The Lost Language of Cranes (10 page)

"
H
OW OLD
were you when Derek and Geoffrey found out that you were gay?" Philip asked Eliot. It was four in the morning, and they were lying on the blue futon, nowhere near sleep.

"Oh, let's see," Eliot said, stretching his arms out behind his head. "I guess it must have been—but no." He smiled. "The thing is, with Derek and Geoffrey, I'd only have had to come out if I was straight. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever actually did come out to them. I just remember, when I was twelve or so, Derek walking into my room and finding me making out with Timmy Musseo. And he just said excuse me and closed the door."

Philip's jaw dropped. "You were making out with boys when you were twelve?"

"Eleven," Eliot said. "Geoffrey and Derek only found out when I was twelve."

"Then how old were you when you first had sex?"

Eliot shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "How do you define sex? If orgasm is the criterion, twelve. If anal or oral penetration is necessary, fifteen."

"And was that with Timmy Musseo?"

"No, no," Eliot said. "Timmy Musseo had a girlfriend by that time. My first experience was with a much older man, a friend of Derek's. He and Geoffrey never found out about it. Probably they still don't know."

"How old is older?"

"Oh, let's see," Eliot said. "When I was fifteen, he must have been twenty-nine, thirty. My age now. He came and stayed with me at the house whenever Derek and Geoffrey went away."

"Did he seduce you?"

"I seduced him," Eliot said, and laughed. "Oh, he wanted to for as long as I did. But I think he was afraid Derek would send him up for statutory rape or something. I was irresistible at fifteen. I kept asking him to give me massages, playing the little nubile waif. And finally—well, he couldn't hold back anymore." He sighed. "It was a wild night. We did everything."

Philip's mouth was dry. "When I was that age," he said, "—well, I never would have dreamed, no matter how much I might have wanted to—" But he knew enough about Eliot's childhood in that rambling brownstone on West Thirteenth Street to know that it was about as different from his own as you could get. Eliot had been raised not by normal parents, after all, but by two men, by Derek Moulthorp, the famous writer, and his lover, Geoffrey Bacon. When Philip imagined him as a child, he was lying in a brocaded canopied bed, having stories read to him by Colleen Dewhurst, but now the fantasy changed, and it was a young man with long brown hair, dressed in an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt, who sat leaning over Eliot in his bed, running his hand languidly through Eliot's hair.

"I just can't imagine," Philip said, "having that kind of self-knowledge, that kind of. . . wherewithal, at fifteen. At fifteen I was just discovering pornography. I didn't have sex until college. "

"Everyone's different," Eliot said, "depending on their background." He was staring up at the ceiling, onto which he had pasted glowing constellations from a kit. At night, sometimes, he liked to name them: dog, dipper, hunter.

"One more question," Philip said. "If you don't mind."

"Not at all," said Eliot.

"How old were you when you had your first real lover?"

"Seventeen," Eliot said. "At Jasper Ridge. My roommate, Ben Hartley, and I were secret lovers for an entire year. He was wonderful. A hockey player. He must have been six foot five. We spent a semester together in Florence, and when we'd walk by the fake David in the Piazza della Signoria, everyone would stare at Ben instead. He was the most amazing lover I ever had. But it was one of those secret things, so it didn't seem real."

"Was it always secret?"

"Unfortunately not," Eliot said. "One of the house monitors happened upon us one afternoon in the shower. Now this was Jasper Ridge, mind you, the hippie school to end all hippie schools, but homosexuality was still not exactly a thriving thing there. We had to talk to the Jaspers themselves, and Mr. Jasper, who was this old ex-Beat with a lot of money, he kept saying, 'Wow, that's really great. I can really relate to that.' He wanted Ben and me to go before the whole school and announce ourselves, because he thought it would be very consciousness-raising for the other kids." Eliot laughed. "Thank God we talked him out of it. Most of those kids were little thugs. They'd have killed us."

"Whatever happened to Ben Hartley?" Philip asked.

"He went to Colgate. We lost touch. Last I heard he was out in California, working as a carpenter or something."

Philip was silent. "My first love affair—if you can call it that—wasn't nearly so much fun," he said.

"You mean Dmitri?"

"Have I mentioned Dmitri?"

"Only in passing."

"Dmitri was a physics major," Philip said. "He was very dark, and he had these mad-scientist eyes that would kind of zero in on you and just not turn away. It was hard to resist. My first lover." He laughed. "You know," he said, "he hated the word 'lovers.' He preferred to say we were 'friends who had sex,' and of course only between us, because he was insistent that none of his friends or, God forbid, his professors ever find out he was gay. He made it clear from day one that if I mentioned our relationship to anyone, even to Sally, he wouldn't speak to me again. But even though he was so secretive, he was very promiscuous. He used to claim to be able to identify how much hair a man had on his ass by how much he had on his wrists. That kind of thing was very important to him."

