Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  She had put her robe back on, and she was standing there now with a look of strained patience hardening her face. She came up to him and put her hands on his elbows. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” she asked. “It’s after midnight. I really wouldn’t be able to do them justice right now. I’m pretty wiped.”

  In the morning he suggested that they take a shower together. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Oh, that’s a nice idea. But why don’t we save it for some evening when we’re really feeling, you know, intense. Seems like a shame to waste it on just an ordinary morning when we’re just going to do—regular work stuff.”

  Her regular work stuff that morning was another session with Jack on the endless literacy project pamphlets, comic books that were going to teach ethnic groups—Blacks and Hispanics—to read by using their own slang and their own grammar as pictured in familiar neighborhood situations. So she would not be able to listen to the whisper songs. “Or why don’t you dub the pieces onto a cassette and I’ll listen to them in the car tomorrow on the way out to Livermore?”

  “Jesus Christ!” he heard himself cry out, “I don’t just want you to hear them, I want to hear what you think of them. I’d like to get your response. I’d like to know that what I feel inside of me is real to you. This stuff is kind of important to me, you know!”

  “Well, when was the last time you looked at anything I’ve done—press releases and pamphlets and stuff? That’s important to me. How much time have you had for that?”

  Just before dinner that evening they patched it up, and she made a “date” to listen to the new whisper songs—the night after next.

  “You want to see me die?” she asked abruptly.

  “Huh?”

  She collapsed slowly in front of him, her knees giving way and her shoulders tilting and her body rolling slightly as she fell so that she came down slowly—first on the heel of her hand and then her weight being let down gradually, along her forearm, elbow and shoulder. Last of all she let her head down gently on the living room rug and—only then—went limp.

  “Not bad, huh?” she asked, blinking her eyes open at him from the floor. “Leslie Brennan’s been coaching us. She’s really into martial arts, and we’ve been practicing at this gym she goes to. On mats.” She got up slowly.

  “Honey,” he said, “why are you doing this? It seems so—I don’t know—theatrical. Playacting. It’s just an empty gesture. If you wanted to do something really useful, like blow up a missile plant, that would be different.”

  “We’ve had this discussion before,” she said firmly, running a hand through her hair and brushing off her elbow. “You’re talking John Wayne adventurism. You’ve got to be realistic. You do what you can, not what you see in the movies. In the movies the rebels are all dedicated to one big … one big action. They blow up a missile plant—and that changes everything. But realistically, life doesn’t follow that male bourgeois individualist ethic, you know. We can’t get into that kind of thing and still lead a normal life—just being wives and mothers. And that’s too high a price. Besides, none of us knows anything about explosives. We’d probably end up blowing ourselves up or getting caught or something. Like what’s-her-name—Kathy Boudine? And then what have you got? Nothing would be accomplished and we’d lose the chance to convince anybody.

  “Besides,” she went on, “when did you earn the right to be so goddam condescending? What have you done for your principles lately? I mean, since the benefit, what was that—two years ago?”

  “Look, the issue isn’t whether you or I do something or not, it’s what you do. Whether what you do makes any kind of a difference, whether it has any actual effect on anybody—I mean, anybody besides yourself. Why this? Why this gesture, these gestures, standing in vigils and stuff? Frankly, this all sounds essentially self-indulgent to me: it just gives you all a chance to hang out together having a good time convincing yourselves you’re actually doing something useful. But what’s it going to change, these gestures? Who’s going to see them? Whose hearts and minds are you going to change?”

  “Well, in the first place it isn’t just one … just one thing. That isn’t all we’re doing, you know. Christ, we’ve done the teach-ins and the vigils, some of the others did the blockade at Port Chicago. Is there some kind of moral law against liking the people who’re working with you for what you all believe in? Is there some kind of law against enjoying what you do, you know, what you do for what you believe in?”

  “Revolution can be fun, huh?”

  She looked at him. “Well, what have you got against fun? Why do you always have to be so puritanical? If you’re going to be such a purist that you keep finding fault with everything we do, if you’re such a perfectionist that you can’t be satisfied with these little actions because you keep imagining that one big huge action that’ll change everything for ever once and for all, then you’re always going to end up doing nothing at all. ‘Perfectionism leads to paralysis.’”

  He wondered who the hell she was quoting now. But before he could ask, she went on, “Besides, these are symbols, you know? Symbols are supposed to get into your insides to get your gut reaction even before you know what’s going on. How else can you move people, how else can you wake them up? Look at Gandhi, for chrissake. All he did was make a handful of salt. Obviously that’s not all he did, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop working for what you believe in, what you want.”

  He suggested going out for dinner in the middle of the week—just the two of them. He suggested the hot tubs again. He suggested meeting her for lunch, and they actually did this once, at a place on Twenty-fourth Street that served pretty good omelets, where they sat across the table from each other while she looked the place over, all the time talking about people he had never met. Eventually she reached over to put her hand on his and ask him, “So, you feeling better?”

