Where All The Ladders Start

by Ron Loewinsohn

  The three of them. The three of them had put together the plans and made the arrangement for the Freezerock concert. Jane had used the kids’ own taste and their knowledge of the local groups, together with David’s own contacts. But she had used her own charm to bring the groups into the fold. She had very cannily scouted the situation ahead of time, figuring out which groups had the highest status among the other musicians and which people would be most sympathetic to the idea of a Freeze benefit. As soon as the Renegades agreed to do it, the others fell right into line. He admired her. She was a terrific lady. Oh, damn.

  Sunday afternoon the crowd was pretty sparse, in spite of the perfect weather. Aside from the Freeze people themselves, most of them carrying signs, there were fewer than a hundred or so, not counting the passersby, who stared as they kept on walking. The leaders would be preaching to the converted. Again. Half a dozen or so of the better-dressed men in that crowd had the air of plainclothesmen. About fifteen uniformed patrolmen were standing in a loosely spaced line along the front wall of the Federal Building, which of course was closed. It was Sunday. The demonstration was totally symbolic: the enemy wasn’t even there.

  There were lots of bad speeches and worse singing. The Mime Troupe did a funny bit of “Gorilla Theater.” Some white-haired woman who was the Regional Director of Something or Other spoke for a long time. She gave an obvious cue, and a couple of dozen people detached themselves from the scattered onlookers and began to move somewhat stiffly up the steps. They seemed to know where they were going. Each one moved directly to what looked like a prearranged spot, avoiding all eye contact, focused only on that spot where they would come to a halt. They were now dispersed randomly around the steps, facing in haphazard directions. Jane was standing at the foot of the stairs, facing more or less in his direction, her eyes in neutral, looking off as if into some distant future. Channel 8’s news crew swung their camera away from the speaker and panned the demonstrators on the steps. They were the only news crew there, though some other guy a few feet away from David, a heavyset man in a plaid shirt, was shouldering his own video camera, which looked hopelessly amateurish by comparison.

  The white-haired woman at the microphone had modulated into a more elevated key, with a regular cadence, like a ritual, but David could not pay attention to what she was saying because he kept thinking that when Jane fell, she would come down on the stairs, and he wondered how she would do that without hurting herself. She must have thought of this, he told himself. He did not want to see her get hurt, and he was also genuinely curious to see how she would avoid it. The white-haired woman at the microphone crescendoed up to a climax on the word blast, and the people around the steps crumpled where they stood. In falling, Jane pivoted around, just as she’d practiced it, and came down parallel to the lowest step. She’d closed her eyes. She looked comfortable lying there—serene, even. Two of the cops along the wall shrugged their shoulders at each other. The really silly part, he thought, would come when these victims of a nuclear holocaust picked themselves up and walked away. Bang-bang! You’re dead!

  The whole operation seemed so well-behaved for a protest, so housebroken. Was this what Dada would remember?

  Afterward, as what was left of the crowd was dispersing, Jane called out to Mona, “Are you coming tonight? To the Wake?”

  When David asked her, “Wake?” she explained quickly that it was her joke name for the party she was throwing tonight for all the people who’d died-in. “That’s clever,” he said.

  But the party itself left him feeling invaded, simultaneously weary and restless. He did not know most of the people she’d invited, and those he had met he knew only casually. Around the piano a crowd was singing Spanish Civil War songs. In the kitchen Jane and four or five other people were talking about strategies for future demonstrations. The heavy-set man in the plaid shirt had brought his video camera into the TV room, and the people in there were watching the tape he had shot earlier, watching themselves die on TV. He couldn’t very well escape into his studio. Even the bedroom was occupied by a small clique of younger people who wanted to get stoned. As he walked through it one of them nodded to him and then raised his arms to indicate the room, the whole house, the structure in which he lived his life, saying, “This is really a neat place. Want a hit?”

  “Thank you, no,” he said. He couldn’t get angry at these people, but he might as well have been one of the cats, at best an object at the periphery of anyone’s awareness. He had begun to stop feeling real even to himself, and the whole house was filled with such a din, not loud, just inescapable. Tuning it out was exhausting. All he wanted to do was leave—without making a big production of it.

  In his studio, he picked up some music paper and a couple of pencils. He took his glasses, the Uher, the good Koss headphones, the scores of the whisper songs, and a handful of blank tapes. He put them all, along with the bottle of Ginny’s corn liquor, quietly into his gadget bag, slung it over his shoulder and let himself out the back door without anyone even noticing. Then he drove over to the church and let himself in. He went down the stairs to the basement in the total darkness, holding on to the wall and feeling for the edge of each step with his toe, all the way down. The gadget bag ordinarily was not heavy, but right now its weight pulled on his shoulder in the dark. He felt so tired.

