The Lost Language of Cranes (19 page)

"Now, Owen, can you describe the man who gave you my number?"

"It was dark."

"It certainly was," Alex Melchor murmured.

"Anyway, I told you. I think it was a mistake. After he left, I found the note on his chair."

"You found the note on the—" There was a moment of silence. "Oh my God!" Alex Melchor said. "What day was this?"

"Sunday."

Suddenly the voice on the other end of the phone burst into a fit of hysterical laughter. "It was Bob Haber!" he said. "Hey, Leo!" he called away from the phone. "Guess who's been hanging out at the Bijou! Bob Haber!"

"I knew it. I knew it," Leo said in the background.

"Forgive me for leaving you on the hook like that," Alex Melchor said. "I think I've figured out the answer to this dilemma. You see, I gave my number and name to this actor named Bob Haber. He's an old college friend of Leo's—that's my lover—and I met him at this dinner party. I'm an agent, you see, and he had a lot of—well, to be perfectly honest, I liked his looks. So I gave him my number and told him to give me a call and we'd have lunch. That was on Saturday. And on Sunday—"

"It fell out of his pocket. I know."

"So the mystery's solved."

"Yes. I'm sorry to have—"

"Oh, don't worry. I'm sorry too. I mean, Owen, you sound like a very nice guy. But I am sort of married to Leo. And Bob Haber—well, I wouldn't recommend him to you. He's a real closet case."

"Sure," Owen said, and wanted to say, "Tell me, show me. Invite me to dinner. Introduce me to Bob Haber. Save me." But he did not.

"Goodbye," he said.

"Bye now." Then Alex Melchor hung up the phone.

Owen fell back in his chair. He could feel his heartbeat, a tiny persistent pulsing in his forehead. Sweat trickled down and dried under his arms. Through his half-closed eyes, he saw that it was past eleven. He realized, quite suddenly, that he had been breathing through his mouth. His throat was dry, his lips chapped to the point of bleeding.

He went into the bathroom. It was a classic boys' school bathroom, with a big trough instead of urinals and three tiny toilets for the first-graders. At one of a row of white enamel sinks he washed his face with a cake of industrial soap. The room smelled strongly of disinfectant. After he had combed his hair, he went back into his office, straightened his desk, put on his coat, and left. It was a cold night out, but windless. He pushed his hands into his coat and started off. The sky was still and clear and full of stars.

For the first twenty blocks he hardly knew what he was feeling. Fragments of the conversation replayed in his head, out of order, along with bits of
The Four Seasons.
Then, around Seventy-second Street, he realized to his great surprise that he did not feel bad. No, not bad at all. To his own shock, he discovered that his hope was still alive—greatly reduced in bulk, it was true, modest and a little ashamed, but there, alive, and fighting fiercely to hold onto him this cold night as he briskly marched downtown. It no longer had a firm grip. It crawled on him, rather, like a baby kangaroo that must struggle blind, in earnest, to find its mother's pouch. Hope breathed choppily but defiantly in Owen, searching for a place to grow again.

He pushed up the collar of his coat and walked faster. His breath became visible in the dark and cold. He had done it. He had made the call. He had come through it alive, still himself. That mattered more to him than the fact that there had been no note, no last-minute offering. He had set a goal and carried through on it, as his father might have put it to him when he was a child, trying to build a model of a car, a Ford Model-T, and if it hadn't turned out quite perfect—Well, what of it? his father had said. You did your best. I'm proud of you, and you deserve a reward.

Owen did deserve a reward. Right now. So he walked into an all-night newsstand and bought himself a Hershey bar, with almonds.

T
HE EVENING
of Derek Moulthorp's dinner Jerene stood with her foot on the edge of the tub. She was wearing a pale silk slip; below her knees, her legs were half covered with shaving cream.

"Wow," Philip said. "You look—"

"I know, I know," she said. "Don't tell me. It's ridiculous."