  That night when he got into bed with her, he felt a sudden, painful wave of emptiness and longing for Ginny pass through him with a shudder, and he buried his face in the neck of the woman lying next to him in bed. His wife. She would think, he knew, that he was being affectionate. She’d been patient with him, letting him be depressed in his own space, as she put it. And he had been patient, waiting and waiting for this pain to stop. But it had only gotten worse, and now here he was, lying in bed, tangled up in his wife’s limbs, the inside of his chest feeling raw. Jane snuggled back at him, and he thought, this is cowardly.

  And if it was cowardly to fool his wife this way, there was, he now realized, another kind of cowardice in the way he had chosen to deal with Ginny, with the crisis of losing her. He had managed to convince himself (and her too) that he was being noble, he had given her up, he’d stepped aside and gotten out of her way because this John person had more to offer her. Children. John wanted kids. He could give them to her, a whole houseful if she wanted. That was more than David had been ready to offer. And he was married. Obviously this was the source of the guilt that John had played on—and she’d cracked. She had run back to the daddy who was safe, who didn’t make her feel quite as guilty.

  And he had done pretty much the same thing. This nobility of his had been painful, it had cost him a lot of pain, but it had also been perfectly safe. He had literally made a virtue of necessity, telling himself he had won a moral victory when in fact he had simply given up. And what the hell, he thought, is a moral victory? If it isn’t moral, how can it be a victory? He had held happiness in his hand, and the first moment he’d been challenged he had—almost instinctively—retreated back into the familiar, safe, middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged structure of his marriage. Was this what Dada would remember?

  Lying here, in the darkness of his own bedroom, hearing the regular breathing that at this moment was his wife, he thought Jane had stopped being real to him when he could no longer have a sense of why she did what she did. Why did she want to get involved in all the embarrassing theatrics of this die-in? Why did she want to go to those
poetry readings? What did she get out of her teaching job? It must have been a very long time since she’d had an inside for him. How long had it been now that he woke up every morning with the realization that he would have to get through yet another day with this person who was waking up next to him. Even while he was up to his ears in the affair with Ginny he would wake up in the morning next to his wife and hear himself mutter “Goddam,” shaking his head in depression. He’d been waking up with that curse on his lips for a long time, it must have been more than a year now. He’d been coming home for months—years?—feeling, as soon as he made the turn onto Shrader Street, pulling up the hill toward his home and his wife, at that moment feeling a wave of depression wash over him, a wave that made him feel there would be no future, or no future that didn’t feel exactly like this present. He had not felt real himself before he’d fallen in love with Ginny, and now that she was gone, there was no one for whom his own reality, his own experience of the world, had an inside.

  He did not want to go on doing nothing, just lying here. He got up. He put on his robe and went downstairs. He fixed himself a drink and then took it into his studio. He closed the door and turned on the RECORDING light, but he had no idea what he was so restlessly wanting to do. He looked around the studio. In his last season of concerts, he thought now as he moved a small pile of programs off the chair and sat down, in his last season of concerts the most radical thing he’d done was to play Ginny’s piece. And that was, by her own admission, modeled on one of his own early pieces. The concerts had included Carter, Ives and Sculthorpe. The Sculthorpe was the most innovative, but that piece had already been premiered at La Jolla the year before.

  He had to face it: he had done exactly what he had grown up telling himself he would never do. His “realistic” policy for the orchestra was also, he now realized, just another instance of playing it safe. He had even congratulated the group for playing with restraint. With restraint, for chrissake! He had not made any enemies, and now he wasn’t sure anymore if he still had it in him to do anything truly outrageous. What was he afraid of?

  He thought about the women he’d been screwing. In every single case he had not put any moves on them till they had made it unmistakably clear that they were not going to turn him down. Was that it? Was he simply afraid of being rejected? Had it come to that?

  Now he began to think, again, about how he had handled the situation with Ginny. She had been honest with him about the whole John business, and he’d been “noble.” He had stepped aside because this John person had more to offer her. According to whom? It was just a hell of a lot simpler for her to be with John. But did he really have so little to offer her?

  Damn. She loved him. She still loved him. And he had walked out of her apartment and into his car and he had driven away—all the while congratulating himself: how noble.

  What a tepid bath of self-pity that had allowed him to soak in. He had told himself that his stepping aside, silent as a church mouse, to let her be with John, was a noble act, an action aimed at some altruistic goal. In fact, it had been simply a gesture, as foolish as Jane standing in that vigil, not an action but a gesture aimed only at making the right kind of impression on an audience, an audience of one—Ginny.

  She had rejected him because John had leaned on her. John had fought for what he wanted, and John had won. If he had put up a struggle, he could still tell himself, she would have stayed. He could have kept her if he’d really wanted to fight for her, but he had—nobly—chosen not to and stepped aside. It had all been just chickenshit. What was really scary, he realized now, was the possibility of fighting for her and still being turned away. He had actually, he realized now, chosen—on whatever level of awareness, with whatever stratagems of self-deceit—to preserve himself in her memory as the man who’d sacrificed his own interests to hers. Better that than the image of himself in her eyes as the man who had fought for her ineptly and then lost, who had gambled his wife and his child for her and blown it all, all his work come to nothing, unworthy of winning, someone to be pitied.

