Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  She turned, already beginning to smile, an expression that traveled quickly from “Is it really?” to “Yes it is!” widening her eyes, the smile brightening its way across her face. She threw her arms around his neck, crying out, “Oh! You did come! Oh, David! You did come!” so that when he stood up, trying to keep his balance, her whole ecstatic body came up with him, her little breasts pressing against his chest, her mouth kissing his face and his mouth, her eyes shining. Her hands were in the hair at the back of his neck, her little tongue darting out to lick his lips and his own tongue.

  He stepped back just enough to “present” her with the gift-wrapped record. “Happy Birthday!” he told her, feeling her waist warm and slim in his hands.

  “Thank you,” she said, and then almost without a pause asked him, “So how was your other party?”

  She had gotten back in control now and was “being cool,” stepping away from him, keeping a decent distance. “Strictly Diane Arbus.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “I’m sorry. Were they musicians?”

  “No,” he said, “psychiatrist types.” This was perfect, he thought. They were both keeping the brakes on. “Ever hang out with psychiatrist types?” he asked her. “They’re always being—very—careful. No one—is going to—rip his hand—or say anything—that might—let any cats—out of any bags. Dull!” He was smiling, and now he looked around the kitchen. “At least these people look alive.” He kept his hands on her hips. “A couple of people at that place—I wanted to take their pulse. There was no other way I could tell for sure that they were still among the living.”

  “Well, I’m sorry it wasn’t more fun. But I’m really glad you could come. But you don’t even have a drink! How long have you been here?”

  She was busy being a good hostess. She started to turn toward the bar, saying over her shoulder, “Do you want a beer? Or wine? Would you like a Black Velvet?” She put the wrapped record up in a cupboard. “I can get you one of those.”

  As they moved through the crowd toward one of the front rooms, she stopped three times to introduce him to pretty young women whom she identified as her roommates. Kelly was the only name he remembered. A bearded young man grabbed Ginny in a playful bear hug, saying, “Raw party, Reb!” and dragged her off to dance. “I’ll be right back!” she yelled over her shoulder.

  He smiled “Okay,” and leaned against the doorjamb, watching her move in rhythm to the music. She and the boy with the beard never got closer than two feet from each other, and she took every chance she could to look over at him and smile. She looked terrific.

  And then it was his turn, and they were dancing easily together, comfortably. She kept giving him these immense grins that she could not completely control, and even when she composed herself, looking downward at the floor, trying to “look serious,” it was clear she was smiling to herself. When she looked up at him suddenly out of one of these brief reveries, her eyes were shining. She jerked her head back in time to the music, and then her bare shoulders, which were freckled. She rolled them first one way and then the other, doing a parody of a Broadway production number.

  Without looking at his watch he told her, “I’ve got to go,” looking sorry as he said it.

  Now he was standing at his own kitchen sink, looking idly out the window at the side of the Sanders’ house, conscious of his wife asleep upstairs and of the vacant space beside her in the bed. His cat Geoffrey tiptoed by on the ledge just outside the window, looking like a ghost cat in the moonlight, meowing to be let in. He scratched the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass the cat bent and twisted as if it were actually being petted. Jane is a lovely woman, he thought, and none of this is even going to so much as wake her up.

  Ginny had said, “I know you’ve got to go. I’ll walk you to your car.” Her Cousin Bea from Atlanta was in town, she told him as she pulled on her jacket while they walked. “She’s really neat. I really like her a lot, and just the fact that she’s here is”—a pause—“one of the best presents I got this year.” She squeezed his hand. The houses lining the street, the cars parked along its curbs, even the young sycamore trees growing out of the open squares of the sidewalk all looked, in the light of the street lamps, like figures in an architect’s drawing.

  He pulled her to him as he turned to face her, and she turned up her face to kiss him on the mouth and on the face around his mouth.