"How long were you together?" Eliot asked.

"Six months, I guess, give or take a few weeks. The last semester of college. But he never loved me. He had an older brother, Alex, who was also gay, and also a physicist, and I think if he loved anyone it was him. Not sexually, of course, just in a sort of worshipful way." He smiled. "I remember at graduation I finally met Alex. He looked just like Dmitri, except he worked out, so he had muscles, and his boyfriend was a male model. They were there with their parents—the father was some sort of industrialist, and their mother was this very thin spacey woman from Texas—and also their grandmother. She was something. Maybe four foot eleven, and built like a tank. She had this little camera, and she was so proud she kept insisting on taking pictures of Dmitri—first alone, and then with Alex, and then with both of us. And standing there, it felt so strange to me, to think that this old woman worshipped them so much, and didn't have the slightest inkling, not the slightest idea about them. Of course, it must have been very hard, both of them being gay after all, and the only sons. I guess they really believed they'd be disowned if they told their parents, and probably they were right. But what amazed me was, it was as if they couldn't care less. They just made joke after joke about it. In fact, I thought I'd feel very nervous standing between them like that, I thought I'd be afraid every second the parents would see something. But somehow I felt safe, safer than I'd felt all that year. I think Dmitri and Alex protected each other, and it was as if their protection covered me as well—does that make sense?"

"Completely," Eliot said. His eyes were closed.

"After that," Philip said, "they walked over to their grandmother and picked her up. Literally. Just put their hands under her behind, and paraded her around the campus while everyone watched, and she laughed and screamed and begged them to put her down. I just stood back with the parents and smiled, until my parents came back to get me."

"Was that the end with Dmitri?"

"Oh, more or less," Philip said. "I visited him once after that, in the summer, at his parents' place in Southampton. He had a whole filing cabinet full of pornography. And I remember I told him that my great fantasy of domestic happiness would be if we put all our underwear in the same drawer and got them mixed up so we couldn't tell whose was whose."

"What did he say to that?"

"Oh, just what you'd expect. He said, 'That's funny, because my brother Alex and I used to do that when we shared a room, but I always knew which was which.' Apparently Dmitri was secretly turned on by wearing his brother's underwear. It's funny, he had no compunction about admitting things like that, even though he would have murdered someone before anyone in his department found out about him. Anyway, after that the weekend just sort of dragged on, and we spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, and Dmitri and his father would talk about engineering, and Dmitri's mother would say things to me like, 'Well, Philip, I know how you feel—when the men in this family start talking science, I just feel left out at sea. The next time, we'll go into the kitchen and talk about literature.' But we never did. Then I went home."

The blanket pulled away, and Eliot turned onto his side, facing the window. Philip looked up at the stars on the ceiling, which were fading fast. Now streams of sunlight were beginning to pour through the window, keeping the little stars steady and hunt. It annoyed Philip that after a night of happy sleeplessness, exhaustion would still punch him awake with the alarm clock in the morning; he would shave, dress, head off to work, while Eliot shifted in the bed and gave a small sigh of contentment. He never said goodbye. Once Eliot was asleep he was dead to the world. There was no waking him.

"Eliot?" Philip said.

"Yes?"

"I'm thinking of telling my parents. About us. Which of course, means telling them about me."

Eliot said nothing.

"I'm thinking of telling them this Sunday," Philip went on. "Do you think it's a good idea?"

"I don't know your parents," Eliot said.

"Well I do. And I can tell you now, I don't think this is going to be a big shock for them. They're going to think 'Of course.' Then they'll understand why I never had a girlfriend and all. I mean, my parents are liberal people. They won't be destroyed by this."

"Probably not," Eliot said.

Philip nodded to himself. "No," he said, "the problem is not going to be my being gay, as much as getting beyond that. Because it's not enough, you know, just telling them and shutting up and never talking about it again. I feel like I should let them know what it's been like for me—what it felt like, growing up, keeping this secret. I feel like I should let them know what it means, having the life I have, having you. They deserve to know."

"That's what Jerene thought," Eliot said. "Look what happened to her."

"My parents are not like Jerene's parents," Philip said, a hint of anger in his voice.

"Oh, probably they won't disown you. But don't be sure it's going to be all sweetness and light, Philip. It's hard for you to realize how new this thing is going to be for them because you've lived with it all your life. But they haven't. They probably haven't even thought about it."

"Oh, I'm sure they've thought about it. They're not stupid."

