Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  “I’ll hurt all I want to if I want to! You think Jane wouldn’t have found out. Of course she’d find out, one way or another, sooner or later. Of course she’d find out. You don’t think I know? What do you think happened to John and me?

  “He was married, too, when I first met him. And I fell in love with him so hard. I was thirteen—when he was teaching photography at St. Bridget’s. I think I would have flunked his course except he wouldn’t let me. I was even more of a brat then than I am now. I can’t believe now the stuff I did. I actually ambushed him in the darkroom. He had to fight me off. The first time I slept with a guy, when I was fourteen, I did it on purpose, just to learn how, so I’d be better at it for John. He held me off till I was sixteen. Then I guess I just wore him down. I kept writing him these letters, till finally he came over to ask me to stop. He was actually pleading with me. I guess I seduced him. And it went on. It went on for a year. A little more than a year. Then Judy ran across one of my letters, and she actually—that woman is incredible, you know—she damn near set a trap. She didn’t say a word to John, but when she ran across that letter, she waited till the next time John gave her some lame-sounding excuse, and then she checked out his office. When he wasn’t there, she went straight to this condo John’s company owns, and when she spotted my VW out in front, it was all over. She caught us with our pants down. Oh, God, I felt like the worst tramp. That was the end of that marriage, so it completely—I mean, completely—fucked up his life, A to Z.” She had said it all sitting there in the passenger seat of his car, her backpack in her lap, her arms folded on top of it, staring out through the windshield. “He’s still paying some incredible alimony to that woman. That was when I got packed off to Nice.

  “About the only good thing that came out of that was my dad. At first he was ready to lynch John, but after a while he realized that sure, we’d screwed up, but we were serious about each other. And John, you know, wasn’t just some child molester. John was taking care of me. He went to Nice to make sure I was okay. When Daddy realized that, he came around. My mom still won’t even mention his name. She’s the reason she and Dad aren’t even coming to the concert.” His own hands were on the steering wheel. He looked at her.

  “Oh, David,” she went on, “don’t you see we’ve got to give this up, this wanting each other? I’m hurting just as much as you. But there’s no future in this. You’re a wonderful man, but don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. I do.” Later that night, at home, David watched the silent man on the news pointing at a wall map of the Falkland Islands. Then the screen was filled with the mustachioed face of a Latin-looking man silently mouthing Las Malvinas. Crowds filled the streets and squares of an ornate city that he assumed was Buenos Aires, waving blue-and-white flags and banners.

  He had to give her up. No, he didn’t have to, but it would be better, for both of them, for everyone. This way his own marriage would be preserved and he would be doing something for her, looking after her interests. Ultimately, he thought, he would be able to feel so good, so glad about her and all she meant, without any selfish envy or disappointment, that he would be able, he thought, to go to her wedding. To wish her all the happiness. Sincerely.

  He had a fine wife and a terrific kid, a beautiful home in the world’s greatest city, he made a living doing what he enjoyed. What more could he want? He had been happy when he was having the affair with Ginny, but happiness, he told himself now, did not consist of having what you wanted. Somehow that never seemed to work, because you always wanted more. Even when he had been out-of-his-head happy with Ginny, there had been dissatisfactions, frustrations. He could never spend the night with her, he could never wake up with her in the morning, he could not, in fact, take her anywhere they wanted to go. They had always wanted something the affair was not giving them—and couldn’t, so long as it stayed an affair. Happiness, then, did not consist of having what you wanted. It must consist of wanting what you had, being satisfied instead of always wanting more. If you could ever get, he thought, to the place where you weren’t always wanting more, something else, you might be happy, content.

  On the screen a silent couple splashed noiselessly in the breakers of a perfect beach as the camera zoomed in on them; in a moment they were dancing a silent mambo as the rufflesleeved orchestra guys shook their maracas: everyone was smiling maniacally. What would that place look like, David thought, the place where you weren’t always wanting more, the place where you were happy, content, satisfied, desiring nothing, needing nothing, not moving hungrily in the direction of any future? He closed his eyes, feeling the cold, wet glass in his hand, which he lifted to his mouth, drinking the whiskey in it. He loved her so much. His eyes had become accustomed to the dark behind his eyelids, and he began to be aware of the occasional flicker of the TV screen. Somewhere out there in that darkness there was that little door.

  For the concert Jane put on her dark blue dress in some sort of silky material that clung to her as it draped around her body. She was still a little heavier than she should have been, but this dress somehow made the most of her ample fleshiness. It made her look not heavy, but voluptuous. When he came back into the bedroom, she was standing in front of the mirror adjusting the scoop neck of her dress. When she saw him she gave him what he took to be a vampish look and said, “I’m wearing something nice for you,” and she pulled the neck of her dress aside to show him the strap of her black bra.

  “Oh, that’s yummy,” he said, kissing her neck.

  “You seem distracted,” she said.

  “Of course I’m distracted.”

  “Look, I know you’re going to be uptight tonight, but please don’t snap at me, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Would you rather go ahead on your own?”