  “Mmmmmmm,” she kept mumbling, kissing him with hunger and enjoyment. “Mmmmmmm. And I thought it was all me. All this time I thought it was all me.”

  Now he was walking softly up the dim stairs of his house, past the little framed portrait of Che Guevara, no bigger than a postage stamp, on the wall of the landing, past the black-furred and black-feathered ceremonial shields and masks Jane had brought back from her Peace Corps stint in the Ivory Coast. He pushed open Danny’s door and stuck his head in, seeing by the light from the bubbling fish tank Danny’s shape in the bed and hearing his breathing. As his eyes got used to the dark he saw the bustlike Darth Vader carrying case on the dresser, a pair of sweatpants draped over it. In his own bedroom Jane was lying curled up asleep. He slipped in the door and, in the moonlight that came through the shutters, began to pull his shirt off over his head.

  As Ginny stood there with her arms around him beside his car she had whispered in his ear, “Were you really feeling this way all along too?”

  “Well, for quite a while,” he had said. He could feel her breasts pressing firmly into his chest.

  “Why did you wait so long?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said. She had caught him by surprise. “I … You know, it may sound strange to you after you’ve seen me hamming it up up there when I’m conducting, but I’m really kind of—”

  “Shy,” she said along with him. “I know,” she went on. “That’s why you're a ham.”

  Goddam, he thought. “I want to see you again,” he said.

  Now he lifted a corner of the blanket and insinuated himself into the bed.

  “I want to see you again too,” she said.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday. How are you going to get away on Sunday?”

  “It’s okay. Jane’s playing a wedding.”

  “She playing piano?”

  “Yeah, piano. How about you?”

  “I’ve got Bea—” He looked at her blankly. “My cousin. I’ve got to show her around tomorrow.”

  “Can you get out of it?”

  “No,” she said.

  He heard a decisive note in her voice that told him right away that it would not do any good to try to pressure her. All that was called for right now was patience.

  “How about Monday?”

  “That’s good. I don’t have any classes till Tuesday.”

  “Shall I come for lunch?” He was keeping a straight face. If he allowed himself to smile, he would end up breaking into an uncontrollable leer.

  Now he snuggled against Jane’s inert body. The covers had rolled over with her, leaving her back exposed. It felt uncomfortably cold as he pressed against it. She was sleeping so soundly she made no move at all to respond to his presence. He closed his eyes, remembering Ginny’s kisses, and the route he’d taken home.

  Chapter Three

  Quantum World:

  Part One

  When he woke up Monday morning, he was already trying to figure out how much time Ginny’s piece would add to the group’s final concert in June—Josquin, Busoni, a piece by De Leon whose double structure fascinated him (it was in two “movements,” but it resolved itself three times), and Ginny. If he cut most of the repeats from the Josquin, that might free up as much as three or four minutes. It was a small price to pay for including her piece, and he’d started to think of those repeats as self-indulgent, anyway. As he was showering and then helping Jane with breakfast and making sure Danny remembered his lunch, he tried to calculate how many additional rehearsals the added fifteen minutes of Ginny’s piece would take. The p
layers hadn’t taken that into account, or they might not have been quite so eager.

  After he got Danny off to school (the boy had made his own lunch but left it sitting on the kitchen counter and had to be reminded about his clean PE stuff too), David went back to his studio and spread out the sheets of Ginny’s score and performance notes. If it hadn’t been so foggy, he would have taken it all outside and worked on the deck. He could not understand those conductors who complained about this part of preparing a concert. At this stage the music existed in a state of impossible perfection. It could never be realized exactly as he was conceiving it now, in the silence of this studio. The best musicians in the world might be able to achieve that Platonic clarity, but his players were just ordinary good semipro people, some of them kids. Still, this was where and when he conceived the sound he wanted, and it was that conception, still off in the silence of the future, that shaped the sounds they would make now and the tactics he would have to use to get there. You had to keep at least one ear on that impossible goal, but you could not move toward it too quickly. You had to pay the strictest kind of attention, not just to the details of notation but also to the details of how to get Patty Morello to understand the relation of her viola line to Ginny’s flute part, how to get Ed Lee to hear the stuttering trajectory of this crescendo. He had to drive them, but he had to do it slowly. The silent score, spread out on the table in front of him, was more than a road map or a blueprint or a recipe. It was the genetic code of the music, a pattern of differences that creates an organism.

