The Lost Language of Cranes (3 page)

"As long as I can. The rent's dirt cheap, and the landlord would kill to get rid of me so he can up it. But it can't go co-op. I checked. Some obscure footnote to the building code, having to do with pipes or something."

"This place?Co-op?" Rose was incredulous.

"Believe it or not, it's happening all over the neighborhood."

"My."

They kept walking. On Amsterdam Avenue, a man was urinating in the gutter. "Is this where you go out?" Rose asked, looking away from the man.

"What do you mean?"

"You know," Rose said. "What you do. With your friends."

"Oh no," Philip said. "Not around here. In fact, lately I've been spending a lot of time in the East Village. It's a wild neighborhood—full of punks and street people and bad artists dressed up in outlandish clothes."

"You're not any of those things," Rose said.

Philip's mouth opened at that statement, but he didn't answer.

Instead he looked away and wrapped his scarf tighter against his throat.

Rose had the sense that she had asked the wrong question. Or asked it in the wrong way. What she meant was, Will you please explain to me what happened, why your life is so different from mine? But Philip said, "Have you decided if you're going to buy the apartment or not?"

She smiled, and shook her head. "We're waiting to hear what the accountant has to say. And then what the lawyer has to say. But it's hard. Your father and I are so set in our ways."

"I can't imagine you living anywhere else, quite frankly," Philip said. He looked away from her. "I hope it works out for you. Look, here comes a cab. I'll get it."

Forget the cab, Rose wanted to say. Tell me something, anything. I am tired of living in the past. But the yellow cab had pulled up, and she had no choice but to get in.

Philip's hand was cold as it took hers, his lips cold as he kissed her on the cheek. "I'll see you soon," he said. "Maybe lunch next week?"

"Yes," she said, and wanted to say, No, not
lunch.
Then the cab door closed, and she was speeding downtown.

"Cold night, huh, lady?" the driver said.

"Sure is," said Rose.

"I like working nights. Lots of guys prefer the days, but nights, you get more interesting customers. The later it is, the more interesting. I took a lady home to Fifth Avenue the other night? She asked for change, right? It turned out she was a guy."

"Really," Rose said.

"You bet," the driver said. "But I say, 'Live and let live.'"

The driver was young. From above the glove compartment, a photograph of a pitted face with a bushy mustache contrasted oddly with the long, clean-shaven neck Rose stared at. A triptych of little girls was taped to the sunvisor: Slavic faces, big smiles on two, the one in the center thin and dangerous-looking.

"Well, the world is changing, that's for sure," the driver said. "A lot of things you wouldn't have seen twenty years ago don't surprise you too much today."

"So true," Rose said.

When Rose woke up, late, on Sunday, Owen was already gone. As always, he'd be back in the evening. She wouldn't ask him where he'd been. It wouldn't be polite.

Still, she wondered. He knew perfectly well what she did with her Sundays. She drank coffee and read the paper, and then she took out one of her manuscripts, and worked until it was time for "Sixty Minutes." She enjoyed the quiet of the apartment, the luxury of having the whole place to herself. Owen was always out. Was he at school? Maybe there was a woman. But only on Sundays.

Today she sat at her desk and read the manuscript of a manual on how to take care of elderly parents. The chapters had titles like "Diseases of the Brain" and "Incontinence: Fact and Myth." She liked the book; it seemed to her oddly comforting.

On page 165, she attached to the manuscript a small yellow sheet of paper on which she wrote, "When one is standing up, one doesn't have a lap." She reread the sentence with some satisfaction and went on. Then, in the midst of "How to Say 'No!'—Nicely," Rose suddenly had a flash of suspicion that she had missed something a few pages back. She backtracked, and indeed, on page 172, found a misplaced modifier, unmarked. What had happened? She reread the paragraph again and did not recognize it. The paragraph described symptoms of senile dementia: forgetfulness, paranoia, compulsive hiding. She was certain she had never read it before. "The straying of the mind," she read. She put the manuscript aside.

She decided not to do any more work today. Her mind was full of anxious thoughts about the apartment and about Philip, and rather than let them interfere with her work, she concluded, she might as well give them free reign to work themselves out or do themselves in. So she put on her coat and gloves and went outside, to walk a bit and breathe the cold air and clear her head. It had stopped raining. She pulled her scarf tight and headed north.

