Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  Now he looked out through the windshield of his car at the black movements of the trees that lined the road, all dappled with moonlight, stretching out for a hundred feet or so ahead before the whole view dissolved into darkness. An occasional wind moved through the leaves, a murmuring or whispering that loomed always just below the level of intelligible speech, as if at any moment this whispering might resolve itself into words. Now all the resinous tree-smells and leaf-smells and earth-smells crowded out his recollection of that basement that had smelled so much like rummage. It was darker here than underneath that church, but the dim road ahead was charged with invitation, an openness waiting only to be filled. The whispering of the trees came to him on a breeze that he felt on the skin of his face and on his ears.

  The weeks had gone by, and nobody reviewed or talked about Les Champs Magnétiques, and he had gone on rehearsing the orchestra and teaching his classes at the conservatory without telling anyone that he had a thin spot in one of the blood vessels in his brain that could blow like a cheap tire in one moment of anger or passion or excitement. God! It had to kill him outright if it went! It couldn’t leave him to stew in his uncontrolled shit as he lay in some bed in some ward unable to move a single paralyzed muscle. It couldn’t leave him to be found huddled behind the coats and pants legs on the floor in the back of the closet, chewing on an old shoe and staring at nothing.

  He thought, too, that if he’d managed somehow to stay a good Catholic, this might have been easier to take. He’d been an altar boy in the seventh grade and at that time had truly believed that in a war or an earthquake the safest place would be under the altar, protected from all harm by the power of the Host. Well, he’d made his break with all that long ago, with all that sort of peace of mind. What he was feeling was the cost of that break. And now he was afraid to get constipated because of the thin spot in that blood vessel in his brain that could blow if he pushed too hard while sitting on the toilet. What a way to be found—with your pants down around your ankles and your ass not even wiped.

  He got through all the rehearsals and even the first concert of the season, late in November (Telemann, Satie and Crumb), with only one slight twinge in his head—in the middle of the Crumb, when he had to lean into the piano to play directly on the strings for one stretch.

  And Ginny Johnson, Gloria’s replacement from Mills, continued to do just fine. In spite of her hair and her clothes and her accent, she turned out to be one of his ablest players. She was the only one who asked to see his score, so that she could get “a little more of a sense of how my part fits into the whole thing. Sometimes it’s hard to hear it all from way over there.” She was, he finally had to admit, better than Gloria, who used to eventually end up getting the phrasing and dynamics the way he wanted them. Ginny got them intuitively, often before he’d explained them to the players.

  He started to get the group up for the next concert, which would include some Messaien vocal stuff as well as some electronic things, without telling them, or anybody, about the angiogram and all the rest of it. There was music he still wanted to create, parts of these pieces—phrases and whole passages—ringing in his ears at odd moments. He had to have time to make more music, to do more conducting. Those were the times when he felt that continual surge of bouyant energy, like riding a wave, when he was up on the podium, when he forgot the weariness in his arms, when he could feel the audience behind him and the orchestra in front of him becoming one thing in the music as he’d conceived it, feeling all the counter-tensions of composers and players and scores and acoustics and audiences coming together as one organism that had the shape he gave it, when there was no distinction between what he wanted to do and who he was. That was the feeling of aliveness that he would have to live without, and he told himself that a life like that would not be life, it would just be rehearsing. It would not be worth living. When Jane asked him what he meant by that, he could not answer her. He agreed to do the workshop in composition theory at Mills again the next summer, allowing himself to joke to Jane that he might have to do it posthumously. She did not laugh.

  Two weeks later he’d taken an afternoon off from Christmas shopping and gone to Kaiser Hospital. When the head neurosurgeon walked into the little examining room carrying a manila folder, he asked, “How long do these headaches of yours last when they hit you?”

  David thought for a moment. “Oh, half an hour, forty-five minutes. An hour at the most.”

  “Jesus Christ!” the man said. He had not bothered to sit down yet. He was looking into the manila file folder as he spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said, “or actually, I’m not sorry—but whatever it is you’ve had, it isn’t a stroke. See, a subarachnoid hemorrhage causes sharp, localized head pains, like the ones you’ve experienced. But they last for twenty-four hours—thirty-six hours sometimes—and you’re not even in that ballpark.

  “So,” he went on, “the bad news is that you get headaches, and some of my colleagues—well, it looks like they erred on the side of caution. Right? And you’ve just been through—what is it here? Two months? Three months? Three months of anxiety, not to mention—Jesus!—three months of no sex? And no swimming or lifting weights. Do you lift weights?” He looked down at David with an amused smile.

  “I’ve tried out a couple of gyms—to work out,” he said. “Actually it’s mostly Nautilus machines.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, you can go back and pump iron all you want. And the swimming and all the rest of it—” He dropped his voice down to a stage whisper. “Fuck your brains out if you like. You’ve had some headaches, and we don’t know what caused them. We really don’t know an awful lot about headaches, really. But whatever caused them, it was not a subarachnoid hemorrhage. You are not in imminent danger of suffering a stroke. This little blip on their scan doesn’t impress me much.”

