Where All The Ladders Start Page 3

  Well, if there really was nothing in it for him, then all the more reason to do it. He had never asked for any rewards. He had done his work and he had never kissed any ass. He’d never even been comfortable with all the socializing, the party-going and party-giving that went with being Musical Director of an orchestra, especially one as marginal as his, trying to keep it funded and attended. He did not want to think of his music as involving any socializing. All he wanted was to do his work. It hadn’t come to much recently, but he would not complain. He would be silent and exult, like a string tuned to his own pitch and his alone.

  How come Blanchard and Valdez never had to worry about this kind of stuff?

  They and the rest of Millsap’s buddies had position. They were all recording—recording for respectable labels and giving each other glowing reviews. They would invite each other to their respective colleges and then provide audiences for their buddies’ work by requiring their classes to attend the concerts. They were all performing and giving each other residencies and NEA fellowships, while David was still rehearsing in—in a rummage sale, he thought as he lifted a garment that turned out to be a bed jacket. Who the hell wears bed jackets now? Forty-three years old, he thought, and I’m still rehearsing in a goddamn rummage sale.

  It wasn’t the discards that bothered him, but some quality of the silence that filled the dim basement, some heavy or spongy feel into which the occasional sounds that drifted down from the street were absorbed and dissolved without an echo. This was the silence of things that had been banished to a kind of nonbeing. The gray light coated these rags, these broken shoes, these old cans and bottles. This silence coated the room as well, and all the things in it, including himself.

  He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and turned in time to see Ginny Johnson come around the corner of the stairwell, stepping down into the room. “Oh, hi!” she said as she walked toward the piano, her knapsack slung over one shoulder. “I thought for sure I’d be the first one here.” She was smiling a great big sort of nervous smile, squeezing herself between the music stands and setting the knapsack down. When she took off her mannish suit jacket and hung it over her chair, he saw the curve of her bottom in her blue jeans and read the logo on the back of her wine-colored bowling shirt: a garland of white roses enclosing a white crown, and underneath the crown the legend “Albert’s Royal Lounge: Athens, Ga.” She turned back around and smiled at him. Why hadn’t he ever noticed before, he wondered, that Ginny Johnson had very nice little boobs? Her eyes were large and pale green, heavily fringed with thick lashes.

  “I thought you were from Atlanta,” he said, smiling and motioning at her shirt.

  “Oh,” she said, giving a quick look over her shoulder. “My boyfriend gave me this. He went to the University of Georgia? And this is the bar where they all used to hang out there.” Her close-cropped dark hair was tousled around her head: it must have been windy outside; she must have just gotten up. There was something bedroomy about the way her hair was disheveled, as if she’d just made love before throwing her clothes on to come down here to rehearse. Her round face was sprinkled with freckles.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  Heading Home:

  Part Two

  Sitting in his car in the darkness of this side road in Golden Gate Park, he heard footsteps and heavy breathing and noticed a movement in his side-view mirror that coalesced quickly into a gray shape growing steadily larger in the mirror, a man in a gray sweat suit that gleamed in the moonlight like some kind of metal—running with that abstracted, vacant expression he saw so often on runners’ faces. The man was “zoned out,” Danny would say, out in space. He might have been a saint or a robot. He passed the car, David was sure, without ever seeing him, without ever having known he existed. And when he had passed, the silence stitched itself back together again behind him.

  David looked at his watch. He’d better head home. He thought of Jane lying alone in their bed, and then almost immediately of Ginny Johnson in the kitchen at that party, her arms around his neck, her freckled face as she reached her mouth up to kiss him, the two of them being jostled by all the people around them. Why had it taken him so long to realize, he wondered now, fingering the key in the ignition without turning it, to realize how—how ripe she was? He hadn’t noticed her, he decided now, because she somehow always looked as if she had “already been there,” a part of the background.

