The Lost Language of Cranes (18 page)

Owen remained at Harte for years, far longer than he'd intended. Because he received more parents than any other administrator, he was given an office that was slightly larger and better-situated than those of his coworkers. He had a new oak desk and three windows, and a whole wall where diplomas (including his Ph.D., prominently displayed at the principal's request) hung alongside pristine black-and-white photographs of Harte boys hard at work in a chemistry lab, laughing on the playground, looking up at a teacher, their eyes misty with knowledge. These photographs, mounted on thick Styrofoam and handsomely framed, were extremely well posed fakes. The chemistry lab in question had never taken place. The photographer had set up the beakers and titration tubes in an arrangement she considered aesthetic and said to the boys, "Okay, now look fascinated. That's right. Good." They had done so obediently. If Upper East Side children knew anything at all, it was how to simulate pleasure for pictures. And though he was often tempted, Owen never revealed this tiny fraud to the parents who huddled over his desk, begging him to divulge their sons' chances at admission. Instead, he took out lists and statistical charts that showed how many Ivy League colleges would accept their sons, and what wonderful grades they would make at them, and what law firms and advertising firms and investment banking firms would employ them, should they be lucky enough to be among the select few admitted to Harte. The parents scrutinized the statistics, nodded. Usually he did not have to sell too hard. It was the parents who had to sell, and sometimes the children themselves. "I realize Greg's S.S.A.T. scores aren't the greatest, but he's got so much imagination and energy," mothers told him. "He started reading very young. He's always saying the wittiest things to company." Fathers boasted about their sons' intuitive know-how, the entrepreneurial instincts they displayed in starting businesses to deliver videotapes from the local rental shop to other residents of the building. The boys themselves arrived in his office well scrubbed and well trained. "Why do I want to go to the Harte School?" they would ask, carefully repeating Owen's question in order to give themselves time to remember. "Because I believe its combination of tradition and innovation in educational methodology would be consonant with my personal ethical system."

Hundreds of them passed through Owen's office; sat across from him, cowed and intimidated in their stiff black suits. Owen, himself dressed in a stiff black suit, sometimes had to fight the impulse to laugh at the ridiculousness of his position; that he, a grown man with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, was being paid to frighten little boys. Usually he flashed a smile to console them after the first five minutes. Sometimes he remained stern and watched their shoulders tighten. It was easy to cut past the spiel their parents had prepared for them. He liked to get them talking about what they liked, whether it was the Hardy Boys or chess tournaments or Twisted Sister. Some of them had long hair they had clearly refused to cut. Others had no instinct for rebellion and seemed eager to follow in the footsteps of their parents, to become exactly what would make everyone in their families most relieved and happy. Those were the boys Owen liked the least.

Sometimes he wondered what all those parents would think of him if they knew the truth about him. Already, when their sons were accepted, their attitude imperceptibly changed. Their original smugness returned, and they treated him with the same patronizing glibness that they lavished upon the faculty; now that they had gotten what they needed from him, there was no need to kowtow to this middle-class Jew. Sitting in his office across from a scared little boy, the door closed, he often pondered the implicit sexuality of the interview, which was somewhere between a rape and a seduction. The candidate was obliged to make himself as attractive as possible to the interviewer; the interviewer was expected to terrorize and dominate the candidate. If they found out about him, Owen quickly decided, the Harte parents would demand his resignation immediately, figuring that if he hadn't already, it was only a matter of time before he went off the deep end and started taking advantage of their desperate little boys, many of whom had been promised cars and computers if they got into Harte and might have done just about am thing to get them. Which was doubly ironic, since Owen was not in the least attracted to boys and had little sympathy for men who were. His own taste ran to very masculine men with chiseled faces and hairy chests, although it was something of a joke to claim he had any "taste" in men at all. He knew which images on a screen or in a magazine excited him; that was all. None of it seemed to have much to do with reality, with the possible exception of Winston Penn, the new English teacher, whose blond hair and strong-jawed face and wire-rimmed glasses had more than once found their way into Owen's masturbatory second life. He liked Winston Penn, liked his slow, careful voice, liked his sweater-vests and bow ties. But he could never approach Winston Penn, except as a colleague. He had learned early on, in prep school, how much it hurt to grow close to men who would never return that closeness.

