Where All The Ladders Start Read online

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said. She was smiling with her whole face, and he could feel his own face sympathetically start to mirror hers. She was really very pretty, standing there wearing a bulky white turtleneck sweater, her face, framed by her dark, dose-cropped hair, a little pink.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” she said, “for the prize—the Caldwell Prize? You all gave me the third prize, and I just wanted to thank you. I’m number twenty-one.”

  “Oh, my God!” he heard himself blurt out. “Was that you? I mean, I don’t mean to sound so surprised. I mean, I am surprised, but it makes perfect sense. Well, congratulations, but I thought—” He stammered right into an imitation of Porky Pig: “A-bu-duh, a-bu-duh abuduh—I can explain everything, folks!” They both laughed.

  “Look,” he went on, “I wanted to give that piece—” He broke off and looked at his watch. “I’m really on the run right this minute, but I want to talk to you. Can we get together for coffee or a drink or something? Oh, you’re over there in East Oakland. You didn’t really come all the way over here just to tell me thanks, did you?”

  “Oh, no. I’m over here now. We found a neat old Victorian here on Fifteenth Avenue. It’s really huge. It even has two rooms we can use for practicing. …”

  He started to move toward the door, touching her elbow as he turned. “That’s great,” he was saying, “so you really got what you wanted—”

  “Well, I didn’t get everything I wanted. Patty got the room with the neatest view and—”

  “Well, if you’re going to put it that way, we never get everything we want. Look, I really have to take off right this minute, dammit, but I also really want to talk to you. Tomorrow? Are you free tomorrow? I mean, for coffee or something?”

  Now he reached out to the ignition key, holding it for a moment longer as he continued listening to the soughing of the leaves as the wind moved through them, rousing them to a murmuring whisper that lingered just below the threshold of speech. When he turned the key in the ignition, the rumble of the motor instantly obliterated all other sounds. He eased the car into motion, turning the wipers on just long enough to clear away the accumulated drizzle.

  When they met for coffee the next day at a place she’d suggested on the outskirts of the Haight-Ashbury, he decided to get there some ten or fifteen minutes late. The place was dim and so aggressively remodeled that it was impossible to imagine what it might have been like before. The walls and ceiling were paneled in bare woods of various shades and textures, and then sealed under a thick coat of polyurethane. The same with the woods of the tables and chairs. A dim green light came through the hanging ferns.

  “This,” he said as he sat down at her table with a gesture that took in the whole café, “feels like being inside a tree.”

  “For sure,” she said, laughing. “It’s pretty corny.” She opened her menu and pointed, saying, “They’ve got wholewheat tortillas! I mean, not even Woody Allen could have thought that up—right? But the coffee’s good, and they make some pain au chocolat that’s as good as what you can get in France.”

  “Oh? When were you in France?”

  Several times, it turned out. Her father was some kind of operations executive at United Airlines. “When I was a senior in high school, I spent the whole year at this girl’s academy outside of Nice.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that town’s name—Nice, I mean—pronounced like that before, like a bad word,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, it was the pits. I mean, the town itself and the beach and everything right there is, you know, terrific. But the school was a joke. Just a lot of little brats being just as wild as they could think up on their daddies’ money. One Iranian girl who roomed with us—she wore her pearls all the time. I mean, twenty-four hours a day she had them on. She didn’t even take them off to take a shower or go to bed. Finally someone told her it was pretty tacky to be flashing her jewelry around like that. We knew her parents had beaucoodles of bucks, so she didn’t need to go to all that trouble to keep reminding us. She was totally flustered. She swore she wasn’t showing off. They were real pearls, you know, and they had to be kept warm all the time or they’d lose their luster. At home, she said—and she told us this with a straight face, you know, like pleading for understanding and sympathy—at home she had a servant who wore them for her. But at school she had to do all these kinds of things for herself. That poor thing, let me tell you. This other girl kept a cab waiting outside the gate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—just in case she should get a notion to go someplace real quick to spend some more money. You couldn’t get in her way when she had money to spend. It was totally disgusting.’’

