The Lost Language of Cranes (33 page)

She was extraordinarily pale, with hair so thin and wispy it might have been woven out of sand. "Now let me get this right," she said, and her voice had grain, was sandy. "You're Philip," she said, pointing to Philip. "And you're Brad."

"That's right," Philip said. He worried he might call her Sandy.

She smiled and reached out her hand. "Well, I'm glad I got that right," she said. "I'm Laura. Come on in."

Inside, the apartment was much changed. New blueberry-patterned curtains hung on the windows. A matching tablecloth covered the table, and a bright, overstuffed couch perched where Jerene's spartan cot had once been. "I'm glad you could make it," Jerene said, parting herself from the stove to kiss Philip on the cheek and introduce herself to Brad. "We're making couscous."

The strains of a melancholy song by the Roches wound through the room, along with a faint smell of incense. "My recipe," said Laura, pointing proudly to the boiling red sauce. "Taste?" She reached a wooden spoon toward Philip, and an acrid sizzle touched his lips. "Fabulous, isn't it?" Laura said. "I got the recipe from a bunch of Algerians I used to live with in Paris. But then I lost it. For years I've been trying to get it back, get it right, and tonight—" She kissed her fingers dramatically, then returned to stirring the tiny buds. She was wearing a knee-length linen dress the color of blueberry yoghurt and had a row of tiny pearls studded into each of her ears. A girl who was almost transparent in her appearance, whom you would imagine would be allergic to everything and live in a Victorian house, and spend her days doing things like rubbing sandalwood oil into the faint freckles of her skin, or crocheting flowers into curtains.

"It's wonderful sauce," Philip said. "I'm glad Jerene's got someone to cook so well for her."

"Oh, she's not so bad herself," Laura said. "Anyway, I owe Jerene a lot more than meals. I don't know if she told you, but before I met her I was living with my mother in abject misery? And every day I had to listen to her have nervous breakdowns about me—you know, 'Why don't you marry a nice boy, it just breaks my heart?'" She turned to Jerene and kissed her on the forehead. "I'm very happy to be out of there, to have a new home," she said, and Philip nodded.

If Laura's looks were Laura Wingfield—fragile and transparent as a tiny glass animal—her temperament was pure Amanda: loud and brash and indiscreet; full of hype and bombast; good-natured, loving, easy to hurt. "So how are things going with your parents, Philip?" she asked, as she handed Philip a glass of grapefruit juice. "Have they come around at all?"

Philip gulped the grapefruit juice. How did Laura know about his parents? "Well," he said.

"Up and down, huh? I know." Laura chewed a piece of ice. "The same thing was true with mine, at first. One minute all curiosity, the next they won't talk to me. I think it's a mid-life thing, ultimately, don't you?"

"I suppose so."

"I wouldn't worry," Laura went on. "I told my parents three, four years ago, and it was a rough road for a while, but now things are really fine—well, at least with my father. He's even given Jerene and me our own set of keys to his place in Bridgehampton for the summer. And that really pleases me. I mean, it makes me feel like he really cares about me, more than he cares about my being a lesbian. As for my mother—she's a different story."

Jerene and Brad now moved across the room to join them by the stove. "Jerene's just been telling me about her work on the Gay Crisis Hotline," Brad said.

"I've thought about doing that kind of thing myself," Laura said. "I think I'd be a pretty good counselor-type person; in fact, I'm thinking about it as a career. But as Jerene can tell you, I have this phone phobia. I mean, I'm terrified of the phone. I guess it's because my first stepfather, when I was little, was kind of a sicko—he never molested me or anything, but he used to make me talk to him on the phone while he masturbated sometimes." And suddenly a look of mortification came over her face, and she slapped her forehead. "What am I doing?" she said. "I always do this. Just interrupt and stuff myself into a conversation. I'm terribly self-involved, just Miss Self-Centered. Please forgive me. Jerene, go on and finish what you were saying."

They moved toward the living room, each bearing a steaming bowl of food. Like the kitchen, it had been transformed. Flowers hung in pots before the windows. A big brass bed stood where Eliot's futon had been curled, and next to it, a big vanity table full of makeup and perfumes and scatterings of lace. There was an Oriental rug on the floor, stuffed animals thrown here and there. The gray walls had been painted sky blue. The only thing that seemed to be the same was the old ugly radiator, silent now in the warm weather. All through the dinner Philip kept looking around the room, expecting to see something that would spark strong feeling in him, but even the most potent of his memories refused to surface. Nothing was left. Everything of the past had been buried under all the strong frippery of Laura's presence.

