The Lost Language of Cranes (15 page)

"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 furcapped 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."

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't born yet."

She laughed. "No, I guess you weren't."

The elevator arrived, and Mrs. Lubin got off on the second floor. He continued to the twelfth. His parents' apartment was at the end of a long mud-colored hall. Undoing the complicated series of locks, he went inside the apartment. His mother sat at her desk in the living room, bent over a long and messy manuscript, and, seeing him, she raised her head in the barest greeting. "Well, well, well," she said, taking off her glasses. "It isn't often we get a spontaneous visit from the likes of you." She stood, offering him her cheek to kiss. She smelled dusty, like pencil shavings, and more faintly, of lavender-scented soap. "What's the occasion?"

"No occasion. I just had a free night and thought I'd drop by."

She helped him off with his coat. "That's nice of you, Philip," she said. "But unfortunately your father's not here now. Tonight's the night he has to address the parents. He'll be in around ten. Anyway, I wasn't planning anything for dinner. I don't know what's in the fridge—"

"Don't worry, Mom," he said, following her into the kitchen, "I'll order out some Chinese food or something. I was just thinking that I'd like to go through some of my old books, and I thought tonight might be a good night to do it."

"Yes. Tonight." She seemed suddenly distracted.

"Mom?" he said.

"What? Oh, yes, tonight. Well, that sounds fine." She began opening up containers of pink Tupperware and dumping their contents into saucepans. "We've got leftover Stroganoff you can finish," she said. "And turkey Tetrazzini. You used to love that."

"Really, Mom, you don't have to—"

"But you're doing me a favor. No one's going to eat these leftovers if you don't."

"Well—"

"All right, then, it's settled." She stirred the contents of the saucepans with a wooden spoon while he sat at the kitchen table and read the paper. One of the models in a Bergdorf Goodman ad bore a strong resemblance to Eliot, he thought, and he almost mentioned the coincidence when he remembered that his mother knew nothing about Eliot, wouldn't even recognize his name. He would have liked to have said to her, "Mom, I'm in love." He would have liked to have told her that later in the week he was having dinner with Derek Moulthorp, that his lover was the adopted son of Derek Moulthorp, whose books she had copy-edited and loved so much she had brought them home for Philip to read. It was almost more than he could bear to keep from telling her. His mouth opened involuntarily, then closed again. He looked at the table. He had no more fear, as he had for years, that she would turn on him, reject him, deny he was her son. He was afraid only of the power he held to hurt her. And yet somehow the atmosphere of this cold night seemed too tender to bear such blows.

He ate his dinner quietly while she sat across from him, rubbing the tip of a pencil eraser against her teeth, her half-glasses hanging low on her nose. Then he went into his room. They had not done much with it since he'd left. The shelves were still filled with the books of his childhood, like all the books in the apartment, haphazardly crammed on top of one another. Off of the shelf he pulled an old gray and pink book with a slightly torn dust jacket. It was titled
Questa and Nebular.
All Philip remembered of the book was that there was a rich child who spent most of his time in a giant playhouse so ambitious in its scale and so accurate in its reproduction of adult reality that it might as well have been a real house. He opened the book to re-acquaint himself with the story, and soon it came flooding back. Of course it was not a real house, and the child's distracted parents worried that their son was "losing touch with reality." Clio, the rich boy's cousin (and the novel's heroine), appreciated her cousin's impulse to escape but didn't have such options herself. Determined not to expect too much, she expected too little; that was what all of Moulthorp's children were like.

Like a child, Philip sat cross-legged on the floor. On the jacket cover of
Questa and Nebular,
three of Derek Moulthorp's famous fat-cheeked emerald-eyed children—the little girl, Clio, and her two odd neighbors, Romaine and Godfrey, a.k.a. Questa and Nebular—stood in a room full of toy robots. Moulthorp had painted them in a style that reminded Philip of the Japanese cartoon shows he had watched after school as a child, Speed Racer and Gigantor and Kimba the White Lion. It thrilled him to think that he had once read this book merely for the pleasure of it, merely because he had enjoyed Moulthorp's other books, and had not realized that someday he would fall in love with a man who had been raised in the benevolent atmosphere of the same mind, the same imagination that had generated these words, these pictures. And yet his nine-year-old self had sat here, lost in
The Wish-Portal,
and not known he was being offered a prophecy of his own life it would take him years to recognize. Eliot had always been there, in those books, on those shelves.

