Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  From my perspective now, it’s disturbing to look back on what happened to a young girl with a much older boy. The thing is, even though I instinctively knew I couldn’t tell anybody, it didn’t feel shameful at the time but, instead, thrillingly clandestine, and full of naughty fun.

  Billy was the teenage son of family friends who were visiting Stamford from Chicago, where his father was a lawyer. They were renting a house in the neighboring town of Westport that summer. One thing about Billy was clear. He made no secret about how much in love he was with my sister Lucy. In fact, the first time I saw Billy, he was spying on Lucy through a window as she made her way to the swimming pool, wearing her sexy black bathing suit.

  That summer, on our first walk up the hill to the house after dinner at the pool house, Billy asked me whether Lucy was “developed.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because he added, “I mean, does she have hair down there?” I told him that I didn’t know, but the subject was never far from my mind that summer. Every time Lucy was nearby, Billy mooned over her as if a goddess had favored him with her presence, a rank of deity I could never come close to matching.

  A few evenings later, Billy and I found ourselves in the living room after everyone was asleep, talking. Billy told me about a Swedish movie he’d seen recently. He described the two actors, and when he went on to say they were both naked, and touching each other, I couldn’t help myself: what he was saying excited me. Billy was a little beer-drunk, maybe, when he proceeded to tell me how good looking I was. The way I felt didn’t show on my face, but at the same time I found I couldn’t keep still. I felt physically aroused. Then Billy suggested the two of us go swimming.

  We walked to the tennis house in silence. It was dark, maybe ten at night, and the air had a hot, saturated feel to it, as if it were about to rain. Inside the tennis house, Billy and I began changing into our bathing suits, Billy in the men’s room, me in the ladies’.

  Earlier that night, Billy had asked me if I’d ever skinny-dipped, and I said no. Now he went for the kill. “Carly,” he said, the sound echoing like a signal from a boat in distress, “have you got a quarter?”

  “I don’t have a quarter,” I said, my voice sliding across the tennis house’s cement floors and pinewood interior. I slipped on my favorite plaid shirt over my bathing suit. Then, in an attempt to please him, I began poking around in ashtrays and in the pockets of the robes hanging off hooks, where my fingers found a dime. Would a dime be good enough? I called out.

  “If you want,” Billy said, as if he were doing me a favor, and then he proposed a bargain: if I brought him my dime, he would give me a quarter in return. I felt even more excited, grown-up, and my heart stepped up its beat.

  That night, the only light came from the cocked lights trained on the pool, which cast spooky shadows.

  “Come in, and bring the dime,” Billy said again from behind the men’s room door.

  Which I did, moving stealthily, sensitive to any and all shadows that moved. I felt scared, less about being attacked by someone or something lunging from the shadow than by the thought that some punishing, responsible adult would barge in on the two of us. I continued to feel physically aroused in a new, unfamiliar way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the sexy Swedish movie Billy had told me about that night, and I entered the men’s room with a mix of confidence, terror, and excitement.

  Billy was standing in the center of the room, bare-chested, a skimpy white towel around his waist. At sixteen, he towered over me, and must have weighed twice as much as I did, too. He was handsome, with olive skin and sandy, straight hair like corn silk, almost down to his eyes. Instead of saying hi, or even greeting me, he said only, “Give me your dime and I’ll let you pull the towel off my waist.”

  I didn’t understand. Billy persisted. He knew that I wanted to see him without his towel, he said. I began to say something, but felt my stammer rise up and clamp the back of my throat. I was trying to buy some time. I started to say something again, and then I simply decided to relax. My arms felt light and funny, my knees boneless. What would it be like, I wondered, to go skinny-dipping with a boy? My crush on him, or whatever it was, was growing bigger by the second.

  Billy repeated his invitation. In fact, he now dared me to pull down his towel. “Either you can do it now, or we can go down to the pool,” he said, implying he was offering me an opportunity that few other girls would dream of declining.

  That first time, at least, I didn’t fall for it. Instead, the two of us made our way down the cement steps toward the swimming pool. It had turned into a soft, beautiful night. It wasn’t going to rain, after all.

