Free The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Page A

choice, in the case of these twins, was the choice that was made. The language had to die. It's the integration of those little girls which is pertinent—that, and what was lost with it."
    She sighed, and Eliot slid the eggs from the pan onto a plate. Philip was looking at her with confusion and curiosity, and she wondered why she always ended up in this position, explaining herself to Eliot's lovers. How odd and foolish she must sound to Philip, the perpetual graduate student lost in the fog of her obscure interests, without perspective on larger matters of the "real world."
    Eliot she loved. When her writing was going badly, he came to her, his voice that of a mother assuring her ugly-duckling daughter that love will soon blossom in her path. "It'll come," he'd say, rubbing her shoulders as she wept at the typewriter. "It'll come."
    She herself had no lover. She considered her work enough of a lover—sometimes gentle and comradely, sometimes fickle, elusive, frustrating, sometimes bringing her to unimagined heights of gratification, or reducing her to rage and inarticulate despair. Occasionally, on the days of rage and inarticulate despair, she put on her leather jacket and ventured uptown to an elegant women's disco called Shescape, and there she stood against a wall, a lit cigarette in her hand, and waited. Usually the women looked at her first. Because she was both very tall and very black, they almost always expected her to take control, to do with them what she would, and this saddened her; once in a while she would have liked to have given up that control to someone else. Still, she fulfilled their fantasies, even binding one girl's small wrists with ribbon when she asked her to. And then in the mornings she would ride the subway home, tiptoe into the apartment, where Eliot lay utterly still in his close, fetid room. Nothing stirred him. She showered, changed her clothes, and headed to the library, where the work—object of her true passion—awaited her, and after a few hours came home to find the apartment steamy from the shower, and Eliot, wrapped in a towel, shaving.
    "How did the night go?"
    "Okay," she'd say. "Yours?"
    "The same. I went to a stupid party in SoHo, and then to the Palladium. Danced a lot."
    She enjoyed standing there on those afternoons, watching him shave. After he finished, they'd sometimes head downstairs to the Indian restaurant run by their neighbors and dip strange breads in hot curries. He was often and casually in love, and talked about it over these dinners. "His name is Philip."
    "What's he like?"
    "Oh—bright-eyed, eager to please.Very sweet, very unsure of himself. I met him through Sally—you know, that girl who works at Goldman, Sachs?"
    "Do you love him? " Jerene asked.
    Eliot smiled. "No, alas."
    "But he loves you."
    "Yes."
    "Yes."
    In the oncoming dark she walked with him through the streets of the East Village. Invariably he had some social engagement he had to get to. She kissed his cheek and headed home. During the evenings she read eighteenth-century novels no one had ever heard of, except on Saturdays, when without fail she watched "The Facts of Life" on Eliot's little television. She was asleep by the time he got home. Sometimes, in the mornings, she'd find strange socks in the bathroom, or contact lenses boiling on the kitchen stove, and know he had brought someone home.
    Once she startled a naked young man in the toilet, and he practically screamed.
    "Sorry," she said, backing away and closing the door.
    In a few minutes he came out, sheepish, wrapped in a towel. "I'm Philip," he said.
    "Nice to meet you, Philip. I'm Jerene, Eliot's roommate."
    "He told me. He's still asleep."
    "Go back to bed," Jerene said. "You look exhausted."
    "We were out really late," he said, and smiled, pleased and surprised to be part of a "we." "Well. It was nice to meet you."
    "It was nice to meet you, too."
    "Good night, then—or, I mean, good morning."
    "Bye."
    He pulled back the Japanese