Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  WHERE

  ALL THE

  LADDERS

  START

  A novel by

  Ron Loewinsohn

  The Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of its characters and all of its incidents are imaginary, made only of words. If any of them resemble characters or incidents in what we call the real world, that resemblance is accidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Ron Loewinsohn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Loewinsohn, Ron.

  Where all the ladders start.

  I. Title.

  PS3523.032W44 1987 813'.54 86-32072

  ISBN 0-87113-151-X

  Table Of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One: Heading Home: Part One

  Chapter Two Heading Home: Part Two

  Chapter Three Quantum World: Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Four Quantum World: Part Two

  Chapter Five Where All The Ladders Start: Part One

  Chapter Six Where All The Ladders Start: Part Two

  This one is for the (memory

  of the) Captain, as promised;

  for Keats (“Thou hast thy

  music too”); and for Dona,

  all the time.

  I would like to thank the Committee on Research of the University of California at Berkeley, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Bard College Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts—for the Fellowships to which they generously appointed me. Most of this novel was written during those Fellowships periods.

  —R. L.

  Now that my ladder’s gone,

  I must lie down where all the ladders start,

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

  —William Butler Yeats,

  “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

  Part One

  Chapter One:

  Heading Home:

  Part One

  No way, he told himself. He wasn’t going to end up making Daniel’s mistake, he thought as he made the turn onto Park Presidio, the long line of streetlights stepping off into the black distance ahead, the avenue bordered by the darker blackness of the trees, the traffic lights at the intersections holding and changing in that rhythm that held you to a steady thirty miles an hour. One of the things that helped make it perfect was the fact of her boyfriend, who put a brake on things for her just the way Jane did for him. This was just good clean fun, and he wasn’t going to let it get more complicated than that. Yet he was also feeling this little engine room or generator humming inside his chest, the vibration of it in his shoulders and arms, in his hands that couldn’t quite hold themselves still on the wheel, and in the smile he could feel right now broadening out his face.

  Driving toward his home, he kept smiling. “What the hell are you grinning about?” he could imagine his wife asking him—in all innocence, thinking he’d heard some good news he was saving up for later or that he was working on a new piece which was going super-well. He’d had his affairs; for that matter, she’d probably had her share. But his three (or was it four? Did the one in L.A. count?) had all been casual one-night stands. This was different: this was a girlfriend.

  And he hadn’t even gotten into bed with her yet, so that there was also this sweetness of anticipation to go along with the sense of relief: it had taken so long to get to this stage, he thought as he drove.

  And then she had practically leapt at him, throwing her arms around his neck when he’d crouched down beside her while the party swirled around them in that loud kitchen where she was down on one knee digging some ice cubes out of one of those Styrofoam coolers behind a cloth-covered table crowded with bottles.

  “I thought I’d find you at the heart of things,” he said, “somewhere near the liquor,” smiling as he crouched down to speak into her ear, or into the shaggy, dark hair that didn’t quite cover it.

  Then she was turning quickly toward him, already beginning to smile in surprised joy, throwing her arms around his neck: “Oh! You did come! Oh, David! You did come!”

  When he stood up to keep his balance, her whole body came up with him, her little breasts pressing into his chest, her mouth kissing his face and his mouth, her eyes shining. Her hands were in the hair at the back of his head. The kitchen was crowded and smoky and noisy, milling with young people he’d never met, the smoky air of the room pulsing with something by The Clash that came storming in from the big speakers in the next room. She was holding his head and kissing his face, her close-cropped hair tousled and her eyes wide with a kind of excitement she couldn’t have controlled even if it had ever occurred to her to want to try. He did the best he could, holding on to the gift-wrapped record with his right hand, to give her a one-armed hug in return. Had he ever made anyone this happy simply by being there? It was like asking for an apple and getting the whole orchard.

  Now, holding the steering wheel lighdy, he drove toward his house on Shrader Street, dark now except for the hall light Jane would have left on for him. In the darkness of the interior of his car his own hands looked white to him as he reached out toward the dashboard to turn up the volume on the tape player. This was his favorite movement of Bartók’s Third Quartet, but he wished he had a tape of the Magnificat or The Great Gate at Kiev, music with an epic surge that was almost palpable. He would turn the volume up full blast, filling the whole dark car with viscous triumph! Music to conquer the world by!

  Then he realized he wanted just the opposite—and turned off the tape. Now he could hear the noise of the engine and all the knocks and groans and bumps of tires and springs and shock absorbers. The Bartók Quartet persisted in his mind too. In between and among all the car-body noises and engine noises he could “hear” the two versions of the main theme playing catch with each other in a fugue: the bare-bones folk melody as Bartók must have first heard it, and playing all around that plain tune was Bartók’s contemplation of the same material, a highly elaborated, detailed variation. Both versions moved toward the same point of resolution: they would get there at the same moment, although by different routes.

  He leaned forward to look up and down the cross street, checked the rearview mirror, and then stepped on the gas, running the red light at Clement. He’d never done that before, either. This was a time of beginnings, dammit, he thought.

