Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  Music was not a universal language, he had thought then, listening to those clangs and swoops up there, three stories above him. This music excluded him as thoroughly as these blank doors or the blank faces on the next street. He knew he would never be able to tell if this flurry of drums and clangs was angry or joyous, or if this andante passage was calm or sinister. But he loved the counterpoints and the punctuation. The abruptness of the transitions. The music had parts that felt riveted together. And he had thought also as he sat there that if he, as an audience, could listen from this distance—a distance both physical, measurable in feet, and also felt, an emotional gap or gulf between his own culture and this one—what would happen if you put the musicians in one room and the audience in the next, or even another room three doors down the hall? On the other hand, why not get rid of the stage and mix up the musicians with the audience? What he loved about music was just how it united the audience with the players, united them by their insides, uniting them into one organ, one organism.

  He was about seventeen then, he hadn’t yet heard of Cage or any other avant-garde composer, so he still thought those ideas were original with him, that no one had ever dreamed them up before. When he mentioned these ideas to his friends or his teachers, most of them could not even understand what he was talking about. Mixing up the audience in the same space with the artists was unthinkable, even to his teachers—except for Mr. Irwin, who told him that those things had already been done and did he want to know where he could learn more about them. That must have been, David realized now, when he started to imagine what eventually flowered into Les Champs Magnétiques.

  He touched Ginny’s elbow and pointed to a white Datsun parked in the shadow of a dumpster in the alley across the street. “I used to come down here on Saturday nights,” he told her, and went on to tell her about himself when he was seventeen, younger than she was right now, “sitting on the fender of some parked car like that,” and the bright ideas he thought he’d invented. “You don’t have any repertoire at seventeen. But I took a lot of flak for those ideas, so that when I found out later that they’d already all been done, even while I’d just been thinking about them, I really felt in one sense vindicated.”

  She was giving him an enormous smile.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked. “I know a couple of okay places to eat around here. Do you like really hot Chinese food, like Hunan, or are you more into Cantonese?”

  They walked around the corner, onto Jackson Street, where she stopped and turned to face him, there on the sidewalk. She put her hands on his shoulders, looking up into his face, and then straight ahead into his chest. “You take me to the neatest places,” she said.

  He smiled back at her. “Same to you, fella.”

  “And then when we get there, the most wonderful things happen. Everything from white unicorns to these magical alleyways where time gets looped around so that I can see you at seventeen sitting on the fender of some parked car listening to that music and all the while you’re standing right next to me holding on to my arm.”

  She was looking up into his eyes now, shaking her head slightly from side to side. The pavement around them was thick with people, the stream of them parting obliviously to pass on both sides.

  “You know I’ve fallen in love with you,” she said now. “It’s all right, isn’t it? It’s just a little bit that I’ve fallen. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, damn, Ginny,” he said as he bent his head down, touching his forehead to hers. “Oh, Ginny, what the hell have we ended up doing?”

  Somehow she managed to look both worried and delighted at the same time, gazing up at him, shaking her head.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Quantum World:

  Part Two

  Now he looked ahead only to the group’s final concert of the season, Ginny’s concert. He had begun to think of her as an organic part of his life, someone who was there as a matter of course, someone he took into consideration when he made plans. He liked explaining to her how her piece fit in with the other three on the program because each one was a “first”—the first piece each composer had written in this form or for this instrumentation. “A concert of fresh starts,” he told her, grinning.

  “Sure,” she said. “A concert of fits and starts.”

  “Groan,” he said.

  Two or three mornings a week now he would get Danny off to school and then drive over to Fifteenth Avenue, stopping first at the Parnassus Bakery on Cole Street to pick up something for breakfast—bagels, croissants, cinnamon rolls. When he got there, he was usually let in by one of her roommates, who always gave him a smile that somehow managed to split the difference between being conspiratorial and completely offhand. Sometimes it was Ginny. Her smile had none of that ambivalence, and he especially savored the matter-of-factness of her “Oh, hi, honey,” that last word spoken far back in her throat as she reached up her mouth to kiss him.

