Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  Two days later he went back. Ginny had called to let him know she’d completed the job of copying out the parts for the players from her own score of “The Queen of Pentacles.” She had already copied out some of them, so it was really no big deal. On the phone he told her he really wanted to talk to her about how her piece fit in with the others on the program.

  As the weeks went by he never stopped being a little surprised at how easy the affair was. When he had tried to imagine Daniel’s affair with Connie, how his friend must have alibied his way out of the house, David figured that the structure of anyone’s day had any number of vacant spaces that aren’t apprehended from the outside and so aren’t even questioned. But getting out of the house and away from your wife for a whole day or evening meant telling lies. The lies had to be convincing yet have all the air of thoughtless talk, and they had to be consistent, the whole story hanging together, packed with details—times of day, the names of people and places, specific amounts of money spent and change left. Yet they could not have too much of an air of prefabrication. They could not sound like alibis.

  What surprised him was how little invention it took to satisfy Jane and Danny. Within a family, David figured, people were, first off, involved in their own rhythms: most of their contact was actually pretty tangential. A family had the capacity for deep involvement, but—especially in a family like his, where they all had clearly defined territories—this capacity most of the time stayed on hold. Familiarity bred obliviousness. Unless the change was momentous—a new haircut, a new blouse or jacket—you simply would not notice any details of your family’s behavior. Had Danny worn a T-shirt this morning at breakfast or a sweatshirt? Had Jane worn jeans or cords to work this morning?

  They all took each other’s presence for granted: they ended up taking each other’s absences the same way. David never asked for the details of Danny’s day, though the boy offered them on his own if they were the right kind—two interceptions in the same PE touch-tackle game or a perfect score on a math test. Another word for this obliviousness was trust, which created the structure within which it was violated. It was a fabric that did not know when it was torn.

  His most painful paranoid fantasies were not about Jane but about Danny. If Jane were to find out—not really a possibility—she would freak out at first, but he would eventually bring her around: the whole business just wasn’t that important. He would drop this little girl in a minute. In one minute.

  He would expect her to do the same if he were suddenly to find out that she was having an affair with some man she’d met at one of these Freeze things. What if she were having one now—with Jack, say? He could not just stand around and let it continue. He would have some questions, of course, but she would throw the other man over and they would go on with their marriage. The important thing was to keep the marriage intact, the system or structure within which they moved.

  It would be completely different with Danny. Danny would be hurt for his mother, and that would make his pain and his anger unbearably righteous. But. Even if Danny were to run into them at some café, he knew that David routinely had lunch with various women. He had taken her to Mischa’s concert with Jane’s blessing. So. Jane routinely went to poetry readings with Jack or whomever. So.

  In “having sex” with Jane (that was the phrase she used), first he would work toward getting her to climax, and then he would lie back and she would work on him. But in making love with Ginny their two rhythms were simultaneous, the two of them making little runs, first one getting a little ahead and then the other catching up, triggering responses and responding in return—but without waiting for it to be anyone’s turn, everything happening in the immediate now.

  At the next rehearsal he distributed the parts for all the pieces they would play at the final concert, including “The Queen of Pentacles,” and gave them a pep talk about the performance. When he looked over at her behind her music stand, Ginny was putting her instrument together, not making eye contact with anyone.

  The next Sunday he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge with her to Point Reyes. When she got into his car, she gave him a quizzical look as he moved the basketball, the knee brace and the sneakers off the passenger seat. He said, “Oh, these are just props.”

  As they drove across the bridge, the red cables blurring past and the fog holding itself off out by the Farallons, the city white in his rearview mirror, his sense of the day kept slipping in and out of focus. One minute he would feel totally enfolded by the present moment, aware only of what it was made of—bright, moist air, the blue water beyond the car window flecked with white sails, and Ginny’s bright young face as she sat next to him, chuckling in her Georgia accent about how she never would actually get used to how gorgeous all this was. And in the next moment he would be painfully aware of the clichéd quality it all had. It was the same stuff—but soaked in a brassy, ironic timbre that made it all sound sardonic, as if some cynic of an engineer someplace, working the controls of this day, was periodically twisting the treble all the way full.

