Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  “Can we,” she said, crying, “can we still be friends?”

  She threw her arms around him. He could feel her wet cheek against his own. She was sobbing. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t want to feel this way about you. But when I did, I did, and I didn’t ever want it to end. I was being a brat. I told you I was a brat.”

  They were still sitting, leaning into each other’s arms. He had to blow his nose. Pawing at his nose with his handkerchief, he told her, “I love you too. I don’t want to get in your way. Whatever you’ve got with John is—I can’t ask you to blow that up. And I. I don’t want to mess that up for you. He. He’s got a lot more to offer you. Than I can. I mean, children. And travel. And …”

  She had given him this, too, the strength to do this, to step aside, to get out of her way. But oh, damn. He cupped her face tenderly in his hand and kissed her wet, salty eyes and cheeks. He kissed the bridge of her nose. He kissed her mouth hungrily. She was half pushing him away. He stood up.

  “I’ll get out of your way, Ginny. I’ll be your friend, I’ll get out of your way. But right now, right now. Right now, Ginny—”

  She stood up too now.

  “Please,” she said. She was stiff in his arms.

  “Ginny, right now—” He had stepped back a pace and now cupped his hands around her breasts. She put her hands on his. She did not push him away, but he knew she would.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t say any more.”

  He let his hands slide down to her waist. He leaned his head forward till his forehead touched hers. He closed his eyes. “Oh, Ginny,” he said. She was still holding on to his hands, which were down at her waist. She did not say anything.

  He needed to sit down. He did, wrapping his arms around her waist as she continued to stand, his cheek hugged against her abdomen. He sat up abruptly, still holding on to her hands. The Rolling Stones poster was just beyond her head. “When is John coming in?” he asked her point-blank. He could not have said how he’d come to this realization.

  She hesitated for only a moment, looking him in the eye, before answering. “Tonight. He can only stay a few days, maybe a week. Then he’s got to go back to Ohio to take care of some business.” She looked at him tenderly; she was in pain herself. “He’s going to come back for the performance, and then …” She paused for a long time. “And then we’re going to Portugal for the summer. He’s going to install one of his units. Then I’ve got to come back and finish up my senior year.”

  He got up. She stayed in her chair, holding on to his hands. He did not want to turn away from her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I know you are. I am too.”

  He did not want to turn away from her. He did not want to walk out of her kitchen or down her hall to her front door. He did not want to walk down her front steps or into his car. He did not want to put his forehead, helplessly, against the cold plastic of the steering wheel. As he drove away he felt as if he were sitting in his own backseat, watching the back of his own head and his own hands on the steering wheel, guiding the car out of the parking space and then into traffic. The man who’s driving this car, he thought, is doing a pretty good job. He’s barely even here, and with not much more than reflexes and memory, he’s doing all the right things with his hands and feet. He started to feel better about himself, until he realized he had no idea where he was going. He wasn’t even sure how he felt about the fact that he had no idea where he was going, that he had no goal, no destination.

  As he drove around aimlessly he began to think that this was really all for the best. He had been so clear on this thing with Ginny from the beginning. It was clear that he wasn’t going to make Daniel’s mistake. He wasn’t going to let it break up his marriage, he’d told himself at the beginning. And now it would not. There wasn’t any danger of that now. Oh, damn. He had never in his life, before this, had to pull his car over to the curb because his eyes were filling up with blinding tears. How could he explain this? To anybody?

  He wanted to talk to her. He dried his eyes enough, he thought, to make himself presentable, and then actually got out of his car and walked across the sidewalk to the phone booth on the corner. But the traffic along this stretch of Geary was impossible. He could imagine himself pleading with her and the two of them continually asking each other to repeat what they had just said. Finding another phone booth would give him a chance to think through a little more clearly what it was he wanted to say to her. He would be standing at one of those walk-up phone booths, maybe in the Park. He would question John’s motives. She didn’t have to give him up. He would remind her about the wine country, he would remind her about the Russian River and Chinatown.