"Do you ever cut yourself?" Philip asked. "I cut myself a lot."

"Remember," Jerene said, "I haven't done this in six years."

The scraping noise of the razor against her skin made Philip wince. He sat down on Jerene's cot, being careful not to muss the dark blue wool dress splattered with wildflowers which had been carefully laid out next to him. He gazed at her. Jerene had a date.

She hardly knew what had driven her to the Laura Ashley store. But she had walked in, remembering her mother, the lacy dresses that had been foisted upon her as a little girl and the hand tightening her hair into ringlets. The salesgirl was Pre-Raphaelite, pale. Long blond hair swept her shoulders. If it had been Shescape, if it had been a Saturday night and she had had on her leather jacket, Jerene would have made her move. Thin like a snake, she was good at winding her way through dance floors, getting where she wanted to be. The girl would have been scared at first, then fascinated when Jerene asked, "Have you got alight?"

She said instead, "I'm looking for a dress"—anticipating surprise with a challenge.

The manageress—an older woman in a suit—lowered her ornamental half-glasses to give Jerene a frank, suspicious gaze. There she stood, six feet tall and denim and leather from head to toe, in a low room full of sachets and potpourris and wallpaper patterned with lilacs. The steel-gray manageress stared at her as if she feared Jerene might break something accidentally, or even on purpose. But the pale girl didn't flinch and showed her dress after dress, and when none of them hung right offered a gift of alteration. Her name was Laura (though not Ashley) and she lived with her mother on Park Avenue, and by the end of the afternoon Jerene had her phone number and a tentative drinks date when the dress was ready, in three days. Walking out of the store, she thought of a friend of hers—a gay man from Louisiana—who after coming out to his parents had honored their request for a new photograph by sending them a picture of himself with a girl, a friend of his named Lucy, standing under a broken piñata at a party. A week later they sent him a check for fifty dollars. At first he was shocked, and wanted to call them up, to challenge them. But in fact he was able to use the fifty dollars.

Now every time he needed money, he simply had his picture taken with a different woman friend. If he sent a series with the same girl, the checks got larger.

Jerene wondered what effect a photo of herself in a dress—a Laura Ashley dress—might have on her mother, whose one weakness was lace. Could that be all it would take? Of course she would never do it, although she found herself contemplating such actions often these days, imagining her mother at her door, tears in her eyes, crying, "You're cured!" And once again it seemed strange to her that six years had passed without even the slightest contact. What would her parents think if they received such a picture in the mail? Would it mean anything to them? Would they even recognize her as their daughter?

It seemed to Jerene funny that after all these years of rebellion she was now finding herself thinking so much like her mother. Buying shirts at Macy's one afternoon, she had been shocked to realize how naturally she applied Margaret's standards of taste and quality, the little rules she had been taught for rooting out the good buys from the sales table. A few years earlier she would have rejected that guidance on principle, bought only what her mother would have thought hideous. It was a gesture of political as well as personal rebellion to mock the taste of mothers. For a long time now it had been the fashion among her friends to be as unornamented as possible. Simplicity was sexy, because it was a rejection of male standards of beauty; what was left was something fleet and unadorned, pure form. She had known women in her first days in New York with whispers of beard, pale mustaches which they cultivated, almost as a challenge. Like the preened and oiled men who wore dabs of eye shadow and had their muscular backs waxed, these women marched shirtless and proud on Gay Pride Sunday—but of course it was a different kind of pride, one that had more to do with denying sexual attraction than flaunting it. All along, Jerene cheated in small ways. As her mother had taught her, she bleached the small hairs on her upper lip once a month, after which, during the course of a morning or an evening, she would wander around her apartment looking like a child with a milk mustache. No one ever knew but Eliot, who laughed at her for feeling so guilty about it. Jerene dressed every day for years in the jeans and lumberjack shirts that were the only wardrobe possible for a serious lesbian leftist, but anyone with an eye for detail would have noticed that there was embroidery on her sleeves. Now things were changing. These days her friends were wearing pink, wearing maid's uniforms, wearing nose rings. Many wrote stories in their spare times for women's pornographic magazines with names like
Bad Attitude.
Lust, like fashion, they were proclaiming, was a radical woman's prerogative, too—as long as it was
her
lust, her fashion; and over the years since her break with her parents—slow, painful years, years in which she had never let her hair grow thick enough to hide her scalp—she
had
found herself eyeing women in pretty dresses on the street in summer. She was eyeing the women, but she was also eyeing the dresses.