  And he was enjoying keeping the brakes on his own anticipation, looking over the music in relation to the other pieces of the concert, all the while feeling a gentle sizzle in his genitals, knowing that soon he would be getting into his car and driving through the park and out Park Presidio to her place, wondering how the final stages of that process would go before they got into bed.

  It took him longer to get there than he had figured: the fog hadn’t lifted, and as he drove, craning around the streaks of the windshield wipers, he could not see more than thirty feet or so ahead.

  One of her roommates let him in, one of the women whose names he couldn’t remember. Valerie, she said. Ginny was back in the kitchen, she said. In the quiet daytime, with no crowds of party people and the fog-softened sunlight filling the tall bay windows, the apartment seemed brighter, more cheerful, more homelike than he’d thought it would. Even the framed circuit boards on the walls of the main hallway looked warmer—charming, actually. One of Beethoven’s piano sonatas was playing somewhere in the house, it was an early one, the fourth, an old recording—monaural. It was Schnabel playing Beethoven.

  In the kitchen Ginny put down the trowel and the flowerpot she’d been filling with black soil and pulled off her gloves while she moved through this cool, bright, plucked air toward him, giving him a big hug but no kiss. He wondered if she might end up getting cold feet. “How does it feel,” he asked her, smiling, “to be twenty-one and two days?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” She smiled back at him.

  She was tense, and it would be his job to get her to relax. She looked fresh. Her hair was still a little wet from her shower. A phone rang somewhere in the house, but she ignored it.

  He said, “I had a terrific morning. I spent it going over ‘The Queen of Pentacles.’ You know we’re going to have to have parts for the players. Do you have a set of those?”

  ‘‘Oh, no. But that shouldn’t be any kind of big problem. How soon do we need them?”

  Stepping back away from him, she said, ‘‘You know, I just realized we don’t have a whole lot, you know, in the way of food in the house. I invite you over for lunch and then I don’t know what I’ve got to give you. I think we’ve got some eggs”—she had walked over to the fridge—‘‘and here’s some cooked shrimp. I can cook us up a kind of freestyle egg foo yung. Sound good?”

  He offered to help, but she sat him down at the kitchen table and poured him a cup of coffee. As she worked, he looked again at those Rolling Stones tongues over the stove. They were so arrogantly—was that it?—stuck out into the world. Well, intensely stuck out. There was an edge of tension he could feel in the set of his own jaw. He was also, he realized, looking at the tongues, hungry.

  “This,” she said, pointing one finger up in the air, “is my birthday present.”

  “The Schnabel?” David asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Came from my dad. He’s so neat. But it didn’t get here till this morning. It’s his own fault, you know, for always waiting till the last minute. But that’s the way he is.”

  “Do you get along with him okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. You know what he gave me for Christmas? The Boulez Woyzzek with Walter Berry.”

  “That’s a pretty good daddy,” he said. “I’d keep him.”

  “Oh, yeah. How about a little wine with lunch? Want some wine?” She looked like she’d been on the point of touching him.

  The fog was burning off, and now the thin January sunlight picked out all the colors that brightened this white kitchen, giving each one a little more sass. He was feeling comfortable, sitting here, full of her food, sipping his wine, idly appreciating the orderly geometry of backyards and fences the window was giving him. He looked across the table at Ginny, who was folding and refolding her paper napkin.

  He slid around to the empty chair beside the table. He took both her hands in his own, holding them tenderly. She let him take them. Finally she gave him a brief sideways look. “What …” she started. “What kind of. Arrangement. Do you have with your wife?”