  It had started a little more than a year before—the September he’d gotten back from that summer he’d spent back East in the Hudson Valley, working on Les Champs Magnétiques with Anselm. What a bust that had turned out to be. It had never even been reviewed. By anybody. All his effort for a solid year, all his music, all of Anselm’s videotapes and films and projections. Nothing. They had set up installations in six cities. It was supposed to make them immortal. Nothing. It might as well never have existed.

  But he’d come back fired up with a sense of new directions, and then he’d had to slam on the brakes as he came up against all the frustrations that, he now told himself, he should have been able to anticipate. The conservatory had wanted him to teach three evenings a week (“Are you trying to wreck my marriage?” he’d asked Mrs. Frisch in the scheduling office). The guy who owned the loft where his orchestra rehearsed had written and then called to say he’d leased the space to a consortium of sculptors, so David had to scramble around for most of September before finding the scruffy basemen
t of the church on Valencia Street on the same day Gloria Sanchez—the first really reliable woodwind person he’d worked with—told him she had to quit because she was going back to L.A. But she had a friend, also at Mills, “a really neat lady,” who played flute mostly, “but she’s also into keyboards and can even do percussion. She’s good. I wouldn’t bullshit you on something like this. I wouldn’t let you down like that, David, you know that.”

  Well, he’d thought, maybe she’ll just be able to play the notes.

  Then there had been that whole painful business with Daniel and Annie. Since their divorce Annie—sensible, budget-keeping Annie—had gotten herself involved with a whole succession of disastrous affairs with the most unlikely men, born losers, all the time talking nonstop about Daniel—usually to deny that she resented him or anything. And then she would tell some bitter joke about “old goats” who blew up their marriages of twenty years to go live in sin with younger women. It had gotten to be something they and all their friends had learned to be patient with.

  And with Daniel it had been worse. His younger woman, Connie (she was barely twenty), was making quite a splash as a fashion model, but she turned out to be a manipulative little airhead who used her looks the way a car salesman will use your first name too soon and too often. The way she leaned toward you as she looked you directly in the eye, meaningfully, or reached out to touch you on the forearm, or whispered in order to draw you nearer to her: it wasn’t actually flirting, but as often as not it got her what she wanted.

  When he asked Daniel one day what they talked about—he and Connie—Daniel had looked out the window at the traffic-patrol kids, more or less marching back to school, and let a dreamy look come into his eyes. “She reads everything I write,” he mused, “everything. And she’s a pretty terrific little editor too. She makes me …” In the silence of his pause Daniel reached up to lean his hand against the window frame. He held the pose. “She makes me feel real. We talk a lot about what I did as a kid, growing up around here. I’d forgotten so much of it, and now it’s like getting it all back. It’s incredible. Want another drink?”

  Around Daniel now there was an almost palpable zone of purposefulness—in the religiousness of his commitment to running and working out. Everything had to be scheduled around his daily run, which he measured precisely and timed with a very expensive digital watch. Vitamins, yogurt, wheat germ, lecithin, protein supplements.

  All the stories Daniel had written since The External World had been published were either about his own childhood or about death. He talked so obsessively about the technical details of his writing habits—what brand of typewriter he had to use, the angle of light, the view out his window, the hours he found best, the sources of his inspiration—that one day David had interrupted him to ask with a smile, “Do you want me to take notes on this for when I write your biography?”

  “Hell, yes, old man.” Daniel grinned, tapping him on the bicep with his fist. “You’ve got to manage your immortality—just like your investments.”

  “I haven’t got any investments,” David said.

  When he and Jane and Danny had first gotten back to California from the Hudson Valley, Daniel had called, wanting to get together. “Let’s go get a beer, just you and me, okay? I know you’ve heard Annie’s side of the story, and I don’t want to try to turn you against her or anything. I just want a chance to tell you my side of things, okay? Then I’d really like you and Jane to meet my fiancée, Connie.” And then, sitting in the overstuffed chairs of some fern bar on Sacramento, Daniel hadn’t been able to stop talking about Connie’s looks and Connie’s boobs and Connie’s career. “I know she’s young enough to be my daughter—I mean, literally—but she’s amazingly mature. I may be a fool, but I don’t think so, old man. I didn’t think that love—I mean real hot passionate love with all the juices flowing—was a possibility anymore. But it is, it is. I could run the Bay-to-Breakers tomorrow—and win! That’s what she’s done for me. You’ve got to meet her and you’ll see what I mean, but look at these: these will give you some idea—” And he’d pulled a batch of pictures out of his knapsack. (He carried a knapsack now, slung over one shoulder.)

  They were eight-by-ten glossies that might have been clipped out of Vogue or Glamour. She was stunningly beautiful, with lots of Farah Fawcett-style blond hair, a real showstopper, with a look in her eye that promised something—some excitement that wasn’t just sex, though it sure as hell included that. She was a blonde, but her eyes had that kind of dark smoulder that went with Latin women, the flash in those eyes whispering insistently of Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and penthouses in Buenos Aires, a woman in a seizure of abandoned dancing, shaking out her glorious mane of dark hair, even though here it was blond.