  David felt like he might begin to cry. “Look,” he said, a little uncertainly, “your, ah, your colleagues tell me I’ve got a blood vessel in my brain that’s as weak as a bad tire, and if I let my blood pressure go—if I run or work out or screw—it could blow like a cheap balloon and I could end up dead, or worse. A vegetable. Now you tell me they’re all wet and not to pay any attention to them. What if I do what you tell me and you end up being the one that’s wrong. Who do I complain to?”

  The man stammered around for a while, but nothing he said made any sense. There really weren’t any guarantees. Everything would happen in its own good time, David thought.

  When he got home he’d told Jane, and they’d decided to check out the man’s story. David lay down on the floor of the bedroom and began, slowly, caudously, to do some sit-ups while Jane sat and watched him with one hand on the phone and the other on Kaiser’s Emergency Room number. He got only one small twinge before he pooped out at thirty-five, complaining about how quickly you fell out of shape when you got older. The brain surgeon had been right. The pains never did come back with anything more than a faint echo of their original force.

  His mood of amazed relief lasted well into January, when he’d gone to the concert at Mills, the concert that Ginny Johnson and Marty and Patty Morello played in and insisted he come to. Jane had some open-house thing at her school that night. Backstage, after the concert, he’d hugged them all, Marty included. They’d done him proud, realizing his teaching with their own gifts, realizing themselves. Ginny, especially, her full lip pressed to the mouthpiece of her flute, actually putting her shoulder into the beat on that vivace passage—the way he’d taught her. He couldn’t stop smiling, he had to keep restraining himself from touching them, and when they invited him to come along to the orchestra party at a ramshackle old stucco “castle” called The Popside Palace in the hills above the campus, he’d said yes immediately. Besides, a blustering January rain was pouring down outside, and it would make more sense to drive back across the bridge in an hour or so. Give it a chance to blow over.

  In his car on the way up to the party the tape player came on automatically, and he let the Moza
rt run on for a moment with his hand poised over the switch, ready to turn it off. “This brat was about thirteen when he wrote this,” he said.

  Sitting next to him, Ginny said, “When I was thirteen, I was four.”

  “You’re still four,” Patty chirped from the backseat.

  “What is this?” Marty was asking. “Are you actually going to sit here and wait for that light to turn green? Go for it.”

  Under the streetlights the rainy cross street was empty as far as they could see in both directions. The light continued red. David turned off the tape and said softly over his shoulder, “I don’t break little laws.”

  “Whoa,” Marty said, “killer.”

  David had asked the women about their classes and the dorms. Ginny was really wanting to move into the city with two or three roommates. They were spending most of their weekends now, she said, checking out apartments. “Yeah, it’ll be a rough commute,” she went on, “but you can set up all your classes for two or three days a week, and the rest of the time you can really get into enjoying the city. This is a good school and all, but I came out here mostly because of San Francisco.” Here she’d given him a look that he could only have described as sly, and added, “This place feels like a convent.”

  At the party, looking out the rain-streaked windows at the smeary lights of Oakland, she’d asked him how long he’d been music director of the group. “Did it always have the same name, the California Chamber Players?”

  “Ten years,” he’d said. When he’d inherited the orchestra from Ulrich, it was called the same thing. He’d wanted to stress contemporary and thought about changing the name to the California Contemporary Chamber Players, he told her.

  “Oh, but those initials wouldn’t do at all,” she said with a grin. After a pause she asked, “This season it looks like every concert includes some classical or baroque stuff. Is that just how things worked out this year, or is that what you do all the time?”

  “That’s what we do,” he said, “all the time. I want to stress contemporary,” he went on, “but I’m a sucker for continuity. So we try, in every concert, to include some old stuff as well as some new. From Buxtehude to last Tuesday. I don’t want us to forget the connections between the present and the past.”

  “Oh, that’s neat,” she said brightly. “I thought it was just to help out at the box office.”

  “Oh, it does that too. It also works that way with the players. I don’t think we could get sixteen to twenty people to cover all the instruments and equipment if we played strictly a contemporary repertoire. We could be more relentlessly avant-garde, according to some of the critics, but I’ve always tried not to listen to critics.”

  He didn’t like the way he was sounding, and abruptly he’d turned to her and said, “I kind of envy you—coming from the South. I’ve only been down there once. One of my teachers in graduate school worked some kind of scam to get some of his students invited down to the Spoleto/Charleston Festival of Two Cities, so I spent a week in Charleston. I really liked it.” Actually the week had involved some tension, since Porthoff, his Composition teacher, was a great fan of Menotti, who was then still a very powerful fixture of the festival. David had always thought of him as a middle-brow reactionary in progressive’s clothing and had been so pissed at the exclusively traditional programming of the festival that he’d organized a kind of salon des rejets that put on a free concert of New Music. It was attended by precisely twelve people, none of them in any way connected with the festival. He’d ended up calling Jane, who was still in Cambridge finishing up her exams, to fly down for the weekend, and she did, promising to meet him for lunch at Henry’s near the old Public Market, wearing a great straw Gone with the Wind hat.