She told them everything. It was as if she hoped that by dumping the whole mess of herself onto them at once they might be struck, almost against their will, by the good mixed in with the nonsense. "Since I dropped out of Hampshire I've just been travelling," she explained, while Jerene scurried about, spicing things, getting salt and pepper. "I was in Morocco, in Paris, in Tangiers. Then I lived in San Francisco for a while. I was working in the women's music industry out there. I knew some sign language, so I got this job interpreting for this singer named Melissa Swallow—you know, for the deaf?" She laughed. "You should've seen me. I wore nothing but turtlenecks and hiking boots, to the dismay of my
très sophistiqués
New York parents, and lived in this communal women's house in Mill Valley and smoked a lot of grass. It was fun, but it wasn't for me, so I headed back East, and my mother—my blessed heart of a mother—got me the job at the Laura Ashley store, figuring that was one place I'd be safe. Little did she know," she said, looking up at Jerene, "who'd be walking in."

Jerene blushed.

"You know," Laura said, "when I told her, she said, 'I can't believe it. I set it up myself. Why did I get you that job?' As if it was her fault. And you know what? Sometimes I believe her. I get so sucked up in her paranoia I start to regret it myself and blame her. You see, I'm basically still a very insecure person, still searching a lot, which is what I was doing then, in San Francisco, and what I'm still doing now, I guess, which is why my mother is such a terrible influence on my life. But I feel very happy, very secure with Jerene. Almost as if I'm settled." Then she leaned confidentially toward Philip, and said, "So have you heard from Eliot lately?" She spoke in such intimate tones of "Eliot" that for a moment Philip forgot what Jerene had told him on the phone: that Laura had met Eliot only once, for about five minutes. She smiled now, eager for his confidence. It was as if, by this intimacy, she hoped to bulldoze her way into what she must have perceived to be a pre-existing group of friends—he and Eliot and Brad and Jerene. Although her impression of them as a group could not have been farther from the truth, her eagerness not to be left out touched Philip.

"Well, I got a letter," he said.

"You did?" asked Brad. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He shrugged. "I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, that's all," he said. "It wasn't a big-deal letter. He just said he'd been travelling, but now he's settled in Paris. He says he has a nice, depressed boyfriend with a strange name. I can't remember what."

Laura swallowed a bite of couscous to clear her mouth for talking. "Thierry," she said.

"Yes," said Philip. "That's it. How did you know?"

She smiled. "I set them up," she said proudly.

Philip gazed at her. "You set them up?"

"Well, sort of. Remember I told you I used to live in Paris, with a bunch of Algerians? Well, Thierry was lovers with one of them, Mustapha, for a while. He lived with his mother in Neuilly or someplace like that. Anyway, we got to be friends, and we stayed friends even after he and Mustapha broke up and I'd moved out of the apartment. So when Eliot told me he was going to Paris, of course I gave him Thierry's number, never in a million years expecting—" She gestured vaguely with her hands, and swallowed another mouthful of couscous.

"Oh," Philip said. He looked at the table, and Jerene, seeing his crestfallen face, added, "I don't think it's really all that serious, Philip, r mean, Eliot doesn't even know how long he'll be in Paris." She looked at him earnestly. He appreciated that she cared. Still, he was embarrassed to be caught mooning like that. He no longer wished to call attention to his old grief, now that he was finally getting over it—especially in front of Brad.

"Jerene," he said, "you're very sweet to be so kind to me. But it really isn't necessary. You can tell me the truth, I'm not going to freak out. Eliot told me himself that he was going to be moving in with Thierry for a while, and I think that's just fine. I hope they're very happy, I hope it works out. He's getting on with his life, and I realize, now, that I've got to get on with mine."

"It looks to me like you're doing that already," Laura said. She glanced significantly at Philip, then at Brad, then at Philip again.

"Married life," Laura said, "is the greatest." And faking Jerene's hand, she held it on the table. Jerene was sitting straight up, her back like a board. She looked like the tin woodsman of Oz. "For Jerene and me, it's been a healing kind of process. For instance—I'm trying to convince her to go and talk to her parents. We've even done some research. Tell them, Jerene."

Jerene laughed nervously. "Well," she said, "I went and saw my grandmother the other day—it was the first time in years."

"Oh, Jerene," Philip said. "That's wonderful. Was it okay? I mean, was it a good thing, was she happy to see you?"

Jerene nodded. "It was very sad," she said. "Of course, she didn't know anything. She's pretty out of it to begin with, and besides, she hardly speaks to my parents, hardly has any more of a relationship with them than I do. She barely knew anything about me, she's been in this nursing home so long. It isn't a bad place, but I think she's lonely." Jerene smiled. "You can't imagine how scared I was going in there. It was the first time I'd had contact with my family for six years."

