The Lost Language of Cranes (41 page)

"Don't worry about it. I'll see you soon. Goodbye."

They hung up. "What happened?" Brad asked, putting his arms around Philip in the strange light.

"I have to go," Philip said. He pulled himself out of the bed, grabbed for his clothes.

"What's wrong?" Brad asked. "Where's your father?"

"He's at a Burger King. All he told me was that he and my mother have 'separated,' whatever the hell that means at one in the morning."

"Separated!"

"That's what I said."

"Jesus."

Philip pulled on his pants, reached for a shirt. "Look," Brad said, "I'll go with you."

"Brad, you don't have to do that."

"I don't care, I'll go with you."

"I think," Philip said as he put on his socks and shoes, "I think I should go there by myself."

Brad sat back on the bed, against the wall, and closed his eyes. From the top of the dresser Philip gathered his wallet, change, and keys and stuffed them in his pockets. "Do you need money for a cab?" Brad asked.

"No, I've got it."

Brad stood up, put on his bathrobe, and walked Philip to the door.

"Well," Philip said, "goodbye," and laughed, still not quite believing that ten minutes out of sleep he was leaving Brad and going uptown to save his father.

"Goodbye," Brad said. Spontaneously, without thought, they kissed for the first time, long and lovingly, then stood there in the doorway, embracing, their eyes shut tightly. "I don't want to leave," Philip said. "I feel safe here. I really want more than anything else to stay here with you, Brad."

"I'll be here," Brad said.

"Thanks," Philip said. "If I don't come back, it's only because I can't. Well, here I go, out into the wild blue yonder." He zipped his jacket, kissed Brad again. Then he unlatched the door and slipped out through the crack of the opening. He moved quietly on the stairs, not wanting to wake anyone.

Outside the street was empty, dark save for the light of a single lamp.

In the cab, speeding uptown, Philip felt strangely giddy, almost drugged. He hugged himself for warmth and leaned back against the stained seat, forcing his eyes wide open to wake himself. He was remembering a night early in his childhood when he'd woken up sweaty and retching, and his parents had had to take him to the emergency room. A fresh snow had fallen, and sitting in the cab he recalled how strange he'd felt as he was carried from sleep out into the world, still in his pajamas, wrapped in blankets. Rose, wearing her nightgown under a coat, held him under the awning of their apartment building while Owen raced up and down the silent, bright midnight avenue, searching for a cab. Snow fell perpetually through that memory, even in the little examining room in the hospital where the doctor gave him a suppository; snow, and with it an unspeakable dread. He didn't believe the world would ever be the same again after that; and he assumed that every night of his life, snow would fall in huge drifts, and death would be close at hand. Tonight it came back—that fearful sense of unreality, as if he was a spectre in someone else's dream. His own capacity for feeling was so heightened that he felt like one of those children bruised into allergic shock by the mere touch of the natural universe. Everything frightened him. Turning to look out the window, he was confronted with the familiar West Side skyline—darker now, since almost every light was out. The city had always seemed huge to him from this vantage point, and it still seemed huge, but now it was not so much a place where anything might happen as a landscape he might get lost in, disappearing forever the way people seemed to be constantly disappearing in this city.
Posters
were put up, rewards offered; people posited theories, claimed to have seen their friends wandering, ghosts, on West Street. A divinity school student, a secretary, a Korean immigrant who spoke no English—all gone without a trace. He imagined himself among them now, his own face staring, like theirs, from the makeshift posters on cafe walls, in the subways.

The cab turned up Broadway, where neon-lit signs still blazed above closed stores, and a few men huddled under awnings. A huge streetcleaning machine was crawling along the other side of the avenue like a strange nocturnal animal, blackening the pavement with water. The cab turned again, then came to a stop outside his building. "Thanks," he said, paying the driver, who roared back downtown without a word. Now he was alone. Only a few lights glowed, dim and yellow, in the windows of the tenements, the only sound the distant humming of the streetcleaner, blocks away.

He walked slowly up the steps into the squalid little entryway and found Owen there in his trenchcoat, squatting on the ground, his eyes closed. "Dad?" he said.