  At the pool, Billy began badgering me again about skinny-dipping. First I would take off his towel, and then I’d strip off my own bathing suit, and the two of us could jump into the pool together. It’s easy, Carly. It wasn’t a proposal, or even a request, more like an order. I was starting to think this was a semi-dangerous idea. Billy stood beside me, half lit by the pool’s dim floodlights. He’d let his towel slip slightly from his rear end, the front of him still holding it up, as if it was dangling off the end of a pole.

  I wasn’t thinking, and had no idea what would happen next, when I moved forward and quickly pulled off his towel, accidentally scratching his skin with my fingernails and making him cry out, “Jeeeesus!” Nor did I sneak a glance at what the towel had been covering. At the same time, I knew I had just crossed a line, one that I wasn’t ready for.

  In a second, Billy had jumped into the pool, naked, and was asking me—no, again ordering me—to take off my bathing suit and join him. I made up the excuse that I was freezing and had to get into the shower, and I took off across the lawn back toward Stoneybroke and the women’s changing room.

  I kept my bathing suit on as I stood under the hot water in the ladies’ room shower, feeling like a character in a scary movie. I was waiting to see if Billy would follow me in, half praying he wouldn’t, half hoping he would. Two minutes later, Billy was standing in the shower stall next to me, naked. I stared down at the tiles on the floor of the shower, doing everything I could not to look at him. Billy told me not to be scared—that it was perfectly okay if I didn’t want to remove my bathing suit, the bigger point being that Joey and Lucy both “did this,” though he wasn’t clear what “this” was. Then Billy took the soap and began lathering his own naked body. Up and down. Side to side.

  Joey and Lucy did this? Did what? I was positive Billy was lying. Even though the shower water was hot, I was shivering. Billy, though, didn’t seem nervous in the least, nor, surprisingly, did he appear at all happy. No, the expression on his face was something else entirely: strange, focused, private. There was a look of determination. I can’t say I knew what he was feeling, but it was clear that he was the male, I was the female; he was the one strutting, and I was the one holding back. By now I wasn’t shivering anymore; I was shaking. Was it fear? Was it desire? I couldn’t tell the two of them apart. Billy reached down and kissed me on the cheek, doused his hand under the shower needles, and dripped hot water on my face, guiding it down in little drips from my forehead.

  “Okay,” he said softly. “You’ll be more comfortable on your knees.”

  I obeyed what seemed like the right next command.

  “Okay, Carly Darling, look up at me.” Billy called me “Carly Darling” a lot, as if mimicking one of my parents, who called me that. I did as he asked, gazing up at his face, though a moment later, by moving my chin lower, Billy made it perfectly clear he hadn’t meant me to look up at his face. “Take it in your hand,” he said.

  How? Like a baseball bat? Like a dinner fork? Like the stem of a flower? I felt the first rise of anger. I wanted to be the one in charge, not Billy. Still, I did as he asked, kneeling on the wet tile and lifting my eyes upward. Then, as fast as possible, I touched him. My shakes dissolved. I couldn’t have given a name to what I was feeling; it was way too complicated. There were opposites at work, but there was no doubt about it: I was
also turned on. But that was it for the night. I pivoted and ran back to the night-lights of the main house.

  * * *

  After that night, wherever Billy and I happened to find ourselves alone, we misbehaved. A bathroom here, a closet there. A beach, a random patch of grass. During Sunday lunches, Billy would try to pull me into his mood in an upstairs bathroom, as the potatoes were being passed downstairs. By the time I saw Dr. Frunzhoffa, I’d become so benumbed to Billy’s behavior—which mostly involved him touching himself, with me never undressed; Billy’s only interest, it seems, was in being observed by another person—my numbness itself almost deserved a verse of Frunzhoffa’s Fred-and-Ginger ballad. Meanwhile, the whole time I was secretly tortured by the fact that Billy was lusting after my sister Lucy and had no qualms about telling me so. On his part I must have represented some covert compromise, I who was too young to know any better, and too infatuated to bust him, even to Dr. Frunzhoffa.

