The Lost Language of Cranes (2 page)

One fall afternoon, in the elevator, Mrs. Lubin—a widow who had lived in the building even longer than the Benjamins—confided in Rose. The landlord, she suspected, was capable of dark treacheries.

A letter a few days later confirmed her worst fears. The building was going co-op. Because they were not rent-controlled and under sixty-five, they had an option to buy at a reduced price, but they could not continue as renters.

Of course there had been portents, rumors, finally letters; but the thing seemed to have been put off indefinitely, and finally they had stopped believing it could really happen. Now it had happened. "Can we afford it?" Rose asked Owen. He took off his reading glasses, put down the letter, and rubbed his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "I suppose we have enough money. I'll have to talk it over with an accountant. I've never imagined spending so much money before, not since Philip went to college."

"We have a few months, at least," Rose said. "Before we lose our option." She looked around herself. Give or take a few new pieces of furniture, and some re-upholstering, it was the same living room they had moved into twenty-one years ago. On the rug, a seventeen-year-old urine stain alone testified to the existence of Doodles, the poodle puppy hit by a car when he was only eight months old. They had lived there so long it no longer seemed like a place to her.

"The maintenance alone is going to be twice our rent," Owen said. "Still, from what I hear, even that's a bargain." He looked out the window. "You know, Arnold Selensky tells me that every other building on the block has already gone co-op."

"I don't want to leave," Rose said. Like old Mrs. Lubin, she panicked at the prospect of change, had heard the stories of the landlords who hired thugs and dropped pets out of windows, feared homelessness. Not everyone felt that way, of course. Owen's spirited friend in the penthouse, Arnold Selensky, rich and getting richer in the video rental business, invited them up for dinner one night, wagged his cognac glass at them across the plexiglass table, and applauded change. "I myself believe in keeping up with the times," he explained. "That music on the stereo, for instance. Eurythmics. Not The Eurythmics, just Eurythmics. Nice, huh? The latest thing. That compact disc player is also the latest thing. No reason just because one's getting on one should lose touch. So many of the old women in this building, they're killing themselves, it seems to me; they're still listening to Lawrence Welk."

Rose thought, Living in the past. Anachronistic. Bag lady.

"There is just no future in rentals," Arnold Selensky said. "And there is quite a future in co-ops. Think about it. We get a good deal, we buy, we sell for twice as much on the open market, and we're on Fifth Avenue. Well, maybe not Fifth, but very likely Park in the Thirties. Or in my case, Tribeca. Loft living, Owen, that's the way. More space than you've ever dreamed of. Like a ranch house in the city. Incredible."

That night Owen woke in a sweat. "What's wrong?" Rose asked him. He shook his head and wouldn't tell her that he had dreamed everything had slipped out from under him, and he had been forced to take to the streets. In the dream, he had no legs. He rode up and down the length of moving subway cars on a skateboard, shaking a tin can for change. Unlike Arnold Selensky, he was not in a job with a future. For ten years he had made a decent salary assessing the value systems and moral character and S.S.A.T. scores of the little boys whose parents wanted to enroll them in the Harte School, a private boys' school in the East Nineties. He spent his mornings reading letters of recommendation from chairmen of the board and conducting interviews with seven-to twelve-year-olds, and in the afternoons taught one class, a Renaissance literature seminar with three bright students. He had thick graying hair he kept cut short, and though he rarely exercised, his body was strung tight as a harpstring. It was as if tension itself had taken a physical form.

Rose always shopped at the little Italian grocery store on the corner, and now that it was a little Korean grocery store she continued to shop there. Twenty-one years ago she had bought at that store the ingredients for the first dinner she ever cooked in t he apartment—an underdone chicken that she and Owen ate off of paper plates—and she had been amazed that vegetables could be so fresh, even in New York City. She and the lady behind the counter, whose name she had never learned, knew each other well; chatted in the afternoons about asparagus; grew middle-aged together. One day the lady changed race; that was how it felt to Rose. She went on as before with the Korean proprietress. Visibly, their little block was no different than it had been. And yet, Arnold Selensky had told her, every other building had gone co-op. It seemed traitorous.

The phone calls started. Real-estate agents, brokers, people who had heard from people who had heard from people. "Excuse me," the voice would say. "Am I correct that there is a five-room apartment available in this building?"

"No, that's not true."

"Ma'am, if there is a five-room apartment available in this building, we could be of service to you."

"No thank you. Goodbye."

The phone calls came more and more frequently, and later at night. If Owen was home, he'd answer sternly. Weekday evenings, when Rose got back from the office, the machine was full of little pleas.

One Sunday, seventeen people called. Rose was irate. "This apartment is not available," she said to the eighteenth caller. "We live here. Why can't you people leave us alone? "

"Look, listen here for a minute," the voice said. It was small and nasal. "Now I'll have you know there is a client who is looking for an apartment in your neighborhood, and will pay good money for it. But I don't care. I'm sick of being screamed at.

All you people do is scream and scream. Well, enough. I'm quitting this stupid job. I could make better money doing anything else besides making these stupid phone calls. I've got three kids and no husband and we're living with my mother in Queens. I call you people because I have to, to feed the kids. I don't enjoy it. The least you could do is have a little understanding, a little sympathy before you start yelling."

"Well, I'm sorry." Rose lapsed into guilt. "You must understand, though. We've been bothered very frequently. We're quiet people, and—"

"I'm sure you're real cozy up there on the East Side. Well, you may not be for long. I know the score. Born and bred in New York, and look what it gets you. A slap in the face."

