Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  “Will you just tell me?”

  “I did tell you. I got stoned. I gave Marty a ride home after rehearsal.” He had started to put down his various bundles and packages of music, his briefcase, umbrella, raincoat. He was completely casual, completely at home with the truth of what he was saying, visualizing and hearing the original scenes of which the narrative he would now give his wife would be only a severely edited, selected, shorthand version. “Marty said, ‘Come on in and have a beer,’ so I figured, what the hell, you weren’t going to be home till late, anyway, so I said sure, and we sat in Marty’s living room—it’s like a college pad. I think he must have seen some movie of a sixties Hippie pad, complete with those Indian bedspreads—what are they called, madras? No, Parsley. No, Paisley. With all the psychedelic patterns. They’ve got a cow skull on the mantel, a string of multicolored beads draped around it, along with dried flowers and Polaroid snapshots. The whole number. Any he—I mean, anyway. Christ, I’m still burnt! Anyway, he turned me on to the most amazing marijuana I’ve ever smoked in all my born fucking days.

  “I thought I had it together when I started to leave, but evidently I didn’t know how this stuff comes on—first slowly, inexorably, like the tide coming in. And then, suddenly, like a ton of bricks, it’s the ice age. Nothing moves. Except I’m driving through the park in a small automobile that weighs about three tons. If I were to have gone as catatonic as I felt right then, I would have rolled right into a stand of trees at approximately thirty miles an hour, and then I would have been propelled into the glass of the windshield, not to mention the steel of the steering column, which is aimed just about at my sternum. I figured I’d better pull over, so I did.”

  “Oh, David.” She came over and hugged him. “Couldn’t you have called?” she asked. But her tone told him she already believed him. She was only making a few more moves because she wasn’t comfortable quitting so early in the game.

  Two evenings later he was sitting in his living room listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. Sitting on his couch with his feet up on the coffee table, he could feel the space of his home all around him. If he turned his head slightly, he could look up the stairs, where Jane had hung the masks and spears and shields she’d brought back from the Ivory Coast. He had put the Morevic version of the Nocturnes on the stereo rather than the Rubinstein because he really wanted to savor that languorous lyricism, Morevic caressing the notes, which seemed to eventuate in the dim air of the room as silver points of sound, without any apparent reference to any instrument, purling through the air in a stream, the chords spreading like pools and then contracting into a quick little rush, as if the stream of music flowed for a moment between some stones, falling in a rill and then slowing down again as it ebbed past some ferns.

  He could hear Jane’s voice rattling along on the phone in the kitchen. She was working her way through some long phone list of Freeze people, repeating the same preprogrammed phrases over and over again, sounding like a tape of herself. She was relaying some message or announcing some function or ragging people for contributions. He had no idea which, but the mechanical singsong of her voice distracted him enough that eventually he got up and went into the dining room and closed the door to the kitchen. The dinner dishes were done, and Danny was up in his room “doing his homework” while watching a rerun of M*A*S*H with the sound off and listening to God knows what on his Walkman. David had helped him with a couple of his geometry problems, and the boy had insisted that he could do the rest on his own.

  Now, sitting on his couch, floating on the slow stream of the Chopin, he mused on Ginny, imagining her practicing in her room, her music stand almost surrounded by ferns and philodendrons, her lower lip firm on the mouthpiece of her flute, her fingers caressing the keys as she dipped and swayed her head and shoulders, insinuating the beat. He tried to imagine the Nocturne he was listening to as it would sound transcribed for flute, but he could still hear Jane’s mechanical phone pitch, even through the closed kitchen door. Her voice had fallen into a pattern that was totally predictable, that only repeated itself rapidly, the way the copies came out of a Xerox machine.

  It wasn’t the Freeze business itself he resented, or the literacy project, but she filled up every available minute of her time with meaningless busywork. Like right now. She was always either physically absent or so preoccupied, she might as well be. She was never there for him. She never listened to what he was saying, never listened to the pieces he was making—and he’d been making so much.