  He kept thinking ahead—to a future from which he looked back at this outing as a thing completed—and thinking back to that moment when he’d first met her (and almost rejected her) there in the basement of the church, the air of it heavy with the smell of discards—old shoes, old bottles, old cans. That was also where he’d first conceived this lust for her ripe young body, wanting to peel off her wine-colored bowling shirt, wanting to slide his hand down inside the elastic waistband of her panties and see if she would get wet for him. And out of the lurid fleshiness of those original fantasies had come this pure movie version of an idealized dream image of fleckless bright air, bracing and clean from the sea, whose salt heaviness it carried coolly, ruffling the dark hair of this freckle-faced girl as she sat by the open window, her arm reaching back along the top of his own seat back, the curve of her breast just there inside her sweater that he now thought of peeling off her, sliding his hand down inside the elastic waistband of her panties. It felt like being in a fugue.

  As he was changing into his hiking boots in the parking lot of the ranger station at Point Reyes, he was already “seeing” himself and Ginny at the top of the trail, already sitting on a bench—no, it was a fallen log by the very edge of the cliff that dropped off sheer, like the edge of a stage at the top of the world, except that here the “audience” would be the sea, a thousand feet below them, and the gray-streaked sky, and the wild birds. He would put his arms around her, and she would give him her mouth for him to kiss.

  The first part of the trail was easy climbing, like walking up a broad flight of stairs through open, majestic stands of redwood and pine that felt like the grand staircases and open banquet rooms of some old villa, mostly dim and moist and slightly cool, with a green, minty smell charging the air, the shadows and freckles of light moving with the breezes. Coming around one bend in the trail, they were greeted by a small crowd of wild iris, violet moth-flowers streaked with gold. The flowers might as well have chirped hello! as they came, abruptly, into view. Within the generalized background noise of leaves and branches moving he could hear an occasional bird call—sharp, bright rips in a dark fabric.

  A little farther up the trail she asked him, pointing to a red flower, “What kind of flower is that?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say.”

  “Sure, because you don’t know.”

  They both laughed, and she reached out to give him a short, intense kiss. As they walked, she told him about her father. He was incredible: he knew not just the names of flowers but all the scientific background on them—when they bloomed, whether in sunny or shady places, if any animals fed on them. All that stuff. He could do the same kind of thing for most of the birds and animals in Madison County. That was his home. He’d been born there, and his daddy had been born there, and his daddy. So he felt like he had to know everything there was to know about the place, even though he was away from it so much of the time. Maybe it was because he had to be
away from it so much. “Like now,” she went on, “he lives—we live, you know—in Atlanta. Well, actually, it’s just outside Atlanta, called Druid Hills, but it’s really part of the city. But he still gets out to Madison County every chance he gets. Really. He even knows the history of the place. Well, he didn’t have to do much studying for that: our family’s lived there since before the Civil War. But, I mean, he can tell you the name of every justice of the peace and the dates they were elected. He could tell you about battles in the Civil War like you wouldn’t believe—down to the numbers of the platoons.” David wondered momentarily if Danny would ever speak of him that way and decided no: girls fall in love with their fathers, boys compete with them. She kept turning around to talk to him as they walked, twisting her upper body around so he could see the curve of her breast as her sweater went taut over it, her eyes bright, and he found himself forgetting to be ironic about her. He wanted to put his hands on her waist as she walked ahead of him and have her turn to face him, her breasts against his chest, to kiss him. Perhaps at the top of the trail he would get ahead of her as they walked along in full view of the gray Pacific, and he would pause before the majesty of this vista, and she would come up softly behind him and put her arms lightly around his neck, laying the side of her face against his back, hugging him. She was delicious. With her brown sweater, her pale green eyes and her dark, short, furlike hair, she seemed completely in harmony with these woods, and then she would twist around like that to smile at him and do something with her eyebrows that made him want to take her clothes off and lay her naked body down on the rosewood bed in her room back in the city. In his fantasy of it her room looked like a private box at the Opera House, creamy white wainscoting and gilt light sconces highlighting the fluting of the pilasters and the scrollwork around the wall panels, the burgundy velvet of the chaise. The look she was giving him put satin sheets on that bed.