It was now ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and Owen was sitting in his office, in the dark, alone, fingering a very creased piece of paper the numbers on which had long since been worn past legibility. No matter; he had them memorized. The scrap was a totem. Earlier this evening he had delivered to a group of prospective Harte parents a speech so familiar to him that he joked to Rose he could give it on automatic pilot. As he talked, his mind moved in other directions, in circles, endlessly recombining the two sets of seven digits and their letter equivalents, creating anagrams, creating a language.

The man was named Alex Melchor, and he was going to save Owen's life—that is, if Owen could only get up the nerve to call back. He had been sitting now for forty-five minutes, his hand cradling the black receiver, which was already slick with sweat.

Occasionally panic seized him. He would get up and pace the room, his mind gripped by a sense of the madness and danger of what he was doing so potent it could have been something he had only just conceived, not lived with for years. On his desk, pictures of Rose and Philip stared up at him with an almost pornographic intensity. Periodically he would sit down again at his desk, calmly dial the number (though his hands were shaking), then press down the two nubs on top of the phone with terrible violence and hold them there, to make sure he had actually cut the call off. His office was purgatory, a middle ground where rest was impossible. He knew he could not leave until he had made the call he could not bring himself to make. And yet, as the night wore on, he wondered, if he didn't make the call, which would be stronger: the feeling of relief at having resisted temptation and evaded potential danger, or the feeling of pain as he walked through the dark, empty streets of the Eighties toward the subway, the longing to touch and be touched by another man beginning again its wail inside of him. That longing pulsed stronger in him tonight than it had for years. He must make the call, he told himself. It was no longer a matter of choice. He must make the call, and for the first time in his life speak of these things, and he would not leave this room until he'd done it.

But what if this Alex Melchor wasn't home? Then the ersatz ringing in the phone's heart would go on and on, and no human voice would interrupt it. He could walk all the way home easily, propelled by the beat of a heart pounding in his chest, then decelerating, easing. No one could accuse him of cowardice, of not trying. (No one but himself.) He would wash his hands, and sit down in his favorite chair, and read, and eat a piece of Rose's apple cake. Or would he? He remembered Alex Melchor's voice, shaky with breath as he whispered in the dark theatre: "Please. I can't do it here. Can't we go somewhere else?"—words so unexpected, so unlikely in a place like that, so surprisingly tender. He was in love with Alex Melchor, with all he knew of him, his underwear and his voice and his telephone number, and as fiercely as fear pulled him away from the telephone, desire pushed him toward it. Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair. And why now? He didn't want hope. He didn't believe in hope. He didn't even think he needed hope. Yet he was in its grip.

He was imagining things that would have been unimaginable to him just a year ago, a month ago. It was the same fantasy that had carried him through prep school, only recast to fit his current life and shrunken expectations. Over the years, as it gained in intensity, Owen's desire had become less and less specific; now what was growing in him was simple, undifferentiated need. The man no longer had to have dark curly hair, or be over six feet tall, it no longer had to be perfect, enviable love of the sort that bloomed in the movies of his adolescence. All he wanted was a man to make love with—fully, exhaustingly, more than once—and perhaps a little companionship. And yet, even that was as impossible now as it had been then. He had a job, a wife, a son. Perhaps he could have pulled it off if he were younger and less established; but it seemed to him that each year he lived as a hypocrite, his identity as a family man, a husband, a professional hardened in the minds of those around him, not to mention those he loved. For twenty-seven years, after all, he had been Rose's husband; he held her fate like a hand grenade. To break out of that mold now—well, he would lose his job. He would lose Rose. He would lose Philip. And still he knew he would not leave this office until he had dialed that number, spoken to that voice; that if not tonight, he would come back tomorrow night, and the next night. It was out of his hands now.