"Even so, the fact remains that no matter how well you explain to your mother why it is you like getting fucked up the ass, she's probably not going to be happy about it."

Philip glared.

"Look," Eliot said, "I'm not saying you shouldn't tell them. I'm just saying that you should think about it very carefully before you do anything rash. And you should be sure you're doing it for them and not for yourself. This is going to be a big deal. Be careful. I know Jerene's case is an extreme, but think about it. The terrible tragedy of all this is that she still loves her parents. And they love her. And if she hadn't told them—well, they could all still have that."

He yawned, closed his eyes. Philip stared at the ceiling. What was his motive in telling his parents, he wondered, when for years he had so successfully avoided this confrontation? Was it for them that he wanted to make this revelation, because they deserved to know the truth? Or was it for himself, as Eliot had suggested, to relieve himself at last of the burden of secrecy? It didn't seem to him there was anything wrong with that. Anyway, he had Eliot now. He could show his parents Eliot, scion of Derek Moulthorp, and then how could they say he was throwing his life away? How could they argue he was making a mistake, damning himself to a life of eternal solitude? He wanted to stick Eliot in front of their distracted faces the way he used to stick finger paintings and cookie-dough Santa Clauses—only now they couldn't turn away from him, they couldn't absently say, "How nice." They would have to pay attention.

"Eliot?" he said. "If I tell them, would you come with me to meet them? Would you come to dinner some time?"

"Sure," Eliot said. He was falling asleep. "Sure." He shuffled a low times, settling. A half an hour later his breath was coming in even rhythmic waves. In only a few minutes the alarm clock would blare. Philip lay in bed, his shoulders rigid, waiting for it.

When Philip remembered his adolescence, he remembered the hidden parts. Hiding had been so important, so essential a part of his life, that even now—grown-up, more or less, and living on his own—he still kept every book with the word "homosexual" in the title hidden, even in his own apartment. These days, when he thought of himself at twelve or thirteen, he did not think of school, his friend Gerard, board games and playground injustice and gold stars in workbooks. He did not envision himself sitting in a classroom, or with his parents at dinner, or in front of the television. Instead, he saw himself always and only lying on the bathroom floor and masturbating, the steam billowing from the shower, the wallpaper curling at the edges. He could remember nothing else, nothing but this forbidden activity, as if his memory was now capable of creating only a negative image, exposing only those things which were then in shadow. Philip's sexual awakening had not been uncommon: a chance collision of penis and thigh, the unexpected, intense terror of orgasm, the shock of the white liquid squirting onto his bedsheet. But what was different for him was that it never ended, this period when sex was only masturbation, it never developed into another stage. For his friend Gerard, there was talk of girls, and then there were girls, sex, talk of love. For Philip there was only this solipsistic stroking, by definition nameless. Of course he realized, from the magazines he glimpsed at the corner newsstand and later bought in profusion, that there were many other men in the world with similar visions in their heads. But he did not think to seek them out, to match himself to one of them, to make love to one of them, because sex for him had never had anything to do with anyone but himself, and certainly had nothing to do with his life, through which he now stumbled, no longer the pensive little boy who at six or seven had spent whole afternoons patiently constructing sand forts or drawing elaborate imaginary subway maps. In school, he laughed too loud and talked too much; his hair, when blown by the wind, stuck straight up; and he had a bad habit of scratching between his legs in public, which his parents were too embarrassed to mention, much less scold him for. Other boys routinely called him "faggot" or "fairy," though he hardly fit the stereotype of the sensitive, silent, "different" boy who knows how to sew, is friends with the teacher and subject to colds. Rather, Philip epitomized what happened when that quiet, unusual sort of boy tried to plow his way back into the exclusive and cruel society of children, becoming, as Philip did, a loudmouth, a clown, foolish in his zeal to be likable, gullible in his need to be wanted. At thirteen, when Philip was invited to a party and was standing with his best friend, the ever popular Gerard, before a feast of Doritos and Chee-tos and Barbequed Potato Chips, he farted so loudly that the whole party of children began to shriek with laughter, flung open the windows, and panted dramatically for air. And Philip, in shock, standing in the center of a crowd of children who ran from him in all directions, laughed too, figuring that this would be his lot in life, to fart at parties and win that peculiar furious attention which seemed perhaps as close as he would get to love. When the boys called him a faggot, curiously neither he nor they ever connected the word with any reality, or with his by-then highly evolved masturbatory life. The girls stared at him, some with their lips upturned in sneers, or their tongues out, the smart, quiet ones pityingly, in groups, at the library tables. He absorbed and steered right around their disapproval—it was attention after all.