  At the bottom of the stairs he found the little door that housed the fuse box and the switches, and turned on the lights. He put down his bag and the Uher, feeling a wonderful relief. He wandered around the music stands. This was the place where he worked, and yet he hadn’t come down here since—since the last rehearsal before Ginny’s concert. All summer he had avoided this place, along with all the other places and all the other things and all the other people who might have reawakened his longing for her. Now its silence felt soft and velvety and warm. The music stands, standing so perkily at attention, made him feel welcomed: they’d been waiting for him, just standing here the whole time, waiting for him.

  He walked over and got the old bottle of Ginny’s corn liquor out of his bag. He held it aloft, toasting the music stands, and then, looking around, he toasted the whole basement—the barrels of old bottles and cans, the boxes of old clothes, rags, really, their faded colors, their musty smells of rummage sales.

  He had never been to Georgia, but the liquor, as it poured into his mouth and he held it there a long time, tasted to him like Georgia—cornfields folded into piny woods; men in a hard, uncompromising struggle with the land, coaxing out of it this whiskey that was now livening all of his insides. He swallowed that mouthful and the next half mouthful, and that was all there was. He didn’t need any more.

  Walking around the music stands, he thought he would have to talk to the custodian about the little three-step ladder he usually stood on to conduct: it was gone.

  He sat down on the floor, the small of his back against the edge of the little raised area where all the rummage sale stuff was crowded. The music stands cast a rhythmic series of shadows along the floor, spindly and evenly spaced. Somewhere down the long, dark passageway to his left that went back past the plywood frame that hid the organ guts, he heard the soft whoosh of the forced-air furnace starting up. In the silence of the basement the moving air of the furnace was like a slow-flowing stream, like a breathing. He knew he was sitting directly under the altar. Leaning his weight back on his elbows, he could “hear” his own whisper songs, not the words—they would come later, he knew—but only the voices, twisting around each other in the space his ears made for them, the voices only humming, murmuring, establishing intervals that ached toward resolution and rests like a stillness earned. These were the wordless whispers of desire, a language that only groped toward speech or toward an animal cry. The voices wrapped themselves around each other.

  He looked at the shadows of the music stands, remembering the time he and Ginny had driven over to Oakland in the late afternoon. On the lower deck of the Bay Bridge the girders cast an evenly spaced series of b
road, dark shadows across three lanes of traffic. As the cars ahead tooled along at a steady sixty miles an hour, they entered and emerged from those shadows in a regular rhythm, bringing the static patterns to life as they moved through them, bending them as the straight edges of the girders’ shadows snaked over their streamlined surfaces, turning space into time. They had both noticed it at the same moment, and they were both reminded—simultaneously—of Les Champs Magnétiques.

  She had been so terrific that way, always making connections, like hearing the rhyme between the woods at Point Reyes and the woods in Les Champs Magnétiques. Or the way the esplanade along Bridgeway in Sausalito reminded her of Savannah. She’d told him, as they sat on the deck at Ondine’s, looking out across the Bay at what they could see of San Francisco through a thin haze, about sitting in a sidewalk café on River Street in Savannah, just as the sun was about to set behind a large building at the end of the esplanade that looked like some sort of power plant. The light was golden, and somewhere a carillon began playing a medley that began with “Camptown Races.” In that warm light, with those bells chiming out those melodies out of her own Southern past, a German freighter, the Leverkuesen Express, from Bremerhaven, moved silently down the reach of the Savannah River toward the sea. Her decks were laden with cargo containers, on her bridge the sailors stood, from time to time waving to someone on shore who had waved at them. “It was absolutely magical,” she’d said then, and then, holding both his hands, “like right now.” Or the time she’d pointed out to him the world in the back of the milk truck. That was the day they’d driven back from Point Reyes. Coming down 101, they’d pulled up behind a shiny-new aluminum milk tank truck, its polished rear panel reflecting the world it was leaving behind. And there, in the middle of that slightly convex image, was his car, with them inside it, moving steadily into the world that was rushing from them, the whole world being made up completely out of movement.

  She was herself a magic, the steady rhythm that bound his days into one unfolding tissue or unrolling thread as he went into and out of these remembrances.

  He looked at the shadows the music stands made on the floor. The bottle was empty. All the space he was aware of was filled with this silence. In the morning he would get into his car and drive over to Ginny’s. He should do it now. He could be at her door in forty-five minutes, maybe less. He could run up these stairs right now, and jump in his car and tear over there, his tires squealing around every corner, skidding to a stop outside her door. She would come to the door in the Atlanta Falcons football jersey she slept in. She would not believe her eyes. She would see, she would see how much he loved her. He would throw himself at her feet: she meant everything to him. She would think he was nuts.

  He was nuts. What the hell could he be thinking? It sounded like the big finish of some cornball made-for-TV movie. How could he continue to take seriously anyone who could fall for such a grandstand play? But how could she fall for it? He knew her better than that. The gesture was extravagant, it really sought only to sweep himself off his feet. What would he be able to do for her—or for himself or for anyone—once he’d thrown himself at her feet?