So he sat there, his heart pounding, and the phone squatted shamelessly before him, offering to unlock for him the secret safe at its heart for which the seven long-memorized digits of Alex Melchor's phone number were the combination.

He picked up the phone. He dialed in a kind of delirium, and it was only when he was finished, and the ringing started, that he came to consciousness and realized what he had done so easily, and that there was no turning back. He could hang up, but he wasn't going to. He would let it ring five times. One. Two. Three.

There was a clicking noise. He took in his breath. A crash sounded. "Oh shit!" a male voice said. He heard music in the background—he couldn't recognize exactly what. For some unknown reason, relief flooded him. His pulse slackened. He wanted to laugh.

"Sorry, I dropped the phone. Hello?" The voice was raspy, slightly effeminate.

"Is this Alex Melchor?" Owen said. He was bent over in his chair, his feet tucked under his buttocks, smiling broadly and holding back laughter.

"No, just a second, I'll get him. Oh, who's calling?"

"You can tell him my name is Owen Benjamin. But he won't recognize it." He could hear the voice that said these words distinctly, although it seemed to have nothing to do with him.

"Okay, just a second. Al-ex! He's in the kitchen, hold on a minute."

It was Vivaldi.
The Four Seasons.
Owen closed his eyes and concentrated on the birdsong of the violin, the tiny pips of music as the bow darted back and forth. He tried to think of birds in trees in parks in summer, as his music appreciation teacher had taught him to do in fourth grade. Birds in trees in parks in summer. He had never forgotten that. Strange, he thought, how things come back. Things are not lost.

More crashing. Then the music was obliterated by a hand over the phone.

"Hello, Alex Melchor," said a new voice, this one deeper, more threatening. Some sort of muffling noise sounded. Owen, frozen, couldn't identify it. For a few seconds, he said nothing, expecting his other voice, the confident voice, to take over, but it had run off, leaving him high and dry and alone. Strings broke on a violin somewhere.

"Alex," he said. "This is Owen Benjamin. Owen. Oh—you don't know my name, do you? But you—we—met—you gave me your name and number and said I should call you, I should give you a call."

There. That was fine. That sounded fine.

"I did
what
?" the voice said. The muffling noise continued. Food. He was eating. And Owen thought, Don't destroy me, please, don't destroy me.

"You left it for me. Your name. You said to call."

"Um—Owen—I don't
think
so," Alex Melchor said. "Are you sure it was my name, and my number? That you didn't dial wrong?"

"Yes. Work and home." Owen repeated the numbers.

"Those are right. I'm sorry, but I really can't recall giving you this note. Where did I supposedly do it?"

Owen stammered, strangled. "A theatre," he said.

"At the theatre!"

"Yes." "What show? I was at the theatre twice last week. We saw
Tango Argentina
and that new Sondheim thing—"

"No, no—not
the
theatre—
a
theatre."

"A movie theatre?"

Owen faltered. "Yes."

"Well, which one?" He sounded impatient.

"The Bijou," Owen said. He closed his eyes.

"Did you say the Bijou?”

"Yes."

Alex Melchor started to laugh. Hard. Loud. "Then, honey, that note must be pretty old, because I haven't been in that dump for ten years! Are you someone from my deep dark past?" he asked. "Hey, Leo! My deep dark past is on the phone!"

Owen was close to tears. "I'm sorry, there must be a mistake. I'm sorry. Something's wrong." He gritted his teeth, prepared to slam down the receiver.

"Hold on," Alex Melchor said. "Don't hang up. I'm curious about this. Now, you're saying that someone at a porno theatre gave you my name and number? Needless to say, I'm very curious to know who this person was."

"No. It was a mistake. I'm sorry."

"Don't hang up! You sound upset. What did you say your name was, Bowen? Listen, Bowen, don't mind me, my shrink tells me fifty thousand times a day my bark is worse than my bite. Now calm down. Just calm down."

"It's Owen," Owen said. "Owen, not Bowen." He laughed a little. Who would have the nerve to name a kid Bowen? he wondered. His voice shook. His throat seemed to constrict. But he did not hang up.