Rose hung up, pushing the receiver down hard. She looked at the phone. Among the many things in the apartment that she took for granted, the phone suddenly seemed very special to her. It was a shade of gray you didn't see very often anymore. There were vultures out there, she decided, returning to her armchair and her reading; they were clutching the phone wires, eager to rip the phone cord out of the wall, knock the walls down, strip the apartment of its furniture and memories, re-paint it and remake it for themselves, without a thought for the life that had been interrupted, the life that had been thrown into the streets.

Now they could buy the apartment; then they would have no savings, but they would have the apartment. That didn't seem like much of a deal to Rose, since in every way she understood they already had the apartment, had lived there twenty-one years of their lives, and continued to live there. She tried to imagine tying herself to the bed, as some elderly tenants on Central Park West had recently done, but found it impossible. Other people, she knew, were waking up at five on Wednesdays to get a first crack at the ads in the
Voice,
were meeting with brokers and scanning obituaries to see where deaths might create vacancies. Rose couldn't face it. She put off the task of looking for a new place to live the way she had put off week after week, for six months, a letter she owed her sister in Chicago. They knew they had "six months to a year," as the terms of the building's transition from rental to co-op were still being negotiated. It sounded like the answer to the question, "How much time have I got, Doctor?" Day after day Rose checked the mail and was relieved to find no threatening notices with firm dates, so that she began to hope that this vague grace period might go on forever. But always some stark letter arrived, reminding her that her days were numbered.

Some afternoons, walking home from work, she would look up at the multi-storied buildings that surrounded her and see them transformed, in the blink of an eye, to heaps of bodies, the live limbs wriggling among the dead. The thought of so much life, boxed in, piled seventeen stories high, made her nauseous.

Philip came over sometimes to stand with his parents in their shell shock. His heart was elsewhere these days, across town, in love for the first time, and hardly had space left in it for grief. Still, sitting with his parents in the living room, he felt a sudden longing for his childhood, and he imagined he might say "goodnight," and turn, and discover his old room as it was, his homework laid out on the desk. Most of his life he had eaten his dinner here, done his homework, washed his hands, watched television and read his books, and gone to bed. Thinking of these things, tears came to his eyes, and he felt a gratifying lump rise in his throat.

But what Rose and Owen felt, as they went to bed, was pain, pure and simple. It started in their stomachs, a hoarse growl, and rose to their heads and threatened to burst through their chests. There was nothing pleasurable about it. They didn't enjoy it. They wanted it gone. The selling of the apartment was the beginning of the end for them. It was the beginning of the beginning for Philip, who longed for something that would signal the irrevocable start of his adulthood. There was no part of his life he wanted to relive, and he was glad of it. He had no regrets except luxurious ones. He looked only forward, hungering for the future, while his parents, suddenly helpless in the face of change, looked back at all they had taken for granted. No matter what else might have happened, the neutral years, the years they remembered as painless, were over. At night they lay awake, far apart, each clinging to the extreme edge of the bed, and assumed the other to be sleeping. Cars passed outside, casting their shadows twelve stories high, and the shadows swept like swift birds over the carpet.

M
OST
S
UNDAYS
Rose and Owen spent apart. It wasn't a rule, it just worked out that way. For the first year after he was back from college, there was another Sunday tradition, that Philip come over for dinner, but recently his visits had become irregular. He would call and say, "I just can't make it this week. But how about lunch, Mom?" Since they worked in the same part of town, lunch was a possibility for them.

Rose had worked twenty years for T. S. Motherwell, a small literary publishing house. She had her cubicle neatly arranged. In the morning she would have some coffee with her friend Carole Schneebaum, then disappear behind the door to do her methodical readings. Every hour or ten pages (whichever came first) she'd get up, stretch, have some coffee. Elsewhere in the office people were panicking about poor sales and bad reviews, but none of this meant much to her. At lunch with Philip she listened to him talk about packaging and product marketing, but none of this meant much to her either. He worked for a company that churned out paperback romance novels. She wondered somewhat at his enthusiasm for the job, but Philip's life had a different scale than hers. "The computer training is invaluable," he explained. "Everything at the office is done on a computer monitor, Mom. Not a typewriter to be seen."

Rose had a Royal which was thirty-five years old. It shouldn't have surprised her that the world had moved ahead of her, but it did. Philip lived on a dirty street in a part of town she had thought white people could not walk through. But no, he assured her, his once-devastated neighborhood was on the upswing now; it was nearly chic. The tiny apartment in which he lived was a jewel, even though it had only two rooms, and the tub was in the kitchen. One weekend when Owen was away at a conference he had invited her over for dinner, and to see the place. Rose didn't like the look of the street, the Puerto Rican teenagers with their radios slung over their shoulders, the stray kittens mewing on the sidewalk. There was graffiti on the buildings, empty rum bottles on the stoop. Inside, however, was exposed brick and mauve walls hung with framed posters. Philip had painted the outside of the tub bright red.

After they ate dinner, Philip put on his coat to walk his mother to Broadway, where she could catch a cab. "This is a very African area," he said as they maneuvered their way among covens of menacing children. "The hallways of the buildings smell like Berber pepper."

On the way out of the door they had to step over a man asleep in the vestibule. "Our doorman," Philip said, and laughed.

"Philip," Rose said, "is that man all right?"

"Don't worry," Philip said. "He lives here. Sometimes he just has trouble making it up the stairs."

"I see."

They walked down 106th Street. "How long do you think you'll stay in this place?" Rose asked.