Philip held the book in his hands now, away from his face, like one of those rare and ancient Bibles the mere touch of which is said to hold curative powers. He opened it, moved past the title page and the copyright page. There, majestic and grand, in bold, legible Jansen, was the Moulthorp canon:

O
THER BOOKS BY
D
EREK
M
OULTHORP

THAT YOU WILL ENJOY

The Original Mr. Olliphant (
1955)

The Frozen Field
(1957)

The Wish-Portal
(1962)

Mr. Olliphant’s Orphanage
(1964)

Mr. Olliphant's Orangery
(1966)

Questa
(1968)

The Radioactive Erector-Set
(1970)

So the career progressed. With the exception of the five-year gap that fell between
The Frozen Field
and
The Wish-Portal
—unquestionably Moulthorp's greatest work—a new book had come out every two years with clockwork regularity, all the way up to
Questa and Nebular,
the last Philip had owned, and beyond: He knew there were five or six more that had been published since his childhood ended. Philip wondered about that five-year gap. Perhaps it simply proved that a work of genius takes longer to gestate than a work of mere competent brilliance. Perhaps a long writer's block had occurred. And yet he could not help being conscious of the fact that the gap corresponded almost exactly with the death of Eliot's parents and his subsequent adoption.

It must have been an ordeal for two men, in the late fifties, to adopt a child, requiring, Philip imagined, a bravery and a self-assurance which could not have been easy for a gay man to come by. Had
The Wish-Portal
been born out of the crisis of those deaths? Certainly the novel exhibited a grand and generous pessimism, a cautious yet extensive knowledge of sorrow, but it hardly provided any facts that would enlighten Philip on the direction of real history. In
The Wish-Portal,
a boy named Alvin and his loud family take a trip in a Winnebago across country, stopping along the way at bizarre tourist attractions. They end up at "The Place Where Time Is Broken"—a house built on the line between two time zones where an old widow and her daughter have setup a makeshift Time Machine Museum. The surprise of the novel is that the Time Machine Museum hides a real "wish-portal," a gateway to other worlds of which even the old women aren't aware. Its wonderfully humane conclusion insists upon children's need for dignity, even in the most undignified situations. Was it because of Eliot, Philip wondered now, that Derek Moulthorp was able to understand this? He could taste the question on his lips; could taste the answer, the knowledge, salty with danger, for he knew Eliot would not like it if he were to ask Derek questions about that part of his life. Eliot avoided talking about his real parents just as he refused to explain the source of his income, changing the subject whenever it came up; he kept no pictures of them, no mementoes. And Philip had learned that it was risky to nag him about it; Eliot's silence on the question had a panicked edge he could feel.

He turned another page of
Questa and Nebular,
and the dedication leapt at him, even though it had nothing to do with Eliot or anyone else he knew or had heard about: "For my nieces and nephews: Sambo, Sousou, Joanna, Alexander, and yes, you too, Margaret." He had never thought to look at the other dedications, and so, springing up from the floor, he began tearing the Derek Moulthorp tides from the shelves. He had to ransack the living room where his mother was watching television before he finally discovered
Mr. Olliphant's Orphanage
tucked between a couple of tourist guides to Venice.
The Radioactive Erector-Set
had fallen behind some home repair manuals. Soon he had them all. Breathless, he arranged them chronologically in a pile on the floor of his room and began to read the dedications.
The Original Mr. Olliphant
had none that he could discover;
The Frozen Field
was dedicated, but unrevealingly: "To the memory of my parents and grandparents." Then came
The Wish-Portal:
"To the memory of Julia and Alan Abrams." That would, of course, be Eliot's parents. And closing the book, Philip thought: They had names. They were real, and their names were Alan and Julia, and they died sometime in the fifties. Alan and Julia: the names conjured images in Philip's mind: a talkative, sprightly young man, thin, with a balding pate and small round glasses; a pretty, dark-haired woman, older, dressed in old clothes. Why old clothes? Who could say if they looked like that? Two people were dead, their car smashed and smoldering, and perhaps a little boy, alive, in the back seat, screaming for his parents. Or was that merely Philip's imagination? Was Eliot really in the car? Had it been a car? Philip didn't know.