"The next step," Laura said, "is going to be a letter, from Jerene to her parents, telling them she's seeing her grandmother and insisting they come and visit her. Because you see, in this case, it's not just Jerene and her parents—it's the whole family. A whole history of disownment, of children rejecting parents and parents rejecting children. I think about this a lot, because of my plans to get my degree in family counseling. For instance, I've been reading up lately in systems theory, and I really think there's a lot to it. What's happened to Jerene—well, it's all part of a family system which is unique. In my family, disownment wasn't even something people thought about. But damn it, here I go again, blathering on about myself. Please forgive me. Let me ask: Did you ever worry about being disowned?"

"Oh, no," Philip said. And Brad said: "Certainly not in my case. My parents are very supportive."

"Which means," Laura said, "that we've all got to be supportive of Jerene in this, because she doesn't have that support; And she needs it."

They all looked at Jerene, who got up, went into the kitchen, and returned with a large multi-hued salad. Laura tossed and distributed it. "So how long have you two been involved?" she asked casually as she finished, and Brad and Philip both choked.

"Well—"

"I mean, we've known each other—"

"The fact is, we're not really involved, in a traditional way. We're just good friends," Philip said.

"Aha." Laura leaned back in her chair.

"Friends," Philip repeated.

"I understand," Laura said. "Of course. But—romantic friends, perhaps?" For this last phrase, she affected a clipped, mock-British accent, batted her eyelashes, stretched her lips thin.

"You might say that."

"So," Jerene said, "has anyone here heard the new Ferron album?"

Everyone had. They discussed it as, for a half an hour or so, the dinner wound itself down. It was like a ride through an amusement park fun house, lurching along through narrow corridors of frenzied display, then suddenly finding yourself at the end, ejected, dizzy on the cold street, a little sick to your stomach.

"She is something," Brad said.

Philip nodded.

"And your friend Jerene seems nice, too, though I guess she didn't have a chance to talk much."

"Oh, she's like that," Philip said. "She's always very quiet with company. Listen, do you want to have a cup of coffee or something?"

Brad was silent. In the light of Laura's coy questioning, anything could sound like a proposition. Anything. And, miserably, Philip remembered the evening last month when he had tried to say "Anything" seductively, and made a fool of himself.

"I mean at the Kiev," he added.

Brad shrugged. "I think I'm probably too tired," he said. "I kind of want to get home."

"I understand," Philip said. "I'm tired, too." He paused. "You know, I couldn't believe it when she asked us how long we'd been seeing each other. I felt very embarrassed. I'm mentioning it only because I don't want you to think that I said anything to her, that I suggested—"

"Philip," Brad said. "Of course not. Don't worry about it." He seemed annoyed.

"No," Philip said. "Of course not. I shouldn't have said anything."

Silently they moved on toward Brad's building, Philip remembering that uncomfortable night back when it had still been winter. Now a warm breeze blew. They walked ungloved, unhatted, without umbrellas. And Philip thought how nice it must be to be able, like Eliot, just to take off from a place you've come to call home, to eject yourself from the complex and dangerous network of friends, lovers, apartments, to sever all ties and leap into the startling newness of the unknown. Sometimes he tried to imagine doing it, just buying a ticket somewhere, say, to Paris, and going there, and he could almost feel the shock, the relief of knowing no one, smelling strange smells, feeling new breezes. But then he would remember that he hardly knew the language, that he had no friends to stay with in Paris; he would realize that once there, he'd have to begin again a ceaseless cycle of worrying—about laundry, about eating out alone and being mistreated by the waiters, about finding a boyfriend. Such concerns apparently didn't faze Eliot. He knew people everywhere, always had places to stay. And once again Philip envisioned Eliot in a trenchcoat, riding on a fast-moving train through some unspeakably beautiful landscape, with no luggage; he was standing on a sort of old-fashioned caboose balcony, the wind blowing through his hair. Probably he was going to Venice. Philip imagined Eliot and his lover, Thierry, riding a gondola through a jade-colored canal, strange, barnacle-caked towers rising above them on all sides. Some people left, some were left; it seemed the world required the two extremes, for balance. There would be no refuge in travel for Philip; he was too much of a coward for adventure, too yoked to routine and familiar comforts. Doomed, Eliot had said. Perhaps that was what he meant, as he sat writing in that dusty room in the Fifth, smelling "that Paris smell." Perhaps he was simply thinking of his own good fortune, and he had written "doomed," and added "to happiness" to cut the cruelty.