The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online

gestures, not play-acting, but somehow the men he slept with found the idea of being loved by him laughable. Wide-eyed in his infatuations, he had made a fool of himself in college, proclaiming his affections too publicly and scaring away whoever it was he had a crush on. Rejection seemed his lot in life. Most Friday nights he ended up at the local gay bar, where graduate students smelling of hydrogen sulphide would lure him to their rooms with dirty talk, pull out old jockstraps, and go to work recreating the Urbana High School locker room, circa 1977.
    In college he had come out late, but with a bang. He was earnestly political, and felt guilty for his years of closetedness, as if somehow he had been personally responsible for the oppression of untold numbers of gay men and women. To make up for the enormity of his cowardice, he told everyone he knew, sometimes approaching near-strangers on the streets of the campus and saying, "Hi—I just wanted to let you know, I'm gay!" to which the bewildered respondent, usually a serious-minded female graduate student who was still trying to remember his name, would stutter something like, "Oh—how nice for you!" smile, and turn away.
    As a child, he had been solitary and quiet, and often—particularly on windy afternoons when the stores and the streets filled up with warm, yellow midtown light—New York itself had seemed his best companion. But now, when he and his friends got together, in dark candlelit West Side apartments, or Indian restaurants draped with tapestries, or huge, crowded nightclubs, he rarely felt that familiarity the city had once offered him. Instead he and his friends got together to be alone together, to smoke cigarettes and commiserate on their lack of boyfriends or girlfriends, to ease the anxiety of their solitary lives with talk and vodka. His evenings with his friends would run a predictable course, and then they would all say goodnight and go home alone to tiny apartments with one window, or big apartments full of closed doors, or perhaps (on particularly bad nights) to bars, where warmth or a human touch is cheaper. They travelled in loosely formed packs, friends from work and their friends and their friends, and roommates thrown into intimacy by ads in the Voice, two in one bedroom or three in two bedrooms or four in three bedrooms. They were all on the prowl, in the market, on the lookout, and had the thin, questing aspect of people desperate to find lovers. Often Philip wondered if this urgent need wasn't the very thing that scared lovers off. It seemed to him a grave injustice that in New York, to get what you needed, you had above all never to look hungry. Everyone was hungry; but everyone else was better at hiding it. Or were they? Soon, Philip believed, he too might look unapproachable, and then, he imagined, it would only be a few short steps to being that way.
    His friend Sally was different. She was the first person Philip had ever come out to, and she had taken him in hand, sitting with him in the college dining hall and identifying who, among the men who passed, was gay (it was an astonishing number), while his leg shook violently beneath the table. Now Sally was a tax analyst. She made money and lived alone in a co-op apartment she had bought by herself, which to Philip was amazing. One night in late September she called him up and asked him to come to a dinner party she was having. "I'm trying to get a lot of people from school together," she explained. "The old gang. But there's also going to be a new person, a guy I just met. I think you'll really like him."
    Philip began to make up an excuse, but Sally interrupted him. "I'm serious," she said. "His name is Eliot Abrams, and he's just your type—tall and thin, with curly hair. And he's had a very interesting life. His parents died when he was little in some awful car crash, and he was raised in a townhouse in the Village by—are you ready for this?—Derek Moulthorp—you know, the guy