  She would listen to all this quietly, sitting in the chair in her bedroom, the phone in her lap, her feet together on the floor. She would pause a while before answering, “David, you’re married. You’ve got a family. Can you really imagine yourself explaining me to Danny?” Would she actually say, “David, I’ve got to hang up now. It’s really for the best. Believe me”?

  Somehow he had to get himself together enough to conduct the group—with Ginny sitting in the middle of it. And at the performance this John person would be sitting right behind him in the audience. Christ! He had to rehearse them tomorrow night! There was too much to do.

  That night, in bed, his wife rolled into him, pressing herself against him in a manner that was unmistakable. He could not tell her he was holding back because of the pictures rolling relentlessly through his mind—endless and mercilessly explicit images of Ginny being fucked by this stolid-faced John. He saw them from a slightly elevated camera angle on the wall opposite Ginny’s rosewood bed, the view the photograph of John and Ginny had of the room and especially of the bed, on which Ginny now lay, spread-legged, on the crest of her climax, riding it, her arms apart, balanced on the lip of the next moment.

  He opened his eyes. He put his arms around his wife. The next evening when he got to the church, early, the heavy smell of the discards oppressed him. It was stuffy and a little difficult to breathe, to get air into his lungs. He wandered among the barrels of rejects. There was still so much to be done. He had been through all this before, he thought. He had never asked for any guarantees, he had never expected any rewards. He only wanted to do his work without having to kiss any ass. His work. What had it come to? Ginny. Still, he would keep silent, he would not complain. He would be secret and exult. He raised his head, hearing the first of the musicians coming down the stairs.

  Ginny got there just before eight. She was very nervous. Standing there on his little ladder with his arms raised, waiting to give them the beat and seeing her standing there behind her music stand, he wanted to drop his baton and come down off his ladder and go over there and sweep her into his arms for everyone to see. He wanted to scold her. She was standing there, poised over the vibraphone with her four little mallets sticking out of her fists. She was looking at him cool and steady, the way everyone else in the group was, waiting for him to give them the downbeat. He gave them the downbeat.

  At the break she came over to where he was standing by himself, drinking a cup of coffee, and asked him how he was.

  “I’m in pain,” he told her. “I’m pressing on, regardless.” He shrugged. “That’s what it means,” he said, “to be professional.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “Do you need a ride home?” he asked, and instantly felt infinitely stupid.

  “No. I’m okay. But I’m going to have to leave right at eleven, okay?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  That night, after Jane fell asleep, he went downstairs in his robe and made himself a drink. He carried it into the TV room and sat on the couch. After a few minutes he got up and turned on the set. While it was warming up he went back in the kitchen and fixed himself another drink, resisting the impulse to unseal the bottle of corn liquor Ginny had
given him, sitting there on the shelf of his pantry. The light dimmed for a moment as he heard the fridge start up its low hum, like a dark stripe across the bottom of the air of the kitchen. The clink of the ice in his drink made small, bright flashes at the top. Outside the window there was only the black air of the world and a strangely distanced reflection of himself standing in his kitchen alone stirring a drink. He went back into the TV room and watched while a silent British spokesman mouthed a press briefing in front of a wall map of the Falkland Islands, which looked like a Rorschach inkblot. The Argentines had sunk the British destroyer H.M.S. Sheffield, hitting it dead-on with a French-made Exocet missile. The British lost twenty men, with many more wounded, in that one engagement. Only two days before, they’d been giddy with victory: they’d sunk the Argentine troop ship the General Belgrano, whose captain was actually named Hector Bonzo. Capitan Bonzo was very fine. He held his head high. There was a fire in his eyes of certain justification, determined already in the future. “At seventeen hundred hours,” he said, looking with a steely singleness of purpose and certitude into that future, “the ship disappeared from the sea [el barco desaparecio]. The Argentine flag was not lowered from the Belgrano. It is still waving, four thousand meters deep.”