Tonight she had her date with Laura. In the bathroom, she washed the shaving cream from her legs, while Philip and Eliot stared, then slipped the new dress awkwardly over her head.

"Remember," Jerene said, "I haven't done this either for six years."

She stepped out into the hall, and looked in the mirror.

"My God," she said. "I look like a pinhead."

"Earrings," Philip said. "You need earrings."

"Yes. I guess." She turned and rummaged through her drawer, where she found a pair of spikes she wore when she wanted to intimidate one of her professors into giving her an extension on a paper. But these were not right for tonight. She dug some more and found an old pair from high school—two long strings of fired blue beads—and attached them.

"Yes," Eliot said. "Exactly."

They were ready. Philip stood in front of the mirror, playing with the knot of his bow tie. "I can't believe I'm finally going to get to meet Derek," he said as he put on his coat. "After reading all those books—to finally meet him—it means a lot to me."

"I'm glad you're so excited."

Outside, a light wind blew along the street. The ice from the previous weekend had started to melt, creating an illusion of spring, and Philip felt proud and happy as he walked—proud of Eliot, who looked so handsome, so self-assured in his pink shirt and sweater; also proud of Jerene, proud that he knew this strange, beautiful woman, so surprising-looking that people would turn and stare at her as they passed. From Sixth Avenue, Eliot had turned them onto Thirteenth Street, where dark trees shone in the blue haze of the streetlamps, and the subtle neon of a basement restaurant occasionally shone below the brick town-houses. They walked up steps to a dark walnut door with a brass knocker. The house was indistinguishable from the row of elegant brownstones in which it stood—boxy, many-windowed, hairy with vines. "Well," Jerene said, "this is where I say goodbye."

"Where's your date?" Philip asked.

"Café Luxembourg, if you can believe it." She shrugged her shoulders, cast her eyes to heaven, and Eliot bent to kiss her goodbye. "Good luck, honey," he said. She waved and disappeared down the street. *

Eliot lifted the knocker and let it drop, then pulling keys from his pocket, clicked one easily into the door. They walked into a foyer, and beyond it into a living room illuminated by firelight.

"Hello, Geoffrey," Eliot said.

"Eliot!" A red-cheeked man emerged from the dark, holding out his arms in greeting. He was roughly pear-shaped, and wore the loose clothes of a father—a yellow cardigan sweater over an Oxford shirt, simple brown slacks, a macraméd belt that appeared to be left over from a child's arts-and-crafts class. "And you must be—" he said, clasping one of Philip's hands in both of his.

"Philip," Philip said.

"Philip, of course!" said Geoffrey. "We've certainly heard about you."

"You have?" Philip grinned.

"Oh yes," Geoffrey said. He leaned closer, as if to deliver a confidence, and Philip saw that the palest of blond beards covered his cheeks, so pale it was practically invisible. Geoffrey's eyes were small but bright, like a hunting dog's, and they held Philip in a reassuring stare. But there was no confidence to be given. "Let me introduce you to our other guest," Geoffrey said, and led them into the living room, where a sinewy man in blue jeans leaned against the wall, nervously shuffling through a book of Etruscan vase-paintings. "This is John Malcolmson, a noted gay journalist," Geoffrey said, and the man put down the book and looked at Philip briefly. "I'm sure you've read John's columns in the
Voice."