  “That week in Charleston,” he went on, “was the first time I’d had any sense of the South as anything different from the usual stereotypes—you know, all rednecks and good ol’ boys. I walked all around, exploring that historic district they’ve got there, and it was really terrific.” He’d done that exploring with Jane. He went on, “That’s what I envy, that sense of always being in touch with a heritage that goes back in a direct, unbroken line for hundreds of years.”

  “That may be true for Charleston,” she said, smiling, “but Atlanta—”

  “Atlanta’s got more of a past than San Francisco, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it go back to Colonial times?”

  “Well, it must have once. But in 1864, Sherman marched through there on his way to the sea, and I don’t think he left more than about three or four stones standing on top of each other. One of the most—I don’t know—the most poignant intersections to me back home is the corner of Peachtree and Ivy. There’s a really neat old church there, with two pointy brick steeples all covered with those copper roofs that are all green with age. It’s really a classic old thing. And it looks like it’s just about to be crushed by the big Hyatt Regency up the street, the one with the Star-looking blue mushroom cap on top of it that turns out to be one of those revolving bars.”

  After a moment she asked, “Are you all going to the Kronos Quartet concert next month?”

  “In Berkeley? Oh, yeah. They get stronger every time out.”

  “Do you think we could bum a ride home with you? Patty and I really want to go. Getting into Berkeley is no big deal, but we don’t want, you know, to go ahead and buy tickets if we’re going to end up not being able to get a ride back.”

  “No problem.”

  The rest of that winter and spring he had seen her about once a week, when they rehearsed. He saw her at the performances, and once in a while at other concerts, like the Kronos Quartet’s. She went home to Atlanta for the summer, and he stayed in San Francisco and did the summer workshop in theory at Mills—again—and the days all started to feel like Xerox copies of the one before, like a rehearsal no one was interested in. (“Come on! What’s the matter with you people? Put some life into it!”)

  The Golden West Foundation renewed the grant that supported the orchestra and paid his salary for another year, and Moncrief at PBS got him another commission doing the score for another documentary, this one on the development of the shopping mall. He felt uncomfortable doing these commercial jobs, but the three he’d done before had made the difference between being able to afford a vacation and staying home those summers. It also felt good, he had to admit, to see his name roll up the screen for all of one and one-half seconds, along with all the other credits, when the program was over.

  His run-in with Blanchard and Valdez over the Caldwell Prize had him in a funk for several days. He did tell Jane the next evening at dinner, and she sympathized with him, the way he knew she would. “They turned down that piece?” she asked, her eyebrows up. “That piece is hot. Danny, eat your salad, don’t play with it. Why don't you have the group go ahead and do it? It’ll be good for you and good for the composer. Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. They’re just numbers. It’s the players I worry about. I’m not really sure how they’d feel about it.”

  “But you decide what other pieces you’re all going to play. Why should this be any different?”

  Lennehan went wild about the piece when David took the tape over to his studio (“Extra-fucking-ordinary!”), but sure enough, he argued against announcing it as a third-prize winner. “It sounds lame, like padding a resume. Who gives a shit about third prize? As far as that goes, who gives a shit about the Caldwell Prize? Prizes don’t validate the artist, it’s the other way around. Why don’t you just bill it as a world premiere and let those two pricks go right on playing with themselves. What’re you going to put on the program with it, Palestrina or something? Come on! When are you going to stop being a closet Major Hoople and actually start putting some of this aesthetic Trotskyism of yours into practice? Stop being so contradictory, man. Kick some ass!”

  “We’ve been here before,” David said. He wanted to get up. A series of six or so unfinished canvases stood against the far wall, mostly white, and when David walked ov
er to look at them more closely, he saw that some of them had jagged lines squiggled in charcoal across the bottom of the canvas. The lightninglike lines had all the quickness of spontaneous dashes of movement, but up close he could see that Lennehan had done them and wiped them out and done them over again, many times over.

  “You want to kick the establishment out,” Lennehan went on, getting really revved up, “and then you want to move into the Presidential Palace—to ‘preserve continuity’ or some jive. I say, blow the fucking palace up! Nuke the fucker! We don’t need no stinking palaces! We don’t need no stinking pope! You know that story about El Greco? Some pope brought him to Rome to paint draperies over all of Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel. ‘Too many nakeds,’ the pope tells him. ‘Can you cover them up?’ El Greco says, ‘Cover them up? I’ll do the whole thing over from scratch.’ That’s the spirit! Dada will remember what IBM forgets! Right?”

  “Amen,” David said.

  Two days later he came out of the big practice room at the conservatory after he’d finished conducting the intermediate strings and almost bumped into Ginny Johnson. She’d been waiting for him just outside the door.