  What he desired so much had to be worth more than one grand gesture. His life couldn’t be “fixed” like some repairable discard. He had to restructure it, and restructuring a life wasn’t something you did with grand gestures, although as symbols, the gestures carried a lot of weight.

  In the morning he would have to talk with Jane. They had tried to make a life together. How had it come to the place where he cursed it as he woke up every morning and cursed it every evening as he reached for the doorknob when he came home? They had tried to make a life together, and most people would probably say that they hadn’t done too badly—a handsome, talented son, et cetera; a substantial house with et cetera; two fulfilling et ceteras.

  But it wasn’t just community property. In the rummage-smelling silence of the church basement, as he sat looking at the chairs and music stands that seemed taut with eagerness to begin a rehearsal or a performance, images came to him, moments his wife and he had shared, some funny or silly moments, charged with something that had preserved them. At a campground just outside Montreal, where they’d gone in his old VW microbus, she’d looked out the TV-shaped window of the bus as he stood outside washing their lunch dishes in a little tub on top of a picnic table. He’d immediately picked up the plastic bottle of detergent, holding it up and pointing to it with the maniacal grin of a housewife in a TV commercial. She had gotten the joke immediately, laughing and covering her mouth, and then she reached out toward the window, going through the exaggerated motions of turning off the TV. When he’d been invited to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, she had flown down from Cambridge to spend a weekend with him. She’d gotten a big straw Gone with the Wind hat for the occasion. She’d be wearing it, they’d agreed, when she met him—at noon for lunch at Henry’s, just off Market Street. She’d looked terrific sitting there in the dim, quiet light of Henry’s, wearing a cool white cotton dress and little sandals, fanning her bare shoulders with that great straw hat. At dinner that evening the waiter had recited all his little speeches in a perfectly mechanical, chirping rhythm that made David think of him as an escapee from a music box. Later that night, in their hotel room, she’d done a perfect imitation of him, doing a robot-walk around the room, bowing to the lamp and reciting her little preprogrammed menu-speech, before correcting herself and turning slightly to address him.

  What had happened to that wit and that humor? Did she ever joke with him anymore? Did she ever create those joke-worlds with him anymore? But he wasn’t being fair. Of course she had a sense of humor. She could also be serious. She was terrific with Danny. He remembered going into Danny’s room at midnight when he’d had the flu, and finding Jane in there already, bathing their son’s forehead with a washcloth, silently, not thinking about being noticed or being thanked.

  She was serious, and she gave of herself so generously. Not only to Danny but really everywhere. Like the Peace Corps, and then with her students and their parents, and even this Freeze stuff, and her literacy project with Jack. Though that, too, was a kind of self-indulgence, he thought: she seemed less interested in actually submitting it to a publisher than in keeping it going as a project-in-process. As a “project” it was like a quilting bee, where it never much mattered if you finished the quilt, as long as you got a chance to gossip with your neighbors, to socialize. But would anyone want to invest in the project? Would the pamphlets themselves work? Would anyone ever learn to read by using them?

  Still, she did work—on the marriage itself. When he’d been crashing in the TV room, avoiding her, she’d come down and done something about it, taken some action to reestablish lines of communication. She’d tried to fix what she thought was wrong. But what had she really done? She’d acted essentially in her own self-interest. As soon as she got to the place where she didn’t feel he was “rejecting” her anymore, she went on about her business, paying no more attention than before to the needs of the marriage—as opposed to her needs. Did she worry, for instance, about what he needed?

  They had tried to make a life together. His home was filled with all the evidence of it. The colors of its walls, the rugs, the dishes, the table they ate their meals on—those were the choices they’d made together. The little nameless things they’d picked up in their life together and become unaccountably attached to—an ashtray they never used that said Paris, a little tin seal that spun a striped ball on its nose when you rolled it along a table. Part of what made it so hard to think about leaving her was the thought that all those things that had gone to make up their life together, those ordinary things that made up so huge a part of his life, would end up down here, in this basement, when she might decide, sometime in the future, that she did not want anything hanging around that reminded her of her past with him, anything that might bring that past to life. How much of that past was alive now? How much of their present was alive? Ho
w long had it been since they’d tried to bring each other to life? Clearly that was beyond trying now. They had tried to make a life together, and now they would have to try something else.

  And then there was Ginny. If he really loved her and had the courage for it, then he would have to work toward winning her. That might take a long time. If she loved him, and if love really did mean to her what it meant to him, then that would be a start. But all the old obstacles were still there. He couldn’t even be sure that she would have the desire to get through or around them, or the courage to try. Two of these obstacles were named Jane and John. Another was named Danny. He would need to keep his cool, to practice restraint.

  He was very tired. He lay down on the floor next to the boxes of old clothes. He was committing himself, silently, with no witness but his own conscience, to realizing a process that would mean—no, that now meant—the end of the kind of life he had been living and the beginning of something entirely different. And after all that, he might not even win. Ever. The odds were hardly in his favor. He could very well spend the rest of his life striving toward what he desired. Yes.