  “Oh, you’ve got to see her in person,” Daniel said. “These don’t really do her justice. She is so perfect, it makes it hard to take her out in public.” He was leering.

  Over the months David had found himself taking longer and longer to return Daniel’s phone calls, eventually not returning them at all. Twenty years of friendship. He and Jane had named Danny after him. His awkwardness with Daniel tasted even more bitter when he realized that in spite of everything, he actually envied Daniel—envied him the success he was having with his book of stories, envied him his audience, envied the “bright future” the book reviewers kept saying he was sure to have. He did not, he kept telling himself, envy him his fashion-model wife (“She’s a Christie Brinkley clone,” Lennehan told him one day on the phone. “The two of them think they’re starring in a Michelob commercial”), but there was something about her jivy energy, not just in the swing of her pelvis but in the way she focused on Daniel with the intensity of someone who was constantly discovering new and delightful things in the same toy box. It made him wistful to think about it. Daniel had really started over. David could be as sarcastic as he liked, but there was no way he could deny it: Daniel looked terrific.

  Jane was focused on just about anything but himself. When she wasn’t in Berkeley teaching college-bound private-school whiz kids, she was working with Jack, one of her buddies from her Peace Corps days in the Ivory Coast, working on a series of comic-book primers that were supposed to bring literacy to the Black and Hispanic ghettos. Or she was at meetings planning Freeze parties, fund-raisers, and teach-ins; or she was running them or on the cleanup committee; or writing letters or whatever—so that even when she was there, she wasn’t there. One night David came into the dining room where she was marking her students’ essays. He very gently kissed the back of her neck as she sat writing something in red ink on a tortuously handwritten sheet of lined paper, and tenderly cupped her breasts in his hands.

  “Mmmmmmm,” she said.

  “There’s more where that came from,” he said, “if you’re interested.”

  “Well, your timing’s off again. But can I take a rain check? Like later on tonight? After I’m done here?”

  He gave her one more kiss, right where the slope of her shoulder became her neck, and then went off to his studio, where he fiddled with some cassettes while he waited for her to finish marking her damn papers, but it wasn’t till eleven-thirty that she came in with a peremptory little wave of her hand to fetch him to bed, where she lay almost inert in his arms, her left arm pinned between them. As usual. “Could you put this someplace else?” he asked, nudging this arm.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “You asleep?”

  “Sorry.” She yawned. “I’m really pretty wiped out. And not really all that turned on. Why don’t you just go ahead and finish.”

  He’d even found himself drawn into some of her Nuclear Freeze functions, and even though he felt pretty good about doing an occasional benefit concert, he did resent having to go to stand-up wine-and-cheese parties stuffed with middle-aged, middle-class middle-brows in tweed jackets. Once he even went with her to a Freeze picnic out in Pleasanton, on the shore of a lake that looked as if it had been bulldozed out of the valley only the
week before. There he found himself sitting at a picnic table with Jane and a dozen or so strangers listening to an impossibly pompous Englishman in his fifties named Longstreth or something, who intoned at them from the head of the table while holding his infant son in his arms. “Our ass is grass,” Longstreth told them, holding their attention with a meaningful silence before going on. “Man’s flesh is as grass, the Bible tells us. One generation cometh and another generation passeth away, and the place whereon he stood knows him not. The Lord will soon be finished with us, so it’s not for ourselves, but”—and here he gazed down with reverence at the swaddled bundle in his arms, the infant so tightly wrapped in blankets, he looked mummified—’’but for the future, for the generations that cometh. We can live on only through them, and so even as we pass on we should continue to strive, to build for them the sort of world we would have for ourselves, a world free of these dreadful weapons of destruction.”

  David wondered idly how they could all manage to sound like tape recordings of each other, but when he looked over at Jane, she was gazing at the man with an almost vacant admiration.

  The man moved away then, toward the lake, the solemnity of his movements at odds with the splashy Hawaiian colors of his swim trunks and his squat, stumpy torso and legs. He carried his bundle of blankets down to the edge of the lake and then slowly peeled the blankets off to reveal the infant, whom he then dipped in the water, cradling the baby’s head and body. Bent over the child that way and cooing, breathing nose to nose with him, the balding man’s face reflected the pinkness of his baby’s skin. Was he breathing his own middle-aged life into the man-child, David wondered, or breathing life out of the child to prolong his own?

  Now, as he ran the red light at Fulton and crossed into the man-made “wilderness” of Golden Gate Park, he could step on the gas, freed from the restraints of those timed traffic lights on Park Presidio. But the curve of the road here and the taller, blacker trees did not allow him to see nearly as far ahead, his headlights showing him only a wall of dark pines that stretched a hundred or so feet in front of him before they curved out of sight. He thought of his own son, Danny, as he turned right at the main crossroad that swept westward through the park toward the ocean.