  “You know,” he said seriously, after a pause, “I wanted to give your piece the first prize, but—”

  “Oh, my God!” she blurted out at first, and then, smiling and shaking her head (she was looking down into her plate), she said, “That’s incredible. That piece is so—so—It’s such a David Lyman piece.” She continued to look down into her plate. “I wrote it after listening to your quartet about two thousand times. Gloria had a copy of the record, but I must have ended up driving her bananas, I played it so often. I think the record was starting to get transparent. Finally I made a tape of it. I was really into a quartet phase when I first got to Mills. I spent most of my time listening to Cage’s quartet and yours and the Bartók cycle. But yours was the one I got so I practically knew it by heart.” Here she looked up at him, but only for a moment. ‘‘You know my favorite part? It’s in the third movement, where you’ve got the same theme in all the different time signatures all going at the same time.”

  He realized his mouth was open. He closed it and decided to give her his best approving-teacher smile, a smile that beamed down from a position slightly above and ahead of the student, radiating down waves of pleased pride in her performance.

  “That’s basically what I did,” she went on, “in ‘The Queen of Pentacles.’ The themes there are all Balinese, and the instrumentation and all is different, you know, but it’s the same thing. You really did inspire me.”

  “You mean that pattern of cross rhythms?”

  “Uh-huh. After I turned in my tape and score for the Caldwell competition last spring, I went home to Atlanta over the summer and listened to your quartet and my piece back-to-back, and it was pretty obvious. To me, anyway.”

  “Well, it wasn’t obvious to me. Not even to Blanchard and Valdez, so what the hell.”

  He had never been to Atlanta, but in the momentary silence that followed, a silence into which the sounds of the café flowed—the clink of silverware against the dishes and the electronic chirps of the cash register, the suddenly loud traffic as someone opened the front door, the blur of conversations at the other tables—he imagined Atlanta, its skyscrapers rising up out of an empty plain like a city in some futuristic travel poster, and in that city, in the suburbs, most likely, in a home that must have been comfortable, with lots of spacious, carpeted rooms whose French windows gave onto wide verandas that seemed like the promenade decks of the house as it sailed across oceans of lawn, somewhere in that house, in some sunny upstairs bedroom, this young woman was listening—intently, meticulously—to the music that had come out of some silence within himself. She was curled up in a big leather chair, her cheek on her fist, her elbow on the armrest, her head framed by the window behind her, a casement window, open now, the drooping branches of a willow just outside it moving in sinuous masses in a fresh breeze that had just sprung up.

  As he sat there in the treelike dimness of that café, he felt a sensation of buoyancy, a sharp lift in his upper body and upper arms that was like waking up out of a doze or coming suddenly into a fully focused consciousness out of some drift of inattention.

  “Look,” he said. He’d just drawn himself upright in his chair, feeling a little stiff. “You know,” he went on, “they’re going to do the first- and second-prize winners at the Spring Festival concert at Mills.”

>   “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, even before I had any idea who number twenty-one was, I wanted to—Well, I liked the piece a lot. I talked this over with several people—my wife and some other friends as well—and I think the Chamber Players ought to do ‘The Queen of Pentacles’—your piece—at our last concert of the season. You know, in June.”

  “Oh, my God!” She was blushing and covering her mouth, sitting back in her chair and then sitting up again. “I don’t think I can take a whole lot more of this.” She got up and did a quick little run over to his side of the table and gave him a hug, with her cheek next to his. When she sat down again, she was more thoughtful.

  “It’s an incredible honor,” she started, “but I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Have you talked with any of the other players? I mean, I still feel like I’m the new kid, and here they’re going to be playing my piece, putting my name in lights—while they’re still doing the shit work down in the trenches. See what I mean?”

