Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  But actually he would just sit, idly watching Michael, who really did own a surfboard and really did know how to use it, riding in on the foamy crests of those waves, whipping the board to the right and the left with sharp thrusts of his hips and body weight, his legs spread, his arms wide apart. He reminded David of the little surfer in the plastic paperweight cube on Ginny’s desk, the man surfing into the present on the crest of that wave whose very movement was making it disintegrate even as it propelled him. But there were so many things now that made him think of her.

  “You look terrific out there,” David told him-as he came back with his board under his arm, the tether still strapped to his ankle. “This is incredible,” he went on. “February! This place will sure as hell make you think warm days will never cease.”

  “For sure,” Michael said, rolling his eyes like a Valley Girl.

  All David had to do for the festival was show up at performances, sit in on a seminar or two and otherwise just hang out, being a kind of minor-league celebrity. Michael gave a performance of some of his old “Preludes and Fugues,” which David thought was only respectfully received.

  “Maybe I should have played them better,” Michael said.

  It was a generous thing to say.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I thought they dug it a lot more than that. Not a tumultuous reception, mind you, but a warm, appreciative one. What do you expect, David? This is an audience of your competitors.”

  “You played it marvelously,” David reassured him. “You really brought out the Slavic intervals and the syncopation. You’re about the only person I know of who picks up on how that piece takes off more from Shostakovich than from Bach.”

  “And what do you want to bet whoever reviews it will actually complain about the ‘bizarre Orientalism, a quasi-Slavic timbre .. They love to talk about timbre: it makes them sound like they know what they’re talking about.”

  During those four days they ran on the beach, getting good and sweaty, and then Michael’s girlfriend, Joanna, would be there to fix margaritas, and they would all pitch in on the cooking, all of them clowning around in the kitchen. The afternoons were filled with a haze-softened sunlight, and the evenings with the hubbub of crowds buzzing in lobbies and the hush of the concert hall before the music began. The music itself was okay.

  In the gift shop at the Cove he bought a series of sun-splashed postcards and mailed them off to Ginny, figuring they would arrive on Saturday, the day before Valentine’s Day. In the message area of each card he wrote just a single word or syllable, so that only when she put them in the proper sequence, spread out on her kitchen table under the Rolling Stones poster, the room filled with the smell of coffee and the sound of Telemann and the light of the morning, would they spell out: WILL—YOU—BE—MY—VAL—EN—TINE?

  Saturday night he called Jane and talked with Danny too. Everything was fine, although she missed him. Danny told him about the Eurhythmics concert he’d gone to and reassured him that he was doing his homework, that he would get the notorious history paper handed in on time. Jane was busy, as usual. The Freeze people were just starting to plan a really big series of demonstrations, in addition to all the legal stuff with congressmen. It was pretty exciting, the closest thing in a long time to the old anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Anselm had called from New York; Jane had given him Harrison’s phone number. She was surprised he still hadn’t called. After a while she got around to asking him how the festival was going. He made a face and said, “Fine. Pretty good, really. The seminars and stuff are all bullshit, but some of the music down here is pretty good. The Kronos is down here. They did a new piece by Dresher and it’s a knockout.”

  “You’re being pretty coy, aren’t you?”

  “Coy?”

  “Come on, how did your concert go?”

  “Well, it wasn’t my concert, but it went okay. Michael played them just right. He played a lot of other stuff too. I’d been thinking of it as his concert.”

  “So? How did it go? How was it re—How’d they like it?”

  “Fine. They liked it fine. I talked it over with Michael, and the bottom line here is that it went well. This is a very tough audience, but there was nice, warm applause. I’m just sorry he played something so old. I felt like I really wanted to let them have a blast of the really new stuff.”

  “Well,” she said, “that probably means it was a smash. For you they’d have to tear down the goalposts before you’d believe they liked it. I know you.”

  She did not know him. She did not know that as soon as he hung up, he was going to call Ginny, and he resented his wife’s familiarity. It was a kind of presumption. She could claim to know him simply because she was his wife, not because she’d done anything to earn a genuine intimacy but just because it was part of a wife’s role to “know” her husband, to be able to read his statements and decode them. The performance had not been a smash, he had not meant to say that. She had twisted his words till they meant what she wanted to hear. And now she would make a kind of proprietary claim on this “smash success.”

  “My husband’s concert was a smash. He worried about it, the poor dear, but I knew all along it would go over.” By the time she was finished, she would have claimed it all. There would hardly be anything left for him.

  When he called Ginny, Valerie answered, letting him know that Ginny was home and could talk, by which he understood that this John person wasn’t there. When Ginny came on the line, she breathed an intense “Yes!” into his ear.

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “The answer to your question is Yes!”

  “What question?”

  “Well, I got this batch of postcards that asked, ‘Will—Tine—Be—’” She must have been shuffling through them as she sat on the edge of her bed with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. “ ‘—Val—My—En.’ These are better than tarot cards. But no matter how I shuffle them, the answer always comes out yes. Even though ‘You’ hasn’t gotten here yet. When is ‘you’ going to get here, you nut?”

