Where All The Ladders Start Page 6

  He let her know about a couple of jobs playing weddings and christenings, and even though she didn’t need the money (she already had a part-time job she didn’t need, at the Mills College Day Care Center, just because she was crazy about kids), she took them for the performance experience. He played the piano at one of these, and afterward he gave her some tips on accents. She put her flute together, right there in his car, and played the phrase exactly the way he’d described. “Yeah,” she said with a quick little nod of her head.

  He asked her about John, the boyfriend she’d mentioned. He designed and installed these big mainframe computers—all over the world. “He knows quite a bit about the technical stuff, but mostly he tells the people what to do who do the actual installing.”

  “How old is John?”

  “Thirty-one or thirty-two, I reckon.”

  “Does he live here in San Francisco?”

  “Oh, no. He’s back in Atlanta. Well, actually, right now he’s in Belize, putting in one of these things in the big hospital in the capital there.”

  They talked about music in general, about Crumb and Cage, whom they both liked, and about Glass, whom they didn’t. They both liked Laurie Anderson and most of the same jazz people—Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette—and most of the same straight-ahead rock groups. She was partial, for sentimental reasons, to the Allman Brothers, even though neither of them liked much else in country rock. There were some people he listened to, like Billy Joel and John Cougar, whom she couldn’t abide. Too slick. He did the best he could to tolerate her thing with New Wave and what he took to be punk.

  “But which groups have you heard?” she asked him in all innocence one day when he’d been going on and on against punks.

  He looked at her, realizing for the first time that he had never actually sat down to listen to any single punk group—either on record or in person—so that he could not associate any given performance with any particular band. “Well,” he said, trying to recover, “they all sound alike, you know. That’s part of the problem. They all crank up the volume so it blitzes out the lyrics, and they all mouth this idiotic anger that isn’t focused on anything. None of them have the wit of—say, the Stones. I mean, when the Stones do “Back Street Girl” in waltz time, that’s really witty. Somebody made that choice—Jagger or Richards or whoever. But it shows a human imagination at work. How much human imagination and wit does it take to spit? At the people who’ve paid to hear you? It wouldn’t matter so much to me if they just spat at assholes or at liberals—in some ways they’re the worst of all. But if you just spit at everybody, without discriminating, then you’re just a spitting machine. You’re not making any human choices. Do you go to those places and have those clowns spit at you?”

  “What? Like the Fab Mab? No way. That’s pretty mindless stuff. Those groups are mostly teenyboppers with fake IDs. They’ve got no technique and no repertoire.”

  But she was fascinated by the style of New Wave, with the deliberate outrageousness of the costumes, with people dressing and doing their apartments and stuff with what she called “rummage sale chic.”

  “I like the fact,” she said, “that these people dress out of secondhand stores, that they choose deliberately the very stuff that’s been thrown away, rejects. The fact that they’re bringing back the very stuff that their parents actually threw out—like chrome dinette sets and stuff.

  I love how they mix up these styles, especially the way they use stuff that’s ‘out of style.’ I love how they mix up the past and the present.

  “You want to meet some of these people?” she asked brightly, and ended up taking him to a concert in a gallery in a loft across the Bay in Emeryville. It was run by a group of people that included a couple of Mills graduate students and exhibited a kind of “art” that David had severe doubts about: films and video animations that featured crabs and lobsters whose shells had been converted—with meticulous attention to detail—into futuristic planes, rockets and armored personnel carriers. “Bionic toys,” David called them, unable to take them seriously.

  The concert itself was all synthesizer-and-tape stuff, a lot of it using altered-sound techniques, all the gadgets hooked up somehow to computers. Even Ginny had to admit that it was pretty awful. It obviously took more technical skill to produce than the stuff that spewed out of the Mabuhay Gardens, but it was “like ‘computer poetry,’” David said. “It obviously never had imagined an audience for itself, actual human beings actually listening as individuals.”

  “Still,” she insisted as they walked back to his car among the warehouses of Emeryville, “I knew some people in Virginia Highlands, back home, who were doing some really dynamite stuff, right where rock and new music and jazz and ethnic music, like gamelan—where they all interface, you know?”

  “Interface?” he said. “Ugh!” And they both laughed.

  She told him about her father, who knew everything. If you asked him about anything—from astrology to computers—he would give you one of those answers that went on for about a mile and a half, but when he was right done, you’d be able to talk about that thing, you’d know about it. He’d gone to the University of Georgia, but she knew that half the stuff he knew about he could never have learned there. He was younger than any of her friends’ fathers, and he spent a lot of time out in the woods around the house, finding Indian arrowheads and stuff. He played tennis and kept himself in shape. He ran a whole office full of computers and the people attached to them. He also played piano—pretty well too. Ragtime, mostly. And he was always giving her records by contemporary people. She had no idea where he heard about them. He was really pretty neat.

  “What does your mother do?”

  “She plays bridge.”

  He told her about Jane and Danny. He particularly wanted to hear what she might have to say about Danny, about the famous haircut. Now that it had grown out, it was actually starting to look not too different from hers.

  “I think you shouldn’t make too big a deal about it.”