  “But, Ginny, I don’t think a single one of them is into composing. I just don’t think they’re likely to feel it as competition. Do you know any of them who are doing any composing? Do you know if any of them entered the Caldwell? Besides, Ginny, you should never turn down a chance to get your work performed. You exist through your work. If you don’t get it performed, actually heard by an audience, you don’t really exist—in every final delicacy of your being.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Sure. We’ll tape the performance. You’ll be able to hear it the way it sounds to an audience. Now that’s a trip, a real time-trip. As far as the players, we can leave it up to them. I think they’re really going to go for it: it’s the kind of piece that lets everybody really show their stuff—all those isolated melodic lines. I think they’re going to go for it.”

  “Can we, like, play them the tape—you know, anonymously, and see how they react? And then decide?”

  There was a directness about her manner, a tough, energetic thereness that he enjoyed. She was comfortable in talking to him, without being either aggressive or needy. She was also very pretty in her little-girl way, with her round face and her pale green eyes. Even her choppy hair.

  The next week she brought him a tape of all her compositions that she’d been able to perform. These were overdubs, she told him, in which she played keyboards, flute and percussion. Her older brother played guitar and acoustic guitar on two of the five tracks.

  The following evening, sitting at home after dinner, he decided to play the tape on the big stereo in the living room. All the tracks were very lush, very indulgent to her flute part, he thought, mostly a showcase for her tone and her technique. Her simple melodic lines were often compelling and surprising, though, with a lyric lift to them, an attractive cantabile quality. Of course, this was a pretty old-fashioned notion of melody. Still, there was a lot to be said for what had endured in the tradition.

  This young woman’s music skittered out into the room in which he sat, setting up intricate geographies of repetitions, so much like his own earlier music, and he felt—in spite of all the particular things he knew were wrong with it—that there were moments when he had gotten inside the music, to the core of this piece, formed from a half dozen intervals, all linked in a ring like a carbon molecule, and that he and these structures of notes were one thing, one complex being that was simultaneously generated by that repeated form and bathed in that form, absorbing and radiating back waves of enjoyment.

  Jane came through the room with one hand full of her students’ papers and the other squeezing a bundle of envelopes. She was already saying, “Did you see that Mischa’s playing with the Symphony again this year?” She waved the hand with the envelopes. “Is this something of yours?” she asked. “I can’t tell anymore when it’s you.”

  “This is Ginny Johnson.”

  “Ginny Johnson?”

  “Yeah, you know. The young woman in the group, the one who ended up being the composer of that gamelan-rock piece, the one we both liked so much. I think we’re going to do it in June.”

  “We?” she asked, cocking her ear to the music.

  “Yeah, the group, the Chamber Players.”

  “Oh,” she said. “This must be this little protegee of yours. I don’t remember meeting this person. Does this ever go anyplace?” she asked, waving her envelope-laden hand at the music. “Does it ever develop into anything?”

  “Why don’t you sit down here,” he said, patting the seat cushion next to him. “Some of it really isn’t bad.”

  She still had both her hands full, and now she lifted them to show him the fullness of her burden, shifting into a gear of exasperation and saying, in a voice that crescendoed steadily up, “Because I don’t have time to sit on my fanny and listen to clever—and cute—young junior Bartóks. I’ve got too much to do just trying to keep this house in running order. And by the time I’ve finished attending to all this crap, I’m too tired to do anything but collapse. Do you hear me?” And she stomped off upstairs.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to the empty room, still held in the complex inter-rhythms of Ginny’s music.

  Now, at Stanyan Street, he came out of the park, out of the dark, tree-charged stillness and back into the harsh lights and sharp angles of the city. The steel window gratings on the bike-rental places across the street caught his attention for a moment, abstracting the neon signs behind them. He slowed down momentarily, realizing that the bars of the gratings were doing to the still legible signs what he wanted the silences to do to that sheet of sound in the piece he still had not even named yet, creating a pattern of gaps or darknesses, silences.