  “No. Thanks. I’d rather get there with you.” He meant it. Her blond hair looked very wispy, very fluffy. She was his lovely wife. The dark blue of her dress accented her blue eyes. “You really do look very pretty tonight,” he said finally.

  “Thanks,” she said. She had been looking herself over in the full-length mirror. “Are what’s-her-name’s parents going to be there tonight?” she asked.

  “Ginny’s? I don’t know. I never thought to ask her, but I’m sure they’ll be there. I mean, wouldn’t you want to be there if it were your daughter? What more could anyone want?”

  “Oh, absolutely. That’s why I asked.” She was smiling at him. “I’m wearing those really wicked little black panties that go with this,” she said, with the appropriate hand gestures.

  He was at the point of saying, “Terrific. That will give me three more things to think about while I’m up there on that podium conducting my ass off.” He said instead, “Oh, yum. I can hardly wait.”

  Later, he would think back on the concert itself and realize that the performance had been simply flat. Technically it had left nothing to be desired, but it had lacked something—brio, vigor, life. But at the time his reaction to getting through those three hours with Ginny in front of him and Jane and John behind him was such an overwhelming relief that he’d had the illusion the players had done brilliantly. “You played with such restraint!” he heard himself telling them backstage after the concert, a smile embossed on his face, his arms weary and heavy-feeling, his armpits sweaty.

  Ginny had gotten through it fine. He somehow had gotten through it fine. He had never once looked at the audience, even when he turned to introduce Ginny and her piece, looking instead at a spot in the back of the hall about two feet above the heads of the people in the last row. “… Virginia Johnson. This is a slightly recast version from the one we heard when we gave it the prize. Ginny has done this version especially for …” When he turned back to look at her, she was terrific. Her eyes were wide open in her excitement, but she gave him a very professional, no-nonsense nod of her head as she stood behind her various keyboards, telling him she was ready when he was.

  Backstage afterward, after he’d told t
he players how much restraint they had played with, Jane was suddenly there, at his side, beaming at him. She really looked very lovely, a handsome woman. She kissed him and told him he was terrific. Then she said, with a note of surprise, “Ginny Johnson was just fine. So poised.”

  They went over to congratulate Ginny. John, the man standing next to her with his left arm around her shoulder the whole brief time they spoke, had the craggy face of a farmer and the easy bearing of a diplomat. David wanted to think of him as oily, but he couldn’t. The man’s graciousness had what seemed like genuine warmth in it. (“Ginny’s told me so much about you. …”)

  When he and Jane got home, he poured a couple of glasses of brandy and carried them upstairs to the bedroom. As Jane began to unfasten the snaps of her dress she asked him if he knew whether this John McDonald was Ginny’s “financé or steady date or what?”

  “I don’t know what they’re called anymore, either,” he said. “The guy she’s having a relationship with. How’s that?”

  “Awful,” she said. She slid the dress off her shoulders.

  “Yeah. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” she said as she walked across the room to hang the dress up in the closet. “He’s old enough to be her father.”

  “You think so? He didn’t look like he could be over thirty-five. Maybe younger.”

  “Don’t you think that’s too old for her?” she asked, hidden from him by the closet door.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it much, really.”

  “Are they living together or something?” she asked, closing the closet door and dabbing some perfume on her wrists and in the valley between her breasts.

  “I don’t know. No, he said he’d just flown in from Atlanta. Or she said it. I forget.”

  She got into bed, sitting up with the pillow against the headboard, pulling the covers up to her chin. “She’s cute, don’t you think?”

  He got into bed beside his wife. He tossed one of the pillows onto the chair and lay down, one arm under his head, his right palm pressed against his wife’s thigh. “Oh, yeah, I guess so. She and this John fella are flying off to Portugal together tomorrow.”

  His wife reached over him to turn off the light. Then she began stroking his chest. She said, “Is that so?”

  Chapter Five

  Where All The Ladders Start:

  Part One

  Again and again he told himself, all this would pass, all this hurting. Eventually, at some point in the future, he would be through that door, in that place where he would not feel any more pain: he would not desire her anymore. He wanted to be able to imagine a future in which he would be able to talk to her about all this with the kind of offhand casualness of some person with a sort of completely uninvolved interest, talking about some experience in the distant past: “I had to learn despair, I had to learn how to give up hoping. It was a tough lesson, Ginny. It was the most painful lesson I’ve ever had to learn, because I don’t think I’m made that way. But I did learn it, and here I am.” At that point he realized that he’d fantasized telling her this at the reception immediately following her wedding. He had a piece of her wedding cake in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. He toasted her, smiling serenely. From the vantage point of that formal garden, Vivaldi playing softly in the background, he would look back on himself the way he felt now, he would watch with admiration this man who was hurting now, setting his jaw, determined to take all the pain that could be dished out to him without saying a word in complaint.

  And all this while Jane went around calling people and writing letters and going to meetings to coordinate the series of vigils, blockades, teach-ins, marches and demonstrations that would eventually even draw Danny into them, the series of mass actions that was to climax in a die-in on the steps of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. She had volunteered to be one of the people “dying-in.”

