Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  * * *

  As the two of us continued treading water, making and missing appointments with couples therapists on the Upper East Side, other issues reared their heads. James and I had gone to an appointment with a doctor—an expert—so many experts!—who told me that if I could remain nursing Ben a little longer, I would produce one extremely healthy child, both emotionally and physically. I’d taken his advice, but my nursing Ben, who was two and a half, made James angry. As James grew unhappier, he pointed fingers at me about even the smallest things. As the conflicts between us simmered, James seemed to slip away from me even more.

  Once, at the end of 1979, when I came across a love letter intended for James from an old girlfriend from the 1960s, James seemed nonplussed by her professions of love. “It’s not your problem,” he said to me. “It’s got nothing to do with you.” Come again? What a way to erase me completely. Casting around wildly for some solution to our marital problems, I followed a recipe provided by a Spanish witch doctor (signs of my own desperate thinking getting messy), smearing myself with oils and unguents—it was a love spell, designed to restore whatever passion or magic had left our relationship—but when James came into the bedroom that night to be faced by red and black candles, fragrances, and Latin music purring from the sound system, he asked if there was anything medicinally interesting in the vapors.

  At the same time, there were moments of love, grace, wonder. James and I sang “You Can Close Your Eyes” together at a concert in Long Island. On the way to the concert, my emotional pendulum had swung back to an ardent belief in our marriage and awe in the combination of James’s qualities—genius, craziness, fascination, selfishness, joy. Onstage, when we sang “You Can Close Your Eyes,” James’s gaze communicated: You have this. You always will, too, because I will always love you.

  Another day, James and I turned a Robert Burns poem into a song, in two-part harmony. Creating a melody was fun and came easy to us. “John Anderson my jo, John, when we were first acquent, your locks were like the raven … your bonnie brow was brent … but now your brow is beld, John, your locks are like the snaw … but blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo!” The song had never had a melody before. This was how James and I operated, though—as though we were following each other’s spirits around the notes.

  That afternoon, as we sang the Robert Burns poem, both of us cried, as we improvised melody and harmony, in part because it was so easy and natural, like breathing, almost inevitable, for us to do. That mixture of music and tears made us realize how ideal things could be if that was all there was.

  In the end, it seemed to me that so much about love, no matter what you did or tried, was left to chance. In my diary I wrote, “If I could manage to achieve constant forbearance … but when James would return after a make-up vow of repentance, and many apologies, my worries would remain: How long would he stay? Long enough to open new wounds, demand promises, looking good from the outside, claim shared songs and poems, flirt with new ways of expressing our undying love … James is visiting the marriage. Always on the verge of moving off. James is always a half-departed man.”

  The state of our marriage gave me the lyrics to what is perhaps the saddest song I’ve ever written, “We’re So Close,” from my album Spy, which I wrote one day in 1979 on the Vineyard while James was keeping me waiting for an hour in the car as he pulled his sailboat from the water. By the time he returned to the car, more than anything I wanted to read the lyrics back to him—“We’re so close we have a silent language / We don’t need words at all … He says: We’re beyond flowers / He says: We’re beyond compliments … We’re so close we can dispense with love / We don’t need love at all”—but something stopped me. What would James have done if I’d read him those lyrics aloud? Most likely nothing. But he would add it to a column in his mind: a long, stern, silent column of recrimination.

  As for Evey, I would rather James lived with her and pined for me than the reverse. What had happened to “Devoted to You,” the song James and I recorded together in 1978, which appeared on Boys in the Trees? The Everly Brothers recorded the most famous version of the song back in 1958, and James and I were both generationally attached to their harmonies, chords, and vocal deliveries. The summer after Ben was born, James and I gravitated to that song as a lullaby we could sing around the apartment. It sounded good soft, just like good Swedish pancakes. I still have a cassette tape of James and me rehearsing the song at home, with Sally, age four, breaking in repeatedly, “No—that’s not how it goes! That’s not how it goes!” and singing her own version instead, which included mention of a teddy bear’s tail.