  The first time he’d met her, the night she replaced Gloria Sanchez, was the first time they’d rehearsed in the church basement, and he hadn’t noticed her till after he had helped carry in and set up the Yamaha keyboard Marty had agreed to lend them till they could do something about the piano. He’d plugged the thing in, getting down on his knees and reaching in under it to get to the outlet, and then, as he stood up and turned to face the group, wanting first off to ask Gloria about the new girl from Mills, he’d felt a sudden panic as he realized that somehow, in spite of the times he’d reminded himself, he hadn’t done anything about auditioning people, and now what the hell was he going to do? Standing directly in front of him was this round-faced girl, her short, dark hair looking shaggy and rough-cut. She had three small silver earrings in one ear and a slim feather hanging down from the other. She was holding a flute case. “Hi,” she said. “My name is Ginny Johnson. I think Gloria must have talked with you all about my taking her place in the woodwinds?” She was wearing a faded Levi’s jacket with the sleeves torn off and a pair of stovepipe-thin black pants.

  It took him a moment to realize that he had actually translated what she had said into this intelligible statement. What she had in fact said was closer to music than to language, a lilting, slow-moving drawl of a melody: Hah. Mah nayme’s Ginny Johnson. Ah think Glowria must’ve tawlked with y’all ’bout mah taykin huh place in the woodwinds?

  Oh, Jesus, he thought, trying not to smile, not just a new kid, and not just a punk new kid, but a redneck punk new kid! Give me a break!

  But when he got up on the little three-step ladder he used for a podium to start rehearsing the Telemann, he looked over at her about six bars before the flute part came in, to give her his you’re-going-to-do-just-fine smile, noticing the rings on her fingers and her lovely, full mouth as she laid her lower lip on the mouthpiece, licking her tongue in and out. And she came in just fine, with a clear, sure, open tone. Her phrasing was a little uneven, but only just a little. She had obviously prepared this piece, and she played with a confident attack.

  Later she told him that she had “already been there,” that she’d come to several of the group’s concerts to hear Gloria, and that they’d even been introduced once, though he didn’t remember it. Once you realized she was pretty, more and more of her features emerged as lovely, but if there were two other people in the room with her, she would be the one you didn’t notice. She almost never wore any makeup, even for concerts, just very casual knock-around clothes in a vaguely New Wave style.

  This was about the time he’d met Daniel’s fiancée, Connie, and a month or so before he got the first of the headaches while they were down in San Diego spending a weekend with Michael Harrison. The first two or three of these headaches were so bad, they made him sit down. He thought of describing the pain to Michael: it felt as if one of those massive rocks that sat off the coast, the waves crashing into its base, had moved all its granite blackness, its hard weight, into the left corner of the back of his skull. But he only said, “It hurts so bad, the pain has a weight.” He got another one when he tried to do some leg-curls at the gym Michael had taken him to. As he lay on his stomach gripping the handles of the Nautilus machine, his face in the folded towel, hearing Devo coming over the PA system, he’d strained to pull the weights up with his calves, pulling his feet up toward his buttocks. The first pain came into the back of his head like a dark liquid, but the next time he pulled against the weights, something speared into the base of his skull with the force of a blow.

  After that t
he headaches came when he worked out or ran—anything that got his blood pressure up. A week later, as he was running in the Panhandle, one of them chiseled him to a stop. He dropped to his knees on the grass, sobbing and clutching the back of his head and seeing piercing, bright flashes of light in the blackness behind his closed eyelids. He felt as if he were kneeling before a wall, just a few feet away from it, and in this wall, a few feet up from its base, was a narrow door, like the door in a squash court, only smaller. He would have to crawl through it. If he could just get through that door, he thought, knowing that it made no sense, the hurting would stop. He would be free from pain in a place of silence and darkness.

  When he got to the hospital, still in his sweats, he started listing his symptoms for the older Japanese doctor, and the man patiently explained to him about headaches that were specific, triggered by the same mechanism all the time, as opposed to those that might come as a response to a cluster of triggering situations and so were called “cluster” headaches, usually caused by stress. David thought this was a very elaborate effort to disguise the fact that the doctors didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, but he only said, “But I’m not under any stress, and besides, the first ones hit me on a weekend, when I was out of town. I was on vacation. I wasn’t under any stress at all.”