Because it was Sunday, and mid-afternoon, most of the mid-town shops and restaurants were closed. The office towers announced their emptiness with patterns of lit windows and fluorescent, lifeless lobbies. The world was in apartments today, behind warmly illuminated curtains. Only bums were out, and people who looked lost. Smashed umbrellas tangled around her feet; on the avenue cars roared by, splashing her with puddled water. Still, she walked. She came to the intersection where the F.D.R. Drive grazes Sutton Place so closely that cars roar within inches of pedestrians, and stepped back, astounded by the maze of skyscrapers thrusting at contrary angles into the sky. Here a white-brick apartment building jutted out over the highway, and she wondered what the cars must look like from the apartment windows as they were sucked underneath it. Beyond the highway and its traffic and speed was the wild, choppy river, and beyond that Roosevelt Island, and the churring tramway, and the Pepsi-Cola sign. Queens. All this hugeness made Rose feel extraordinarily tiny, so she turned around and headed back to First Avenue, and made her way downtown. The sounds of the highway and the river were immediately muffled, as if the city had drawn its breath and was holding it in. She remembered an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in which an astronaut had run hopelessly through an empty town, trying to awaken life by screaming until he was hoarse. There was nothing there. It turned out that the town was his dream, that he was in an isolation tank, being tested for his eventual ejection into outer space. Godspeed, John Glenn. We're all with you.

Other people, Rose thought, were camouflage. If someone were to jump her right now, drag her into an alley, who would hear? The noise certainly wouldn't carry up to the apartments. Hadn't a woman once been raped under her window while she slept or read or just sat there, never bothering to look outside?

She ducked into the Horn & Hardart Automat at Forty-second Street. Christmas music chimed through the cavernous cafeteria, bouncing off Art Deco pillars and creating a stuttering chorus, the voices out-of-sync with one another. Behind that was a low hum of life, of talking. Rose stared at the little metal cubbyholes, each of which contained one discrete thing: a tuna fish sandwich with its accompanying mound of potato chips; a goblet of slick red Jell-O cubes. Most of them were empty. This place had entranced her twenty-five years ago, when it had seemed like something from the future. It had been featured prominently in a Depression-era comedy she had been taken to as a child in Chicago. Now she knew enough about the future to know that the Automat was an antique, an anachronism, a thing of the past. She got a cup of coffee from an elderly black woman with a stocking pulled over her hair and sat down and drank it. All the people in the Automat were old, and they were eating things like roast turkey with green beans or Salisbury steak. They ate slowly, and chewed each mouthful methodically, as Rose's mother had instructed her to do, to make it last. Most were alone, some in couples, and several looked as if they lived in the streets. What she wanted was a cheeseburger, a Whopper from Burger King, dripping with mayonnaise and mustard and soggy pickles. She indulged this secret vice only occasionally, and then with great guilt, wolfing down the criminal burger in a corner so she could get out as soon as possible, afraid of being seen, although she realized that anyone who saw her would probably be eating the same thing. Now, in the Automat, Rose saw herself, a tall middle-aged woman in a tightly buttoned coat, drinking a cup of coffee alone, and felt such pity for that woman that she drew her breath and put her hand on the table for ballast. Fifty-two years old, pensive-eyed, dark-haired; men called her "handsome." She gulped down what was left of her coffee and hurried out the door.

It was drizzling again, but she kept walking. In the low Thirties and high Twenties there was a sudden burst of life—busy delis and warm, noisy Chinese restaurants and big, busy buildings with couples standing in front of them, hailing cabs. Then a dead region around Fourteenth Street, which made her think about Philip. A gang of Hispanic boys huddled under the marquee of an abandoned theatre, watching her. She kept going. There was no stopping now, even though it was getting dark and the wind was fierce. The voyage had her now. She walked down Third Avenue to St. Mark's Place, and turned into what she knew was the East Village. There were signs of the weekend everywhere: broken bottles; splotches of urine on the walls; purple-haired girls sitting on stoops, rubbing white, freckled arms for warmth. The quiet of an aftermath. She kept walking, through the Ukrainian district, past the Kiev and the other twenty-four-hour restaurants, and turned down Sixth Street,' where a flourish of Indian restaurants bloomed brightly, like exotic flowers: Ganges, Romna, Anar Bagh. What was here? She was going in circles now.

At the corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue, holding her head down against the rain, she ran into Owen. It was like running into a friend from the office. The wind was blowing the tails of his trenchcoat up, and the ends of the red scarf she had knitted him were whipping his cheeks. He was walking very fast toward Ninth Street, his face pale and agitated, and then he was in front of her.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," she said. "I took a walk, and—it just got longer and longer."

"Uh-huh," he said. He burrowed his hands in his pockets and looked over his shoulder, lifted one foot from the ground and then the other.

"I decided I felt like walking," Rose said.

"Yes," Owen said. "I felt like it, too."

"It's some day for it, let me tell you," Rose said.

They stood there for a moment in the rain and the cold, lifting their feet up and down. Rose's toes were numb.

"I'm thinking of going to that bookstore on St. Mark's Place," Owen said. "Would you like to join me?"