  “Devoted to You” made the most of James’s and my voices while also planting emotion in the listener, even if it was just us. Then as now, it’s the most natural song imaginable to sing, and in that way it’s not unlike James’s song “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which also made the most of how our two voices sounded in harmony. Somebody told me once that “Devoted to You” was an almost perfect intersection of James’s gorgeous cello tone and my own airy alto flute sound, which feels embarrassing to repeat, but it was true.

  “I’ll never hurt you … I’ll never lie … I’ll never be untrue…” Our love—and our vows—used to be so clear, so complete, so inevitable, both to us and to our fans. Now, our love seemed providential, in play, its future outside our control.

  * * *

  Ben’s fever was still worrisome, and James still hadn’t come home. I gave Ben baby aspirin, told him stories, waited, and made a few calls to friends, seeking reassurance. Two hours later, James finally crawled through the door, a Steppenwolf divided cleanly in half between his higher nature and his animal one. I kept my mouth shut. We placed a cold washcloth on Ben’s burning forehead, doing our best to cool him while Sally dozed nearby, knowing nothing of this ragged, wretched period James and I were going through, me hoping and praying that sooner rather than later, the four Taylors would be an us again. Later that night, after the aspirin took effect, Ben’s fever broke, and we were all able to get some driftlike sleep.

  * * *

  But then, the next evening, Ben’s fever was down, and James bounced up and told me he had to go pick up a friend. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He didn’t return until eight thirty the following morning.

  I sat there in the living room, stone-faced. “Either you’re here or you’re not,” I said wanly.

  “All right,” James said after a silence. “I’ll move out.”

  “Right now,” I said. “And I don’t want the kids to see you again … I’m calling a lawyer. I want a trial separation.”

  I was that pissed and exhausted—but that certain of what I was saying, too. What got me was the ease with which James announced that he would move out, since I hadn’t expected, or really wanted, him to acquiesce. Fight for your love. Burn for it. Can’t help it. I’m a fool for you. There’s nothing you can do to turn me away.

  But I said none of this aloud. I took Sally to school, and when I got back, James was gone.

  When I broke down a few hours later, it was a deluge, a big, fat, noisy, teary one. In the middle, the phone rang, and not caring who heard me gulping for air, I answered it. It was Alex, James’s older brother, responding quickly and fiercely to the news that James had moved out. In no time at all, Alex mobilized James’s mother, and God knows who else, which made me feel good, wanted, and supported, as if the problem were James’s and, ultimately, fixable.

  “What can I do?” Alex asked before hanging up.

  “You can keep us away from each other,” I said.

  Trudy Taylor called several times that day. “Everybody’s got problems,” she said at one point, adding that in her opinion, James should dry out somewhere, like the Betty Ford Clinic. Nervous about offending her, I suggested that James’s father, Ike, was the only person who could possibly get through to James on this topic. That day, I was snooping in James’s pants pockets, where I found a note from Evey. Written on sky-
blue stationery, it was a hippie dancer’s version of a poem, and in it she called James “Jamie”—his childhood name—and spelled love “luv,” ending with the line, “As they say down on the ranch, ‘You’re my kinda guy.’ No one’s gonna tell us what to do!”

  That afternoon, as Ben, Sally, and I were playing with a doll-sized Japanese tea set on the floor of Sally’s bedroom, keys jangled and the front door opened. It was James. He had come back. For the rest of the day, he said nothing about moving out, which frankly came as a relief to me, as it spared me from the reality of something too alien to grasp. Before dinner, I told him I was planning to visit my sister Joey, who was in an East Side hospital, having had back surgery—could he and I meet for dinner afterward? He replied that he’d be “delighted” to have some fun with Ben and Sally until I came back. He spoke quickly, his energy twinkly. Maybe he realized that here—home—was where he belonged, as he tightly hugged Ben and Sally, who, not surprisingly, had many things to show their daddy.