  “I’ll be flying back tomorrow evening, but isn’t John still there?”

  “Can you believe that S.O.B. went out to a basketball game?”

  “He must be pretty hungry for basketball if he went out to watch the Warriors. Across the bay?”

  “Yeah. They’re playing Kansas City. Someone gave him tickets. He always gets tickets to these things. How was your concert? You better send me another batch of postcards because I’ve already just about worn these out, reading them over and over. You nut! How was your concert? God, I wish I could have been there!”

  “The concert was fine, really. Look, I’m sorry about the postcards. I didn’t think till the minute after I’d mailed them that they’d get there while John was still there. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”

  “No, I figured you’d be writing me something, so I was keeping an eye out for the mailman. As soon as I saw them, I thought, ‘Bless his buttons,’ and snatched them into my backpack.”

  He flew back the next evening, but John stayed in town all the next week. Each morning David would call her, and each morning she would answer the phone saying, “Oh, hi, Kathleen. No, I’m not going to school today. John’s still here. Take good notes, okay?”

  He went into his studio and banged out a song sequence for her, using Oh-hi-Kath-leen as the introductory text. In the month since they’d been going together he’d made more music, he realized now, than in all the preceding year. And he’d enjoyed it more. As he worked his keyboards and switches he thought of her lying in bed with John as she answered the phone. He thought of her spreading her legs for John, reaching down between their bodies to guide the blind, butting head of this other man’s penis into her vulva. She would get wet for John, just the way she did for him. She would not be able to help it. It did not really bother him, he told himself as he adjusted the treble control on the big Tandberg open-reel deck. John even drove her to rehearsal once and picked her up afterward,
but she managed to keep him from coming in. David gave her what he thought was an impassive look as she raised the flute and licked her lips. He was up on his ladder, his arms up, waiting to give them the downbeat. She winked at him. He gave them the downbeat.

  The day after John went back to Atlanta he went over to her place in the morning with a bottle of Irish whiskey he wanted to give her. He didn’t know where the grain that went into it had come from, he was going to tell her, but the whiskey itself had been made and bottled and aged in the same distillery in Dublin that his grandfather had managed. He’d thought to tell her all this as he rang her bell, but when Valerie answered the door, he heard a synthesizer somewhere in the house stumbling along through his twelfth “Prelude and Fugue”—one of the group Michael Harrison had played down in La Jolla. He stopped, just inside the door, listening, his head bowed, smiling uncontrollably.

  He was still smiling when he came into the little parlor where she got up from the keyboard with a great grin. When he gestured at the sheet music quizzically, she said, “Well, I couldn’t have my Valentine, so—”

  “But where did you get the sheet music?”

  “At Mills. Oh, honey. I could play them forever. I’d have to, to get them right. Oh, those people down in La Jolla had a treat! I just hope they appreciated it.”

  He did not know what to say. “The water of life,” he said, handing her the whiskey bottle, feeling his whole body smiling.

  He loved to walk around town with her, in broad daylight, being out in public with her, being very discreet, very cool. Walking through Union Square, which reminded her of City Center Park back home, they stopped to join the crowd watching the robot dancers on the sidewalk in front of Macy’s: a couple of black teenagers in outrageously formal outfits—white ruffle-front shirts and black bow ties. Their tuxedo pants had shiny stripes down the sides, but they were cut like zoot suits, pleats at the belt, baggy at the knees, and then rubber-band-tight at the ankles. There was something aggressive about their formal clothes, he said, and she said, “Oh, yeah. They got dressed up at us.” She nudged him to look at an older couple standing pucker-lipped with fascination at the edge of the crowd. “They look shrink-wrapped,” she said.

  The big chrome-plated stereo at the curb was blasting out something by the Funkadelics in that herky-jerk rhythm that was mostly synthesizers: die-stamped, percussive. It was this sharp-edged, precisely calibrated music that drove and controlled the dancers. The boys danced almost without moving their feet at all, all the motion in the upper body, head and arms, all the moves smooth, precise, preprogrammed, both of their black faces impassive, inert, the eyes blank and unfocused, hardly moving. Most of the time they moved in unison, their arms or necks describing long, slow arcs and slides. At the end of these slides the head or hand locked into place, clicked into the slot prepared for it by the program. But part of the dance included also a funny sort of wave. One of them would initiate a motion—bending or leaning toward his partner, who stood by motionless the whole while; then, at the precise moment when the first one ended his move, locked into that preprogrammed slot, his arrested motion was taken up by the other, like the billiard balls in those physics demonstrations.

  Ginny thought they were neat, but he wasn’t so sure. This was just another instance, he said, of people wanting to become robots or computers, which never felt the difficulty of being human, of having a soul and being tormented with desire. He felt himself starting to get revved up about this, telling her how, in the past, people invoked Destiny to give form and structure to their lives, especially when disaster came down. Destiny was something worth struggling against; it had the size and weight to make it a worthwhile contender. A human being struggling against Destiny had worth, dignity. Now, when disaster strikes, people blame it on “the program” or “the system,” which gives people no size at all, it reduces them to semiconductors.