  “That’s how stress headaches work. Stress causes the little vessels in the brain, the little pipes in there, to constrict. Then, when you go on a weekend vacation, the pressure is released and these little tubes expand into the surrounding tissue. The equipment does get less and less resilient with time, so we see these headaches more in older people. We call these ‘weekend’ headaches.”

  The less they know about something, David thought, the more names they throw at it. He said, “I’m not under any stress.”

  “Are you married?” the doctor asked, in a tone that would have ended the discussion, except that David then told him about the pains that came piercing into his head when he ran or worked out.

  Then the doctor got very nervous. “We can’t rule out the possibility of an aneurysm,” the man said, and then went on to explain: “Like a weak spot in a tire, a thin place in one of the blood vessels within the brain. Ordinarily the thin spot manages all right. But, say for some reason the blood pressure should rise dramatically and abruptly—lifting weights. Then that thin spot bulges out into the surrounding brain matter.” He paused.

  “If it should go,” he went on, “well. It would be a very quick and very painful way to go.”

  David did not want to allow himself to believe it. He had always “known he was going to die,” but to him that had always meant that on some future day, in perfect health and having at last achieved some measure of satisfaction in his work and in his life with Jane and Danny, he would be run down by a beer truck and killed instantly. Or shot at random by a mad assassin spraying the crowds with machine-gun fire and killed instantly. Or struck by a heart attack and killed instantly. Or that he would go to bed one night at the age of seventy-five or so, having brought to completion everything he had put his hand to, and go off into a sleep from which he simply would not awaken. He would die like having a switch turned off. He had never thought of himself going through the process of breaking down slowly, gradually, a dying that would take a whole lifetime.

  He’d never imagined having to worry about his blood pressure. (Would he have to take it several times a day now, with one of those gadgets the nurse used to wrap around his arm?) To live without swimming or running or working out. No tennis, no squash. No getting angry and yelling, no making love. His blood pressure sure as hell went up whenever he conducted the orchestra; he could feel it as a surge of energy throughout his limbs and his torso. It was when he felt most alive. Would he have to give that up too? Would he end up being one of those people who used to make him smirk with impatience as he sat behind the wheel of his car, waiting for the old man to clear the pedestrian crosswalk in front of him, the white-haired man moving slowly, painfully, as he picked up the aluminum walker and swung it forward, laying its back legs a few inches in front of himself and then pulling on the handles and lowering the front legs as he stepped forward two little awkward old-man steps.

  The doctor had insisted on a CAT scan, and David found himself one morning in November lying on a white metal slab in the radiology room at Kaiser Hospital, with an IV stuck in his arm and his head adhesive-taped to the slab. The machine rolled the slab, with him on it, slowly back, inserting him into its enormous enamel-white hole. The massive white machine filled the room, inserting his head into itself in precise increments, holding his head at each position for exactly the interval it needed, while its various lenses whirred at different pitches as they orbited around his skull taking X-ray pictures of minute slices of his brain. What would these pictures show? The machine would see him as one of its own, an assembly of tubes and pipes, levers and circuits. He felt like Gulliver.

  A week later some other doctor, some specialist in the neurosurgery department, told him from behind his desk, strewn with black sheets of X-ray film, that they had found something in one of the pictures. “It’s hard to tell exactly what it is because the resolution on these pictures is not that fine. But there is some little blip—possibly an aneurysm, possibly just an extra little curlicue to one of the smaller vessels. We can’t tell.” He wanted to do another test, called an angiogram, that would give them “a clearer readout. But I’m obliged to inform you,” the man went on, “that the procedure is not without risk—that in looking for the source of a possible stroke we might cause one. The risk is there, but it’s very small.” The result of a stroke like that—in the event of an occurrence—could range from nothing at all, no dysfunction, to mild paralysis, of the facial muscles, for instance, to loss of specific functions like sight or hearing.

