The Lost Language of Cranes (7 page)

R
OSE TOLD
P
HILIP
a story. A woman from her office had gone with her husband on a cruise around the world, a dream second honeymoon, and they had gotten off the ship to spend a day on the island of Crete. Somewhere in the course of that hot afternoon spent bargaining for trinkets and staring at ruins in the sun, a delivery boy rode a rusty Solex around a blind corner andinto that woman's husband, knocking him against the street and killing him. In a split second, the husband, who only moments before had been worrying to her about the squat toilets, was dead, gone, out of the world twenty years too early, on a day trip they had debated not making, on an island they had no ties with and would never again visit in their lives. Then that woman was a widow, and she was being escorted by two policemen to a cool, dark office, sat face to face opposite the pimple-faced killer, a boy of fourteen who shook and wept and cried out in Greek, "Don't kill me! Don't kill me!" It was funny, the woman told Rose, but sitting there, her first instinct had been to go over and put her arms around the boy and tell him everything was all right. But she didn't. A man with a mustache that extended from earlobe to earlobe asked her questions in an English she could hardly understand. What could she tell him? Her husband had wanted to stay on the ship because his stomach was bothering him; that fish last night, she'd warned him against it.
She
was curious about the shopping. He came with her at the last minute, on the spur of the moment. Of course, somewhere she still believed it hadn't happened at all, because it shouldn't have; it was all too fast, and nobody's fault. His clothes were still in the closet of their cabin, the soap still wet from the last time he'd washed his hands. Only as she approached the ship that afternoon, escorted by the captain and the cruise director, and the whistle blew, a high, piercing wail against which she had to cover her ears, did the protective membrane burst, making her cry out as loudly (she thought) as the ship's horn cried out, announcing that departure was imminent, and she must leave him there forever.

Rose told Philip this story one afternoon when he was sitting in her kitchen, eating cake and looking distracted. She said that the woman had told it over and over to everyone at the office, as if by perpetual telling she might find some logic that would prove once and for all that this death couldn't have been avoided. And there lay the horror of it. All it had taken was one wrong move, one wrong step. If they had browsed a bit longer at the little store, if they had crossed the street a bit faster, it wouldn't have happened. The boy couldn't have known; it wasn't his fault. If anyone was to blame, it was the city, for not installing a proper stoplight, but cities—particularly foreign cities—were generally indifferent to grief and sorrow.

Rose finished. Philip looked at her respectfully. "I hardly know what to say," he said, and went back to the piece of cake she'd put before him. What was there to say? In fact, the story didn't seem nearly as awful to Philip as it did to his mother. Chance made sense to him, more sense than cause. He believed that all the turnings of life, including its turn into death, were purely arbitrary; and he felt wiser than Rose, who was as bewildered by the meanderings that had led her to where she sat now, alive, as she was by the leisurely steps that had brought a stranger to be hurled against the ancient stones of that faraway street. Of course, such feelings were a new phenomenon for him, and had entirely to do with Eliot. Before Eliot, Philip had lived so long without physical love that he believed it to be the only thing in the world he needed. He had fluctuated from one extreme to another, and this, he believed, put him in a very different position from that of his mother, who had, as far as Philip could see, dwelled for years in that middle ground between emptiness and fulfillment, a realm where contentment and despair coexist as dual sensations so similar, and so faint, that they become impossible to distinguish, like the hiss of the radiator and the hum of the dishwasher.

This Sunday, she arrived home from her voyage downtown wet and disoriented, pulled off her raincoat and clothes, stumbled into the shower, and stood there under the rush of steam and water until she was warm again. Then she dusted herself with lavender-scented powder, put on a long, loose bathrobe, and sat: down in her favorite chair to read.

A few minutes into her book she looked at the clock. It was nearly dinnertime, and still Owen wasn't home. She could not quite believe that she had run into him this afternoon, that she had spoken with him as if he were a passing acquaintance. It was as if someone else had been living with her all those years, eating dinner with her, sleeping in her bed, and raising her child. Owen had been replaced; he had replaced himself, gone somewhere else. Or perhaps it was Rose who was gone, Rose who had been walking entranced or asleep for twenty years and was just waking up to discover, like an invalid emerging from a coma, how much time had actually passed. Twenty-seven years.

She put her book away, settled down on the sofa, and turned 0n the television. A nurse who was gentle and kindly the last time Rose had watched the series had become, over a month's interval, a psychopathic murderer. Rose was confused. She tried to follow the story line, to figure out what had happened to the nurse; but where was Owen? To her surprise, she found herself wishing more than anything that it had not happened, that she might relive the day and take another route, miss seeing Owen. But of course it had happened, she had seen him. The strangeness of the meeting altered things; she could not concentrate, and remembered the years of Sunday nights watching television, so taken for granted, as precious and rare.

The television show was getting out of hand, so Rose switched it off, stood up, and walked to the window. Outside, the wind blew the hat off a woman on the street, who ran after it, past a bus, a cab, onto the sidewalk. She thought, Really, you're exaggerating. It hasn't been
that
long. For the first fourteen years or so, anyway, Philip was growing up, they had a child to occupy them. Maybe five years Owen had been gone, at most. And certainly, there had been moments when a great desire for change welled up in Rose, moments when, as she had long ago read in Proust (and she always, always remembered), the heartstrings yearn to be plucked at any cost, the soul tires of contentment, the body craves any kind of change, even decimation, even death. During those rare episodes of wanting, Rose had always looked to someone else, not to Owen. Could that have been it? she wondered now. It had all happened years ago, and besides, he could never have found out; she covered her tracks. But what if he did know? What if he knew, and had decided, rather than leave her outright, simply to disappear, and see if she noticed? And had she noticed? Not until today.

