The Lost Language of Cranes (25 page)

When no word came for a week, he left Jerene a note in her mailbox, begging her to meet him at a coffee shop the next afternoon. She was late, but she came. In a back booth, on ugly red vinyl benches patched with industrial tape, they drank coffee for which Philip insisted on paying. Jerene looked as thin and nervous as ever in her black leather jacket and jeans. "I'm glad you got my note," Philip said.

"Yes, I got it."

"It's been a long time. What have you been up to?"

"Well," she said, "the main thing I've been up to is quitting graduate school."

"Really? Why?"

"I just decided it wasn't for me. I realized that I'm not finishing my dissertation because I really don't want to write a dissertation. So I quit. Instead I'm doing other things, better things." She smiled confidently. "I have a job as a bouncer at this dyke bar," she said. "I keep the men out. Isn't that a riot?"

Philip smiled. "After seven years, it must be tough," he said.

She nodded a vigorous no. "It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life. I just said, fuck it, and suddenly all the pressures were gone, totally gone. It's the best thing I could have done. Anyway, I'm much happier now. I have a nice new girlfriend—believe it or not, she's the one who works at Laura Ashley. And I'm volunteering, answering phone calls at the Gay Hotline. I can't tell you what it's like not to have to depend on a library for your sanity. I'm relaxed for the first time in seven years. I can think about my life and not just about that damned dissertation."

Philip smiled. "That's great," he said. Then: "I was afraid you wouldn't come."

She laughed. "Why wouldn't I come, Philip?"

"I don't know. It feels right now like the world's in a conspiracy to isolate me. Or at least Eliot is." He laughed again, and then his lips froze in a parody of a smile, and tears welled in his eyes.

"Philip," Jerene said. "Philip." She put down her coffee cup, rubbed her hands together like an insect. She did not seem able to touch him. "Look," she said. "I know how you feel. I've been let down, too. Anyway, I think Eliot's being a baby. I tell him every day what a child he's being."

Philip blew his nose. "You do?" he said.

Jerene nodded.

"What does he say?"

She looked away. "He says he doesn't want to see you. He says he can't face you."

Philip's eyes widened, and he leaned forward in his seat. "Can't face me!" he said. "Can't face me!" And cried harder.

"Please don't ask me to justify him," Jerene said. "He does this to people. He's done this to other boyfriends. He can be a real bastard at times."

But Philip seemed not to hear her. He was really sobbing now. Across the way, a long-haired woman wearing dark circular glasses, as if inspired by him, began to cry as well.

Then, afterwards, in the midst of the heaves and the tear-mopping: "He owes it to me."

"Owes what to you?" Jerene asked.

Philip stuttered. "He owes it to me—at least to—at least to talk to me."

Jerene took his hand. "Philip," she said, "I know. You should be pissed off. He's being very immature, very irresponsible. He's a very weak person; very few people realize it, but he's very weak. I'm not trying to justify his behavior, nothing like that—just pointing out that weakness in his case makes him cruel."

Philip, in angry tears, said, "You can't just tell me to hate him,

Jerene; it's never that goddamned easy just to decide you hate someone when they're the person you love." He pulled a ragged tissue out of his pocket, blew his nose again. "Tell him he has to talk to me," he said. "He owes it to me."

"I'll tell him, Philip," Jerene said. "But I can't promise it'll do any good. It's like when you haven't paid your phone bill. You just don't pay it and don't pay it. And then you get a letter. And then you get another letter. And still you don't pay it. And then, suddenly, your phone's been disconnected. Well, Eliot is somewhere in the stage just before he gets the first letter. I don't know what good it'll do, but I'll tell him you want to talk to him."

Calmer, Philip said, "Thank you." And across the way, the owl-eyed woman dried her eyes. "Jesus, where are we, Bellevue?" the waitress said to the cook. "Greenwich Village, land of fruits and nuts," he replied, and threw a hamburger patty onto the grill.

They paid their bill and left. Nervously, on the sidewalk, they hugged and parted, walking in opposite directions in the wind. Philip put on a pair of dark glasses he had recently purchased. He felt like one of the betrayed, beaten-down women he saw sometimes walking in his parents' neighborhood, wrapped in pale coats and scarves and with their eyes hidden behind night-black shades, as if all clothing were a bandage to cover unspeakable scars. He thrust his hands in his pockets. He did not want to think. Across the street a dark-haired young man with small glasses, wearing an old black blazer, sat on a bus-stop bench reading a newspaper, and Philip's heart leapt to twice its normal speed. But then he saw the man wasn't Eliot. He didn't even look like Eliot.