  They came out of the dark villa of the woods into a broad, green meadow whose tall grass rippled light and then dark in waves as the wind rippled over it. It was brighter out here, and a little warmer, under a partly cloudy sky. The trail here followed a little stream that broadened out into small pools and then narrowed down to flow in a riffle of white between some stones. About a quarter of a mile later Ginny stopped, pointing to a rock beside the trail. It was a lizard, crouched and ready to spring, immobile. It moved its head from time to time, so quickly that they could see only the abrupt changes. From one position. To the next.

  “It’s a quantum lizard.” Ginny laughed. “In a minute it’s going to make a quantum leap.”

  The rock the lizard had been crouching on was now empty. The shadow of a cloud moved slowly over the moving surface of the stream. As they started to move up the trail Ginny said with a little laugh, “That’s where I want to go—Quantum World. Why don’t they give us theme parks like that? I’ve had it with this Six Flags and Disney World stuff. What we want is Quantum World, where all you get is here and there. Now and then. None of this boring transition stuff in between—right? What do you—”

  She stopped talking as he reached out to grasp her shoulder, pointing with his other hand at the far edge of the meadow, just about where the trail plunged back again into some tall timber: two white deer, a stag and a doe, moving with a stately tread, like some bright image out of a fairy tale, into the darkness of the distant pines. David felt her put her arms around his chest, saying, “They’re real. I see them too.”

  “I’d heard about them all my life,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever actually seen them. I don’t think they’re found anywhere else outside the National Seashore.” At the far end of the meadow the two white animals moved in a courtly measure together, like apparitions, and disappeared in the darkness of the distant trees. Ginny looked up at him with an openmouthed smile and a tilt of her head. Her look put a sort of seal on the moment and their being in it together.

  “Oh, they were better than unicorns,” she said finally. “They were real. We both saw them.”

  “Isn’t what’s real always better?” he asked, and then hoped she would not press him to explain what he meant.

  The trail did not end at a narrow ledge or precipice but at a broad, rolling plateau of brown grasses and gray rocks and low bushes, all of it bent back by the wind that pressed in on it constantly from the, sea. The land here fell away gradually, in rolling breaks and folds, down to another dark stand of wind-bent pines about a mile below them to the west. Beyond those twisted trees the Pacific stretched in streaks and masses of greens and greys, dark smudges of fishing boats moving in slow motion across the wide water without sound. The sky was moving, the clouds in it moving quickly, the wind that drove them a constant sound in their ears. To the north they could see beyond the shoulder of the mountain they were standing on, into the two neighboring valleys, each with a dark line of trees crowding along the length of the stream that flowed through them, unseen, to the sea.

  “Like it?” he asked with a wave of his hand that took in the whole panorama. “My set designer worked on this all last week. Knocked himself out. But I still don’t think he’s got the lighting right.”

  “I like it just like it is,” she said, squeezing his arm.

  “Oh, it was supposed to be brighter. Scattered clouds, I kept telling him. But this is too much, he’s completely overdone it. What the hell.”

  “I like it just like it is,” she repeated. “Isn’t what’s real always better?” She was laughing now.

  “Yes, but—” He was laughing, too, now, trying to recover. “It doesn’t even look real. Look at that sky. It looks secondhand. It looks like something that was used in a Werner Herzog movie.”

