Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  One of the young semipros in the Marin master class was a blond pathologist named Carol Wilson who talked, during the breaks, about her “regressions,” her past lives. She went regularly to a regression specialist who put her into some sort of hypnotic trance during which she would travel to her past existences, seeing, hearing, even tasting and smelling all the details of a previous childhood she’d had in some rural cottage in Elizabethan England, noticing such things as the pattern of the brocade covering the mantel and the number of tines on her fork. She was interested in what she called “Mill Valley Punk Music.”

  “You mean whole-grain punk?” David asked her, smiling.

  After a pause she asked, “What’s so funny about that, I’d like to know,” with an aggressively injured, deadpan expression. Then she broke into a smile. “As a matter of fact, I meant natural-fibers punk.”

  Later on he took her down to the rocks in Sausalito, where the Bay splashed up onto the boulders at their feet, and there, looking out across the Bay at the city that looked like a travel poster for itself, they ate the sushi out of the little Styrofoam trays they’d bought at the deli in San Anselmo, and drank the wine he’d bought, along with the plastic wineglasses, in the liquor store next to the No-Name bar. He figured she was worth maybe two more dates, if necessary, but no more than that, unless she got the job done. He wasn’t sure she was going to, because when he reached out to stroke her temple as she sat beside him on that rock, she at first only stopped talking and leaned into his hand. When he said, “Like that?” she rolled the weight of her head on his hand for a moment longer and then said dreamily, “I’m purring.” But suddenly she pulled herself upright and gave him a challenging look. “You’re not getting funny on me, are you?”

  “Funny?” he asked, aware that he was exaggerating the raised-eyebrow routine a little.

  “Yeah, you know: sexual.” She was looking him right in the eye. This, David thought, was part of the price he would have to pay if he expected this woman to do what he needed her to do. What he needed somebody to do. She would be better than most because she was nothing that remotely resembled Ginny. She was tall and blond and long; even her movements felt angular. She was from Santa Barbara and was something of an athlete: she rode bikes everywhere and ran and water-skied.

  “So sexual to you,” he said, “is funny, huh? That’s interesting.”

  “You know what I mean,” she insisted.

  He did not know what she meant, though she had a very pretty face and long, slim legs. Eventually he drove her home, thinking as he drove away that this was one of the things he would have to begin to get used to if he expected any help in silencing the echoes of Ginny that continued to haunt him every single waking instant that he wasn’t distracted by something else. The amount of resistance Carol Wilson was giving him did not make her a very good investment, he thought.

  Just then he swung onto the on ramp, and as he went into that big curve something slid across the panel on top of the dashboard. It was Carol’s sunglasses. He grinned and got off at the Larkspur exit to look for a phone booth.

  She had a supple athlete’s body, and David was amazed at the way she could manage—no matter what position they were in (and she would teach him some he had only heard about)—to reach down, around, between or through their various arms and legs and torsos to stroke his balls. She had a tattoo of Saturn right over her appendix, and she was extremely good at what she did. Except that she never came. When he asked her about it, she said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your problem, okay?” When he refused to look at a science-fiction story she had written (“Carol, what do I know about science fiction? I’m a musician.” “But you read, you’re a teacher”), she pouted for half an hour and then told him she didn’t think they should see each other anymore—“Sexually, I mean. You know?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She looked surprised when he said that, but she said only, “Hmm.”

  She had served a function, and he had been nice to her in some way that he wasn’t sure he would be able to specify. Well, he had worked very hard trying to bring her off. What the hell. She had done her part well (she had only asked about his wife once), and he had done his part, so they had both made a good bargain.

  He took a lot of satisfaction and confidence from the fact that he had endured this pain for this long while continuing to function, and the longer he endured it this way, the more confident he would feel. It might go on for a long time, but he would be equal to that challenge, having learned to nourish himself on his own despair.

  At home, Jane was working full blast on the big “Freezerock” benefit concert. She spent a lot of time now asking Danny which groups he and Kathleen listened to, especially any local groups that were starting to get hot. “The immediate goal,” she would explain to the two young people gravely, “is, you know, publicity, exposure, some operating capital and a good turnout for the Die-In. But we mustn’t ever forget the ultimate goals.”

  To David these conferences began to take on a conspiratorial air.

  He would come out of his studio in the evening, after sitting alone in the dark, the RECORDING light on outside, listening to other people’s work—Bartók’s Third Quartet especially—or listening to nothing, the headphones over his ears. He would come out of his studio these evenings and there they would be, the three of them sitting around the kitchen table, Danny with a cup of coffee in front of him, his short, spiky haircut set off so sharply against Kathleen’s blond ringlets. Even the name “Freezerock” had been Jane’s idea, and David began seeing posters and hearing more and more radio announcements for her Freezerock concert.