  My “interludes” with Billy lasted, but with less frequency, for six years, into my teens. Until that time, he was my captor and I was his slave. Love: that was what I felt for him, or so I convinced myself. During those years, I waited on his every word, gesture, glance, and mood. Being in pursuit of such a low, sneaky, treacherous catch caused me to retreat even farther down inside myself, if that was even possible. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to get Billy into trouble, more that I didn’t want anyone to stop me, or bring to light how ashamed and conflicted I felt about what the two of us were doing.

  When I told Joey and Lucy about Billy, they both accused me of making it up. At the same time, they told my mother, who expelled Billy for an entire month of one summer, which in retrospect feels like a strangely mild response. The biggest secret and vanity of the Simon family was to insist that nothing was wrong when, in fact, so much was wrong, and neither one of my parents ever owned up to it. Today, when I hold my preadolescent diary, small and old and blue, with its cover graphic of a little girl holding a mass of flowers, I have in my hands the tenderest possible proof of my own innocent, flailing, unparented judgment, all of it expelled and encrypted inside that diary whenever it took place. After finishing each entry, I would secure the cover with its tiny key, keeping my fascinated public at bay for another day. If someone had been interested or persistent enough to dig, my diary, with its secrets both exposed and concealed, would have called out: Someone, please read this and save me.

  I was falling in love with Billy. Lucy was in love with her boyfriend, Marty, Joey was in love with her current paramour, and Mommy, well, Mommy … I didn’t know yet, but she seemed to be waiting. Just waiting.

  That, right there, is such a crucial point in my emotional life. I was already doing things that grown-ups, who shouldn’t be doing what they were doing, were doing anyway in an overly sexual atmosphere, where the night was a series of dark corners inhabited by couples swinging branch to branch, lost in music and rapture. The night was a wild cat, stalking from garden to garden. One big copper beech tree in the center of this Garden of Paradise may have been keeping its secrets. It was a part of the thoroughfare on which Daddy would walk at night, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the ramparts. How many were in those bushes, in those shadows, that if my father had known about, would have taken his life then and there? But he walked, looking straight ahead and never at the shadows.

  Me graduating from sixth grade.

  Ronny and Mommy, 1955.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  carly, meet ronny

  In the mid-1950s, around the same time Billy was quietly stealing a part of me, I started losing my parents. Mommy and Daddy were still there, of course, but in altered forms. Love, as I’d defined it up until that point, took on darker, more secretive meanings and shadowy forms. Our house became a place of intrigue, and implications, and late-night taboos.

  Until that time, and in spite of what was going on with Billy, I’d been happily suspended in a Little Golden Books world, with their sunny, skinny spines and images of family normalcy—Daddy coming home from work; Mommy turning around from the stove, where she was placing the top crust onto the apple pie; Laurie the dog wagging her tail. I didn’t understand how beneath what looked to the world like an enviable marriage, each one of my parents must have felt so alone, to the extent that in 1954, my mother began a relationship with a much younger man.

  Granted, I knew nothing at the time. In fact, not until 1960. But the relationship hung so heavily in the air that I intuitively knew something was happening, knew that my parents weren’t in love, knew that what my sisters had told me was true: that when Mommy and Daddy kissed, it was nothing more than a show. And then I repelled that notion and forgot it. A few times as I was growing up, probably in thrall to a romantic movie I’d just seen, I would ask Daddy to bend Mommy down as if in a swoon and kiss her with “passion.” When they obliged me, the meeting of their lips came off as awkwardly as two antiques clanking together in the back of a moving truck. In retrospect, I knew there was a reason that I was always watching Mommy and Daddy for signs, hints, clues of what was really going on in their marriage, trying to read between the lines, and yet rejecting everything that didn’t fit in with my storybook fantasy.