  In a hollow that sheltered them from the wind they sat down to eat the trail mix and drink the bottles of fruit juice they’d bought at the little general store in Olema where David had joked about whole-grain Twinkies. The man behind the counter had not been amused. “We don’t carry those,” he’d said, poker-faced and curt.

  Now she said around a mouthful of trail mix, “You know, when we were coming through those woods back there that felt so much like a house, I kept wondering why the whole thing sounded so, you know, familiar. I think I just figured out why.”

  He looked at her.

  “It was the air. You know, the ambient background, all the little noises we’re not even supposed to notice: the branches creaking and leaves rustling, and once in a while the noise of a bird or an animal. That’s what you used for part of the ostinato background in Les Champs Magnétiques. Didn’t you? That piece is so neat. It taught me how to listen all over again: it forced me to work to catch all the ‘rhymes.’ It’s really a winner.”

  She was very comfortable in praising him, and he was a little annoyed with his own unease, but he changed the subject just the same. “When I was in Spain,” he said, “you know, on that same trip with Jane—I’m really not trying to rhyme like that—anyway, when we were in the Pyrenees, in the foothills, really, the landscape there looks like this, these same colors and this same rolling quality, even though the light’s all wrong. It’s brutally hot and dry there. I mean, hot. You know, when shade was invented, in the twelfth century, nobody told Spain about it, and as a result there is no shade in Spain.” She laughed. She always laughed at his jokes.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “In this little café in this little town in the Pyrenees—where the landscape looks like this only a lot hotter, which is what reminded me of it … don’t worry, I’ll get back to the thread of this story. In this little café I met a little old man. He told us that when he was a kid, he tended cattle—I forget whether they were cows or goats—in the high mountain pastures up above the town. He and his brothers. It was his job to carry the milk down the trail to town, where it was carted off to another town just down the road that had the processing and distributing stuff.

  “God! You’ve got to imagine a country like this, except with no ocean, no hint of any water, brutally hot and dry, and down
all these mountain trails are stumbling these Spanish boys with demijohn cans strapped to their backs, all at the same time: a river of milk in the making.

  “Anyway. In this little old café in Spain this little old man told us all about how, as a young kid, he used to trot down this mountain trail—this is in the earliest sort of predawn, when the whole world is a gray blur, sometimes even foggy—and he had to follow this trail while carrying a ten-gallon can of milk strapped into some sort of cradle arrangement for carrying on his back. The thing must have weighed—what? Eighty pounds? And he had to get there fast, but he couldn’t go too fast, or by the time he’d gotten to the bottom he’d have churned the cream in the can to butter. He had to learn to walk with a funny gliding motion. He showed us, going down a flight of stairs right there in the café. I expected to be embarrassed, but it was really very stately and graceful.”

  She put her arms around him and snuggled into his chest, her thick hair tickling his nose. He hugged her closer. They were comfortable in their down jackets, lying at the bottom of a fold in the mountain. The rising mound in front of them sheltered them from the wind, but it also blocked off most of their straight-ahead view of the ocean. To their right they could look miles to the north, toward a ledge of sloping mountains, mostly open grassy slopes, darkened here and there with trees or whitened with rock outcroppings. And beyond that, the enormous mass of the Pacific and the striped and roiling clouds sweeping eastward above it. She felt small and firm in his arms.

  For a moment he found himself thinking about Jane. On that same trip to Spain he had sat with her on the slope of a mountain, looking down at an expansive vista that included a dam and the artificial lake behind it. He could not remember, right off, what he had felt then, sitting on that mountainside in Spain with his wife. He’d been pissed. She had insisted on buying a majolica plate that put them over their shopping budget, and besides, the damn thing was going to break before they could either ship it or carry it home. He hadn’t even liked the way it looked, but she had insisted she was using “her” money. Her money was hers, of course, but his money was theirs. He could feel himself start to get annoyed about it all over again, even now, years later. He hugged Ginny to himself, nuzzling her hair.