  At night, after his family had gone to bed, leaving the dark house to him, silent, David would come out of his studio, mix himself a drink and sit down on the couch in front of the TV set. Billie Jean King, thirty-eight years old, defeated nineteen-year-old Tracy Austin in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon. Austin had not even been born when King won her first Wimbledon doubles championship in 1961. The number of young Argentine men killed in the Falklands war climbed to two thousand. The Argentine people no longer waved their pale-blue-and-white banners as they massed in the ornate plazas of Buenos Aires. Earlier, a reporter had asked Argentine Foreign Minister Nicanor Costa-Mendez if his troops, backed up against the sea and surrounded, were planning to surrender. “What was that word you used?” he asked with a pained smile, his hand touching the back of his ear. “We don’t have that word in our dictionary,” he said in English.

  He watched these news shows until they ended, usually with the sound off. Then he would spin the dial till he saw something, even a commercial, that gave some promise of distraction, and he would more or less watch that, sipping away at his drink, till he knew that his mind was exhausted enough to let him sleep.

  One Sunday afternoon, driving back from a concert in Berkeley, he passed the campus of the university on his way to a classical record store he’d heard about. As he drove past the broad, gently sloping academic lawn he noticed people standing at attention on this grass, standing at regular five-foot intervals. They stood facing west, their eyes apparently in neutral, their arms at their sides or clasped behind their backs, like sentinels. Some of them held signs that leaned back against their legs, signs that made some mention of PEACE or VIGIL or NO MORE NUKES or FREEZE or something about WEAPONS RESEARCH. There were no pedestrians in sight, and none of the people in any of the cars driving past seemed to be paying the demonstrators any attention at all. He had hardly even noticed them himself. Their only audience was their own consciences. Yet tonight, he was sure, they would sleep the Sleep of the Just. Maybe that was ultimately the purpose of these vigils and witnesses and demonstrations, these protests for liberals—not so much to make an actual change in the world, to sabotage a missile, say, or better, a missile assembly plant, as to let people sleep that Sleep of the Just. These movements, then, were like pop religions: they sold peace of mind, they put people to sleep. To call them movem
ents at all seemed ironic.

  He had just, in the same moment, begun to congratulate himself on being able to think about something other than Ginny when he noticed that one of the people in that line of witnesses, standing at attention and holding a sign that read YOU CAN’T HUG YOUR KID WITH NUCLEAR ARMS, was Jane. His wife. He was past her before he could even take his foot off the gas pedal, let alone step on the brakes to slow down. But then, why would he slow down? Why would he stop? What could he say to her?

  At Cheryl Kennedy’s Fourth of July/birthday party he met Doris Hennessy, the weather lady on channel 8. She and Cheryl had gone to high school together in Burlingame and still kept in touch. Doris Hennessy was a tall, busty redhead. On TV her tailored suits offset the wanton, abandoned pile of her auburn hair. Cheryl had told her about this composer friend of hers, and she was really delighted to meet him. Didn’t he conduct an orchestra too? How did that feel, she wanted to know, to stand up there and have a hundred-and-something people obey every flick of your wrist?

  “There are only about fifteen or twenty of them. People. In the orchestra. It’s just a chamber-music group. Not like the symphony.”

  “But still—” she said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  He could not do very much as they stood awkwardly around the potato salad on Cheryl’s patio with Jane over by the Weber and everyone standing around shivering in sweaters and complaining about the foolishness of having an outdoor barbecue in the summer in San Francisco. So he stood around and listened to Doris talk animatedly about The Tibetan Book of the Dead and her out-of-body experiences and “irrefutable” evidence of an afterlife—people on operating tables hearing voices that coaxed them toward cosmic white lights pulsing with serene, psalmlike music.

  A week later he ran into her in the produce section of the Lucky store. She had just broken off a two-year “relationship” (yes, she hated that word, too, but there really just wasn’t any other word handy), and the fact that he was married actually made him more attractive to her. She was not looking to get into anything “meaningful.” (That was another word they both hated.)

  The first time he went over to her apartment, when he got into bed with her, she said nothing, but she was almost feral in her intensity, and a couple of times he had to warn her about her teeth and her fingernails. “You know I’m going to have to explain any teeth marks or scratches you leave on me.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, kissing the spot on his neck where she had just bitten him.

  She was not a TV superstar, but she was well-known enough that he could not take her into a bar or a restaurant without her being recognized. Partly because of this they spent their first couple of dates at her apartment on Parnassus, fucking themselves into exhaustion. When they did go out, he heard himself suggest a drive up to the wine country, but being there again, with Doris, and having a picnic at those same tables just off the parking lot at Rutherford Hills, where they could sit and look out through the branches of the live oaks to see most of the Napa Valley laid out below—all of it only made everything worse. As he reached across the table to pour a little more of the wine, he felt his chin start to wrinkle as the beginning of a sob worked its way up out of his chest. He turned away from her.

  “What’s the matter?” Doris asked. And now she pulled her wineglass closer to her on the table and then folded her hands in front of it. It might have been a poker hand. “Got the guilties?” she asked. “Look,” she went on, “if this is going to get all complicated with emotions and stuff, it isn’t going to be any fun.”

  The next time he called her it was to ask her to have coffee with him so he could tell her they should break things off. She immediately snarled at him, “Didn’t you watch the news last night?”

  “No,” he said, “what happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened. I wasn’t on. They canned me. With exactly two hours’ notice. They called in some clown who ‘really communicates excitement about cold fronts.’” She had already lined up an audition with a station up in Portland. Of course she was pissed. She would “see him around.”