Owen jumped up. "Philip," he said, "I must have fallen asleep." He smiled. His eyes were red, swollen. A tiny track of dried blood ran from a crack in his lower lip down his chin.

"Thanks for coming, son," Owen said.

"Let's go inside," Philip said, and fished for his keys. "You must be cold."

Again Owen smiled. They went in, climbed the yellow flights of stairs to Philip's apartment. He hadn't cleaned the place up in a while, and a fusty odor of dirty clothes hung in the air. "Let me open some windows, air the place out," Philip said.

But Owen said, "Don't do anything on my account." He took off his coat, hung it up on a hook in the kitchen. "Take anything you want from the refrigerator," Philip said as he pulled sheets off the bed to re-make it.

"Oh, don't do that. I fully intend to sleep on the floor."

"Dad—"

"No," Owen said. "I insist." He walked to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a cardboard carton of orange juice. "Check the date," Philip cautioned. "It could be bad."

Owen opened the carton and smelled it. "I'm afraid so." He laughed. Then he pulled off his jacket and tie and sat down on Philip's sofa to remove his shoes. Then he pulled off his socks, and Philip saw his father's pale ankles, lined with thick red grooves that mirrored the pattern of the socks. They were blue socks; a few inky spots of sweat stained Owen's toes. "I should have thought to bring a change of clothes," he said. "But I'll just go back and change after I know Rose has left for work."

"That seems like a good idea," Philip said. He took a pair of pajamas from a drawer and carried them modestly into the bathroom to change. When he came out, he saw his father leaning over himself, with his head close to the ground, staring at the floor.

"Dad," he said.

Owen didn't answer.

"Are you feeling bad?"

Owen lifted his head, gave a weak smile. "I don't know, son," he said. "I guess I'm just confused. This is the first time in years I've spent a night anywhere besides with your mother, at home. Sometimes—I just don't know myself anymore."

Philip looked at the ground. "I'm sorry the orange juice is bad," he said. "But I have some very good apple-apricot juice. You'll like it."

"Thanks, son, no."

"Okay." Philip turned to look out the window. "So—do you want to tell me what happened?"

Owen didn't move. He sat on the old sofa, breathing audibly. "I'm not sure," he said quietly, "how much you've figured out this last week about me."

"What do you mean?"

He was quiet. "I'm a homosexual," he said. "I'm a homosexual, too."

Philip stared at the neat rows of garbage cans in the alley, listened to the hiss of the radiator.

"Does that news surprise you, son?"

"No, not really," Philip said. His eyes began suddenly to tear. "It's just I—I guess I never let myself see it before."

"We said the same thing to you, remember, your mother and I?"

"Yes." He was shivering violently, but he could not bring himself to move from the window. He wrapped his arms around his waist, ground his teeth to keep them from chattering, tried to will himself into stillness.

"Did you tell Mom tonight? Is that what happened?" he managed to ask.

Owen shrugged. "More or less. She's had it pretty much figured out since the night you came home to tell us about yourself. So it was just a matter of talking about it."

"And how does she feel?"

"Confused," Owen said. "And angry." His voice grew soft. "She said she thought I made a fool of myself with Winston tonight, that I embarrassed her. Did you think that?"

"Dad," Philip said, "I hope you don't think because I told Mom what you'd said about Winston—that—"

Owen shook his head. "Don't worry. She knew already." He looked away. "I really hope I didn't give myself away like that. If so—I don't know how I'll ever be able to face—how I'll ever—"

"Winston wasn't embarrassed at all. He told me in the car on the way home that he had a wonderful time tonight."

"He did?"

"Yes. He likes you a lot, Dad; he thinks you're great. So don't worry."

Owen smiled in spite of himself. "Well, that's a bit of a relief," he said. "But Rose." He sighed. "I don't know what's going to happen, Philip—if we'll stay together, if we'll separate. One minute she's so angry, the next so—sad, so weak."

Philip hugged himself tighter. He counted the garbage cans out the window, counted the windows of the tenement across the alley.