  “You mean, give him a chance to grow out of it—or for it to grow out of him?”

  “I mean, give yourself a chance to let it grow on you. You might even get to like it.”

  After the last rehearsal for the last concert of the year, in early December, he offered her a ride home, and in the car the talk got serious, and he found himself asking her if she had ever “imagined herself dead.”

  “Imagine myself dead?” she asked, looking at him as if he’d addressed her in Martian.

  Of course, he thought, how could she have any conception of death as it would apply to her, as it would leave her looking to the people who would “discover the body”? He said, “It isn’t something I do all the time, but yeah. I went through this scare a little while back, and I found that I was having these little fantasy trips on how I would look, you know, when the first people would come in and find my—body. Somehow I always imagined that for me it would be private. That people would come in later, afterward. Private and quiet and painless, and neat. But also private.”

  He told her about the headaches: “It felt like someone was driving an Alpenstock into the base of my skull.” The pains were pretty bad, he told her, but of course they didn’t last very long. He heard himself tell her how he would sit in his studio those nights with his headphones on, all the equipment turned off, listening to the sound of his own blood as it pulsed in his ears. “The really weird thing,” he went on, “was the night before I had to go see their head honcho neurosurgeon. They didn’t stress it at the time, but that means brain surgeon, and I was convinced that this guy was going to start cutting on my head, and I had this flash of just checking out right there on the operating table. The night before I was supposed to see him, I found myself cleaning up the house—I mean compulsively. I mean I was standing there watching myself wiping off the tops of the jars in the spice rack and taking the old toothbrush out of the cleaning closet and actually scrubbing the grunge off the grout between the tiles
on the kitchen counter. We’re talking industrial-strength obsessiveness here. And the worst part is that as I’m doing all this, I flashed on Jane the night before she went into labor with Danny, when she went into her nesting-instinct routine. That’s when I realized what cleanliness really means to me. It really is next to godliness, like silence: everything is in perfect order, nothing is happening.”

  “But why didn’t you tell anyone?” she asked. “None of us had any idea, and you probably could have used some support right then.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “it just didn’t seem like the kind of thing I wanted to take out an ad about.”

  “This is where I live,” she said, pointing, and he stepped on the brakes. She opened the door and then turned to thank him. Suddenly, on an impulse, she leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the mouth. “You take care of yourself, you hear?” she said as she stepped out. He watched her body move inside her clothes as she walked across the sidewalk and up her steps. She was short but perfectly proportioned, somehow managing to look both slender and—ripe was really the only word for it. She had a cute face, round and very young and open, with large round eyes, pale green, with thick, dark lashes. She moved with a kind of bounce that made him want to give her a big hug, holding that firm little body close against his own.

  Now he turned into his driveway and set the hand brake. At the bottom of the hill the twin towers of St. Ignatius Church rose up into the moonlight. He walked up his front steps, enjoying the new buoyancy in his movements. He smiled now, remembering his surprise when he’d discovered—those weeks after the last concert filled up with all the Christmas shopping and the required partying—that he’d been thinking about her more and more, nearly constantly. Actually missing her.

  The evening before the first rehearsal of the new year, when he ran into her, as usual, in the café, she had a long package sticking out of her knapsack and made a big show of digging it out and presenting him with it. “I brung you something from home. Merry Christmas!” It was a gift-wrapped bottle of corn liquor that, according to her, was made from corn grown in Madison County, Georgia, where her family came from, and where lots of them still lived. He was very moved, he told her, feeling awkward that he didn’t have a present for her. She told him that it had really been neat to get back home, and her parents were great. Her Mom had made this enormous feast as usual, and she had pigged out as usual, and now she would have to run twice as many miles a week just to try to get back into shape. “Everything’s just kind of,” she said with a gesture that took in all of her lower body, “everything’s just kind of drifting south.”

  He laughed and continued to look her in the eye. He reached out and put his hand on hers as it lay curled beside her cup. “I missed you,” he said. “That surprised me, but it’s true.”

  Her mouth dropped open a little as she turned her head to look down at his hand covering her own, there on the table, right in front of her. She smiled, to herself at first, and then she raised her head to give the smile completely to him, saying, “I missed you too.” She moved her free hand to cover his. “But I wasn’t surprised.” In the lamplight he noticed again that her forearms, as they lay along the table, were downed with light brown hair. She did not wear any perfume, but there was a wonderful early-morning shower smell that came to him from her.

  He gave her hand a little squeeze before letting it go to pick up his coffee cup.

  The next week she told him, “I want to invite you to a birthday party. I’ll be twenty-one!” She was grinning, her face more open than ever. She’d put some kind of emphasis, though he wasn’t exactly sure how, on you.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’ve already got a thing I have to go to Saturday night, some Freeze thing. But. Let me see if I can’t get myself sprung early, and I’ll try to make it. It’s at your place?”

  In the next few days he found himself plotting. She was so pretty. Just good clean fun. He could tell Jane he was tired or just not interested in these Freeze parties—and he wasn’t. But then she would offer to stay home with him.

