The Lost Language of Cranes Read Free

traitorous.
    The phone calls started. Real-estate agents, brokers, people who had heard from people who had heard from people. "Excuse me," the voice would say. "Am I correct that there is a five-room apartment available in this building?"
    "No, that's not true."
    "Ma'am, if there is a five-room apartment available in this building, we could be of service to you."
    "No thank you. Goodbye."
    The phone calls came more and more frequently, and later at night. If Owen was home, he'd answer sternly. Weekday evenings, when Rose got back from the office, the machine was full of little pleas.
    One Sunday, seventeen people called. Rose was irate. "This apartment is not available," she said to the eighteenth caller. "We live here. Why can't you people leave us alone? "
    "Look, listen here for a minute," the voice said. It was small and nasal. "Now I'll have you know there is a client who is looking for an apartment in your neighborhood, and will pay good money for it. But I don't care. I'm sick of being screamed at.
    All you people do is scream and scream. Well, enough. I'm quitting this stupid job. I could make better money doing anything else besides making these stupid phone calls. I've got three kids and no husband and we're living with my mother in Queens. I call you people because I have to, to feed the kids. I don't enjoy it. The least you could do is have a little understanding, a little sympathy before you start yelling."
    "Well, I'm sorry." Rose lapsed into guilt. "You must understand, though. We've been bothered very frequently. We're quiet people, and—"
    "I'm sure you're real cozy up there on the East Side. Well, you may not be for long. I know the score. Born and bred in New York, and look what it gets you. A slap in the face."
    Rose hung up, pushing the receiver down hard. She looked at the phone. Among the many things in the apartment that she took for granted, the phone suddenly seemed very special to her. It was a shade of gray you didn't see very often anymore. There were vultures out there, she decided, returning to her armchair and her reading; they were clutching the phone wires, eager to rip the phone cord out of the wall, knock the walls down, strip the apartment of its furniture and memories, re-paint it and remake it for themselves, without a thought for the life that had been interrupted, the life that had been thrown into the streets.
    Now they could buy the apartment; then they would have no savings, but they would have the apartment. That didn't seem like much of a deal to Rose, since in every way she understood they already had the apartment, had lived there twenty-one years of their lives, and continued to live there. She tried to imagine tying herself to the bed, as some elderly tenants on Central Park West had recently done, but found it impossible. Other people, she knew, were waking up at five on Wednesdays to get a first crack at the ads in the Voice, were meeting with brokers and scanning obituaries to see where deaths might create vacancies. Rose couldn't face it. She put off the task of looking for a new place to live the way she had put off week after week, for six months, a letter she owed her sister in Chicago. They knew they had "six months to a year," as the terms of the building's transition from rental to co-op were still being negotiated. It sounded like the answer to the question, "How much time have I got, Doctor?" Day after day Rose checked the mail and was relieved to find no threatening notices with firm dates, so that she began to hope that this vague grace period might go on forever. But always some stark letter arrived, reminding her that her days were numbered.
    Some afternoons, walking home from work, she would look up at the multi-storied buildings that surrounded her and see them transformed, in the blink of an eye, to heaps of bodies, the live limbs wriggling among the dead. The thought of so much life, boxed in, piled seventeen stories high, made her nauseous.
    Philip came