  Sometimes they would have coffee and whatever first, and then drift on to her room. Once she started it by getting up from her breakfast to sit in his lap, her hands locked behind his neck, looking up at him, her eyes wide. He fell in love with her all over again. Or they would get started right at the front door, kissing hello innocently enough, their bodies pressing and moving against each other, and then she would start nibbling his ear and they would go straight back to her room and close the door, saving breakfast for later.

  The first time he went over there after their trip to Chinatown, all the framed circuit boards were gone from the walls of the main hallway. They’d been replaced by wall hangings made of great loops of rope and thick skeins of yarn, mostly in reds and earth tones. He pointed at them, and looked at her, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Aren’t they neat?” she said. “Barbara moved out and she took her circuit boards with her. So that wall looked emptier and emptier to me, till I saw these in a show at the gallery at school. I just went wild. I said, ‘I’ll take them.’ They look like chitlins or something, don’t they?” She put her fists on her hips and did a quick “Southern Belle” routine: “Since I fell in love with you, honey, the whole world looks like that to me.”

  “Like intestines?”

  “No,” she said, back in her own voice. “They look like big lobes and globes of wet flesh. Juicy. Like organs.”

  “Well to me they just look like wool. But I like them. They’ve got a nice feel to them. They look like they’d be fun to feel—”

  He took her to the Hopper show at the Museum of Modern Art, explaining to her how Hopper’s choice of camera angle often charged an otherwise completely ordinary scene with menace or some other form of unease. “The angle’s almost always just a little bit ‘off’ from what you’d expect,” he went on. “See how in these three you’re literally ‘looking down on’ these figures?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, and went on to point out how the figures were disoriented even more, ‘a little bit strange’—in spite of their ordinariness—because of the stolid, wooden way they stood in their clothes. When he asked her where she’d learned all that, she said offhandedly, “John. He’s into photography, actually, but a lot of the same stuff comes up in painting too. He’s pretty excited about the prints he just did of a big batch of pictures he took in Belize.”

  “Oh, you didn’t tell me he’d called.”

  “Yes, I did, I just didn’t say anything about the pictures. It just didn’t seem worth mentioning.”

  “Oh. Is he into music too? Does he play an instrument?”

  “John?” Her tone made the question patently absurd. “He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “John? Gee, it seems like forever. I must have been in the seventh or eighth grade, because I was still at St. Bridget’s. That’s this Catholic girls’ school my folks sent me to in Atlanta. They’re not Catholics or anything—I mean, they’re not any kind of religio
n—but this school has a real good reputation for academics. It must have—it cost enough, you know. Anyway, John was working there part-time, teaching photography. I had a terrible crush on him. All of us did. We’d all make these dumb jokes about going in the darkroom with him and seeing what would develop. Funny, huh? He finally went away to do his computer-engineering stuff, but we stayed in touch. We’ve been, you know, going together—off and on—for about five years.”

  He took her to Sausalito once, and another time, when he knew they would have the whole day, he drove her up to the Russian River, where they rented a canoe. Another afternoon, as she was idly looking at the picture on the label of the bottle of wine they’d been drinking, he said to her, “You know, the place where they make that stuff really does look like that.”

  “Is it far away?” she asked. And two days later they were cruising up Highway 29 into the Napa Valley, and he was joking with her about what kinds of wine grapes did they grow in Georgia?

