Where All The Ladders Start Page 9

  When they finally got up to leave, they had to walk back up to the top of the ridge to pick up the trail, and there they both stood for a moment, looking out toward the west—the ocean and the sky—and back toward the land, folding away from them under the gray, scudding light. She came up behind him softly while he stood there and put her hands lightly on his shoulders, laying the side of her face against his back.

  On the trail down she got in front of him, and after a while she started doing something he couldn’t figure out at first, walking a lot more slowly, with a funny gliding motion. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m trying to get downhill as fast as I can without churning the cream into butter.”

  When they were almost at the bottom of the trail, beside a many-trunked crowd of redwood trees they’d noticed when they started out, she turned to him, saying, “Now I want you to put on the brakes. I want you to make the time move real slow now. Like when you’re conducting. Just like that: Ral-en-tan-do.”

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “Hungry?”

  He took her to Nick’s Cove, just a little way outside of Marshall, where it was crowded and smoky and noisy and funky. They got a good table by the window in the corner so she could look out at the far shore of Tomales Bay. Straight ahead the short row of four or five clapboard houses that made up “The Cove” clung to the shore, hovering over the water on stilts. She looked around at the view, grinning, and then looked at him, intent, her eyes not staying in focus on his own but moving over his face, almost imperceptibly shaking her head, as if incredulous at her good fortune.

  “You’re a pretty man,” she said at last.

  “Nobody ever called me that before,” he said.

  “You take me to the neatest places.”

  “This old place?”

  “Not just this place—I really like this old place, it’s neat. That mountain wasn’t bad, either, and those white deer.” She reached across to hold his hand.

  “This is just a greasy spoon with a view,” he said. “The barbecued oysters are great, and they’ve got a pretty good selection of beer. The oysters are fresh, too: they grow them in these beds right here. But that’s about it.”

  “It must be the company, then.”

  She’d been to lots of fancy places. Her father was an airline bigwig, so restaurant people all over the world were always trying to court him, and he used to take her along to these places, sometimes with her mother and brother, sometimes just the two of them. “We got the full VIP treatment, I hope to tell you.” She preferred funky old places like this, which were easier to relax in. It helped if the place had been run by the same family for several generations. Nick’s reminded her of a place they used to go to on the Georgia coast, the Shrimp Boat, just below Savannah.

  She was lovely now, he thought, smiling and freckled, lifting the beer to her lips as the sun broke through the overcast and everything got brighter for a minute. She looked at him over the rim of her glass. She could not seem to keep her eyes off him. He liked that, but there was a part of him that felt uncomfortable about it.

  “If you see a bright yellow glow around me,” she said, “don’t worry. It’s just my aura.”

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “You know, my aura? People are supposed to have these auras around them all the time, like fields of energy, you know, and the color is supposed to change with your mood, and when you’re really happy, your aura’s supposed to flash on bright yellow—Don’t look at me like that!” She was breaking up.

  “Like what?”

  “You know, like I’m some kind of nut. You’ve heard of this stuff.” She could not keep a straight face.

  “What? Different-colored auras?” He was smiling too. “Yeah. How can you live in California and not know about this stuff? This is where all that stuff comes from, right? Besides, I don’t really believe in that stuff. It’s you guys who started it.”

  “Oh? Did I bring it up just now?”

  “I was just joking! I don’t really believe in it, I swear!” she cried in a parody of pleading, just as the waitress came up with their orders, and she tried to get herself “settled down.” She told him about the time her daddy took her to this place out on West Paces Ferry Road, back home in Atlanta. It was one of the places that had shut down just so they could give them a private party. “I swear, half the men there looked like mafiosos. All of them—except for Daddy—being pretty obvious about ‘getting up to go to the bathroom’ and then coming back to the table sniffing up their noses and shaking their heads. The women too. I must have been about sixteen, and one of the women kept kicking me under the table and making these eye signs till I finally figured it out and went to the bathroom myself, and sure enough, there was a mirror lying there with these two perfect little lines on it.”

  “Does your father do drugs?”

  “If he does, he’s been pretty cool about it around the family. He knows my brother and I have been smoking dope for years. My mom freaked out the first time she found a roach in my room. She must have done some dope—right?—or how else could she recognize a roach? But Daddy just talked to me really calm about how it is against the law and how he didn’t want any of his kids hung up with arrest records behind anything as trivial as weed. So Mom’s reaction was, ‘How could you do such a thing as take drugs!’ But his reaction was, ‘Do you really want to take this chance on getting seriously busted for this one innocuous little trip? And now that you’ve got your mother’s attention, why don’t you cool it with “accidentally” leaving roaches around where she can find them?’”

  “It’s terrific,” he said, “to meet someone who actually gets along with her parents.”