"You're probably wondering," Owen said, "how long I've known. And the answer is, like you, all my life. But when I was growing up, things were different, Philip. Oh, some people managed, I suppose, even though it meant sacrificing your family, your career—everything. It was a disease, you see. So I married your mother and hoped it would go away. I really did hope that. Those first few years I tried so hard. But the problem was sex. I—I couldn't have an orgasm without fantasizing about men, and I had to have an orgasm, or else your mother, she would have—do you mind me telling you all this?"

Philip shook his head, kept counting.

"And then," Owen said, "we moved to New York." He paused, took a breath. "Suddenly there was this huge homosexual world, open and enticing. Or maybe it had always been there, and I was finally ready to start looking for it." He gave a long, low sigh of pain. "I've never talked about this, do you realize that? Fifty-two years old. This is the first time in my life I've admitted it that's not over the phone. My God. My God."

He was silent. Philip closed his eyes and prayed he wouldn't cry, that his father wouldn't cry. He braced himself against the window, knowing he must keep control, knowing he must not stop his father no matter how much he wanted to. What had started had become inevitable; it was as if Owen were giving birth to something with his words, something that was determined to fight its way out of him.

Owen began to talk then, and it was as if he couldn't stop. "I started going to the Bijou and other porn theatres when I was thirty," he said. "Boy, was I scared the first time I went—but also excited. Because what those men were doing on that screen—that was what I wanted to do, what I'd always wanted to do. And they did it so naturally, so willingly. They weren't shy or scared. They weren't worrying about whether it was wrong. It's strange, but those porn films were kind of healing for me. Everyone thinks pornography is alienating, and I guess it is, but for a man who's as scared as I was—well, it was telling me what I felt wasn't so wrong, and that I wasn't alone in feeling it. They were saying, Don't push it out of your mind. Revel in it. Celebrate it." He smiled. "The way those men made love," he said, "there was rebellion in their eyes. That meant something to me, Philip, it really did. So I got braver. I started to meet men at the Bijou, have sex with them. Not much at first. But then, over time, more and more until I'd done everything—or at least, everything you could do in a public place. And all without a word, without an exchange of names, isn't that incredible? Not once. Afterwards I'd feel so guilty I'd just run out of there and swear I'd never go back. I'd go every Sunday and every Sunday I'd come back and see Rose and just want to kill myself, I felt so bad for what I was doing to her. All week I'd swear I wouldn't go back. But then Sunday would roll around again, and I just couldn't control it. Do you see?" he asked. "I really couldn't control it. That was why I was so curious when you told me you'd gone to the Bijou. I thought, What if we were there at the same time? If I'd ever run into you there, Philip—well, I don't know what I would have done. I just assumed from the beginning that you would hate me, renounce me as your father if you ever found out. Maybe that's why I was so distant, as a father, all those years. Maybe I was thinking, If he doesn't really know me that well, it won't be so much of a blow when he learns the truth." He laughed bitterly. "It was horrible, really, what I was feeling, the sense I had that I was running a terrible risk every minute of my life—risking my family, my career—but not being able to help it; somehow just not being able to help it. I was thinking every day how I had to change my life, how I couldn't go on this way; but I knew the more I thought that, the farther I was getting from where I thought I should have been. It was as if I was fighting the wrong thing, fighting my life with Rose when I should have been fighting the homosexual stuff. But it was out of my hands by then. The more I thought about the possibility of loving a man, the more I couldn't go back to my life with Rose, and yet I couldn't bear the Bijou anymore, just couldn't bear it. And then you
came
home, with your news." He smiled. "I was so shocked," he said. "I'd never imagined you might be gay, I guess because I was so caught up in thinking how I'd tell my straight son the truth about me. Everything you said terrified me, but it also inspired me, I guess, gave me incentive. That night, I realized I couldn't go back to the way things were. Good or bad, I was too far gone. And after that—well, it was just a matter of time before Rose saw it. I'd let my guard down. I guess subconsciously I must have wanted her to find out, because I stopped covering my tracks. It was so easy, not having to cover my tracks. So blissfully easy."

He was silent. "I'm sorry I'm talking so much," he said. "I know it's very late. You probably have to go to bed. I won't talk anymore."

"Dad, don't be silly," Philip said. He looked at the clock and saw it was already close to three. Sleep was no longer a possibility anyway.