  He stood in the middle of the room, rubbing his chin. He rubbed the wrinkle between his eyes. He would start crying again in a minute. He loved her so much. He could never just give her up. She must be worth more to him than this. He must be worth more to him than this. It was starting to come clear now, and he felt himself tilt over the edge of something.

  She would be back in early September, in a week or so, back in that house in the Richmond where they’d been happy together—in her tree-house-like bedroom where they’d made such delicious love, in the sunny kitchen where those Rolling Stones tongues licked at all the air of the world, where they’d sat at the table working together on her score of “The Queen of Pentacles,” where they’d worked together on his whisper songs, where they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder, together, at the counter making stuffed calamari. He would go there. He would confront her.

  Now he could feel his breath start to come short and shallow, feeling his whole nervous system pulsing—a tightness gripping his upper arms and shoulders. He would see her. He would not continue this absurd pretense. He would tell her—he would tell her how much he loved her, how much better for her he was than this John person. He would throw himself at her feet. It would be the scariest thing he had ever done. The possibility that she might reject him seized him with panic, but the possibility that she might accept him was even worse: it would not leave a single thread of his life unchanged.

  Chapter Six

  Where All The Ladders Start:

  Part Two

  He began to wonder if he had not ended up making Daniel’s mistake, after all. He asked himself this all the time now, even as he was standing in the line that didn’t seem to be moving in the post office on Stanyan Street, where he’d agreed to stop off on his way to Lennehan’s studio—to take care of some Freeze stuff for Jane that had to be sent off by registered mail, some documents connected with the permit for their die-in demonstration. They couldn’t just hand the documents to the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary in Charge of Permits for Die-Ins, they had to record the action of having sent them. It was all bullshit, he thought, as he stood there impatiently, restlessly reading the posters encouraging people to collect stamps and prohibiting them from sending firearms and explosives through the mails, while the main theme of Bach’s Cantata 208 ran through his head like a sound track for the memory that tormented him with its own sweetness, the memory of that meadow at Point Reyes where the white deer did in fact safely graze beside the stream where Ginny had seen the Quantum lizard, the stream on whose moving surface he’d watched the moving shadows of those clouds. The deer’s hooves had splashed in that stream as they’d moved off into the darkness of those pines. That was all writ on water. His heart felt like a stone in his chest.

  Way back in the beginning he’d driven home from her birthday party congratulating himself: he was going to start getting some of that supplemental affection he needed—and he was going to make sure it stayed supplemental. He wasn’t going to let himself make Daniel’s mistake, he’d told himself.

  What had Daniel’s mistake been? (Some guy in a leather jacket about four places ahead of him in the line was grumbling out loud in an Irish accent about the slowness of the service, about the incompetence of the government in general and of the post office in particular.) What was Daniel’s mistake? Daniel had gotten involved with a beautiful young model. He’d fallen in love with her and divorced his wife. That was obviously a surrender to romance. Then he’d married his heart’s desire. That must have been an attempt to turn a romantic fantasy into reality, to realize what could only exist in dreams and fairy tales.

  As far as David could tell, Daniel was happy as a clam. He was married to a glamorous airhead, but what counted for Daniel obviously was that she listened to his every word, she read every line of his stories, she even memorized some of them. What Daniel had thought and felt in his most private silences lived in her. His book was being read, it
had gotten excited reviews. David had seen him on TV, sitting back in his chair being thoughtful on some early-morning talk show. Everywhere David looked, people were listening to Daniel. At the university his students would be taking notes on what he said. He would be quoted. He had paid the cost of a twenty-year marriage, but what the hell. What was the mistake David had been so certain he was going to avoid?

  Now one of the only two clerks on duty, a heavy black woman in her forties, was putting one of those CLOSED—USE NEXT WINDOW signs up on the counter in front of her. There must have been some twenty people in line, David figured, and at least half of them were grumbling audibly, shaking their heads in disbelief at each other.

  The guy in the black leather jacket up ahead of him in line took command of this chorus. “What the fuck is going on here? Look, there must be twenty fucking people in this line. Why can’t we get a little fucking service, huh?”

  The one woman clerk remaining behind the counter gave him a look that announced she would “ignore” him if he shut up now, but if he kept it up—

  The people in line began to disavow the man, some of them distancing themselves from him physically, all of them making something of a show of their revulsion. The guy’s chrome-studded black leather jacket had a dog chain looped somehow through one of his epaulets, and he had a leather collar around his neck with half-inch chrome spikes. His head was shaved, except for a stubble Mohican in the shape of a cross. An iridescent feather dangled from one of his ears.

  “You should have more clerks—not less—to take care of this number of people!” The punk in the leather jacket was actually wagging his finger at the woman postal clerk. “What the fuck are you doing taking clerks off the front line at a time like this? Why can’t you guys get yourselves more fucking together than this? Shit—”