  “These kids,” he said, lowering his voice and shrugging toward the dancers, “can draw a crowd like this because they’re being what this audience wants to become—machines. See, machines don’t have to make decisions or plans for the future. For a machine, no matter how complicated, the time is always now, but for people, now is always crawling toward the future, dragging a whole lifetime’s worth of memory around behind it.”

  She was looking at the dancers, almost imperceptibly moving her head, neck and shoulders in sympathy with their glides and locks. “They couldn’t do that without practice,” she said. “You know, rehearsing.”

  “Sure. They’re good at it. But why practice to glamorize machines?”

  “Well, you can’t practice without having a performance in mind—you know, sometime in the future. So, that’s pretty human. And the moment they start performing, if they do it well, that shows the practice that led up to it, you know, to this performance right now. And besides,” she said, taking her wallet out of her backpack, “they may be acting like machines now, but there isn’t anybody here who doesn’t know that they’re thinking about the immediate future, when they do their big finish and then start in to pass the hat. Check it out,” she said, shrugging at the shrink-wrapped couple. “They know the money pitch is coming. Look at them start to pucker up to leave.”

  He gave her a quick hug. Being out on the street like this, in broad daylight, in the middle of these crowds and buildings, everyone bundled up in sweaters and scarves, gave them a different kind of thrill. They liked the public anonymity, hanging on to their secret even while being “out in the open.” The need to be discreet in public never quite felt real, though it made them both feel more defiant, actively involved in some rebellion. They spoke in short you-know-what-I-mean-we-don’t-have-to-go-into-detail phrases about the need to be cool, to not touch each other or hang on to each other or embrace each other on the street. But they were constantly violating their own rules, sometimes in suddenly private situations, like an elevator or a corridor or an empty stretch of street, but sometimes also defiantly—at a crowded intersection or in a café.

  Once, waiting for an elevator in a parking garage, she looked up into his eyes for a long time, and then, drawn apparently without any reference to her will, she reached up her hands to clasp them behind his neck and lifted up her face to kiss him. As they were locked like that, having forgotten for a moment where they were, the elevator door began to open with a slight hiss that startled them both back to the present. As he let go of her he caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of the young woman in her twenties who stepped out of the elevator and passed them with a smile that combined embarrassment and amusement. When the door opened for her, it must have been like the curtains parting at the opening of a play. And there was the play: him and Ginny. Was it just the idea of “lovers” and the corniness of the scene that she was smiling at? Or had she noticed that his hair was starting to turn gray and Ginny’s obviously wasn’t? And what key was she smiling in? Amusement? Disdain? Envy?

  It was only later that he realized that at that moment he’d felt a version of the feeling he had when he was conducting—a feeling of weight and substance, feeling buoyed up in the regard of the people listening, of this woman who’d stepped out of the elevator when the doors opened.

  Late in March, during the break at one of the rehearsals, Patty Morello and Ed Lee and Marty all came up to him separately to ask him about phrasing, dynamics and tempi in “The Queen of Pentacles.” They were terrific. They were already beginning to work on it at home, and they weren’t scheduled to start rehearsing it for another couple of weeks.

  He told Ginny about it the next morning, after they’d made some delicious love and before they went off to Chinatown, where he’d promised to take her. They ended up parking in a little alley on Telegraph Hill and then walking down the Kearney Street steps, laughing as they both simultaneously began “gliding” down the steps smoothly, trying to keep from churning the cream into butter. From the top of the steps the city lay all spread out below them, like a map of itself, and as they jou
nced down into it, their view of it flattened out, becoming less a map they were looking at and more an actual city they were entering—all the noises and smells of Broadway on a sunny early spring afternoon, with the barkers already out in front of the Topless-Bottomless-He-and-She-Love-Dance joints, reaching out to stage-whisper at them as they passed. “Hey! Come on in here! Just get a peek right here—they’re actually fucking onstage right now!’’ Holding the heavy curtain open into some dark, blue-smoky interior: “How about some hot sex!”

  “No thanks,” Ginny sang back at him, “we just had some!”

  In Chinatown thick crowds of bundled-up strangers thronged the sidewalks of Grant Avenue, moving with leisurely casualness through an air dense with smells and noises. They relaxed into “being tourists,” pausing in front of grocery stores, pretending to look at the unidentifiable dried vegetables piled in crates outside but actually looking at the people.

  When they’d had enough of the nonstop press of Grant Avenue, he turned them into quiet cross streets and alleys, some of them so narrow she could reach out and touch the dark brick walls on both sides as she walked. He told her how, when he’d been a kid—a teenager, really—he would come down here, usually alone, on a Saturday night, and wander through these alleys, guided only by the gongs and sudden glisses of the Chinese music spilling down from the third-story balconies where the better social clubs hung out.

  As they stopped at an intersection, looking up toward those same balconies, or balconies very much like them, trellised with green wrought iron, he had an intense vision of himself at seventeen perched on the fender of some parked car in the three A.M. darkness of this same alley, munching on a pork bun and taking a furtive sip from his can of Rainier Ale.