  “Arrangement?” he asked, smiling with exaggerated incredulity. She looked him in the eye. He wondered how often this question would come up. But then, all that was needed now was a little patience. A little humor. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She kissed his mouth.

  Her room felt like a tree house, containing its warm, green-charged light the way a balloon contains its air. Its windows were full of leaves, and the dormers and the shelves and the windowsills were crowded with potted plants and hanging plants, ferns and coleus and succulents. In the far corner her music stand rose up perkily out of a small thicket of philodendrons.

  On her desk he saw a small, clear plastic cube: inside it a little 3-D surfer stood spread-legged on his board, balanced on the crest of a great curling wave, his arms spread apart, balanced on the lip of the next moment. When he picked it up to look at it, he realized it was filled with glycerine, like those little crystal balls that contained 3-D snow scenes, the “snow” in them swirling around when you picked them up and tilted them. When he picked up the cube and tilted it, the spray from that perfect wave swirled around, almost obscuring the little surfer.

  On the wall facing her rosewood bed was a color enlargement out of which a Ginny with a good deal more hair and a craggy-faced man looked down into the room. They had heavy sweaters on, and their arms were around each other’s shoulders.

  “Is that John?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s him.”

  She turned to face him, snaking her arms up around his neck and flashing him an enormous smile, reaching up her mouth to kiss him.

  He had expected to have to do some seducing, and he was surprised to find that he would have to keep his cool in a totally different way. He could actually feel his heart beating faster, his breathing becoming shallow, even his temperature starting to rise. She inspired him; he was reveling in the taut, alive feel of the skin of her neck.

  When he stepped back for a moment and began to pull her shirttail out of her blue jeans, she came forward a little way, reaching up her hands to unbutton his shirt, and when she was done with that, she undid his belt and his fly.

  Jane had never in all her life done that.

  When they got into bed it was very nice. They adjusted very comfortably to each other’s arms and legs. He had expected both of them to be a little more awkward, but she was consistently surprising him now. She was much more active than Jane, coming at
him hungrily, a look of intense inwardness coming over her face. He was surprised again when she turned over to sit on top of him, straddling his hips—her white and freckled young body. On the wall behind her the color enlargement of John, arm in arm with that longer-haired version of herself, looked on impassively as she lowered her hips in a rolling motion, and suddenly he had gotten there.

  She gave him a smile that looked genuinely pleased. She’d just done something naughty, and she wasn’t sorry for it one damn bit. “How’re you doing?” she asked.

  “You got me.”

  “I know.” She smiled even more. “You haven’t got me yet.”

  “I know,” he echoed. As she lay herself down on his chest, hugging him tenderly, he said, “Our timing could use a little work, but aside from that—”

  She giggled in his ear. “You know how to get to Carnegie Hall?”

  “Carnegie Hall?” He was still thrust up inside her. “Oh, yeah,” he said, recalling the punch-line of the old joke—“practice, practice.” He gave her a big hug.

  Afterward, driving home, he tried to remember, to visualize what his own everyday behavior was like. How did he behave when he was “being natural,” “being himself”? Jane would ask him how his day had gone, and he would only have to say, “Fine.” He could have spent the whole day in his studio, or wandering around town with the Uher, taping material. He would keep it simple: he’d spent the morning working in his studio and then went down to this video game arcade he knew on Broadway because he wanted those noises. What if she asked to hear the tapes? Once he’d gotten there he realized that he’d forgotten to bring the right mike, so he had to let the whole thing slide. He had left the damn mike in his other gadget bag, and now he had to wonder if he really did want those sounds. But it wasn’t any kind of big deal. He could get them later.

  But she never asked him. She told him all about her hassles with her students’ parents. They were in the middle of parent-teacher conferences, and although she got along fine with almost all of her students, their parents “drove her up the wall.”