  Why was Mommy so interested in this man, and why did she move him into our house? What did they have in common? I could only guess. Mommy grew up poor in a row of red-brick-porched houses in a lower-middle-class part of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Cockroaches were underfoot, utilities and rent bills went unpaid. Mommy always seemed proud of her hand-to-mouth background. Even as Mrs. Simon, she was never a snobby, prissy, uptown brat, never had matching table linen, silver spoons, or china with no nicks. Throughout her marriage, Mommy had done everything she could to impress Daddy and the social circles in which they moved. Lacking easy wit, she had tried to appear a woman of words, not realizing that brilliant men rarely seek out brilliant women. Maybe she had enough finesse, of acted-out glamour, of “putting it on,” flinging her hair back, applying red lipstick, coming up with the “just so” word or story in between the dessert course and the after-dinner brandies. Maybe she felt bored, unappreciated, undesired. What she didn’t know was that the secret love she was about to embark on inside her husband’s own house would impair Daddy’s health and probably even hasten his early death. Or maybe she suspected but had just stopped caring.

  * * *

  Mommy had always feared for my little brother Peter’s manhood in an all-female household. Daddy was worldly and sophisticated and driven—no one really expected him to be the lawn-mowing, basketball-dribbling, baseball-batting type of father, too. Which is why one day, Mommy tacked up an ad on a bulletin board in the hallway of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Wanted: A young, athletic male companion who had the time and patience to oversee the only boy, aged six, in a household of girls, and who could shuttle the boy back and forth to assorted playing fields and sports events. More or less.

  I was eight years old and making myself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich the afternoon Ronny first appeared in our kitchen in Riverdale, the official reason being that he was a perfect candidate for the Peter-babysitting job. Ronny was maybe an inch or two shorter than Daddy and densely muscled, his physique that of a big, healthy football player, with a light rubbery ring of hard flesh around his waist. It was a kind of alien midwestern bulk I’d never seen before, one where I could almost imagine what lay underneath: steaks and potato salad, mingling with Ronny’s own gristle and fascia. It took only a few weeks for my mother to begin likening him to her idol, Gary Cooper, by which I think she meant Ronny was more a body man than a word man.

  As Ronny stood beside her, I picked up subtle changes in my mother. Her eyelids fluttered and her lips puckered: “Ron will be staying with us upstairs, in the back bedroom,” Mommy said, adding that he was from Pittsburgh and studying to be a teacher. Mommy was forty-two at the time, Ronny only nineteen.

  The first time I laid eyes on Ronny, I felt an immediate, e
lectric dislike, followed by an inexplicable disgust. The world felt suddenly unstable, as though it had gone from solid to liquid, but rather than confront what was going on—and really, I had no clue at the time—I focused on something else: Ronny’s sandaled bare left foot, specifically his toe. I just couldn’t ignore it. The explanation was simple—Ronny had an ingrown toenail—but all I could think of was that his nail was alive, an aquatic horror-movie creature pushing and burrowing further inside his body. I turned away, but it was too late: Ronny’s toe had already registered in my brain. Already there was a wrongness about him, building connections inside me on a cellular level. Or maybe I was already responding to the invisible currents between him and my mother.

  In the weeks and days before we packed up to go to Stamford that summer, Ronny was officially hired by the Simon family. It made perfect sense for Peter to have a male babysitter. Along with writing and putting on plays, Helen Gaspard, now the nanny for our whole family, had taught us girls to sew, make up plays for our dolls, and put on stage makeup. In contrast, Peter and his friends collected baseball cards, played with wooden soldiers and train sets, and shook down the adults for spare change in exchange for elaborate card tricks. Ronny seemed custom-made for the job.

  He was awkward and uncomfortable around the adults, but no matter—Ronny was also custom-made for Mommy. The connection between them was instantaneous, and they must have found private solace in their shared vulnerability. An orphan, Ronny certainly must have told Mommy his backstory—how he’d watched the airplane that held his mother and father explode as it took off from the airport in Pittsburgh, crashing to the earth, leaving him parentless and alone. No doubt Mommy could match him sorrow by sorrow, as she told him about sitting in her drunken father’s lap or sleeping out on the fire escape in summers, with the intermittent swish of the passing train the only thing that cooled her off on hot black nights. Had Mommy never felt good enough, appreciated enough, loved enough, until Ronny came along?