  The hospital was on the other side of town, but somehow I managed the round trip in under forty-five minutes, taking my emotional temperature every time the taxi paused at a red light. Was I still angry at James? Of course I was, maybe even livid. At the same time, I was aware of a never-ending current of hope. Facts were facts: James was a dad babysitting his two kids—on the same day that I told him I never wanted him to see Sally and Ben again. Right. The warp speed of my inconsistency stunned me, the chain-link fence of sarcasm, panic, fury, blindness, withering despair, and now, optimism …

  Back inside the building on Central Park West, I discovered I had left home without my apartment keys. I rang the loud kitchen bell. No answer. For five minutes, I kept it up, calling out, “James! James!” Just before I went back downstairs to find a pay phone so I could call our home number, I heard Ben’s little voice calling out to me. He sounded scared, and in my mind I could see through the front door with X-ray eyes, see my little boy straining on his tiptoes as tall as he could.

  “I can’t open the door!” he cried.

  I did my best to keep my voice calm. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “A-sweep,” came Ben’s voice.

  “Daddy’s asleep? What did you say, Ben? Asleep?”

  “Yef, Daddy’s a-sweep.”

  * * *

  The mutability of both our moods during that period was immense, a pendulum that rocked back and forth, sometimes several times a day. Insecurity. Protectiveness. Frustration. Love. Loathing. One day I would beg James to forget our differences, and the next day I would apologize. He would forgive me, and then it was his turn to apologize. Two days would pass, and I would turn cold, only to touch up against James’s own frost. One day he told me, “I love you,” and when I told him not to go to Evey, he promised he wouldn’t. “Not a chance,” he said. Two nights later, I told James that it seemed as though he and Evey were happy together and that he should pursue her seriously, but I was just baiting him, hoping he’d swear his undying love to me and to our family. Another day, another night, another mood, as we inflicted hurts on each other both accidental and intentional.

  * * *

  New York teems with accomplices to human wiles and passions and urges: doormen who look the other way and let the wrong people upstairs, bank tellers who cash phony checks, florists who write neat cursive notes to concubines. Mine was a locksmith on Columbus Avenue, who, in exchange for an autograph for his aunt Gloria, I’d convinced to make me a set of duplicate keys to James’s coke-’n’-whiskey abode on West Seventieth Street, which I had never visited. Yes, it was sneaky, but it wasn’t nefarious, corrupt, or dangerous, and I had long accepted a certain degree of stealth as part of my necessary defensive armor. I wouldn’t use the keys just yet, tucking them deep into my wallet’s change purse before walking home six blocks south and one block east to our apartment on Central Park West. I don’t know what I was waiting for, but I’d know when the time was right.

  When I opened the back door, James was sitting in the kitchen, wearing a black, hooded terrycloth robe and devouring Italian sausages. It was morning. The apartment was thick with the small of sausage fat, mingling uneasily with expensive, scented Christmas candles.

  “Good morning, baby!” I said enthusiastically.

  “Hello, sweet thing.” James, otherwise occupied, didn’t look up. He was busy burning a piece of bent-out-of-shape metal clothes hanger, and melting both ends of a length of heavy nylon rope. James was always having inventive encounters with tinfoil, carbon-stained spoons, and other makeshift ingredients. Whatever he was concocting this morning, the explanation was bound to be eccentric, maybe even incomprehensible, so I didn’t ask. Unless pressed, James rarely offered up an answer anyway, so I simply stood there, taking in the clutter on the table and the miasmic wafts of cigarette smoke, sausages, and green French candles.

  “When did you get up?” I said at last.

  “Oh, ’bout an hour ago.” A pause. “Your brother Peter called. He has tickets to some sports game, and wants to take the kids. There may have been another call, I think I wrote it down.”