  Even though he was in pain now, just about every instant his attention wasn’t engaged by something else, he began to look forward to the time when he would be able to recall how he had managed to get through this, coming through it all the stronger in the end. The pain itself, in his chest and shoulders and upper arms, felt dark and heavy. It did not feel like a sensation that originated inside his own body; it felt instead like something huge—a glacier or a weather front. Only a small portion of this mass dwelt within his body at any one time, and he would have to endure its entire massive bulk as it moved slowly through him. He would let it ravage his body and his heart, standing up to it silently, indomitably. In that future from which he would be able to look back on himself as he was now, this endurance would be a source of great satisfaction and pride. There was nothing else to do now but to continue to go about—from day to day, every day—the daily business of living his life.

  He no longer bothered to go to bed first with Jane and then wait till she had fallen asleep before he went downstairs quietly in his robe to sit in front of the silent TV screen. Now he began to “work” in his studio from shortly after dinner and the dishes and stuff till well into the night, till after Jane had gone to bed. At eleven-thirty or so he would come out of his studio to fix himself a drink and sit in front of the TV.

  The same British Defense Ministry spokesman was sitting at the same little table in front of a wall map, only now the map showed a close-up of Port Stanley, with big red cartoon bomb-blasts over the airstrip and huge red arrows swooping around the mountain range that separated the capital from the British beachhead at Port San Carlos. David heard a plane flying high overhead. The man behind the table moved his mouth, his hands folded in front of him on the table. David loved this man. He was the ultimate unflappable Britisher. He made all these announcements in the same meticulously deadpan delivery, with a determined resistance to manifesting any sort of emotional response to the actual content of the disasters he was reporting. David could imagine this man reporting the destruction of London by a nuclear attack in the same precisely calibrated tones: “There. Were. No. Survivors.” Silent Harrier jump jets catapulted vertically from the decks of silent aircraft carriers.

  Jane was more wrapped up than ever in her Freeze stuff. Frozen all the way through, David thought. Danny had gotten himself a little girlfriend, a blond guitarist named Kathleen with lots of Peter Frampton-style ringlets down to her shoulders. She looked about nine years old. She and Danny rehearsed with Danny’s group in Matt Schneider’s garage over on Clayton, so during the days now he could pretty much count on having the house to himself.

  The British fleet, the newsman was now saying, was all in place around the Falkland Islands. Their commander, Rear Admiral “Seadog Sandy” John Woodward, was known for his meticulous planning and now appeared to be ready to launch his final assault. His challenge was formidable, and he had a long and very vulnerable supply line. To complicate matters some eighteen hundred British civilians actually lived on the islands, and Woodward’s strategy had to avoid endangering them. Civilian casualties would be unthinkable. Heads of state were quoted. The Security Council of the UN appeared on the screen in all its august, droning formality.

  Again and again, in the middle of all this high international drama—Secretary of State Haig and UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar shuttling back and forth between Buenos Aires, London and New York, the familiar crisis stage-sets of the airport news conference, the press briefing with maps and pointers—in the middle of all this swirl of world events he would remember again Ginny’s eyes as she looked up at him from behind that improvised bar in the kitchen at her birthday party. Her eyes had gone wide in a kind of uncontrollable delight, simply because he’d been there. He would bow his head to the power of this emotion, bringing his hand up to touch lightly the skin of his forehead just above and directly between his eyes, as if by controlling that one wrinkle of skin he could keep himself from crying. But he couldn’t, and afterward he would dry his eyes, blow his nose and make himself another drink. By this time all the news broadcasts wer
e over, and it was just himself and reruns of Saturday Night Live, Jack Benny, Perry Mason and The Three Stooges.

  The summer theory seminar at Mills was mostly Mills students, but his Tuesday-Thursday studio, the master class in improvisation at College of Marin, was all young adults, professional or semipro musicians concerned with technique. He had done both these workshops before, and they more or less took care of themselves. They took care of him, too, giving him a focus for his attention. He minded now only the long drives to and from these two jobs, long periods when his body and some preset part of his brain and nervous system went through the motions of guiding his car through traffic, leaving him free to feel his pain. The interior of his car felt thronged, crowded with memories of Ginny—the smell of her hair, the smell of her skin, the weight of her head on his chest as he had driven back from Point Reyes and Nick’s Cove, the breathy sound of her voice and the music of her accent—“You take me to the neatest places.”

  Driving across to Marin was especially hard: then the emptiness of the passenger seat had an almost brassy ring. The late-morning overcast was just beginning to burn off; Alcatraz looked cold and bleak through the blurring red cables of the bridge. The surface of the Bay was all those different colors and textures of green and gray-green, streaked with the white wake of a single freighter moving imperceptibly off Fort Point. The gray air held the whole landscape in a bowl, suspended as if in clear plastic. As they had started back toward this highway at the end of that day on the Point Reyes headlands, she had asked him to slow everything down, to set a slower tempo. “Ral-en-tan-do.” Soon all this would be over, he kept telling himself.