  He had never felt so productive, so fertile, and yet he could never get his wife’s attention, never get her to focus on him. Even when they “had sex” he got no sense that she was actually being there with him and for him. Last night, after Danny had gotten up from the dinner table, she’d told him that she was “feeling kind of itchy, you know what I mean?” And even though he really was tired and still enervated from the night before, he’d gone along with it. But she’d insisted on keeping all the lights off the way she always did, and in the total darkness, in her immobile silence, he’d worked on her determinedly for a very long time—longer, even, than usual—until she came. Then she’d worked on him till he came, and that had been that.

  Now the stream of the Chopin was flowing into the dim air of the living room slowly, narrowly, the notes coming into being one at a time, like coins of light on the slow-moving surface of a brook as Morevic stroked them tenderly, prolonging the rests, the notes coming in almost behind the beat, stretching out the time, extending this moment, all the time renewing itself, endlessly. Constantly flowing, music had its being in time, and yet it defied time, both while it was playing, when it was always now, and afterward, when it persisted silently in recordings, on scores and in the memories of living people. All day long he’d been hearing these notes in his mind, and all day long he’d been wanting to hear them in his ears. In Poland, someone had told him, Chopin’s cottage was a kind of national monument. People came from all over the world to sit on the grass under the beech trees around the cottage while some unseen pianist inside the house played the Preludes and Nocturnes. That’s what it meant to be immortal. On their one trip to Europe he had wanted to go there, to sit on that lawn and hear this music, to give Chopin that kind of homage, but Jane had insisted that they didn’t have time.

  All day he’d been looking forward to this moment when he would sit on this couch and give himself to this languor. He’d thought of asking Jane to sit with him on the couch to listen to the Chopin together, but he knew in advance that she would not have time for any such “luxuries,” as she called them. When was the last time that this woman had sat beside him in their own living room? When was the last time they’d gone together to a concert? Luxuries? He could hardly understand how she could continue to be alive without them. And sure enough, when he’d asked her, she’d actually gotten irritated. “Jesus Christ! I don’t have time for that!”

  In the half-light of the room the notes of the Chopin sounded delicately metallic, more like bubbles of quicksilver suspended and slowly moving in the dim air than like strings struck by the hammers of a piano. Then Jane laughed from the kitchen, breaking the spell—that same nervous, embarrassed chuckle she habitually emitted whenever she wasn’t sure of herself. It was just about the same nervous giggle that always betrayed her whenever she put on her one “sexy” nightgown, which was the other way she had of letting him know she was interested in “having sex.” She would put on the sexy nightgown and then make some lame joke that mocked its sexiness, that allowed her to point with condescension at its humor or its corniness from whatever distant vantage point she imagined herself occupying. Wherever that was it sure as hell wasn’t there in the bedroom with him. Then she’d giggle her nervous giggle. She’d been making lame jokes like that, he now realized, whenever they “had sex,” no matter what she was wearing, or not wearing. They would start getting into some serious necking, and then she would make some trivializing or distancing joke, and then she would laugh that em
barrassed, uncomfortable chuckle.

  Often, in the middle of “having sex,” she would do something that got him revved up enough to make him moan or cry out, and then she’d stop, saying (with what he took, in the darkness of the bedroom, to be an exaggerated leer), “We don’t want to get you too excited.” She had been doing it habitually for so long that he’d come to accept it simply as part of the way she was, like the color of her eyes. One night about a year before, she had done it again, and he had sat up abruptly in the bed, snapped on the light, and asked her coldly, “When have I ever let myself get ‘too excited’ and gone off and left you behind?” She’d only looked at him. “If I’d ever, even once,” he went on, “let myself get ‘too excited’ and gone out of control and left you behind without getting off, I could understand. But—”

  It hadn’t done a damn bit of good, as if it had never happened, as if she’d never heard a word of it. The very next time she’d started to get him worked up, she’d done it again, as if it had been programmed into her: “We don’t want to get you too excited.” After that he’d given up, and whenever she did it, he only said to himself, “We?”