  When she was finished with her meal, she continued to sit, idly pushing a prawn around on her plate with her fork. “My daddy used to catch shrimp for me,” she said out of this reverie, not looking at anything in particular. “This was just off the Georgia coast. We’ve got a summer place out there. You catch them with this net, and you’ve got to fold it up just right, so when you cast it out, it’ll open up, you know, and sink the way it’s supposed to. Well, when you throw it out like that, you know, you’ve got to do a little sort of dance with it to get it to open out right? Daddy would fold it all up really carefully and then stand out there in the water about up to his knees, and he would do his little dance and then throw out this net that would bloom open like magic. And then he’d haul it in, and there would be all these wonderful shrimp. I know I’ve never tasted any better.”

  “It would be hard to get them any fresher.”

  “For sure. But it was the fact that he caught them for me. He taught me how to clean them and cook them, but I never wanted to learn how to catch them like that. That was what made it so special, that he did his little dance for me.”

  After a long pause David asked, “How long has it been since you’ve done that—gone out and caught shrimp with your Dad like that?”

  “A long time,” she said quietly.

  In the car on the way back she told him about the relatives she still visited back in Madison County, spread out between Franklin Springs—“That’s a one-horse town”—and Pocataligo—“That’s a one-mule town.” She told him about her aunt who used to save her son the cherries out of the fruit cocktail, and about another aunt who drove all the way to Atlanta and back—better than a hundred miles, round trip—just to deliver the bar of soap her college freshman son had forgotten. “I mean, those people live for their kids, you know?” She told him about the ritual holiday visits to the old folks in the family, white-haired patriarchs and grandmothers who would receive audiences and shake her hand gravely as they sat in their La-Z-Boy recliners on air-conditioned sun porches.

  “Not on the veranda?” David asked her. “Sippin’ lemonade in a rockin’ chair and fannin’ themselves with a little straw fan?”

  “In that humidity? It’s air-conditioning all the way.”

  She told him about her great-granddaddy drain
ing the swamp. Her great-granddaddy had been a civil engineer who built roads and bridges all over eastern Georgia and on down into Florida. One of his jobs was to drain a swamp down near Valdosta. “This was still in the nineteenth century. He noticed that the swamp was on a slight plateau, so he just stuck a pipe down into it and hung the free end of the pipe over the side of the plateau, you know, so its bottom end was lower than the bottom of the swamp. Then he plugged up both ends pf the pipe, filled it with water, and then pulled the plug out of the lower end. Of course all the water siphoned out of the swamp. But all the folks around there—I mean Indians, black people, white folks—they all swore my great-granddaddy was some kind of magician.” She imitated their awestruck faces.

  “That’s a great story,” he told her. “But a swamp—on a plateau?”

  “You know, that always bothered me too, but I never asked. I must not have wanted to ask. But it must have been a flood or something, and in the telling of it, you know, over a hundred years or so, the details got garbled like that.” She had let herself get lost in her story, and in her defense of its authenticity, a history that clothed her in the fabric of the South, whose people came alive in her telling of it, smiling and gesturing animatedly here in his car as they drove inland over the rolling brown hills of Marin County. She was most alive, really, when she let herself get revved up this way about home. And it was this sense of home being as clearly defined and consistent as a rhythm or the framing structure of a house, something so palpably there that she could take it as much for granted as the color of the walls or the weather—this was what he envied in her now.

  As they drove through that warehouse and railroad section of Petaluma, the freeway looming up in the middle distance, she waved her palm across the windshield, crying out in mock agony, “No! It’s all moving too fast! You were going to slow it all down and make it last, remember? My God, it looks like Mordor!”

  But they both knew that the day was coming to an end for them, and when he got her home, he gave her a hug that said, “I’m going to have to leave in a minute.”

  “I know you’ve got to leave,” she said in his ear, though she was not whispering, “but I sure wish we could fuck.” All the way home he kept hearing her saying that: “Ah know yew’ve got to lee-ve”—and then a little pause—“but Ah sure weesh we cd fu-uck,” the last word with a funny glissando in the middle of it that was like the upward motion of her pelvis when they were making love. He kept hearing her voice like a piece of tape in a repeat loop.

  He was very lucky. He had it all. Well, not all, but he really couldn’t complain. He had a lovely wife about whom he felt right now, right this minute, very warm. He had a handsome, talented son, a fine home with a studio that was—well, manageable, and a career that—well, right now it was on hold, but that obviously was going to change before the last movement. He didn’t have any health problems: he didn’t have to worry about those headaches anymore. And now a terrific young girlfriend. And she was obviously pretty sweet on him. This was more than physical for her too.

  That evening, in his own kitchen, when he and Jane and Danny were all working on dinner, he listened to Danny telling him how he had burned the opposing cornerback twice with the same move, and then, the third time, burned his ass again with the opposite fake. “Three touchdowns, Dad. You ever score three touchdowns in one game? It was rad.”

  “Rad?” David asked him.

  “Yeah, radical: real good. You know that.”

  “So radical means good now, huh?”