After that, Philip went to many parties. He called up everyone he knew, asking about parties. Eliot was never at any of them. He remembered his mother telling him about a divorced couple she knew who, finding themselves at the same party, were able to coordinate their movements so they were never in the same room at the same time. There was an element of graceful cooperation to their mutual avoidance that impressed Rose. But Philip knew that if he ran into Eliot at a party (and this was unlikely, for Eliot had a talent for prefiguring where Philip was going to be and staying away), he would not be graceful; he would run up to him, grab him around the waist, not let go.

One weeknight, around eleven o'clock, he was sitting with Brad Robinson, an old friend from college, drinking coffee at the Kiev, a twenty-four-hour restaurant that blazed alive after midnight, like someone on his second wind on late-night Second Avenue. It was indicative of Philip's depressed state that he thought nothing of travelling halfway across the city in the middle of the night just to drink coffee. Now, surrounded by refugees from the East "Village nightlife, packed into a down casement that made him look like the pupa of some rare and ridiculous butterfly, he hugged himself against the chill wind that blew through him every time the door swung open, ate slices of hot babka drowned in cinnamon and butter, and talked about Eliot. The breath of the Indian waitress came in visible clouds as she poured refills of hot coffee for them. Squeezed-out tea bags sweated on saucers. The waitress, who had gloves on, brought more babka, and added figures onto their soiled green bill.

"I suppose what I miss," Philip said, "is the feeling of euphoria he gave me. Real euphoria. Because everything seemed so right, so comfortable, with Eliot. You never had to tell him anything, to embarrass yourself explaining. He always knew, and he always did exactly what you hoped he'd do."

Brad was not impressed. "He's a jerk," he said to Philip. "He thinks he's more than human. You speak of him as if he was such a supersensitive person, but I think he just took advantage of your sensitivity, of the fact that little gestures, things which are nothing to him, can mean a lot to you. And, in return, he receives reverence. But of course, reverence gets boring, or so he says. I know the type. Once they get bored, just like that—they cut everything off."

At twenty-five, Brad, like many of Philip's friends, could still count his lovers on one hand, but believed that density of experience compensated for quantity of experience. He remembered every detail of the seven nights of his life he had spent with his three lovers; indeed, his gift for scrutiny and analysis during as well as after was, he acknowledged, probably one of the reasons most of his "love affairs" hadn't lasted more than a few days. As Sally had often told Philip, people can smell panic a mile away.

"Was
I too reverent?" Philip asked Brad now. "He always said that if he got sick of me he'd let me know. I guess he did. So I wonder—
_:
should I have been more challenging? Tougher? More independent? Should I have played hard-to-get?"

Brad shook his head. He was small, pale-skinned, compact; at twenty-five he still looked fifteen, always got carded at bars and clubs, even during the months he had a pale blond beard. "You could have been any of those things," he told Philip now. "But it's hard with Eliot. He encourages you to be totally dependent on him from the start. He enjoys that. You have to get over his initial impact before you can recognize that he's just another human being, even though he'd like you to think he's some sort of superior alien, some visitor from another planet or something."

Philip took a sip of coffee and looked at his reflection in the breath-warmed restaurant window. "I can't deny anything you say," he said. "I can't pretend that it doesn't make me feel better, in some ways, to hear someone talk who isn't in awe of him. But at the same time, you have to admit, he does have a talent, a huge one. He's a real sensualist, I guess you'd say, in that he knows how to make people feel—not different, exactly, but more intensely than they normally might. He did that for me. I only wish I could describe the intensity of it, the wonder of it—"

But he could not describe it. Eliot's influence was ephemeral; it grew brackish in memory. Already, when Philip visualized their days and nights together, the scenes had a greenish, unreal tint to them, like old film that has sat in a canister too long. They looked as if they were taking place underwater. And as he spoke the word "wonder"—well, he felt nothing now. The memory was fading. Like any Samaritan, Philip knew, Eliot's own pleasure demanded that he give pleasure to others; but was that samaritanism, or greed for control? Had Philip been misreading Eliot all along, thinking he wanted nothing but to give? Every sensualist requires an object, after all, just as every magician requires a volunteer from the audience—some tame, trusting creature, full of earnest feeling and unexpected desire, immensely sensitive to his immediate surroundings, in other words, someone nearsighted, nearly blind. Even Philip's fantasies about how Eliot would leave him were blind, part of a private dream. He never thought of Eliot as needing anything.