  He went to the gym and worked out. In the middle of a seated press, remembering John standing there backstage after Ginny’s concert, his arm casually around her shoulder and saying with that easy grace he always associated with Southern aristocrats, “Ginny’s told me so much about you,” he realized in some concrete way he had not grasped before that Ginny was going to be back in San Francisco at the end of the summer, at the latest by the beginning of the fall semester at Mills. Of course he had “known” this all along. But.

  Now he found he was very excited, an electricity running just under the skin of his limbs, the way it did when he was up on the podium and the orchestra was surging up to him and the music was alive. She was only going to be in Portugal for a month or so. She had to be back in September to start her senior term at Mills. His heart was beating faster, he could feel the adrenaline racing through his system like a herd of animals—a massive movement made up of uncountable little, excited, moving individuals. Some action was being demanded of him, something immediate. He had no idea what that action was.

  And he had just begun to feel he was doing better. He had thought only that she would be in Portugal with this John person. Five or six thousand miles away. But this. She would be back in the same apartment on Fifteenth Avenue. He might even run into her by coincidence at some concert. Jesus Christ—he had insisted that they should still be friends, and she, of course, would simply assume that she’d be coming back to the orchestra for the fall season. Somehow he had not even allowed himself to think about either possibility—continuing to rehearse and conduct the group with her in the middle of it, unattainable, or auditioning anyone to replace her. He had just barely begun to learn how to deal with her absence without breaking down and crying four or five times a day, and now he would have to undergo a whole new education in pain—how to deal with the fact of her presence.

  That night he came out of his studio around eleven to begin watching the news. He turned on the TV set, left the sound off and then went into the pantry to fix himself a drink of Ginny’s corn liquor. He told himself he would have to get some more bourbon tomorrow. When he walked back into the TV room, he was startled: someone else was in there. A figure was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the couch. He recognized her: it was Jane.

  “Hi,” he said in what he took to be a cheery voice, “want to watch some news with me?”

  “No,” she said. The muscles around her mouth were taut. “I think we need to have a talk.”

  “A talk?”

  “Yeah. We’re not talking, David. At all. And I’ve tried. Haven’t you noticed how much I’ve left you alone? I’ve just been hoping that eventually, if I gave you enough space, you’d start it yourself.”

  “Start it. What’s it?”

  “Oh, David. Start talking, getting whatever it is that’s bugging you out in the open. You know what I mean. What’s the matter? What the hell have I done now? Can we just reestablish some lines of communication?”

  “What have you done? Communication? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “David, you’ve been sleeping down here just about every night since God knows when—for the last couple of months. How do you think that makes me feel, lying upstairs in that big empty bed? You’re rejecting me.” She was sitting on the edge of the couch, her forearms hugging herself across her lap. “I’ve left you alone,” she went on, “we’ve been over and over the rules about the studio, and I’ve never gone in there to bug you or anything. But you haven’t been working. I know. You haven’t been in the studio. You’ve been sitting in here watching TV. You’ve practically moved in down here. You’ve been avoiding me.”

  Even now the news crew on Channel 8 was involved in some silent “happy talk” with the new weatherman. They all looked so photogenically upbeat. He got up and turned the set off, getting a whiff of her perfume. The front of her robe had fallen open sl
ightly, and he could look down into her bosom. “I’ve been avoiding everybody,” he said softly, looking down at her breasts.

  “I’ve tried to be patient,” she said, “but there’s a limit. How do you think it makes me feel night after night to lie there alone in that cold, damn bed?”

  “Don’t get angry,” he said softly. He knelt down at her feet and put his head in her lap. “I’ve been pretty depressed. Don’t get pissed. I really don’t need you to get pissed at me on top of being as down as this.”

  “So talk to me. Tell me, what’s bugging you? What are you depressed about?”

  He was depressed about his work, he told her; it had come to nothing. Maybe this was his midlife crisis or whatever, but he had not felt he could talk to her about it because she was always so involved with her own stuff—school business and Freeze business, the literacy project that she seemed to shoehorn into any available free afternoon (how long had she and Jack been working on that thing, anyway?), literary people he didn’t know from Adam. He hadn’t felt he could talk to her. About anything. She’d been excluding him, it felt like, from her territory.

  Of course they ended up making love on the rug, right there where they were in the little TV room. But it was pretty much the way it always had been with Jane: she took a very long time to come, and all the while he felt he was simply doing a form of hard labor.

  Why couldn’t he get back into the frame of mind in which it had always been okay—sex with Jane? Good enough? What the hell more did he want? This was the realistic solution, wasn’t it?

  She began to stir and finally sat up, holding the robe up to cover her bosom. “This is very romantic and all,” she said, “but we both have things to do in the morning, and I think we’ll feel a whole lot better about the whole thing if we go upstairs and sleep in a real bed. Okay?”

  “Got a minute?” he said. “I want you to hear something. These are some of the whisper songs I was telling you about. Remember when we woke up one morning and KQED was playing that Folkways record of the African kids singing—”