  The boy was wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, and with his punk haircut he looked almost aggressively underdressed. But David did not say a word. He thought about his day with Ginny, savoring it, and he thought of what she would be doing now. She would be doing the same thing, probably: making dinner. How did they work the cooking over there? Did they take turns cooking and all eat together, or was it every woman for herself? He imagined her in the kitchen of that house on Fifteenth Avenue, standing under the Rolling Stones poster, slicing a block of tofu into small cubes and slipping the cubes into the pan in which the ramen noodles were simmering while his string quartet alternately stuttered and sang over the stereo speakers. She listened—she really listened to his music, which made both it and him feel more real, more substantial, having the being of a thing heard, a thing seen or tasted.

  That night the sex with Jane was pretty good, very quiet, the way it always was with Jane, but good too. He always made sure she came, and then she took care of him. He wondered, as he drifted off to sleep with Jane’s arm over his shoulder and her breasts pressed against his back, if Ginny was spending the night with anyone. How could he blame her if she was? Didn’t he want her to? He did not blame her. He did want her to.

  But all the next week he found himself thinking about her more and more. He was constantly visualizing her face and hearing her drawl, especially the way she’d said, “I sure wish we could fuck.” When Jane was “interested,” she would wear some perfume or put on some blouse he’d told her looked sexy on her.

  I sure wish we could fuck!

  Curiously, these images of Ginny did not make her absence more bothersome: they were tokens of her presence, and they filled up the space of his days. He called her, just to tell her, “You know, ma’am, even missing you feels good.”

  He had to see the printer about the posters and programs for the final concert of the season, and it felt very good to have the man look over his typewritten and pasted-up copy and say, “A world premiere, huh?” David wanted to make sure about the sizes of type on all the names and titles, wanting all the names—Josquin, Busoni, De Leon and Johnson—to be the same size. “Same with the titles, right?” The man knew just what he was, talking about, nodding in agreement and puffing away on his cigarette.

  When he got to Ginny’s place on Friday, she answered the door wearing a sort of scoop-necked top that draped seductively around her young bosom. Wow! He could feel her thighs all up and down his own as she kissed him hello. The next thing he knew, they were in her room and she was kicking the door shut and coming back to give him another standing embrace.

  She ended up sitting on the edge of the bed, holding him and kissing his stomach through his shirt as he stood in front of her. The picture of John glowered down into the room, the picture of his arm around the picture of Ginny’s shoulders. When he started to unbuckle his belt, she stopped him, saying, “I’ve been thinking about doing this all week.” It actually made him catch his breath, to think that all week, without knowing it, he had been the focus of this girl’s desire, existing in her desire for him. He was so immediately real to her, even his absence provoked her imagination, setting her off into fantasies: what she would do when he got there. And when they’d taken each other’s clothes off and gotten into bed and gone through all the preliminaries and she was totally focused on what was now just a little way out there ahead of them, each thrust of her pelvis reaching out for it, still somehow just a little beyond her reach, he could feel her kick into a different gear, an abandon he’d never felt before. She was panting and calling out his name, calling to him in his ear, and then his name became the rhythm, the vehicle that would take her over the crest of this wave, calling his name, affirming each thrust, sweeping him up, into her rhythm, until the breathless music she made of his name in his ear was both a plea and a command to keep fucking her.

  He had never been pleaded with like that, so immediately the source of someone else’s fulfillment, and it took him right over that crest himself, going over it with her, her head thrown back, her whole body arched and stiff and vibrating against his for a long moment, her arms and legs spread wide apart. And then she fell away from him as her whole body ebbed into a pool of relaxation, and after a while she drifted back to him to touch the side of his face.

  “Oh, honey,” she said with a smile and an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Something had changed. She’d said it in a key of such familiarity, she was probably not even awar
e she’d said it. For himself he thought now, oh, shit. Later, when he would look back on all this, this would be, he thought, the moment when she’d changed for him too.

  She was pretty, and he had seen that early on—although her hair had bothered him at first and he didn’t know when he’d gotten used to it, when it had become for him just another part of her, like the color of her eyes. He’d seen lots of young women like her—short yet perfectly proportioned with short, thick, dark hair, with pale green eyes and heavy lashes, their eyes set wide apart and their faces open. They might as well have been Raggedy Ann dolls: they wore their prettiness only on their skin. You could get it all in one look. Ginny had some quality that kept changing her features with her mood or his, something he thought of as her “thereness” or presence, something that charged her skin and her movements with a quick sureness.

  John had called her. He was back in Atlanta. He would definitely be coming to Ginny’s concert, he was pretty sure. But he was also coming next Friday, possibly for the weekend, possibly for longer.

  “Well, if it’s just for the weekend, that’ll be perfect. I’ll be in La Jolla.”

  “Oh, for the music festival.”

  “Right,” he said. “You haven’t told him. About us, I mean.”

  “No,” she said, “it didn’t make any sense.”

  La Jolla was perfect—four days of total release. The skies were a little overcast, but the temperature was up in the seventies, and every morning Michael Harrison would drive them down to the beach, where David would sit and pretend he was going over the scores of the group’s concerts, particularly the last one in June—Ginny’s concert.