  He had run into Ginny again in the same coffee shop the following week, just before rehearsal. It got to be a regular thing. In the café he was all smiles and teacherly encouragement, the same as during rehearsals. He would smile down at her from his ladder and she would smile back up at him, her breasts frankly there in a white T-shirt that read UNDERGROUND ATLANTA. They would see each other in the audience at various concerts. He would smile at her, too, from across the table in the Mexican bar up the street from the church, where most of the group went after rehearsals. They talked about her compositions, about their formal structure, their overall shape, their instrumentation and voicing, about her melodic sense and her ear for cross rhythms, about color.

  In October Mischa sent the tickets for his concert at the Opera House. “Oh, damn,” Jane said, hitting the letter with her fingertips, “that date’s impossible. We’ve got a planning committee meeting.’’ She boo-hooed about it, but the meeting was crucial, she said. They both asked Danny, who only sneered and asked how come they never got tickets for the Divinyls’ concerts. Finally Jane suggested, “You know, what’s-her-name, your little protegée. Brahms might teach her something about development.”

  Mischa’s concert was terrific, and afterward they went backstage, where Ginny was surprisingly poised—even though she was wide-eyed in meeting Mischa, who took them all out to a country-western bar he knew on Chestnut Street, where he kept feeding the jukebox quarters till closing time.

  In David’s car on the way home that night she could not keep from touching him repeatedly—on the arm, on the shoulder, on his hand. She had done a great job of playing the role of a sophisticated grown-up with Mischa, but now, with David, she could relax and be her own age, telling him how hard it had been to restrain her excitement at meeting a star. “But I done it!” she cried out now, offering him her hand to slap five.

  Her knowledge of music theory was surprisingly thorough. She had read Hindemith and Schönberg, she knew her Heinrich Schenker and her Walter Piston cold. They went together to a Sculthorpe-Dresher concert at 80 Langton Street and afterward sat in Tosca’s on Columbus Avenue till almost closing, talking about what they liked and why. She wasn’t at all interested in serialism, which he was glad to hear. She had seen and heard Les Champs
Magnétiques at the Dance Collective’s loft.

  “How come you never told me?’’ he asked. “You know it never even got reviewed? Anywhere?”

  “Yes, it did. It got a real good review in The Bird, you know, The Great Speckled Bird? It’s this little newspaper that comes out of Virginia Highlands, in Atlanta. That’s where I first heard of you. They had Les Champs Magnétiques at the Academy Theater on Peachtree, but I didn’t actually see it and hear it till I came out here. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I sure as hell didn’t want you to think I was some kind of groupie, you know. But I loved the piece. I went back there to the Dance Collective three times. That was when I knew I’d made the right choice coming out here to Mills, being in the Bay Area. My dad had been pushing real hard for Oberlin.”

  “You didn’t happen to keep that review, did you?”

  She looked at him for a moment. “I’m sure it’s someplace in all my stuff back home. My dad could send it to me. You never saw it?”

  “No,” he said.

  In the coffee shop, when they ran into each other, they talked about the piece the group was preparing, and then about the group itself. He found himself talking to her about personnel problems and strategies for cajoling or psyching out or—her word—inspiring them to play at the highest level of their ensemble ability. “I think you could get a lot tougher with Patty,” she told him once, “but with Marty you’d better lighten up. All that ‘macho man’ he comes on with is a pretty thin act, you know what I mean?”

  He enjoyed listening to her talk. She had a breathy voice and an eager, forward-leaning way of jutting her chin a little when she spoke, probably because her shortness (she was only an inch or so over five feet) forced her to look up at most of the people she spoke with. This pitch put an odd emphasis on her slow Georgia drawl. All her vowels were turned into diphthongs, as if they’d been deflected by passing through a magnetic field. Her large eyes were pale green, and she opened them wide as she looked at him straight on.