  But he wasn’t being fair, he thought, letting his head loll back against the couch. He was concentrating on all the negative things and forgetting the good things, those poignant moments when they had been genuinely together. He tried to recall some of these, but he could not. They must be there, he told himself as the notes of the Nocturne occurred in the air around him. They must be there, even though he couldn’t remember them because he was so in love with Ginny, his love for her obliterating those “golden moments” with his wife like one melody drowning out another. But he could not recover a single detail of those moments, and he was left looking back at a series of irksome habits and annoying incidents separated from each other by stretches of gray, undifferentiated time, time that felt like so many holes in his life, silences that gave him nothing, that instead absorbed his energy and his aliveness, leaving him feeling drained and blank.

  This blankness or silence, he knew, was insidious precisely because it felt so innocuous. Such little things, he could go on telling himself, year in and year out, such little things could never actually harm him, they were such trivial things, irritations, really. Yet a life made up of silences like that would eventually add up to death, to being dead, and part of the danger of this kind of nonbeing was its quiet slowness, since any more urgent, more clamorous danger would provoke some immediate reaction. He didn’t feel anymore that he existed for his wife because she never listened to him. He was never more than part of the background for her.

  The Nocturne’s melody wound and spread in the warm air, ebbing and pulsing. By now Ginny would be done practicing. Would she be doing some homework? Did college students still get assigned homework? Would she be watching TV? When he’d walked into her house that first day after he’d gotten back from the music festival in La Jolla the air of the place was filled with the notes of his own “Preludes and Fugues’’ as she’d stumblingly brought them to life. She had made a tape of his quartet and taken it back to Atlanta to study. She had taken him to Quantum World. The stream of the music narrowed again, and he felt as if he were standing at the edge of that stream, the ferns on the far bank crowding into the water itself in their abundance, only a short step away. It would take only a little bit of a stretch to step across. It was thrilling to think of stepping across the stream: he could not see beyond the abundant low shrubs that crowded the opposite bank. He hesitated for a long moment, and then he stepped across. In the morning he would go to see her, he would tell her all this and she would come into his arms and then they would make love. They would make love. They would fuck. They would make a life together.

  In the morning, after Jane had left for work and Danny had gone off to school, David took his coffee cup out onto the deck. It was overcast, but this would burn off, he knew, and it would be a glorious day. The second of May and it was doing its usual spring number. The plum tree had started to blossom a month ago, and now the persimmon tree was in full leaf. He watched a hummingbird hovering motionless in midair, its wings a green blur, beside the hibiscus. It’s taking all its energy, David thought, just to stay in the same place. Then, suddenly, the bird was gone. Off to Quantum World, he thought. At ten o’clock he drove over to Ginny’s.

  She met him at the front door with her toothbrush still in her mouth and somehow managed to mumble intelligibly around it, “I'll be with you in a minute, go on in and get yourself some coffee—” with all the appropriate hand gestures in case he didn’t understand. She had a watering can in her free hand, and as he started to move back toward the kitchen she began circulating around the living room, the toothbrush still poking out of her mouth, bending tenderly over each houseplant with her watering can.

  The light over the trees in the backyard was soft but gray. It would be another couple of hours, he thought, before the sun broke through. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down. It was so easy to wait for her. In a minute she would come in and sit on his lap. She would put her forehead to his, her nose to the tip of his nose, she would touch the side of his face. He looked up at the Rolling Stones poster and decided he’d been right all along: the tongues hanging out were not unfriendly. They were not sticking out aggressively, as if to say “Nyah, nyah!” or “Fuck you!” But they weren’t hanging out, either, like a cartoon of thirst. They were deliberately flopped out in a gesture of total abandon; they were also ready to taste everything that was there. Ready to lick the world.