And what might Eliot have needed? Was it surprise, someone to do something to him for a change, to read his mind, to act on his own secret desires? Perhaps. Yet when his phone machine went on and didn't go off, Philip (of course) assumed Eliot to be walking free, rid of a burden, gratified. How did he know Eliot wasn't in his own way searching as well?

After an hour, Philip and Brad paid their bill and headed out onto the street. Even at this hour, the sidewalk was full of people selling their lives—vast collections of magazines and paperbacks, old clothes, eyeglasses, shoes. They walked among the refuse, uptown a little ways, and Brad, tough and unflaggable as ever in his romantic pursuits, told Philip about Gregg, an actor he was in love with from afar. He wanted one thing in life, and he knew exactly what it was: to find someone he could settle down with, live with forever. Each time Philip saw Brad, it seemed there was another actor, another hope, and though they always disappointed Brad, his spirit never weakened; he never lost faith.

They wavered on the stoop of Brad's building. Brad stood in his trenchcoat one step up, so that he was slightly taller than Philip for once, and looked across the street, his hands in his pockets, his strawlike hair blowing. Philip could see the clouds of his breath as he shuffled from one foot to the other, whistling.

"Well," he said.

"Well."

They were silent for a few seconds, standing there, the outsides of their coats touching. "Around this time of night," Brad said, "I can't help wondering what Gregg's up to. He's just finishing up at the theatre, I guess; taking his curtain call, or changing clothes. Getting ready to go home, or to go for a drink with someone. Sometimes I want to go to the theatre and wait by the entrance until he comes out. But I'm afraid I'd be too scared to say anything, do anything. I'd just hide in the shadows and wait until he was gone down the street." He sighed. "I think I'm in love with him," he said, and Philip wondered if he was giving a hint, if he was letting him down gently.

"Well, then, you should do it," Philip said. "Be brave, Brad.

How do you know he's not just sitting there hoping against hope that when he walks out you'll be waiting for him?" But his heart wasn't in it, and Brad could tell. He shook his head sadly. "Well," he said, "I really have to get going now. I've got to get up early. But it was great seeing you. And bear up, will you, Philip? Call me anytime you need anything."

They hugged and Brad smiled down at Philip. "Anything?" Philip said. "Do you really mean that?" He smiled. It had just popped out of his mouth.

Brad stepped back a bit. "Uh—well," he said. "Pretty much. Well, goodnight." He patted Philip on the shoulder and headed inside.

Philip waited until a good few seconds after the building door had closed to turn away. It was just beginning to occur to him how ridiculous that "anything" must have sounded, how embarrassed he'd be by morning; for the moment, he was just numb.

He wandered down Second Avenue toward Sixth Street, walked down Eliot's block. Across the street from his building he stopped, and counted the floors to Eliot's window. The light was off.

Then he was stumbling down West Tenth Street at three o'clock on a Saturday morning in February. A thin sheet of ice covered much of the sidewalk. Every few minutes he would feel himself slipping and have to grab onto a lamppost to keep from falling over. Other patches of sidewalk were sprinkled with a thick, brown sawdust that somehow managed to break down the ice and leave puddles of dirty water in its place. This water had long ago seeped through his boots, which in the morning would be covered with a thin layer of salty precipitate, and was now soaking through his socks. He had not felt his toes for over an hour. He had no excuse to be wandering the meat-packing district at this late hour, on a freezing cold night. He thought about going to the Anvil, a bar he'd heard a lot about, to watch the legendary master-slave whipping that happened every night there. He thought about checking into the Hide Away Chateau—the motel above the Anvil, shaped like a piece of pie and occupying its own individual island in the middle of the West Side Highway—and renting a room by the hour. He had nowhere else to be. His Week-at-a-Glance was empty. He was expected nowhere for brunch the next day, nowhere for dinner the next evening, and so on into eternity. If it weren't for his job and his parents, he could quite well disappear.