There was a familiar rattling noise at the door. Owen's key was a copy of a copy of a copy and didn't quite fit the lock; he always had to fiddle with it a few seconds before he could get the door open. For years he had been muttering about getting a new key made, and for years Rose had had a joke with him about what a convenient signal the rattling noise was when she was in bed with the doorman and had to shunt him quickly out the service entrance. Owen never got the key fixed, enjoying a little, she suspected, the secret knowledge he had acquired of its quirks and nuances.

The door opened. Owen's raincoat dripped onto the carpet. He took his Totes hat and held it gingerly over the doormat, and bits of slush dropped to the floor. Only then did he look up and notice Rose, who had stood up from her chair and immediately sat down again.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello," he said.

"My God, you're wet," she said. "Did you walk all the way home?" Then she caught her breath. Without ever intending to, she had acknowledged their meeting, that strange, numb moment on the street which had seemed to take place on the threshold of another life.

"Yes, I did," Owen said. "I don't know why... I felt like it, for no particular reason."

"Give me your coat," Rose said. She began unbuttoning, and Owen's hand dodged into the coat pocket, closed around the small, well-creased wedge of paper, and pulled it out as the coat pulled away from him into Rose's hands. Surreptitiously he replaced it in his pants pocket. His hand remained there, fondling it, re-creasing the edges.

Rose was taking his coat. He felt a sudden stab of guilt, watching her, recognizing as if for the first time in years all the good she had done him, their comfortable life together, this home built to the precise measurements of their compatibility.

"Thanks," he said. He could hardly say, "I'm sorry," though he wanted to. He tried to think how many Sundays he had done just this—come back from one or another pornographic movie theatre, purged (for the moment) of a week's tension, a week's need, and imagined that in a single afternoon the hell had been flushed from his life. Safe at home, he would feel the sort of relief that a child feels when he commits some act of petty theft and is not caught. He would think of the risk he had taken, contemplate the danger of the situation, and nestle in the absolute safety of his chair, with his book, his cake. Yet each week, it seemed, the hell would begin creeping back a little earlier, after just a day, an evening, an hour. With it came desire of a sort he had never imagined possible, and the only thing that kept him from going back to the theatre during the week was his immense fear of being seen. He would wait until Sunday, a day he figured was somehow hallowed, and therefore safe. He allowed himself Sundays. Yet each Sunday night, returning home, he would wonder how much longer he could keep this up. First he had been satisfied with the films alone; then a quick hand-job in the back row; then, over the years, being sucked, sucking, fingers up his anus; once, a muffled attempt at penetration. Sometimes his repulsion at his own actions was so great that he would find himself spitting onto the sidewalk, over and over, desperate to get that taste out of his mouth. Each week he wanted more.

He stood in the hall while Rose hung his coat over the towel rack in the bathroom. He wrapped his arms around himself and thought: Alex Melchor. It amazed him to discover, after all this time, that he still had the capacity to feel joy, and his pleasure at feeling pleasure was itself such a remarkable sensation that in the end the actual note really didn't mean that much. Anyway, he reminded himself, things were as bad as ever. He and Rose still had to make a decision about the apartment. Nothing had changed. No, everything was as it had been. And as he repeated those words to himself, his hand felt inside his pocket and stroked the note. It had frightened him at first. On the way back he had had to duck into a coffee shop and wait until he was sure no one was looking before he dared unfold it and re-read it. It really did say what he thought it had said. There really was a phone number—he had already memorized it in case he should lose the note—although still, the idea of actually dialing the number was inconceivable. He was taking great pleasure, as he stood there, creating mathematical patterns out of the seven digits, figuring out keys to memory, adding and subtracting and multiplying.

He walked into the bathroom and said, "Rose." She turned from where she stood, startled, and looked at him. He was smiling at her.

"My Rose," he said, and embraced her. He wanted suddenly to tell her all about this man, this Alex Melchor, this number the first three digits of which added up to the same sum as the last lour digits. He wished she were his friend, his confidante. Such absurd urges to confess had come on him before, however, and he had learned to control them. She was his wife. And thinking of Alex Melchor, his hand, his eyeglasses, Owen was taken by sudden desire; he bent and kissed her. Then he pulled away. "It was nice running into you today," he said.

"Yes," she said. "Funny, wasn't it?" She went back to hanging his coat on the towel rack.

"I'll be in the living room," he said, walking away from her. Well, he thought, perhaps I've gone to that movie theatre for the last time. He smiled at that thought, remembering the first time—the horror he had felt, the sudden stab of realization that he was, as he had always feared, a homosexual. And what had he done? He had gone flying out of that theatre and straightaway practically raped poor Rose on the living room couch, trying to see her, only her, to force the images from that screen out of his mind. But when he came, it was men he was thinking of, even though he said, "Rose, Rose," and she answered him, "Yes, I'm here, I'm here. I won't let you go." That he had lied to her—that he had built a marriage with her on the basis of a sexual lie—was a regret of such magnitude that he could not get around it; it was therefore one which, at this moment, he chose to ignore. For years, after all, he had told himself that if someone were to ask him, pursue him, if someone were to give him a chance, he would take it. He'd never imagined it would actually happen; he was, after all, a married man, completely heterosexual in the eyes of the world. Now it had. The chance lay in his pocket. Someone named Alex Melchor desired him. It would be simple. He would call. He would call and say—oh, never mind what he would say. He moved across the living room, sat down in his chair, took up his book. He knew he could live off this possibility just as a possibility for a long time; he knew it could keep him going for days now, because a starving man has a different notion of plenty.