  There was a stretch in the second half of “The Queen of Pentacles” where the guitar and the flute played a kind of chase duet. Her original score and notes suggested that she wanted both voices to be equally strong throughout the passage, but he wanted to talk with her about possibly letting the two voices argue more—well, more dramatically—first one taking the lead and then the other asserting itself. He had not brought his copy of the score with him, but he could show her on her copy. Their baby. He smiled to himself, thinking how good working with her was going to feel.

  When she came in, she was carrying her coffee cup. She gave him a quick kiss and then sat down on the chair she’d pulled closer to his, so that their knees were actually touching. She took his hands in hers. He could smell her toothpaste. He heard himself say, “Boy, it’s good to see you.” He did not want to blurt it all out at once. He did not want to blow her away. She looked to him now, actually a little tired, as if she had not gotten a good night’s sleep.

  “Oh, God, I feel like forty miles of bad road,” she said. “John called last night.” She was looking directly at the top button of his shirt.

  “He’s still coming to the concert, isn’t he?”

  “We talked till about three in the morning,” she said. “I’m still a little zoned out.”

  He looked at her.

  “We talked for a long time, just about Atlanta, and how Daddy’s doing, and John’s business, and his younger brother. And then he started in asking me about how was I doing, and what was I doing, and I told him, you know, keeping it pretty general. You know, to let him know I haven’t been staying home every night practicing my flute.

  “So finally he just came right out and asked me, ‘Are you going out with any of these guys?’ and I said, ‘Of course, aren’t you?’ And you know what that cool bastard said right then? He said, ‘No, I’m not going out with any of those guys you’re going out with.’

  “He claims he isn’t going out with anybody back home, and I wish I didn’t believe him. But I’d want to kill him too. And them.

  “But he kept bugging me with all these questions about who and where did they take me and how did I like it. I liked it fine, I told him. I’m having a good time. ‘But you’re not actually going to bed with these guys, are you?’ he asked me. ‘Well, sure,’ I said, ‘one or two of them.’”

  He looked at her.

  “He told me I was being weak,” she went on. “If I was really mature
and faithful, I’d have more self-control. I can’t lie to him, it wouldn’t do any good, anyway, you know. He knows me, he’d spot it in a minute. I mean, that’s why he asked, right? He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t already know the answer.”

  She went on. “I wasn’t going to tell him who. I thought, I don’t have to be that honest with him. But then he said, ‘Well, the only man there you’d be likely to feel that close to would be Lyman.’ I didn’t say anything, and he knew right then he’d gotten it on the first guess. I guess I talked about you too much. I mean, you know, before.

  ‘‘Oh, David,” she said, beginning to cry, ‘‘I don’t want to lose you. You mean so much to me.”

  He realized he had begun to shake his head slowly while looking at her. “Don’t,” he wanted to tell her. “Don’t say any more, please. Don’t say anything else, please.” But he could not speak. She was crying for real now, watching him shaking his head and beginning to nod her own.

  “Don’t say any more,” he wanted to tell her. “That’s enough.”

  “I’ve never met anyone like you. I never met anyone who made me feel so happy. You made me feel like a kid again—”

  “Please,” he wanted to tell her. “No more.” He wanted to not hear her voice, to be wrapped up in a silence that would somehow get him through the rest of the morning, a silence like a door.

  “Honey,” she went on, “I never even knew I could feel some of the things you made me feel. You taught me so much. About music. And everything. You gave me so much. Sometimes I feel like something you just made up.”

  Please. No more. Please, don’t say any more. She had never felt so real to him, so separate from him.

  She went on, shaking her head.

  He looked at her. She was going to say it.

  “But—” she said.

  Oh, no, Ginny, he thought. He felt like he might have an attack of diarrhea. At the last second she had chickened out. She was looking at him with the words in her mouth. The look on her face was asking him to help her.