  “Well, you know,” she answered, “they do make wine in Georgia. But you could just about pour it on your pancakes in the morning. No, we don’t make really neat wines back home, and we don’t have any of this really dramatic scenery your set designer keeps coming up with, but we’ve got, you know, other things. It’s so much greener than here, more lush. That’s one of the things I don’t think I could ever get used to here—the dry, dead look of these hills when they’re all yellow and brown. I’m used to things being much more green, where there’s more water. Sometimes, just driving along some highway in dinky old Georgia, maybe just outside of town, you’ll cross a bridge over a river—I don’t mean just the Chattahoochee, I mean just about any river back home—and when you look down, you can’t even see the banks of the river because the vegetation grows right into the water. Like it’s actually spilling over into the water. There’s that kind of feeling of, like, abundance. Even the air feels different on your skin—gentle and a lot more moist. It is humid, but here everything’s so dry. Even the air here feels real brittle, you know? At home, even downtown, the air feels real—velvety. And you can smell the flowers and the trees in the air. Especially at night.”

  He loved to listen to her talk. Her eellike vowels bent in the middle and glided around corners of the language he’d never known were there.

  “And when you lie on the veranda,” she went on, “at night in early April, like right now, and smell those blossoms and hear the Jesuits—those are, like, these little crickets—singing in the woods? Let me tell you, it’s like living in honey.”

  “Can you hear the—Jesuits?—can you hear them where you live in Atlanta, or do you have to go out to the country for that? Jesuits! I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why they call them that—”

  “Oh, I could make a couple of guesses, but—”

  “Well, where we live—in Druid Hills?—that’s really like a part of Atlanta even though it is pretty rural out there. Our lot is about a half an acre, which I guess is pretty good-sized for a city lot. The house itself looks like what happened when a fake Tudor got into a wrestling match with an antebellum mansion. The place isn’t any mansion by a long shot, but the Tudor lost, because we’ve got one of those verandas that goes all the way around the house.”

  “Does your set designer have a lot of Spanish moss dripping off the old ancestral oaks and stuff?”

  “Well,” she said, “you actually don’t see that much Spanish moss around Atlanta. More toward the ocean, or farther south, toward the Gulf. Where I grew up, what you see more is kudzu vines. That’s this real deep green vine, like ivy, and it’s a climbing vine, so it climbs up and covers everything in sight. I reckon that by 1995 there won’t be a square inch of Georgia that isn’t right covered with kudzu vines. It’s really pretty stuff, and kind of magical. Sometimes you’ll be driving down some country road, and all this kudzu is draped all over everything on both sides of the road, and you get the feeling you’re in a painting by Max Ernst or something, one of those dreamscapes. It’s a parasite, you know.”

  They drove up to Rutherford Hills and parked in the lot beside the picnic tables, scattered around in a grove of live oaks, looking down on the dark green of the vineyards in the valley below them and the violet of the mountains beyond. They bought a bottle of zinfandel and stashed it in the car while they peeled down to their jogging outfits and then ran down to the bottom of the hill and back. He was surprised that she made it all the way back to the top without stopping; he was surprised he had made it without stopping. At the picnic tables they both walked around for a few minutes with their hands on their kidneys, neither of them saying anything but giving each other looks that said, “Yeah, that was a good workout.”

  “Okay,” he said at last, “let’s go put back some of those calories.”

  He opened the wine while she laid out the cold chicken she’d made the night before and the cheeses and stuff they’d just bought in Oakville. From their table they could look out across the whole valley, its vineyards crosshatched in different shades of dark green, the whole world presenting itself to their senses with a kind of scrubbed-face eagerness. They were sitting side by side at the redwood picnic table, looking at the spectacle, when he realized she was not looking at the valley but at him. When he turned toward her, she gave him an enormous grin, nodding her head to indicate the Southern-fried chicken he was just taking a bite of, and said, “I love to feed you. I love the idea of all my food turning into David Lyman.”

  He did not know what to say, so he just waved his drumstick at the view. “Feels like we’re sitting in the bleachers.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Way to go, World!”

  He took her to Midori’s, in Japantown, and taught her how to eat sushi, sitting at the counter where they could watch the cooks work. “Mmmmmm,” she purred, “tasting her food” at him. “Oh, I sure am glad God gave us mouths!”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “For all kinds of reasons.”