Rose smiled, shook her head. "That's okay," she said. "I should be getting back. I have that Alzheimer's manuscript to finish for next week." She faltered. "Are you coming home soon?"

"No, not quite yet," Owen said. "I have some things to do."

"Okay. Well, I'll see you soon."

Owen smiled. "Yes," he said. "Soon."

"Okay. Well, bye."

"Bye."

They stood facing each other for a few more awkward seconds. Then Owen lifted his hand tentatively—half a wave—and walked away from her.

She had to stay there on the corner a minute before she could move. She was stunned beyond surprise. They collided with each other every day in the living room, after all. Twenty-seven years of marriage, she thought, and this is the first time I've seen what he looked like when he thought I wasn't there, the first time I've stumbled on the life he leads alone. And what was he doing so far downtown? What was
she
doing? Why hadn't they had a cup of coffee together, ridden home together?

She turned and walked north. Her legs ached from the long voyage, and she hailed a cab, got in, was thankful that it was well heated. Inside her boots, her wet toes were thawing. She thought, Twenty-seven years of marriage, and I hardly know him. Riding in the cab she felt numb and stupid, cocooned by her life, for she had stumbled into her husband on a strange street corner, running some mysterious errand she knew nothing of, and they had spoken briefly like strangers, parted like strangers. What was surprising was that she hardly felt surprised at all.

Owen walked on Sundays. That was all she knew. Perhaps he had someplace to go. Perhaps not. And now it was as if this tiny fact of his walking was all she knew about him. The slate of his life was clean, emptied in an instant. Who had she been living with all this time?

It was snowing. The snow fell in wet gobs outside the cab's windows. The city brightened as night fell, until, through the fogged windows of Rose's cab, it looked as if it were lit by candles.

Owen walked. It was not an activity; it was a condition. For miles, in thick boots, over the length of an island, he walked. He had no destination. His destination was a circle. He walked so that when he arrived home, to the warm light of the living room and the smell of dinner, these things would seem real to him, home would seem real. He walked to ward off the encroaching panic of a wet Sunday, an apartment about to be lost, a life nearing the beginning of its end. When he walked, he stopped only at newsstands. He observed the covers of the pornographic magazines, scrutinizing them without sentiment. It was a rotten day to be outdoors. Young men still wearing pajamas under their coats dashed from under awnings to grab copies of the Sunday paper. Others lingered on street corners or leaned against walls—prostitutes and hustlers, drug peddlers, hare krishna, anyone for sale or with something to sell—while the buyers wandered, circling their targets, searching faces for the proper nod, wink, smile. The signal. Owen was an expert at Sundays. He recognized the traps.

For years he had felt safe only in his apartment, only with Rose. But now everything had turned around. The apartment was the place where he was afraid. Unidentifiable dangers lurked in the corners, waiting to spring. Static electricity clung to the walls, the bedspread, the sofa. He could not touch his fingers to any surface without risking a tiny shock. Worst of all, the threat was obscure. It hid like a coward, refused to show its face. He could not name it. He grew so anxious he had to flee into the open placelessness of the city, where, if not safety, he found at least the company of other scared strangers. There was a brotherhood of middle-aged men who wandered on Sunday afternoons, looking at one another gravely across streets, never nodding. They shuffled past Owen on the sidewalks, the shoulders of their trenchcoats brushing his. They emerged at dusk from empty office buildings and hailed cabs. All of them had hats bent over their faces, downcast eyes suggesting secrets. They all had secrets. And yet Owen at least was getting tired of his. Yes, if anyone asked him now, he'd tell all, though it would do him no good anymore; he'd tell for spite. But no one asked him. Not even Rose seemed to suspect anything of him; he had stood right in front of her just this afternoon, staring her in the face with it, and she hadn't seen it. He had thought he might have to turn away from the stupid confusion in her eyes then, the way they went blank and her mouth twitched. She had struggled for words. Such effort, and all for nothing! Why bother? Why not shout it out right then and there, in the street? After all, as soon as they were evicted from their apartment they would be street people anyway. Already they wandered the city separately, as if in preparation for the oncoming solitary poverty in which they'd soon start to run into each other: he unshaven, his clothes rotting, sleeping in men's shelters, eating soup made from potato peelings; Rose scraggly-haired and dirty, her legs covered with sores. They'd be on line at the lice clinic, waiting to be shampooed and shaved, and Owen, thinking he recognized her, would say, "Excuse me—Rose? Is that you, Rose?" And slowly she would emerge from her stupor, turn and look at him, her skin sallow and smeared with filth, her lips cracked, as his were, hair greasy; should he go on? He could go on, he knew, coloring in the details of their ruin. To make themselves into such creatures—that would be triumphant! That would be a spit in the face of this life.