, eager for his confidence. It was as if, by this intimacy, she hoped to bulldoze her way into what she must have perceived to be a pre-existing group of friends—he and Eliot and Brad and Jerene. Although her impression of them as a group could not have been farther from the truth, her eagerness not to be left out touched Philip.
“Well, I got a letter,” he said.
“You did?” asked Brad. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, that’s all,” he said. “It wasn’t a big-deal letter. He just said he’d been travelling, but now he’s settled in Paris. He says he has a nice, depressed boyfriend with a strange name. I can’t remember what.”
Laura swallowed a bite of couscous to clear her mouth for talking. “Thierry,” she said.
“Yes,” said Philip. “That’s it. How did you know?”
She smiled. “I set them up,” she said proudly.
Philip gazed at her. “You set them up?”
“Well, sort of. Remember I told you I used to live in Paris, with a bunch of Algerians? Well, Thierry was lovers with one of them, Mustapha, for a while. He lived with his mother in Neuilly or someplace like that. Anyway, we got to be friends, and we stayed friends even after he and Mustapha broke up and I’d moved out of the apartment. So when Eliot told me he was going to Paris, of course I gave him Thierry’s number, never in a million years expecting—” She ges
tured vaguely with her hands, and swallowed another mouthful of couscous.
“Oh,” Philip said. He looked at the table, and Jerene, seeing his crestfallen face, added, “I don’t think it’s really all that serious, Philip. I mean, Eliot doesn’t even know how long he’ll be in Paris.” She looked at him earnestly. He appreciated that she cared. Still, he was embarrassed to be caught mooning like that. He no longer wished to call attention to his old grief, now that he was finally getting over it—especially in front of Brad.
“Jerene,” he said, “you’re very sweet to be so kind to me. But it really isn’t necessary. You can tell me the truth, I’m not going to freak out. Eliot told me himself that he was going to be moving in with Thierry for a while, and I think that’s just fine. I hope they’re very happy, I hope it works out. He’s getting on with his life, and I realize, now, that I’ve got to get on with mine.”
“It looks to me like you’re doing that already,” Laura said. She glanced significantly at Philip, then at Brad, then at Philip again.
“Married life,” Laura said, “is the greatest.” And taking Jerene’s hand, she held it on the table. Jerene was sitting straight up, her back like a board. She looked like the tin woodsman of Oz. “For Jerene and me, it’s been a healing kind of process. For instance—I’m trying to convince her to go and talk to her parents. We’ve even done some research. Tell them, Jerene.”
Jerene laughed nervously. “Well,” she said, “I went and saw my grandmother the other day—it was the first time in years.”
“Oh, Jerene,” Philip said. “That’s wonderful. Was it okay? I mean, was it a good thing, was she happy to see you?”
Jerene nodded. “It was very sad,” she said. “Of course, she didn’t know anything. She’s pretty out of it to begin with, and besides, she hardly speaks to my parents, hardly has any more of a relationship with them than I do. She barely knew anything about me, she’s been in this nursing home so long. It isn’t a bad place, but I think she’s lonely.” Jerene smiled. “You can’t imagine how scared I was going in there. It was the first time I’d had contact with my family for six years.”
The Lost Language of Cranes Page 25