  “You always get them in twos,” he explained, “because it’s easier to remember the bill in multiples of two, and the sushi-san—the chef—has to keep score in his head. They don’t make mistakes. The training for a sushi-san is like Zen archery. They have to be able to devein a shrimp—no, a prawn, you couldn’t do it with a shrimp. They have to devein a prawn with one throw of a meat cleaver from twenty feet.

  “You nut,” she said.

  He drove her through the neighborhood where he’d grown up, near the old Mission Dolores. “That’s where I lived,” he told her, pointing to a three-story building of railroad flats in the middle of a row of almost identical buildings. He drove her past the studio of his first piano teacher, in a little alley off Eighteenth Street; the duplex where he and Phil Hennessy first learned to improvise, taking turns laying down the pattern of chord changes on the piano while the other cut loose on guitar.

  He hadn’t been in this part of town for years. A lot of it had been taken over by the gay community. Driving through it again, it looked so pathetically working-class. What must it look like to her? She had grown up in an antebellum/Tudor mansion in a suburb called Druid Hills. What he was showing her was the neighborhood he’d left behind. He thought he’d burned his bridges, yet it felt important to show her what he’d come out of, to stand before her the way he did, the way he was.

  “When I was thirteen or so I went through a stretch where I used to stop in there,” he told her, pointing out a corner coffee shop, “for coffee and doughnuts every morning on my way to school. What was so important wasn’t so much the coffee and doughnuts as getting them every morning—an ongoing process. I wanted the waitress to get to know me as ‘one of the regulars.’ I wanted to be able to sit down with the grown-ups and have the waitress come by and ask, ‘The usual?’ Weird, huh?”

  He took her to see the Palace of Fine Arts, doing his tour-guide routine. This was Maybeck’s fantasy of a “Classical Greek Temple of Art” put up for the World’s Fair
of 1913 or whenever. It had originally been built out of very cheap, flimsy materials, and started falling apart almost immediately. Sometime in the fifties the city decided to restore the whole thing in concrete. In the back they had a little theater and a museum of sorts. As they drove around in back she asked him about the signs reading EXPLORATORIUM.

  “You mean you’ve never been?”

  They went in, and found themselves in an enormous, dim space—the ceilings were easily over a hundred feet high—crowded with hands-on science and nature exhibits. Almost all of the adults in the place were attached to one or more children. Ginny was ready to clap her hands in delight. She read all the explanations and instructions for each exhibit before pushing the buttons or pulling the levers or whatever. In the strobe-light room they both turned toward each other with enormous grins, waving exaggeratedly in stop action, their arms and hands flashing from point to point and blanking out in between, crying out almost simultaneously—“It’s Quantum World! It’s Quantum World!”

  The day the group was scheduled to rehearse “The Queen of Pentacles” for the first time, he wanted to get over to Ginny’s early, figuring she’d be nervous, she’d like to have her hand held. He went straight over from the vet, where he’d had to take one of the cats because Jane couldn’t do it: she had a dentist appointment. Ginny was pretty nervous, but she’d turned it all inward, talking a lot less, the beginnings of a scowl in the small crease between her eyebrows. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said when he asked her. “I want to concentrate, you know, focus all the nervous energy into performance.”

  He wanted to tell her how professional she sounded, but he thought better of it.

  He took her to Caferatta’s for lunch, where they sat at one of the little tables in the front window, looking across the street at Washington Square. “One year,” he told her, “about twenty years ago, they had the art festival here. Right here—in the park. The thing went on for four or five days. They set up little masonite-and-frame booths or stalls, and of course you’d see endless watercolors of the Golden Gate Bridge and Fishermen’s Wharf, but there were also shows that included Parke and Bischoff and Diebenkorn. That was the year I first saw any of de Feo’s work or Bruce Conner’s. And the first time I heard a live performance of anything of Cage’s—his quartet, in fact.