  He felt diabolical, orchestrating a complete campaign. He began by telling Jane that “some of the players” had invited the two of them to this other party, which he was sort of interested in—but only after Ralph and Mona’s thing. It was definitely a second-party-of-the-evening kind of party. Young people. They should just see how they felt, they would play it by ear. He didn’t mention it to her again. Then he reserved a tennis court for Saturday morning. On Friday night he insisted on taking her out for a coffee-and-dessert date, dawdling over his cappuccino. In the morning, after their set of tennis (he’d played every shot he could to her forehand, prolonging the rallies as much as possible), he talked her into making a visit to the hot tubs on Hayes Street. He stayed in the tub as little as possible himself, getting up every few minutes to stand under the cool shower. Sitting back in the bubbling water, looking completely enervated, she asked him, “Why haven’t we ever done this before?”.

  That evening when they got to the party, parked about half a block down the street, she went through her “briefing” routine—so they wouldn’t have those embarrassing moments of not being able to remember the names of people they hadn’t seen in six months. “Ralph is in securities and Mona runs the Sunset Women’s Center on Judah. Frank and Miriam—”

  “Right, Frank and Miriam Masturbate.” He could not take any of this seriously.

  “Massingale,” she said. “He’s a shrink and—”

  “And she’s a fake Arab.”

  “Oh, David.”

  “They’re just ambitious dead people. What else did you expect to meet at a wine-tasting class? That’s like going to Snobs-R-Us.”

  “All right, I was wrong. You were right to boycott it. I’ll never do it again, okay? Give me a break! Jerry Morris runs a nurse-training program …”

  Ralph and Mona’s party was very quiet and well behaved. The word that came to David’s mind was housebroken as he stood in front of an elegantly framed print of something by Klimt, next to a man in a brown suit who held his cigar with his real hand and his glass of Perrier with his artificial one, a forcepslike stainless-steel contraption that he manipulated with great pride. A tape was playing softly somewhere, just at the threshold of hearing, an uninterrupted stream of lightweight baroque stuff done, evidently, by some synthesizer-equipped “soft rock” group. The music tinkled in the background of their conversations like the ice in their drinks. A lady in a lavender turtleneck swooped past him to grab the hostess by both elbows. “Oh, Mona,” she cooed, “your party’s really cooking. Cooked just right, really.” David looked across the room, where Jane was just being surprised by a woman in a too-low-cut neckline and an artificial face who handed her the obligatory joint of the party. Jane took one uncomfortable-looking hit and handed it back, moving away as she did.

  By ten o’clock Jane was yawning in the middle of conversations, and by eleven he was driving her home over Twin Peaks and she was apologizing for not having any more energy. She was the one who suggested that he go on to the other party after he’d dropped her off. He put up a little bit of resistance but not much. “I’ve been feeling so weirdly hyper,” he said, trailing off without finishing his sentence.

  Driving over to Ginny’s after dropping his wife off, he kept telling himself to keep his cool: there wasn’t anyone else’s cool he had to worry about, and there wasn’t anyone else who would keep his. There were no guarantees. For all he knew, this John boyfriend of hers would be there from Atlanta or Belize or wherever. Besides, some of the players from the group were sure to be there, and he wasn’t going to do anything that couldn’t be taken back to Jane, dammit. In fact, what made the whole—whatever it was, an adventure—what made the whole adventure so terrific was just that it was free. No one was going to get hurt.

  When he got there, the front door was ajar and something by The Clash was pouring down the stairs and out into the night. Marty, Monica, and a gang of three or four other
musicians were just coming down the front steps, telling him he’d just missed everybody: all the other players from the group had already left. Just inside the door a shaved-head boy in a basketball referee’s striped shirt paused in the middle of lighting a joint to offer it to him. David took his social hit and kept on moving.

  The throbbing music itself was a medium within which the cigarette and dope smoke was suspended. Clots and strings of people crowded the dim hall and various rooms he was able to look into (over the shoulders of the people there). In the front room some of them were bouncing straight up and down in that pogo dance as the drums and electric guitars took possession of the smoky air around them. He made his way down the hall toward the back of the apartment, where he figured the kitchen would be, jostling a tall woman with a blond streak down the middle of her shaggy black mane who was involved in an intense, doorway-blocking conversation with a gaunt young man whose shoulder-length blond hair hung straight down as if he’d just washed it and it was still wet. Framed circuit boards of various sizes hung on the walls like abstract pictures, wires, capacitors, transducers and printed circuits protruding from them in their impossibly bright colors.

  The kitchen was dominated by a poster over the stove: a gaggle of Rolling Stones mouths sticking their tongues maniacally out at the world. In a small pantry or laundry room off the kitchen three or four people were scrunched down on the floor fiddling with the controls of an aluminum beer keg. A few feet away, in what was probably the “breakfast nook,” a bar had been set up, most of its cloth-covered top now crowded with bottles and stacks of plastic party glasses. Crouched down behind it, wearing a clingy white sleeveless knit sweater was Ginny. A large coleus spilled its leaves out of its pot on the window ledge behind her.

  He squatted down next to her and spoke directly into the shaggy hair that didn’t quite cover her ear. “I thought I’d find you at the heart of things, somewhere near the liquor.”