  My body tensed under all the uncertainty of the past twenty-four hours. All those pink slips of message paper filled with phone messages, all the grocery bags scribbled with set lists, all the pieces of paper towel with James’s handwriting on them: a fledgling lyric, decodable, maybe, as a message meant for me—or was it a message for her? Were James and I going to break apart—yes or no?

  “Listen, darling,” I said now, “I’m planning on going to an Amnesty meeting this afternoon if you’ll be around.” My friend Rose Styron was a founder and board member of Amnesty International USA, and Carinthia West and Mia Farrow were joining us. The General Electric repairman was also coming to fix the dishwasher motor: Would James let him in, and also tip him?

  No answer. Just the dim electricity of underground thoughts.

  New smells now conjoined with the old ones. James had burned the ends of more rope and was now tinkering around with some electrical cords. In a way I loved it. It was so him.

  Inside the bathroom, I washed my face and, just to add insult to the already phantasmagoric collection of apartment smells, put on cologne. Reaching into my pocket, I fingered the outline of the keys the autograph-seeking locksmith had made me. What would happen if and when I took the plunge of interfering with James’s extracurricular love affair?

  I returned to the kitchen, and James asked me if it was okay if Ben and Sally went off to the basketball game with Peter. “Absolutely,” I said, “I’ll call him.”

  * * *

  Someone told me once that we are capable of loving only four people in our lives. Another person told me that human beings can love an infinite number of people. I’m more comfortable with the infinite-number theory, the crucial difference being the number of people I feel I can love well.

  I loved James in a way that couldn’t possibly be deeper or more sure. I loved him in the same way my fingers snap when the rhythm of a song syncs perfectly with my brain’s own cellular clatter. I loved James not despite his broken-down spirit, but because of it. I loved James in his pain even when the last thing he seemed to need was someone to love him. When I thought ahead, into our shared future, I had an image of myself filling up the flesh and wrinkles of my aging skin with a smile so sunny and warm that even if James didn’t see it, he would be healed. Did it seem completely out of the question that he and I would continue churning our butter for years and years in some thatched-roof cottage on a flowery Alpine slope? It didn’t matter if I hated him simultaneously.

  James and I spent the next hour acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary, small talk sprinkled with the usual “darlings,” and when we passed each other in the hallway, a polite tennis volley of “Excuse me’s.” I was amazed, as ever, by how many potentially life-altering thoughts can take place under the patina of small talk. Inside, I was thinking: Keys. Tonight. What shall I wear? How will I behave in front of her?

  This was
n’t how my father had loved my mother. It wasn’t what kept Daddy, in the end, from demanding that Ronny leave our house, vacate that third-floor room with its secret door, and insist that his wife respect, honor, love, and obey him in sickness and in health. Mommy did none of those things at a time when Daddy needed her the most. Why didn’t my father stand up for himself? Why didn’t he take care of himself? Why didn’t he act? Why was I putting up with so many things, in almost exactly the same way my father had? Daddy must have accepted his life as it was, as I did sometimes, too: successful on the surface, and perhaps the surface was the only thing that really counted. When faced with a life gone off its tracks, Daddy kept going, kept walking around the house, showing up at work, letting himself get progressively blinder until he was left with only the faintest peripheral vision. That way, he wouldn’t have to share a real glance with Mommy, the adulteress, while the much younger rival was stealing her away. No, he was polite as a lake.

  That was precisely what I would not do.

  * * *

  Dinner that night in our apartment was quiet but tense. Sally, almost six, and Ben, almost three, were both tired from the basketball game they had attended, and Ben was rubbing his eyes.

  James and I sat, occasionally purring gentle names at each other, though passing the bread was about as romantic as things got.

  “Baby,” I said at one point, “look at Sally’s new dress. Do you know that she made it?”

  “I honestly did not know that, sweet pea. Sal, is this dress for a certain occasion?”

  Sally told him that she and a few classmates had written a play at school, and that a couple of kids had made costumes, and that Mommy—me—had told her I could wear it at dinner.

  Ben jumped in, from his high chair: “I spilled ketchup on it.”