  David raised his glass silently to the man and drank it off.

  Gaylord Perry, with Seattle now, had just won his three hundredth game at the age of forty-three, and of course the reporters kept making lots of dumb references to “The Ancient Mariner.” Two rooms away the hum of the fridge continued to paint its dark stripe across the bottom of the kitchen. He could “hear” now, too, the whip of the wind as it had moved those clouds so hurriedly across the sky at Point Reyes when Ginny had come up from behind and hugged him. He realized that the TV picture had gone to black-and-white some time ago. He was watching a rerun of Perry Mason.

  Just about every night now, he found himself down here. He would lie on his back beside his wife and stare at the black air of the bedroom. Images came to him then of Ginny and John—some of them actually pornographic: Ginny leering and vamping while she went through athletic contortions and “positions,” a girlie-magazine parody of things she had done with him. Other images were purely innocent yet somehow more cutting: Ginny smiling “meaningfully” at John over the rim of her coffee cup or hugging John around the waist, laying her head on his sternum with an inward smile. These images simultaneously engrossed him and repelled him, making him feel unspeakably filthy yet excited too. Then he would go downstairs, fix himself a drink, and turn on the TV set and sit there watching it, usually with the sound off, hearing the hum of the fridge and the silence it left when it switched itself off. Most of the time he would turn off the set before he fell asleep.

  At the last rehearsal the strings were still having problems with phrasing. “Can’t you hear the difference?” he kept nagging them, straining to stay patient. “They’re all eighth notes. Just because some of them get accented doesn’t mean you hold them any longer.” He sang it for them, and of course his voice broke, as he knew it would, and he made a face that gave them permission to laugh at him, easing the tension. Behind her music stand, Ginny was smiling at him admiringly, and afterward it was she who suggested they go out for a drink.

  He took her to the Mission Rock Resort. It was too cold and windy to sit on any of the decks, so they got a window table in the bar upstairs, looking out at the lights of the ships in dry dock, dwarfed by the derricks and cranes and massively complicated machinery that held them immobilized, out of the water, where they looked wounded and ungainly, a different breed from the ships riding at anchor out in the Bay. Directly below them, at various wooden wharves lit up by strings of light bulbs, the little fishing boats and pleasure boats rocked their masts back and forth with a graceful, sportive air that mocked the big, laid-up freighters.

  He said, “I used to love to come here, and then, after a while, it stopped being fun. I’m sure it was those ships in dry dock. They’re depressing. They still are. I don’t know why I suggested this place.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t like it,” she said. “How are you? How are you doing?” She looked genuinely concerned.

  “You know I’m still in love with you,” he said. “It hurts like hell. All the time. All the time.”

  “I feel the same way,” she said. “You’re not making it any easier.”

  “You’re the one who asked. Oh, God, let’s not fight.”

  “I don’t want to fight, either. It hurts for me too.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to make things worse. I know it’s hard on you too. But damn. You know, there is nothing—nothing—that can’t make me think of you. I mean, everything reminds me of you. A Southern accent I hear on the street or on TV will remind me of you, any mention of the South. Even South America or South San Francisco. Any mention of any Southern states or the Confederacy or the Civil War. Stephen Foster, for chrissake, makes me cry like a baby. The Harlem Globe Trotters make me think of you just with their ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ Coca-Cola, Ty Cobb, Ted Turner, even his Cable News Network, peaches, anything. Why the hell did you get involved with someone named John? I can’t even take a leak without thinking about him. And you. Anything light green, like the color of your eyes. Your voice or anything—”

  “David,” she broke in, putting her hand gently on his. “You were so terrific tonight,” she said. She looked him in the eye. “The way you keep that orchestra in line is incredible. So patient. And we’re all being the most incredible brats. You really are a wizard.”