  “Hearing?” David asked.

  “Or paralysis of whole limbs or systems, or total paralysis.” A pause. “Or worse.” But, he went on, they needed to find out if this was in fact an aneurysm and if they needed to begin thinking about surgical procedures.

  “Brain surgery?”

  He did not tell anyone, but before he’d thought to ask Jane to keep the whole business to herself, she had talked about it to Ingrid, their German neighbor across the street, and she, of course, told her husband, Karl, a heavyset guy who wrote programs for some software outfit in Sunnyvale. David tried to avoid him, but Karl had waved him across the street one afternoon and, standing next to his BMW, told him all about a friend’s father who had migraines. The man was late coming home from work one day and Karl’s friend went down to his father’s office. “Found him slumped over his desk with half his head blown away. He’d put a gun to his head. Couldn’t stand the pain.”

  “Gee, thanks, Karl. You sure know how to cheer a man up.”

  “What is this? You afraid of death? That’s just the tendency of the organism to seek to perpetuate itself. It’s programmed into us, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I guess you’d think so, Karl.”

  “I tell you, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “That’s just what I’m afraid of.”

  He’d asked Jane not to tell anyone else. He did not want any more of these “pep talks,” or worse, all the sympathetic looks that came with lowered voices and touches on the elbow. “What a drag to be deferred to, the way people do when you’re sick or crippled. Or old.”

  He did not want to admit it, but he was ashamed, ashamed of the sickness, which was a form of weakness, and ashamed of his body, which clearly had begun to turn against him, something it would do more and more often now, and more treacherously—if it didn’t kill him in the process. He’d been noticing that cuts took longer to heal now. He’d sprained his knee last year playing basketball with a bunch of Daniel’s friends, and it still hurt him from time to time, especially when it got rainy or foggy. And now this. His body had become something he had to carry around and care for, like a car when it break
s down, transformed instantly from a vehicle into a burden.

  He’d begun spending more and more time in his studio, sometimes working, but mostly just listening to tapes—his own unfinished projects or Mozart or someone else the group was working on. And then sometimes, and then gradually more and more often, sitting in the studio with the lights off and the door closed and the RECORDING light on outside. He’d sit there in the darkness with the headphones over his ears, all the equipment switched off, listening to the sound his own blood made as his heart pumped it through his veins, all his veins, even the one in his brain that had a weak spot in it like a bad tire.

  He took the Uher to rehearsal one night and stayed in the church basement long after everyone else had gone home. He wanted to take whatever the place might give him, walking in his stocking feet past the rehearsal space that was defined only by the music stands and the musicians’ chairs and the little three-step ladder that he used as a podium because he could sit down or stand up on it as the mood came to him. The weight of the Uher on his hip and the tug of the shoulder strap felt good as he moved, slowly waving the omnidirectional mike in the grainy light of the basement, imagining the tape as it unrolled, soaking up this silence. He went past the barrels of old clothes and shoes and bottles of various colors and cans of different materials, the room narrowing as it went back directly underneath where he knew the altar was on the floor above. Directly in front of him, modestly hidden by a plywood partition, was the complicated guts of the organ, the pumping parts.

  Eventually he did what he knew he’d come down here to do: he sat on the bottom step of the stairs that went up to the church entrance and the street, and he turned off the tape recorder. Then he reached up to the little door high up in the wall that housed the fuse box marked HIGH VOLTAGE (the place could never have passed a building code inspection) and threw the switch that cut off all the lights in the basement. He could still feel the ovals of the headphones “pressing” on the sides of his head, even though he was holding them in his hand. The darkness settled on the skin of his face and hands. In the silence he could “hear” bits and snippets of three separate pieces that he wanted to make, especially the whisper songs and the one that laid down an ostinato, a sheet of patterned sounds, across which silences played like ghosts, slowly eliminating sections of the pattern; eventually only a few ragged strands of the original sheet would remain, revealed now as its structural skeleton.