  He wanted to say something denigrating about his powers as a wizard, but just then the mariachi music on the jukebox stopped, and he could hear the deep, steady hum of the exhaust fan and the sharp clank of dishes from the next room. He would be good, he decided.

  “You hear that?” he asked her, his head cocked, his eyes not focused on anything. She looked at him quizzically, leaning her head forward and tilting it slightly.

  “There,” he said, “that lowest hum of all. It’s the compressor for all this refrigeration. It sets down a bass that lives down underneath all these upper-register noises”—he clinked the ice in his drink at her—“and if you can ever peel this stuff away, you can hear it. But you have to know it’s there, and you have to listen hard for it.”

  She wasn’t sure she heard it yet.

  “That’s the piece I want to put together right now. A kind of figured bass, way down there in the lowest audible range, down around twenty-five CPS or whatever, where its grab is on the listener’s gonads and diaphragm. You should feel it in your lungs even before you realize you’re hearing it—because it’s so ingrained with all this other clutter—textures laid down like a blanket of sound, like some of Nancarrow’s things for player piano, where the notes come hammering out of there so fast, it sounds like you could actually see the sheet of notes, like a whole row of dotted lines moving at twelve thousand miles an hour. All of that clutter gets peeled away, but gradually, till there’s nothing left but that figured bass, and that’s almost inaudible, even though it’s been there all along, heard or not, consciously or not—actually shaping the rest of the piece. Of course, it’s the way the peeling is done. I want to poke—not just holes but patterns of holes in that sheet of sound: voids, silences. They’re what’s down underneath even that lowest figured bass—those silences, those voids.”

  “Now I hear it,” she said, looking over at him and smiling.

  It was getting late. He should get her home. John had gone back to Atlanta. They were going to leave for Portugal the day after the concert. That involved taking some of her exams early, but that was no sweat. She did not want to mess herself up when she came back to finish up her senior year. There was nothing to do but take her home, and he stood up and offered her his hand. She did not let it go as they left and walked down the stairs. On the gravel path outside, she slipped her arm around his waist as they walked along the Bay toward his car.

  “When they
run the Bay-to-Breakers,” he said, “this is where they start.”

  When they got to his car, she leaned back against it, still holding his hand. Her dark, thick hair had grown out some, but it still looked kind of shaggy. Her pale eyes gleamed at him, fringed by her dark lashes. She was beaming at him. Then she began to move toward him in a slow, dreamlike slide that continued till her mouth met his and opened for him, her body coming up, too, and pressing now against him, her breasts and her thighs.

  He held her. She did love him. She had tried to break away but could not. Her body had spoken the truth. She could not reject him, she did love him, though she might lose sight of it in the clutter of other emotions and demands. They would get through the concert somehow, and then they would deal with John. They would deal with everything. That was only a week.

  He held her close beside the water under the streetlight, leaned up against his parked car, hearing the words spill out of him: He loved her so much.

  They got into his car, and as he started the engine he smiled over at her, a sort of it-feels-so-good-to-be-back-home smile, but she did not give it back to him. Her face, instead, began to break apart and she began to cry, silently. She folded her face into her hands, wailing quietly. “Oh, I’ve blown it! Again! I’ve blown it again! I swore I wouldn’t do that. I told you I’m a brat. Please take me home. You’ve got to go home too. To your wife. And your family.”

  “It never hurt her—Jane, I mean. We’ve never given her one instant of pain. I swear to you. It even made things better between us. You don’t know that, you can’t know that, but it’s true.”

  “Tell that to Jane. I can’t take it.”

  “I'm telling you, you’re just giving yourself this guilt trip. Or John’s given it to you. You don’t have to do any of this. You didn’t do any of this before you talked to John about us. Christ, he knows just how to push your buttons, doesn’t he? For chrissake, Ginny, listen to me. I am older: those years have got to be worth something. Listen to me, I tell you. This is something I know more about than you. Let me save you some pain—”